The Ghost in the Glass House (8 page)

Speaking the truth made Clare feel strangely light. But it also made her dizzy, as if she'd forgotten how to keep her balance without the extra weight. In any case, having spoken it at last, she refused to retreat. She raised her chin and settled back into the wing chair.

“Well, where is it?” Jack asked, as if the answer might provide some clue to her stubbornness.

“New York.”

“Do you live in a mansion?”

Clare shook her head. “It's just a city house,” she said. “On a little park.”

“Have you heard of the Taj Mahal?” Jack demanded.

Clare nodded.

“What about the Arctic Circle?”

She nodded again.

“Don't you want to see them?” he asked.

“That's not what you said,” Clare said. “You asked me where did I want to go.” She had begun to feel slightly embarrassed by the paucity of her own dreams. But at the same time, all the coasts and gangplanks she'd seen, the fountains and plazas, the circuses and cathedrals, had begun to glow with a strange new light, not because her own feelings for them had changed but because of how they might seem to Jack. It was something like the way she felt when she first saw how women eyed her mother's jewels at parties, and realized that what Clare had thought of as playthings were actually treasures to be envied.

Something struck the roof overhead. Clare glanced up. A few more raindrops rattled on the glass, then settled into a steady patter. If Clare waited for the rain to gather strength, she'd be soaked when she got to the house—which would lead to all kinds of uncomfortable questions about where she'd been.

“I have to go,” she said. She crossed the room, which seemed half alive itself now with the blurred shadows of the water coursing over the glass.

Then she stepped out into the cloudburst, and ran.

A
S
C
LARE HAD HOPED
, Bridget's mother answered the door.

She had never bobbed her dark hair like some of the younger women in their set, and today it was swept back off her face in the style of an earlier decade. On her, the old style was still effective. It framed her dark eyes and set off her pale skin. Her day dress, as usual, was white, Battenberg lace over batiste. When she smiled in welcome, she focused on something just beyond Clare, as if she might be greeting a spirit who had followed her in.

“If I didn't know better,” Clare's mother had observed once, “I'd say she was a laudanum eater. It's too bad she's not. At least then she could stop taking it.”

“Clare,” Bridget's mother said, and bent to give her an automatic kiss on the cheek. “Are you here to see Bridget?”

Clare nodded. “But I wanted to ask you something,” she said. “About the other side.”

For the first time, Bridget's mother met her eyes. “Anything in particular?” she asked.

Clare shrugged and held her tongue. Children, she had learned, enjoyed some of the same advantages that women did: people were prone to believe that their minds operated in some mysterious range outside the bounds of ordinary logic. Perhaps from worry that the strange logic would infect their own minds, or perhaps simply because women and children were both susceptible to tears, most people were loath to press a child for explanations, especially when a child didn't seem inclined to give one and remained quiet and polite in every other respect.

“Well,” Bridget's mother said after a minute. “I was just making some lemonade. Would you like to help me with it?”

The kitchen, Clare discovered when she followed Bridget's mother, hung out over the water just like the sun porch did. Sun streamed through a wide strip of windows onto the slate floor. Beyond them, the ocean was a bright, hard blue gray, its surface troubled by thousands of small waves.

Bridget's mother took up the spot she had apparently left at the counter, a white marble shot through with black veins that faded to gray as they sank deeper in the pale stone. She sliced a lemon in half, nudged a glass juicer down the counter toward Clare, and dropped the two sides of the divided lemon beside it.

Clare picked one half up, touched its fleshy heart to the sharp tip of the juicer, and pressed down. “You've lived with ghosts before, haven't you?” she asked, as juice ran down the glass slopes into the juicer's moat.

Bridget's mother nodded and sliced another lemon into pieces. “Why do you ask?”

“Who were they?” Clare said.

“What you have to understand,” Bridget's mother said in a tone that indicated she didn't really expect Clare to understand at all, “is that real ghosts have very little to do with the ghost stories you might hear from other children.”

