The Swallow (30 page)

I sat down beside her.

“Don’t cry, Mum,” I said, tears falling down my own cheeks. “I’m right here. I’m not gone yet. Don’t cry.”

“Polly,” she said, but her eyes looked right through me. “Polly, I miss you so much.”

Susie looked at us curiously. “Olly!” she said again.

“I’m scared, Mum,” I said, leaning my head against her shoulder. “I’m so scared.”

I sat with her for a long, long time. Gradually she stopped crying.

“My little Polly,” she murmured. “My sweet girl.”

“Pat?” came my father’s voice from the doorway. “Pat, are you okay?”

She stood up and wiped her eyes.

“Yes, I’m fine, Ned. It just came over me, all of a sudden. It’s funny, though, sometimes I feel that Polly is here, in this room.”

He came in and looked around. His glance passed right over me.

“I think you’re right,” he said. “I’m glad we’ve left everything the way it was.” He sighed.

“I must get on,” said my mother, picking up Susie. “Lucy
said she’d take Susie for a walk, and I promised the boys I’d make some oatmeal cookies.” She bustled out.

My father stepped over to the shelves and took down a book. It was
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
, by C.S. Lewis. He used to read to me when I was younger, and that was one of our favorites. He sat down on the bed and opened it, flipping through. Then he closed it and shut his eyes.

“Polly,” he said in a ragged voice I’d never heard from him before. “Polly. Where are you?”

“Here,” I said, slipping my hand into his and giving it a squeeze. “I’m right here, Dad.”

He just kept sitting there with his eyes shut, making no sign that he heard me. Then he made the sign of the cross across his chest. “Go in peace, Polly. Rest in peace.”

Rose

I curled up under Polly’s blankets in the corner by the wall. I thought she’d probably come back soon. I closed my eyes and fell asleep.

I dreamed of the ocean. Vast, blue, stretching in all directions. I was lying on a raft, bobbing gently up and down as the water rolled beneath me. The sky was a brighter blue above me, and the sun felt warm on my skin. A sense of peace stole over me, and I felt that I would be happy to go on floating like that forever, buoyed up by the deep water below me, cradled by the rocking waves, warmed by the sun.

Suddenly Polly was there beside me on the raft. She smiled at me and gave a big sigh.

“This is the life,” she said, and then I woke up.

Polly was sitting beside me in the attic, her head leaning against the wall.

“Polly,” I said, struggling to sit up. “Are you okay? Did you find your mother?”

She nodded. “She couldn’t see me,” she whispered. “Neither could Dad. You’re right.”

She was paler than ever.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. I really didn’t know what to say. I had a pain in my throat.

“I’m scared, Rose,” she said in a small voice. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I want my mother. But she can’t see me! I don’t want to go. I want everything back the way it was, the Horrors and my awful sisters and the baby taking my room and everything. I want it all back.”

She clung to me.

I could barely speak. “Polly, I wish I could give you everything back, but I can’t. All I know is that wherever you’re going, it won’t hurt anymore.”

“But it hurts now,” she cried. “It hurts too much.”

I stroked her hair, the way the old lady had stroked mine, and I patted her back, and she cried.

Time seemed to stand still. I was aware of her frail body and her tears. I was aware of the attic walls around us, and
outside, the sky going on and on. The cemetery. The world turning. I didn’t want the moment to end. I willed it not to end.

But eventually she stopped crying. And then she sat up and looked at me. She smiled. It was a ghost of the old Polly smile, but it was still there.

“Don’t cry, Rose,” she said. “You’re right. We can’t do anything about it.”

“If you’d never met me,” I said miserably, “you’d be able to stay. You wouldn’t know you were dead.”

She sat forward. “But it wouldn’t have been any good. I would have just got lonelier and more unhappy, thinking that nobody loved me because nobody ever talked to me. If not for you I’d have been drifting forever. Can’t you see, Rose? I was meant to meet you. You were the only one who could help me get through this. Just like you were the only one who could help Winnie. You have the most wonderful gift, Rose, and you don’t realize it.”

It didn’t feel like a gift. Right at that moment it felt like the most terrible curse. To make a friend like Polly, and then to lose her. What kind of a gift was that?

“Don’t go,” I said, starting to cry again. “Stay. Don’t leave me.”

She put her arms around me. They were light and almost weightless, like the touch of feathers.

“I’ll miss you so much,” I said. “You’ve been such a good friend to me, and I’ve had so much fun with you. You’re—you’re the best ghost I ever met.”

I could feel her starting to shake. I pulled back from her embrace, and then I realized she was laughing.

“That’s a really silly thing to say, Rose,” she said, and then I started laughing too.

Finally we wiped our eyes and looked at each other.

“I’ll never forget you, Polly,” I said.

“Me neither,” she replied. Her face looked translucent, and it seemed like there was a white glow spreading inside her, lighting her up from within.

“Good-bye, Rose,” she said softly.

“Good-bye, Polly,” I said, and watched as the light surrounded her and then faded away.

I was alone again.

TOAST

Rose

Life went on without Polly. Every day got shorter as October moved slowly towards Halloween. I wore the shawl all the time, except at school. I felt the kindness of the old lady, my great-grandmother, wrapping around me whenever I wore it.

