Ghost Downstairs

Chapter Fourteen

The rain gave way to a warm spring evening, in capricious April fashion. The green light of the low sun through the trees, and the bewitching floral fragrance curling in through the open door, only depressed Lina. Why couldn’t she look forward to a relaxing walk with her lover tonight, the way couples all over town were doing? April, cruel as ever, did not have an answer for her.

At six o’clock, Marla and Alan, with the help of Consuela and one of the day cooks, got all the seniors into their lightweight sweaters, and in a slow parade bustled them outside into cars.

“The movie starts at six forty-five,” Marla said to Lina on the front porch, “and lasts, say, two hours, so we’ll see you around nine thirty. That’s if we’re making good time.” She looked over her shoulder to the van, where George, Gertrude, and Dolly stood and waited for others to get settled in their seats. Marla rolled her eyes. “At this rate, maybe later.”

“Terrific!” George hollered on the sidewalk. “I get to sit between two women!”

“George, you nut,” Marla called. Then she looked at Lina. “You two be careful.”

Lina nodded.

Marla squinted up at the house’s brick walls, gaze darting from window to window as if checking for any new ghosts, then shrugged to Lina and jogged off to the van.

Ren appeared in the foyer as they drove away.

“Does Marla know what you’re planning?” Lina asked.

He shook his head. “She’s just concerned. Radiator thing put them all on edge.”

Lina nodded, her arms folded. She stayed on the porch and rubbed the toe of her shoe against the threshold, not wishing to enter the house.

“Come on,” Ren said.

She pushed herself forward, and he shut the door behind her. The sound echoed in the silent house. “Nice evening,” she said. “Spring.”

“Yes.” He walked forward into the parlor. “Just like that other evening, sixty-eight years ago.”

She followed him and made no answer, thinking it an idle comment. Then she halted and lifted her head.

He caught the surprised glance. “You didn’t realize?”

“No. The date sounded familiar, but…”

“Yep.” He turned, extended his arms to the ceiling, and called, “Happy anniversary, Julia.”

Something rattled on one of the upstairs floors. A series of thumps, like running footsteps, traveled north to south down the corridor, and came down the stairs. Ren and Lina turned, but the noise faded.

Lina swallowed. “Stormy weather tonight?”

“Very.” Ren had let his arms drop, and now he sounded less brave. “Perfect conditions.”

“For what? What are we doing?” Lina wasn’t sure why she whispered the question.

Ren walked past her, scanning the walls and ceiling. “You’ve been replaced, Julia,” he announced to the house. “You and I were over a long time ago. There’s no reason for us to stay linked. I want you to leave. You hear me?”

The lights flickered. Lina heard, from the kitchen, the click and hum of the refrigerator losing electricity and then reviving. Though they stood in the middle of the parlor, with nothing but soft furniture around them, she found herself instinctively rotating, trying to watch her back. “What are we doing?” she asked again.

“She’s strong tonight. Very strong. I almost think she’s trying to answer me.”

“Has that ever happened before?”

“Never.” He took a few steps toward the kitchen and called, “Show us what you want, Julia. Answer me when I’ve got it right. Do you want this woman to leave?”

“Ren—”

“Shh.”

They waited.

Nothing. Lina felt relieved for a moment.

“Do you want me to leave?” he asked then, and panic hit her. “You want me to stay off the property from now on? Will that set you free?”

“Don’t,” she whimpered, but he shushed her. She held her breath. When nothing moved after several seconds, she exhaled and seized his elbow. “Ren, don’t. What good is it? Haven’t you asked before?”

He took her hand, but kept his gaze on the room around them. “All the time, but tonight—you have to believe me—tonight feels very different. We might actually get an answer.” He raised his voice. “All right, Julia. Is there any way to set you free? Is there anything we can do to make you leave this house?”

The row of paintings on the wall in front of them, landscapes of seashores and forests, swung on their hooks one after the other in a succession too quick for a living hand. The air throbbed with a strange cold breath. The word “Yes,” like a trick of the wind, echoed from all corners at the same time.

