34
It follows me inside. Thewondering. Mila looks so bewildered as she slowly makes her way up the path, into the summery warmth of the lake house, glancing behind her toward the water, opening her mouth as if to form a question. I am convinced that her fall was not an accident. I’m just not sure if the person who pushed her was living or dead. And even if I wanted to tell her what happened to her, I can’t. We’re trained to believe certain things almost from birth. What goes up must come down. What goes around comes around. Life and death are fundamentally incompatible. They simply cannot coexist.
Consider this, though.
We all see stars after they die.
Billions of ghosts, haunting the endless infinite night. Chelsea used to say stars made her sad, because we could never see them while they lived. As if they have stories to tell or anything to do except burn. But that’s not precisely true. They create and they destroy. They collapse and absorb everything within their reach. They make life possible. I’m not a religious person. I was raised in the church of Einstein and Hawking. I believe that what we know of the universe is just a fifteen-billion–light-year snapshot, as likely as not to be a relative speck in relation to the whole. As likely as not to beone in an infinite number, each moment of our lives existing simultaneously and endlessly, somewhere. As likely as not to be heading toward a bounce. An endless cycle of birth and growth and collapse and death and rebirth.
Of course we know almost nothing about the universe we live in.
And since that’s true, isn’t it arrogant to refuse to admit that anything is impossible?
Even ghosts?
I can’t bring myself to call them that. They don’t fit into my concept of the world. But I’m convinced they were living once, and I am certain they’re dead. They’re gone, but they’re still here. They don’t feel like ghosts, but maybe it’s all semantics. They are possible, and they exist. I don’t believe in them, I know them. We share history and a home.
They play and fight and sometimes they do bad things. Of course, that’s probably not the way they look at it. To them, it probably goes something like this:
The living are possible. They exist. They play and fight and sometimes they do bad things.
And then we punish them.
I try to banish the thought in the wake of the incident on the dock. We all need to relax. That’s all. After we get Mila dried off and calmed down, Chelsea and Emily run upstairs to the attic with cold drinks and tarot cards, leaving Mila alone in the loft, attempting to apply makeup to her bruised, swollen nose using a tiny compact mirror.
I watch her for a moment, feeling torn. A dark circle is forming under one eye, and the left side of her face looks likesomething fromNight of the Living Dead. She needs more than a simple sweep of powder and a tiny mirror. But Emily would never forgive me for helping her. I sigh and clear my throat, and Mila raises her long-lashed eyes. She has old Hollywood eyes, dark and round, with lashes like butterfly wings. There’s something comforting and familiar about it. “Come with me.” I lead her into my room and sit her on the corner of the bed before the fairy-tale mirror, the magic mirror, as Chelsea and I used to call it, and pull out my makeup case.
“I can do it,” she insists.
“Can you, though?” I lift her hand doubtfully. Her knuckles are swollen; she slammed them into the dock as we pulled her out of the water.
“Fine.” She leans in toward me and closes her eyes nervously. “Don’t make me look like a freak.”
A smile bubbles to my lips. “Don’t move, then.” A sudden cool sensation startles me just as I’m about to touch the brush to her face, but it’s only a breeze sweeping in through the open balcony doors. I steady myself and concentrate on smoothing the cuts and bruises, masking the swelling. “I’m sorry about my friends. We’re all perfectly nice people, I promise.”
She smirks, keeping the upper half of her face still. “Nice isn’t the same as good.”
I grin. She has a little bit of spark under the timid exterior. “No, it’s definitely not. But none of us are monsters, either.”
“I know. Rejection is unbecoming of us all.” She rolls her eyes.
I pause. “What do you mean?”
She raises an eyebrow. “Ryan tried to pick me up before Chase did. But… I mean, who would you go with?”
“Chelsea.”
She smiles one of thoseI get itsmiles. “But never Ryan.”
She does get it. Never Ryan. He’s not unattractive. It’s hard to describe why never Ryan. I do understand what Chelsea sees in him. They’re both nerdy and quirky. Funny. We got along when we were younger. But he’s gotten somehow darker as we’ve grown. There’s a bitterness to his humor now, a brooding quality that hangs on him like dissatisfaction is woven into him. I have mentioned it to Chelsea, and she says I’m reading him wrong. But I can’t shake the sense that he resents me, and has from the first time Chelsea and I kissed. And it got much, much worse after they secretly dated when Chels and I were broken up and then she left him to get back together with me. That didn’t make him the kind of person who would turn on Chase for dating a girl who turned him down. It just makes him consistent. That’s why never Ryan.
The magic mirror frames us like a picture as I work, and I try to be quick, to finish before Chelsea and Emily tire of tarot and come looking for me, but the mirror always has a little bit of a spellbinding effect on me, and I find my arms slowing. My eyes fall on a row of dolls sitting on the bed, and my mind begins to wander back to another time, when the room was new to me. The room that used to belong to my dead aunt. The dead are especially drawn to this place.
It was in this room that I saw the second quiet person I can remember meeting. The blue lady. I was four, my aunt’s age when she died. It was an arrival day, and my parents were busy unpacking and settling the house. I was arranging my toys on my bed in the order I wanted to play with them—book,puzzle, doll, book, puzzle, doll—when I heard a pair of footsteps descending from the attic. For a second, I didn’t think anything of it, because half of arrival day is footsteps up and down the attic ladder, suitcases up, empty arms down.
But I could hear my father outside through the open windows and my mother in the kitchen, along with the smells of buttery popcorn and simmering crab cakes. The footsteps continued, and I froze in place, kneeling at the bedside,Where the Wild Things Arein one hand and a custom doll in the other, one my mother had ordered to be made to look just like me.
Some strange impulse hit, a weird protective thing, and I shoved the doll under my pillow. Like, if there was a robber, they could take everything but my Kennedy doll. She only had me to protect her, after all. I guess my protective instincts did not extend to the rest of my dolls.