Cackle, page 13
I shimmy out of my pants and sweater, dip a toe in to check the temperature of the water. It’s warm.
I step into the shallow end, which isn’t actually that shallow. I dunk myself under and begin to do the backstroke. When I get to the other side of the pool, I let myself float there.
“How is it?” Sophie asks.
“It’s great,” I say. “What are you reading?”
“Some book of alchemy,” she says. She fakes snoring.
“That bad?”
“No,” she says. “I’m melodramatic.”
“You? No.”
“Sarcasm, darling.”
I begin to swim around, do some laps. I was on the swim team throughout middle school but decided to quit freshmen year after Kim Schulman made a comment about my flat chest. I’d spent three years trying to convince myself that no one cared about my lack of boobs except me, only to have my paranoia validated.
I wonder what Kim is up to now. I bet she’s married. I make a mental note to Internet-stalk her later.
And while I’m envisioning what her wedding dress might have looked like, if she wore a ball gown or something more fitted, I’m able to ignore the sensation working its way up my foot, around my ankle.
But as it becomes tighter, colder, more aggressive, I’m forced to open my eyes and look beneath me, directly under the spot where I’m treading water in the deep end.
At first, I think it’s my shadow, until I see the distinct fingers.
With a single violent tug, I’m underwater.
The sting of water up my nose, inside my lungs, shocks me into complete stasis. I’m being dragged down to the bottom of the pool. The whirring in my ears is vicious.
I make the mistake of turning. There’s a person there. Kind of. A person with grayish pocked skin and bulging eyes, the color in them like melted wax. I scream and water punches down my throat.
I thrash around, trying to get the thing away. I fight for the surface, but it becomes very clear to me very quickly that it will not let me go. I manage to move us over to the side, and with everything I have, I kick, smashing it into the wall.
But it’s gone. It’s my foot that absorbs the impact.
I float up to the surface. I throw myself onto the ledge, coughing up pool water and probably my lungs along with the rest of my internal organs. The gum I swallowed when I was six.
“Annie, what happened? Are you okay?”
Sophie reaches out and pulls me up over the ledge.
“Your foot!” she says.
I look down. It’s mangled. Bleeding. I can’t feel it.
“What the fuck, Sophie?!”
“What?” she asks, looking confused, hurt by my anger.
“There was a . . . a . . . a thing! A guy! A person in your pool! It just tried to drown me!”
She inches toward the edge, carefully craning her neck to see into the pool.
“It’s gone now,” I say. “It’s . . . it’s a ghost! It looked like a ghost!”
“Hmm,” she says, tapping her lip.
“I thought you said your house wasn’t haunted.”
She doesn’t answer. She won’t look at me.
“I almost drowned,” I say. “Is your house haunted?”
Without raising her eyes to meet mine, she mumbles, “Maybe a little.”
“Sophie!”
“If I had told you, you would have never wanted to come over again!” she says. “You’re not in any danger. They’re just . . . inconvenient.”
“Who are they? And I’d say almost drowning isn’t an inconvenience. Death isn’t an inconvenience.”
“Well, I don’t know if I’d agree, but . . .”
“Sophie!”
“I didn’t realize they could swim,” she says. “I apologize. Please, please don’t be angry with me.”
She grabs my hands and kisses them. “Please? I’ll fix your foot.”
I can’t bring myself to look at it again. I know it’s broken.
“I need to go to a doctor,” I say.
“Pshh,” she says. “I can fix it. And I promise I’ll do something about the ghosts. They’re just excited because you’re new.”
“Excited?”
She sighs. “I should have been honest with you. I thought it would be too much if I told you everything all at once. I didn’t want to scare you away. I wanted you to still want to be my friend and to come over and for us to have a normal experience. As friends. Who can, you know, hang out.”
Her eyes are wide and sweet and pleading. Most of the time, with Sophie, I feel like the clueless, uncool little sister, but every once in a while, I’m the big sister with the allowance money and the jeans she wants to borrow.
I don’t know. I’m an only child.
“You can get rid of them?” I ask. “The ghosts?”
“Oh, yes. It’s much easier since they’re already dead.”
I find this disturbing on multiple levels. First, I don’t appreciate her nonchalant attitude toward literal ghosts. Second, it implies she’s familiar with the difficulties related to disposing of living people.
She gathers up my pants and sweater. “Let’s talk about this upstairs.”
“How am I getting upstairs?” I ask.
She leans down and lifts my arm over her head so it’s draped across her back. She shuts her eyes hard, and a moment later, I’m weightless. She opens the door to the spiral staircase, and I whimper at the sight of it. There’s no way we’re getting up it side by side, and there’s no way I’m getting up alone.
Sophie reaches out and touches the wall. We climb the first step, her anchoring me as I float along beside her, and somehow we fit. It’s like the stairs expand for us to accommodate us.
