The Ghost of You Lingers, page 20
She threw her head back and laughed. “I wish you could’ve met Agatha; I really do. You remind me of her.” She wiped her eyes, smearing her mascara. “She was much worse to take care of, though.”
“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.”
Patting the edge of the bed, Miranda rose and said, “Just when I thought I was through with taking care of stubborn Cartwright women, you showed up.”
“I’m—”
She shook her head. “No, dear, I’m glad you did.” Miranda looked out the window at the almost-full moon. “Your auntie was a royal pain in my rear for over twenty years, and I wouldn’t trade a second of it. Even when I had to help her wipe her rear.”
That made me smile. “Why did Agatha really give me this house? She had a Gibson guitar sitting in the shed like it was waiting for me to find it. Why?”
She cocked her head to the side, then shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe she just wanted to see what would happen.”
“But she’s dead.”
Miranda winked. “That doesn’t mean she can’t see us, love.”
Chapter 23
When I woke the next morning, there were three mugs on the bedside table next to me. Annabelle had dragged a table upstairs from one of the spare bedrooms. Each mug was a different color and held a different variety of tea that I had no interest in drinking. One had the phrase “Uff da” on it. I sipped from each, trying to keep my face from showing how much I hated the taste. Annabelle hovered by the bed, literally unable to keep her feet anchored to the floor.
I managed to get to the bathroom under my own power, then accepted a piece of toast from Annabelle and notified Yasmin that I wasn’t dead via text. Finally, I settled back down in bed, exhausted after being awake and moving for only an hour.
“Sit down, Marley,” I said, patting the empty stretch of bed next to me.
After fretting for a few more seconds, she sat down carefully on the bed, then lay down and faced me. I carefully turned onto my uninjured side and reached out my hand. Annabelle reached back, holding her hand above mine. Our palms were ships passing each other by, sharing the same water but never meeting.
My eyelids dropped. With her cool, ghostly energy next to me, I felt safe and tired enough to sleep for days.
“What if I stayed?” I said, only half aware of what I was saying.
“What do you mean?”
“What if I didn’t go back to New York?” I didn’t say “back home.” My apartment was nice. My pothos plant would probably miss me eventually. But it wasn’t home. It was just the place I went to in between stints on stage. As long as I was playing music, I was home. Or so I thought. For a while, I thought Abaddon could be home, as long as Annabelle was here. Now I wasn’t sure where home was anymore.
“I could stay here. With you.”
“If you stayed here,” Annabelle said slowly, her voice barely more than a whisper, like she didn’t want to wake me, “you’d need to make an actual apology to Yasmin. And I’d hold you to your promise to buy me a new fridge.”
I smiled but didn’t have the energy to laugh.
“And you’d finish your song,” she continued. “You’d record it and put it on the internet Tubes, then make a million dollars off it.”
I chuckled at that. “Don’t make me laugh, Marley, it hurts.”
She smiled, tucking the hand that wasn’t holding mine under her cheek. “Fine. You would sing to me, and I would be the best audience of one.”
“That’s much more likely.”
“I would make dinner for you. We would pretend to have tea together. And you would get bored.”
“I wouldn’t—”
“You would. I would tell you to travel, and when you got back, you’d tell me all about the places you’d seen. And you’d bring me souvenirs and buy me more books. I’d read to you at night and watch you sleep.”
I must’ve made a face, because she added, “Not in a creepy way.”
“Sounds nice,” I murmured.
“It would be,” she whispered. “You’d grow older. There’s nothing either of us could do about that. And if you got sick or sad, I couldn’t hold you or comfort you. If you fell from another ladder or another stupid horse, I couldn’t fix you. I could only watch as you slipped further away from me. And then one day, I would be alone again.”
There was no sound in the room but my raspy breathing and the beating of my heart. Eventually, I blinked and shook my head, trying to come to my senses through a thick fog of painkillers but not quite getting there.
“Nuh uh,” I said.
“What?”
