The Accident Season (18 page)

I ask, “What are you trying to catch?”

Elsie gives me a very serious look. Suddenly my heart sinks. I feel like I had this one question I could ask out of all the questions I want to ask her, and I’ve wasted it on this one and I’ll never get another chance.

Behind me, somebody calls my name. For a moment I think it is the river, but then I see that it’s Bea. When I turn back, Elsie is gone, but I hardly expected her to stick around anyway. I wish I had asked her why she is in all my pictures. I wish I had asked her if anyone has the answers I’m looking for. My reflection is distorted in the water at my feet.

“Cara!” Bea yells again. There’s something in her voice I rarely hear. It’s almost like an edge of fear. “Cara, get back here!”

I splash back across the river. Bea is running toward me. She has my bags in her hands. Behind her, other people are running. They are all sweat-soaked and panting, they are all costumed, but some of them are more undressed than dressed up; they are all carrying bags and bottles and they are all running away. The garden is a mess of masks.

“What’s going on?” I reach Bea and she grabs my arms and pulls me after her. We aren’t heading for the open gates but for the side fence. It looks higher than the gates ever have.

“Hold on,” I say to Bea. I try to stop her. “You want us to climb?”

“Somebody called the police,” she says breathlessly. “We have to get out of here.”

Now I can make out the sirens that I thought were just part of a song. I say, “Oh shit,” and I help Bea to hoist our bags up and sling them over into the field on the other side.

“Where are Sam and Alice?”

“I couldn’t find them. Niamh heard the sirens first. She and Kim legged it out, but I thought Sam was in the kitchen . . .” Bea pauses for breath as we start to climb. We wedge our feet in between the bars and pull ourselves up inch by inch. “But I couldn’t see Joe or Martin either,” she says, panting. “So they must’ve gotten out before me.”

Her words are slightly reassuring, but then I make the mistake of looking back toward the house. The mess of masks and bottles and bags and people running and police running makes me feel sick. When we get to the other side of the fence, I throw up into the ditch. Bea and I hold hands and run home. I am wet to the skin, I am shivering and my wings are shaking. I am cold stone behind my mask. I might not be human at all.

S
am and Alice don’t come back to Bea’s house all night. We call and call their phones, but both numbers go straight to voicemail. We don’t dare call my house phone in case my mother picks up and they aren’t there.

Bea and I sit on her bed and talk and smoke out of her bedroom window for hours, watching the rain fall on the conservatory roof below. By morning our voices are hoarse and our lungs are black, but we are sober. I don’t remember anything we talked about during the night. We fall asleep just as the sky begins to lighten and the last of the rain eases off.

***

In my dreams, at the changelings’ party, the house is in chaos. Creatures run and scream in a thousand languages, there are roars and howls and whinnies. There is a dead wolf on the floor. His blood soaks into the carpet. As the huge house
empties, the changelings turn and see the man made entirely of metal standing in front of the door. The people crowd past him to get outside, the surge of changelings parting like a river around his iron body. Those who touch him accidentally begin to burn and smoke. The hinges at his mouth work and he smiles an eerie smile.

The four siblings look from the bleeding remains of the wolf boy to their stepfather and a crazy fear fills their hearts. They have used up the last of their powers killing the wolf and now there is nothing left. They take each other’s hands and hold on tight. They begin to realize that they are never going home.

***

When we wake up we walk to the ghost house. The way is longer than it ever has been before even though the rain didn’t continue through the morning and the ground is almost dry. Bea and I meander like rivers, like we’re almost afraid to reach our destination or like we wish it’d change, just for a while. Sam and Alice still aren’t answering their phones.

It’s early afternoon and the sky is a washed-out gray. There is no one on the roads. In the fields, the sheep bleat damply. When we get to the river, there are no workers repairing the wooden bridge; it lies there alone and broken. It’s propped up by poles and beams and pulleys, but it’s still completely uncrossable. Bea stands on the riverbank and her hair curls red in her eyes. She still has a few painted
scales stuck to her face. It makes her look dirty and beautiful.

“Are you in love with Alice?” I ask her suddenly.

Bea doesn’t answer. “You know she’s probably at Nick’s place, right?”

I shake my head. “No way she’d go back to him.”

Bea runs her hands through her hair. “You don’t know that,” she says.

I think about the way Nick was crushing Alice into the peeling paint of the wall. I think about her elbows. I think about her as a little girl, bundled up warmer than October every summer, afraid of showing her body. I remember her asking me to sleep in her room some nights. “No,” I say to Bea. “I’m sure of it.”

