The Vanishing Season (2 page)

The weather was warm, but the heat of summer was gone, so they left all the doors open, ignoring the few bugs that flew in through the holes in the screens. As Maggie worked she could hear the distant lapping of the water on the lakeshore and, sometimes, the distant hammering in the woods. She still hadn’t taken the time to walk over to the lake and dip a toe in.

She scrubbed, dusted, and arranged her room bit by bit. The walls were a flaking sprawl of pink flowers, which she peeled using a scraper and hot water mixed with fabric softener. Once that was done, she painted the walls a pale blue that her dad picked up on sale at Lowe’s, which looked much better but also too plain. She dug out her pencils and a piece of loose-leaf and sat down to sketch a mural to do on one wall. But after sitting for a while, tapping her pencil against her teeth, she couldn’t think of anything that she was really excited about. She decided to wait for inspiration to strike, if ever. Maggie had used to paint and draw all the time as a kid. She’d been good at it, but over the past few years her enthusiasm for it had slipped away.

Once the plain white shelves were immaculately clean, she filled them with photos of her and Jacie, her and her parents, her favorite books (
Jane Eyre
,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
,
Beloved
), her dusty sketchbook that she hadn’t opened in years, and a figurine of a spider on a web that reminded her of
Charlotte’s Web
(which had been her favorite when she was a kid). She put a standing lamp in the corner so that it dimly illuminated her bed for reading, and tucked her white coverlet tight around the edges of her mattress the way she liked it. She put her collection of paints and canvases in a low cabinet, at the back, where they were unlikely to see the light of day again.

That evening she finally got to put on her running shoes, pull her long hair into a ponytail, and jog down Water Street—which was the one way in and out and stretched across two miles of mostly empty fields and woods before it hit a main road. It all looked different running than from the car: the dipping valley; the pastures; the shimmer of the line of Lake Michigan to her left; the stand of thick, shady pine trees across the fields. From some slight rises along the road she could see the shining tin tops of distantly neighboring farmhouses, but when she pulled out her cell phone there was still no signal. Besides the house next door, there was only one more property, obscured within the woods and marked by a rusted, crooked mailbox with a No Trespassing sticker stuck to one side, a Beware of Dog sign planted beside it, and a long, winding driveway that disappeared into the trees. It had to be the property where the hammering had been coming from, but she didn’t slow down to get a closer look.

Her blood was pumping hard now. Every time she got a glimpse of the sky, it seemed to be doing something different: filling up with white, puffy clouds; getting crisscrossed and scarred by the trails of airplanes; graying and seemingly getting lower to the ground. Running, Maggie liked to imagine she was a buck, strong and fast. It always made her feel less restless, a little less stuck in her own skin. She pushed herself, going harder than usual. At the end of her route, panting and holding her knees, she paused to look at a tall, gray silo in a field of high grass, and the sky lit up for a split second. A late-summer storm was coming in, and the silo stood out stark white against the gray night. Maggie turned back. She knew, from the ride in (she hadn’t been away from Water Street since), that there was nothing for another mile but wilderness.

Back home her dad had disappeared into what he had deemed the study, no doubt arranging his over-the-top collection of books (he had over a thousand of them and hadn’t been willing to toss even one, much to her mom’s despair) in alphabetical order on the sagging, built-in shelves. An obsession with their books was one of the things Maggie and her dad had in common. Also they looked alike—symmetrical, dark-haired, with faint freckles over their noses—though Maggie, he liked to say, was prettier and not as bald. He hadn’t had a full-time job in two years, ever since they’d decided to homeschool her. According to him her classes hadn’t been keeping up with her brain, even after she’d skipped a grade.

The house was silent and dim from the coming storm. Maggie showered, changed, then grabbed a book at random from a pile by the study door and took it out onto the back porch to watch the dark clouds blowing in. She’d tried to avoid these moments of sitting still all week; these were the times she found herself getting overwhelmed by homesickness. Now she was thinking that she’d never sleep in her apartment again, never spend Saturday mornings in cafés with her best friend, Jacie, talking over lattes. It was an unsettling, weightless feeling, at sixteen, to have everything she’d known her whole life end so abruptly.

