“How many cats do you have?” the teenaged Target cashier asked, eyeing the conveyor belt in her checkout lane. A ten-pound bag of cat food, a large litter box, one enormous cardboard scratching pad, an army of fake mice, and a huge jar of catnip were all waiting to be scanned.
“One. Why?”
Beside me, Kit snorted. “They call this ‘nesting,’ you know. And most people do it for their human offspring.”
The cashier didn’t bother hiding her laughter, and my cheeks burned.
“You weren’t complaining while you helped me pick out those plates,” I told Kit.
“I’m not complaining. I’m mocking. There’s a difference.”
I ignored her, focusing instead on the cashier, who was shocking me with the 4-digit dollar amount I’d managed to rack up. I whispered a low “Thank you” to my father for leaving me all his savings and swiped my credit card.
In the parking lot, Kit helped me cram an entire wedding registry’s worth of stuff into the back of her van. It was a tight fit between the new mattress I’d picked up and Kit’s own purchases, which mostly consisted of a pile of used textbooks and an absurd number of extension cords.
My legs ached from all the shopping. I was asleep in the passenger seat before we even reached the highway. Compared to the night I’d spent on the window seat and the bathroom floor, the nap I took in Kit’s van had been the best sleep I’d gotten since I came here.
The sound of a honking horn woke me up. I blinked out the windshield and recognized the sunny backyard-turned-parking lot at Primrose House. Graham was walking from a large garage beside the carport toward the house’s back door.
“Hey!” Kit rolled down her window and leaned out the van to shout at him. “Landlord! Come give us a hand!”
I ran my fingers through my hair and searched through my purse for some gum as Kit pulled into her parking space beneath the wide carport. Graham ambled over to us, his hands in the pockets of his paint-spattered coveralls.
“Whoa.” He whistled when Kit opened the van’s back door. “Ladies be shopping.”
“Don’t even start with that fake sexist shtick.” Kit punched him in the arm. “Your newest tenant is the one responsible for this mess, not me. I’m just a good Samaritan.”
“And I’m guessing you expect me to help you lug this mattress up to the attic.”
“You don’t mind, do you?” I asked, heat flooding my face once again. It felt presumptuous to ask, but I had no idea how we’d get the new bed upstairs without some help.
Exhaling, he interlaced his fingers and stretched his arms out in front of his chest. “Stand aside, ladies. Let the man handle this.”
An hour later, after much swearing and arguing about the best way to get a plastic-wrapped mattress up two flights of stairs, all of my new purchases finally made it into my apartment. The cabinet above the kitchen sink groaned as I unpacked the last of my new plates and stacked them carefully inside.
“Let me make you dinner.” I closed the cabinet door and dusted my hands off on my jeans. “We can eat off my new dishes.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Kit said.
“No, seriously. If you hadn’t helped me out, I would’ve been doomed to sleep on the taco impersonator mattress over there forever. I owe you. Big time.”
Kit raised an eyebrow. “Oh, I know. And I’ll remember you said that. But I have to take a raincheck. I’m meeting my dad for dinner and then have to drop off some books to a friend.”
She waved and skipped out of my apartment. I turned to Graham.
“What about you?” I asked. “Tuna sandwiches on brand-new Corelle dinnerware? We can eat right after we heave the old bed out the window.”
“We advertise the place as ‘fully furnished,’” he reminded me. “If you move out and take that nice new mattress with you, where would I be then?”
I stared at him for a moment. Was that a playful, almost flirtatious note I detected? Nah. He still wore that same expression he had while going over the repair and maintenance clause of the rental agreement.
He passed on dinner as well, apparently preferring the chore of dragging the old mattress off to rot away in a storage closet somewhere over my company. I finished unpacking by myself and collapsed onto the new mattress. My spinal column sang out in joy.
“Brrrllll.” Striker announced herself as she hopped through the open window. She walked around the apartment, sniffing the new items and rubbing her face on every corner and edge she passed. She soon found her new pile of goodies near the kitchen, and I watched with amusement as she clawed at the cardboard scratching pad.
I spent a few minutes trying to get Striker to play with her new toys, but she seemed more interested in the packaging. Crumpled paper was the big winner. I made her a few balls out of my receipts then headed out the door. As much as I couldn’t wait to sleep on my new bed, there was another more important item on my to-do list: I needed to find a job.
If I was smart about spending, I could afford to live for a few months off my inheritance. But I preferred the idea of keeping that money in savings. And as bored as I’d been behind a reception desk, I had a feeling unemployment would be pretty dull too.
