The Accident Season (4 page)

“And Melanie,” says Sam.

My mother’s father died one accident season when I was
six. I don’t remember much about him—only that the year he died was the first year I became properly aware of the accident season. I’d never seen my mother cry before that day.

“And Mom,” I agree. I push the photo album away. “Let’s not think about this anymore.”

Sam hesitates for a moment, but then he agrees with me and we lie on our backs and listen to the record whirring beneath the music. He points up at one of the clouds on the ceiling above my bed. My father painted them for me when I was six years old so that I could see shapes in the clouds even when I couldn’t see the sky. My room has been repainted several times since then, but the ceiling stays the same.

“Skull and crossbones,” Sam says.

I shake my head. “Magic wand shooting sparks.”

Sam points at another. “Murky pond at sunset.”

I laugh out loud. He’s pointing to the cloud my father specifically painted to look like a bunny rabbit. “You’re right,” I say. “It’s definitely a murky pond at sunset.”

When I look over at him, his brow is furrowed. I think of Elsie’s worried face.

“Strange little elf-girl,” he says to me.

“No. Warrior queen.”

He laughs at that a little. “Strange little warrior elf-queen,” he amends.

“Pirate with a heart of gold.” I stare straight into his eyes.

“No,” he says. “Lost boy.” He sounds like a ghost. A shiver runs up and down my arms. I bring them close to my body and look away from Sam. His eyes are riverbanks. They’d pull you in if you aren’t careful.

“Gold-hearted lost pirate boy, then,” I say like I’m still joking.

“Ahoy, matey,” Sam says halfheartedly.

We look up at the ceiling clouds and listen to the music for a bit. Alice is on the phone in her bedroom. Her voice murmurs through the wall between us.

I look over at Sam. He’s lying with one arm over his head, staring at the ceiling. He has the lightest dusting of freckles across the bridge of his nose and a hint of stubble on his jaw. There is a small silence as the record changes song. On the other side of the wall, Alice’s voice gets louder.

I look at the photograph again. I think of Seth taking it, telling us to stop messing around because his laughter was making the camera shake. My heart feels heavy. Seth died almost exactly a year after this picture was taken. The same year Christopher left.
It’s going to be a bad one,
Bea said, but I can’t imagine a worse one than that.

At that moment Alice yells and something crashes into the wall in her room behind me. The impact shakes loose the bookshelf above my bed on my side of the wall. The books clatter down on top of me—their spines stinging—and then the shelf itself follows, hitting me square on the
shoulder. The pain explodes like fireworks. Sam swears. I groan. He starts pulling the books and the shelf off me and I wince at the pain blossoming all down the left side of my body.

“Alice, what happened?” I yell from under the pile of books. My mother runs up the stairs. She and Alice appear in the doorway at the same time. I shove the collected works of Arthur Conan Doyle off my arm and move my shoulder carefully around in its socket.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Alice is saying. “My phone just flew out of my hand.”

“I’m fine,” I say quickly, but the damage is done.

My mother’s eyes are too bright. She mutters about getting me something for the bruising and shuffles downstairs. Sam puts the last of the books down on the floor.

I try to grin. “Who knew reading was such a dangerous hobby?” I say. “I’ve never regretted my collection of fancy hardbacks before. It’s paperbacks all the way from here on in.”

Sam isn’t listening. He gives Alice a funny look. “Is your phone really heavy enough to knock a shelf off the wall?” he asks her.

“What?”

“I’m just saying,” Sam says. “Maybe you shouldn’t be throwing shit around during the accident season.”

Alice’s eyes narrow. “Oh, for God’s sake, Sam,” she says. “Would you give the accident thing a rest? I wasn’t throwing
shit around, I was on the phone to Nick and it slipped out of my hand.”

Sam doesn’t look convinced. He says, “Yeah, but—”

Alice sighs and cuts him off. “Whatever,” she says. “I’m going to bed. I’ll try not to cause any ‘accidents’ from there.”

***

Alice wasn’t the first to jump, but she was the first to fall. It started with dares. Dare you to roll down the hill. Dare you to touch a nettle. Dare you to jump across the stream.

