Lily's Ghosts Read online

  Lily’s Ghosts

  Laura Ruby

  Copyright © 2003, 2005, 2011 by Laura Ruby

  ISBN:

  0983310831

  978-09833108-3-9

  www.lauraruby.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical without permission in writing from Laura Ruby & Metro Books.

  A slightly different version first published by HarperCollins in 2003.

  Cover design by Janie Bynum.

  www.bynumcreative.com

  Smashwords Edition: April 2011

  Contents

  Dedication

  Boo

  Chapter One

  Lemonade

  Chapter Two

  Whatever Lola Wants

  Chapter Three

  The Good Fortunes Shoppe

  Chapter Four

  Pink

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Jamarama

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Hoodlums

  Chapter Ten

  What Goes Up Must Come Down

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Phantom of the Opera

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Madame Durriken’s Fortune

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Heart

  The Lily Song

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Katherine in the Cradle

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Ghosts

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Boo

  Acknowledgments

  Coming Soon: The First Volume in The Wall and the Wing Series

  The Chapter Before the First, The Professor Remembers

  Chapter One, The Girl Who Wasn’t There

  Dedication:

  To Melissa and Jessica, for helping me remember.

  And for Steve, for everything.

  Boo

  The historic City of Cape May, a charming shore village on the tiptoe of New Jersey, is famous for three things: Victorian homes frosted pink and white as the sweetest cakes, sun-washed beaches littered with “diamonds,” and many befuddled ghosts.

  Most do not know that they are ghosts. They go about their business, bound for the shore or for their old jobs as tour guides or bank tellers or taffy pullers, yammering peevishly at the living. Sometimes they wander the halls of their grand old houses, wondering why guests bring so much furniture and seem to stay for so long.

  And then there are those tragic few who understand that their lives have taken an abrupt and brutal turn and that they are helpless to change it. These are the sad ones, the angry ones, the ones who rattle the pipes and steal the socks and hide the house keys in the fridge. These are the ones who scuttle under the beds and whisper shush, shush in the dark.

  Of course, not everyone who dies becomes a ghost; some souls linger on in this strange twilight while others burst like soap bubbles in the sun, atoms scattering happily, gratefully to the heavens.

  Who knows what weighs these sad souls to this earth?

  Who knows what haunts the ghosts?

  Chapter One

  Just after six in the evening, with the January sky glowering through the windows, Lily decided to throw Uncle Max in the closet.

  It wasn’t her painting. It wasn’t even her house. But it was a terrible picture. Even her mother thought so, and he was her mother’s uncle.

  “Oh, that awful thing,” her mother had said. “Just ignore it. Don’t even look at it.”

  “How can you not look at it?” In the portrait, Uncle Max was just a little older than Lily, but his color was odd and gray and faded, as if he’d spent some time in a washing machine. Pinkish lips flashed a thin zipper of teeth, like the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood.” The eyes, though, the eyes were the worst. Lily thought that if she turned off the lights, the eyes would green up the dark, twirl like pinwheels in the sockets.

  “If I looked like that, there’s no way I’d let anyone paint a picture of me.”

  Lily’s mother waved her hand. “What does he care? He’s dead.”

  For Lily, it was bad enough that she and her mother had been kicked out of the big white house in Montclair, New Jersey, just that morning. It was bad enough that they had to call Uncle Wesley — whom Lily’s mother hadn’t seen in years and who was the only family they had left — and beg for a place to stay. And it was bad enough that Lily had to endure four hours on a cramped and wheezing bus with everything she owned stuffed into duffel bags while her cat, Julep, howled like a zoo monkey the whole way.

  She was not going to spend the next few months in this strange old house staring at some goggle-eyed, fish-faced dead boy.

  She settled on an empty closet in the hall just past the huge staircase. She set the frame on the closet floor, leaning the painting face first against the wall.

  “Good night, Uncle Max,” she said, and slammed the door shut.

  She did not feel any better.

  Lily shoved her hands into her pockets and stalked into the living room, or the parlor, as her mother had called it. She couldn’t help but notice how pretty the room was — all high ceilings and polished floors, antique chairs with their whimsical animal feet — like the summer home of some duchess. But pretty, Lily thought, was deceiving. Pretty meant “Look but don’t touch.” Pretty meant “Mine but not yours.”

  The front door belched a cranky moan, and her mother’s exasperated voice rang out. “Yikes, Lily! You didn’t even bring the suitcases upstairs yet!”

  “I was looking around.”

  “It’s nice, don’t you think?”

  Lily shrugged. “If you like museums.”

  “Oh, well, don’t you worry about me,” her mother said. “I’ll just lug these four-hundred-pound grocery bags all by myself.”

  Lily helped carry the bags into the kitchen and empty the contents onto the counter. “Where’s the milk?”

  Her mother pressed her palms to her temples. “It’s official. I’m senile.”

  “You can always wait until tomorrow morning.”

