Spooky Little Girl (26 page)

“My eye!” they heard the mailman wail. “My eye! There’s something in my eye!”

And through the tiny break in the curtains, Lucy saw a flash of blue streak by, and heard the frenzied sounds of flat, wide feet in thick-soled shoes slapping the pavement all the way back down the driveway.

Neither Lucy nor Naunie could contain themselves.

“I can’t believe you blew in his eye!” Lucy cackled with laughter. “How did you know he was going to do that?”

“I had no idea!” Naunie replied in between fits of hysterical laughter. “He coulda stuck a stick of dynamite through there and I would have had to blow that out, too!”

“That is the funniest thing I’ve seen since I’ve been dead!” Lucy chortled and bent down to rub Tulip, who didn’t make a move despite all of the racket.

“Isn’t Naunie funny, Tulip?” Lucy asked as she stroked Tulip’s sweet face and her floppy ears. The dog responded by blinking her eyes, and then exhaled deeply. She seemed so tired.

Lucy rubbed the dog’s head, and then her chest in a doggie massage, but she also had another reason. She was looking for what she didn’t want to find. She ran her hands over every part of Tulip’s little doggie body, looking. Tulip didn’t mind; she melted into Lucy’s lap and enjoyed the attention. Lucy rubbed along her legs, back, belly, ears, chest, everywhere she thought she might find another lump. When she was confident that she’d done a thorough job, she breathed a tiny sigh of relief. She didn’t find another, just the two she had already felt.

Since she had felt the second lump under Tulip’s leg, she had tried in vain to figure out a way to tell Martin to get her to the vet. Tulip was old, and was slowing down, but Lucy suspected that Tulip’s lack of energy and appetite had more to do with what Lucy
had found than with the issue of a dog growing older. This was a different kind of spirit work than Lucy had entertained; how do you play charades with someone who can’t see you? How could she leave hints about something that someone should do, rather than something they
could
do? This was a whole different ballgame than finding a key under a microwave. This wasn’t a case of leaving a missing wallet on a dining room table for someone to find, but something far more complex.

She decided to seek some advice from an older, a little wiser, but much more volatile source.

“Naunie,” Lucy started. “We have a problem, and I need your help. I found a couple of lumps on Tulip recently, and they’re not going away. I don’t think Martin knows they’re there, and I need to figure out a way to let him know she needs to go to the vet. I just don’t know how to do that. Do you think that doing the whispering thing in his ear might work?”

Naunie paused for a moment. “I don’t know. You could try it, but I’ve never seen it work like that,” she said. “I’ve only seen it used to generate a sudden thought or a memory, never to get someone to do something. It’s just a little ‘bolt of thought’ lightning.”

Lucy nodded.

“Maybe we could record a TV show about animal doctors, kind of plant the seed in his head that she might need a checkup,” her grandmother suggested. “Or maybe we can take a picture of her leg and put it on the frame like we just did.”

Lucy nodded. They were worthwhile suggestions, but she didn’t really think there was time for Martin to figure out a puzzle.

“I really need something more direct and not open to interpretation,” Lucy said. “I don’t think time is on our side here.”

“It’s too bad we can’t write him a letter without channeling through someone else, and I don’t even know how to do that,”
Naunie said. “It would be so easy to slip him a note in his morning paper, don’t you think?”

“Neither one of us is strong enough to hold a pencil and apply that sort of pressure for that long, even if I drained the battery of a semi,” Lucy said.

“Sure, we can smack the mail and press buttons, turn a page, but anything other than that…,” Naunie added.

Lucy suddenly looked at Naunie.

“Unless…,” Lucy said with a smile.

After dinner that night, the smile on Nola’s face was unmistakable. It was the smile of victory, of pride, of unbridled delight. Martin sat at the dinner table taking his last couple of bites, and she approached him with an offering in her hand.

“I wanted to give this to you on our anniversary,” she explained almost humbly. “But I wanted to make sure I got the quotes in the speech bubbles right.”

She stretched both arms out and presented him with the masterpiece she had been slaving over every night, every lunch hour for the last week: the photo album.