The book she’d picked—she saw, glancing at the cover—was nonfiction; it was about butterflies and moths. She flipped through the pages, reading snippets and only half paying attention.

Suddenly a voice to her right startled her. Maggie jerked and turned.

“Sorry, I scared you?”

The girl stood with one foot uncertainly on the bottom stair of the porch; she was wiry, all gazelle-like limbs and long, unkempt, deep-brown hair. She had something—some kind of moving, squirming thing—in her hands. A big, rangy, slobbery hound dog was trailing along behind her. It was the girl Maggie had seen from far away that first day, on the beach.

“Pauline,” she said, stretching out her fisted hands as if to shake Maggie’s. Maggie leaned forward in her chair. Pauline turned to her dog. “This is Abe, my soul twin.” She freed one hand again and patted Abe’s snout.

Pauline climbed up the stairs now more confidently and peered into the house curiously. “You know, I always think of this as the haunted house. I’m glad you’re here; you’ll chase out the ghosts,” she said, turning back and coming to sit beside Maggie, without waiting for an invitation.

“I mean, it’s not like I really think there are ghosts. I’m not stupid. But it’s hard not to wonder. I’ve seen lights on over here sometimes.”

Maggie didn’t believe in ghosts. She’d read somewhere that sightings of ghosts were the result of magnetic fields. Or carbon monoxide poisoning in old houses. Pauline jerked open her hands to reveal a duckling.

“I’m taking it to the shelter, but I thought you might like to see it. Crazy, a duckling born this time of year. Maybe its mother left it behind.” Pauline stroked the duckling’s head gently, a little longingly, with her skinny thumbs. “Ducklings are so cute, they make my eyes water. Do you ever have that happen?” Maggie shook her head. “Where’d you move from?”

“Chicago,” Maggie said, unsure of what to make of her new, duckling-loving neighbor.

“Moving must suck.”

Maggie wasn’t really willing to say whether it sucked or not to someone she didn’t know, but Pauline didn’t wait for an answer anyway.

“It’s a small town, but it’s okay. It’s boring, but . . .” Pauline stared around, gesturing to the lake. “There’s stuff to do on the water. Summer’s great except for all the tourists. Winter feels like it will never end. But besides that . . .”

Pauline turned in her seat toward Maggie and pulled up her knees. She shifted the duckling to one hand and held out a long thread of her hair against Maggie’s with the other. “Almost the same color,” she said. Pauline’s was longer and messier, while Maggie’s was neatly combed. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be overly enthusiastic. I’m just glad you’re here. We’ve never had a neighbor on this side.”

Maggie was used to girls like Pauline—strikingly beautiful girls—being a little aloof. Pauline was the opposite; she came across as sweet, eager, and a little lonely. She gazed around at the crumbling deck, then smiled brightly at Maggie.

“Did you get the tea?”

“Yeah, thanks . . . I’ve never gotten . . . tea as a present before.”

“My mom’s family has a tea company, Tidings Tea. So we get a ton for free.” Maggie had seen the brand in grocery stores; she’d seen ads for it on TV. Tidings Tea was a big deal.

“Wow.”

Pauline seemed to sense she was overwhelming Maggie, and she sank back, stretched like a cat, and lapsed into silence for a few moments, studying the yard and the lake and then the house.

Maggie tried to think of something to ask her. Finally she said the first thing that came to her. “What’s all the hammering in the woods?” she asked. “Beyond your house?”

Pauline seemed to puzzle over this for a second, and then her eyes lit up with recognition. “Oh, that’s my Liam, Liam Witte, our neighbor on the other side, but much farther down Water Street. He’s our age. He’s building something between our houses, so we can meet there in the winter.” She wrapped her arms around her knees. “He knows I hate the winter, and he says it’s a surprise and I’m not allowed to go back there. You should definitely go and say hi.”

“That’s really sweet.” Maggie knew guys were always quick to do favors for beautiful girls. Not that she didn’t benefit from the rule now and then, but she wasn’t nearly Pauline-beautiful. Girls who were Pauline-beautiful, Maggie knew, had the world open up its gates for them wherever they went. Girls like Maggie were noticed once people looked closely, but most people didn’t look that close.

“It’s just me and Liam. And the adults. You should come canoeing with us this Sunday afternoon, before the weather turns cold. It’ll happen faster than you think.”