“They don't?” Clare asked, with a note of false wonder.

“Almost nothing,” Bridget's mother said. “You see, they're not like you and me.”

“But you've talked with them,” Clare prompted.

“Ghosts very rarely speak,” Bridget's mother said. “And when they're spoken to, they often retreat. That's why it's so important to work with trained mediums.”

Clare had the same sensation she got when she heard people rattle off travelers' rumors about a place Clare had actually been: the realization that she already knew more than the adult who was pretending to educate her. She didn't like the feeling, but she was getting used to it. It bothered her most in moments like this, when she didn't know the answer herself, and needed one.

“Then how do you know they're there?” Clare tried.

“Most of us aren't sensitive enough to encounter them,” Bridget's mother said. “I do have some sensitivity myself, but I wouldn't call it a true gift.”

“What's it like?” Clare asked. “To feel a ghost?”

“Often there's a chill,” Bridget's mother said. “An unseasonable chill. You have a sense that you're not alone.” She added this detail as if the thought came as a relief. “And then there are apparitions.”

“Ghosts that you see,” Clare guessed.

Bridget's mother nodded.

“Have you seen any?” Clare asked.

Bridget's mother's hand curled around a lemon.

“There was a girl who came to our room every night in Paris,” she said. “All she wore was a sleeping shift. And rubies, a thick necklace. I could see her, but Robert couldn't. He hated for me to talk about it.”

“Who was she?” Clare asked.

“A nobleman's mistress,” Bridget's mother said. “His wife couldn't bear a son. So when the girl delivered a boy, he took him to give to his wife as her own. The girl threw herself from our window down on the stones. He gave her the rubies in exchange for her son.”

Clare had heard worse, both on palace tours and in gossip over lunch. The story didn't shake her. But the mechanics didn't add up.

“How did you know who she was?” Clare asked. “If she didn't speak?”

“I heard the story from a servant,” Bridget's mother said. “Her mother knew the girl.”

“Was she the first ghost you saw?”

Bridget's mother shook her head. “That was in Italy,” she said. “On my honeymoon. An old man. He sat in a chair on the balcony. The first time I saw him, I thought he was a thief. But when I screamed, he looked at me as if I'd hurt his feelings, and faded away to nothing.”

“Did he come back?” Clare asked. “Like the girl?”

Bridget's mother pushed the pieces of another lemon across the marble to Clare. “Every day,” she said. “I started to take breakfast with him when Robert was out.”

“So you did talk with him,” Clare insisted.

“He didn't speak to me,” Bridget's mother said. “But he listened. Robert was convinced I had a lover. He could hear me talking, but when he came out, the old man always vanished. It made him wild.” The memory of a smile flickered over her lips.

Clare thought back on Jack's chatter and pranks. He didn't seem to have much in common with these wraiths that couldn't do anything more than appear or fade away. “So why did he come, do you think?”

“The old man?”

Clare nodded.

“I'm not sure,” Bridget's mother said. “Usually ghosts want to tell us something about who they were.”

Clare lifted a hollow rind from the glass and pressed a fresh lemon down. For all his dreams, Jack hardly mentioned his past life. Which was strange, she realized. One of the first lessons she'd learned about people, on the endless journey that followed her father's death, was that they were almost always their own favorite subject. Over and over again, people proclaimed her both clever and charming not because they'd actually learned anything about her but because she'd spent the whole time asking questions about them. But Jack had matched her almost question for question. She hadn't recognized it at the time because there were too many other things to get used to: the voice without a face, the pages that turned themselves. But Jack's reserve would have been strange for any boy. And, if Bridget's mother could be believed, it was even out of character for a ghost.

A step creaked in the hall outside. Bridget's father appeared in the kitchen door, dressed like a movie actor in a pale silk shirt and light trousers. He took several paces before he realized anyone was there besides his wife, his face so flat and slack that Clare barely recognized him. But at the sight of Clare, a new spirit seemed to take control of him. His famous smile spread over his handsome features. He veered toward his wife, slipped his arms around her waist, and gave her a kiss on the cheek that would have been perfectly credible if Clare hadn't caught the earlier glimpse of him, before he realized she was there.

