Haunted (18 page)

“I see what you're saying,” I said.

“It's a good idea,” said Miles.

“Thanks, Eleanor,” I said, smiling across the room at her. I prepared. Poor Mom, knitting away furiously to create something bright to adorn her daughter's head, and Steven, placidly helping place puzzle pieces with Zen-like patience . . . their world would never be the same again.

Their questions about death, the afterlife, would be answered by knowing their dead child could communicate with them.

There would be tears, I knew. There would be an outgush of emotion so unedited that it would splinter the souls of each of us here. It would wring me out, exhaust me, make me experience anew the catastrophe of having died.

But I needed to do it. I couldn't stand the idea that Mom constantly replayed in her mind the discussion that day, when I'd told her I'd fainted and she'd laughed and told me to keep breathing when talking to cute guys.

I let go of Miles's hand and leaned in closer to Tabby. She did something she'd never done before. She raised her gaze and looked at me.

I felt it deep to my core, a stabbing impact to my very heart, or what was left of it.

“Oh, Tabby,” I whispered.

She continued to level her gaze at me, with those eyes that appeared huge since the face enclosing them was so small. Everything about her was perfect, untouched, curved with the beautiful lines of childhood.

“Phee,” she said.

“Oh thank God, Tabby,” I said, tears welling up in my eyes. “You see me.”

“Here you go,” said Steven. He was trying to hand her a puzzle piece. “What are you staring at?” He waved his hands in front of her face. “Earth to Tabby!”

Mom laughed. “Her teen spaciness begins already. It's a little early, Tabby!”

Tabby and I looked at each other for long moments, serious and intense as lovers.
She sees me.

“Tabby, I need you to say a word for me,” I said, my voice trembling through the tears.

She waited.

“The word is Eglantine. Can you please say it?”

She just looked at me, sadness pouring all over her features. It was so
wrong
. No one that young should have that adult expression of wretchedness. A toddler's rounded face should show nothing but glee and wonder at the new things the world showed them on a daily basis.

“Eglantine,” I repeated. “Can you say it for me?”

“Phee,” she said.

I buried my face in my hands. This was too much for me. She
missed
me. She longed for me, her older sister who had barely paid her any attention when alive. I hadn't realized how much a part of her small world I was.

“I miss you, Tabby,” I said. “I love you so much, and I wish I could be there for you. I'm so sorry I left.”

She nodded.

“Tabby?” asked Steven.

“Miss you,” she said.

My hands uselessly stroked in the air for her. I wanted to hug her, to fix the crazy cowlick of her hair and tuck the wayward strand behind her ears. I wanted to hold her pudgy hands and swing her around and around the room. I'd done that, I remembered. I'd swung her. I'd given her something, a few episodes of hysterical laughter as I made her, like me, completely dizzy.

“I miss you
so
much,” I said.

She burst into tears. The howls of unselfconscious agony only young children are capable of.

“What
is
it?” asked Steven. He and Mom were on her now, hugging and trying to soothe. “She just started spacing out, and then this,” he told Mom.

“Eglantine,” I said. “Say it, Tabby.”

She couldn't say anything; she was hyperventilating. “Take some breaths,” said Mom at the exact same time I said it.

That was a gift. Tabby laughed at the surprise of this synchronicity, and instantly her tears were gone. The thundercloud of the toddler: so quickly storming, so quickly sailing off to someone else's sky.

“Eglantine,” I said, although it broke my heart to insist. This was the moment. Everything was going to change. Right now.

“Eggwantine,” said Tabby.

Mom drew back from Tabby as if she were a fire that had burned her. “
What
did you say?” she said, her face an intense, focused machine.

“Oh, Mom,” I said softly.

“Eggwantine,” said Tabby.

Mom looked wildly to Steven. “That doll!” she said, her voice a gurgle of barely controlled hysteria. “Phoebe's doll. Tabitha wasn't even born yet!”

“What are you talking about?” said Steven.