Across the water, the trees whisper. It’s a keening, lonely sound. “Let’s not go to the ghost house just yet,” I say.

We sit up on the picnic table and throw small stones into the water. I tell Bea about seeing Elsie last night. I’ve been searching for the faintest trace of her all week, but when I finally found her, we hardly talked at all. The whole night feels so surreal already. Then I remember something and I ask Bea if she saw anyone go into the master bedroom during the party.

Bea thinks for a second. “No,” she says slowly. “Come to think of it, I didn’t. And I didn’t go in there all night. Not after we got changed.”

“Neither did I.” My stones land heavy in the water. Some
miss completely and scuttle away along the riverbank or get lost in the grass. “I asked them to close.” I don’t look at Bea.

“You asked what to close? The doors?”

I nod.

“And they did.” She doesn’t phrase it as a question. “Why?” is the question she does ask.

I shrug. I fling a stone as far as I can. It lands in the middle of the river with a satisfying splash. “I don’t know,” I say. “It just didn’t feel right to have anybody else in there.”

When I raise my head, Bea is giving me a funny look. “And they call
me
a witch,” she murmurs.

I fling the next stone even harder. I remember Bea saying that every witch needs somebody to kiss on Halloween. When I think about it, I feel guilty for having kissed Toby, but when I think about it even more, I just feel angry.
I can kiss who I want,
I think. And then I remember that technically I can’t. I can kiss whoever I want, except Sam, because he is pretty much my brother, and you can’t kiss your brother. Except that I did. My world is so tangled, I don’t know what to make of it. A tiny little voice deep inside me reminds me that Toby’s kiss was less than nothing compared to Sam’s. A matchstick against a bonfire.

Then I remember seeing Bea kissing Carl last night. I turn to face her. “Were you making out with Carl last night?”

Bea throws a pebble up and catches it again. She slides off the picnic table and over to the water. She flicks her wrist
and sends the pebble flying over the surface of the river. It skips five times. “I guess,” she says with her back toward me. “I was a little drunk, maybe.”

“A little drunk?” I say, like that’s her excuse. The river eats Bea’s next stone before it gets the chance to bounce. “Why did you do it?” I ask her. Bea doesn’t answer. The river’s hungry. It cries out for more stones. “Bea, what happened last night?”

Bea comes back over to the bench, but she doesn’t look me in the eye. She takes out her cards. I don’t want to know what her cards have to tell us. I want to know what’s going on with her.

“No.” I grab her arms before she can shuffle them. “Not the cards. Not the cards. You tell me.”

Bea wrenches her arms away from me.

“You tell me what you’re thinking,” I say as she takes a few quick steps away. She winces. I raise my voice. “You tell me yourself. Don’t hide behind them.” I’m almost shouting now. The river’s shouting with me.

Bea turns to meet it head on. She shakes and shakes her head. When she speaks, she’s louder than the water flying over the tallest rocks.

“I’m a goddamn coward.” She spins around to face me. Her sleeves fall over her hands. She holds out the deck of cards and points it at me. “But so are you. You’re a coward, Cara Morris. You’re a goddamn coward and a liar.” I feel like I’ve been slapped.

“You’re just like me,” Bea is saying. “Only with you it’s worse because you won’t even admit it to yourself.”

“What are you—?”

“Why did you kiss Toby, Cara? Why did you kiss him?”

“I don’t know,” I say, agitated. “I was drunk, he was nice. Why shouldn’t I have kissed him?”

Bea just stares at me. I wonder if she knows. I wonder what her cards said to Sam that time he kissed her. I wonder if he kissed her like he kissed me. I jump down from the picnic table and I walk right up to Bea and I take her face in my hands and press my lips to hers. She tastes like cigarette smoke and toast and black coffee. When we break apart, she shakes her head. She turns around and walks away. My eyes are dry, but I feel like I’m crying. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.

I go on alone. There’s nothing else I can do, so I pick myself up and walk on. I go to the ghost house. The gates are locked again with a big new padlock, probably put there by the police, but I climb over like last night, and at the top the gates waver and I’m not sure they’ll let me through. I freeze up there—one leg on the side of the house and one on the side of the road, and I let the gates sway me while they make up their mind. They must have decided I’m okay to go through, because the iron underneath me stills for a moment, long enough to let me lift my other leg over and quickly climb down.

The garden is a wilderness. There are plastic bags and beer cans and bottles and bits of costume strewn across the grass like weeds. There are masks staring blankly up at the sky. The grass grows through their eye sockets. They look like so many ghosts. I look up at the house and it looks back at me. I can’t see any faces in the windows. I wonder if I ever really did. When I open the front door, though, it groans like it always has, like it’s welcoming me home.