Ren drew closer to her, the two of them pressing their backs together. “Did you hear that?” he said.

“I did.”

“She spoke. Oh, my God, she spoke. Julia! Is there something we can do? Can you tell us?”

The pictures swung again, this time more violently. One fell to the carpet. A keening cry reached Lina’s ears, starting soft from upstairs, then sweeping down the stairs and growing louder. A female voice sobbed and shrieked, and between the hysterical gasps Lina caught words.

“Sean! Oh, God, no…no no no…wake up, Sean, wake up! Oh, please.

Sean!”

“Julia,” Sean Reynolds answered, pressed to Lina’s back. “Julia! I forgive you, for God’s sake!”

The sobs faded out quickly, as if someone had turned down the volume knob and then switched it off. The quiet hung like a guillotine blade above them.

Mastering every impulse she had to rush outside into the gentle, free night air and sprint as far as her feet would take her, Lina turned around to face Ren. He was pale. He tottered backward a step and sat down on the nearest sofa. She sat too.

“I never heard her say that,” he said. “I was unconscious. I never knew what she said…what she did…”

Even then, the colder logic in Lina’s mind reasoned that Julia had hardly said anything unusual for the situation. But the words themselves were not the important factor. “She spoke,” Lina said.

“And she thinks there’s a way. A way out of this.”

“But how?”

He looked at the ceiling. “She’s always stronger on this night, the anniversary of my death, not hers, because that’s what started it all. So I think…I think we have to erase it.”

“Erase it?”

“Tape over it. Go through all the steps. Reenact it. I’ve always guessed that if she saw it happen all over again, on this night in particular, she’d go mad—probably knock the place to pieces. So I haven’t dared. Besides, I’d need someone to help me, someone to play her part. Never wanted to ask anyone to do that.” He lowered his face and smoothed his trousers at the knees. “And if it were someone who was similar to her in one crucial way, if it were someone who had…”

“Also killed someone accidentally,” Lina murmured.

“Yeah. Then it might work even better. I don’t know.”

Though he still avoided her eyes, Lina composed her features into something like courage. “I’ll do it. If that’s what it takes.”

Now he looked at her, and his appearance gave her a strange flash of fear. Once again, he looked pale and eerie enough to be a ghost. “You can still run, you know.”

The words, his voice, the touch of wry humor, the love and understanding beneath it, filled her with grief at everything they were risking. But she stayed where she was and shook her head. “Not this time.”

He took her hand and looked down at it in silence. At last he said, “Shall we begin?”

Her throat felt like it was coated with rust, but she managed one word. “Sure.”

He led her to the back staircase. “It started here. The rest of the girls all went away to the dance. The other houseboys were out too. I came up from the basement to wait for her.” He released her hand and hopped onto one of the stools at the breakfast bar. “Julia,” he said, laying emphasis on her name now, “pretended she didn’t feel well, and stayed. She came down when the others were gone.” He tilted his chin toward the stairs.

Lina understood it was her turn. She climbed up a few steps, then swiveled. Feeling a fool, and a frightened fool at that, she came back down and tried to imagine herself as an elegant blond from the 1930s. She paused at the landing to view Ren, who sat there looking exactly as he must have that night—the same outfit, certainly, and perhaps even the same angle of light, from the bulb above the sink.

“What do I say?” she asked.

He bowed his head to grimace at his nails. “She said, ‘Oh, houseboy, I seem to have a headache. Would you help me to the couch?’” His mimicry of Julia’s flirtation might have been funny any other night.

Now, Lina felt sick. But she repeated the line, in a pathetic echo.

A door slammed somewhere on one of the upper floors. They both glanced up.

Ren slid off the stool and took her hand. “So. To the couch.”

They returned to the parlor beside the dining room and sat down on a sofa. “This couldn’t be the same couch,” Lina pointed out.

