Spirited (23 page)

“But, Gramma, where is she?”

Gramma smiles until her eyes are hidden within layers of brown skin. “She is in your papa’s book.”

~*~*~

Annie Horseberg is the only Hansen girl on the open page of the family Bible. Sarah’s daughter. She is the one. There is no date of death, but how accurate is the book? Does my father keep it current? Does he even write in it at all? The black ink on the parchment is all in the same cursive hand, written with the same fountain pen. It’s old—too old to be true. Annie has no daughters, unless they are written on the next page. I fiddle with the lock.

“Dad, can you please tell me where the key to the display case is?” My hand holding the phone is sweating. I have never asked for the key before.

He sighs, “Can it wait until I get home? Then I can help you.”

He knows I am responsible enough, but I give up. I don’t want to push him.

I try a different strategy. “Do you know if your great aunt is still alive?”

“Great Aunt Annie? Oh sure. She must be ninety by now. She lives with her son Basil down in, uh, Lubbock. We send her a postcard every Christmas.”

“Basil?” my hand shakes. My vision blurs.

“Yeah, he was named after her brother. His address is in my desk at home.”

“Thanks, Dad.” I hang up the phone before I fade out of reality.

~*~*~

Thirty years have passed since I was in England. When they found out where I was, my two surviving sisters begged me to return Basil to his father, but money was so scarce, and I couldn’t bear to give him up. Years later, after I learned Garret had been killed during D-Day, I burned all of his letters. I could never tell Basil I’d taken him away from his rightful father.

“Sarah, you are simply spiteful, not coming until now.” The two old women sitting with me, teacups in hand, lace kerchiefs over thinning hair, remind me of Mother.

“And this must be young Annie. We have only seen you in photographs. How beautiful you are.”

“I am engaged.” Annie beams and shows yet another photograph for the aunts to admire.

They titter. “Ooo, how handsome.” And, “Such a lucky lad to win our Annie.”

“And what about Basil? Why is he not here with you?”

“I’ve already explained. He couldn’t shake his commitments with work. He sends his love.”

My sisters are quiet for a moment. They sip their tea. “Does he know?” they ask.

“No, and he is never to know.”

“Know what mother?” Annie asks.

Sarah’s memories are frying my brain. I no longer know what’s real.

I hold the phone in my hands again. “I can’t just phone Lubbock. I have to go there.”

“Why, Lenora?” My mother’s voice over the line is thin and distorted.

“Because Gramma Hansen said I had to.”

“Your Gramma Hansen is crazy.”

I bet she’s wanted to say that for years.

“I’m moving in a week, and I might not get the chance. She’s ninety years old, she could die any day.”

“Honey, you met Aunt Annie when you were little. Don’t you remember?”

“I have? When?”

“When she had her first stroke. We thought she was going to die. We visited her in the hospital.”

I faintly remember an old woman slumped in a wheelchair with the sun streaming through the atrium windows. “Did she touch me?”

“What do you mean?”

“Has she ever touched me?”

“Now that I think about it, I don’t think she has. She wasn’t really coherent last time. Why would that matter?”

Annie Horseberg must be the
curandera
. I need to go to her.

“Dylan said he would drive me.”

“Lenora… “

“Don’t lecture me, Mom. I’m moving out soon. I’ll be living on my own. I can handle a little road trip.”

She was quiet on the other end. She wouldn’t argue with me the last week before she became an empty-nester. Besides, this problem wasn’t hers to fix.

“OK,” she said. “Be careful.”

Be careful? How exactly do I do that?

~*~*~

“Can you control it? Make it turn on and off?” Dylan’s fingers are wrapped around my hand.

The sun is low on the western horizon. We should have waited to leave in the morning, but I wanted to get packed and out of the house before my folks came home from work. I left them a note. I turn off my phone so they can’t bug me.

“Not really. I can invite it, but I can’t make it stop.” I stare out my window, watching fields of rich, golden wheat rolling by. I don’t want to look at Dylan. I feel like I’m using him, making him take me on this fantastical journey to settle the spirits of my dead ancestors, and when we get back, I’m going to dump him. The fact that I’m even holding his hand is giving him the wrong impression. I’m leading him on. I should stop, but I just can’t let go. A tear falls from the corner of my eye.

Dylan sees it. “Everything OK?”

“Not really.”

“‘Nora, we need to talk about this whole—”

“Not right now. Not yet.”

We watch the sun set in silence.

We find a roadside turn out and pull up the camper top. Crickets are singing under our feet. Stars are falling on our heads. I absorb Dylan like this is the last night of our lives. I can’t help it. He’s beautiful. He lays out the bedrolls head to foot.

“Don’t kick me in the face when the dreams come.” He smiles as if it’s a joke.

I do kick him in the face. He pins down my legs before I remember where I am.

“What happened?” he asks.

“H-her b-body! I know where they t-took it!” I shiver with fear and cold. “It’s raining!”

He hugs me to stop the shaking. “No, it’s not. It’s just the crickets.”

I plug my ears. “The w-water is dripping on h-her. I c-can’t see. There is n-no light. The mine. They threw her body down the mineshaft!”

Dylan doesn’t let go. He falls asleep with his arms still around me.

~*~*~

“Mary Anne, is that you?”

We are standing in the doorway of room 207 in the extended care unit in the St. Rose Hospital in Lubbock. It has taken us all morning to find her.

“No, Mrs. Horseberg. I’m your nurse. I’ve brought some people to visit you.” The nurse pushes back the flimsy curtain to reveal a tiny woman enveloped in quilts. She motions for the nurse to get her glasses from the bedside table.

“Oh, you’re not Mary Anne. Your hair is too dark.”