I go upstairs. The steps are hazardous. They threaten to collapse in upon themselves wherever I put my weight. I hang on to the banister rail for guidance, but even that feels fragile. I’m beginning to realize how dangerous it really was to have the party here. I wonder where Sam and Alice are and I begin to feel afraid.

When I reach the doors to the master bedroom, I stop. I don’t know if the doors will stay shut like they did at the party, but when I turn the handles, they let me in.

There is no mess inside the room. There are the flashlights we set up—dark now that their batteries have all died—and the waxy remains of candles. I’m surprised the whole house didn’t burn down. There is the charred fire pit in the middle of the bedroom, and there are the dusty drapes, and there are our footprints in the dirt on the floor, but that’s it. There are no bottles or candy wrappers or beer cans. There are no masks. There are just the dead candles and the silence.

I start to go back downstairs, but then I hear a little
sound behind me, and instead of turning around, I stay facing the door and take out my phone. I try to breathe noiselessly, but it feels like the ghostly person behind me is taking their breaths exactly when I take mine. I hear them only as an echo. Quickly I spin to face the middle of the room and I raise my phone up in front of my face and snap a picture. Then I leave real fast.

I’m amazed the stairs hold my weight. I’m amazed the porch is still holding itself up. I’m amazed I don’t fall off the iron gates and crack my skull, but then I remember that it’s the first of November and so the accident season should be finished by now. But it still doesn’t feel like it’s over at all.

I go back to the river and I take out my phone, but before I can open up my pictures folder, I get a call. It’s Toby. I don’t answer. I have too many kisses to answer for already.

When the call ends, I go into my pictures folder. I open the photo I took in the master bedroom. When I brought my phone up in front of me, there were only the walls, the candle stubs, and the moldy drapes covering the dirty windows. The light was weak and grayish and speckled with dust motes like snow, although I don’t expect that to come up on the tiny screen. What comes up instead is Elsie. She is standing right in the shot like I was taking the picture of her all along. Her hair is escaping from its braid in flyaway locks and the lines on her forehead are pinched and deep. Her mouth is open like she’s in the middle of a sentence.

Before I even realize it, I’m running back to the house. I run like there’s someone chasing me, and it feels like there is, somehow; someone hard and fast and strangely silent on cold metal legs. My feet slap on the uneven road, and loose gravel rolls right in under my shoes, threatening to trip me up. The iron gates burn my hands and the weeds in the garden rise up to meet me. They tangle around my ankles like vines. Inside, the ghost house feels like it’ll collapse around me. Or maybe I am the one collapsing. I go upstairs.

Elsie is in the master bedroom.

E
lsie is standing beside her typewriter. In front of her, sitting on the wooden box that the secrets go into, is a complicated-looking contraption that I think might be a hunter’s trap. It looks big enough to catch a small animal, anyway. It’s all iron and wire and coils. It almost hums. Without really meaning to, I ask Elsie the question again: “What are you trying to catch?”

Unsurprisingly, Elsie doesn’t answer me. “Do you want to leave a secret?” she says instead. I look at the trap on top of the box. I shake my head.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” she says. “In guardian spirits?”

I think about the secret I typed out a few years ago, when Elsie had just started with the secrets booth. I said that I wished there was such a thing as ghosts, like Bea believes,
because that’d mean my father and Seth are still around somewhere. I also said that I didn’t actually believe it myself. Now I don’t know what to say.

“Sometimes I think I’m going crazy,” Elsie says. “Sometimes I think I am one.” She smiles, but it looks fake. “There’s a secret for the box.” She hunkers down and types the secret out.

“A ghost?” I ask as she is typing.

“A ghost,” she says without looking up. “A guardian spirit. Something like that.”

I want to ask her how she can be unsure about whether or not she is a ghost, but then I think of all the things our brains deny, all the memories they hide from us, all the secrets they keep.

Elsie sits cross-legged on the floor in front of the typewriter. In one fluid movement I join her. We and the trap and the typewriter make a circle like we’re about to pray. I press the palms of my hands into the dust.

“Do you remember when we used to hang out?” I ask Elsie. She smiles. “We’d stay up in the library all break time and read these history books with lots of pictures. The ancient Greeks with their white dresses, Romans in armor, bare-breasted Amazons, Aztec sacrifices.”

“All dead,” says Elsie. “All gone. Like your dad.”

