Ghost Girl (20 page)

When we got home from the fair,
Miss Vest still never said a word about marrying Wit and moving away. The longer she kept quiet, the more I could feel something inside me withering, turning curled and brown, just like the leaves on the trees down the mountainside. By November, the skies had gone as gray and cold as stone, and I could feel our house filling up with the same stony silence.

Miss Vest just assumed my worrying over Aunt Birdy was the thing that was holding my tongue—and she was partly right. As if things weren't bad enough, Aunt Birdy's cough was back. Sometimes she coughed so hard I thought her tiny sparrow bones might break into pieces. I kept catching her squeezing her eyes shut, like a wave of pain was passing through her—something worse than her old spells of rheumatism. And worst of all, her eyes barely sparked up now when I stretched out on her bed to read her a new book. But she still wouldn't hear any mention of going to the hospital. When Dr. Hunt and Miss Vest brought up the idea, she shook her head with a wisp of a smile and said, “You two must want to finish me off with that kind of talk.”

Even though I was such sorry company, Miss Vest never quit coming to sit with me in the afternoons once school let out. While Aunt Birdy rested in the bedroom, Miss Vest tried to distract me with tricky arithmetic problems and writing assignments or funny stories about the kids at school. I listened with dull eyes. I was tempted to make fun of her, to smirk at her high, silly laugh and the way she threw her hands around while she talked. But I clenched all my bitterness back behind my teeth, and after a while it got to be kind of like a game—to see how long I could last without yelling, “
How could you do it? How could you be planning to go off and leave us like this?
”

Then one afternoon, without warning, Miss Vest was the one who turned silent. She came in the door, checked on Aunt Birdy, then sat down by the fire and started to grade papers, barely even flicking a glance in my direction for the next hour or so. I kept myself busy cutting photographs out of
National Geographic
s to liven up the walls around Aunt Birdy's bed. It was so still in the front room, you could hear the snip of my scissors as I cut out pictures of the Great Wall of China, of giant red kangaroos in Australia, and of a circle of Indians dancing out on a desert somewhere. I kept sneaking looks at Miss Vest. Her lips were pressed thin, and she was holding her red pen so tight her knuckles had turned white. Maybe she was finally fed up with me and all my peevishness.

I was grateful when a knock came at the door. Miss Vest jumped at the sound, and I pushed the magazines off my lap and hurried to see who it was. I was surprised to find Mr. Jessup and Dewey standing in the doorway. Mr. Jessup had a pained look on his face.

“Hello, April,” he said. “Miss Vest here?”

I stepped aside and let them in. “It's over, Miss Vest,” Mr. Jessup said, walking up to her and dropping a newspaper in her lap. “Sergeant Jordan just brought the evenin' paper up to the schoolhouse.”

At first I had no notion of what they were talking about. Dewey watched me from near the door with his hands shoved in his pockets. Then I peeked over Miss Vest's shoulder and saw the big headlines and Franklin D. Roosevelt's picture spread across the front page. And the truth shot through me like an electric current, leaving me numb. It was November 9, the day after the election, and President Hoover had lost. Lost in a landslide to Roosevelt while I sat hidden away at Aunt Birdy's.

Miss Vest closed her eyes. “The poor president,” she whispered. “Poor Mrs. Hoover. . . . They'll be so heartbroken.”

Dewey spoke up from the doorway. “What's gonna happen to the school, Miss Vest? Will it close down?”

“Of course not, Dewey,” she said quietly. “The Hoovers have paid to run the school so far, but I'm sure Madison County will take over the expenses. Don't worry. The school will be fine.”

“Are you sure?”

Everybody looked up at me, surprised.

But now I couldn't stop myself. “What about when you go off and get married?”

Two spots of red flamed up in Miss Vest's cheeks. “
What?
” she asked.

“You're getting married to Wit, aren't you?”

