The Accident Season (14 page)

I shake my head. “Alice, no.”

The look she gives me is sad but fierce. She turns and goes back upstairs, talking softly on the phone to Nick. I just stare after her because I can’t move. Sam is behind me, but he isn’t moving either. Numbly, I walk upstairs to my bedroom without turning around. When I get into bed, I notice that I am still holding the phone.

S
am is asleep when the rest of us are ready for school the next morning. Alice thumps on his door, but he doesn’t come out. My mother passes by and says, “He is like a sleeping bear—don’t open the door to his grotto!” and Alice laughs.

I can’t laugh. All I can think about is last night. I try not to think about it, but of course that never works. It’s like that saying about elephants.
There’s nothing I can do,
I tell myself,
but pretend it never happened.
A little lost thought comes up and says,
Yes, it turns out you’re really very good at that
. I squash the thought like an insect on my leg. I bang on Sam’s bedroom door.

“Sammy,” I yell like it’s any other morning. “Get your lazy ass out of bed.” The groan from inside really does sound like a bear. “Sam!” I shout louder.

Sam opens the door. His eyes are squinty and his hair is tousled and he leans on the door frame, his face in the tiny open gap onto the landing. I imagine questions in his eyes, but I also imagine excuses. I imagine regret. The rain, the whiskey, the cigarette smoke like a shared kiss. I stop myself on the word
kiss
.
He’s my brother,
I remind myself for the hundredth time.

“We’re going,” I say. I make my voice impatient.

Sam’s eyes are sad like the deepest water. “Yep,” he says. His voice is whiskey-hoarse. He clears his throat. Alice hurries across the landing and down the stairs and Sam waits until she’s out of sight before saying, “Can I talk to you for a sec?”

He opens his door slightly wider and I can see in the thin gap that he is halfway through getting dressed; he is barefoot and topless, his trousers low on his hips. My face burns.

“We’re late,” I say, and my voice sounds strangled.

Alice calls from the kitchen and my mother hurries up the stairs to fetch something she’s forgotten in her room.

“You know Melanie will be another twenty minutes,” Sam says. “Cara, please.”

“We’re
going
!” Alice shouts from the hall.

My mother emerges from her bedroom holding a pair of socks in one hand, her wallet and phone tucked into her sling for safekeeping, and her sunglasses dangling from
her mouth. “Sam, aren’t you dressed yet?” she says, lisping through the earpiece of the glasses between her teeth. I take the glasses from her mouth so she won’t break them, or her teeth. “Hurry up—you three are walking to school. Gracie’ll be here any minute to drive me to work.”

“Hey!” Alice shouts louder. “Guys! I’ve a test first period, so you’d better not make me late.”

My mother smiles and shakes her head. “You heard the woman,” she says, pointing her wallet at Sam. “Hop to it.”

Sam retreats into his room without a word. I stare at his closed door for maybe a fraction of a second too long, because my mother gives me a funny look as I trudge down the stairs.

Alice hasn’t told our mother about her accident yesterday. She isn’t wearing her sling, and has put on uniform trousers instead of a skirt so there’s no way my mother would know she was at the hospital last night with a dislocated shoulder and butchered knees, needing multiple stitches. All my mother knows—or thinks she knows—is that Alice got hit in the face by a soccer ball crossing the field after school.

Alice spends most of the walk to school complaining about her sadistic economics teacher who has sprung a surprise test on them on the last day before the midterm break. She doesn’t mention her accident, or Nick, or anything we talked about last night. She and Sam act completely normal
around each other. I can’t tell if Sam and I do the same; I’ve forgotten what normal feels like.

To me the school day drags by, but Bea is practically bouncing through every class. People keep coming up to us in the halls or the cafeteria to talk about the party. Some of Alice’s friends organize to meet us at the ghost house later tonight to set up, and it’s easier than I expect to get swept up in party preparations so that everything else is almost forgotten. Even finding Elsie seems to have faded into the background. I’m not sure I can take any more surprises after everything that happened last night.

Finally the bell rings for the end of our last class. Bea, Alice, Sam, and I change out of our uniforms in the school bathrooms. Then we walk to the ghost house, armed with bags of costumes and decorations, candles and flashlights that Bea has been keeping at her place so our mother won’t know about our plans, as well as three bottles of wine that Sam’s had hidden in his cupboard since my mother’s last dinner party. We send my mother cheerful texts about decorating Bea’s garden for trick-or-treaters so she won’t suspect a thing.