I hear a rattling sound and peer behind us to see the lemonade tray following us up the stairs. Carrying itself.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ll take care of the ghosts, I promise. I didn’t think they would bother you. I understand if you don’t want to come here anymore.”
There’s such sadness in her voice, such defeat.
“Maybe not for a swim,” I say.
Her smile is bright as a firework. “Really?”
“And I don’t want to sleep in that room,” I say. “There’s a ghost in there.”
“Is there really?”
“Yes.”
“I’m so sorry, pet. Truly, I am.”
“It’s okay.” I’m not capable of staying mad at anyone. I don’t have the stamina.
She carries me to the conservatory. It’s basically a fancy greenhouse, a giant glass room brimming with plants. It’s balmy and smells incredible. There’s a gorgeous array of colors from all of the flowers. There are rows and rows of herbs. Vines hang from the ceiling.
I’m reminded.
“Hey,” I ask her, “did you put up a plant in my stairway?”
“Hmm?” She sets me down on a stool in a corner, next to a workbench. She wastes no time busying herself, grinding away with a stone and pestle.
“I noticed there was a plant hanging above the stairs up to my apartment,” I say. I gesture to the room around us. “Wondering if maybe you had something to do with that.”
“Hm . . . oh, yes,” she says. “Mistletoe. It’s often misunderstood and absurdly misused. It brings peace. When we met, I sensed you were in need of peace.”
“Oh. Okay.” I’m not sure how I feel about her sneaking into my stairway to hang a plant, but I know her well enough by now to know that her intentions were good.
“Is that weird?” she asks me after a minute of silence. “Was that a strange thing to do? Be honest with me, please.”
“Kind of, yeah,” I say.
“It’s been so long since I . . .” She sighs. “I don’t know how to be any other way. I suppose I’m out of touch. Terribly uncool.”
“Are you about to heal my foot with magic?” I ask her. “Because that’s pretty fucking cool.”
She giggles. Her cheeks go pink and she hides them with her hands.
“I am!” she says. “I am about to do exactly that! Close your eyes.”
I do. There’s a moment of pain as she covers my foot in some kind of cold, wet paste. I hear her walking away from me, and when she returns, I hear the sound of running water and feel the spray of liquid passing gently across my foot.
“All done,” she says. “You can open your eyes now.”
My toes are straight; there’s no blood, no swelling. And more than that, there’s no more dead skin or calluses. It’s like I just got a pedicure.
“Wow,” I say. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” she says. “I feel too guilty to be thanked. You’re not still mad, are you?”
“No,” I say. “But honestly, I don’t think I’ve really accepted what just happened.”
I don’t think I’m digesting any of this information. About Sophie, about the town, about the fact that I was just almost drowned by a ghost that could somehow manifest in physical form. My brain doesn’t know what to do with any of this. It’s like being a doctor stumped on a diagnosis. It’s probably fine. Monitor the symptoms.
“I can walk you home if you like,” she says.
I shrug. “I don’t have anything to do at home.”
At least here, I have Sophie. I have company. I don’t want to be alone, sad and thinking about Sam, about why he texted me this morning.
I wonder why he texted me this morning.
“What should we do?” she asks. “Are you hungry? Should I make the goulash? Do you want to read? Watch a movie?”
I notice a wet stain on her dress. I realize, in total horror, that it’s my blood.
“Sophie,” I say, “I think I bled on you.”
I point.
“Oh,” she says. A grin splits across her face. “Human blood. My favorite!”
That was definitely a joke.
“Come upstairs with me. We can go into my closet. Play dress-up,” she says.
“Okay!”
I put my pajama pants back on, my sweater, my socks. My bathing suit is still damp, and now my clothes are damp, too. It’s uncomfortable, and I look like a slouch compared to Sophie, who is the epitome of elegance despite her dress being stained with blood.
We go upstairs, to the east wing. Sophie opens a set of French doors and announces, “This is my room.”
It’s very black. Black-and-silver damask wallpaper, a monumental four-poster bed with black velvet curtains, a black crystal chandelier. There are bouquets of black roses in black vases all around the room. It’s intense, severe, but somehow beautiful in its severity.
“Closet is through here,” she says. She opens another set of French doors.
The closet is almost as big as the bedroom. We’re surrounded by dresses, mostly black. They seem to sway on their own, to dance in a nonexistent breeze.
Sophie walks with purpose all the way to the back of the closet. She pulls some dresses aside to reveal an armoire. She opens the bottom drawer and begins sifting through it.
“You like to wear pants, yes?” she asks. “I’m going to find some pants for you.”
“That’s okay,” I say. “I can wear these.”
“They’re wet,” she says. “And besides, it’s dress-up. You agreed.”
“Okay, okay,” I say. “Your pants will all be too short on me.”
“Maybe,” she says. “I can make you some.”
“Make them?”
“I made all these,” she says, gesturing to the rest of the closet, to what must be over a hundred dresses. “Don’t be impressed. As I’ve said, I have a lot of free time. Here, catch!”
