Outback Ghost (23 page)

The last time she'd had intercourse she'd been in her teens and it had been different in almost every way imaginable. She'd thought sex was okay with Samuel – he'd seemed to like it more than she did, but she'd guessed that was normal. Everyone knew men were obsessed with doing it. But Adam had taken
it
to a whole other realm. If she'd known sex could be like that – could make her feel as if her head had been blown right off her body – she'd never have been able to go so long without it.

Just thinking about the way he'd played her body had an orgasm rising within her again. Was that even possible? She grabbed a glass from the overhead cupboard, filled it at the tap and had just lifted it to her lips when she heard a shriek coming from Heidi's room. ‘Mummy!'

In her haste to get to her daughter, Stella dropped the glass on the kitchen floor and almost tripped on the hem of her robe. She tightened it as she ran and then flung the door to Heidi's room wide open. ‘Heids? What's wrong?'

Heidi was sitting bolt upright in the middle of the bed, the lamplight shining on the tears pouring down her cheeks. Stella knew she'd had a nightmare, so she climbed right in alongside and pulled her into her arms. ‘It's all right, sweetheart,' she whispered, holding Heidi's head against her chest and stroking her hair.

Slowly her sobs subsided but as Heidi's crying died down, Stella became aware of a soft whimpering coming from the corner near the window. Her skin tingled as she turned her head towards the sound, hoping to see Whiskers there. There was no cat but the curtains swayed slightly as if the window behind them was letting in the wind.

Problem was Stella knew that window was bolted shut.

Stella held Heidi tight against her, unable to tear her gaze from the curtains. Were they really moving or was it her imagination? And maybe that sound she'd heard had been the wind outside because it seemed to have stopped now.

‘Mummy? Hurts.' For a moment Stella thought Heidi meant something else was hurting her but then she realised she was holding her too strongly.

She loosened her embrace but didn't let go. Every instinct told her to protect and comfort. ‘Sorry, honey, I just wanted to make you feel better. Can you tell Mummy what's wrong? Was it a bad dream?' Oh please God let it simply be a nightmare. Never before had she wanted her daughter to suffer such sleep afflictions, but right now it seemed far more appealing than the alternative. An alternative she wasn't certain she could even believe in.

‘No.' Heidi's little body shook with emotion yet again.

‘What then?'

There was a long pause before she answered. ‘Lily-Blue sad. She won't stop crying. I'm sad.'

Those heartfelt words caused Stella's heart to jolt and then cramp in her chest. Heidi's capacity to recognise the emotions of others – happy, but even more so, sad – had always stood out. She'd see an old person alone in a supermarket and need to connect. Stella knew this empathy wasn't unusual in people with Down syndrome and she'd learnt to deal with it. Even admire it. Heidi seemed to know which people would be open to her affection and she steered cleared of those who wouldn't, those who'd look at her like she was a freak. Stella had come to trust this instinct, so much so that if Heidi took an instant dislike to someone (and this was rare), Stella was wary too, but so far, real people had always been at the receiving end of her empathy. People Stella could see, hear, smell, talk to and even touch if she felt the need.

This empathy towards Lily-Blue was scary and she didn't know how to react.

She swallowed, knowing Heidi needed her to get over her fears and hang-ups. ‘Do you know why Lily-Blue is sad?'

Heidi nodded solemnly. ‘She misses her mum.'

Tears welled in Stella's eyes. The image of the photos on Esther's fridge flashed into her head and she found herself wanting to reach out and comfort that little girl in much the same way she sought to comfort her own.

That's ridiculous
, she told herself. Did she really believe Heidi was communicating with a ghost? Adam's sister's body had never been found. But no matter how much she logically tried to reason this weird encounter away, she couldn't. In her heart she knew that Adam's sister had died a long time ago and the goosebumps on her arms, on her legs – was it possible to have goosebumps on your heart? – all made her feel as if that little girl was here, in this room, with them.

‘Oh.' Stella felt totally inept to deal with something like this.

Heidi's little body shook again and another big sob left it. Within seconds Stella felt her daughter's tears seeping into her robe. ‘Oh' wasn't enough. She was the mum here; it was her job to fix things.