Bridget's mother tolerated the attention for a moment, then gave a light shrug, as if trying to shake off a bit of cottonwood that had settled on her shoulder.

Bridget's father turned his smile on Clare.

“Don't you look like a new day,” he said. “You're growing up to be a very pretty girl. Of course, that's no surprise, since you're Cynthia's daughter.”

Clare glanced at Bridget's mother, but she poured a steady stream of lemon juice onto a pyramid of sugar at the base of a clear pitcher, as if she hadn't heard a thing.

“Clare?” Bridget said. “What are you doing here?”

Clare turned toward the door, startled. She hadn't planned to go looking for Bridget until she was done pumping Bridget's mother for information. And she hadn't planned on mentioning the conversation with Bridget's mother to Bridget, whose petulance over Clare's interest in the otherworld could easily cast a shadow well into the afternoon.

Clare attempted a diversion with a fact Mack had offered her as she left the big house. “Do you want to go down to the candy store?” she asked. “They're making macarons this morning, but once they sell through, they'll close up the shop.”

“I'd hardly call it a store,” Bridget said. “More like a giant cigar box.”

She was right. None of the storefronts that made up the town's tiny commercial district were distinguished architectural accomplishments. But the candy store in particular was a narrow, unwieldy eyesore that seemed to perch on the ridge above the beach even more precariously than its neighbors. Inside, the ceiling was inexplicably high, as if the builder had reached skyward to claim space he couldn't afford at ground level. And beyond these aesthetic objections, the shop owner, a ruddy, sharp-tongued fisherman's wife whose passion for creating French-style sweets made her deeply uneasy even as she indulged it, changed the menu every day, so that a favorite item might not appear again for a week, or even longer if a customer was unwise enough to become importunate in her pleading. The establishment didn't offer the refined experience the seasonal children were accustomed to, but it did have the clear advantage of being one of the only places in town that would tolerate young people at all. So despite Bridget's grievances, she and Clare found themselves there often.

Bridget's father fumbled in his pockets and withdrew a pair of silver dollars. He offered one first to Clare, and then to Bridget. Clare dropped her eyes as she accepted hers, half embarrassed by the generosity and half wishing she could return it to him with a stony silence that warned him to leave both her and her mother alone. But she knew that, since she was a child, even if she refused the gift, it would never be counted as anything more than her own bad manners.

“Is that enough?” Bridget's father asked, his voice uncertain. “You can get whatever you want?”

In the village candy store, where everything was sold three and four for a penny, just one of the silver dollars would buy them more sweets than either of them could eat in a week. If they spent both, they'd have enough candy to build a good-sized castle on the sand, and still be able to throw what remained into the surf by the handful. Clare pictured a flock of macarons floating out to sea: orange, lavender, and bottle green. Then they began to vanish, one by one, as fish slipped to the surface and carried them under.

Bridget dropped her silver dollar in her pocket and nodded curtly at her father, as if he were an aging servant no one could quite bear to fire.

“Well?” she said to Clare. “Aren't you coming?”

G
LASS JARS LINED THE
walls of the shop, filled with the longest-lasting sweets: a dozen colors of rock candy crystallized on wooden wands, lemon and cinnamon drops, jawbreakers spattered with red, yellow, and blue, candy sticks in every possible flavor: apple, cherry, butterscotch, mint, sarsaparilla, lime, licorice.

The proprietor ruled her domain from behind a long counter that enclosed her pristine workspace, partially shielded by oak and glass cases that presented the day's more perishable offerings: a coconut cake, a bowl of caramels, and a few neat lines of macarons, already somewhat diminished by the day's sales.

Bridget laid her silver dollar on the counter like a gunslinger proving he was good for the next few rounds, and ordered a dozen.