Lily's Ghosts Read online

  Lily knew all this because she was there, sitting at the restaurants or in the movie theaters, playing with her straw wrappers as her mother and the men cooked up their schemes. The men would try to ask Lily questions when they noticed her.

  “And what do you like to do?” They asked this because Lily’s mother was an artist and they assumed Lily was one too.

  “Science experiments,” Lily might answer.

  Lily’s mother explained, “Lily’s a bit more practical.”

  And because the men were mostly practical, and mostly terrified that they would be practical for the rest of their lives, their faces would fill with a mixture of pity and disgust, as if her mother had said, “Lily has head lice.”

  The men had no names. Lily referred to them by their occupations: Dental Man, Insurance Boy, Gear Head and that traitor, Computer Geek. Lily wondered what her mother would scare up next. Grocery Guy? Fish Guts?

  Clutching a pile of books, Lily eased into one of the high-backed chairs in the parlor. It might have been worth a fortune, but was about as comfortable as a pile of rocks. She moved into the dining room to try the chairs there.

  In the window facing her, a shadow flickered, stopping Lily in her tracks. A rubbery-looking white hand popped up and pressed into the glass like a starfish, the fingers stiff as tiny periscopes. Her eyelids shuddered in surprise, and then the hand was gone.

  Her mother swept down the hall and into the room. “Morning!” she sang. Her eyes followed Lily’s startled gaze, and she raised her eyebrows.

  “There was a hand in the window,” said Lily, pointing. “Somebody’s hand, reaching up against the glass outside.”

  Her mother shrugged. “Maybe someone was waving at you. This is a small town. People are friendly.”

  “What people? Nobody knows we’re here.”

  “Except for the man next door,” said her mother.

  They had gotten the house keys from the neighbor, as Uncle Wesley had told them to. Not much taller than Lily, with a large, bald head and a wormy body, their neighbor looked like a giant baby in a bad mood. Angry Baby Man.

  Lily dropped her books on the dining room table. “What kind of person just goes around slapping their greasy hands on people’s windows?”

  “There are only a few thousand year-round residents in Cape May.” Her mother tapped the pile of books. “And I’m sure that most of them and their hands are in school right now.”

  “Uh-huh,” Lily said. She was sure the year-round residents, if there were any, were all shut up in their restored Victorians polishing their antiques and counting their money. Or maybe they all had maids for that kind of thing.

  Lily’s mother rummaged in her coat pockets, in her purse. “Did you see the house key? I thought I put it in my pocket.” Lily’s mother paused in her search. “You can still change your mind about school, you know.”

  Lily watched the window for another hand or maybe a foot or an elbow. “You said I wouldn’t have to change schools again. You promised you would homeschool me, Mom.”

  Her mother chewed her lip. “Yes, and I have all the materials. But how are you going to make any friends?”

  Lily thought of Wendy, her best friend in kindergarten, Susan in fourth grade. Karen from Montclair. Saying good-bye to them all. “I’ll join the local football team.”

  “I’m sure the kids here are very nice.”

  “So I make friends with the nice kids and then we move to Kentucky or France or somewhere.”

  “Why would we ever move to Kentucky?”

  “We’ve moved everywhere else.”

  Her mother threw up her hands. “Okay. But just until the end of the year. It’s high school in September for you.” Arden pulled her bushy hair away from her face and snapped a rubber band around it. Two blond curls sprang free and stuck out like antennae. “And now I have to go to work.”

  “You said the store doesn’t open up until March.”

  “It doesn’t, but I have a lot of planning and cleaning to do. Uncle Wesley had to pull a few strings to get me the assistant manager’s position, and the owners are taking his word for it that they can trust me to run things until the summer. I want to get a head start.” She jingled her bracelets. “Besides, I’m going to make some more just like these, maybe with shells. Something beachy. What do you think?”

  Lily imagined her mother spending what little money they had left on silver and garnets and paperclips just so that she could make some of her strange earrings shaped like toasters. Or since they were now living at the beach, lobsters. Lobsters on toast.