‘Heidi,' she said, her voice firm. ‘What else do you know about Lily-Blue? Has she told you who her mum is?'

Heidi shook her head.

Stella let out a sigh of relief. ‘Has she told you anything about her family?'

‘She misses her brother and dad. But mum is most sad.'

‘So you don't know who her family are?'

‘No.' Heidi looked at Stella oddly as if wondering why she was pressing this issue.

‘Okay.' Stella brought Heidi's head back against her chest and kissed her forehead. This knowledge gave her tiny comfort. Who knows how Adam or Esther would react if Heidi blurted all this out to them.

‘What we going to do?' Heidi asked.

Her utter faith that her mum could fix this warmed Stella's heart, yet also left her feeling vulnerable and inadequate. She hated to ask Heidi more questions, but she needed as much information as she could get before she decided what to do. ‘What else can you tell me about Lily-Blue? Has she always lived here?'

Heidi's face scrunched into a frown. ‘She lives here now. She only used to visit. Did piano lessons.'

‘Good.' Stella stroked Heidi's hair in reassurance. ‘Anything else? How old is she?'

This brought a small smile to Heidi's lips. ‘She's seven. Like me.'

Exactly the right age. ‘Do you know why she can't see her mum anymore?'

‘No. Something bad happened but she won't tell me. She wants her mum happy again.'

At Heidi's words, Stella swore she felt the air shift over the bed. Her skin bristled slightly but she didn't feel the discomfort she'd felt when she'd seen the curtain moving and heard the soft crying earlier. Hearing the way Heidi talked about her ‘friend' had humanised her for Stella. Thanks to the photo she had an idea in her head of what this spirit looked like and she liked Adam and Esther and therefore felt an affinity towards it. But the biggest thing she felt was obligation. She wanted nothing more than to fix her daughter's heartache, and to do that she had to help Lily-Blue.

In the course of a few hours, she'd gone from not believing in ghosts to fearing them and then wanting to help them. What was the world coming to?

‘Okay, darling,' she whispered to Heidi, ‘I think it's time you get some rest. I'm going to stay here with you tonight—'

‘And Lily-Blue?' Heidi asked.

Stella nodded. ‘Yes, and Lily-Blue. And I promise you I'm going to think long and hard about Lily-Blue's problem. I know you want to help her and we're going to do the best we can, but I need you to trust me on this, okay?'

‘Yes.' Heidi's voice was starting to sound drowsy.

Stella manoeuvered them both so Heidi was lying down, her arm protectively and lovingly draped across her daughter's little body. ‘I don't want you to say anything about Lily-Blue to anyone else just yet,' she said. She didn't know whether to tell Heidi she thought she was speaking to a ghost or to leave such terms out of this, but she wanted to instill in her the importance of not saying anything, especially to Adam or Esther. ‘I need you to promise me this and I promise you I'll do everything I can to make Lily-Blue and her mummy happy again. Okay?'

‘Okay, Mummy.' Heidi snuggled into Stella and for once she was thankful for Heidi's unquestioning faith and trust. Sometimes this lack of guile and Heidi's inherent belief in goodness worried Stella, but tonight she welcomed it.

Just when she thought Heidi was asleep, she reached out, slipped her hand inside Stella's robe and rubbed it over Stella's bare stomach. ‘Why aren't you wearing pjs?'

A wave of heat washed over Stella as she recalled what she'd been doing not so long ago. What kind of mother indulged in casual sex with her daughter sleeping only a room away? Or not sleeping as it so appeared. She cringed at the thought of Heidi having heard anything but her guilt meshed together with the pleasure that rode on the recollection. ‘I was hot,' she said quickly. ‘Now go to sleep.'

Heidi's little hand sought Stella's and she squeezed it. ‘Love you, Mummy.'

Aww
. Stella felt as if her heart had cracked in half. ‘Love you too.'

