The Haunting of Sunshine Girl (27 page)

I spin around on my heel. “How can you sound so casual about forgetting your husband? How can you be so
resigned
to it? If it were me, I'd paper my house with blown-up photographs. I'd write down all my memories so I could remember every detail.”

Victoria puts her hands on my shoulders, her voice still frustratingly calm. “I'm afraid it wouldn't make a difference, Sunshine. Eventually you'd throw them all away, wondering how they got there in the first place. Believe me. I've seen it happen.” I can feel the warmth of her palms through my T-shirt, my sweater, my jacket.

I twist myself from her grasp. “Well, it's not going to happen to me. I'm going home to my mother. I should never have left her alone.” Hot tears overflow from my eyes and roll down my cheeks. “She's already hurt herself once.” I finger the scar at the base of my left thumb.

Victoria looks directly into my eyes. “But not seriously, right?”

The lump in my throat is getting bigger by the second. “She sliced her wrist open with a knife. Then she turned the knife on me,” I add. “It looked plenty serious to me.”

“I know this must be overwhelming, Sunshine, but I need you to listen to me now. Think about it. Your mother is a
nurse.
She has medical expertise. If she wanted to cause any real damage, she'd know how. The demon only made her do that to get your attention—not to inflict any real damage.”

“Why did the demon want my attention?”

“For a demon, that's part of the fun—wreaking havoc, frightening people, destroying their lives. It knew that the surest way to scare you was to make you worry about your mother's safety, to drive a wedge between two people who'd always been so close.”

How does Victoria know so much about us? Maybe she's been lying to me all this time. Maybe she
is
my mentor. Maybe this is part of my test.

“How do I know you're telling the truth?” My voice shakes as an even more awful thought occurs to me. “How do I know you're not possessed by the demon too? Maybe you're just keeping me here so I can't get home in time to save my mom!” I open the front door, grateful for the gust of cool air that blows in from outside. I step onto the front porch and begin sprinting down the stairs and across the front yard.

“You have until New Year's Eve!” she shouts, speaking quickly to get the words out before I'm out of reach.

I spin around. “Why New Year's Eve?”

“That's when he killed my family—at midnight on New Year's Eve last year. The demon has tormented its share of people in the year that's passed, but hasn't destroyed one since. It draws
strength from the turn of one year into the next. The strength it needs to actually take a life.”

New Year's Eve. One week from today. I press the heels of my sneakers into Victoria's snow-spattered yard. Without looking up I say, “So I have some time to figure out how to save her?”

“You do.” She nods. “I promise you that she will be safe until then. But there is one more thing,” Victoria adds softly, and now I do look up. “Once a full year has passed since Anna's death without the demon's exorcism, her spirit . . .” She pauses. Now I think she's the one who's going to burst into tears. But she swallows her tears and sets her mouth into a straight line long enough to say, “Anna's spirit will be destroyed too. I will forget—”

“I understand,” I say quickly so she doesn't have to say it out loud:
I will forget that I ever had a family. That I ever was a mother.

“I can help you,” Victoria begins, but I shake my head.

“I thought you said it was my test, not yours.”

“It is. But I'm allowed to help, now that you've found me.”

I nod. “I'll come back,” I promise. I need all the help I can get.

Even though I'm longing to see our house filled with Mom's knickknacks, her clothes, her fingerprints—all that proof that she is a real, solid person and not a fading memory—I walk home slowly, going over in my mind everything that Victoria just told me. She said I had time, so I may as well take it. I'm about halfway home when I reach into my pocket for my phone and begin typing.

You'll never believe what I found out.

Delete.

I have so much to tell you!

Delete.

You were right and I was wrong.

Delete.

It's impossible to find the right thing to say to Nolan. I draft and discard a dozen text messages on the walk from Victoria's house to my own. Finally I type
I'm sorry
and hit send. The tiniest little bit of snow is falling, just a flurry. I dig a hat out of my jacket pocket and shove it on my head, but it doesn't make a bit of difference. I'm still cold, colder maybe than I've ever been in my entire life. And that's saying something, because I've spent most of the past few months freezing.

I'm tempted to resend the text a dozen times, but I settle for once. And then I wait. I must have checked my phone twenty times before I turn onto our street. I'm so busy looking down that I trip and fall nearly flat on my face in front of someone's driveway.

“Ow,” I say out loud, even though there's no one around to hear me. It's still early, and for once the fog isn't blindingly thick. I think it's too cold for fog, like the deep freeze has made everything crystal clear.

I'm a luiseach. A guardian angel. A supernatural warrior. A light bringer. Just like Nolan said I was. And it's up to me to save my mother.

Not just my mother. And not just Anna's spirit and Victoria's memories. It's up to me to save
myself.
Because who will I be if I don't have Mom? If I can't even
remember
that I used to have her? She's the only family I have.

Though I can't help wondering whether Victoria knows who my real parents are. The two luiseach who gave me up. Maybe she knows why.

I shake my head. I don't care whether Victoria knows. I don't care whether she offers to bring me to them. They aren't my parents. Mom is all the parent I'll ever need. The only one I want.

Still on my knees, snow melting into my jeans, I glance around to make sure there's no one around and try saying it out loud, like I just want to know what the sentence will feel like: “I'm a luiseach.”

Butterflies flutter in my stomach, but otherwise nothing happens. I say it again, louder this time: “I'm a luiseach.”