Mom and Dad and Uncle Seth, who was Mom’s brother, and Nana Morris, who was Mom’s mom, were talking to their neighbor from two doors down in front of Nana and Granddad Morris’s house. Granddad Morris was on his way home from work. The dogs were on leads because Mom wouldn’t let Alice and Cara near them otherwise. But not always. Only in October. Alice wondered if maybe Mom was a little bit afraid of Halloween. Or of dogs. Or both. Alice would have liked to have a dog.

Because Mom was busy talking to the neighbor, Alice and Cara and Darren ran ahead. Darren was the son of Nana and Granddad Morris’s next-door neighbors and he thought he was the boss and also the strongest because he was a boy and he was eight and a half and Alice was seven and a girl. Cara was six and didn’t care who was the boss. She just wanted to pick flowers.

Alice told Darren she only couldn’t run as fast as him
because she had skinned her knees falling in the school yard last Friday, but then Darren pulled up the legs of his trousers to show the scabs on his knees. They were even bigger than hers.

Uncle Seth laughed at that, and said to Mom, “See, Melanie? All kids have skinned knees,” but Mom just made her mouth small, which she only did when she knew you were telling fibs. Alice didn’t think Uncle Seth was telling fibs.

Uncle Seth picked Mom up by the waist and swung her around until she laughed, but it was a nervous laugh. Mom didn’t like being swung around. Not when it was nearly Halloween. The neighbor made a face. Alice thought it was maybe because the neighbor thought grown-ups shouldn’t swing other grown-ups around, or maybe it was because Uncle Seth had tattoos on his arms and Mom’s hair was bright pink.

Uncle Seth had blond hair like Alice’s. Dad had brown hair like Cara’s. Nobody but Mom had hair that was pink.

Nana and Granddad Morris lived right next door to a park that had a big hill with a patch of nettles at the bottom and a stream that you could walk across and only get your knee socks wet. Alice had white knee socks with holes in the shapes of little flowers all the way up. Cara’s knee socks were blue and they were always around her ankles.

Darren shouted the dares: “Dare you to roll down the hill and jump across the stream.”

Darren rolled down the hill first, then one of his sisters, then one of the other boys on the estate.

When it was Alice’s turn, she could hear Mom shouting, “Alice, no!” and Dad saying, “It’s okay, Melanie, it’s just a bit of grass,” and Nana Morris saying, “Oh, is that the telephone? Be right back, Imelda.”

Darren’s sister was the first to jump across the stream. Quickly, before Darren could show her how much braver he was, Alice ran and jumped across before him.

When she landed, her feet fell on a big clump of grass and one of her ankles twisted, and suddenly she lost her balance and fell straight into the stream. Cara ran over to help her, but she fell too, right into the patch of nettles. Cara burst into tears.

For the first time ever, nobody came. The grown-ups had all gone inside. Alice got out of the water and went over to Cara. Crying and itching and scratched and wet, they limped back to Nana and Granddad Morris’s house together.

Everyone was sitting on the couches. Nana was holding the phone and Uncle Seth was reaching out to her and Mom had her face in her hands and Dad had his arms around her.

“What’s so funny?” Cara asked. But Alice knew that Mom wasn’t laughing. Her hands were shaking and she looked like a broken bird. Uncle Seth’s broad shoulders were shaking and he looked like a big blond bear. Dad glanced up and he shook his head.

It was Dad, not Mom, who patched Alice and Cara up and dried them off. It was Dad who told them that Granddad Morris had gone to heaven instead of coming home for tea. And
it was Dad, not Mom, who put an extra sweater on each of them and told them to sit in the front room and watch the TV like good girls and not play outside because it wasn’t safe.

Cara and Alice looked at each other. Cara’s legs were itchy and red, her socks around her ankles. Alice’s socks were grass-stained and wet. Granddad Morris had gone to heaven and it wasn’t safe to play outside.

M
y mother spends the rest of the night pulling down every shelf in the house, and none of us get much sleep. At three in the morning, when the whirring of the electric screwdriver is setting everyone’s teeth on edge, Alice comes into my room.

“Are you sleeping?” she asks.

“No. Who could, with that racket?”