“I guess.” I want to trace the frown lines on her forehead. I can’t quite decide if I am scared of her or if I want
to protect her. I remember what Bea’s cards said about her.
She needs us to help her find her way home
. “What about your family?” I ask. “Where do you even live?”

“My dad is dead,” she says. “Like yours.” She clacks that secret out on the keys. Her sweater is worn. Her hair is frizzing out of its messy braid. She looks so worried.

Without meaning to, I think out loud. “My family, we’ve got a lot of secrets. All of us.”

Elsie writes that down too. The click of the keys is like a heartbeat. I go on: “Bea is sort of always enchanted with the world, but she’s just a lost girl like the rest of us. Her dad is gone, and her mom—she spends all her time hanging around with pretentious theater folk, pretending she’s ten years younger than she is, which usually involves pretending she was never married, or that she doesn’t have a daughter. Bea is alone a lot.” Elsie types as I talk. It feels like candles are flickering around us, but none of them are lit. The walls are all shadow anyway.

“My sister is sad all the time. She was—well, I think she was hurt really badly once, and now she goes out with boys who hurt her and sometimes she hurts herself. She doesn’t need the accident season, I guess. My mother does. She needs it to explain all the bad things that’ve happened to her. To us all. My dad’s death, and Seth—he was my mother’s brother, he was her best friend, like Sam is to me, I guess, only—” I stop for a second. “Only not. Like he used to be, when we
were little.” I want to stop talking, but I can’t. My mouth moves of its own accord and the words keep spilling out. Elsie keeps typing. She slides the bar over after every line like she’s slicing a piece of meat. Shedding skins.

“Things changed really fast.” I’m thinking while I’m talking, but my thoughts are running faster than what I’m saying. “Or maybe I just realized really fast that they’d been changing all along. Sam, he’s—he’s my ex-stepbrother, but you know that. When his father left, he was . . . blank, and angry.”

Elsie’s eyes are huge. She’s pulling in all my words through that typewriter, like she’s eating them for breakfast, like they’re the only words she’s heard in a year.

“Now he’s still got this—this—it’s not sadness, it’s more like, I don’t know . . . Like he’s not really there all the time. Like he’s flickering in and out of sight, like he’s afraid he’s going to disappear. Like his father disappeared.”

The typewriter dings again. I know that what’s going on is strange, like being in a dream, but I can’t quite put a finger on why, so I find myself talking to her as if everything’s normal, as if I do this every day—spill my secrets and the secrets of those around me to a strange girl I used to know; as if I didn’t take a picture of an empty room and have her show up in it.

“You see a lot more than you think you do,” Elsie says.

“You sound like Bea,” I tell her. Then I say: “Bea is my best friend. I want to keep her close, like she’s this treasure
I’ve found, but now I think she’s in love with Alice and that makes me afraid of being alone.”

“What about Sam?” Elsie says as she types. “Don’t you have him?”

I shake my head. “I wish.”

When I hear the words I’ve just said, I put my hands over my mouth. Elsie’s fingers fly over the typewriter keys. I want to tell her to stop; I want to take the last inked letters back, but I can’t speak.

When I tell her the next secret, my voice is a whisper. “I love him. Sam.” I close my eyes and feel his lips on mine. “I’m in love with him.” I touch my lips and whisper again. “But I can never tell him, and I have to keep pretending it isn’t there.”

“You can’t pretend love away,” Elsie says. She says it like someone who knows firsthand. I look up at her. She is hunched over her typewriter like she is every break time at school. Mousy hair, high-collared blouse. Her open cardigan has big red buttons running up the front. A couple of them are missing.

“Do you ever get this feeling . . .” I ask Elsie finally, when the room has grown silent after the tapping of her fingers on the keys. “This feeling that you’ve done everything wrong?” I press my dusty palms to my chest. “Right here. This feeling like your world’s about to blow open.”

Elsie’s shoulders slump. “All the time.”

I look down at the typewriter in front of her; at the animal trap resting on the wooden secrets box. “What are your secrets?” I ask Elsie softly. I don’t expect her to reply. “What are you trying to catch?”

Elsie turns the typewriter to face me. It makes a horrible metallic screech when she pushes it across the floor.

“When I was little,” she says, “before we became friends—before . . . before anything else I can remember, I remember this voice.”

I look down at the typewriter and position my fingers over the keys. When I look back up at Elsie, she starts talking again. “A woman,” she says. “She’d come to me and ask me things. To think of her, to remember her, to ask if I was happy and safe.”

“Just a voice?”

“Write it down,” is all Elsie says to me. I write it down. I write:
I have been hearing a voice since I was a child
.
It asks me if I am happy and safe. I am neither.