“No, but it’ll do.”

“What next?”

“Well…I let her kiss me.” Even now, in the middle of all this, Ren found a roguish smile for her.

Lina, in turn, found a laugh, and kissed him. The scent of his skin brought tears to her eyes, but she blinked them away and settled her arms around his neck. “I guess now I offer you a drink?”

A crash came from the darkened dining room behind them. They looked over the back of the couch. Several of the chairs had been knocked over. The sound of angry, fast breathing gusted toward them and stopped.

Shaking, Lina looked to Ren.

He pulled a flask from his back pocket, swung it between finger and thumb, and placed it in her hand.

She removed the cap with unsteady fingers and sniffed at the flask. “Brandy. And presumably something else.”

“Yes. The drug.”

“What kind of sleeping pill did she use?”

“You can’t get it nowadays. It was found to be too unsafe in too many people. Imagine that.”

“So this is…”

“Prescription pain meds. Strongest I could find. Scrounged it from Gertrude’s room.”

Lina winced, knowing the pharmacopoeia the residents took. “Yeah. That should do it.” She lowered the flask to her lap. “Oh, God, Ren. Don’t.”

“Why? What’ll it do? Kill me?” His mouth twitched in a dry smile.

“But what if it works this time?”

“It worked last time, technically.” He plucked the flask from her. “What do you think, Julia?” he said to the dining room. “Shall I have a little brandy for strength?”

An enraged growl zoomed toward them. The curtains on the nearest window, along with their rod, came down in a rip of fabric and squeak of drywall screws. Fine dust sifted over Ren and Lina, who shielded their heads. Quiet settled in, with the faint background sound of labored breathing.

Lina ventured to lower her arms and glance around, though every primal instinct screamed for her to run.

The rooms were starting to look a mess. Ren noted it as well. “We’ll have a lot to answer for tonight when Marla gets home.” He held up the flask in salute to Lina. “To you, my love.” He pivoted to toast the air beside the couch. “And to Julia, whom I never loved, and who must leave tonight.” As he swigged the brandy, another frustrated shriek rippled around the sofa. Lina, sure she was caught in a nightmare, watched Ren’s throat pulse as he swallowed the poison; one, two, three gulps; and then she couldn’t count them anymore, because the floor lamp tipped over and went dark. Seconds later, all the remaining lights flickered and went out too. The hum of the kitchen appliances died. This time nothing came back on.

Lina squeezed her eyes shut.

Ren’s arm slipped around her, and his lips, damp and rich with the scent of brandy, kissed her forehead. “Don’t be afraid.”

A laugh, which would have been charmingly girlish in other circumstances, danced away from them toward the staircase.

“She’s still here,” Lina whispered.

“Of course.”

“We don’t have much time. The drugs will work fast. You’ll pass out soon, and it’s dark, and…”

“Come on.” He rose from the couch, guiding her by the shoulders. “Candles.”

Just enough light leaked in from outside, from the city, for them to get into the kitchen without tripping over the fallen dining room chairs. Ren, who knew all the contents of the cupboards, led the way to one of them. Lina heard the waxy click of candles being drawn out of their box, and the papery rattle of a matchbook. Then came a brilliant yellow flare, and Ren lit a white taper. He jammed it into a candlestick and handed it to her.

“Now what?” Lina asked. “What happened next?”

Ren steadied the candle by closing his hand around it, just above hers. “She invited me up to her room. Said she had something to show me, but we all know what that means.” A row of hanging pans rattled and banged, their copper bottoms flashing. Ren turned and raised his voice. “Yes, we know what that means, don’t we, Julia? Come up to my room and die.”

The pans lifted from their hooks and flew every which way. The clatter was deafening. Lina ducked, shielding the flame. Ren stumbled. A heavy saucepan fell at their feet. When she lifted her head, she saw him gripping the edge of the counter, one hand covering his eye. She reached for it. “Are you all right?”