A few days ago we agreed to come early to the ghost house, to have some time there by ourselves before the party starts. I tell myself I’m glad about this; that showing Sam and Alice around and drinking wine before the ball will make everything seem normal again.

By the time we’ve reached the ghost house, the sky is all dark clouds and the afternoon is murky. The temperature’s down by several degrees today and the wind is fierce. It whips my scarf around my neck, threatening to strangle me. I look up at the big bay windows of the master bedroom, and for just a moment I think I see a face behind the net curtains. I blink and the face is gone.

Bea and Alice climb over the gates first, and when they’re both in the garden, I pass the bottles of wine through the bars to Alice and throw the bag over to Bea. When I start to climb over ahead of Sam, I notice that it’s easier to climb without gloves on my hands, and with the canvas Converse I usually never wear during the accident season on my feet. I realize that, apart from the night before last, on the ice, this is the fewest layers I’ve worn in any accident season since what happened to Seth. And here I am scaling gates to break into abandoned houses. If only my mother could see me now.

At the top of the gates I wobble. I’m trying to shake the image of Seth out of my head, but I shake a little too violently for the ancient gates and the blowing wind. When I bring my left leg over—my right already wedged between the bars on the ghost house side—I lose my balance. My left leg kicks out into thin air and the force of it makes the right one slip. I hardly have time to gasp. Suddenly both my legs are kicking out more than two meters
above the ground. Alice screams. My hands grip the gates like vises and I try to scrape my feet back over the iron curlicues until they’ve found new footholds. My heart hammers in my mouth and my hands begin to sweat. My grip slips.

“Cara!” Bea shouts. She holds her arms out toward me, as if that’ll help.

It feels like my feet don’t belong to me. I can’t make them do what I want them to do; my shoes slide across the bars of the gate and I can’t find any of the metal swirls to brace myself on. All I can see are my white knuckles gripping the rusted bars in front of me. The gates shake.

“Sam, stay where you are!” Alice shouts from below. “If you try to climb, you’ll shake the gates.”

I can feel Sam let go of the gates. I try not to panic. I pedal my feet uselessly, until finally my flailing legs find a foothold. I wedge my feet into the bars and press myself tight against the gate. The muscles in my arms scream.

I stay folded over the top of the gates just long enough to steady my breath before making my careful way down. I’m glad when my feet find solid ground. Between the top of the gates and the ice on the river, I think there isn’t nearly enough solid ground in my life right now. When Sam lands on our side of the garden, he puts his arm around me.

“You okay, little sister?” he says softly, sounding like the Sam I’ve always known. My heart tries to skip a beat, but I
ignore it.
Everything is back to normal,
I tell myself.
It was wrong, he regrets it, we’re not going to talk about it. This is for the best.

I am concentrating so hard on this that I forget to remind him I’m not his sister. Because for all intents and purposes, I am.
Back to normal,
I remind myself again.
For the best.

When we get onto the porch, Bea holds out her hand to push the handle, but the door just opens by itself, like it has felt our bodies in front of it, like it knows we want to come in. Alice gives an uncertain laugh.

Inside, the house feels different. Maybe it’s because of the darkness—the hall is lit by shadows and flashlight beams—or maybe it’s the wind crying in through every crack, but today the ghost house feels more haunted than it did before (and it already felt haunted enough). Alice and Sam are mesmerized. Bea gives them the grand tour. When we get to the double doors to the master bedroom, we all fall silent.

I set my shoulders. “Okay.” I gesture to Bea to take one of the handles. I take the other. Together, we push open the doors into the master bedroom and let Sam and Alice step inside.

Nothing has changed. It’s like the picture I took. The walls are peeling and I can almost make out faces in the faded paper. The dirt is thick over everything, except the trails our feet left last time. They are the only tracks in the room.

We train the beams of light over the floorboards to the fire pit. Sam mutters a quiet “Wow.”

Bea marches straight to the bay windows and pulls the curtains. The dust makes clouds around her head. There is no one there. There is no Elsie. There are no ghosts; only the dust in the light, our breath and the wind in the quiet, and the feeling that something, or a lot of somethings, are watching us. So maybe there are ghosts after all.