It was less than a minute before Heidi's breathing took on the heavy sound of sleep but Stella guessed sleep wouldn't come as easily to her. As she cherished the feeling of Heidi's little body enveloped in her arms, she tried to reconcile her feelings and duties towards her daughter with what she'd done with Adam. All those sensations, all those feelings that had rocked her while she'd made love with him, had been things she'd thought she could live without. But now that she'd tasted such fruits, she wanted more. She wanted someone to tell her that feeling like a sensual woman again and loving the way her body fit and moved with his didn't have to exist separately to her love for Heidi, but somehow she knew that wasn't the case.

Too depressed by that thought and longing for a coffee but not wanting to move in case Heidi awoke and got upset again, Stella lay prostrate on the bed wondering what the hell she was supposed to do about Lily-Blue. Then a thought struck. Had Heidi's other imaginary friends also been more than Stella had imagined? She'd always been kind of proud of Heidi's vivid imagination and the way she interacted with her ‘friends', but the thought that maybe her daughter was communicating with the other side spooked her.

Having always believed she
didn't
believe in ghosts, she racked her brain trying to think of the snippets of information she'd heard from others and had relegated to some deep, distant place in her mind. If only she could extract herself long enough to get her computer and use Google.

It was now blatantly clear that the reason she'd never found any information on Lily-Blue was because she'd disappeared before the age of the internet but there'd be millions of sites about ghosts.

Heidi made a snoring sound and Stella carefully disentangled herself from her daughter and slipped out of bed. She looked at the vacant spot by the window – she could no longer see movement, hear anything or feel a presence in the room and she wondered if Lily-Blue was resting now too. Did ghosts sleep? Unable to answer that question when not so long ago she hadn't even thought they existed, she pleaded with it nonetheless.

‘I'll be back in a moment,' she whispered. ‘Please just let her sleep.'

And then she hurried down the hallway into the kitchen and grabbed her laptop off the table. She didn't pause long enough to get the coffee she craved and was back in Heidi's bedroom within thirty seconds. Heidi had sprawled diagonally across the bed in the short time Stella had been gone, so she perched herself on the other end and opened the laptop. Impatience plagued her as she waited for the computer to rouse to life and she cursed at the seemingly ridiculous length of time it took her internet to connect. When it did, when she clicked open her browser and saw Google pop up on the screen in front of her, she'd never been happier for the World Wide Web.

What is a ghost?
she typed quickly.

As suspected, pages and pages of entries appeared on the screen before her. She glanced behind her, wondering if Lily-Blue was here somewhere and if she could see what Stella was doing. She'd have no clue that this was a virtual font of information; she might not even recognise the laptop. Pushing that thought aside, she started with the first site.

It was a simple definition –
A ghost is an apparition of a dead person believed to appear or show itself to the living.

But Stella wanted more than this. She wanted to know why her little girl could see and interact with such a thing. She wanted answers, meanings, reasons. She wanted to know if her suspicion that something untoward had ended Lily-Blue's life fit with the general consensus of ghost believers. The next site came a little closer.

A spirit or apparition that shows itself to the living is the energy or soul of a dead person, who is somehow stuck between death and eternity, unable to successfully pass over. It is believed these spirits often died in traumatic or highly emotional circumstances. There have been many instances of living people interacting with the dead – through the use of the senses. Ghosts have been seen, smelt, heard and even touched.

Stella snorted. ‘Unknown? Isn't everything about the supernatural speculation?'

She hadn't meant to say this aloud, but as she did the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end and an icy chill descended over her body. Tucking her legs beneath the covers, she tried not to let the feeling of someone in the room besides them unbalance her as she continued to read.

There are many reasons why a spirit might not have been able to pass over. Some remain close to the place they died, even if they had not been there for long. It is believed these spirits may be confused or may not even know they are dead.

Oh God. Stella clamped her hand over her mouth, her heart aching at the confusion Lily-Blue might be feeling.

These ghosts stay in the place of their death but only make contact with people who are sensitive to spirits. Some spirits stay on earth because they are scared of what awaits them, others still want to take care of unfinished business. This may be something to do with those closest to them or a message they need to deliver, and until they complete their goal, they cannot leave the realms of earth.