“I made a . . . doll . . . when she was eight, when . . . Don and I were still—” She could barely get it out, her breath hitching and gasping. She was out of air just as if she had fallen from a tree and had the breath knocked out of her.

That's right. Mom was married to my dad back then. Even Steven didn't know about the doll. Eglantine was the perfect code word for just me and Mom to share.

“So why is Tabby . . . ?” asked Steven.

“Oh my God, my God, my God, my God, my God,” said Mom. “Tabby, what do you know? What do you know?” She grabbed Tabby's shoulders so hard that Tabby gave a little cry.

Tabby extracted her left arm enough to point to me. “Phee here,” she said.

Mom screamed.

“What the hell?” shouted Steven. “What the hell is going on?”

“It's okay, Phoebe, it's okay,” said Miles to me. “Just let it happen. They'll be okay.”

“Tell them I love them,” I said to Tabby. I couldn't stop crying, but I managed to keep my breath so I could talk. It would be too frustrating to come this far and not be able to communicate. I focused as hard as I could on quelling the emotions that threatened to shred me to nothing.

But Tabby couldn't say it. We were still intermittent, like a radio station tuning in and out.

“Phoebe is
here
?” Mom asked, when she could speak again. She scanned where Tabby had pointed, but her eyes glossed over me as if I weren't there.

“Eggwantine,” she said again. Oh, poor Tabby, she was on stage and no one had handed her a script.

“Tell them I love them,” I said again. I positioned my face right in front of hers, and it worked: she nodded.

“Phee love you,” she announced.

Mom dug her fingernails deep into her own cheeks. When she removed them a moment later, to instead dig them into Steven's arm, eight little perfect half-moons of blood marked her face.

“Phoebe!” Mom screamed. “Phoebe!” Her screaming softened to a wail. “I can't see you!”

“I forgive you,” I said. This time I said it to her directly. Tabby didn't pick it up and repeat it. “I forgive you, Mom.”

“This is crazy,” said Steven. “Anne, she isn't here. There's no possible way she's here.”

“But she
said,
” said Mom. “She said—Eglantine.”

“She must've heard about the doll before Phoebe died,” he said.

“No!”
shouted Mom. “That doll was lost eight years ago. This is real, Steven. Phoebe's here, she's here . . . Oh, my sweetheart, I miss you so much.” Her eyes, with large dilated pupils, looked around the room wildly, as if trying to track a fly too fast to catch a glimpse of.

“I forgive you, Mom,” I said again. I felt Miles's hand steal back into mine. I glanced over at Eleanor, still sitting on the sofa, watching with compassionate eyes. “Can you tell her, Tabby?” I prompted.

“Phee say forgive,” said Tabby finally. She crawled into Mom's lap, throwing her arms around her neck. Mom broke down, sobbing into Tabby's hair.

“I can't see you, I can't see you,” she kept saying.

“It's okay,” I said.

“It's okay,” Tabby repeated.

“I forgive you,” I coached.

“Forgive,” said Tabby.

Mom rocked back and forth with Tabby, sobbing. Steven sat there with his mouth open, shaking his head over and over. “This isn't happening,” he said in a voice so low I wouldn't have caught it if I hadn't happened to be looking at him right then.

A long time later, Mom lifted her head again. Her face was as blotchy as a map rendered only in shades and tones of red. Her eyes were so bloodshot they made her green irises a weird and intense stained-glass rose window.

“You forgive me?” she asked the air plaintively. She had heard, then.

“Yes,” I said simply.

“I'm so sorry, Phoebe,” she said. “I should have listened to you. I've wanted to kill myself a hundred times over that I didn't listen. I've wished I were . . . like you.” She couldn't say the word
dead,
I saw.

“It's not your fault,” I said. “Tabby, tell her. Not your fault.”

“Nawfawt,” said Tabby.

“Not your fault,” I corrected.

“Naw y'fawt.”

