Ghost Girl (6 page)

Then came the sound of the lunch bell ringing and Jeremiah shot off-screen. Then came the view of me rising to turn off the machine. The screen went blank.

I stood up to go turn the lights back on, but before I could move more than a pace or two from my chair, a picture came back on the screen. I halted midstep.

The picture was of very poor quality, gray and grainy from too little light. Studying the screen, I assumed it must simply have been something previously recorded on the tape. Wondering if it was done at the clinic, I tried to make out the features of the room. Then I startled. This was
our
room, at a slightly different angle. The camera must have been bumped. The machine must have been running when the overhead lights were off. But how? When? I distinctly remembered turning it off before going to lunch. In fact, my looming form approaching the camera was recorded.

“OOOOOOoooooooooooo,” came a small, disembodied voice off-screen. Other noises—the shuffling of feet, the movement of chairs—accompanied it.

Confused and eerily discomforted, I sat back down in the chair and tried to make sense of it all.

“OOOOooooooooo-oo-oooooooo.”      Jadie materialized only inches from the camera. “OOoooooooo,” she continued to croon in a small, high-pitched voice. Weaving back and forth, first so close to the camera that only her mouth was visible and then swinging so far back as to almost disappear into the gray gloom, she kept at the noise for two or three minutes.

Jadie paused and for a second or two simply faced the camera. Then, turning, she took two pencils off an adjacent table. Pressing one lengthways against her upper lip and the other in the same fashion against the lower, she turned her lips outward to create a grotesquely exaggerated mouth. She was breathing out a sound toward the camera as she did so, sort of an “ucka ucka ucka” noise.

The weirdness of it overwhelmed me, pinning me to my seat. She was only barely visible, her voice almost disembodied. As she backed away from the camera, her mass of dark hair eventually merged into the gloom around her, leaving only her face palely discernible. She halted there and was momentarily silent. Then the image began to approach the camera again. A whispering started up and at first I couldn’t make out the words. She was too far away from the microphone and speaking too softly. Then she came nearer.

“Help me,” she was saying, almost sighing. “Help me, help me, help me, help me, help me …” Coming nearer and nearer until all that was visible on the screen was a mouth forming the same words over and over again. “Help me, help me, help me, help me, help me …” Then the monitor went blank.

Only then, when the screen turned to snow, and white noise buzzed in my ears, did I realize that throughout the whole eerie episode, Jadie had been standing upright.

I
must have watched that short segment of videotape a dozen times while trying to puzzle out its meaning. It was now obvious to me that Jadie must have slipped back into the classroom after I’d gone down for lunch with the others, and that was why the lights were not on; also why, when I’d returned from lunch, I’d found insufficient tape to record during the afternoon, although at the time I had never put two and two together.

But what was the point of it all? Had she wanted me to see this? Was it a direct message to me? Or had she simply been playing around with the recorder with no thoughts as to whether someone might view it? And what about her posture? There was no mistaking the fact that on the tape she was standing normally. Had she intended me to know she could stand upright, or had I fortuitously dropped onto secret information?

Unsure of these matters, I chose the patient approach. I didn’t mention the tape, not the next day nor any of the days following, although we continued to use the recorder, and, as I had promised, I taped the children performing a little play from one of their reading books, which we all viewed “on TV.” My hope was that if it had been a deliberate message, my silence would smoke her out. She’d either hint at it or else leave me another message. Neither happened.

As often does happen in this kind of environment, a more pressing crisis came along to scupper the subtle moment, however thought provoking. In this instance, Philip suffered a grand mal seizure in class. It was the first seizure he’d had in several years, but the whole following week was frantic, as one seizure followed another, until at last he was admitted to the hospital in Falls River. The experience proved deeply disturbing to the other children, particularly Jeremiah, who was convinced Philip would die with each seizure and often stirred the others into panic with his terror. All my time and energy was taken up trying to keep us on an even keel.

More than two weeks later, I was sitting alone after school at the table in the classroom, finishing my plans for the next day, when I was overcome with the sensation of being watched. I looked up, around, but saw nothing. Back I went to my work, but the sensation, powerful and unshakable, persisted. I glanced up at the clock. It was 4:15, so all the children were long gone and most of the other teachers would be down in the teachers’ lounge. At last, I rose and went to the door to look out in the hallway.

There stood Jadie.

“Hello,” I said.

She gazed up at me.

“This isn’t really the right time for being inside. It’s okay to come over and play on the swings after school, but I’m not at all sure Mr. Tinbergen would want children walking around inside the building. He might get cross.”

She continued to gaze up.

“Do you need something?”

No response.

I glanced down the corridor. It was no joke about Mr. Tinbergen. I knew he didn’t like children in the building outside school hours.

“This is my time to work on plans,” I said. “I’m quite busy. If you need something, I’ll try to help, but otherwise, I think you should go back outside.”

Not a word out of her.

I regarded her. “Do you want to come in? Is that it?”

Still she gazed at me, her head cocked to overcome her hunched-over position.

“I am working hard,” I murmured. “If you come in, you’ll need to play very quietly.”

Without so much as a nod, she slipped around me and into the classroom.

Scuttling over to the cabinet containing jigsaw puzzles, Jadie took one out and hobbled back across the room with it. Putting it down opposite me at the table, she slumped into a chair, then dumped the puzzle out and began assembling it. Furtively, I watched her. She’d changed from school and was now wearing a ratty-looking pink sweatshirt and a worn pair of corduroy pants. Her long dark hair tumbled over her shoulders. Studying her hair, I wondered if it was possible to get a brush through it. Probably not.

Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes passed in complete silence while I finished my plans. Jadie worked diligently on the jigsaw. She was good at them and had done this one several times before, but it was a large one with nearly a hundred pieces, so it kept her busy. I found myself watching her more and more. Try as I did, I couldn’t keep my mind on my work. What kept intruding were thoughts of that video.

“Sit up more, would you?” I murmured, my voice barely audible.

Jadie paused, her hand, holding a puzzle piece, halted midmotion.

“Show me how you do it.”

Maybe it wasn’t my voice that had made her pause. Maybe she had merely been trying to locate where the puzzle piece went. Anyway, she found it and fitted it in. Then she reached for another piece and continued on, as if I had never spoken.

“Show me how you straighten up. Like you did on the videotape.”

There was still no indication that she was listening to me.

“I
know
, Jadie.”

Very faintly, she nodded but she still didn’t look up.

Silence.

“All right,” I said and closed my plan book. “That’s okay. The choice is yours.”

Jadie lifted her head. She lifted it right up, so that she was looking at me squarely and not through her eyebrows as usual, but she didn’t straighten up any farther. I saw her face fully so seldom that the blueness of her eyes caught me by surprise. They were so faultlessly blue, the intensity of the color heightened by the dark lashes.

She searched my face. “Who are you?” she asked, her voice oddly plaintive.

“Torey,” I said, not quite sure what she meant.

“Torey?” It was said like a foreign word. “Torey? You’re Torey?”

“Yes.”

“Torey?” she repeated. “But who are you?”

Unable to understand what she wanted to know, I hesitated.

“Who are you?”

“A teacher,” I said, uncertainly. “Someone who helps children.”

For the first time, her eyes left my face. A deeply puzzled expression on her face, she turned and glanced around the room, then down at the jigsaw. “But who are you?” she asked a fourth time.

Bewildered, because I could tell I wasn’t responding in a way that answered her question, I replied, “Who do you think I am?”

Jadie paused a moment, then shrugged. “Maybe you’re God.”

The following afternoon, I was in the cloakroom, sitting at the teacher’s desk, when I heard the snick of the latch on the classroom door. While I could see into the classroom from the desk, the door was out of my line of vision, so I didn’t know who it was.

“Yes? Lucy?” I queried, thinking perhaps she had come to drop off the dittos she’d promised earlier.

No answer.

Rising, I stuck my head around the cloakroom door. There was Jadie. “You like coming in for an after-school visit, don’t you?” I said.

A faint nod.

“I don’t think this can happen every night,” I said. “Sometimes I have work to do outside the room, and I can’t leave you in here alone. And if Mr. Tinbergen gets wind of it and doesn’t like it, then there’ll have to be a stop to it. Yes? You understand? Because he kind of has a rule about children in the building after hours.”

She gave an almost imperceptible shrug of her shoulders and hobbled off to the corner where the animals were kept. Gently raising the top of the rabbit’s cage, she lifted him out and cradled him in her arms. I returned to the cloakroom and went back to work.

Twenty minutes must have passed with Jadie playing quietly in the classroom, and I’d almost forgotten she was there. I couldn’t see her from where I was and she made virtually no noise. Then she appeared in the doorway between the classroom and the cloakroom. In her hand she carried a sheet of paper.

Normally, the cloakroom wasn’t lit. There were two doors in the long, narrow room, the one Jadie was standing in, and another at the far end, which opened into the hallway. Usually, these gave sufficient light for putting away coats and boots. Now, however, because I was working at the desk, I had the far door into the hallway shut and the overhead light on.

Jadie paused in the doorway, and her expression approached astonishment, as she scanned the high, old-fashioned walls, the ledges above the rows of hooks meant for storing lunchboxes and books, the hooks themselves, the benches beneath. Tentatively, she stepped inside.

“You haven’t had a good look at it with the lights on?” I asked.

“Usually, it’s dark in here.”

“That’s because I don’t like to put the light on during the day. We always forget it and that wastes electricity. And there’s no window in here to give natural light, but we usually get enough from the hallway and the classroom.”

“There’s no windows,” Jadie murmured, looking up.

“No.”

Once again she scrutinized the room carefully, then her attention went back to the paper in her hand. “Can I use this?” she asked. “Can I draw on it?”

“Yes, if you want.”

She disappeared back into the classroom but within moments had returned, clutching the paper under her arm and carrying a margarine tub full of crayons. Laying the things down on the linoleum floor of the cloakroom, she knelt beside them and, without further comment to me, she began to draw.

The paper was a large 2
x
3-foot sheet, and Jadie colored virtually all of it black, except for a tiny area down in the right-hand corner. Here were two minute, faceless, bell-shaped figures.

“That looks interesting,” I said, leaning forward across my desk.

Jadie lifted the drawing up and examined it. “It’s me and Amber there,” she said, touching the figures.

“I see.”

Silence followed while both of us studied the picture. I then threw caution to the wind and said what was on my mind, although it probably wasn’t ideal psychological technique. “You know, Jadie, to tell you the truth, those don’t look much like little girls to me. They’re a curious shape.”

“That’s because I just said it was me and Amber. I didn’t say we were little girls. We’re not there. We’re ghosts.”

“Oh. I see. This is you and your sister dressed up like ghosts. Is it at Halloween time?”

“No. We’re not dressed up. We
are
ghosts.”

“Oh.”

Silence.

“Which one is you and which is Amber?”

Laboriously rising from where she had been working, Jadie brought the picture over and laid it on the desk in front of me. Taking a pencil from the holder, she wrote her name under one figure and her sister’s under the other.