It was another temperate spring day in Donn’s Hill. The air on the light breeze smelled fresh, and the sky was a perfect, cloudless blue. The walk from my apartment to the town square was just long enough to warm up my muscles, and I pushed up the sleeves of my sweatshirt as I strolled down the sidewalk.
I started to cut across the square toward Main Street and spotted Penelope Bishop sitting at a folding table decorated with green and yellow bunting. When I reached her post beside the fountain, I tried to pack as much pleasantness into my voice as possible. “Good morning.”
Penelope looked up from her computer tablet, then sat it carefully on the table and folded her well-manicured hands on top of it. Her nails were the exact shade of pink as her blouse, and her long honey-brown hair was pulled back into an intricate fishbone braid. She looked as though she’d just stepped out of a fashion magazine.
“Good morning,” she replied, her voice cool.
Man, she really doesn’t like me. She didn’t even know me. I felt a burning urge to prove her wrong.
I glanced at the table and saw a sheet with “Volunteer Sign-up” scrawled across the top. A handful of names and phone numbers were scribbled below.
“Are you looking for volunteers?” I asked.
Penelope sniffed. “Yes, for the Afterlife Festival. I assume you’re familiar with it?”
“I am.” Ha! For some reason, already knowing something about the town felt like scoring a point against her.
“It’s two weeks away. We’re looking for volunteers to help with setting up and tearing down the tents and exhibits, running the raffle and auction, manning the information booth, et cetera. I doubt you’d be interested.”
A muscle in the side of my neck twitched. There was that snap judgment again. Well, I’ll show her. I pasted a giant plastic smile on my face and grabbed a pen.
“I’d love to help out,” I told her through gritted teeth as I added my name and cell-phone number to the list.
When I was done, I looked back up at her, expecting to see a look of surprise. Her expression was neutral, but the look of hatred in her cold, gray eyes took me aback.
“Thank you,” she said in a flat voice. She pulled the sign-up sheet back toward her and glanced down at it, and her eyes narrowed. “Ms. Clair,” she added with a final sniff.
I nodded then scuttled away across the square. The encounter left me confused and angry. What was her problem? Did she know me from somewhere? That look in her eyes just now betrayed something much deeper than I’d first sensed at the fountain… something almost sinister.
* * *
Main Street was bustling with the Saturday shopping crowd. Up and down the road, the little stores had their front doors propped open to let in the fresh spring air, and the locals were strolling down the sidewalks in light jackets.
One of these shops has got to be hiring. As I walked toward the coffee shop to check the bulletin board, I planned to keep an eye out for help wanted signs in the windows.
I crossed the street and stopped in front of the bookstore I’d noticed on my first day in town. It was one of the old houses that had been converted into a business, similar in style to Primrose House but quite a bit smaller. The clapboard was painted a deep cerulean blue. The sign above the window announced nine lives book exchange: new—used—trades. I rationalized stopping in by thinking the bookstore might have a community bulletin board like the one at The Astral Bean, and pushed open the door.
A bell tinkled above me as I stepped into the shop. The foyer opened into a large, sunny room filled with rows of heavy oak bookcases. The original cream-colored plaster walls and tall, wooden baseboards gave the store a vintage feel. Led Zeppelin’s “Four Sticks” was playing from a stereo on the fireplace mantle, and though the air was heavy with the earthy scent of nag champa incense, I detected my favorite smell beneath it: old books. My spirits lifted at once, driving all thoughts of that hateful Penelope Bishop from my mind.
I breathed deeply, closing my eyes. I associated this smell with my parents, who were both bookworms. Although my mother’s personal collection had been extremely small, she had taken me to our local library every Saturday morning without fail. While other children sat in front of televisions, eating cold cereal and watching cartoons, I lay on my stomach between the stacks in the children’s section, reading about fantastic adventures. Mom would let me check out a small pile of books to get me through the week, and by the next Saturday, I’d be hungry for more.
My father loved books as well. The whole time I was growing up, we would sit at opposite ends of the couch as we read together, my feet slowly growing closer to his. He had amassed an enormous collection of anthropological textbooks, biographies and other nonfiction, classics, and mysteries. The only books he didn’t have a taste for were fantasy, and we often argued about the virtues (or lack thereof) of that genre.
“Don’t you wish you had magical powers?” I’d asked him.
