Ghost Girl (7 page)

“What about your mom and dad? And Sapphire?”

“Don’t got no mom or dad when me and Amber are ghosts. And Sapphire’s too little. She don’t know how to do it.”

“I see.” I leaned forward to examine the picture more carefully. “Just the two of you, then? It sounds like it might be lonely, just two little girls.”

“But like I said, we aren’t little girls. We’re ghosts. Ghosts don’t get lonely. It’s nice being alone, when you’re a ghost. We just float around, go way up high, and look down on people doing things. But they can’t see us, ’cause we’re invisible, so they don’t know we’re doing it.”

I nodded. “That does sound interesting. What kinds of things do you see people doing?”

“Just things. Like going to bed or watching TV. We go and look in all the other people’s houses.”

“I see.”

“I don’t mind when it goes dark, then. Gotta be dark to be a ghost. But if it goes too dark before you get out, you can’t do it. You can’t get out of your body and you get shut in.”

I looked over, perplexed. “What do you mean?”

An expression flickered across Jadie’s face that I couldn’t identify—alarm? concern?—I wasn’t sure. She turned her head away sharply and didn’t answer.

“What’s the matter? Does it frighten you to talk about this?”

A pause. “Well, really I shouldn’t be telling you.”

“Why?”

“I’m not supposed to.”

“Why?”

“’Cause what goes on inside your head is private.” She looked over. “That’s right, isn’t it? You shouldn’t know private things.”

I shrugged faintly and gave a half smile. “Sometimes it doesn’t hurt.” I tried to keep the tone conversational. “Besides, I’m interested. How do you get to be a ghost? Could I do it? Would you be able to teach
me?
”

“I don’t think so,” she said, her voice dubious, then she hesitated, her gaze fixed on the drawing. “Well, you sort of make yourself go quiet. Real still. Like you’re dead. Then, when you got all of you that way, you just sort of slip out of your body and go away.” Another pause and she frowned at the picture. “But I don’t know if a grown-up could do it.”

“Is it easy for you?” I asked.

“Yeah, kind of.”

“How do you come back into your body afterwards?”

Jadie didn’t answer.

“You don’t know?”

She shook her head. “I just wake up in the morning and I’m back.”

“A dream?”

Jadie frowned. “No. I didn’t say that. It’s not just a dream. It’s something I can really do. It’s just that I try to stay out, but I always fall asleep.”

“It sounds as if you don’t really want to come back.”

“Well, see, if you’re a ghost when the sun comes up, then you stay a ghost forever. That’s what Tashee says. You won’t ever get back into your body after that, because if the sun comes up on it with no person in it, it dies.”

“Oh.”

“So I always try to stay awake. I drink Coke. There’s always Coke to drink, but then I get sleepy. I fall asleep then and that makes me go back into my body. So when I wake up in the morning, I’m always still here.”

“And you would rather have stayed a ghost?”

Jadie nodded.

The conversation seemed to peter out then. We both stared at the picture, as silence enveloped us.

“I like this drawing,” I said at last. “Do you suppose I could have it?”

Jadie looked over. “What would you do with it?”

“Just keep it. Maybe put it up on the wall. It’s a good picture. Maybe the others would like to see it.”

“No,”
Jadie replied, alarm in her voice. “I don’t want anybody else to see it.”

“No? Why not?”

“’Cause I told you. ’Cause it’s private what goes on inside you. Besides, if you put it on the wall, spiders might walk on it. Spiders might see. Then the policemen would come.”

She completely lost me on that one. “Policemen?” I said in bewilderment. “What do you mean?”

“They’d take me away for lying. They’d put me in jail. I might die. Sometimes policemen kill you with their guns, if they think you’re trying to get away. And if they got you in the jail, sometimes they kill you in a chair.”

Seeing that she was becoming agitated, I quickly changed tack. “So Tashee knows about being a ghost, too?”

