I got up on my elbows in the bed.
“Kiwi says your boyfriend’s not real. Or he’s real, but he’s some Loomis kid you’re meeting up with in the woods.”
We stared at each other across the channel between our two beds.
“I won’t tell anybody, I swear. Is he older than you, this guy?” I paused, running down the list of boys with heartbeats who we knew. “Is it Gus Waddell? It’s not Cubby, is it?”
“Oh, well shoot, Ava!” she laughed, flopping back on her mattress. “Yes, he’s much older than me. He’s not some Loomis kid, either. Cubby Wallach, oof.” She scrunched her face in a way to further underscore: Not. Cubby. “Cubby’s just some kid. My boyfriend is a dredgeman from Clarinda, Iowa.”
Her fist contracted into an abacus. She counted knuckles for a while.
“I guess if he’d lived he’d be Grandpa’s age. But he still looks like he did the day he died.”
“Oh.” I frowned up at her. “That’s lucky, I guess.”
She leaned in and patted my head. “Good night, Ava,” she whispered.
“Good morning, you mean.” This was the fat cherry on the whole crappy sundae because it was obviously morning — the skies were pinking up behind the kapok.
“Not for me. I’m exhausted, Ava. The Spiritist Telegraph says some Spiritists sleep for a week after a possession, but I’m going to set the alarm for lunchtime.”
“Mmnh.” I mummied myself in the bedspread. Osceola could sleep forever, for all I cared. Fine by me. I would save the park by myself. I had important training to do with my red Seth.
“Okay. Getting into bed now.” But she sat on the edge of my bed instead. “Listen, I’m sorry I left without telling you. There’s a secret I have to keep for someone. Don’t worry, okay?”
I did my best to inhale like a sleeping person.
“Hey, chickee, I do wish I could tell you,” she mumbled sadly somewhere above my head, the mattress sagging with her weight, “what’s happening to me …”
Two thirty a.m., about ten days after the Chief’s depature: I walked downstairs to investigate an animal rumbling in the kitchen and found my sister gorging on a lump of cauliflower — there was nothing left to eat, she said, and she was ravenous. Swamp rats could not have cleaned out our pantry more thoroughly. I saw an apple core, broken spaghetti, six cola cans. Her lipstick had left a glossy print on the plastic we kept our bread in. She’d sucked the stick of butter into a little fang. “What the heck are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing, Ava?” She shook a box at me. “I’m starving.”
“But why are you dressed like that? Did you run out of clean clothes to wear?”
“This is my boyfriend’s shirt. He asked me to wear it.”
I recognized the canary checks, the stains on the collar that had probably set in the spring of 1936. She’d pushed the green cuffs up above her elbows and left the long shirttails flowing over her knees, which looked small and white as clams beneath this big guy’s shirt. My eyes settled on the mole just above her wristbone. Ossie had complained about this dumb mole her whole life and it was a relief to rest my eyes on it; I had the disorienting suspicion that this black mole must be where my real sister was hiding. My real sister had gotten sucked inward and in her place was this weird stranger.
“You’re probably going to get smallpox from that shirt,” I frowned. “Malaria. You’ll probably die now, too.”
Ossie rolled her eyes. A weak film of light rinsed the stairwell and I could see our shadows bending upward on the far wall like candle flames. At a certain point the tall women of our shadows intersected, became the blank upstairs.
When we were younger, two or three years earlier, we used to play a stupid game called Mountaineering on this stairwell, Osceola on the bottom step and me belaying her with the bedsheets on top. We crumpled Kiwi’s looseleaf to make the avalanche; if as a super bonus a pissed-off Kiwi emerged from his study cave, he got cast as our Yeti. It was very life-or-death.
“Remember Mountaineering?”
“Oh, Ava.”
“That was a fun game.”
Ossie looked stricken.
“Remember End of the World, how mad Mom got when we ruined her towels? Remember that time we got Mom to play, too?” I paused. “The Chief says you’re lovesick. He says it’s just a phase.”
“What? It’s nothing like that. This isn’t some dumb crush. It isn’t … I really can’t …”
Ossie was anguished, or just insulted, I couldn’t tell. I was watching her hands move up and down, as if they might be reaching for something the words could not touch.
“And afterward, when I’m coming out of it? When he leaves me …?” she tried to explain.
“Uh-huh.” I pictured this withdrawal as something invisible, painful, autonomic, a reflexive ejection, like a Seth disgorging feathers.
“Oh, it’s much worse than that stuff you hear on the radio. Your heart breaks, too, but that’s just kid’s stuff, Ava. Heartbreak is just for starters, for mortals …”
Ossie pushed the white apples of her fists into her stomach, as if she were trying to find a new way to feed herself. After a possession came a condition called Spellbreak (The Spiritist’s Telegraph, page 206). This was when your ghost left you, the end of your séance experience. Ossie said the loss of contact with her ghost was absolute.
“Every time I get afraid he won’t come back, Ava. He’s my same age, can you believe that? He’s a teenager. He’s like us.”
“Oh boy. I bet we have so much in common.” I knew what our brother would say: Way to pick a winner, Osceola.
Don’t come back, ghost, I thought in a shout. Leave her alone. Whoever you are, stay lost.
Ossie thumped the cabinets for more dry food, and I thought of the Chief drumming up a Seth. A jar of gherkin pickles got passed down to me, followed by a brown tin of these prehistoric Little Cheddars, a discontinued brand of cracker. Ossie’s hands puffed huge and white behind the aqua light of the jar. I used my alligator-wrestling muscles to open it.
“He needs me to live,” she said mournfully, crunching into a pickle. “He needs me to hold on to his memories, and to move around the world … Death kidnapped him, Ava.” She stared at me with dry, serious eyes; for one second she looked exactly like Mom if you netted her offstage and unawares. “He was so young.”
I touched her arm through the soft cage of the dead boy’s plaids. I had just brushed my teeth but I ate these disgusting foods to keep her company. (That was my grand sacrifice — I ate miniature pickles with my sister. In retrospect, it seems that I might have done a little more for her.)
“Are we playing a game, Ossie?”
“It’s no game with him. He’s sincere. Serious about me. You know what I mean?”
“I know,” I said, sick with questions. “Were we playing a game before, though?”
Ossie ignored me. “We are a couple now. We live together here—” She touched her heart through the thin cotton. I noticed two initials embroidered on the shirt pocket in raspberry thread: L.T.
“You and the ghost.”
“Me and Louis.”
And then she gasped and clapped a hand over her mouth. “Shoot! I wasn’t supposed to tell you his real name.”
“Louis,” I said slowly. Got it. That was easy: the L of the L.T. I didn’t like this. Something was changing here, speeding up like a heartbeat.
“Okay. And when can I meet him?”
“My ghost is on the move, Ava,” she said — as if her ghost were some prowling scoundrel or a moon on the wane. She smiled at me, her eyes raw and wet. “I think I’d like for you to meet him.”