“I just can’t stand reading a bunch of made-up, difficult-to-pronounce names. I can’t connect with stuff like that,” he’d said.
I’d shaken my head, unable to understand that at all, and buried my nose back in a book about elves and dwarves and magic rings.
I smiled as I walked through the stacks at Nine Lives Book Exchange, trailing my finger along a shelf of trade paperbacks and feeling the difference in the sizes of books. I randomly pulled out a battered copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and checked the inside cover for the price; it was a mere 10¢. I sighed happily, hugging the book to my chest. At prices like these, I’d be able to rebuild my entire collection.
A tall woman looked up from behind the sales counter as I wound my way between the shelves. She had long, straight black hair that was lightly streaked with gray, and sharp green eyes. Her simple indigo gown made me think of something one of Jane Austen’s heroines would have worn while practicing the piano-forte.
Her eyebrows drew together. For a moment, I thought she recognized me. Then her face relaxed. “Can I help you with something?” she asked, smiling. Her voice held a slight accent, but I couldn’t place it.
“Just browsing.” I smiled back. “This is a great shop.”
“Thank you.”
I walked over to her counter. Beneath the glass, a strange collection of antiques rested on a long piece of purple velvet: a miniature cauldron, several curved knives of varying sizes, glass jars filled with different colored powders, and a pewter goblet.
“Do you have an interest in the history of witchcraft?” she asked.
“Umm…” It wasn’t something I had ever thought of, but it seemed rude to say so. “Is that what these antique things are from?”
She nodded. “The athame knives are from colonial times, and the goblet dates back to eighteenth-century England.”
“Wow.”
“But you’re not interested in that.” She tilted her head and narrowed her eyes in thought. “I can always tell. You’re here for the books.”
My shoulders dropped, and I laughed. “How’d you know?”
“As I said, I can always tell. You have the air of someone who prefers words on a page to the world around her.”
She said it so matter-of-fact that I didn’t know how to respond.
“But tell me,” she said, “Is your name Mackenzie?”
My eyes widened. “Yes. How did you know? Are you psychic or something?”
The woman continued to smile at me, but her eyes darkened. “Yes, but not that kind. And I wouldn’t need psychic powers to know that you’re Evelyn’s daughter. You look exactly like her.”
The sound of my mother’s name made the breath hitch in my throat. “You knew her?” I whispered.
“Yes, she was my great friend. Did she ever mention me? I’m Gabrielle.”
I cast my mind backwards once again, searching for any memory of that name and finding none. Eventually, I had to give up and shake my head. “I’m sorry,” I said.
Gabrielle lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Why should you apologize? You were very young. I was heartbroken to hear of her passing.”
I stared at her, waiting for her to continue or to explain how she’d known. My mother’s obituary had only been published in our local paper, and I couldn’t imagine how the news would have reached all the way out here.
Gabrielle didn’t continue speaking. I felt awkward standing there in near silence; the only sounds in the shop were the strains of classic rock coming from the stereo.
“Well, I should be going,” I said at last, putting the copy of Frankenstein back on the shelf and starting for the door. “It was a pleasure meeting you, but—”
“I have some photographs of her.”
I stopped. “Of my mother?”
Gabrielle nodded. “Please, come upstairs. I’d like to show them to you.”
There was no question; I had to see them. I’d been staring at the same teeny stack of photos of my mother for nineteen years. The chance to see a new picture of her was something I’d never pass up, so I followed Gabrielle up a set of stairs in the foyer. We passed the second-floor landing and continued up to the third floor, where she pushed open a heavy oak door and led me inside.
We were in a single cavernous room that took up the entire attic. Folding screens blocked some sections of the room from my view, but the parts I could see were decorated in a vaguely Middle Eastern style. In the center, an enormous square rug with a kaleidoscope design covered the floor. A large round table with a low profile stood on the rug, surrounded by eight puffy pillows that served as seats. Heavy curtains covered the dormer windows, and a tall mirror peeked out from beneath a thin sheet in the corner.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“This is where I commune with the departed.” Gabrielle gestured around the room, as though it should be obvious from the furnishings.
“Wait, that’s what you meant by ‘not that kind of psychic?’ You weren’t kidding?”
She laughed. “I was not.”
“You summon ghosts?”
She tilted her head again. “I suppose you could put it that way.”
I stared around me. Gabrielle must be one of the mediums Kit was talking about. Somebody like the people that my mom…
I turned back to Gabrielle. “This is how you knew my mother, isn’t it? Instead of visiting family, she was coming to see you, wasn’t she?” As soon as the thought came into my head, it was out my mouth, and I knew it was the truth.
