Chapter 21
Violet
If you didn’t count Sister—who plagued my nightmares from a very early age—I first saw the ghost of a dead person when I was in first grade.
Apparently, I asked the teacher why the boy at the back of the classroom didn’t have to do homework like the rest of us.
When questioned about this injustice and asked who I was talking about, I pointed to an empty corner. I was sent home. My mother was furious.
Oh, what a joy it is to have a childhood in which you’re a freak.
To understand early that you’re so unlike other people that you’re impossible for them to comprehend.
To learn not to trust what you see and to certainly never speak of it.
To think you might be insane, and to know that if you are, you’re alone in a world in which no one cares.
The dead don’t show me how they died. They don’t tell me their stories.
It would almost be better if they did, if in my freakishness I could at least have some understanding of what made them do what they do.
But they appeared in silence. Sometimes they looked at me with stark, pleading expressions, and sometimes they looked away, as if they didn’t know I was there.
As if my torture was, to them, unnoticeable as they went about their business.
None of them had ever spoken to me. Not until the young man in the storage unit—that had been the first. But now, as I sat on the toilet in the ladies’ room at Fell Hospital with my pants around my ankles and heard the bathroom door open, I realized it had started earlier than that.
It had started with the old woman back in Long Island, putting the landscapers’ phone number in the middle of her bed for me to see.
That hadn’t happened before, either, and I hadn’t paid it close enough attention.
I had been too distracted by the phone call summoning me home to Ben.
Ben, who had spoken. To someone other than me.
Sister had no mercy. She gave no quarter for humiliation, which was why the bathroom door opened after I’d finished urinating and before I could pull my pants up. I froze in startlement as the footsteps came into the otherwise empty ladies’ room.
Oh, Sister, I thought through the haze of terror. I hate you so much.
I thought it might be Cathy Caldwell who came into the bathroom, but it wasn’t women’s feet I spied under the stall door. It was girls’ feet in a familiar pair of Oxfords.
There was no other sign as Alice McMurtry, my dead childhood friend, came into the room.
The lights didn’t dim and there was no icy hand on my neck.
There was only Alice’s footsteps. She had hated those shoes, but her mother had bought them, and Alice didn’t get to pick what shoes she wanted to buy.
She was only twelve. So she had obediently worn the shoes, since she had no other pair to wear to school.
She had most likely been wearing them when she died.
They had probably found those shoes on her feet as she lay by the train tracks all alone.
Alice’s feet stopped outside my stall door, and I thought, Sister will never stop torturing me. Never.
“Alice,” I choked out, my voice wavering in the silent bathroom.
“It’s all right,” Alice said. Her voice was thin, as if she was on a bad phone line, but it was hers. I hadn’t heard it in so many years. I suddenly felt like crying.
I put my hand on the closed stall door. I should pull my pants up, but what did it matter? I had been humiliated so many times since I was sent home that day in first grade that it didn’t matter anymore. One more humiliation could be added to the pile.
“I have to tell you something,” Alice said. “I don’t have much time.”
I pressed my hand to the door and tried to breathe. The stall door was cool, as if it had been kept in a refrigerator.
“She wants you to leave,” Alice said from beyond her death, which had happened so long ago. “She’s trying to scare you. She doesn’t want you here.”
“Sister?” I asked.
Alice’s voice dropped to a whisper, as if that word had scared her. “She’s very dangerous. But please don’t go.”
So Sister wanted me gone. I had felt the hostility since I came here, worse than before I left. “Who put the phone number on the bed?” I asked. “If it wasn’t her, if she didn’t want me to come, who was it?”
“We’re trying to help you,” Alice said. “You can make her go away.”
“I can’t.” The only one that had ever made me truly afraid was Sister. The fear of the others I’d seen was an old bruise now, dull with overuse. The fear of Sister was a bottomless pit, sharp and acrid, a roller coaster drop to the center of the earth. “I can’t.”
“You can,” Alice said. “Violet, you can do anything.”
My tears were hot and icy at the same time as they stung my eyes. “Alice, I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have been there. You shouldn’t have been alone.”
“It wasn’t so bad,” my friend said. “It didn’t hurt. There was nothing you could have done.”
I thought of Ben, dying alone like Alice had, and the tears slipped free and slid down my cheeks. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cried. “What happened?” I asked her.
“I don’t remember,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. It was fast. My time was over, that’s all. We only get so much time.”
I closed my eyes. This had always been here.
Alice, Ben, my parents. Cathy Caldwell and the rest of them.
You don’t put your past behind you, no matter how much you tell yourself you do.
It sits waiting, patient, until you come back.
You never get very far away. Especially when you’re me, and the place you come from is Fell.
I would never get far away from this town.
“Tell me what to do, Alice,” I said.
“This is the wrong place to look,” she replied. “You won’t find him here.”
“Then where do I go?”
“You already know,” she said. “It’s all connected. He’s been telling you and telling you. You have to go back to the beginning. The real beginning.”
I had thought Ben’s birth was the beginning. That was why I was here. Did she mean to go back further than that? How? And to where?
My hand was clammy on the stall door, my tears drying on my cheeks. I was running out of time. I could feel it. “Is he my brother?” I asked her.
Silence.
I glanced down. The shoes were still visible under the door. “Alice?” I called.
Silence, and then a whisper. “It’s the wrong question. Be careful, Violet. Three of you went into the house. Only two of you will leave.”
“What does that mean?”
“I have to go.”
“Alice!”
The squeak of shoes on the floor, then silence.
I was cold now. I hadn’t felt threatened when Alice was here, but now a chill crawled up the back of my neck. I stood, pulling up my pants in a hurry, flushing the toilet. I pushed open the stall door.
The bathroom was empty. There was only my reflection in the mirror. My face was pale and my eyes were red. I quickly scrubbed my palms over my cheeks.
I stepped forward and turned on the tap.
There was a cold breath of air, and then Martin Peabody appeared in the mirror behind my shoulder. His tall form was familiar now. In his eyes was nothing but torment.
The edges of my vision went gray. I gripped the counter as the water hissed. I fought the dizziness. I couldn’t pass out again. Not here.
“Sister sent me,” Martin said.
I opened my mouth, but only a strangled sound came out. Humiliation upon humiliation, it seemed. I was not only going to see a ghost while I was on the toilet, but I was now going to pass out on this bathroom floor, alone.
Still, I fought it. I felt my nails scrabble against the hard counter.
I tried to make my throat work. In the mirror, Martin’s hand came up.
He was going to touch me, like the boy in the storage unit had.
He was going to push me, grip the back of my neck the way Sister would, and it was going to be horrible, and I was helpless.
This would happen over and over, and I would always be helpless.
Lisette, I thought.
There was a quick wash of sensation from Martin Peabody, as if he had brushed me with his fingertips. The sadness was icy and suffocating, and he had believed with every part of himself that it would never end, that he would feel like this forever. He had believed that to the last moment.
I dropped on weakened legs, falling to my knees, pulling away from Martin. As I went down in a dizzy spiral, my forehead knocked against the edge of the counter. The water was still running.
Not again. Not again.
The room spun. The floor came closer.
Somewhere, a door opened with a bang. Footsteps approached. This was going to get worse. Someone else was coming. There was more than one, there were too many, and I didn’t know how to—
Hands gripped me, pulled me up. Big, warm hands. A hard shoulder was pressed into my midsection.
Then Bradley Pine stood up, threw me over his shoulder, and carried me from the room.