  “I need it for my coffee. You know how I get if I don’t have my coffee.” Lily’s mother tossed the few items she had bought into the refrigerator. “I won’t bother taking off my coat. You wouldn’t believe how cold it is out there.”

  Lily scowled at her mother’s orange cape, the loud, patchwork skirt peeking out from beneath it. “It’s January, Mom. It’s supposed to be cold, isn’t it?”

  “I just didn’t think it would be this cold.”

  “You never think it will be this cold,” Lily said. Or this bad or this hard or this long.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Never mind.”

  Her mother wandered into the dining room and Lily followed. “Did I tell you that the house has been in the family for more than a hundred years?”

  “You told me.” Lily took in the china cabinet with its bellyful of crystal, the chandelier that glittered like a small universe over the table. “If this is a summer house, what’s the winter house look like?”

  “Bigger. More expensive shiny stuff. It’s been a long time since we’ve been there.”<
br />
  “Was Dad with us?”

  If her mother didn’t want to answer a question, she did one of three things: smiled, shrugged, or pursed her lips as if she were blowing a kiss. Her mother smiled her “no comment” smile.

  Lily sighed. “So is your Uncle Wesley a millionaire or something?”

  “Or something,” her mother said, laughing. She ran her hand across the surface of the table, the bracelets she had designed herself jangling on her thin arm. “I don’t think Uncle Wes has changed anything here since you were little. And it’s been a long time since you were little.”

  Lily inspected the split ends of her long, cinnamon-stick hair. She was used to being as tall as her mother, as tall as an adult. She was thirteen, but sometimes Lily felt like an adult, the way she imagined an adult would feel. Tired. Disappointed.

  Her mother sighed. “I can see antiques are not our thing. Did you check if we have cable?” She marched down the hallway past the stairs and into the TV room, Lily trailing behind.

  Her mother plucked the remote off the top of the TV and flicked on the machine. “More channels than a teenager could hope for,” she said. She looked past Lily to the wall. “Lily? Where’s the painting?”

  “What painting?” Lily made her own eyes big and round, batting her eyelashes.

  “Uh huh. So innocent. You know what painting.” Her mother pointed to the empty space over the mantle.

  “Oh, that painting. I put it in the closet.”

  “Lily!”

  “It’s bad. You said so yourself.”

  “But I didn’t say that you could take it down!”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to it.”

  Her mother turned off the TV, sighed at the unadorned wall. “I suppose the closet won’t hurt it.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Lily said.

  Her mother looked from the wall to Lily, Lily to the wall, her expression morphing into her sad clown face, her I’m-sorry face. Lily hoped her mother wouldn’t try to hug her.

  But instead of reaching for Lily, her mother hid her hands in the voluminous folds of the orange cloak. “I promise that this is going to be okay, okay?”

  Lily nodded, thinking that she had once heard a bird with a call just like that, a polite bird that asked okay? Okay? “Is it OK if I eat this birdseed? Is it OK if I poop on your head?”

  A thin, faraway mewl caught her mother’s attention, and she pulled her hands out from the folds in the cloak, smoothed her hair from her face. “You can’t keep the cat in that box forever. We’ll be here till June, at least. Then we’ll get our own place. Maybe even on the beach. How does that sound?”

  It sounded like another one of her mother’s fantasies, but it was no use telling her. In the dining room, Lily and her mother found Julep looking small and doomed in her cat carrier. Lily opened the latch. The Siamese stepped out, blinking her blue eyes, poking the air with her wise nose.

  Lily stroked the cat’s silky fur, but Julep did not press her head into the curve of Lily’s palm the way she always did. The cat stared at the ceiling.

  “What’s up there, Julep?”

  Julep vaulted onto one of the chairs and then onto the table. She padded to the middle of the table and sat beneath the chandelier.

  Lily’s mother leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb. “What’s she doing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Julep made a strange sound in her throat, a cross between a meow and moan. She rose up on her hind legs and batted at something with a front paw.

  “Oh, that’s not too creepy,” said her mother. “Yikes.”

  “Maybe there’s a spider,” Lily said, though she didn’t see any spiders. She scratched at the back of her own neck, where the tiny hairs prickled.

  “I can’t even watch.” Lily’s mother grabbed the cat. “She shouldn’t be on the table anyway,” she said, and tossed her to the floor. Julep turned and skidded out of the dining room, down the hallway, and out of sight.

  Lily looked up at the chandelier. The crystals winked.

  “She’s just a little skittish. We’re all a little skittish.” Her mother clasped both hands over her head and stretched. “I’ll be right back with the milk,” she said, and strode down the hall toward the front door. When she reached the staircase, she turned. “You know, it smells exactly the same. Like lemon. And tea with mint.” She glanced up the staircase as if she expected someone to appear at the top.

  “Mom?”

  Her mother turned. “Yeah?”

  “How did your uncle Max die?”

  Lily’s mother made her kissy face. “Why don’t you go upstairs and pick a bedroom? I’ll be fifteen minutes, tops.”