He let her draw the hand away to reveal a curved cut on his cheekbone. Blood oozed up dark in the candlelight. She yanked a clean dish towel from a shelf, but he stopped her before it touched his face. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Step outside the lines,” Lina begged. “Make yourself well again. Forget all this.”

“So we can wait for it to happen another night?”

She looked about at the scattered cookware and crushed the towel into a tight ball in her hand. He was right, of course. It would not end here if they chickened out now. She flung the towel across the butcher’s block, where it unraveled after one bounce and rippled to the floor. “It makes me so angry,” she burst out.

“Good. Be angry. It’s better than being afraid.” His hand slipped onto her shoulder. “Now let’s go upstairs.”

As they climbed the steps, whispers and moans and scrapes sounded from all sides of the house. It could have been the wind; leaves swayed outside the windows. But when the intercom sputtered and crackled with static—despite the electricity being gone—she knew the poltergeist was still with them. “To her room?” she asked.

“Yes. Your room.”

Lina paused on the stairs and looked at him. The candle flame made his shadow jump and quiver. His right cheek was a reddish smear, smudged where he had dabbed at the blood. “Wait,” she said. “You died in my room?”

He tilted his head reluctantly. “I didn’t want to scare you, but…”

“Good Lord.” She resumed the climb. “I thought it was the parlor.”

“I’m sorry. It just seemed…”

He didn’t finish the sentence, and she heard a sliding sound like cloth against the wooden walls. She spun around. He had halted, his two feet on different steps, and leaned his shoulder against the wall, blinking as if disoriented.

Terror and grief sprang up in her heart. She dove under his arm and hooked it around herself. “The pills?”

He nodded. “Starting to kick in, I think.”

“Come on.” Her voice wasn’t quivering, at least. If she just viewed this as tending to a patient, maybe she could get through it. “Let’s get you to my room.”

“Girls are…always saying that to me.” He smiled.

As they walked slowly down the dark third-floor corridor, a rumble shook the house. Lina felt it in her feet, and heard it in the jingle of wall ornaments and light fixtures. “What’s she doing?” she asked. She prayed it wouldn’t be something as bad as the exploding radiator.

“Don’t know. Tearing down the…cabinets…in the kitchen?” He had begun blinking and giving rapid little shakes of his head, as though unable to focus.

Don’t panic , Lina told herself, pressing her lips together to fight down a scream. His weight heavy on her shoulders, they made it into her room and fell to their knees. Lina set the candlestick on a hardback book lying on the floor. Ren collapsed onto his back and closed his eyes with a sigh.

Lina ran her hand over his puppy-fur hair. “How you feeling?”

“Oh…just fabulous.” His eyelids lifted, and he reached up to brush her face with his knuckles.

She tried to smile, but tears filled her eyes. In a floor below, something heavy smashed into something solid and structural. The house rang with the vibration. “Ren,” Lina squeaked. “If you pass out, and she’s still here, what do I do?”

“Tell her…to do what she has to do…to end it.”

“But…” A tear fell down her face and sparkled in candlelight on the back of his hand. He smoothed his thumb across her cheek. “What if…her leaving makes you disappear too? What if she takes you with her?”

“Lina,” he soothed, faint but warm, tired eyes shining with reflections of flame. “I should have been gone a long time ago.”

She knew that. She had thought it many times and steeled herself against the possibility. Or, at least, she had tried to. She pressed her face against his hand and choked down sobs. Now was not a good time to cry—not now, when the floor was shaking and the books scudding along their shelves from whatever destruction Julia was wreaking downstairs.

“I’m glad it’s you,” he said, “that I’ll finally get to die for.”

“Don’t say that.” She wiped her eyes. “If you’re dying, I’m dying right next to you.”

“No, no. Listen. Promise me…”

“What?”

“If she tries to trap you, promise me you’ll run.”

She gave him a twisted, affectionate smile. “And leave you here? I’m a nurse. I can’t abandon a patient.”