Miss Vest blinked. I could almost see the gears turning inside her head, working to churn out some sort of answer that wasn't a lie but would keep me calm.

I decided to save her the trouble. “You don't have to keep it a secret anymore,” I said. “Everybody knows.” My voice sounded ugly and mean.

I glanced over at Dewey. He stood frozen, staring like he didn't recognize me.

“April—” Mr. Jessup started.

“No,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “I want to know when she was gonna tell us. The day before the wedding? The day before she packs up and leaves?”

Miss Vest got to her feet and took a couple steps toward me. “April,” she began. “It's true. Wit and I
have
talked about getting married. But nothing's definite yet, and I didn't want to spring this on you with everything else . . . with Aunt Birdy so ill and the election and your mother . . .”

Her voice trailed off.

“So when are you leaving?” I asked flat out.

Her hands fluttered like moths and she wouldn't look me in the eye. “Well, we—we just aren't sure. Now with the Hoovers going out of office, they might need to give up Camp Rapidan. And if that happens, they won't be needing the marines here anymore. And Wit, well, he just doesn't know where he'll be stationed next.” She drew in a deep breath. “But April, I—”

That's when I turned my back on her. “I'm going to check on Aunt Birdy,” I said.

“April . . . please,” Miss Vest begged.

I knew better than to look back. All of a sudden, I remembered the first time I ever laid eyes on Miss Vest, the first day she visited the school. I remembered hiding behind the woodpile and seeing her gaze down at the dead chestnut trees. I knew then that she would never stay. And when she looked in my direction that day, I had sprung down the mountainside as fast as I could go, faster than I had ever run before.

“April,” Miss Vest said again. She was right behind me and I felt her hand on my arm.

But now I knew better than to turn back.

I opened the door to Aunt Birdy's room and slipped inside. Then I pushed the heavy plank door closed and leaned against it until I heard the sharp click of the latch.

Finally, I heard them leave. I sat in the chair beside Aunt Birdy's bed while the sky outside the window turned from pink to burnt orange to deep blue. When it was almost black outside, I lit the lamp and watched the shadows brush over the dark hollows in Aunt Birdy's cheeks. She slept on and on, and I sat without moving, without reaching out to trace the good luck signs on the headboard or shift my place in the hardback chair.

I knew it was time to stoke the fires, to heat up the soup and wake Aunt Birdy for supper. But I couldn't seem to rouse myself, and the same thoughts kept running through my head.
They've all left me, Riley and Mama, Miss Vest and the Hoovers, and now Aunt Birdy, and soon they'll take our house too. . . .

When I looked down again, Aunt Birdy had opened her eyes. She was watching me, studying me almost, like she had been awake for hours. I reached over to squeeze her hand and she squeezed back.

Before I could ask her how she felt, she started talking. “Just now, Apry, you reminded me so much of your mama. You got that same far-off look in your eyes. What were you thinking about?”

Aunt Birdy needed me to be strong. Her voice was so raspy and faint, but just hearing the sound of it made me give in. “I don't want you to leave me, Aunt Birdy,” I whispered. “What'll I do? I'll be all alone.”

“Oh, honey, you'll never be alone. You got folks who love you so much.”

I shook my head back and forth. “Seems like I keep losing them. . . .”

“No, Apry. It's like my stones. Some people, they walk along and just see a rock. They wouldn't see a fish or a moon or anything beautiful. That's got to be practiced, you know, looking deeper. If you just look close enough, you might find something you weren't expecting. You just have to start with a stone. . . .”

I nodded. She was rambling and her eyes were closing again. I gave her shoulder a little shake. “Aunt Birdy, you gotta eat something. You want some supper?”

“No, honey, no,” she mumbled, blinking hard, trying to keep awake for me.

“But I made you something special,” I told her, hopping to my feet. “It'll only take me a minute.”

