EIGHTEEN

LUCY

It was so strange and sad to walk into Grampa’s house and know he’d never set foot in there again. But there was too much to do to think about it for long. Mom had a long conversation with Uncle Steve on the phone, which sounded at my end like this: “Oh, good. I’m so glad you can get away. Saturday? What time? We’ll meet your train. Meanwhile…yes, okay…Do you have any preferences? Okay, well, we can try. Lucy and I will get things started…What? Oh God, Stephen, I don’t know. We’ll talk about it when you get here.”

“What?” I asked.

“Hmm?” My mom seemed deep in thought, or maybe submerged in panic.

“Oh God, what?”

“Oh. Shamus made both Stephen and me executors, just to cover the bases. But Stephen’s asking if I’ll do it all and take some money for it.”

“What’s an executor?”

She shook her head, looking tired. “It’s the person who carries out the instructions in a person’s will—takes care of all the financial stuff, sells the house, finds out what other money there is, doles it all out the way the will specifies. It’s a lot of trouble and time, is what it is. Meanwhile, it’s Thursday and he wants to have the service on Sunday or Monday, so he can get back.”

So we launched into it—arranging cremation, tracking down Grampa’s church and setting a service date with the priest, writing an obituary, going through his phone list to find and call his friends, tracking down cousins and aunties I’d barely heard of, ordering flowers. In between all that, we tackled the fridge, throwing out the old festering food. Then we brought in some basics for ourselves.

“God, Mom,” I finally blurted out. “Did you have to do all this when Dad died?” It was only Friday night, and I was exhausted. Trying to sleep on Grampa’s lumpy old couch the night before hadn’t helped.

She sighed and shook her head. “It’s pretty much a blur,” she said. “But I remember feeling like I couldn’t handle doing one more thing, yet dreading when it would be done and reality would well and truly hit.” It was the most she’d ever told me about that time, and I had a sudden urge to jump up and hug her—hard. But I hesitated and lost my chance. Mom glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall and jumped up. “Oh Lord, I have to meet with that priest soon. Lucy, would you be a dear and rustle up some sort of lunch? And then you can stay here, if you want, and get some homework done.”

“You sure?” I was grateful for a break, though the worry about my mom was not banished yet. But she gave me a quick squeeze and said that it was great having me here, but yes, she was fine.

I didn’t get much work done. Mostly I wandered around Grampa’s house, looking at his stuff and remembering him. He teased me about how I looked when we started visiting last year. Mom resolutely never commented on my new style, and Kate asked me earnest questions like, “Who are you armoring yourself against?” But Grampa took one look at me and cackled, “Well, Little Miss Hole-in-Your-Stockings, did you get in a fight with a pair of scissors?” And then he ran his gnarled old hand over my chopped and razored hair. He saw me just fine through the hair dye and boots, and I loved him for that.

I found a stack of photo albums in the shelf beside his easy chair, full of pictures of my dad and Uncle Steve as kids. I looked carefully at the photos of my grandmother. According to family lore, she had waited dutifully until her sons went off to university, then packed her bags and left, eventually landing in California and remarrying. She had written to my dad every Christmas, but never came to visit.

I put the albums on the coffee table, thinking Uncle Steve might want to look through them. He’d told Mom he just wanted to get rid of the house and its contents as quickly as possible, and we should take anything we wanted as a keepsake. I wandered aimlessly around, glancing into kitchen cupboards and at the cheap old knickknacks on the shelves, and then I opened the door to the dark, ladder-like steps leading up to the attic. I had a sudden, vivid memory of discovering these stairs as a kid and being firmly forbidden to go up there. “It’s not safe, Lucy,” my dad had said as he latched the little hook that locked the door.

There was a light switch on the wall, and when I flipped it, a dim light blinked on. Still, I rummaged around in the kitchen until I found a flashlight—and then headed up.

Mom got back late in the afternoon with a liquor-store bag, from which she unpacked two bottles of wine. One went into the fridge, and the other she opened. To my surprise she poured two glasses, handed one to me and sprawled out in Grampa’s big armchair, easing off her shoes.