“Run.” He closed his eyes again. “You have to run. Promise me.”

A tremendous boom rang out, accompanied by a glare of light from her window. The whole house shook. Glass shattered on the lower floors, and a strange and awful roar advanced.

Lina scrambled to her window and looked down. Horror silenced her, though her mouth opened as if to scream. Fire poured out the broken doors and windows on the ground floor, licking upward toward her along the brick walls. She flew back to Ren, who lay with his eyes closed, his fingers splayed on his forehead. “Fire!” she shrieked, her voice returning in force. “She set the house on fire! Get up, please get up!” She tried to tug him, but he was heavier and limper than before.

“Run,” he breathed, through lips that barely moved.

She had both arms under him now and pulled his torso up, but his head fell back and his arm drooped to the carpet. “Wake up!” she screamed. “Oh, no, no, no…oh, God, Ren, please wake up.” She felt a gust of hot air, and looked at the doorway to see an orange glow lighting the hall. It brightened even as she watched. “Oh, God,” she whimpered, then pulled Ren as hard as she could. “Come on, honey. You’re coming with me.”

The glow from the encroaching fire lit the hallway well enough that she didn’t need the candle, so she left it. Fire hazards were a moot point now. As she hauled Ren out into the corridor she wondered how on earth Julia could have caused such a massive burst of flame from a mere book of matches, which was the only fire-starter Lina recalled seeing.

Then she remembered the gas stove. The crashing noises must have been Julia breaking through a wall and into a gas line, and flooding the kitchen with natural gas so she could strike a match and set off an explosion. The horror of this thought gave Lina a burst of panicked strength, and she managed to drag Ren past her own doorway and halfway to Mrs. B’s.

The orange glow came from the back staircase, the one they had just used. That was also the direction of the fire escape. But if the flames were coming from that direction, she didn’t dare try it. Besides, carrying Ren down the iron ladder would be almost impossible. In the other direction, toward the wider main staircase, the hall was still dark. Though the idea of venturing into that darkness unnerved her, it was the safer of her two options. She prayed for a clear passage down the stairs and out to the street. It was dangerous to stay in the house any longer. If the fire didn’t trap her, Julia would. Lina just needed to get outside, drag Ren to safety…

Something tugged him the other direction. She stumbled, and his arms almost fell from her grasp. As she looked at her unconscious lover, he slid a few inches away from her. Someone unseen was pulling his feet. Lina was done with fear; now anger flooded her. She seized Ren around the torso and pulled. It worked for a second or two, but then the opposing force recovered and yanked him back. She squinted at the yellow-lit hallway. Were the wisps of smoke playing tricks on her, or did a translucent figure actually stand there? Was that a slender, curved body; a flutter of a skirt below a knee?

The figure, if there was a figure, moved again, and Ren’s body slid another few inches away from Lina. Lina’s fingers, wrapped around his wrist, felt instinctively for a pulse and found none. She pressed a kiss onto his hand and held his wrist tighter, willing the pulse to come back.

But instead his arm melted into nothing. He dissolved and vanished into the smoke. Lina stared at the empty carpet in anguish. A few yards away, the air rippled again, stronger now, as if trying to coalesce into the solid form of a woman. Ren was gone. Staying here to fight a partially invisible ghost was pointless. Lina turned and bolted into the darkness.

It would be okay, she tried to believe as she turned a corner and stumbled down the pitch-black corridor, one hand on the wall for guidance. He said he had tried suicide before, and still came back. He would come back this time too. But she also remembered that he—or rather his father, through the medium—had said The house is holding you . If the house were destroyed, its ghosts might be set free. He should have been gone long ago, he had said, and now this escape began to look like it had been his plan all along.

The thought that she had just left him forever was too painful. She halted and looked over her shoulder, her mind clamoring idiotically that she should at least check that he was really gone. She took a step that direction, but then something wooden (a beam between floors?) squealed and crashed nearby, and the roar of flame amplified. Smoke stung Lina’s nose and filled her lungs, hot and choking. She leaned on the wall.