“That’s horseshit. A great big pile of—”
“Oh, not again, please.”
“Nuh uh,” I repeated. “You’re just scared.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You’re not scared of me eventually dying. If I left, you wouldn’t have to risk being alive again. You’re scared of being alive again because you’re scared of dying. But it’s okay, Marley, it’s normal to be scared of dying. Even if you’re a ghost.”
“Oh darling,” she said, and I realized that Annabelle was crying softly. Her tears fell from her face but dissipated into nothing before they reached the pillowcase. “That’s not at all what I’m afraid of.”
“Then what?”
“I’m afraid of only being able to love you for one day.” She wiped her eyes, then held my hand again. I expected it to feel wet, but it didn’t, just cold and tingly. “What if I came back, but all I had was one day with you? I couldn’t bear it, knowing that we might’ve had a lifetime. It would break my heart to see you live your life to the end, but I would rather have that than only one day.”
I put both my hands out, about a foot apart. I gestured to one, then the other. “Rock. Hard place.”
She passed her hand through both of mine. “I go through them both.”
“You’re right, Marley,” I said, closing my eyes. I was exhausted even though I’d only been awake for a short time. “I didn’t have the right to ask you to choose. Those are both shitty options. But I still wish you would choose to come back and be with me.”
I must’ve fallen asleep again, because the next thing I knew, my room was full of daylight and my ghost was gone.
***
Dr. Johnson had been right. The day after the fall—and the day after that—I was in an absolute world of hurt. I slept most of the next day in a painkiller haze, then moved downstairs. My bruises got darker and uglier while my joints screamed at me every time I moved.
While I recovered, Sage, Adam, and Tyler became permanent fixtures in the house. Tyler delivered casseroles from his moms and sent back reports on my health to Sara. He and Adam followed Annabelle around the house, relentlessly prodding her with questions and asking her to walk through walls. Every attempt at filming the result failed, but they recorded at least a dozen tries, dissolving into laughter each time they witnessed Annabelle float or stick her arm through a wall. She laughed along with them, rediscovering some of the joy of her current form as the boys found her mundane life in the cottage worthy of a dozen failed TikToks.
My right arm was still too sore to comfortably hold my guitar, but I sat on the intact sofa in the sitting room and watched Sage play, giving them pointers. Sage was a natural musician, and watching them improve after just a few hours of instruction did something funny to my insides.
When Nate appeared at the front door holding Yasmin’s trunk in his beefy arms, Annabelle let him in. He gingerly stepped toward me and kept his voice in a whisper. “Hi, Gibson.”
“I’m not in a coma, Nate, you can talk normally.”
He looked relieved but still stood at a distance like he was afraid I might bite him. “Okay, then. I’ll just . . .” He pointed to the stairs. Yasmin had moved her things back into the rose-wallpaper room for the time being. Our ceasefire was holding, but Yasmin and I hadn’t really talked since she brought me home from the Johnsons.
“Yeah.” I chewed the inside of my cheek. I settled in Annabelle’s chair in her alcove, trying not to move in ways that hurt, which meant mostly not moving.
Annabelle gave me a disapproving look that said “You need to talk to her” with her eyebrows.
I cleared my throat. “Nate, can you ask Yasmin to come downstairs? I’d like to talk.”
“Sure.” He continued up the stairs with her bag, and gently opened and closed the door to her room.
“How about some tea to help you with this conversation?” Annabelle asked, even though I already had a half-full mug at my elbow. Her manic insistence on making tea as a way of repairing the damage done by our argument and my fall made me even more fond of her.
“Sure, Marley.” I got up with a groan and followed her into the kitchen, watching as Annabelle busied herself at the sink. When Yasmin came downstairs, Annabelle set two cups on the table and then vanished, giving me a thumbs-up before she faded completely.
“Do you want this? I literally can’t drink any more tea but I will never tell Annabelle that.” I pointed to my mug. It was yellow and was labeled “Tears of Ohio fans.”
