appealing, but no. I’m gonna read.”
“Smarty-pants.” Pauline turned and half slid, half walked across the lawn, as if she were on her way to the gallows.
Maggie couldn’t concentrate on Moby Dick , and she couldn’t sleep. She wandered the halls, padding along the smooth, wooden floors. The house felt huge and silent. Finally she crawled back into bed and stared at the ceiling. She didn’t realize she’d fallen asleep until, around 4:00 a.m., she awoke to a woman’s voice in the yard. At first she thought it was a real person, wailing. Then the noise separated itself into words. It wasn’t wailing after all, but singing.
I saw my love walk down the aisle
On her finger he placed a ring
All I could do was cry
It was a beautiful voice drifting up to the windows from the side porch. Maggie tiptoed downstairs and emerged wrapped in an afghan onto the wooden deck. A light came on behind her in the kitchen, and she was joined by her mother.
“That’s Etta James,” her mother said.
They both stood there staring at the instrument plugged into the porch outlet—a swirling, antique gramophone.
I drift into the gray morning air and follow a snowflake down to the Larsen porch. The earth seems hushed as the first snow of the year falls on Maggie Larsen and her mom—just a light, thin covering, as if the winter were dipping in a toe. Their hair is soon sugar-dusted. I rise to the sound of Etta James.
I’ve started floating high above the peninsula to look for other ghosts like me on the land below, thinking they’ll glow and give themselves away, because I remember that ghosts should glow. (Though maybe, I wonder, only to each other? Or not at all?) Besides the glare of electric lights, the peninsula is dark: large swaths of woods; long, dark shores.
Still, below, in the early dawn, something runs rampant through Gill Creek. It tips over garbage cans, taps against windows, breathes onto people’s necks. The residents think it’s animals, or the wind. But I think it’s fear itself.
I return to Maggie, who’s now alone on the porch. She feels it too, the icy cold down her neck, the sense of something threatening just beyond her reach. I try to imagine I’m her guardian angel—I try to send her strength, but she doesn’t feel it.
She shivers in the cold, and the moment is gone.
6
MAGGIE WAS DRINKING COFFEE OVER HER TEXTBOOK AT THE GLASS KITCHEN table Tuesday—taking notes for a comparative-lit paper while her mom sat across from her, on the phone with her boss—when they heard a scratching at the door.
Maggie looked out the window, and no one was there. But when she placed her nose to the glass and looked down, she saw Abe sitting on the porch landing, tail thwapp ing against the slatted wood, a tiny slip of paper sticking out from under his collar. She opened the door and pulled the paper out of its spot.
Snow day, we’re off. Didn’t want to wake you. Gone to Liam’s. Come over.
Maggie went to the fridge and rolled up a piece of ham for Abe, who chomped it and ran off. She checked with her mom, promising to come back in time to get a full day’s schoolwork in, and then pulled on her boots and hat and coat and trudged across the fresh field, her tracks punctuating the white expanse behind her. Only about an inch of snow was on the ground, but it was enough to cover the whole field in a layer of white, making the features of the yard vanish. She breathed the cold air in deeply, and instead of taking the road she cut through the sparse woods, swinging by the sauna in the glade to check Liam’s progress. (The roof was up, but the one wall was still missing, the empty space draped in a blue plastic tarp.)
Liam’s house was a low, long, one-story wood cabin butting right up near the edge of the lake and surrounded by thick trees. A thin thread of smoke was rising through the chimney into the air and filling the woods with a delicious, smoky smell. A cardinal crossed Maggie’s path and she
“Smarty-pants.” Pauline turned and half slid, half walked across the lawn, as if she were on her way to the gallows.
Maggie couldn’t concentrate on Moby Dick , and she couldn’t sleep. She wandered the halls, padding along the smooth, wooden floors. The house felt huge and silent. Finally she crawled back into bed and stared at the ceiling. She didn’t realize she’d fallen asleep until, around 4:00 a.m., she awoke to a woman’s voice in the yard. At first she thought it was a real person, wailing. Then the noise separated itself into words. It wasn’t wailing after all, but singing.
I saw my love walk down the aisle
On her finger he placed a ring
All I could do was cry
It was a beautiful voice drifting up to the windows from the side porch. Maggie tiptoed downstairs and emerged wrapped in an afghan onto the wooden deck. A light came on behind her in the kitchen, and she was joined by her mother.
“That’s Etta James,” her mother said.
They both stood there staring at the instrument plugged into the porch outlet—a swirling, antique gramophone.
I drift into the gray morning air and follow a snowflake down to the Larsen porch. The earth seems hushed as the first snow of the year falls on Maggie Larsen and her mom—just a light, thin covering, as if the winter were dipping in a toe. Their hair is soon sugar-dusted. I rise to the sound of Etta James.
I’ve started floating high above the peninsula to look for other ghosts like me on the land below, thinking they’ll glow and give themselves away, because I remember that ghosts should glow. (Though maybe, I wonder, only to each other? Or not at all?) Besides the glare of electric lights, the peninsula is dark: large swaths of woods; long, dark shores.
Still, below, in the early dawn, something runs rampant through Gill Creek. It tips over garbage cans, taps against windows, breathes onto people’s necks. The residents think it’s animals, or the wind. But I think it’s fear itself.
I return to Maggie, who’s now alone on the porch. She feels it too, the icy cold down her neck, the sense of something threatening just beyond her reach. I try to imagine I’m her guardian angel—I try to send her strength, but she doesn’t feel it.
She shivers in the cold, and the moment is gone.
6
MAGGIE WAS DRINKING COFFEE OVER HER TEXTBOOK AT THE GLASS KITCHEN table Tuesday—taking notes for a comparative-lit paper while her mom sat across from her, on the phone with her boss—when they heard a scratching at the door.
Maggie looked out the window, and no one was there. But when she placed her nose to the glass and looked down, she saw Abe sitting on the porch landing, tail thwapp ing against the slatted wood, a tiny slip of paper sticking out from under his collar. She opened the door and pulled the paper out of its spot.
Snow day, we’re off. Didn’t want to wake you. Gone to Liam’s. Come over.
Maggie went to the fridge and rolled up a piece of ham for Abe, who chomped it and ran off. She checked with her mom, promising to come back in time to get a full day’s schoolwork in, and then pulled on her boots and hat and coat and trudged across the fresh field, her tracks punctuating the white expanse behind her. Only about an inch of snow was on the ground, but it was enough to cover the whole field in a layer of white, making the features of the yard vanish. She breathed the cold air in deeply, and instead of taking the road she cut through the sparse woods, swinging by the sauna in the glade to check Liam’s progress. (The roof was up, but the one wall was still missing, the empty space draped in a blue plastic tarp.)
Liam’s house was a low, long, one-story wood cabin butting right up near the edge of the lake and surrounded by thick trees. A thin thread of smoke was rising through the chimney into the air and filling the woods with a delicious, smoky smell. A cardinal crossed Maggie’s path and she
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