Martin smiled immediately, and thought it was very sweet of her to decorate the front of a book that way, with both of their names applied in sparkly paint. He never had expressed a need to see his name embellished with glitter, but if that’s the way she wanted to interpret her artistic side, he was willing to sparkle a little. She had made a good dinner.

“Open it,” Nola urged.

Martin lifted the front cover, and the second he did, something hit him—this album was familiar, he knew it. The photos on the first page, however, were not the photos that had been there when he’d shoved the album into the darkness of the bottom shelf of the
bookcase when he’d been sorting Lucy’s things a year before. These were photos of him and Nola on their first camping trip taken not too long ago. Suddenly, the crumpled-up photos in the side table made sense; he knew where they had come from. He quickly flipped from one page to the next and saw him and Nola, him and Nola, him and Nola, and then nothing, empty pages all the way until the end.

“Don’t go so fast!” Nola chided him. “You need to read all the captions and the stickers I put on the pictures, Martin! Look, in that one, you’re a tomato at the Grand Canyon! You’re a tomato riding a burro! Ha, ha, ha!”

Martin shut the book and looked at her.

“This is my album, right? These had my pictures in it. Am I right about that?” he asked.

“Well, I thought … it would be nice if…” Nola hesitated, her face completely drooping. “I wanted to make an album for us. For you and me.”

“Then, why didn’t you get a new one? Why use this one? Why did you use this one?” he asked, his voice rigid.

“It was full of … the other pictures, and I wanted to make it mine. I wanted to make it
ours
. You know, so we would have memories, too,” she tried to explain.

“You should have bought a new one, Nola,” he said angrily. “You had no business touching this one. I found the smashed photos in the side table. I would like to have the other ones, please.”

Nola didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t say anything. She stood there, hoping that in any second he would change his mind and realize how much work she had put into this album and how some of the captions were really funny and how now they had something that was theirs and it was full of good times that they could laugh about and look at over and over again.

“Nola. I want my pictures,” he said again. “Please.”

Nola shook her head, like a child who has suddenly realized exactly just how deeply she is in trouble.

“I don’t have them,” she said quietly.

“Then, get them,” he told her.

“I mean, I don’t have them anymore,” she replied. “They’re gone. I got rid of them.”

Martin stopped looking at her. He had to look down at the table, where he could still see the “tin” of his name spelled out in gleaming blue letters.

“You had no right,” he finally said, shaking his head slowly. “Those were mine. How could you do that? How could you think that was right?”

Nola shook her head quickly, almost frantically. Didn’t he see?

“She’s gone! Lucy is gone, Martin! It is time to start over, because it’s my turn now,” she said, her voice rising. “I don’t understand why you would ever want pictures of her. Why would you want pictures of someone that had done something so bad to you?”

“Because they were mine!” he said, one octave below yelling. “You had no right to touch anything of mine. They didn’t belong to you.”

No matter how much she should have stopped there, Nola could not control herself. She was like a train shooting downhill, warning lights flashing but no way to stop.

“You are seeing Lucy again, aren’t you?” she said as she burst into a flood of angry and desperate tears. “I knew it! She’s sneaking in here when I’m gone and you’re seeing her behind my back!”

“That’s ridiculous,” Martin scoffed. “I haven’t heard from her in nearly a year.”

“Then why would you want those pictures?” Nola sobbed.
“Why would you want those pictures if you still didn’t have feelings for her? If you still didn’t love her?”

From across the table, where she had been sitting the entire night, Lucy looked at Martin. She had been whispering to him during the entire meal that Tulip needed his help, Tulip was sick, and that she needed to go to the vet, but there was no sign or acknowledgment that he’d heard her. Now she studied his face, watched his eyes, the eyes that would not look at Nola. He looked confused, furious, unsure. His hands were clenched together in front of him, gripping each other tightly. She hadn’t seen Martin look this way since they’d had the fight about chicken skin.

Without even thinking, she reached out and gently touched his hands, offering a reassuring pat. She meant it to be gentle and kind. Instead, his reaction was sudden and quick, jerking his hands and body backward and away in a reactive move.