She throws me a pair of silky gray pants, then opens the top drawer and throws me a black cashmere sweater. “Try those.”
She turns around.
I’m not getting naked right here in the closet.
“I’m going back to my room,” I say. “My underwear is in there.”
“All right, darling,” she says. “But come right back. I want to see how they look.”
As I walk back out through her bedroom, I again remember what’s so easy to forget when I’m around Sophie.
This house is very, very scary.
I break into a light jog, hurrying to my room, where I can change quickly and get back to her.
I close the door, undress as fast as I possibly can, flinging my wet bathing suit across the room. It lands on top of the canopy. A problem for later. I put on my underwear, my bra, then the pants and sweater. They’re both incredibly soft. The pants are too short.
I’m too afraid to check my reflection. I don’t know whom else I’ll see in the mirror.
As I go to power walk past the staircase, I remember that my phone is still downstairs on the dining room table.
Retrieving it would mean journeying solo through the ghost house. But it would also mean I can text Sam back. See what he wants.
Maybe he’ll apologize for our last conversation.
Maybe he misses me.
I turn and travel quietly down the steps. I don’t want Sophie to hear me. I don’t think she would approve.
I run on tiptoes through the mirror hallway, looking only at the floor. When I get to the dining room, I see my phone on the table. I pick it up. The text from Sam hangs there on my home screen. Hey.
I lower my thumb down to unlock my phone.
“Annie.”
I drop my phone.
Sophie is sitting at the table, looking thoroughly unamused.
“Sophie! You startled me!”
“Well,” she says. She opens her hand and my phone flies into it.
“I was just getting my phone,” I say.
She raises an eyebrow.
“I wasn’t going to text him back.”
She raises the other eyebrow.
“Sophie.”
“Annie.”
“I’m being honest,” I say. “I just like to have my phone. I feel weird without it.”
“I’ve heard that happens,” she says. She hands me my phone. “As long as you’re not tempted.”
“I’m not,” I say. I feel bad lying to her. I feel even worse for my own weakness. “It’s just . . . I think the hardest part about a breakup is not talking to the one person you’ve always talked to. About everything.”
“Pet,” she says, softening. She stands up and puts her arms around me.
“It’s like breaking a habit. It’s hard.”
“It’s not something I’ve experienced,” she says. “But I can see that you’re struggling. Why don’t we go back upstairs? I can show you some of my old dresses from back when. Then maybe we can make dinner. Relax in the library.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“And I can walk you home after,” she says. “Or you can stay. Whatever you like.”
I really can’t imagine ever sleeping here again after what happened in the pool, but I don’t want to come out and say that to her.
I nod politely and follow her back to her closet, where we spend hours going through all of her dresses, some that date back to the seventeenth century. And her hats! She has an extensive collection of hats.
“Notice none of them are tall and pointy,” she says.
I did notice.
* * *
—
Later that night, after we eat leftover pastries for dinner and drink gin cocktails and read each other poems in the library, I tell Sophie that I’m going to go home, and she doesn’t try to convince me to stay.
“I’ll walk you through the wood,” she says. She puts on a magnificent black feathered coat that she rediscovered in the back of her closet. She tells me that she’s going to make me one to match, even though I express my doubts at being able to pull it off.
We walk in silence for a while, which is unusual for us. We rarely have a substantial lull in conversation.
It begins to get uncomfortable.
“What are you thinking about?” I ask her.
“Just remembering something,” she says. “Something that happened in these woods a long time ago.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
She runs her hand along my arm. “Not really. Not a pleasant memory.”
“I’m sorry, Sophie.”
“I’ve come a long way,” she says. “There’s no reason to be sorry for the things that make us better.”
“Yeah. But why do the things that make us better always have to suck so much? Can’t there be a route to self-improvement with—I don’t know—rainbows and cupcakes and, like, sitting on the couch?”
She laughs. “I think so! I believe it’s possible.”
“Good,” I say. “Sign me up for that.”
“Not everything can be easy. Not everything has to be so hard,” she says.
“Yeah.”
The silence rises again, putting space between us. I should let it be, allow it to exist, be content with it. Sam and I used to sit in silence, and it was fine. But something about this quiet I can’t trust. I fear it’ll continue to expand and expand until it swallows the promise of our friendship.
“Do you know those ghosts?” I ask. “In your house? Do you know who they are?”
Sophie sighs, and I know instantly it was the worst thing I could have said.
“No,” she says. “No idea.”
I find that hard to believe. She’s lived in Rowan for hundreds of years. She’s lived in that house for almost a hundred.
“No?” I ask.
“Annie,” she says, “the more thought and energy you give them, the more they’ll appear to you. They’re attracted to that energy. It’s quite similar to your ex-boyfriend. You give him power with your thoughts.”
“You’re right,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“We can put it in the past now, yes?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll take care of it,” she says. “I promise, no more ghosts.”
