Chapter Nine #2
“There’s always music in this house. It’s so normal, nobody blinks. But when you play…” He tips forward onto the balls of his feet, a bright, glazed glint in his eyes. “It’s like everything stops. Everyone freezes to listen. I swear the damn thunder holds back to hear.”
A shiver rolls down my spine, and suddenly the tiny room is three times smaller. Whatever I might have said dies on my tongue, and all I can do is stare at him. The fleeting face in the window. The presence at my back when I sat down at the keys.
“Sorry. That was weird.”
“Stop apologizing,” I say, not realizing I mean it until it’s out. “I’m willing to forgive the light stalking on account of there probably being nothing to do when you’re a…when you’re like you.”
He gives me a lopsided grin. “You’ve got no idea.”
My lips quirk up of their own accord, and I quickly pull them back into a line. Finn’s smile widens.
“But if you do go snooping again, I will exorcise you.”
“That’s for demons,” he says, “but got you. Loud and clear.”
The subject of an exorcism does beg an obvious question. Whether there’s a way to make him disappear and take his goofy smile and that familiar grief that hangs in his eyes with him before it becomes something to lose.
There is a knock on the door, and Finn and I turn toward it. The second the knob turns he vanishes, and my sister pokes her head in.
“Hey,” she says. She slips inside and closes the door behind her. “I heard you scream. Are you okay?”
“Define okay.”
“In your case? It’s debatable,” she says. She shifts her weight, as if gauging how welcome her intrusion is, and eventually makes her way over to the bed. She sinks into the mattress beside me. “Want to talk about it?”
“Nope,” I say. I was so caught up in the dead guy in my room, I momentarily forgot about the nightmare—and the new addition to it. It all comes back in a rush. “It was the usual.”
Margot nods. “Want me to go?”
I shake my head.
She nods again and leans over, flipping off the lamp. We settle onto our backs, side by side. I wouldn’t have been able to ask, but Margot knows me well enough to stay anyway. I’m glad she did. The dark is never as foreboding when you’re not facing it alone.
“I found one of Harper’s shirts when I was unpacking,” Margot says eventually.
I struggle to swallow the lump that forms in my throat. I don’t fight the tears when they burn the backs of my eyes. They slide down my cheek, tickling my nose, falling onto the pillow.
“Her dads gave me a box of her stuff,” I say. “Clothes and whatever else. Said I could do what I wanted with it.” The box is still in my closet, next to sheet music and all the other things I pretend don’t exist. “I haven’t opened it.”
“I miss her,” Margot whispers, voice small.
“So do I,” I say. A sob bubbles up in my chest, and though I try to shove it back, it slips past my lips. A pitiful, broken sound.
Margot slips her arms around me. Her tears dampen my hair.
We stay that way for a long time, the Griffin sisters holding each other too tight for the ghosts to sneak between.
I assume she’s fallen asleep until she breaks the silence.
“I miss you, too, you know,” she says. It comes out hesitant—not a common attribute in my sister. It knocks over the stack of bricks before I get the chance to form a wall.
“I’m here,” I say.
“You’re not,” Margot says. “Not really. It’s like…like you’re some kind of ghost. Like you and Harper both died that day, but only she got buried.”
The words are sharp, and coming from anyone else, they’d shut me down. Cut the power and leave me in the dark. But from Margot, they gain purchase, and they sting.
I don’t try to lie. She’d call me out on it. That’s the shitty part about shedding your armor, even if only for a minute. You don’t get to control what spills out. Don’t get to shove it back in before someone sees.
“I don’t know how to…be without her. Like, every day I’m still here, every time I laugh at a joke or feel even the tiniest bit okay, I’m betraying her. Rubbing life in her face.”
“But she’s not here.”
“What, so you’re a skeptic now?”
Margot cranes her head my way.
“Oh, no, this house is still haunted. I’m just saying, if Harper is out there somewhere, ghosting it up, she’d be damn pissed at you. You know that, right? That she’d kill you if she knew you refused to live your life because she can’t?”
I clamp my eyes shut to prevent more tears from slipping out.
Harper would be livid. She’d give me that pursed-lip look of hers, lecture me, and shove me out of the cage I’ve made a home in. But she isn’t here to do any of that. And I was always the sidekick, anyway. Never learned how to push because I had someone else to do it.
“Remember when Dad left?” Margot says. “That first month, we all walked around like we’d lost a toe. Off-balance. We had to, like, relearn all our routines. Figure out how it all worked without him in the frame.”
“Dad didn’t die. He didn’t have some tragic accident. He’s touring the country with a bunch of other middle-aged dudes.”
“No, but you know what I mean. We figured out how to live around his absence. And it was smaller, because we could still call him or see him, but it’s the same, isn’t it?
There’s a Harper-sized hole”—Margot reaches out, pokes a finger into my chest—“and instead of trying to live around it, you curled up inside it and got comfortable.”
I give her a long look.
“The world kept moving, Jo. Maybe you should start moving with it.”