She nodded. “They had all gone before her. She was desperate to speak to them. The first time she came to me was a few months after they’d left her all alone.”
A hard lump grew in my throat as she spoke. I knew my mother didn’t have any family left. She’d explained about the car accident when I asked why I didn’t get birthday presents from my grandparents, but I’d never really thought about what that could have meant for her and how alone she must have felt.
Alone, like me. I’m just like her now. My family is gone.
I swallowed, trying to force the tears to go away. “Were you… were you able to reach any of them?”
“Yes, your grandmother. She was the only one who didn’t move on.” Gabrielle’s voice was low, and I shivered.
She moved behind a screen, and it sounded as though she was rummaging around in a box full of paper. She hadn’t invited me to follow her, so I stood awkwardly next to the round table, trying not to picture eight people holding hands around it while a disembodied spirit floated above.
You’ve seen too many cheesy movies, I lectured myself.
Gabrielle came back around the corner and handed me three faded photographs. The first was of a family standing in front of a single-story brick house. In the picture, a dark-haired man in a suit loomed over a wicker chair with a wide, rounded back. His hands rested on the shoulders of a slender woman sitting in the chair. Two girls in floral-print dresses flanked the woman, and a baby wearing an oversized bonnet sat in her lap. None of them looked familiar to me.
“Who are these people?” I asked.
“This is your mother’s family, taken when she was just a year old. She brought it to the first séance she attended.”
Her family. My family. I brought the photo nearer to my face to examine the people more closely. My grandfather had a serious face and a pencil mustache. His shadowy eyes made him look perpetually tired. My two aunts, whom I remembered were named Eloise and Emily, grinned widely. I stared hard at the baby in the middle of the frame, but her face was slightly blurred, and it was difficult to make out any details. My mother as a baby. I couldn’t believe it.
I moved the family portrait to the bottom of the pile, my eyes hungry for another picture of my mom. In the second photo, she was easily recognizable, looking the way she had when I was a child. She appeared to be in her early twenties; her curly brown hair shone in the sun, and her blue eyes were alive with laughter. She was sitting on a dock in shorts and a T-shirt, dangling her legs in the water. I saw trees and a cabin on the lakeshore behind her. She sat next to two identical women with long dark hair and piercing green eyes.
I jerked my head up. “Is one of these you?”
“Yes, I’m on the left.”
The green eyes of the woman she indicated sparkled with happiness, but the eyes that were now cast downward on the photo were flat and dull, as though they hadn’t been touched by a real smile in a long time.
“Where was this taken?” I asked.
“At a lake near here. I’d just moved here from Spain and met your mother. It was the first Afterlife Festival for both of us. She used to spend an entire month in Donn’s Hill, before you were born. It was the only time I got to see her each year.”
“And the other woman? I assume you’re twins?”
“We are. We were. I’m not sure how to put that anymore. That’s my twin sister Rosanna.”
Rosanna looked so similar to Gabrielle it was spooky. The only difference was that instead of simply smiling at the camera, like my mother and Gabrielle were doing, Rosanna was pulling a silly face and sticking out her tongue. The three of them looked young and happy, and I found myself wishing I could’ve been there, with the warm sun above me and the cool water at my feet.
“She passed away last year after a long battle with multiple myeloma.”
“Oh.” I looked back up at Gabrielle. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
The sad smile flitted across her lined face again, and Gabrielle nodded. I knew that nod. I’d made that same, robotic gesture countless times since my father’s death. It was the only response I could come up with for “Sorry for your loss.” Thanking someone seemed strange, and I couldn’t say why. In any other situation, my knee-jerk reaction to an apology was to say something like “Don’t worry about it” or “No problem,” but “Sorry for your loss” wasn’t really an apology, so those weren’t appropriate. Instead, I had settled on a nod and hoped it conveyed all the feelings I couldn’t put into words. I appreciated the sympathy—truly I did. But I had no way to verbalize it. Not without starting to cry all over again and not in any way that was eloquent enough to describe it accurately.
I flipped to the third photo, and the tears I’d been struggling to keep back broke free and ran down my face. My mother, looking radiant, sat on a bench next to a younger version of my father. I’d never seen them together, not in life or in a picture. I hadn’t even met my father until after my mother died, and my existence had been as much of a shock to him as her death had been to me.