“Time for a break.” She sighed and then lifted her glass to me. “Here’s to your Grampa Shamus.”

I reached over to clink her glass, and we had a solemn sip. “I hope Stephen appreciates this.” Mom sighed again.

“How are we doing?” I asked.

“I think things are pretty much ready to go. If Stephen wants to change anything about the service, he can see to it on Saturday, but he doesn’t seem to care.” She leaned her head back against the headrest, which honestly looked kinda grubby, and closed her eyes. “Let’s find somewhere nice to go for dinner tonight. I’m tired of camping here.”

We sat in silence for a bit—a nice silence, though, not awkward. Things seemed to be changing with my mom and me. When I thought about it, maybe they had been for a while, but this trip was pushing things along. I didn’t feel like we were on eggshells with each other anymore. Mom sat up, and her eyes fell on the photo albums. “What’re these?”

“I found them this afternoon. I thought Uncle Stephen might want to take a look.”

She picked one up and sat beside me on the couch. “We should take a look too.” She took a good slug of wine, as if to fortify herself, and opened the album.

What happened next was amazing, but it’s hard to explain why. It sounds normal, right? Looking at family photos after someone dies. But for us, it wasn’t normal. We laughed over goofy photos of my dad as a kid, his hair so blond I could hardly believe it was him. We watched him grow tall and skinny and pimply and then turn into a handsome, dark-haired college student. When we hit the wedding photos, my mom started bawling, and so did I, and she put her arm around me and passed the Kleenex box, and we sniveled our way through my mom showing off her pregnant belly and my dad holding a red-faced bundle that was allegedly me and then me as a toddler on this same old couch. And then my mom closed the album firmly, dragged her hand across her nose and said, “That’s all I can handle for now.” She looked at me and I saw her lip kind of quiver, and she said, “But this was good. And I’m really glad you’re here with me.” And then I got teary again too, but we laughed it off and jumped up to get ready for dinner.

On the way to the restaurant, I sent Jack a quick text. Miss you. But I think I have my mom back!

Over dinner I told Mom about my find in the attic. “It’s mostly junk, I guess, beat-up old chairs, bags of clothes or curtains or whatever, some suitcases like the kind you see in old movies. I found a box of books with leather bindings that looked intriguing, but it turned out to be a set called Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. They’re, like, four famous books per volume, each down to 100 pages.”

Mom snorted in amusement. “Great literature for the short attention span.”

I hurried on. “But anyway, under that box I found an old metal trunk. It’s not big, but it’s kinda heavy to bring down the stairs myself. I dragged it out into the open, but I couldn’t get the lid up. I don’t think it’s locked, just all rusted and jammed.”

“Huh. I think your grampa would have been too young to be in the war,” said Mom thoughtfully, “but maybe it’s some other kind of travel trunk?”

“It seems too small for that,” I said.

“Curiouser and curiouser!” Mom’s eyes widened. “You don’t suppose he was carrying on a secret love affair and that’s why his wife left? Maybe we shouldn’t open it.”

“You’re kidding, right? We have to open it.”

That night we rummaged around in Grampa’s basement until we found WD-40, pliers and a screwdriver, and then we climbed up to the attic and pried open the trunk’s clasp. The lid lifted with a screech, and I peered in.

“If a mouse jumps out of here, I’m going to scream,” I said as I cautiously lifted out a small, moth-eaten blanket.

“That looks like a baby blanket.” My mom sounded bemused. “But it’s such coarse wool, too scratchy for a baby.”

Next came some brittle folded papers that I opened gently and trained the flashlight on. One seemed to be a United States immigration record for Donal and Sigrid Sullivan, dated 1811. The other was a marriage license, dated Boston 1812, between Donal Sullivan and Sigrid Larsdatter. Oh, that was cool. “Mom, that must be a Sullivan ancestor. Geez, how many greats back would that be?” Under the certificate was a folded piece of lace, now yellow and stiff.

“Marriage veil?” My mom guessed. “Though…” She peered at the two papers. “They came over as a married couple. Why would they get married again?”

