We Sing It Anyway #2
“You haven’t been here.” It was impossible for me to keep the resentment out of my voice, and so after a momentary struggle, I gave up on trying. Why should I make an effort? No one else had. “How do you know?”
“I can see the house, and the mice swarmed me as soon as I popped in,” said Mary. “They had a lot to say about the current state of things.”
“Traitors,” I muttered.
“They’re worried about you. And honestly, so am I.”
“So where have you been?” The question was pointless, and I knew it: Mary had been with the children.
That was where Mary always was. They came first for her, and always would.
She didn’t have a choice in the matter, not really.
She was a caretaker ghost, attached to the family specifically to serve as a babysitter.
Part of how she maintained her haunting was by following its rules, and that meant that when there were kids around, she would always prioritize them above anyone else.
Which had been fine for years, when our parents had finished having children and my generation had been too young to start. But now, between Verity and Alex and one quasi-adoption, we had four kids under ten in the family, and Mary was almost always busy. Which reminded me …
I sat up and blinked at her, then said, “You’re here,” almost accusingly.
Mary, her white hair like a beacon in the dimness of the room, nodded. “I am,” she agreed.
“I didn’t call for you.”
“No, you didn’t,” she said.
“But you’re here. Why are you here?”
“The ten-thousand-dollar question.” Mary looked around the room with unfeigned disdain. “I’m here because the anima mundi has given me the afternoon off to help you deal with what’s about to happen.”
“Why? What’s about to happen?” I asked, voice tight with sudden wariness.
The anima mundi was Mary’s actual employer, the cosmic force that kept her anchored to our reality rather than moving on into the afterlife.
They were the living spirit of the Earth, older than time and beyond most simple human concepts, like “gender.” When the literal soul of the planet where you live says they’re nonbinary, you don’t argue with them.
They kept a pretty tight leash on Mary most of the time, because sustaining a haunting as involved as she was—one that could interact with the physical world at will, and pass for one of the living under almost all circumstances—was pretty energy-intensive, and it turns out the spirit of the world isn’t that invested in my weird family having easy access to babysitting.
Unreasonable, right? But the anima mundi did like all the other services Mary could provide, at least half of which were sarcasm-based, and so they kept her around, just limited.
If she was here when no one had called for her, that meant something big enough for the anima mundi to gauge it worth the cost was going on. I closed my eyes, still sitting up on the bed.
“Who died?” I asked.
“What?”
“You’re here, and you say it’s important enough that the anima mundi has given you the afternoon off, and that means someone died. No one’s pregnant right now, and I’d know if anyone was getting married. So. Who died?”
“Oh, sweetheart, no. No, think in the other direction.”
I cracked open an eye, looking at her suspiciously. “The other direction?”
“Yes.” Mary nodded encouragingly. “The direction that says I’m going to go get Evie in a minute, because there’s no way the two of us are getting this house livable on our own. I’m guessing Ted is still incapacitated?”
“Yeah,” I said, voice gone flat. “I haven’t seen him in a week. He never really comes out of his room anymore.”
“I know he’s not dead—I’d feel it if he were—but he’s not my responsibility the way you are,” said Mary. “I raised you better than this. Get out of bed.”
“No.”
“Elsinore…”
“No. My mother’s dead, my brother’s gone, I don’t see any reason why I should get out of this bed.” I glared at her. “Give me one good reason.”
“Six months ago, your cousin told you that she was going to bring your brother home,” said Mary. “She did it.”
I froze.
Not quite literally: I’m not a cryomancer like James, I can’t turn my own body into ice just because something startles me. But effectively. It felt like someone had wrapped spectral fingers around my heart and lungs and was now squeezing, steadily cutting off both air and circulation.
“Elsie? You have to breathe, sweetheart. Breathe now.”
I inhaled, automatically following instructions, and continued to stare at Mary, silently pleading for her to explain.
She sat down on the edge of the bed, wrinkling her nose at the state of my sheets, and said, “All right, short version. The people you saw take Arthur were from Johrlar.”
“I assumed it was something like that, when they didn’t come back,” I said. My voice sounded strange, like I was hearing it from somewhere outside of my body. “Aunt Evie said I shouldn’t worry.”
