The Turning (13 page)

On the day that Linda and Flora left there was nothing to do
but
read. The sky was dark and cloudy, and by the time I woke up, I could hear a steady soaking rain pounding on the roof. At breakfast I asked Linda if she was sure she wanted to go on such a nasty day, and Linda said it was better that way. She and Flora would get everything checked out—she smiled at Flora to make sure she understood this was all routine and wasn’t going to hurt and was nothing to be scared of—and they could save the beautiful days for playing outside and being in the garden.

I’d told my dad I planned to read a lot when I was on the island, but I hadn’t kept my promise. I’ve been playing with my secret collection of video games, probably more than I should have—mostly in the late afternoons and early evenings, when the children are watching Linda cook and I’m waiting to be called downstairs for dinner.

So this seemed like a good day for me to catch up on my reading, though this time I certainly wasn’t going to do it in the library.

After Miles and I waved to Linda and Flora and watched the red truck disappear down the road, Miles asked—very politely, of course—if it would be okay if he went to his room. He said he was in the middle of a book by an explorer who lived among the Marsh Arabs in what’s now Iraq. I said that sounded interesting, though I didn’t think it did.

I went to my room. I felt a little guilty that this kid was reading his way through all the books in the house and I was playing Grand Theft Auto. I looked through my books again, and guess what I found? A collection of famous ghost stories. I read one story called “The Monkey’s Paw” and another in which a girl sees dead people pass by a window while she’s having tea with an elderly relative. By the time I’d started the third story—about a haunted dollhouse—I wanted company, and I decided to go look for Miles.

I knocked on Miles’s door, but no one answered. I found him lying on top of his bed, so involved in his book that he hadn’t heard me push open the door.

“Hey,” I said. “Want to play a video game?”

He couldn’t have looked more shocked if I’d said, Want to jump off the roof and learn how to fly? Want to catch a toad in the garden and eat it? Want to learn the secret of the universe? For a moment I wondered if he’d ever heard of video games. But he’d been to school. He probably knew all about video games.

Miles broke into a wide grin, which quickly faded. He actually looked around to make sure that no one was listening. Then he said, “Cool. That would be cool.”

Miles and I went up to my room and sat down in front of the console. I thought Grand Theft Auto might be a little much for him. So I got this Wild West game that I’d loved when I was younger and I’d sort of grown out of. But I liked having it with me, so I’d brought it along.

I showed Miles how to play, and he caught on fast. Naturally there were video games—against the rules or not—at his school. He went first, and he was the sheriff, walking down the streets of this frontier town, blowing away the desperadoes who jumped off the roofs or fired at him from the doorways. I coached him a little, telling him when to shoot and jump and dodge, and he was doing pretty well.

That was when I began to notice a strange thing.

Among the bad guys he had to kill were a couple of characters I’d never seen in the game before. I got closer and looked over Miles’s shoulder so I could be sure I wasn’t mistaken. But I wasn’t wrong. I wasn’t imagining things. I only wish I were.

Two of the characters that kept reappearing and threatening him with guns and bombs and bows and arrows were cartoon versions of Norris and Lucy. They shot at him from the alleys and windows, and Miles shot them dead. Did he know that’s what he was doing? Did he see who they were? Or was I hallucinating again? Were the villains the same Wild West bad guys as always, or had Norris and Lucy somehow found their way into the game—the same way they’d found their way onto the boat and to the library, the tower, and the lakeshore?

Miles asked if I wanted to play. I said I was a little tired; I hadn’t slept well last night. I said I’d just lie down on the bed. He could play as long as he wanted.

I must have fallen asleep. When I awoke, Miles was gone. The room was empty. The video console was dark. It was still raining hard outside, and I had a fever.

The next thing I knew, Linda was leaning over me, her cool hand on my forehead. I was sick, but not too out of it to feel grateful that Linda wasn’t asking about the forbidden video console in my room.

“I think I’m sick,” I said.

“Good diagnosis, Dr. Jack,” said Linda. “There’s something going around. Actually, the doctor said that he thought Flora might have had a little bug or something. He thought that might have been what disturbed her sleep and made her wander outside in the dark. Maybe you caught it from her, though heaven knows how either of you could have been exposed to germs, given how isolated we are on this island. Maybe Flora caught it from a bumblebee and passed it on to you.”

The ghosts made us sick, I thought. But I knew if I said that, it would be the fever talking.

“So here’s my plan,” said Linda. “Let’s sit tight and not panic. Let’s keep you warm and full of fluids and see if your fever goes down.”

That sounds like a good plan to me, I wanted to say. But what I heard come out was “Plan … me.”

“I knew you’d agree,” said Linda. “Don’t tell Jim Crackstone I said so, but this is one of those times when television would really come in handy. I remember when I was a kid, I loved staying home sick from school and getting to watch TV all day.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“See?” said Linda. “You sound better already.”

For what was left of the day, and into the evening, Linda was in and out of my room, bringing me water and tea, covering me with more blankets. At one point she put a cool cloth on my head, and it felt so good, I almost did something intensely embarrassing. I almost grabbed her hand and kissed it. I kept thinking how much I wished she was my mom, and I promised myself that when I got better and went home, I would make sure, no matter what it took, that Linda and my dad met and fell in love and got married.

I’d completely lost track of time, but I know that it was late at night when Linda came into my room one last time with one more glass of water with lemon and two more pills to bring down my fever.

I said, “Couldn’t you stay here for a while? There’s that couch …”

Linda said, “You’re a big boy, Jack. And you’ve just got the flu. You’re not dying. Trust me, I’ll come check on you a couple of times during the night.”