Yasmin sat down in what had become her usual spot at the table. She sniffed her mug and then mine. She shrugged and accepted both.
I began, “So, uh—”
At the same time, she said, “I guess we—”
We both paused, then I said, “Look, I’m sorry for what I said the other day.”
She played with the lacy hem of her sleeve. She was wearing a blouse that wouldn’t look out of place at the Renaissance fair.
“I was mad at Annabelle for rejecting me and I took it out on you. Even though you were basically squatting here without paying rent or utilities, it was immature of me and it wasn’t fair to you.”
“Thank you for apologizing.” She directed her words to the mug in front of her instead of me. “I don’t know what went down, but clearly it really hurt you and I’m sorry for that. We both probably could’ve handled this better.”
“Maybe.” Sitting across from her, I felt attached to my weird cousin all of a sudden. “But we’re Cartwright women, so maybe that’s expecting a bit much.”
She laughed. “Facts.”
We sat comfortably while awkward guitar chords drifted in from the alcove. Sage was trying to learn “Because the Night” on my guitar, but their progress was slow.
“We can still do it, you know,” Yasmin said quietly. “The ritual.”
I frowned. “But I burned the book.”
She rolled her eyes. “Do you honestly think I didn’t copy that entire book? I scanned it and hand copied the diagrams. They are backed up to three different types of drives. The Cartwright family grimoire is fully digital now.”
“You are something else, you know that?” I said. She frowned, and I added, “I mean that as a compliment.”
Yasmin finished one mug of tea and started on the other. “She really didn’t want to come back?”
I shook my head.
“I guess it doesn’t matter, then.”
Annabelle appeared suddenly, seated in the chair between us. Both Yasmin and I jumped, startled, and Yasmin’s empty mug knocked over.
Annabelle righted the mug and said, “Let’s do it.” She looked at Yasmin, then at me, a serious expression on her face. “I’ll do the ritual. Just tell me what I need to do.”
Chapter 24
The days in between my fall and the ritual passed in a blur of activity. Yasmin rushed around gathering materials and practicing her magic chants like she was rehearsing for a play. She had a notebook full of scribbles that she consulted, adjusting her glasses and squinting at her own handwriting. She tore off a page and told me to memorize the lines on it. “Can you do that?” she asked. “It has to be perfect.”
I scoffed and reminded her of all the lyrics and chords I kept in my brain. Learning a magical chant was nothing compared to the list of places in “I’ve Been Everywhere.”
On the morning of the ritual, Nate, Sage, Adam, and Tyler helped move the furniture in the sitting room out of the way, then rolled up the large rug that had covered the floor. The rug wasn’t horribly ugly, but it had at least a decade’s worth of stains and dust. Once it was off the floor, I realized how much better the room looked without it. I told Yasmin to have it cleaned instead of throwing it away, figuring it might come in handy if whatever they were going to do ruined the floors. She directed Nate to take it outside where she’d already scheduled a pickup service. Once dealing with the rug was finished, Yasmin checked the item off her to-do list with a flourish. She was good at this.
Under her direction, Adam and Tyler painted a large circle on the floor with the enthusiasm of kids armed with paint and a forbidden surface. Yasmin painted smaller symbols within the circle herself, using directions from her copy of the grimoire and handwritten notes from the one I’d burned.
I stood in the hallway and watched as my cousin destroyed the hardwood floor of my house. “What do I do?”
Miranda took me by the elbow and steered me to the wingback chair in Annabelle’s alcove. “Sit right there, love.”
“But what can I do?”
“Do you know your part of the incantation?”
I nodded.
“Good.” She looked at me with kindness and fond exasperation. “Then you can sit.” She patted my knee and walked away.
All I could do was watch, feeling useless. It felt like waiting for Christmas as a kid, without the surety that at the end of the night, I would receive a gift.
“Are you all right, my dear?”
I jumped, startled at Annabelle’s sudden appearance. She was standing at my elbow, halfway embedded in the floor so that her eyes were level with mine.
