Chapter 22
After a moment of charged silence, there was a flash. It lit up the dim hallway and made me close my eyes. When I opened them again, I had to blink a few times.
Adam said, “Cool, she doesn’t show up in the picture.” He leaned over to show Tyler, who tried to take another picture with his own phone. I covered my eyes at the flash and so did Annabelle. Her waist was invisible now.
Sara swatted at Tyler’s phone, saying, “Stop that.” Then everyone started talking at once.
Adam and Tyler kept trying to take pictures of Annabelle, trying different filters.
Sage suggested that maybe a video would work.
Big Mike stood up and put his hands on his hips, frowning at the appearance of a ghost in the hall as if he didn’t approve.
Rebecca rushed over to Annabelle, cooing and gasping like a kid who caught Santa Claus in the act.
Sara hadn’t gotten up from the couch. She looked tired.
“Excuse me, everyone! Please calm down,” Annabelle said, raising her voice and commanding the room.
The sound of it sent involuntary shivers down my spine.
I’d never heard her speak in quite that tone before.
I gulped, realizing I was eager to hear it again—in a different context, definitely in private.
To Adam and Tyler, she said, “I assure you that I will not show up in those no matter how many you take.”
Reluctantly, the preteens put down their phones. They didn’t put them away, though, preferring to hold on to the devices, just in case.
“I’m sorry for appearing suddenly like this,” Annabelle said. “I’m sure it’s frightening, but—”
Sage broke in, saying, “It’s fucking cool.”
“Language,” murmured Mike.
To me, Adam said, “You didn’t tell us you were dumped by a ghost!”
“Would you have believed me?”
Annabelle cleared her throat and turned away so I couldn’t see her reaction to Adam saying she’d dumped me.
She was still disappearing, but more slowly now.
She looked around the house, admiring the family photos on the walls and the homey decor.
A smile lit up her face as she noticed a piece of framed artwork showing a nude woman reclining on a divan. “What a lovely house.”
“Thank you,” Rebecca said. “Who are you, by the way?”
“Well, you see—”
Annabelle was interrupted by a loud knocking at the door. Rebecca opened it and admitted a harried-looking Yasmin. Her hair was sticking out of a side ponytail, and she was out of breath. “Excuse me, but is there an asshole named Gibson here? And maybe a—”
Annabelle waved at Yasmin. “Hi.”
“There you are!” Yasmin rushed into the hallway, sounding relieved. She turned to me, and her vibe instantly turned sour. “And there you are.”
I sighed. “Rebecca, this is Yasmin. She’s my cousin and she wants to take my house.” I gestured at the group in the living room. “Yasmin, this is ... everybody.”
Everyone started talking over one another again, but I tuned them out because Annabelle was still disappearing. I could only see her lovely bust, shoulders, and head. Her arms were still attached, though. The effect was both unnerving and a little silly. Like a special effect from a movie.
“You need to go, Marley.”
She nodded. “Gibson—”
I shook my head, pointing at the door even though she wouldn’t be using it. “Go. We’ll talk when I get home.”
“You’ll come home?”
I held out my hand, palm up. She held her palm to mine, her ghostly energy just barely touching my flesh.
“I promise.”
***
Everyone took the ghost explanation differently.
Rebecca nodded, accepting every word of Yasmin’s like she’d been waiting her whole life to receive concrete proof of the existence of ghosts.
Adam and Tyler asked so many questions that Sara ordered them to bed just to get them to stop talking, and Mike harrumphed the entire time Yasmin talked, crossing and uncrossing his arms.
After a debate that I didn’t really listen to, Mike rolled me back to Abaddon while Yasmin and Sara walked behind us talking about medical instructions.
I overheard Yasmin trying to explain Annabelle and my family’s history of witchcraft, again, to the skeptical doctor.
My eyelids were drooping, even though Mike hit every rock on the roads that led to the house, jolting me in the chair and sending new waves of pain through my body.
Yasmin hopped up the steps and opened the front door, which she hadn’t locked.
Mike and Sara helped me out of the chair and across the porch, then finally inside, where Annabelle was waiting.
She was wearing her white house slippers and a worried smile.
Her hands fluttered nervously, but all of her body was as visible as she ever had been.
After taking me up to the third-floor bedroom and leaving me with Annabelle, Mike and Sara stuck around for a few minutes. I heard them talking with Yasmin, their indistinct voices drifting upstairs.
Just as they left, Miranda arrived. She helped me into the bathroom so that I could improvise a shower, and she helped me scrub in places I couldn’t reach.
It hurt too much to extend my right arm.
She held my T-shirt sleeves patiently while Annabelle stood by and watched, biting her lip.
Then she helped me to bed, tucking in the covers and helping me arrange my aching limbs.
Annabelle fussed. She hovered by the side of the bed, drifting here and there, adjusting blankets that didn’t need adjusting and wringing her hands.
“Why don’t I get you a cup of tea?”
“I don’t—” Behind her, Miranda nodded vigorously, telling me to let Annabelle make me tea. “That would be great, Marley, thanks.”
“I’ll be right back!” She disappeared with a little poof of energy instead of leaving via the open door.
Miranda chuckled. “She’ll feel better with something to do.
She was the same way with Agatha toward the end.
” She perched on the edge of the bed. Miranda smelled like old-lady perfume and sugar cookies.
Her face was perfectly painted as usual, with scarlet lips and smokey eyes.
“Do you actually need anything, though? Other than tea?”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what, dear?”
“Everything.” I swallowed, tasting the chalky pill I’d just taken. “I promise I wasn’t always such a mess. Well, okay, I’ve been a mess a few times. But not like this. It’s like the moment I got here, I just fell apart.”
She smiled kindly. “Oh honey, that’s okay. Sometimes you need to fall apart so you can put yourself back together. And maybe you’ve been holding yourself together too long. You needed to fall apart but didn’t have a place to do it safely until you got here.”
Miranda handed me a tissue. I blew my nose, loudly discharging a giant wad of snot, then took a deep, painful breath. “Now I’m sorry for blowing my nose right at the end of your really nice speech.”
She threw her head back and laughed. “I wish you could’ve met Agatha; I really do. You remind me of her.” She wiped her eyes, smearing her mascara. “She was much worse to take care of, though.”
“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.”
Patting the edge of the bed, Miranda rose and said, “Just when I thought I was through with taking care of stubborn Cartwright women, you showed up.”
“I’m—”
She shook her head. “No, dear, I’m glad you did.” Miranda looked out the window at the almost-full moon. “Your auntie was a royal pain in my rear for over twenty years, and I wouldn’t trade a second of it. Even when I had to help her wipe her rear.”
That made me smile. “Why did Agatha really give me this house? She had a Gibson guitar sitting in the shed like it was waiting for me to find it. Why?”
She cocked her head to the side, then shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe she just wanted to see what would happen.”
“But she’s dead.”
Miranda winked. “That doesn’t mean she can’t see us, love.”