I missed Polly more than I could say. She was the only friend I’d ever had. I wanted her back.

The things she said to me in the attic that last Sunday kept rattling around in my head. She had always behaved as if it was really cool that I could see ghosts, and I thought that was because she didn’t understand how scary it was. But she was right about Winnie and my father. Winnie didn’t exactly stop being scary once I helped her, but she did go away. And Polly—well, I guess I helped her to go too, although everything in me had wanted her to stay.

All this time I had thought that ghosts wanted me to make them alive again, but maybe they wanted something quite different.

At least I didn’t have to worry anymore about my parents sending me away, like Winnie. I wanted to talk to my father
about Polly, but I couldn’t. Not yet. I was too used to not talking. And even though they said things were going to change, so far nothing much was different. I still came home from school most days to an empty house, with Kendrick lurking in the kitchen and giving me dirty looks. My parents did try talking to me at breakfast a few times, but it was all rather awkward.

One morning, just before Halloween, I was sitting draped in my purple shawl, poking at my porridge, while my parents read the paper and the Breakfast Ghost looked longingly at my toast.

“Rose,” said my mother suddenly.

I jumped. “Yes?”

“Yesterday I had a little visit with Pat Lacey, next door. I dropped in after work.”

“You did?” I asked, amazed.

“Yes, she asked me to. She felt so bad about the night she came over and accused you and got so upset. She wanted to apologize. She’s a very nice woman, I have to say—down-to-earth, energetic. And her husband, Ned, breezed in just before I left, and he was quite charming, and he was full of apologies too, for his argument with your father when we moved in, remember? About the parking?”

I nodded.

“Well, we all started out on the wrong foot. They are a perfectly good family, and they’ve been through such a hard time this last year, I really feel for them. Pat and I put our heads together and we’ve come up with a plan.”

My heart sank.

“She wants to offer you a little part-time babysitting job. She needs help with Susie around dinnertime on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Her girls are all busy with school activities those days, and it’s hard for her to get the dinner made with the little boys running around and Susie demanding attention. So she thought you could come over after school, help out with Susie, and then stay on for supper with their family.”

My mother looked at me as if she expected me to say something.

I didn’t. I was too busy trying to sort out whether I was mad or interested.

“Well, Rose?” she said with a little twitch that meant I had had long enough to consider my answer.

“Are you just palming me off on them because you and Father still don’t have time for me?”

I could see her counting to five before answering. Not ten. That would take too long.

“That’s rather an unfortunate attitude, Rose,” she said, finally. “I’m just being practical. Your father and I are doing our best to free up more time to be at home. But it’s complicated, and it’s not going to happen overnight. Meanwhile, you could do with the company of other children, and Pat really could use the help.”

She had me and she knew it.

“Okay,” I said with a shrug, and I ate a spoonful of porridge. The Breakfast Ghost sighed.

I broke off a piece of toast, spread it with marmalade and
pushed it over to him. My mother had gone back to her paper. But my father was watching me.

“Take it,” I whispered fiercely to the ghost. “Take it, if you can.”

For a moment the ghost was so startled he didn’t do anything. Then he reached out carefully and brought the toast to his lips and took a big bite.

FLIGHTS OF ANGELS

Rose

I clutched the purple shawl close around my shoulders, under my cloak. It was cold, with a smell of snow in the air. It was two days after Halloween, and I was going to the cemetery to look for Polly’s grave.

Mrs. Lacey had told me where to find it. I had been over to their house to help with Susie on Halloween, and, I have to admit, I’d had fun. Polly’s family was exactly the way she described it: Lucy was stuck-up and snobby and used a lot of big words, Moo was drippy and Goo was caked with makeup, and everyone talked at once and the Horrors were dressed up as pirates and doing a lot of jumping around and yelling. Their noisy dinnertime seemed like a circus compared to my quiet suppers in our empty dining room. Mr. Lacey was going on about the origins of Halloween and how today was called All Soul’s Day, the day to pray for the spirits of the dead.

Eventually nearly everybody had gone about their own Halloween business, and I’d put Susie to bed and looked around Polly’s room at her books and her old dolls. I kept feeling that she would appear any minute, but she didn’t. Her
presence was everywhere in that house—and yet she was gone.

I waited till today to go to the cemetery. It seemed fitting to visit Polly’s grave on All Soul’s Day. I wanted to get there while it was still light, so I hurried over as soon as I got home from school, looking nervously through the iron railings for ghosts. Suddenly the stone gateposts of the cemetery loomed up ahead of me. Beyond them, the road twisted into darkness.

After walking for half a minute I left the road and headed along a path that led off to the left, past gravestones that were newer and smaller than the Victorian monuments. I had never been in this part of the cemetery.

I looked over my shoulder. The shadows were gathering behind me. I thought I caught a glimpse of something flickering through the trees, but when I focused on it, it was gone.

The path led nearly all the way to the railings that bordered Sumach Street. When I got to the end, I turned right and counted ten big steps. I stopped in front of a newish-looking granite headstone. I bent over to read the inscription in the fading light.

Pauline Margaret Lacey
March 4, 1951, to April 8, 1963
May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest
.

And underneath that was the outline of a bird with a forked tail, flying, wings outstretched. A swallow.