“What’s the matter?” Nola asked. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, yes,” he said, unsure himself, shuddering. “I felt a chill; a shiver went through me. I don’t know how to explain it.”

“I hope you’re not coming down with something,” Nola said, putting her hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry I upset you. I thought you would be surprised.”

Martin nodded, wanting to understand why she’d done it, but not able to. “I have copies of some of the photos on my computer,” he said quietly. “And I have not seen Lucy. I don’t know where she is. You’re just going to have to take my word for that.”

Nola agreed. It didn’t appear as if she really had a choice. “All right,” she finally said. “I will.”

The next morning, after Martin had had his coffee, read the paper, and closed the bathroom door after going in for a shower, Lucy put
her plan into action. She knew that if there was one thing that Martin loved more than a hot cup of coffee in the morning and reading his paper, it was phase two of Martin’s morning routine: taking a hot, and she meant HOT, shower. Oftentimes when Martin had finished his steam bath of sorts, there wouldn’t be enough hot water left for the duration of Lucy’s shower. And with that nugget of information in her invisible ghost hand, she marched her way through the bathroom door and waited.

Martin was in the shower, and the steam was billowing over the shower curtain. Lucy grabbed his electric razor and held it tightly on its stand, and when that was drained, she went for the twin electric toothbrushes, until she felt she had enough energy built up to send a message from beyond. She had no idea if her plan was even feasible, but she couldn’t risk not trying; she didn’t know if he had heard her last night or not, and she wasn’t willing to bet on it. She needed a sure thing, and she thought this was the only way to get it.

She put her finger up to the mirror, thinking it was a little nuts that her most important lesson in ghost school thus far had been learned by watching a Demi Moore movie.

“MARTIN,” she wrote in the steam gathering on the mirror, “Tulip is sick. Take her to vet asap. PLEASE.”

Lucy waited to make sure her message wasn’t going to get fogged over, then slipped out of the bathroom.

She nearly fell into Nola, who was waiting on the other side of the door with the digital frame in her hand. She had found it, and was gripping it so tightly her knuckles looked like they were glowing white.

Naunie was removing herself from the line of fire by staying safely in the living room, and she motioned to Lucy to join her. They heard the water turn off and the clatter of the shower curtain being drawn back.

Then the silence of the house was sliced with the shrill ringing of the phone, and it suddenly occurred to Lucy that during the whole time she had been there, she had not heard it before.

Nola remained in the darkened hallway, unmoving, her fingers still clutching the frame.

The phone rang again.

“Nola!” Martin called out as if she was on the other side of the house. “Get it, will you?”

She didn’t budge.

Another ring choked the interim quiet.

Martin emerged from the bathroom quickly in the plaid robe Lucy had given him, his hair completely wet, not yet tousled with a towel, and his face flushed with the heat of the shower. He, too, nearly ran right into Nola, who remained as still as a garden statue. Martin got to the kitchen phone just as the fourth ring erupted, and he answered it gruffly.

“Hello. Yeah. Yeah,” his muffled voice said. “No, not today, he’s not scheduled till ten. That sounds like a mess. No, don’t do anything until I get there. Give me ten minutes.”

Nola had moved. Instead of standing in the hall, she was now standing in the bathroom doorway, frozen.

Lucy suddenly realized that she was staring at the mirror. Lucy held her theoretical breath.

Martin hung up the phone and headed down the hall toward the bedroom.

Nola turned and began to slowly walk toward him.

“Martin,” she called out—not angrily, not agitated, but simply, plainly. She walked down the hall until she was out of Lucy’s sight.

“I gotta go, Nola,” Martin huffed, and Lucy heard him scurrying around the bedroom, trying to get dressed quickly.

“Martin,” she called again. “Why did you take away my pictures?”

“I don’t—” he began, and then sighed. “I can’t now. I have to go. The delivery is a mess. They got everything screwed up and we have a sale starting today.”

“My pictures are gone,” she said quietly. “Why did you do that? Are you trying to teach me a lesson—I take your pictures, you take mine?”

“Can we talk about this later?” he said. Lucy heard pounding, and imagined him hopping on one foot to get his other shoe on. She had known Martin to do that.