  Her mother grabbed the pencil out of Lily’s hand, and scribbled a telephone number in Lily’s notebook. “Here’s the number for the store, just in case.” Arden looked down at the stacks of books. “Homeschooling, huh? Am I asking for trouble or what?” she said to the cat, which sat on one of the dining room chairs gazing placidly at the ceiling.

  Lily pointed. “What do you think she sees up there?”

  “She’s a lovely little thing, but she has a brain the size of a fig.” Her mother turned out her pockets. “And so do I, apparently.”

  “Just go, Mom. I’ll look for the key later. I’m sure it’s around somewhere.”

  “Okay.” Her mother slipped on her orange cloak. “I’ll be home around noon. I want you to strip the beds and put the sheets and towels in the wash.”

  “Mom!”

  “And I want one chapter in that math book finished.

  “Mom!”

  “You were the one who wanted to be homeschooled. Did you think I’d be a pushover?”

  * * *

  Lily waited until she heard the front door close before she got up and went to the window. She craned her neck in both directions, but there was nothing to see. No shadows, no rubbery hands, not even a squirrel dancing along the sill. It was as if the entire world were fast asleep.

  Lily finished her math chapter in a couple of hours, stripped the beds, and then dragged all the laundry to the basement. She had expected something dark and dank, but the room was cross-hatched by bright yellow sunbeams that shot through the small high windows. There wasn’t much: more fussy furniture; a stack of boxes; a washer and dryer; her mom’s old Kewpie doll sitting in a chair, its little hands like fat pink stars against its bright red dress.

  The Kewpie was one of the few things Lily’s mom insisted on dragging from place to place. “My mother left it to me,” she’d say. “I can’t get rid of it,” though she always stashed it somewhere no one would see it.

  Lily separated the whites from the colors and stuffed the sheets and towels into the machine, using dish soap for laundry detergent. After flipping on the washer, she kicked the rest of the wash into a pile by the boxes. It couldn’t hurt to take a peek into them, she thought, walking over to lift the lid of the closest one. An old desk lamp, a radio, some other junk. She pushed the box aside to get to the next box, a lot heavier than the first. National Geographics, some old, some more recent, almost all with the ocean on the cover.

  She knelt on the floor and flipped through the magazines, looking for pictures of sharks and squid and weird-looking fish. There were photos of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia (pretty cool), poison jellyfish (very cool), and an article about finding the Titanic in the Atlantic. Robert Ballard, the guy who found the Titanic, talked about how he didn’t find any skeletons in the wreck because bones dissolve quickly in the deep ocean, that the only thing left of the passengers was their shoes; the sea animals didn’t know enough to eat the leather.

  Lily looked up from the article, imagining rows and rows of shoes, their laces dancing sadly in the purple murk of the ocean. The Kewpie watched from its perch, its chubby arms splayed in a plastic imitation of bouncing baby joy.

  Lily frowned. Weren’t the arms down before?

  She stared, unblinking. The doll’s bald head — anointed with a single blond curl on the crown — was cast downward but its huge, round eyes peeked sideways from under the lashes, as if i
t had just noticed her, as if it were amused. Lily gave the doll a hesitant half-wave before she realized what she was doing and then, feeling tremendously stupid, dropped her hand.

  Rolling her eyes at herself, Lily went back to the Titanic article. What was interesting was that this guy Ballard didn’t try to collect any of the shoes, though even soggy old oxfords from the Titanic would be worth a ton of money. He felt that the shoes marked a special place and that disturbing them would be wrong. Too many people, the article said, looked at shipwrecks as just another way to get rich rather than a way to learn about ourselves. People thought more of money than they did of history or of science.

  At this, Lily snorted. She thought plenty of science, but how many millions of dollars had it cost to fund the scientific expedition to find the Titanic? If there wasn’t any money, there wasn’t much science.