Perhaps, after all, she needed to do nothing more. She had always counted death her bitterest enemy, whether she had been a fearful child, or a nurse, or the lover of a ghost, but now she saw that death was also sweet release. She had long dreaded her final hour on Earth and what shape it might take, but now it was not hard to face. It might even be the honorable thing, to stand here in the suffocating smoke, go down with the ship, let Julia destroy her along with Ren and the house and all the residents’ possessions.

“See you on the other side,” she whispered, dizzy from the fumes. She was certain Ren heard her.

A draft of cold air swirled around her, clearing a space for her to breathe. Ren’s voice came from behind her, from beside her, from within her head. “Live. Promise me. Run!”

She gasped a breath, and the clean air brought with it the reminder that she was still young; that the world was still out there; that happiness and beauty still existed. She turned and plunged into darkness and smoke, and flew down the stairs. She made it to the second floor without collisions or falls, despite the murky, unbreathable blindness. She felt along the wall until she gripped the handrail of the stairs leading to the ground floor, and began jogging down them. Here there was light, but a dangerous light: yellow and orange throbbed in a screen of smoke, and as she descended, thin flames poured out from where they licked the first-story ceiling. She ducked to avoid them.

She was almost to the ground when the blow hit her. A body, slender and fast, jumped onto her back. Arms wrapped around her throat. Lina, her scream choked off, fell the last two steps and rolled on the carpet at the foot of the stairs, embroiled in a wrestling match with someone she could not see. But when she gripped one of the arms and pried it off her throat, she found, with shock, that she could see it. A woman’s arm, dusted with downy blond hair, fingernails neatly pared and painted red.

“No!” Lina coughed, struggling. “You. Will. Not. Kill. Me.”

Furious breathing blew against Lina’s ear as Julia tried to regain her chokehold. But with a twist, a kick, and a jerk of the elbow, Lina knocked Julia away and heard the ghost-girl cry out. Lina got her feet beneath her, but a glance up convinced her to crawl instead of run. The ceiling was a mass of smoke and flame, and bits of burning plaster were falling. She bolted ahead on hands and knees. She needed only to reach the front door.

A line of fire raced across the carpet, cutting her off from the foyer. She stared in horror, and knew at once she could not attempt one of those jumpthrough-the-flames tricks people were always doing in movies. She turned wildly. Was there a window anywhere near? Or—

A female figure emerged from the smoke, crawling, flickering between transparency and opacity. Her short blond waves were in disarray, and her jade-green skirt dragged on the carpet beside her knees. The malice in her eyes, fixed on Lina, was hard, glittering, and thoroughly determined. It was enough to reanimate Lina. She turned and leaped through the wall of fire.

Crashing on the slate floor of the foyer hard enough to leave bruises on her hip and shoulder, she thought only of whether or not she was on fire. With amazement, she discovered she was not. Furthermore, she was only a yard from the front door. She lunged for it, burned her palm on the knob, yanked her hand away and wrapped it in her shirt, and was about to try again through the cloth, when the window beside the door shattered. Lina curled away, covering her face. The glass fell in shards around her shoes, and she looked at it. That was odd: why would the glass break inward?

Then an axe smashed the remaining shards in the window frame, and a yellow-coated arm reached through. Flashing red and blue lights colored the smoke. She had not even heard the sirens until now. A firefighter wearing a clear-shielded helmet stuck his head in and grabbed her by the arm. “Come on! Get out. Take my hand. Put your foot here.”

Something hot fell on Lina’s shoulder as she climbed onto the windowsill, and the firefighter batted it off. Slipping through, she cut her ankle on a piece of glass, and paused out of instinct to press her sock against it. The firefighter hauled her farther away, down the front path, telling her they would take care of her as soon as they got her away from the house.

A fire truck blocked their street; hoses snaked all over the pavement. Barriers had been set up at the nearest intersections. People in fluorescent yellow coats and fireproof boots jogged up to incoming cars and curious pedestrians, telling them they had to stay back.

