The Ghost in the Glass House (14 page)

“What do you think?” Tilda demanded as the smile faded back into her face's familiar lines. “Does it measure up to the Dutch?”

“Even better,” Clare said, despite the fact that the Dutch pastries, as far as she knew, had never existed.

Tilda wet her finger, selected an anise seed from a small bowl beside the cookie sheet, and gave her creation sight. She spun the sheet on the counter to apply the opposite eye. Then she picked up the pastry bag again and provided her original swan with a perfect mate.

Clare had just come down from the boy's room, where she'd been on a hunt for any clue to Jack's real name. She'd prowled through the empty closet, pushed aside the tin soldiers in his desk, checked the speller and notebooks for a signature, but found nothing more than a half-finished translation of a Greek naval campaign.

Even as she'd searched, she'd half known it was useless. She liked to make up stories based on the evidence earlier guests sometimes left in hotel rooms: a sequin, a cigarette burn, a phone number scrawled through the price of drinks on a menu. But they were only ever enough to dream, not to understand someone, or find them. Only somebody who had known them could tell you that.

“How did you learn to do that?” Clare asked Tilda now.

After her first pair of swans, Tilda had become sure-handed as she filled the wax paper with a small flock of frothy birds. Still, she was so occupied that she might not be on guard. And this question, Clare hoped, was vague enough not to raise an alarm but still draw Tilda back into the past.

“The same way I learned everything else,” Tilda said. She finished one bird's wing and began to form the belly of another.

“Your mother?” Clare guessed, hoping to snare her in sentimental recollection.

Tilda gave a shard of something like laughter. “My mother had three before me and seven after,” she said. “She taught me to stay out of the way.”

“So you taught yourself?” Clare tried: an attempt at flattery.

Tilda wouldn't be taken in by this, either. She gave her head a firm shake. “The young missus,” she said. But her eyes softened.

Every other time Clare had tried to probe a flash of feeling from Tilda, Tilda had clammed up. So this time Clare stayed silent, like a hunter waiting for an animal to forget the sound of his footstep in the woods.

Her ploy worked. A moment later, Tilda went on without a prompt. “She got tired of bread pudding,” she said. “I'd only been here a week. Bread pudding was all I knew to make.”

“She taught you,” Clare said, her voice low, so as not to break the spell.

When Tilda shook her head this time, the gesture was almost girlish. The trace of youth playing over her worn frame was spooky. It had never occurred to Clare before that Tilda must have been young once, too. Clare's heart twisted at the thought, but she wasn't sure if it was because Tilda had once been young like her, or because one day she would be old like Tilda.

“She said I should surprise her,” Tilda said. “And order anything I wanted from the farmers or from town. I thought I was a rich girl.”

“What did you make?” Clare asked.

“A lemon cake as heavy as a brick,” Tilda said. “Angel food cake without any sugar in it. Mack put butter on that and ate it for bread. He ate it all, everything we couldn't send to the big table.”

Tilda's manner was so free as she said this that Clare decided to risk a direct question.

“What about the boy who lived here?” she asked. “What did he like?”

All traces of youth vanished from Tilda's face. She gave Clare a hard look.

“We don't speak of the dead,” she said.

It was clear from her tone that she considered this the end of the conversation. But Clare quickly saw the advantage she'd just gained. Tilda hadn't just admitted that a boy had lived in the house. She'd also admitted that he was dead.

“Dead?” Clare said. “Did something happen to him?”

“That hardly matters,” Tilda said. “You're dead just the same.”

Clare swallowed, trying to calculate how she could have lost the upper hand so quickly, and what she could do to win it back.

“My father died three years ago,” she blurted.

This fact, she knew, virtually guaranteed unconditional surrender. Her mother's friends murmured it to one another and bowls of strawberries appeared at her place or carousel gates swung open even though the ride had closed. But she had never used her father's death to her advantage until now. The price was too high. His loss drained the pleasure from the berries and carousels and tangled them in weird shadows. She had never wanted those shadows to infect anything else. So when the words escaped her lips she froze, startled.

Tilda didn't blink. “My father died before I could talk,” she said. “I used to play with some buttons of his, but then my brothers took them.”

Clare didn't know if she had been neatly outplayed or if Tilda had just told her a genuine confidence. She stared into Tilda's eyes as if they were windows to a room whose door Clare couldn't find.

Tilda swept up the baking sheet, turned her back to Clare, and shut the birds inside the oven.

“J
ACK
?” C
LARE SAID
.

She pulled the door of the glass house shut behind her, her skin tingling.

In the day since Jack first touched her hand, she had discovered that her memories of him worked very differently than her memories of her father. The things she remembered about her father grew weaker and more strange each time she called them up, like paper melting in the rain.But each time she remembered Jack's touch, all the same warmth she'd felt at first flooded back. In fact, it seemed to grow stronger each time she thought of it. And it didn't just grow stronger. It created false memories or dreams. Jack had never touched her face, but when she thought of his hand on hers the memory bent, and suddenly the featherweight of his finger brushed her cheek, followed the line of her lip, dropped to the weird bones that met below her chin. And these new dreams didn't wait for her to call them up. They broke into all her other thoughts. She couldn't escape them, but they also kept her company everywhere she went.

Now that she stood in the glass house again, though, she realized with an uncomfortable shock that Jack wasn't just a memory she carried with her. He was a whole boy, with ideas of his own, whose form she couldn't even see to reach for.

A hand touched her arm. Another one brushed her cheek.

“Tag,” Jack said. “You're it.”

Clare had never liked tag, even when the other players weren't invisible. So she employed the same strategy that she did when other children tried to tag her into their games. She walked over to the sea-foam divan, and sat down.

A moment later, Jack settled beside her.

As his fingers threaded through hers, she said, “You're it.”