“I’ve asked her to stop, but she’s got that look about her—you know the one.”

I nod. I know the one.

“I’m worried about her, Cara.” Alice perches on the side of my bed. I move my legs to make room for her. When she lies down, her hair tickles my bare arms. “I’m worried about all of us.” Alice has the same sad smile as my mother’s. It pulls down at the edges. I want to tell her I’m worried about all of us too, but for some reason I feel like I should be the one
comforting her. She so rarely talks about things like this. Of course, that just makes me even more worried.

“I’m sorry about the bookshelf,” she says after a pause.

“I’m fine, really.” The drilling from downstairs is buzzing in my brain. “It’s the accident season. I always expect a few bruises.” I wonder if Alice will get annoyed at me for mentioning the accidents like she did with Sam. I also kind of wonder why the thought of them makes her so angry, but I’m afraid to ask. It’s strange enough that she’s talking about them to me now, however indirectly.

Alice opens her mouth to speak but then shuts it again. She shakes her head. “Still,” she says finally, “I’m sorry.” She sighs and rests her head on the pillow.

I give Alice an awkward sideways-lying-down hug. Then I reach over to my bedside table and pick up my phone. Quickly, so I don’t have time to persuade myself not to, I show Alice my pictures.

Still lying down, she swipes through a few of them. “Nice,” she says. She tucks her hair behind her ears and looks through more. She gives a little laugh. “I remember this one. And this—wow, you and Sam look so young. When was this taken? And more importantly, what’s with my outfit? Are those
Crocs
? Ugh. What was I thinking?”

I frown. “Alice,” I say. “Look closer. Look who’s in all of them.”

“Who?” Alice tilts the phone and looks closer.

“Elsie.”

“Elsie?”

“
Elsie
.” I put more emphasis on the word. It isn’t exactly a common name. “Elsie . . .” I rack my brains for her last name. “Elsie . . . Murphy? Maguire? It’ll come back to me. We were friends for a while, after Dad died.”

Again, I feel a quick rush of shame at how much I’ve forgotten about her. Her last name is on the tip of my tongue. “Elsie,” I say again to Alice. “That Elsie.” I point to the picture on the phone. It was taken on a school tour of Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin two years ago. Sam and I are posing in the center of the frame and Elsie (identifiable by the sleeve of her sweater) is reading a plaque by the door of the cell.

“Where?” says Alice, shaking her head. “I just see you and Sam.”

I point at Elsie’s elbow. “There. And she’s in all of them.” I scroll through the pictures, pointing out the Elsie in every one. After a few minutes of silence, Alice takes the phone from me, scrolls back, and points to the one in Kilmainham again.

“How do you know that’s Elsie?” she asks.

“That’s her elbow.”

“How do you know it’s her elbow?”

“Look.” I point. “It’s clearly her sweater.”

Alice gives me an exasperated look. “Cara, that could be anybody’s sweater.”

“How many people over the age of five do you know who wear big ugly hand-knitted sweaters?” It does look hand-knitted, probably with more love than skill. It’s a bland off-white color, and bobbly.

“Okay,” I say, swiping to another picture. “What about this one?” It’s a picture of a house party we went to this summer after having begged Alice to persuade her friends to invite us. Alice peers at the photo. “That is
definitely
Elsie’s hair,” I say.

Alice shakes her head. “It’s frizzy brown hair. Every second girl in this country has frizzy brown hair.
You
have frizzy brown hair.”

“Not like this—not this length and in this braid and this . . . mousy. My hair’s not mousy.”

“Okay,” Alice says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult your hair. You have very un-mousy hair.”

“This isn’t about my hair!” I exclaim. “It’s about Elsie being in all my pictures. It’s about her following me—or—or—or weird coincidences—or me going a little crazy, which apparently is the option you’re choosing to go with right now.”

Alice smiles fondly at me. “I don’t think you’re crazy, Cara. I think you’ve always had a big imagination, and there’s nothing wrong with that.” I roll my eyes. Her tone is slightly patronizing for my liking. “And,” she continues with a little laugh, “I think you hang around with Bea Kivlan a bit too much. But there’s nothing wrong with that either.”