I had made the potato soup that morning, working from a recipe in one of Miss Vest's ladies' magazines. The recipe called for some things I had never heard of before—dried thyme and golden sherry. But we had onions and potatoes and flour and there was milk and a slab of bacon out in the springhouse. It had felt good to follow the cookbook's instructions one by one and think of nothing else besides chopping and whisking and stirring for a change.

I raced to heat up the fire in the stove, and once the soup was warm, I ladled some into a bowl, grabbed a spoon, and hurried back to Aunt Birdy. But she was asleep again, curled up on her side like a little girl.

“Oh, Aunt Birdy,” I moaned. But there was no use waking her. She hadn't eaten much of anything for days. I set the soup bowl on the floor and sat down in the chair beside the bed again to watch and to wait. I don't know how much time had passed before I heard a knock at the door—it was a shy knock at first, then louder.

I knew it was Miss Vest, coming to say she was sorry, to try and smooth things over. But it wouldn't do any good. She was marrying Wit and leaving, and nothing I could say would change that. Aunt Birdy's eyelids flickered, and for once I prayed for her to stay asleep, just until Miss Vest gave up and went away. I grabbed the sides of the chair and held on tight as if a twister was bearing down on me, ready to sweep me away.

It wasn't until a few minutes after the knocking on the door stopped that I looked down and saw my hands clenched in a fist in my lap and remembered Mama.
I was just like her.
Here I was, hiding from the knocking, waiting for Miss Vest to go away, just like Mama and I had all those horrible days after I first broke my arm. Aunt Birdy had even said it—she had said I was the spitting image of Mama, staring out the window with a far-off look in my eyes.
Ghost girl.
I'd never be anything else as long as I kept turning folks away.

I scrambled to my feet and ran for the front door. But by the time I yanked it open, no one was there—just something wrapped in a blanket sitting on the porch, three steps away.

“Wait!” I cried into the icy black night. My voice rang over the mountain and sent puffs of steam into the air. “That you, Miss Vest? Come back! I'm here.
Come back!
” I stared up toward the schoolhouse.

But there was no answer. Only the rattle of dry leaves in the branches, and somewhere down in the hollow a hound barking at the moon.

I fetched the lantern inside the front door, then kneeled down by the strange-looking bundle and pulled the blanket away. My breath caught as I ran my hand along the sharp edges and the smooth wood. I would have known that shape anywhere.

It was the Victrola. And when I looked up to search the dark yard again, Dewey stepped out from the shadows.

“Why?” was all I could say.

He shuffled into the light, then stood kicking his toe against the bottom porch step. “You should have it,” he said with his eyes fixed on his feet. “I know you feel like you got nothing left. But the Victrola never really seemed like it belonged to us anyway. You should have it.”

“What'd your ma have to say about that?”

“She and Ida weren't too happy, but Daddy thought it was a good idea.”

We were quiet for a while as I fingered the stack of records that Dewey had wrapped in the blanket alongside the Victrola. I slipped the top one, “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” to the bottom of the pile, and then hugged the records to my chest. I didn't even care if Dewey saw me weeping.

“Thank you,” I finally said.

He shrugged with a little smile twitching over his lips.

I wiped my face against my sleeve. “You think I could ask you for one more favor?”

“What's that?”

“You think you could sit with Aunt Birdy a while? There's something I need to do.”

Dewey nodded and followed me inside. I could have kissed him for not asking any questions. He just listened, serious as a preacher, while I listed off instructions: where to sit, where to put the Victrola, what to say if Aunt Birdy woke up. Then I grabbed my coat and the lantern and bolted into the dark.

It had been such a long time
since I had followed the trail to our place over on Doubletop. But even in the dark, my feet seemed to remember every rut and stone and rise. After a mile or so, I decided I didn't need the lantern anymore. My hands were turning numb holding on to the cold metal handle. And the flickering light threw strange shadows over the bare trees at the edge of the path and sent awful thoughts creeping into my head. What if I had waited too long to fetch Mama? What if Aunt Birdy was gone by the time I got back?