Immediately, Jack's fingers began to twist in hers. She tried to hold on but he slipped free, not the way she had pulled her hand from Bram's, but the way water sank into sand.

Before she could even miss him, though, his arm slid over her shoulders.

“Now
you're
it,” Jack said.

“No,” Clare said, her hand on his invisible knee. “I've got you.”

He tapped her arm. “Got you back.”

“But I still had you,” Clare argued, and squeezed his knee to remind him.

Jack's other hand covered hers on his knee. “You're it,” he insisted.

Now they were thoroughly tangled together. “We're both it,” Clare said. “We both win.”

“That's not how you win,” Jack said.

Wrapped up with him, Clare felt Jack's weightlessness infect her again. This time it didn't come with vertigo, but hope. With his hand on hers, everything felt possible. Why shouldn't she also walk through walls?

“I went up to your room the other day,” she murmured. “But I couldn't find anything that told your name.”

His touch was so light it was hard to tell, but she thought she felt him shift away. She waited for him to settle back.

“What's wrong?” she asked, when he didn't.

In answer, he pulled completely free of her.

Stung, Clare sat up.

“Don't you care who you are? I thought you'd want to know,” she said.

A twinge told her this was only half true. She'd wanted to know. She hadn't thought whether he would or not, until now.

“Why do you care so much?” Jack burst out.

Clare stared into the empty space where he had been.

Jack's voice softened. “I can be any boy you like,” he said. His invisible hand found hers again. “I can be a prince if you want a prince. And if you want to go to sea, the next day I can be a sailor.”

Clare's mind toyed with this lamp of endless wishes. But she already knew him: his pranks, his itch to explore, his bragging and gifts. Even without a face, he was too vivid to erase and remake each day.

“But you
are
somebody,” she said.

Jack's voice was quieter than she had ever heard it.

“What if you don't like him?” he asked.

Clare lifted a hand to his face. Her fingers brushed the skin under his invisible eyes, then spread until her thumb found his mouth. Jack let out a sigh like the last sound a child makes before he's finished crying.

With only her hands as a guide, Clare pressed her lips to his.

She felt him press back, not warm and firm like her mother's kisses, but the way water caressed her skin when she floated in the ocean, holding her up although she could never hold it. This lack only seemed to make the new heat under her skin flare hotter, asking for something she didn't have the words to name. It was stronger than anything she had felt before, except pain.

Confused, she turned her face away against his shirt. His light touch smoothed her hair.

“I never kissed anyone before,” he told her.

“How do you know?” she said.

Jack laughed. But when he answered, his voice was serious. “I know it like I still know all the places I want to go,” he said.

“I never did either,” Clare told him. The heat inside her mellowed to warmth, but as it left it seemed to take some part of her with it. She glanced up the hill at the windows Jack said were Tilda's.

Jack kissed her temple. His arm circled her shoulders.

As it did, the unseen mist that ringed the glass house seemed to flicker up around them in Clare's mind, like a single stray frame cut into the reel of a movie. At the thought of it, her greed to see her father stirred.

“What's it like,” she asked, “when you go in the mist?”

Jack drew a lazy eight on the bare skin of her shoulder, then brushed it away.

“You can't see anything,” he said. “It's like you're walking at night, but the night has turned white.”

“How far have you gone?”

“I don't know,” Jack said. “It's hard to tell.”

“I could get some string,” Clare suggested. “Thin string, so it would be easy to carry. We could tie it to a tree and you could take it with you.”

“I don't like to go into the mist,” Jack said. He sounded like a child, confessing a fear.

But Clare's imagination, which had furnished the yard with unseen mist, now began to furnish the mist with wonders. And hope made her pitiless. “Don't you want to explore it?” she asked.

“It's nothing but mist,” Jack insisted.

“You can't be sure of that,” Clare said. “You've never gone far enough.”

“What do you know about it?” Jack retorted. “What do you think I'd find?”

“Well,” Clare said. “You're not the only person who ever died.”

Jack's arm vanished from her shoulders so quickly that she wondered for an instant if her words had cast an inadvertent spell that threw him back into the other world.

“Jack?” she asked.

He must have gotten up in agitation, because now he spoke from above her. But his voice was low, as if for fear of being overheard. “There's someone in there,” he half whispered.

Clare's heart lurched with hope.

“Who?” she demanded.

“I don't know.”

“What do they say?” Clare asked.

“Nothing,” Jack said. Each of his answers was more reluctant.

“Do they touch you?” she asked, with a thrill of horror.

“No,” Jack said. Frustration crept into his tone.

“Then how do you know they're there?”

Jack dropped his voice even lower. “The way you know someone's in a room,” he said. “Even when they don't say anything.”

Involuntarily, Clare dropped her voice as well. “Do you think they might hurt you?” she asked.

“No,” Jack said immediately.

Clare spread her hands in exasperation. “Then what are you afraid of?” she asked.

“It's hard to come back,” Jack told her. “When you go too far in.”

“You get lost?” Clare asked.

“No,” Jack said. “The mist sort of—pulls you in. The farther you go, the stronger it gets.”

“Then where do you meet this person?” Clare asked, circling back to the clues that might lead to her own father.

“He's always there,” Jack said. Then his voice leapt. “Who's that?”

Clare had the sickening sense that another spirit had just joined them in the room. She gave a violent shudder.

But when her head jerked around, she saw her mother walking across the lawn, straight toward the glass house.

Clare crouched in the shadow of one of the wing chairs.

“My mother,” she whispered.

There was no time to say more. While her mother's view was still obscured by the trunks of the maples, Clare scrambled out of the glass house. She circled the back, screened by the thick vines, and came around the front just as her mother reached the glade.

“Clare!” her mother crowed. “Tilda thought you might be around here somewhere.”