“My name is Lenora Hansen. I met you once when I was seven. I’m your nephew’s daughter.”

I wait for recognition to spread across her face, but it doesn’t. She strains at the quilt under her chin, even though she doesn’t have the strength to lift it. It’s already as high as it will go before it covers her face.

The nurse whispers
Good luck
under her breath before she leaves.

“That’s a lovely ribbon you have around your neck.” The old woman sighs. “My brother married a Mexican woman who wore one of those.”

I sit down beside her. “Your brother, Basil Hansen, was my great-grandfather.”

Her eyes widen. “He is not a Hansen—not my brother.”

I look to Dylan for help. He motions to hold her hand. The second my skin contacts hers, the room falls into darkness.

“Give me more rope,” Annie calls up to the circle of light above her head.

If Mother knew what she was doing, she’d have a conniption. Annie looks down at the rope tied around the hips of her jeans. The light from her headlamp catches spatters of white water as it drips from the rocks. Curiosity killed the cat. So why was she doing this?

It’s the hair. Basil always had the most beautiful hair. It grew in bouncy blond curls as bright as sunflowers, but hers was dull and straight like her father’s. She had coveted his hair her whole life. Now he was married to that beautiful girl from Mexico, and their twins were dark like her and had curly hair like him. It’s just not fair, especially on boys.

That was why she always wondered about Basil’s parentage; otherwise she might not have believed what the aunts told her when they sneaked her into the cellar.

“Have you ever compared the dates of Basil’s birth and your parent’s marriage?” they ask.

“What is this all about?” Annie felt a bit claustrophobic in there with unfamiliar relatives and shelves of peach preserves.

“He is not hers. She stole him. Took him across the sea when she ran off with that reporter. We have never seen him since. Sarah was too afraid to bring him back here in case he learned the truth.”

“Such a scandal,” one says.

“We will never forgive ourselves for what we did.” They begin blubbering like babies. The hankies come out, and they blow their noses like horns.

“Promise not to tell your mother.”

Annie is skeptical. She doesn’t believe their story, so she has to find out for herself. She never would have found the old shaft if it weren’t for their detailed instructions. She gropes along the steep passage, securing her footing with each step.

“That’s far enough,” someone yells down. “We’re bringing you back up.”

“Just a few more feet,” she shouts. “I can see the end.” Her voice echoes through the hollow earth, melding with the drip-drip of water.

Her dim light focuses on something other than black rocks. Something pink. A tattered, faded ribbon. Her breath shakes, and she loses her footing, slipping a few inches over the pebbles. The stones roll down the slope and join the growing pile below. The tunnel has collapsed where the rail track disappears into a wall of rocks. She reaches for the nearest boulder and tips it over to reveal a scrap of gray lace covered in mildew. She heaves the next boulder out of the way and stifles a scream. An arm, a skeleton arm, hard and blackened with one hundred years of rot. She cups her trembling hands over her mouth. One more rock pushed aside reveals the skull. Shreds of ribbon are still tied around a disintegrating, blond curl. A blond curl like Basil’s.

“Pull me up!” Annie hides her panic. She promised the aunts not to tell. They can live with their shame.

“Find anything?” a voice
asks.

“No, there’s nothing.”

I gasp. Dylan has pulled our hands apart. Annie is looking at me with tears in her eyes.

“You saw my memory.” She weeps.

“Your aunts threw Mary Anne’s body down the mineshaft.”

“They had no money and no other way to bury her. They lied to Garret and told him she was in an unmarked grave in the Folkestone cemetery. Even when he saved up for a headstone, they remained silent. My whole life I have kept their secret. They made me promise never to tell anyone.” She sniffed.

“You’ve been carrying this burden for so long.”

“I’ll carry it until I am released.” Her frail hands poke out from the mass of blankets on her bed. Has she been hanging onto life until I found her? I close my eyes and try to summon the ghosts. They do not come. They have gone to their rest.

“Thank you, Aunt Annie. You have healed me.”

“No child, you have healed me.” Her smile fills my heart.

I hug her gently. She touches the red ribbon. I take it off and give it to her. She gives me one of her handmade quilts. I thank the nurse on our way out.

~*~*~

As we drive out of the city Dylan blurts out, “My brother helped me find a journeyman in Tallahassee who would honor all of my apprenticeship hours. I can get a transfer by next month.”

I stare at his white knuckles and flushed face. He gulps, waiting for my reaction.

“Uh, what did you say?”

He pulls the truck over. “I got a job so I can come to Florida with you.”

I’ve never seen him so nervous. He takes my face in his hands. “Do you want me to?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

He thinks I am angry. “Well, we never talked about it. You never said anything. I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know what you wanted.”

I reach over and kiss him. “I love you.” I surprise us both.

“I love you too.”

I lean back and cover my smile with Annie’s quilt. He gives a shaky sigh and pulls back onto the road. The wheat fields are neon bright in the August sun.

A couple of hours later I turn my cell phone back on. Dad calls within minutes.

“Lenora, have you been in to see Annie?”

“Yeah, we saw her around noon.”

“Oh, honey, I’m so glad you did. Basil just called. Annie passed away about an hour ago. I’m sorry.”

Tears fill my eyes. “It’s OK. She was just waiting for me.”

“What did she tell you?”

“We aren’t Hansens, at least not by blood. We’re Doles. There was a mix up in the aftermath of the war… “

Dylan takes my hand. I don’t let go. Instead of stopping to sleep along the roadside, we decide to drive all night.

Tomorrow I’ll start packing.

Phantom of the Prom

When I volunteered to help decorate the infamous Wilshire Castle for the prom, I hadn’t talked to Dominic. I didn’t know that to him “prom” was a four-letter word. The guy I love to the depths of my heart refused to take me.