  Lily watched as the door swung shut, then grabbed as many bags as she could carry and dragged them to the second floor. All of the bedrooms were decorated with jumbles of fussy-looking furniture; Lily chose one for herself by putting her duffels on the floor by the closet. She didn’t bother to unpack.

  She sat on the musty bed, hands knotted on her lap. At the house in Montclair, in the corner of her yellow bedroom, there was a microscope that she’d had to leave behind, a microscope that her mother’s boyfriend, The Computer Geek, had bought Lily for her birthday. Lily loved to look at things under it: an eyelash, a bit of dust, a mosquito. She unclasped her hands and rubbed the velvet bedcover. Her microscope was gone. Her friends were gone. The yellow room in Montclair, gone.

  Lily felt the tears welling up in her eyes and she swiped at them, squinting them away. She could hear the wind wailing outside, high and thin and human: Help meeee! Help meeee! She could smell the faint tang of lemon and tea with mint. She could see Julep crouched beneath the dresser, eyes fluorescent with fear. When the phone rang Lily pounced on it, realizing after she gulped her eager hellos that there was no one there.

  Lemonade

  Just a few blocks away from Uncle Wes’s house, on a cold and sandy beach, a balding man with a jelly belly and toothpick legs half sat, half fell on his wife.

  “Hey!” said his wife. She, as always, wore a polka-dotted swimsuit and a bathing cap blooming with bright and unsettling rubber flowers. “You’re crushing me.”

  “How about making some room, then, instead of hogging the whole sheet?”

  The wife rolled her eyes and moved two inches to the left. Husband and wife watched the gray sea curl and unfurl like a tongue. If they did not seem to be bothered by the frigid winter air, it was because they couldn’t feel it.

  “Did you bring the lemonade?” the man said.

  “No,” said the woman. “I thought you brought the lemonade.”

  The man shook his head. “Didn’t I ask you to bring the lemonade before we got into the car?”

  “Where is the car?” asked the woman.

  “Where we left it.”

  “Oh.” The woman fluffed the big floppy flowers on her bathing cap. “Where did we leave it?”

  The man frowned at his wife. “I don’t know. All I know is that I want some lemonade.”

  The two had left their car in a ditch twenty-three years before, after the man swerved to avoid some geese crossing the road.

  “Should we see if the concession stand is open yet?”

  “Forget it. Let’s just go swimming before the crowds get here.”

  The woman laughed, pointed at the ocean, where numerous heads bobbed in the icy surf. “We’re too late.”

  “Darned kids,” the man said. They watched as one of them, a girl of about thirteen or fourteen, ran out of the water. She was wearing a woolen dress over pantaloons. “Where do they get those crazy outfits?”

  “At least she’s not walking around half-naked like some of the other ones,” said the wife, throwing a stern look at another teenager prancing around the beach in a black leotard, fishnet stockings and a tiny satin skirt. “But that wool dress looks awfully heavy.”

  The girl, who had drowned in 1909, was running up and down the beach in the sodden dress calling, “Father! Father? Wher
e are you? Father?”

  The woman’s brows furrowed in worry. “Do you think she’s lost?”

  “Looks like,” said the man.

  “Do you think we should help her?”

  “She’ll be fine.”

  The woman harrumphed. It was one of her favorite things to do.

  “Get a load of that guy,” said her husband, shaking his head at a caped figure wearing knee breeches and a plumed hat.

  The woman gestured to a tall fellow in animal skin pants, shells, and feathers making his way down the beach toward them. “And what do you think he’s dressed up for?”

  “Lunatics,” the man said. “I don’t know why they don’t lock up all these people where they belong.”

  The man, a Lenape Indian who had died in a skirmish with Dutch settlers in 1644, stopped suddenly, and gaped at the man and his wife before hurrying off in the opposite direction, his moccasins kicking up sand in stiff sprays as he ran.

  “Well! What spooked him?” asked the woman, indignant.

  The man looked at his wife’s bathing cap, at the rubber flowers sprouting from it like Brussels sprouts. “Beats me.”

  Chapter Two

  The house — shiny and drapey and mossy with doilies — loomed so huge and imposing that for the first week Lily felt like a hamster scratching around in it. And she kept touching things, things she knew she shouldn’t. She wondered how she was going to make herself at home, even for a little while, when she had to keep rubbing her fingerprints off everything.

  At least there’s no boyfriend this time, she consoled herself. Except for the distant uncle in Philadelphia, and the dead one in the closet, Lily and her mother were pretty much on their own.

  It wouldn’t stay that way for long.

  Here’s how it always happened: Lily’s mother met a man. Her mother and the man would date. Soon, they would make plans. Plans to move. Plans to get married. Plans to start a business. They planned and planned and planned until the plans were so elaborate that the man would get all tangled up in them, forget his part. Finally, the man, whoever he was, would announce he needed his “space” and would shuffle away, shaking his head like a cat who’d landed on his feet after a dizzying fall.