Alice kneels down on the dirty floor and opens the backpack I hadn’t noticed she was carrying. Inside, along with the battery-charged music docks she borrowed from Nick for the party, she has packed away what looks like hundreds of candles wrapped in paper. She takes them out one by one and calls for us to help. Her voice echoes around the bare room. I shiver.

Bea and Sam set out the candles; little tea lights, colored candles from gift shops, big church candles that remind me of Christmas. In the gleam of the flashlight they look like bones. Alice follows behind us with one of those long tapered lighters you use for barbecues, and forms a hundred flames. The flickering lights make me anxious. Everything in the room is just so flammable, and we are most of all.

Bea takes four more paper packets out of her bag. They’re clearly not candles. She hands one to each of us, and when we open them, we see the masks.

“We made them yesterday,” says Alice. “We needed to
use wire and pliers and knives, so we didn’t want to do it at our house, and Bea’s mom had loads of stuff we could use, so we decided to make them a surprise.”

I hold up my mask in the moving light. It’s delicate and sparkly and the sequins look like a statue’s tears. In the darkness it’s the same blue-brown-green as the river in sunlight. When I put it on, it fits as if it’s been molded from my bones. Beside me in his black mask, Sam looks like a bandit, like the pirate in
The Princess Bride
; he looks like half his face has been erased. Like a censor bar’s sitting over his cheeks, hiding his eyes. It’s creepy. Across the room Alice’s face is made of tree bark and autumn leaves. Bea’s skin is scales.

I touch my cheeks, my glitter tears. “You really made these?”

Alice nods.

“They’re kind of creepy,” Sam says, echoing my feelings exactly. “They feel like they’ve been cut off someone else rather than made.”

Alice looks proud, but I feel uncomfortable and unlike myself. I want to take the mask off, but the others keep theirs on, so I don’t touch it. Something about the way it wraps around my face makes me hear my breath much louder than usual. I keep jumping and wanting to turn, thinking my breath is the breath of someone else behind me.

Sam turns off his flashlight and we’re surrounded by candlelight. We sit down between the window and the door
(almost as if we are ready to run away at any minute) and pass around the jam jars that Bea’s brought with her to use as glasses. We open one of the bottles of wine and fill them to the brim.

“This really is the perfect place for our party,” Bea says. Beside her, Alice smiles under her tree-bark mask. I wonder if she is imagining her friends’ reactions to the place or if the ghost house really is working its spell on her. Outside, the wind rattles the windowpanes and downstairs it sounds like a wolf’s been let into the house.

We sip from our jam-jar wineglasses and listen to the howling, and Bea tells us about the wolves of Ireland; how, not so long ago, forests covered all the land, and the wolves roamed free. How they’d wander from coast to coast and sometimes turn into beautiful, tall humans and come up to the villages to seduce the sons of millers and the daughters of smiths. The sons and daughters’d spend one night with the wolves and fall in love forever, and when the wolf left the next morning—padding silently and four-legged back into the trees—the son of the miller or the daughter of the smith would spend three years searching the forests, barefoot and trembling, until they died from exhaustion at the foot of a tree. And then the wolf would come back and feast on their flesh.

Beside me, Sam laughs, maybe a little nervously. “You have a morbid mind,” he says to Bea.

Alice, who usually scoffs at Bea’s stories, starts asking Bea questions about the wolves. She sounds more curious than sarcastic, but then with Alice it’s sometimes hard to tell. “Is there a way of telling,” she asks, “that they’re a wolf and not a human?”

Bea takes a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket and lights one. The candles all jump at the new piece of fire in the room. “Traditionally, they have more hair than humans. Male werewolves’ll have hairy chests, and both will have long matted locks and wild thickets between their legs.”

Sam chokes on his jar of wine. I pat him on the back until he stops coughing. Alice holds out her hand for Bea’s cigarette.

“Wolves also make excellent lovers,” says Bea. “Or so I’ve heard.”

“From who?” I want to know. Bea just smiles mysteriously.

“Humans also make excellent lovers,” says Alice, who knows far more about these things than I.

“Oh, but not like a human wolf.” The walls seem to bend forward to listen, and even the heavy curtains creep toward the sound of Bea’s voice. “When they look at you, it’s like they can see clear through your clothes and right in under your skin. Like they can smell on you what it is you desire and just how hard you want to be held. They’ll pin you to the floor until you almost die with pleasure; their hands on your hips
will raise bruises, and their kisses are like bites that’ll devour you whole. You’ll never get out alive.”