“You’re not—”

“I think,” Alice goes on as if I haven’t spoken, “that there’s a rational explanation for everything. Elsie goes to the same school as us, and lives in the same town, which, you may have noticed, isn’t exactly a bustling metropolis. It stands to reason she’d be in a bunch of your photos.”

“
All
my photos,” I correct her.

“She is immediately recognizable in
some
of your photos.”

I flop my head back on the bed, just about ready to give up on the argument.

“But if you really think she might be following you,” Alice goes on, “why don’t you just ask her?”

I huff my breath out to the clouds on the ceiling. “Because she wasn’t in school today.”

Alice pulls herself up off my bed, wincing at the pain from her bruises. They almost match up with where I can feel mine blooming, except the one on her face. She has taken off her makeup for bed and the bruise looks like the night sky, only angrier. “So just ask her about it tomorrow.” She gives a little laugh and goes back into her bedroom, as if everything in her world is as simple as that.

***

When I sleep that night, I dream about the kids I thought I saw inside the train. The girl dressed like a forest, the tall, scaly-skinned mermaid girl, the flickering ghost boy, and the
tiny Converse-wearing fairy girl. But in my dream those aren’t costumes, that’s their skin. They are taking the train to a party in a strange old house where all the changelings go on Halloween. The littlest girl, the one with the wings, holds out the invitation. It asks guests to come as themselves, to discard their everyday disguises. So the fairy girl lets out her wings, the tree girl removes her human mask and becomes brittle as old bark, covered in leaves. The mermaid girl uncovers her gills and lets her scales catch the light, and the boy in the black-and-white suit begins to flicker like a silent-film reel.

The old house they’re going to is full of people who aren’t really people. There are animals with human eyes who stand on two legs, there are lizard-things as big as horses, there are flickering ghosts and tiny pixies and tall, willowy fairies and tufty-haired goblins. There are giants crouching through doorways and there are strange fish creatures come in from the sea. Rooms and rooms filled with creatures who have taken off their costumes and look inhuman but also somehow seem so much more human than any of us ever will.

***

Sam and I have made plans to go shopping in Galway the next morning. I want to ask Alice if she’ll come too because I kind of like that she hung out with us yesterday, but she has already left for Nick’s house when I get up. Bea, who would usually join us, is spending the weekend with her
grandparents in Ballina. Sam and I take the bus into the city alone.

The city center is crowded and noisy, but these aren’t three-a.m. drilling noises or falling-down-the-stairs noises or the horrible gasp-scream sounds Alice sometimes lets out in her sleep that make me feel like I’ve been plunged in a bathtub full of ice water. These are whole-world noises. There are people talking and children crying and dogs barking and feet clattering on cobblestones and street performers singing and market stallholders haggling, and everything’s so alive it hurts, almost.

After the whispers and stares at school and the padded corners of the house, this place is a different world. Its brightness and noise make a lump rise in my throat. There are sharp edges everywhere here, and so many people; there is traffic and there are strangers, there are animals and there is uneven ground, but walking down from the bus station with Sam by my side and the whole world real around me, I feel safer than I have in weeks.

On the pedestrian cobblestone streets, people are eating under parasols outside bars as if it is still summer, preferably in a Mediterranean country. It is certainly strangely warm for October, but the tourists are all wearing their coats. The bright-colored buildings are brighter than ever in the startling light that only happens in a summery autumn when the trees are on fire and the air is too clear and the warmth makes mirrors of every smooth surface.

Sam and I spend the better part of an hour in Charlie Byrne’s bookshop, where I find a used copy of
The Secret Garden
and a volume of Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Sam flicks through the secondhand graphic novel section, but all the good titles have already been bought. Instead, he buys a heavily underlined copy of
On the Road
and a book about Hitchcock films that is missing its cover.

Afterward, bags of books in hand, we wind around crowds of tourists outside souvenir shops and get ice cream at the tiny little shop on the corner. My mother texts us both every half an hour to make sure we’re okay. If we don’t answer immediately, she calls. During the accident season, we know to answer immediately.

After answering my mother’s fifth text, Sam tells me that last night he dreamed about an old farmhouse in the middle of the country and how he knew it was empty but he kept seeing all these faces in the windows. I tell him about the kids I thought I saw in our reflection in the train window, and about my dream of the changeling siblings.