“I can’t swim,” Maggie said. She didn’t add that she hated water in general. She’d always had a fear of drowning.

“We won’t swim,” Pauline reassured her, as if the trip were already decided. She asked if Maggie had read about the girl they’d found in the lake.

“Yeah,” Maggie said. “Sad.”

“Scary,” Pauline said, low. She pushed her wild hair back over her shoulders from where it had crept against the sides of her face. “They haven’t found who did it.”

“I thought it was an accident or suicide or something.”

Pauline shook her head. “They said that at first. But no. My cousin in Sturgeon Bay knows a cop. They just haven’t released it in the papers yet.”

Maggie felt a chill run down through her feet. “That’s horrible.”

Suddenly Abe planted his paws on the swing and licked the duckling.

Pauline let out a laugh—so screechy it could scrape paint off a car. That was the first moment Maggie started to like Pauline—the moment she heard her rough, husky laughter that wasn’t beautiful at all.

“Well,” Pauline said, standing, peering up at the sky as the first drops fell, “I’m gonna take this little guy to the shelter before it pours. Come over anytime. And welcome to the neighborhood, blah-blah-blah.”

“Okay, thanks,” Maggie said, standing.

Pauline waved over her shoulder as she walked down the stairs. Rather than taking the driveway to the road, she waded straight toward her house through the tall grass, parting it as she went and leaving a river of flinging grasshoppers and Abe bounding behind her.

That night, as heavy rain streaked the windows and thunderclouds settled over the house, Maggie was exploring the small, empty back parlor for remnants of past residents (all she found was a matchbox) when she stepped on a rotten plank and broke through a hole in the floor. For a terrifying moment, one leg dangled into the emptiness of the cellar below the house, the cool, stale air running up her leg. Catching her breath, she yanked her leg out and found her dad in his study, sitting cross-legged on the floor arranging his shelves.

“My foot broke through the floor. I almost died,” she teased. But she was shaken.

“So you’re saying you want to be able to walk around your own house without feeling that your life’s endangered.” He nodded, his glasses glinting in the lamplight. “Okay, I can do that, but it seems a little demanding.” Maggie smirked at him.

He promised to go into town and buy some supplies the next morning to fix the floor. Then he stood, put his hands on her cheeks, and rubbed them hard, something he’d done ever since she was little. It was his weird dad way of showing affection.

Maggie crawled into bed that night feeling more at home than she had the night before. Knowing one person made more of a difference than she would have guessed. She liked Pauline already. It usually took her longer to form an opinion of people.

Unable to sleep, she peered out into the dark yard. Across the field yellow light from the white house’s windows shone through the rain, giving off a comforting sense of safety and the feeling that someone else was out there in the world besides just her and her parents.

Maggie dreamed that night about the lake, black and shining in the dark, with angels spreading their wings on its surface. Open and closed, open and closed, like the wings of moths.

I’m part of this house, and the residents can hear me in their sleep. I rattle the dishes and creak along the floors in the dark. I turn on the lights downstairs, though they’re sure they turned them off when they went to bed. I watch a leg crash through the ceiling into the darkness and I reach out to touch it. But I have no hands, no arms, nothing I can see. I wonder if I ever did.

All I know for sure is that I’m timeless: I drift in and out of the past as easily as if I were walking from one room to another. Moments reach out and pull me in. Without meaning to, I’ve visited centuries in this very same spot. I’ve watched the building of ships in the harbor. I see things in colors that couldn’t possibly be. (The past has a shimmer. Different moments and feelings are colored differently.) I can hear the motion of stars above the house. This is what a haunting is like for the one who haunts—it’s like being everywhere and nowhere at once. Time layers on itself, present and past. But this is what time keeps bringing me back to: this house, this peninsula, these people, this girl. It seems I’m stuck to Door County and pinned to Water Street. I can move over other towns, but I end up back here—as if a magnet’s pulled me home. And I don’t know why.

I search my soul for what I know about ghosts, though I can’t remember where I learned it or who I was when I did. Ghosts come back for revenge, or they linger to protect someone, or they stay because of some unfinished business. And I wonder, if I’m a ghost, which kind of ghost am I?