So that’s what I thought was happening when I woke up … who knows how many hours later. I thought Linda was looking in on me.

My fever had come roaring back. I was freezing and burning, both at once. Everything hurt. My head, my throat, my legs. Every hair felt like a needle of pain sticking into my scalp. Even the backs of my hands ached.

I felt the pressure of someone sitting at the end of my bed. Thank God Linda had come.

“Linda,” I said. “Linda?”

A voice, a woman’s voice, said, “Thank you for letting me in.”

Are you reading this, Sophie? Have you actually made it to the end of this letter? Well, I’m glad to hear it.

You know what makes me mad, Sophie? The idea of you holding this letter in one hand and reading it with one eye while you’re looking in the mirror and brushing mascara on the other. So you can hurry up and go out with your friends. Friends? With your old friend Josh. Do you think I don’t know that my dad saw you outside the ice cream stand, and do you think my dad didn’t know that Josh was sitting next to you in the front seat of the car?

So what are you thinking, Sophie? Gee, I’m glad I didn’t have to take care of boring old Jack when he was sick with the flu. Or maybe you’re wondering if the person sitting on my bed scared me to death or bit me and now I’m a vampire, too.

Nothing like that happened, obviously. But a lot of other strange stuff happened, things so bizarre that I don’t feel like the same person I used to be. The Jack you knew has left the building. You can call me New Jack. And New Jack is not going to write you another line, he’s not going to tell you what happened next, unless you tell Josh to drop dead and you write me a letter this minute.

Love,

Your boyfriend,

New Jack

DEAR JACK,

Your letter really upset me. I was relieved to know you hadn’t gotten worse, since obviously you wouldn’t be writing to me if you hadn’t recovered. But your tone was so different, as if you really had become another person. Are you sure you’re okay? Does your dad know what’s happening? Don’t you think someone should tell him?

And why are you being so mean to me? I’m not going out with Josh. Where did you get the idea that your dad saw me with him? The afternoon I ran into your dad outside the ice cream stand, I was with my cousins. That was my cousin Biff beside me in the front seat. You can ask anyone. Ask my mom and dad if you don’t believe me. I never lied to you, Jack.

I assume that by the time you get this you’ll be completely better and back to the nice, sweet person I knew before you went to that island. I could kill my dad for setting this whole thing up. Anyhow, it’s not that long now until you return. Only another three weeks and you’ll be home, and we’ll be back together and you can see for yourself who I really care about—you or Josh.

So anyway, keep writing to me. I want to know what happened next and who was sitting on your bed that night you had the fever.

Love,

Sophie

DEAR SOPHIE,

Well, that certainly speeded things up! I guess the only way to get you to write back without waiting a million years is for me to be dying of fever with a ghost in my room.

Because, Sophie, you know who was at the end of my bed. You know it was Lucy. When I heard her voice, it sounded so familiar. As if it were a voice I’d been hearing inside my head from before I can remember.

“It’s cold in here,” she said.

“I know. I’m freezing,” I said.

“But you’re sick,” she said. “I’m just dead.”

“You’re dead?” I said.

“You already knew that,” she said.

“I am seriously sick,” I said. “Is this really happening?”

“This is really happening,” she said.

Once she said that, a lot of things seemed settled. Since she was dead, I didn’t need to ask her how she’d gotten on the ferry or on the other side of the lake or, for that matter, how she got into my room. Though why had she thanked me for letting her in? My head was buzzing with fever.

“I saw you on the boat,” I said.

“I know. I saw you, too. But I didn’t know who you were then or where you were going. Despite what the living think, ghosts don’t know everything. We know almost everything. But not some things.”

“That’s kind of confusing,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You have to be one of us to understand.” I wondered who she meant by us. Her and Norris? Or all the restless ghosts that still wandered among the living?

“Why were you on the boat?”

“Because I wanted to see the island again? Because I was happy here? Because I cared about the children? All those reasons and more. And Norris wouldn’t let me go without him, so …”

Did I say that Lucy talked very fast, almost double normal speed? Maybe that was where I got the impression that she wasn’t sure how long she could stay. It reinforced my sense that she was there—and not there. I felt her weight on the edge of my bed, the weight of an actual body, but at the same time I could see through her. I could see the wall of my room through her red hair and through the golden aura around her. She seemed nervous and ready to vanish if anyone saw her or scared her or told her to leave. Strangely, I didn’t want her to leave.

Maybe because I was sure she would stay only for a while, I said, “Did you do something bad to the children?” I would have waited longer to ask something like that if I thought we had more time. And I would never have asked a living person so directly.

“It wasn’t good,” said Lucy. “What we did wasn’t good.”

“You and Norris?”

Lucy jumped when I said his name, then nodded. Or I think she nodded. A cold wind blew through the room. It was as if it was suddenly winter and someone had opened a window.

I couldn’t bring myself to ask her what they’d done.

I said, “I saw you playing cards on the boat.”

“The cards?” she said. “You saw the cards? I wish you hadn’t. That was the worst part, really.”

“The worst part? How bad could cards be?” It was bizarre how much better I felt, talking to a ghost. At the same time, I was thinking that I must be getting worse, and that my rising fever was the reason I imagined I was having a conversation with a dead person.

“It was what we were playing for,” she said.

“High stakes?”

“Nothing higher,” said Lucy. Somehow in my delirium I remembered Linda saying that Norris and Lucy hadn’t been interested in the children’s bodies, but their souls.

Actually, I was hearing Linda’s voice—asking how I felt and if I needed more water.

“I’m sleeping,” I said. “I’m fine.” I was afraid that Linda had scared the ghost away. What if I never got to hear what was so terrible about a game of cards?