“Sorry, were you there for a while? I think I might have zoned out a bit,” I said.
“I’m here,” Annabelle said, not quite answering the question.
“What about you? Are you okay, Marley?”
“I must confess I’m a bit nervous,” she said.
“Understandable.” I rested my head on the back of the chair and turned to look at Annabelle as she watched the preparations unfold. A lock of her hair escaped from behind her ear, and for the umpteenth time, I wished I could reach out and touch her, if only to tuck it back.
A lump formed in my throat as I settled back to watch Yasmin boss Nate, Miranda, and the kids around. Miranda playfully squeezed Nate’s arm when he muscled an antique side table out of the way, causing him to blush all the way from the V-neck of his shirt to the tip of his hairline. The house, once so empty and silent, seemed full to the brim with life and laughter. The hole in my chest filled with feelings. These people were here for me and Annabelle, not because I had asked, but because they wanted to help.
A cold, ghostly hand gently stroked the back of my neck. Little tingles lit up my sensitive skin in the spots where Annabelle’s fingers made contact. I remembered feeling this same sensation my first night in the house. Despite not knowing how I would react to the presence of a ghost, Annabelle had tried to comfort me the only way she could.
“Thanks, Marley,” I whispered. “If this doesn’t work—”
“It will,” she said firmly. “And . . . I know.”
***
Timing was crucial. Annabelle was to step into the magically drawn and charged circle exactly at sunset. The ritual would happen hours before the full extent of the eclipse. I assume there were magical reasons that had to do with the mystical properties of sunset versus midnight or whatever, but didn’t ask. If it let Annabelle come back sooner, sunset was fine by me.
Yasmin had smeared a dark red liquid on her face and around the circle on the floor. I didn’t want to know what it was or if it would stain but I had a feeling it would definitely stain.
Annabelle stood on the edge of the circle, fidgeting as the grandfather clock in the sitting room ticked down the seconds until she was to step forward. Yasmin had three different watches on her wrist and an alarm on her phone to get the timing right, but Annabelle kept her eyes on the old clock. All three of the magic books were infuriatingly vague about what would happen once she entered the circle at sunset on the night of the blood moon.
All Agatha’s book said was: “She shall come to be as she no longer was, then shall come thrice more.”
At 8:17 p.m., Yasmin clapped loudly. “It’s time!”
Miranda, Yasmin, and I stood on the edges of the circle and held hands. We chanted a series of phrases. With her maroon dress and matching overcoat, Miranda looked exactly like a friendly witch you might find living in a cabin in the woods. Yasmin, however, was channeling a more modern version of witchcraft, wearing an off-the-shoulder patterned dress with long bell sleeves and knee-high boots.
Our intoned words bled into each other in my mind, adding an eerie soundscape to the darkness slowly falling on the house. Nate, Sage, Adam, and Tyler watched from the alcove. Tyler filmed the entire thing on his phone but had promised not to narrate.
Finally, it was time.
We stopped chanting and everyone seemed to take an anticipatory breath as we broke apart and allowed Annabelle to step forward into the circle. She looked around, bemused. She held her hands at her sides, twitching her fingers every now and then as if she wasn’t quite sure what to do with her hands.
Yasmin grabbed my hand again and squeezed it. “Second incantation.”
“Right.” I joined in with Miranda and Yasmin, my mouth slipping on the words I’d boasted about hastily memorizing while my head was still stuffy with painkillers. My ankle throbbed from bearing my weight for the minutes we’d been standing.
For a minute that seemed to hang suspended in time, nothing happened. Then all of a sudden, the energy in the room changed. Annabelle started glowing with a pulsing light. The radiance around her head reminded me of a halo, and I remembered the first time she appeared over my head. I had thought of her as an angel.
“Oh,” Annabelle said, looking at her glowing hands.
Yasmin squeezed my hand again, and I realized I had forgotten to keep saying my assigned phrase. I squared my shoulders, ignored my aching body and resumed. Across from me, Miranda’s face was a mask of calm.