Jadie nodded. “Yeah. Tashee’s the one who taught me and Amber how to do it.”

“That was clever of her.”

Jadie nodded again. “Tashee knows lots and lots of stuff.”

“Sounds like Tashee’s very special to you.”

For the first time, a slight hint of a smile touched Jadie’s lips. “Yeah, she’s my best friend. I like her better than anybody.”

“Is she in school here? She’s not in Mrs. McLaren’s class, is she? Is she a third-grader?”

Jadie looked at me, her expression bemused. “Well, of course not,” she said, her tone implying that I’d asked a very silly question indeed. “That’s why me and Amber turn into ghosts.”

“What do you mean?”

“So’s we can go visit Tashee. Tashee can’t come here. She’s been dead more than a year now.”

I
was disappointed when Jadie did not show up after school the next afternoon. Her appearance had been an intrusion initially, but after two visits, I was curious about her and looked forward to seeing her again in the undisturbed quiet of the late afternoon. Once the children were gone and I’d done what I needed to outside the classroom, I brought my work out to the table in the classroom, thinking this would make me more accessible than the cloakroom had done. However, Jadie went home at the end of the school day, as usual, and did not come back again. On two or three occasions, I thought I’d heard her outside in the hall, but whenever I went to the door, no one was there.

It wasn’t until well into the next week that Jadie again appeared after hours. It was quite late in the day—after 4:30—and I’d finished all my work, had made a tour through the teachers’ lounge, and was now back at my desk in the cloakroom, paging through a teaching magazine. Click went the latch on the classroom door, then no sound.

“Yes?” I called.

Jadie appeared in the doorway. She’d been home and changed and was now wearing a horrible home-made jog-suit with rickrack stitched unevenly around the neck and sleeves.

“Hello,” I said, and smiled.

Jadie stepped just inside the cloakroom. Twisting her head, she surveyed the small room very thoroughly. Above the coat hooks were the shelves, and above the shelf on the right ran two heating pipes. They were about three inches each in diameter and entered the room through the far end wall to run parallel about two feet above the shelf for the entire length of the room before disappearing out through the wall behind the desk. In fact, the room was well supplied with pipes, because there was also a large plumbing pipe about eight inches in diameter that rose vertically through the floor in the corner near the far door and disappeared through the ceiling. All these things Jadie surveyed carefully. Then she turned her head and looked at the door, which was open between the cloakroom and the classroom. This was a heavy, old-fashioned door made of solid wood. Even without touching it, one could tell it was strong. There was a window in our classroom door, but there wasn’t in this, nor in the one between the cloakroom and the hall. Jadie turned and put a hand out to feel the door.

Jadie examined the door minutely. She ran her hands over the wood, lingering to feel the grain. She pursued the ornamental molding with her fingers, then came to the knob and lock. These, like the door itself, were old-fashioned, and there was a proper keyhole. All of this, too, Jadie examined carefully, poking her little finger into the keyhole, turning the knob, watching the latch go in and out.

This whole procedure took a full ten minutes, and, throughout, I didn’t say a word. Still at my desk, I simply watched. Jadie didn’t seem particularly interested in my presence. All her attention was focused on the door. Gently, she eased it away from its stop and pushed it closed, shutting the two of us into the cloakroom. Then she turned the knob and opened it slightly. She fingered the latching mechanism.

“Here’s the deadbolt,” she murmured, more to herself than to me. She touched the bolt in its housing inside the latch. Then she shut the door again, tried the knob, opened it, felt the lock, closed it. This she did at least six or seven times before turning abruptly to me. “You got a key for this? Can you lock it?”

I nodded.

Her face brightened. “Give it to me, okay? Lemme lock it shut.”