Finally, at the very bottom of the chest, I found the real treasure: a sheaf of papers, punched and tied together between cardboard ends, inscribed on the first page: Sigrid’s Story: as told to her daughter-in-law Anna Sullivan (née Mahoney) on June 12, 1859. Gently I turned a few pages. Lines of slanted, loopy handwriting in faded black ink stared back at me. I shook my head, frustrated by the dim light. “Let’s have a closer look downstairs.”

“You check it out, luv. I’m done like dinner.”

Luv. Both my parents used to call me that when I was little—but I hadn’t heard it in ages. It sounded nice.

“Sleep well,” I said. “Mom—Uncle Steve said I could choose something as a keepsake. Do you think I could have this?”

“You can ask him,” she said. “Something that old might be worth something, I suppose, but I doubt Stephen cares.” She yawned hugely as we started down the stairs. “Lucy, are you okay on that couch really?”

“I’m getting used to it,” I lied.

“Maybe we should get a hotel room for tomorrow,” she said. “The little guest bed’s pretty bad too, and I just can’t bring myself to sleep in Shamus’s bed.”

No. Me neither.

JACK

With Lucy gone, the Match Girl weighed more heavily on my mind. Now that I’d discovered the pattern, it was impossible to tell myself these were isolated freak events that would likely never happen again. The next full moon seemed to be racing toward me. I thought more than once about telling my parents—even headed down the stairs from my room once to do it—but in the end I just couldn’t find the words. Hey, guys, you won’t believe what’s been happening. No, they wouldn’t. And I would have found that easier to take when this first started, back when I didn’t really believe it either. Now, I didn’t want to waste time with medical tests or shrinks or “proving” to my parents that this was somehow real. I just wanted them to help me make it stop.

Rather than do nothing, I continued to slog through the Andersen books, though I was sick of them—and him. At least they helped me fall asleep at night: I’d hardly ever read anything more boring.

It was getting close to midnight, and I was just about to chuck HCA’s diary and turn out the light when my eye caught something that chased away all thoughts of sleep. In the middle of a long entry about a trip to Italy, I saw the young girl who used to sell matches outside the theater. My heart started tripping fast as I stared at the words. I scanned back to find the place where the passage started and read more carefully:

There are beggars on the streets everywhere; they are quite a nuisance and my landlady warned me that many are also accomplished pickpockets so one must avoid any close contact. Strange how one beggar can stir one’s sympathy, but many become menacing. But there was one little waif, clutching a tray of grimy trinkets, who caught my attention. She jogged a memory, but it was some time before I realized whom she reminded me of: the young girl who used to sell matches outside the theater…

I was just a boy myself, new to the city and poor as a church mouse, struggling to survive on the pittance the Royal Danish Theater paid me as a choirboy. But the little girl —she could not have been more than ten years of age—who stood on the street with her matches until the last patron and player left the theater was clearly worse off than I. She was there on the coldest nights, shivering in her thin shawl, and though I had no spare coins for her I did sometimes slip an extra piece of bread or a hard-boiled egg from my aunt’s table into my coat pocket to give her. Then one night the street was empty of vendors, and when I mentioned it one of the players told me the police had cleared them off due to complaints from the theater patrons.

I was still living at my aunt’s, for though the realization that she was effectively running a brothel shamed me intolerably, for the present I had no other recourse. And I thought no more about the match girl until one night when I was returning “home” unusually late, and saw a slim figure ahead of me. Hearing my footsteps, she glanced back fearfully, giving me a glimpse of her. I recognized her at once, the very striking large blue eyes in a wan little face, and waved to reassure her, but it seemed to have the opposite effect. She redoubled her steps, hurrying to a hovel at the end of the street and slipping in the door.

I didn’t like to speak unnecessarily to my aunt, but I could not resist asking her about the girl the next day. She’s an inveterate gossip who goes out of her way to learn her neighbors’ business.

“Oh, that’s a sad tale,” she told me. “That’s Sigrid Larsdatter’s child. They say she ran off with a foreign sailor, leaving her daughter and husband behind.”