“Is anybody else in there?” the firefighter holding Lina around the ribs asked. “Listen to me. Is anyone else in there?”

“No,” she rasped. “I don’t think so.” And then she dared to turn around and look at the house. The sight brought her to her knees.

Above the neighbors’ roofs and treetops, flame-lit smoke billowed and plumed. The beautiful, century-old house was burning; roaring and crackling and blistering; all three floors and the basement and the roof and the maple tree, windows shattering, steam hissing in the wake of fire hoses. She thought she heard a high-pitched scream from within, but it might have been the wail of a staircase collapsing.

And so the spell is broken . She sat back on the wet pavement and put her face in her hands.

She heard Marla asking a firefighter, “Did you find anyone else inside? We have to know! Did you? Have you found anyone?”

“No, ma’am,” the firefighter said. “Nobody except this lady.”

Something in Lina’s mind snapped, and for a time she had no notion what was happening around her.

After a while she discovered she was sitting across the street on the curb, being given a cup of something bland and sweet to drink. Her ankle was bandaged, and a portable oxygen mask sat beside her. Tears stung her face, especially the steam-burn along her jaw. She glanced up to see Gary, who offered her a sympathetic smile and said something meant to be comforting. She made no sense of the words.

Marla, Alan, Consuela, and some of the seniors’ family members milled on the sidewalk, tending to the elderly residents and talking on cell phones, writing down where each person was going to stay that night.

Lina hoped no one would try to assign her a hotel room, or send her to her mom’s house in Tacoma. She was determined to stay here until the last ember was cold and everyone else had left, and then maybe Ren would reappear on the blackened, vacant property. If he did, it would be enough. Even if he had to haunt the ruins of the house instead of the house itself, and even if she couldn’t touch him this time, it would be enough to see him again.

Behind her, Gary’s voice emerged from the clamor. “What about your houseboy? He wasn’t in there, was he?”

She clapped her hands to her ears so she wouldn’t hear whatever lie Marla or Alan responded with. After a while she got up and stepped across the obstacle course of hoses. The rest of her acquaintances stood in a knot under a cherry tree, talking and shivering. She didn’t attempt to make eye contact with them, and no one stopped her.

She stumbled past onlookers, people she had never seen before who had congregated in excitement to watch a giant house burning down. She kept walking until she turned a corner and the street grew darker and quieter. The concrete retaining wall of someone’s front yard loomed over the sidewalk, higher than her head. It felt dank and pebbly to her fingertips. Her feet came to a stop, and she turned and leaned her forehead on the wall. “I don’t know how to go on without you,” she said. “You told me to live but I don’t know how.”

The sound of sobs, moving closer, brought her head up. They advanced with unusual speed, and around the corner came a young woman, moving fast but not exactly walking. She glided as if on silent roller skates. Lina recognized her and stepped back in alarm—then paused, because this was not the same Julia she had wrestled at the staircase. This Julia was still pretty, still had wavy fair hair cut to her chin, still wore a tea-length dress in jade green. But she carried no malice in her eyes, no cruelty. She looked merely like a heartbroken girl. She stopped in front of Lina, imploring her with a look. The scent of rose-vanilla perfume and cigarette smoke drifted to Lina’s nose.

“Tell Sean…” The woman gulped. “Tell Sean thank you. Tell him thank you.”

An icy feeling skittered over Lina’s skin. “What?”

“Tell him thank you!” Julia insisted, clutching a handkerchief in front of her chest. “Tell him.”

Lina managed to nod. It seemed to appease the young woman, who lowered her head and moved past, skimming along the sidewalk. Lina turned to watch her. The white of her graceful neck disappeared a few paces away, dissolving into the night air. The sound of her sobs ceased. The scent of perfume, which smelled like one favored by the richer old ladies at the house, lingered a moment before blowing away on a gust of wind.