Still nothing, not even a bird or a squirrel to startle with the sound of my voice. Almost as if I wasn't saying something earth shattering, something that—just a few months ago, back in Austin, when Ashley and I were arguing over which movie to see, which boy was cutest, which ice cream flavor best—would have sounded unbelievable, incredible, even to a weirdo like me.

Ashley would say that I'd lost my mind. She'd say Mom probably just needs therapy—and me too, for believing all this. Her response would be so utterly
normal.
I wipe the dirt and pine needles and snow from my palms and stand up. The knees of my jeans are wet from my fall, and the right leg is ripped open. I guess texting and walking is almost as bad an idea as texting and driving. I sigh. All the words Victoria spoke are dancing around in my head, twisting and turning over one another, forming an enormous ball of anguish.

For just a few minutes I want to think about something else, anything else. Something that's a little bit easier to wrap my head around. Even the most seasoned luiseach probably has to take a break once in a while, right? Standing still, I send another text, this one to Ashley.

Merry Christmas,
I write.
I miss you.

It's the truth. Last year at this time Ashley and I were texting each other pictures of our Christmas trees, arguing over which of us had done a better job stringing the lights, and giggling over the ornaments we'd made for each other out of popsicle sticks back when we were six.

Ashley responds right away.
Merry Christmas! I miss you too.

How are things with Cory Cooper?

So amazing. I can't believe I'm actually going to have someone to kiss at midnight on New Year's Eve for once!

I almost laugh out loud at the difference between Ashley's and my New Year's Eve plans. Ashley's still living the life of a normal teenager, still trying to get me to be normal with her, just like she has for years—telling me to shop at normal stores, to wear normal clothes, to try normal hobbies. At least now I know that it wasn't entirely my fault that I was never any good at being normal. I wasn't born normal. Apparently I wasn't even born
human.

I couldn't help it that I love taxidermied animals and vintage clothes and books written two centuries ago. But the truth is, although I never cared about fitting in, I do miss the normal things Ashley and I used to do together. Just
regular
stuff like going to the movies or to a party. Lying out around the pool in her backyard. Listening to music. Studying SAT words. Eating pizza while we watched TV.

Ashley writes,
How are you? How's Kat?

So much for thinking about something else. I have no idea how to answer that question. I could tell Ashley that my mom is sick. She would care—she loves my mom. When we were growing up she and I spent as much time at each other's houses as
we did at our own. She'd probably offer to beg her parents for a plane ticket so she could fly up here and help me take care of Mom. Of course, she'd probably think that care involved making soup and picking up prescriptions at the pharmacy, not evil spirits and exorcisms.

I shake my head. How will it work—this forgetting? Will I remember Ashley, but not the fact that she loved my mom? But how can I remember Ashley without remembering Mom and our life in Austin—all those things are tied up together so tightly. Does that mean I'll forget my life in Austin too? I'll only remember my haunted life here in Ridgemont?

How long will it take for me to forget? Victoria hasn't forgotten her husband yet, not completely, and he died only a year ago. Maybe it will happen slowly. At first I'll just wonder where my favorite mustang T-shirt came from, but eventually I won't know who raised me until, finally, I'll believe that no one raised me at all. That I never was a part of a family, even a small one that was only made up of two people.

My phone buzzes with another text from Ashley:
Hello? Earth to Sunshine?
So I write back,
We're fine,
hoping that in a few days it will be the truth. Maybe that way it's not technically a lie.

Make any progress with that hot guy?

We had a fight,
I type honestly.

Oh no! Think you can work it out?

I'm not sure.

Well, keep me posted.

I will.

And let me know if you want to talk about it.

I smile a tiny, sad sort of smile. I can't talk about it without talking about a dozen other things Ashley won't believe or understand.
The truth is, even though Ashley and I have been close since elementary school, we've never actually had all that much in common, and now—with so much distance between us, going to different schools, living in climates so different we may as well be on different planets—we have even less to talk about. The two thousand miles between Austin, Texas, and Ridgemont, Washington, did come between us in the end. Now it feels absurd that we ever thought our friendship was stronger than that.

I stuff my phone back into my pocket and resume the walk home. Even after the desolation of Victoria's street, our neighborhood looks even more deserted than usual today. The decorative lights outside the house across from ours aren't lit. It looks like no one is home. This isn't the kind of neighborhood people come home to for the holidays. It's the kind of place people leave.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Apologies and Thank Yous

Mom is in the kitchen
sipping coffee when I walk in. She's still dressed in the scrubs she slept in, her auburn hair mussed and knotted down her back. She probably asked to have today off months ago, long before the demon moved in, back when she still cared about holidays and vacation. She doesn't look surprised to see me, doesn't ask what I was up to at this hour on the first day of winter vacation, doesn't ask how my jeans ended up dirty and ripped.

“I was just taking a walk,” I say. Even if she's not asking, I feel the need to make up some kind of excuse.

If I stared long enough and hard enough, would I be able to see the demon beneath her skin? I narrow my eyes, remembering the shadow that trailed behind her from one room to the next, so much bigger than her shadow should have been. Was that the demon's shadow I saw?

I take a deep breath, tasting the mildewy-ness that saturates our house. I take off my hat, gloves, and jacket, then put them dutifully away in the coat closet by the front door. I run my fingers through my frizzball and knead my scalp with my fingertips the way Mom did when I was little and couldn't sleep.

If I fail, I guess I won't remember that. Maybe I'll rub my scalp and wonder why it's so comforting.