  She tossed the magazine back into the box, glancing at the Kewpie. Now the head faced squarely forward and the black irises, which had peeked so coyly and sweetly out of the corners of its eyes, looked straight at her.

  Lily’s jaw unhinged like a snake’s, her lungs suddenly stripped of oxygen. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then opened her eyes again, testing. The doll didn’t move. Her breathing slowed. Of course it didn’t move! It was a doll. She was just seeing it from a different angle, that’s all.

  Lily rubbed her cheeks. First phone calls, then hands, now dolls. What was wrong with her? Leaving Montclair, that was it. Well, it was no use thinking about that.

  She stuck out her tongue at the Kewpie and began packing up the rest of the magazines the way she found them. Lily had been given tons of cheap baby dolls over the years, mostly by her mother’s boyfriends. As a little girl, she’d liked to pull off the arms and legs to see how they were attached, liked to pluck out the eyes to see what they were made of.

  “I don’t like dolls,” she said, her voice reverberating off the concrete walls. “No brains. No guts.”

  A hollow clattering behind her rocked her on her heels and she wheeled around, gripped the dryer. The Kewpie had somehow tumbled out of the little wooden chair and now sat on the floor, arms up over its head, blunt sausage fingers beseeching. Like it wanted to be picked up. Like it wanted—

  “Oh, come on!” Lily hissed at herself. She forced herself to approach the doll. Its dimpled, sickeningly sweet smile seemed like a leer. Go ahead, it said. Pick me up, I dare you. I’ll grab you with my sticky baby fingers and I’ll—

  Lily grabbed it by its cold, plastic throat and shoved it back into a sitting position on the chair. Then she backed away and walked upstairs, willing herself to step slowly through the dining room and hallway, casually up the main staircase, though her stomach clenched and her muscles hummed.

  She went into the bathroom and took a brush from the medicine cabinet. “No brains, no guts, no brains, no guts,” she muttered as she gave her long hair a dozen painful, vigorous strokes. Even up in the bathroom, Lily could hear the thrum of the washing machine. And then another noise, quieter, sneaking underneath it. She cocked her head and squinted. There it was again, a creaking sound, thin and faint, like a door opening into another world. Then a muted tap, tap, tap. Slow and stealthy.

  Like footsteps. Like tiny footsteps.

  Her eyes flew open wide, the brush sliding out of her hand and clattering in the sink. “Mom?” she said, she hoped.

  She left the bathroom and slowly walked down the stairs. The front door was shut. She made her way into the dining room and then into the kitchen. “Mom! Mom?”

  No Mom. Lily stood still, listening for the creak, for the footsteps, but now all she heard was the dumb drone of the refrigerator. She checked the back door, but it was bolted from the inside.

  Lily walked back to the front door, opened it, and looked out onto the front porch. She turned her head left and right, scanning the street, but saw no one but a lone mailman wearing a crazy blue hat with fuzzy antlers, even though Christmas had come and gone.

  She stepped back inside the house and slammed the door shut, trying to erase from her mind the kooky-freaky images of Kewpie dolls hopscotching around the basement.

  This is nuts. Hands don’t float, dolls don’t walk, and life isn’t some stupid horror movie. She would put her schoolbooks away and watch some soap operas and then her mother would come home and things would be normal…well, maybe not normal, but familiar.

  But her books weren’t on the table where she had left them. They were gone. The only thing on the table was Julep, blue eyes blinking, the house key Lily’s mother had lost lying at her tiny brown feet.

  The phone rang shrilly. Lily snatched up the receiver without thinking, without taking her eyes from the key.

  “Hello?” she said.

  A deep voice rasped, “Hello, Lily.”

  Lily dropped the phone, scooped the key from the dining room table, and ran out of the front door.

  She raced into the backyard and all the way around the house, moving so fast that by the time she saw the tall, skinny boy walking down the sidewalk with his head thrown back, paper towels up his nose, she couldn’t stop. She crashed right into him, toppling them both.

  Whatever Lola Wants

  Lola stomped down the sidewalk in her leotard, fuchsia satin skirt and stocking feet, shaking the sand from her black character shoes and thinking that this whole death thing was totally bogus.

