• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 760 0

disentangled itself from the tree branches. In its clear light she watched her goats hard at work increasing themselves. She felt that Cole would approve of her ingenuity. But for the first time in all her plotting she also now felt a twinge of sadness for these mothers and for their babies who would all come to naught, at least from a maternal point of view. Yes, it was food, and people needed food and their merry feasts, but from this end it seemed like so much effort and loss just to repair a barn and pay off some debts on an old, sad farm. For the hundredth time Lusa tried and failed to imagine how she was going to stay here, or why. When she tried to describe her life in words, there was nothing at all to hold her in this place. And words were all she could offer over the phone to her father, to Arlie and her other friends, to her former boss: “Less than a year,” she was starting to say, “I’ll be out of here.”

But there were so many other things besides words. There were the odors of honeysuckle and freshly turned earth, and ancient songs played out on the roof by the rain. Moths tracing spirals in the moonlight. Ghosts.

“Rick,” she said, “do you ever see ghosts?”

“You mean real ones?”

“As opposed to imaginary ones?” She laughed. “I guess that means no. Sorry I asked.”

“Why? You been seeing ghosts?”

“They’re in my house. It’s full of them. Some are mine, people from my own family—my dead grandfather, specifically. And some are your family. Some I can’t identify.”

“Scary.”

“No, that’s the funny thing, is they’re not. They’re all really happy. They’re good company, to tell you the truth. They make it seem less lonely in the house.”

“I don’t know, Lusa. Sounds a little bit cuckoo.”

“I know it does.” He’d used her name—no one else in the family did, ever—and he had not called her Aunt Lusa. Whatever this meant, it stopped the conversation for a minute.

“Well,” she said finally. “I just wanted to tell somebody. Sorry.”

“No, it’s OK. It’s kind of interesting. I never seen any ghosts, but I never seen Alaska, either, and it’s probably up there.”

“That’s a sensible philosophy.”

“What do they look like?”

She glanced at him. “Are you really interested?”

He shrugged. “Yeah.”

“They’re not like in the movies. They’re like actual people, in my house. Kids, to be exact. Mostly they play on the steps. This morning I heard them whispering. I got up and looked down over the banister and they were sitting there on the second step from the bottom, with their backs to me.”

“Who was?” Now he was interested.

“Promise you won’t tell anybody this.”

“Cross my heart.”

“Cole and Jewel. A boy and a girl, and that’s who they were. About four and seven years old, maybe.”

“Nuh-uh. You sure?”

“Yes.”

“You never knew Cole when he was little, though,” he pointed out.

She gave him a look. “You’re questioning my scientific accuracy? They were ghosts! I don’t know how I knew it was him, I just did. I’ve seen pictures, and you know, or maybe you don’t, but when you’ve been that close to somebody you can learn to know their whole life. It was him, OK? And your aunt Jewel, brother and sister. She had her arm around his shoulders like she meant to protect her kid brother from the whole big world. Like she knew she’d lose him someday. All of the sudden I understood this whole new thing about both of them, how close they’d been. And I felt really sad for Jewel.”

“Everybody feels sad for Aunt Jewel. Talk about getting the short end of the stick.”

“What, because her husband left her?”

“Yeah, Uncle Shel hitting the road, and then Cole dying, and her kids’ being messed up, and now getting sick.”

“What sick, how sick?”

“I don’t even know. Honest to God, they don’t tell me anything. They act like I’m a little kid. But I have eyes, I can see her hair’s falling out.”

“Oh no,” Lusa whispered, looking down. “God. Is it cancer?”

“I think so. Of the…” He touched his chest. “She had that operation last year, on both sides, but it’s still got all through her.”

“Last year? After I moved here, or before?”

“I’m not really sure. It was all hush-hush,