We Sing It Anyway #5
Mary looked at me anxiously, then nodded. “All right, Elsie. Rose and I are right outside if you need us.”
“I’ll need a clean towel.”
She smiled, face softening. “I’ll get you a nice warm one from the dryer.”
She didn’t say whose dryer it was going to be from, only vanished, leaving me alone in the shower.
I wiped the water from my face, the spell of my sorrow blessedly broken by her interruption, and quickly finished the process of scrubbing off weeks of sweat and grime.
I had almost forgotten how wonderful it felt to be clean.
I shampooed my hair three times before I called it good enough and turned off the water.
When I pulled the shower curtain aside, the towel I’d asked for was waiting for me on the counter, fresh and clean and as warm as had been promised.
I wrapped it around myself, grabbing the second towel that had helpfully accompanied it to dry my hair.
There wasn’t time to use the hairdryer: Mary might be able to tell them to wait until I was ready, but I had already taken long enough in the shower, and I didn’t want to wait any longer.
Once I was dry, I realized I had another problem: my clothing was so filthy that it was stiff, and the thought of putting it back on was revolting. I clutched the towel a little more tightly around myself as I eased the bathroom door open and crept out into the hall, heading for the stairs.
I was almost there when Rose appeared in front of me. “I’ve dealt with depression before, plenty,” she said. “You look more grief-stricken than some of the weeping ladies I’ve known, and they’re ghosts whose entire existence is about grieving. Are you okay?”
“Nope,” I said, almost cheerfully. “Not even remotely. But I’m doing my best, and that’s really all I can do right now. So will you let me get dressed?”
“We should have been haunting you a long time ago,” said Rose, stepping to the side. “Mary’s gone to get you something clean to wear. Hope you’re comfortable with her fashion sense, because you know you’re about to be covered from collarbone to ankles.”
“Yeah, but it’ll all be my stuff, which means I like it.” I barely remembered what it was like to have clean clothes on. I flashed Rose a smile as I climbed the stairs, trying to look as reassuring as I could.
From her expression, she wasn’t buying it, but she folded her arms and let me go, not popping back up ahead of me. Sometimes hanging out with ghosts can be a little exhausting that way.
Mary had already been to my room, leaving jeans, a sweater, and the necessary undergarments neatly folded on my unmade bed.
They, like the towel before them, were still warm from the dryer.
I dressed quickly, not taking as much time as I wanted to savor the feeling of clean clothing against my skin, and grabbed a brush from my dresser, raking it through my hair before turning back to the door.
Time to face the music.
I walked slowly back down the stairs, following the sound of voices, and found Mary and Rose in the living room, along with roughly half of a Costco sheet cake.
Mary was crouched down, clearly deep in negotiations with the small group of Aeslin mice in priestly regalia who had gathered there.
One of them spotted me and squeaked in excitement, causing the rest to turn and exclaim jubilantly, “HAIL!”
“Yes, yes, I know, Elsie taking a shower is very impressive, but I need you to stay focused,” said Mary, snapping her fingers.
“You can have this whole cake if you’ll just promise to give us a little space during the upcoming reunion.
Go into the walls and don’t come out until someone asks for you. ”
“But Priestess—” objected a mouse.
Mary fixed it with a stern eye. “I can quote the scripture as well as you can. Or do I need to remind you that did not the Patient Priestess say, ‘There is a time for everything, and right now it’s time to sit quietly and let people have some space’?”
“You do a good job with the scripture, but you can’t pronounce the capital letters the way they do,” I said, stepping fully into the living room.
“But Mary’s right, guys: I need to do this without an audience.
I know you’ll be watching, but can you do your watching from out of sight, please? For me?”
It had been long enough since I asked the mice to do anything but leave me alone that they seemed inclined to listen. They conferred briefly among themselves, then turned to me and bowed, the one at the head of their little group squeaking, “It Shall be Done!”
“Thank you,” I said solemnly, and watched as they scattered for the walls. True to her word, Mary carried the cake over to the cleanest corner of the room and set it down where it could be swarmed without creating too much of a distraction. She set it down, then walked back to me.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
“As I’ll ever be,” I said.