I was shocked. “How could she do such a thing?”

“Oh well.” My aunt shrugged. Her morals, needless to say, were sorely lacking. “I don’t blame her one whit for leaving that Henricksen. He was always a mean old drunk, that one, and I’ve no doubt her life with him was a misery. But leaving the child—that’s harsh.

“Seems to me the baby was with her grandparents for some time,” she mused. “Yes, that’s right. Then the grandmother died, and the child was sent back to her father. But Henricksen has gone from bad to worse since then. He’s not fit to raise a goat.”

I thought about that young girl sometimes, though I rarely ever caught a glimpse of her after that. Soon I was able to move to a more respectable lodging, and I forgot about the girl until some time later, when my aunt sent me a note to say she’d been found dead and frozen in the street.

I was young enough to be shocked by her end, horrified even, and full of raging indignation against a world that would stand indifferent to a poor child’s suffering. And I took up my pen. Do you know, I had forgotten that altogether until now! I wrote the girl’s history in a lather, more a fiery sermon than a story, with no thought but to find an outlet for my turmoil. I wonder if I still have it among my papers?

Imagine, that was almost twenty years ago. I find that child’s plight still moves me; perhaps I shall find my old account and see if it can’t be turned into a proper tale.

It is too hot here to write seriously. How anything gets accomplished in this scorching sun is beyond me; I find I must lie down each afternoon just to keep from fainting and my face is as red as a lobster. If I ever return here, it must be in the cooler season…

The Match Girl was real. I could hardly believe it. My brain was spinning, trying to grasp what it meant. We were dealing with a “real” ghost, not a fictional character? Was that better or worse?

I grabbed my phone to call Lucy, then glanced at the time. Twelve thirty. Damn. I thought she said they were staying at her grandfather’s house, not a hotel, but I didn’t know if she had her own room. Lucy wouldn’t mind being woken up for this, but her mom would. Reluctantly, I turned out the light. It felt like morning would never come.

I barely slept all night, my stupid brain rehashing Andersen’s journal entry over and over. Plus, I was afraid I’d dream of Little Creepy Girl, with my brain so full of her, and that probably kept me awake too. Then I overslept, staggering into the kitchen in a fog.

“You look terrible, Jack—are you okay?” My mom kind of did a double take when she looked up from her coffee and paper.

“Yeah, just slept badly, and now I’m late. Is there any more of that?” I hefted the coffee pot experimentally and filled up a travel mug.

“Toast?”

“Maybe just a PB sandwich—it’ll be faster and I can take it with me.” I felt rather than saw her eyes on me, felt her unspoken question. “Honestly, I’m fine—just tired. I tested 6.3 this morning.”

“Okay, kiddo. Just for the record—I didn’t ask.”

“I know.” In fairness, she hadn’t, and I had sounded a little testy. “I gotta run. Thanks for the coffee.”

I didn’t want to phone Lucy on the bus—too loud and public—but I texted her. Crazy news. Call u at lunchtime?

By second period, I realized I had messed up. I was down to one test strip, up to 16, and my set, which I should have changed that morning, was looking pretty frayed around the edges. Once the infusion set gets pulled loose or just overstays its welcome in that patch of skin, it doesn’t matter how much insulin you shoot in there; it doesn’t get absorbed. I wasn’t going to make the biology field trip unless I got it all sorted at lunchtime. Reluctantly, I called my mom.

“Um, hi. I wondered if you’d be free to bring me some stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“I need test strips and a new set. I can grab the bus if you can’t come, but there’s this biology trip to the Turtle Trauma Centre and…”

“I can come right at noon—is that soon enough?”

“Yeah, I’ll be waiting at the door. Thanks, Mom.”

“You’re not done with me yet. I know you were tired this morning, but Jack, I won’t always be around to bring you stuff.”

Oh, here we go. “I know. Look, I’m sorry.”

She just kept on like I hadn’t said anything. My dad calls it her “Danish implacability.”

“So your backup supplies are going to be really important…”

“Right. Look, I have to get back—”

“…which is why I suggested you keep extra supplies in your locker.”