Fascinated by her behavior, I agreed and dug the key out of my desk drawer. Jadie deftly slipped it into the keyhole and turned it. The deadbolt slid into place with a satisfying thunk. “That’s good,” she murmured in a pleased tone. Removing the key, she tried to open the door but, of course, it didn’t move. Then she unlocked the door, opened it, stuck her head into the classroom, pulled back, and slammed the door shut, relocking it. From there, she scuttled down to the other door, which opened into the hallway.

“Does the key work in this one, too?” she asked me. “Can we lock this one?” But before I could reply, she was already trying the key in the lock. It did fit both doors, and a satisfied smile crossed Jadie’s face as she tugged at the newly locked door. Abruptly, she let go and scuttled back to the other door to try it again. This, still locked, too, refused to budge. “Got to cover this up,” she muttered and came to the desk. Seizing a foil of masking tape, she tore a strip off and placed it carefully over the keyhole. “Key’s in the other one. Can’t see in, but got to cover this one up.” Then, unexpectedly, she veered away from the door. Bent double, she began hurriedly moving around the circumference of the small room, her eyes on the floor.

“Are you looking for something?” I asked.

“Spiders. No spiders,” she muttered. “There’s no spiders in here.”

“No. Mr. Tinbergen has a man who comes around and sprays. He was just here in February. So there’re no spiders.”

Jadie looked up. “No spiders. No windows. Nobody can get in.”

“No.”

She scuttled to the door that led into the classroom and tried it once more to see if it would open. Being locked, it didn’t budge, but she pulled and pulled and pulled, putting one foot against the door frame to give herself more leverage. When the door still failed to move, Jadie did something totally unexpected. She laughed.

I had never heard Jadie laugh. Indeed, I’d never seen more than the occasional faint smile, but now she laughed merrily, the sound filling the cloakroom.

“You certainly do like the fact that the door doesn’t open,” I said.

“It’s locked. I’ve locked us in. No one else can be here. No windows they can see in at. No spiders gonna know. This is good.”

“Yes,” I agreed.

“This is good,” she repeated. “I’m safe here.”

“You feel safe.”

What started as a pause grew. Jadie’s eyes had wandered from the doors, the walls, the floor to rest on my face. “You wanna see me stand up?” she asked, her tone almost conspiratorial.

I nodded.

Slowly, a bit stiffly, she straightened her posture until she was upright. Steadying herself with one hand on the wall, she thrust her shoulders back and her stomach out. She smiled at me, an easy, knowing smile.

I smiled back. “Good.”

Turning from me, she reached up and clasped a coat hook in each hand. Bracing her feet against the bench beneath the coat hooks, she arched her body outward, stretching what must have been very tight muscles. Repeatedly, she pulled herself up to the coat hook and then back in an odd kind of chin-up, until at last she audibly sighed with relief. All this time, neither of us spoke.

Jadie climbed down from the bench and, still standing upright, turned her attention to pulling down the cuffs of her cardigan and adjusting her clothes. “I know what that sign means now,” she said quietly, not looking over.

“What sign is that?”

“Over by Ninth Street, there’s a brown church, and it’s got that sign out front. It says ‘Safe with God.’ I kept reading it when we went by, and I never knew what it meant.” She smiled. “But I do now. I’m safe in here, aren’t I? I’m safe with you.”

The next afternoon Jadie appeared again after school. I’d ensconced myself early on in the cloakroom in readiness. The latch on the classroom door snicked and then came the quiet shuffling of Jadie’s feet across the classroom, until she finally appeared in the doorway of the cloakroom. I smiled at her, and there was a hint of a smile in return in Jadie’s eyes, although it never reached her lips. Opening my desk drawer, I took out the key.

“Do you want to lock the doors?” I asked.

This brought the broad, easy grin of a secret shared. She snatched the key from my hand and dashed for the far door to secure it, then back to the door beside my desk. She fastened the bit of masking tape over the keyhole, then pulled again at each of the doors to make sure they were fast. Already standing upright by the time she’d finished these tasks, she paused at the door into the classroom to gently caress the housing of the bolt.

“You like that lock,” I said.