Mary disappeared, and Rose and I were alone.
She bumped her shoulder against mine. “Chin up,” she said. “You’re gonna see your brother. I’d give anything to see my brothers again.”
I glanced at her in surprise. “You have brothers?”
“Past tense. I died, they didn’t, we lost touch. Then they died, and I was elsewhere doing my ghost gig, and now they’re off in the great beyond where all good people go, and I’m never going to see them again.” She shrugged broadly. “You’re getting an incredible gift. Appreciate it.”
“I will. I am. I do.” I took a deep breath. “I guess this is a sort of a weird situation, huh?”
“Yeah. So it’s okay that you don’t know exactly how to feel.
Nobody expects to deal with a sudden sibling resurrection.
Or if they do, they’re probably not the sort of person you really want to be spending time with.
Resurrectionists aren’t very good company.
Their creations can be, but that’s a matter of rebelling against toxic family traditions, not raising the dead. ”
“Fair enough,” I agreed. With the mice hidden in the walls and Mary gone, my empty hands felt suddenly awkward, like they were supposed to be holding or cupping something, like anyone who saw me would think I was somehow unfinished.
I let them rest against my sides, then immediately crossed my arms, trying to seem more at ease with my surroundings.
Rose eyed me sympathetically. “It’s gonna be okay, Els. Just breathe.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“Most living things manage the breathing part just fine as long as they don’t think about it too hard.”
“How am I supposed to stop thinking about it when you won’t stop talking about it?”
She shrugged broadly. “That’s for you to figure out, not for me to tell you.”
I eyed her, huffed, and started picking up dishes from the various flat surfaces around us, stacking them up for easier transport to the kitchen.
The whole house needed a focused, dedicated scrubbing-down, but that was no reason to sit idle.
Now that I could see how bad it had all gotten, I couldn’t stop seeing it.
There was no warning before the pressure in the room changed, sharp as an impending storm.
I straightened and turned, and there was my cousin Sarah, wearing a weird black bodysuit that gleamed like oil on the surface of a puddle in the dim living-room light.
She was holding the arm of a dark-haired man in jeans and a plain blue sweatshirt, his weight balanced uncomfortably on the balls of his feet, like he expected to need to run at any moment.
The emotions pouring off of her were concern and joy, in almost equal measure. She was worried, although I couldn’t have said about what—him, my reaction, the state of the house. And she was radiant with delight, a satisfaction that was almost too big for her body to contain.
His emotions were a similar mixture. Relief, and adoration, and a spiky, uncomfortable grief. The specific mixture was new, but the shapes of those emotions were as familiar as my own. I knew.
Even if Rose and Mary hadn’t already warned me, I would have known.
I had grown up alongside those emotions, and had been feeling them secondhand for most of my life.
Lilu—even part Lilu—are empaths, not true telepaths like Sarah.
We get and can influence other people’s emotions.
Some of us have more trouble than others when it comes to shutting them out.
I’ve always been better at it than Artie, who got more of the reception and less of the control.
But I knew the mind that was brushing against mine.
I hadn’t fully believed until that moment. I’d been told, but it was so impossible that I hadn’t fully been able to accept what I was hearing. Suddenly, my empty hands felt like the least important things in the world. I stepped forward, lifting my arms, ready to embrace him.
“Artie,” I breathed, tears springing to my eyes.
“Hey,” he said, and stepped away from Sarah, who let him go without complaint.
We met in the middle of the room, wrapping our arms tightly around one another, and I held on to him like I was never going to let go.
I never wanted to. His body had been with me almost since the moment he’d been born, but he, himself, had been gone for years.
Having him back was painful and glorious at once, like lancing an infected wound and letting the rot finally drain out.
The pressure shifted again, and Sarah’s emotions vanished from the swirling stew around us. Artie gave me another squeeze.
“She’s gone to get Arthur,” he said, voice low. “He’s going to need some reassurance when he gets here. He’s pretty freaked out.”
“And you’re not?”