Which had just made me worry more than ever. Why do people do that, say you shouldn’t worry when there’s everything in the world to worry about? Some of the smartest people I know have fallen into that particular trap.
At least my Uncle Kevin hadn’t told me not to worry. He’d just sighed, looking pained, and muttered something about wishing his children would tell him before they chased his parents off into alternate dimensions on wild quests that might or might not end in tears.
We have a fun family, is what I’m saying.
“Worrying wouldn’t have done any good,” Mary said. “They were very far away, and there’s nothing any of us could have done to help them. Even I can’t travel that far. The anima mundi’s power stops at the Earth’s pneuma. Once they moved beyond it, they were on their own.”
“But you’re saying they found Arthur?”
“Well…” She hesitated, expression turning complicated. “Yes and no. It’s not as straightforward as all that.”
“It better be,” I said. “They went to another dimension and came back with a different version of my brother once. I got used to the idea of Arthur after losing Artie. I don’t have another adjustment in me.”
“I…” She sighed, shoulders slumping. “I am not doing this right. Hold on, I’ll get someone who can help.”
Then she was gone, leaving me looking at the empty air.
Minutes ticked by without her returning.
Cautiously, I slid off the bed and began gathering laundry from the floor, tossing it into the empty hamper.
It wasn’t going to be big enough, but if Mary was planning to come back and resume making me feel bad about my life choices, I wanted to be able to at least pretend to have started making a dent in the room.
I am a grown woman, have been for years, but she was my babysitter. I’d still be responding to her as an authority figure when I was in my nineties, assuming I managed to live that long. In our family, living past middle age seems to be a fifty-fifty prospect at the absolute best.
Once I had a stretch of flooring clear, I could finally see why it had been crunching every time I walked: a thin layer of crinkly wrappers had been laid out over the rug, covering it in a shining patchwork of candy bar, granola, and various fast-food wrappers.
It was too precise to have happened accidentally.
I stared at it for a moment, trying to make sense of the array.
Then, in a level tone, I called, “I need a priest.”
That would seem like an odd thing to announce in most bedrooms, unless you were in the market for an exorcism.
In my house, it was as normal as asking for a bedtime story.
There was a moment of quiet, followed by a rustling sound from the base of the wall, and a mouse burst into view, running across the remaining laundry to scale the leg of the bed and sit, looking at me attentively.
Its fur was a light tan color where it hadn’t been streaked with half a dozen conflicting shades of hair dye.
Normal mice are color-blind. I’ve never had the nerve to ask a member of my clergy whether the same is true for Aeslin mice.
If they’re not color-blind, they know exactly what they look like, and asking might hurt their feelings.
The mouse continued to watch me, whiskers trembling with anticipation. I took a deep breath. “Hello, priest,” I said. “Do you know why there’s a layer of wrappers covering my rug?”
“Yes,” squeaked the mouse. I waited for it to continue. It didn’t.
That was odd. Aeslin mice aren’t known for their brevity. “And?” I prompted.
“Lo, did not the Patient Priestess say ‘This Is the Time for Mourning, and It Is Inappropriate to Expect Me to Vacuum Right Now’? And she did lay tarps across the floors and plastic over the furnishings, to keep them safe and clean until the Time for Mourning had passed, and the world could be brought to lemon-scented brightness once again.”
I blinked. “You covered the floor in trash so I wouldn’t have to vacuum?” I asked.
“Yes, Priestess,” squeaked the mouse. It glanced toward the now-overflowing laundry basket, ears going briefly flat against its head. “Are you … may we Hope the Time for Mourning is coming unto an End?”
For the first time since a bunch of cuckoos snatched my brother and sent half my family on a wild-goose chase trying to find him, I felt a pang of guilt.
We’d been neglecting the mice something awful, Dad and me.
Oh, they had enough to eat, because we were still eating: DoorDash and pizza delivery are miracles of the modern age.
But when was the last time they’d had cheese that wasn’t scraped off a Hawaiian special, or cake that hadn’t come in a Hostess wrapper?
My family had a covenant with the mice, and we weren’t keeping up our end of the bargain.
“I don’t know,” I said, honestly. “But Mary’s going to be back soon, and she’s upset enough about the state of the house that I figured I should at least try to show her that I still know how to make an effort. I’m sorry.”