“She kept coming to me, every week, thinking about me every day, and then she started thinking about somebody else too—another little girl. And then, later, another. Later still, a boy. She came to me with three children in her heart, and from the beginning she’d ask me to watch over them. To watch over you.”

I stop typing. “Me?”

“Keep writing,” Elsie whispers. “She came to me every
week, asking me to watch over you. She was too afraid. She still is, I think. So I knew that was my job. To watch over you. I look out for you. But once a year, I go away. I go searching.”

“What?” I’m beginning to change my mind. I don’t think Elsie is a ghost, not really; but ghost or not, I do think she’s probably crazy. My hands rest lightly on the typewriter keys. “Elsie, what does this have to do with me?”

Elsie points at the typewriter, urging me to keep writing. She says it like it’s obvious: “I’ve been watching over you all.” When I look up from the little metal keys, I see that there are tears in Elsie’s eyes. She says: “I guess I’m not doing a very good job.”

“But why would . . . ?” Now that I can ask all my questions, I don’t know what to say.

“For one month of every year I get to go away, go searching,” she says. “I don’t abandon you,” she adds quickly. “I still try to look out for you; I’m always there in the background. I just . . . I just go away for a little while too.”

When I think about it, I realize that maybe there has always been a time when Elsie’s not around so much—around the accident season maybe—but then, I’m questioning my memory at the moment. I don’t trust anything I think I remember.

“I didn’t ask for this,” Elsie says, and her words echo what I said to Bea earlier. Her voice is strange. “I’m tired,” she
says. “And I . . . I feel like I’ve failed. You and Sam, Alice . . . I don’t want to fail her again. But I feel like I’ve failed you all.”

I type out that secret.
I feel like I’ve failed you all
. I don’t know if it is Elsie’s secret or mine.

And I feel like I’ve failed Elsie—by not remembering her, by not finding her before now. I look at the worry lines on her forehead that have become so familiar. She looks so worried, always so worried, so I ask her, “If you’ve been watching over us, who is looking out for you?”

Elsie looks surprised; then she smiles. “Maybe I don’t need someone to look out for me,” she says. “Maybe I just need to be remembered.”

Maybe I just need to be remembered,
I type. When the words hit the edge of the paper and the typewriter spits the sheet out with a chime, I go to put the page of secrets into the wooden box, but the trap is in my way.

I ask Elsie the question again. “But what are you looking for?” I think about the dream catchers and the mousetrap, the flypapers, the butterfly net. I stare down at the terrifying trap in front of me. I say, “What are you trying to catch?”

Elsie sort of shrugs and gestures toward the window. “My mother always said I would catch my death out there.”

She moves the trap off the top of the wooden box. It is heavy, but she’s stronger than she looks. “I want you to take it over,” she says.

“Take what over?”

“The secrets booth.” Elsie pushes the box toward me. “If you want it.”

I frown and push the box and the typewriter back toward Elsie. There’s a shaking in my limbs. “It’s yours,” I say to her. “When we go back to school after the midterm break you’ll be there, in the library, and people’ll type up their secrets and you’ll put them up on the clotheslines in the halls at the end of term and it’ll be the same as every year. I don’t know how to do that.”

Elsie shakes her head. She says my name gently, like a reminder. Like she knows that I knew when she’d disappeared. Like she knows that I know that everything’s changed. “I’m not going back to school,” Elsie tells me. She smiles, and for once it reaches her eyes. “I’m going to catch my death if it kills me.”

My laugh surprises me. “I didn’t realize you were funny.” Elsie laughs with me. The sound of it bounces around the room. When the laughter has echoed all around us, I whisper, “Are you really a ghost?”

“I don’t know,” Elsie says. “It’s hard to tell.”

“Is it? You’d think it’d be pretty obvious.”

“Surprisingly, it isn’t.” Elsie pushes herself off the floor and picks up her horrible trap. It is huge in her arms and looks heavy. “Maybe I’m just this crazy little lost girl. Maybe I saw you and your lovely family and was bored with my own only-child life and so I followed you around like a puppy who wished you’d adopt her.”

“But we never saw you.” Elsie’s walking away, but I can’t seem to stand up. The floorboards creak underneath me like they’re trying to keep me here. “You were in all my pictures, but I never saw you.”

“There’s a lot you pretend you didn’t see.”

When Elsie leaves, it is as if she’s never been. The dust where she was sitting is undisturbed, and when I try to find the photo of her in my phone, it has disappeared like it was never taken. Maybe I’ve been talking to myself all along.