  First of all, she had to wear the same outfit everyday. Second, there was nothing to do. Third, there was nobody to hang out with.

  “You’re supposed to eat your broccoli,” she’d said to the woman in the gag-me bathing cap, “not glue it to your hat.”

  “I bet your mother doesn’t know what you’re wearing,” said the woman.

  “I bet you don’t know that you’re dead.”

  The woman had clutched at her chest and called Lola a hoodlum. Pu-lease. What did people have against a little friendly conversation?

  This was all Steffie’s fault, right down to the frump in the bathing cap. If Steffie hadn’t stolen the lead in the school musical, then she wouldn’t be stuck wearing this stupid satin skirt for all eternity. She would have starred as Lola, the ultra mega hottie in Damn Yankees. And she would have been the one that the guys were drooling over instead of being some lame sidekick chorus girl no one noticed.

  The play was about an old guy who sells his soul to the devil to become a baseball star, but afterward tries to worm out of the deal. The devil sends the lovely Lola to sweeten the offer. Everyone knew that she had that part wrapped up. It was practically written for her! And then Steffie, this plain-as-paper nobody from the science club, shows up at the auditions, wows dorky Mr. Pringle the director, and ruins everything. The science club! Science geeks can’t sing! They don’t wear fishnets!

  She couldn’t even remember how it happened, when, exactly, she died. One minute she was at the cast party, choking down spinach dip and giving Steffie the evil eye, the next she was sprawled on a darkened stage dressed in her stupid sidekick satin skirt, surrounded by ghosts — most of them so dull and oblivious she longed to shoot herself in the head, pointless as that would be. She figured that it was something she was born with, a weak heart or broken blood vessel or some sort of majorly rare, impossible-to-detect cancer.

  Anyway, her death was tragic, that much she knew. It was always tragic when somebody with her looks and talent and potential was taken so young. She had been destined for greatness. Hadn’t her mother said…um…well, she couldn’t remember exactly what her mother had said, or even what her mother looked like, but her mother must have said some wonderful, loving, motherly things. Her father, too. She wondered if she had any brothers or sisters.

  “Whatever Lola wants,” she sang. She might be dead, but she still had a killer voice. She was Lola. Even if she hadn’t forgotten her real name — did it begin with a B or maybe a D? — she’d call herself Lola just to prove how totally Lola she was.

  Unlike Steffie the doof, who was just some
pathetic geekazoid Lola wannabe.

  Some guy, a live one, was staggering down the sidewalk with something stuck up his nose, gross! But Lola plunked herself down in the middle of the walk anyway — what did she care? he’d stagger right through her — and slipped into her shoes. That’s when the red haired girl burst from the Victorian house right in front of her, ran a crazy lap around her house, then barreled right into the guy.

  If Lola had possessed a heart, it would have hammered out a mambo beat.

  Steffie.

  It was Steffie, she was sure of it. But what did that dipstick do to her hair? It was a long scraggly wreck, even worse than before. Hadn’t she ever heard of a haircut? A perm? An exorcist? And the clothes! Flared jeans! Gag! She looked like a reject from the disco era. Didn’t she know it was 1987 already? (Or maybe it was 1988 now; it was kind of hard to keep track.) Anyway, the geek needed some serious help.

  She cracked a wide crocodile smile.

  Lola was just the girl to help her.

  Chapter Three

  The boy lay motionless on the grass. “Hey, are you all right?” Lily said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t see you.”

  “Mmmng,” the boy mumbled. “Mngirken.”

  “What?” Lily scrambled over to him, saw the blood freckling the front of his green coat, the paper towels he held to his nose.

  He pulled the bloody wad away from his face. “My nose,” he honked, “was already broken. And now I think it’s sideways, too.”

  Lily leaned closer to inspect his nose. It wasn’t pretty. “It’s a little lumpy,” she said, “but it’s where it’s supposed to be.”