“Ghost trains and changelings,” he tells me. “Spooky dreams. It’s coming up to Halloween.”

We get separated by a large family all walking together down the middle of the road and come together again on the other side. The laces of Sam’s boots are a million years too long and he has wound them around his ankles for safekeeping, but they are coming loose and trail on the
ground as he walks. I keep worrying he’ll trip and fall.

“I didn’t realize,” I say, counting the days. “It’s in six days.” Then, remembering my dream, and what Bea said yesterday about us getting our priorities straight, I suddenly have an idea. It lands fully formed in the palm of my hand.

“We should have a party,” I say to Sam.

“A Halloween party?”

“Yeah.”

“What,” Sam says, “you, me, and Bea?”

“No.” I narrow my eyes at him. “A
real
party. Like the ones we went to with Alice this summer. Like the ones Toby Healy and that crowd are always talking about. We should have a party like that.”

Sam bites off the bottom of his cone and sucks the ice cream through it. “No one would come if we threw a party,” he says. “It’d end up just being you, me, and Bea.”

“Not necessarily.” I think of Alice smoking with us behind the soccer field. “It’s like Bea said. People need a distraction from study and mock exams and college applications. I know a couple of people in our year who’d go. And if we can get Alice to invite her friends, who’d then invite
their
friends, we could get a really good crowd.”

We cross the bridge at Spanish Arch and make our way down to the pier. Sam squints at me, the sun reflected on the water blinding us both. “Not that I’m against the idea,” he says, “but wouldn’t most people already have
parties to go to? Like you said, Halloween’s six days away.”

But the idea is growing in my head like a balloon. “Not if ours was better,” I say, and I can hear the excitement building in my voice. “Not if we make it a story.”

“A story?”

“Like in my dream,” I explain. “Where everybody takes off their human masks and comes as who they really are. So, it’s a costume party, but you have to come as what you feel like on the inside. All our demons, right there in the open.” I point my melting ice-cream cone at him. “Now, doesn’t
that
sound better than any old house party?”

Sam smiles, but I can tell he’s not convinced. “It does, yeah, but—”

“And we can make fancy invitations, like for a ball. We can explain that people are invited to take off their human disguises and come as their true selves behind the human mask.” I stop and grab Sam’s arm. “A masquerade! We swap our human masks for masks that represent our true selves! Who’d go to some stupid Halloween party when they could come to the changelings’ masquerade?”

Sam laughs and covers my hand with one of his. “Well,
I’d
definitely go to a party like that.”

“Right?” I practically bounce on the spot, close enough to step on Sam’s toes. “And we could do it, we
could
. If Alice can persuade her friends—”

“If we can persuade Alice . . .”

I shrug and we walk on. “I think she might like the idea.” I picture Alice’s bruised face at lunchtime yesterday. Alice avoiding her friends. I pause for a second to get my thoughts in order. “I think she’d be happy to have people talking about something other than our accidents for once,” I say softly.

Sam has heard me; he nods thoughtfully. Then a glint comes into his eyes. “And,” he says as we finish our ice creams and wipe our sticky hands with paper napkins, “maybe Nick would let us have it at his place.”

“Yes!” I squeal. “Sam, you’re a genius.”

Nick and his four band mates rent a house in a development at the edge of town. Most of the houses in the development were never bought or lived in, so he has very few neighbors to object to them holding band practice until four in the morning or throwing wild parties on weekdays. And Halloween falls on a Friday this year. My mother would never have to know.

“I know, I know,” Sam says modestly. “What can I say? I’m brilliant.”

He links arms with me and we cross the road to avoid a gaggle of angry-looking swans. The sails of the ships in the mouth of the river clink softly in the breeze. When we reach the end of the pier, there are children drawing hopscotch squares on the ground in colored chalk. In the sky the seagulls swirl, and on every bench there seems to be a couple
kissing. We walk out to the edge of the water and sit on the stone wall facing the wide Atlantic and Sam whistles one of Bea’s sea shanties—a particularly rude drinking song—and I laugh and call him a drunken sailor.