In the picture, my father’s face was young and full of joy. His hair was a shaggy mess, not at all like the short crew cut I’d always seen him wear. He had a ridiculous bushy mustache, but his face was easily recognizable behind it; his high cheekbones and sky blue eyes gave him away.
“How… how did you get this?” I sniffed and lifted an edge of my T-shirt to gently wipe a few splattered tears from the photo. My father had never mentioned going to Donn’s Hill, not once. “Did you know my dad?”
Gabrielle shook her head. “No, I never had the pleasure. Your mother mailed this to me in one of her letters, shortly before you were born.”
Seeing my parents together mesmerized me. Neither of them had ever told me how they’d met or why they hadn’t been able to raise me together. I’d asked my father time and again while I was growing up. He’d given me simple answers at first, telling me that “Sometimes mommies and daddies just can’t be together.” It wasn’t until I was a teenager that he had admitted he couldn’t explain because he simply didn’t know the answer.
“Your mother was a good woman,” he’d said. “I wish every day that I could’ve been there to see your first steps and teach you how to ride your bike. I don’t know why she kept you from me, but I’m sure she had some reason that made sense to her.”
I mentally added myself to the photo, sitting on the bench beside my mom. All I’d ever wanted was a single memory with both of my parents together.
“Can I… would you mind if…” The words stopped coming.
Gabrielle reached out and touched my hand. “Of course you can keep them. Your mother would have wanted you to have them.”
Her touch released some kind of pressure valve inside me, and I collapsed onto a pillow at the round table, heaving silent sobs over the photographs. I’d thought I’d cried myself dry in the hospital room when my dad died, thought I’d cried myself dry again in the weeks after, when my grief over the loss of my father mingled with the grief over the loss of so many years of my life, wasted with a man like Josh. But now I saw that the tear-free days since I’d come to Donn’s Hill weren’t the end of the crying. They were the eye of the storm.
After several minutes, my ragged breath began to smooth out, and the tears slowed to a trickle. My eyes felt puffy; little bits of mascara poked at the insides of my eyelids, and I was sure it was running down my face in gray streaks.
Gabrielle brought me a glass of water, and I sipped it. Thoughts of the photographs kept tugging at my mind, so I forced myself to look around the room and think about something else. I wonder where Gabrielle got that rug. This water tastes delicious.
That was safer. I used mundane thoughts like bricks and built a wall around the memories of my parents in my mind, protecting them but also protecting myself. My parents deserved to be mourned. Every tear was a testament to their importance, but this wasn’t the place. If I allowed any thought related to them to come full force into my mind, I’d lose it all over again, and I wanted to get home to the privacy of my room before that happened.
I stood up on shaky legs and gave Gabrielle a hug. “Thank you so much,” I told her. I wanted to say more, but the risk of falling apart again was too high.
Seeming to understand, she squeezed me back. And for the first time since we’d come upstairs, her smile reached up into her eyes. “You’re very welcome. Please visit me any time. Here’s my number.”
I nodded and accepted her business card. Gabrielle Suntador, it read. Bridge to the Beyond.
She walked me downstairs and out the door of the bookstore, and I made my way home. Any thought of finding a job was forgotten, replaced with an overwhelming need to be in my own space. When I got back to my apartment, I taped the photographs to the wall just above my bed. I placed them carefully in a triangle, with the picture of my parents in the place of honor at the top and the ones of my mother’s family and her at the dock below. Then I dug out the picture of my mother and me at the petting zoo and put it at the bottom, making a diamond out of our family.
I sat cross-legged on my bed and stared at the top photo, taking in every detail of my parents in their young happiness. The pictures—especially this one—brought so many questions to the forefront of my mind. Where was it taken? Who had taken it? Were there other pictures of them together out in the world somewhere?
Huge cracks formed in the mental wall I’d built at Gabrielle’s, and the protective barrier crumbled to dust. I allowed myself to cry as I’d never cried in my life, letting the sobs I usually suppressed escape my throat. I gave myself over to grief and regret, holding back nothing and not censoring my thoughts from myself.
At some point, Striker hopped through the window and joined me on the bed. She climbed into my lap and lay there, letting my tears fall onto her back. I gathered her into my arms and buried my face in her sleek fur. She smelled good, like perfume, a scent that reminded me of my mother’s bathrobe. The memory brought a new wave of sadness, and my tears continued to fall. Striker made no complaint, and I cried myself into a deep, dreamless sleep.