Mom got it. “How can you say it's not my fault?” she said despairingly. “They said if you'd been diagnosed, there were medications—” She broke into a fresh batch of crying.

There was so much I wanted to express, too much to be able to fit through the small funnel of Tabby's mouth. I felt blame, too; after all, I had been nearly an adult and could've made a better argument for seeking medical care.

I also wanted to tell her about Madame Arnaud, how proud I was that I'd been the one to figure out how to kill her, and that I'd entered the water again to accomplish it. That I'd saved Tabby from a terrible death. There was simply no way to express all that: and maybe it was best for her not to know how close Tabby had come to being Madame Arnaud's next victim.

I just needed to let Mom know I was at rest, although I wasn't.

And say good-bye forever.

“My fault, too,” I said, simplifying my language so it would be easy for Tabby to parrot back.

Tabby looked at me with her eyes full and moist. “Phee's fawt,” she said.

Mom moaned, her voice rising in pitch until it was soprano. “It was never, never, never your fault,” she said fiercely. “I am your mom. It was my job to protect you.”

Steven joined the conversation, pulling himself out of the head-shaking repetition he'd put himself into. “Anne, don't fight it. Phoebe's trying to tell you it's okay. She doesn't blame you, doesn't blame us.”

Mom looked at him, and he pulled her and Tabby together into a passionate hug.

“She's come back to tell us it's all right,” he said. “We need to do her the favor of listening.”

Listening,
yes, I rejoiced! All I ever wanted: for them to listen!

Mom nodded while he used his shirt hem to dry her face. “Okay,” she said in a shaky voice. “You're right.”

“Phoebe, we love you and miss you
so much,
” said Steven. He didn't bother to try to guess where I might be; he said the words tenderly to Mom as if she were my proxy. “We wish we had done everything differently, but thank you for telling us you forgive us.”

God bless you, Steven!
I thought. I looked into his face for signs that he was my real dad. I had to conclude that even if he wasn't my biological father, he was still truly, truly my father.

And now it was time for me to draw the curtain closed. Mom and Steven already had enough to absorb; I couldn't add more to their list of reality-shaking concepts to contemplate.

“I have to go,” I said. Eleanor nodded sadly but encouragingly at me.

“No!” said Tabby.

“I'm so sorry,” I said to her. “You're the best little sister I could have ever hoped for. I have to go now, though.”

I longed to tell her I'd keep an eye out for her, and be there to cheer her on as she grew, but I didn't want to confuse my good-bye. The thought struck me, though, that if she continued to hone her skills at detecting me, she might know I was there anyway.

Who knows what the future holds,
I thought.
I can't control it. All I can do is try to make it so my family hurts the least amount possible.

“Good-bye, sweetheart,” I said.

“No! Phee stay!” she said in her voice that threatened of a coming tantrum.

“Oh no, no, Tabby,” I said warningly. I almost cracked a smile at the idea I was scolding her from the other side. “Be a good girl. Don't get upset. I have to go. Say good-bye to mom and your dad for me.”

It didn't work. She started to make the huffy chorts of a fit. Damn! This was hardly the elegant, poignant way I wanted to withdraw from my family forever.

“Tabby! Sh!” I said.

Miles looked at me and started laughing.

“Is Phoebe leaving?” Mom asked her. “Phoebe, no, stay!” She looked as stricken as she had the day the coroner told her my disease had been preventable.

This was all falling apart.

“Let her go,” said Steven, the voice of reason. “You want her to go to a place of peace, don't you? Don't force her to stay.”

“Noooo,” wailed Tabby. She crawled out of Mom's lap. Her hands formed into fists and she beat them against her puzzle board on the floor. The pieces that had already been placed—unwitting chickens and piglets who had been minding their own business—sprang into the air.

Argh! Why did she have to ruin such a touching moment?

But then I swallowed. She wasn't upset because she wasn't getting her way. She was upset because she thought she'd never see me again. And that realization was enough to send me somewhere else momentarily.