Kindred Spirits (4 page)

“Allthetime,”Momsays.“He’s
practicallyanencyclopedia of old sayings.”

“My ma taught him how to
talk. He belonged to her until she died,” Granny says. “he’s just about as old
as I am.” Granny gets up and opens the cage, and Methuselah hops on her
shoulder, pirate-style. Mr. and Mrs. So look fascinated, but it’s the same kind
of fascination that comes from seeing a two-headed cow or something else too
weird to be explained.

Adam is all smiles. We
haven’t disappointed him. My family beats a horror movie any day.

Methuselah nuzzles his
beak in Granny’s braids. “Be friendly. Talk to the folks, honey,” Granny says.

Methuselah squawks,
“There’s more than one way to choke a dog with butter.”

As Mom and I head toward
the kitchen, I whisper, “Are you sure it’s a good idea to leave her alone with
them?”

“Mercy, Miranda, you
sound as bad as half the people in this town.” Mom sets a pot of coffee on a tray
loaded with cups and saucers, cream and sugar, and glasses of milk for Adam and
me.

“What do you think she’ll
do? Cast a spell on them?”

“No.” I pick up the tray
that holds the blackberry pie, forks, and dessert plates. “Just scare them
off.”

“Don’t be silly,” Mom
says, picking up the coffee tray. “Dr. and Mrs. So are sophisticated. I’m sure
he’s had to deal with all kinds of people as patients, and believe it or not,
there are people in the world who are weirder than your granny.”

When we go back into the
living room, Granny still has Methuselah perched on her shoulder and is saying,
“Over in your part of the world, they say sang has mighty strong healing
powers. I ain’t never had much luck with it myself, though. How do you use it?”

“I’m
afraid I’ve never heard of anything called sang,” Dr. So says.

“She means ginseng,” Mom
says as she cuts the pie. “Sang is just what mountain people call it.”

“Ah, yes,” Dr. So says.
“I have heard of it, then. But I’m afraid I don’t know much about folk
remedies, Mrs. Chandler. My background is in Western medicine.” His smile is
open and friendly, like Adam’s.

“Well, I could teach you
about the old mountain ways of healing, if you ever took a notion to learn,”
Granny says. “I know what kind of herbs to mix for different kinds of
complaints and what words from the Bible you say to clear up a boil or a sty.”

“Dr. and Mrs. So, where
were you living before you moved to Wilder?” Mom interrupts

Granny, and I’m glad.

“Boston,” Mrs. So says.

“Oh, I’ve always wanted
to take Miranda there and show her all the historical sites,” Mom says,
offering around cream and sugar.

“You ought to take her to
Salem,” Adam says, “to the witch museum.”

Mrs. So giggles. It’s a
nice, bubbly sound. “Oh, the witch museum! What a tourist trap! We took Adam
there because we thought it would teach him about the Salem witch trials, about
how people can be persecuted because they’re different.”

Dr. So laughs. “But all
the trip to the witch museum did was get Adam obsessed with the idea that
witchcraft and witches might really exist. It was all just another horror movie
to him.”

“I
knowed a woman back in the hills that they said was a witch,” Granny says.
“They said she turned her neighbor’s cow’s milk into pure blood. Of course,
lots of folks said my ma was a witch, too.”

“Mom, can I show Adam my
room?” I blurt. I feel my mind starting to seek out what’s going on in Dr. and
Mrs. So’s minds, to find out what’s behind the polite expressions on their
faces, even though I don’t want to know.

“Sure, honey, if it’s
okay with his parents.”

Dr. and Mrs. So nod, and
I lead Adam up the stairs.

“Your grandma should have
been in some of those old horror movies,” Adam says once we’re out of earshot.
“She would’ve been great as the old gypsy that tells the guy he’s going to turn
into a werewolf.”

“I hope she’s not
freaking out your parents too bad.”

“No, Dad thinks she’s
interesting, I can tell. And your mom seems really nice.”

“Yeah, Granny’s nice,
too. She just takes some getting used to.” I lead him down the hall, past some
embarrassing baby pictures of me. “So...this is my room.”

Adam takes it all in, the
antique canopy bed, the purple and gold paisley wallpaper, the lamps I drape
with scarves because Abigail can’t handle bright light.

“I like it,” he declares.
“The cool thing about all these old houses is the weird angles of the walls.”
He cocks his head to take in the way the walls bend and turn. “Like this one’s
slanted over here, and this one sticks out all funny. It’s so different from
the room I had in my old apartment, which was like a shoebox, only smaller.”

“Mom says this room was
hell to wallpaper.”

“I guess so. It’s a lot like my room in
my house, really. I guess the only thing I like about Wilder is my room.” He
looks at me. “And I like you, too. As a friend, I mean.”

I
feel embarrassed and happy at the same time. “Thanks,” I say. “Well, I don’t
have a Nintendo or a TV, but,”

Knock, knock, knock. The
sound is coming from inside my closet door. What am I supposed to say’
But I
do have a ghost?

I look at Adam’s face.
He’s definitely freaking out. “Okay, Adam,” I say. “I’ve got something to show
you, well, not some thing, really. And chances are you won’t be able to see
anything at all. But you’re perfectly safe, so don’t be scared, okay?”

Adam swallows hard, but
says, “O-okay.”

I open the closet door,
and in flounces Abigail. “Oh, you didn’t tell me your new friend was from the
Orient!” She claps her hands. “How exotic!”

Adam looks like someone
who wants to run but whose feet have been Superglued to the floor.
“Uh...Miranda, where’s that voice coming from?”

“You can hear her?”

Adam nods.

“Can you see anything?”

He looks where Abigail is
standing. “I see a gray mist, like the steam that rises from a tea kettle.”

Abigail laughs. “Well,
I’m not much to look at from your point of view, am I? Miranda, tell him what I
really look like.”

“Adam,” I say. “This is
Abigail. She has long blonde hair and blue eyes and is very pretty. She’s
wearing an old-fashioned light blue dress with a big bow around the waist.”

“The same dress I was
buried in,” Abigail says, looking down at it in disgust. “And I am sick of it,
let me tell you. But the clothes you’re buried in are the clothes you’re stuck
with for all eternity. When you’re on this side, that is. On the other side we
don’t need clothes. We don’t have bodies...exactly.”

“So,” Adam manages to get
out, “you’re a ghost?”

“Well, I prefer being
called a spirit, but you may use the G- word if you feel strongly about it.”

Adam looks in Abigail’s
direction, then looks at me. “Whoa. Miranda, when I asked you the other day if
you believed in ghosts, I didn’t think you were going to open your closet door
and one would come walking out.”

I let myself feel what he
feels. It’s shock, but it’s a happy kind of shock, like a little kid who’s
walked into the living room on Christmas Eve night and seen Santa Claus.

“Surprise,” I say,
grinning at him. But then a thought crosses my mind. “Abigail, you always said
the reason you can appear to me is because I have the Sight. Does this mean
that Adam has the Sight, too?”

Abigail sits on the edge
of my dresser and fiddles with a cat figurine. “No. If he had the Sight, he
could see me in the flesh, like you do. Adam can hear me and see vapors where I
am because his mind is more open than most people’s. He doesn’t close his mind
off to things that are...extraordinary.” She shifts the figurine from hand to
hand. “Do you think I’m extraordinary, Adam?”

“Yes,” Adam says, his
eyes on the figurine that Amanda is holding. To his eyes, it must look like
it’s floating in space.

“I think you’re
extraordinary, too,” Abigail says. “Most people would have run out of here as
soon as I appeared, or at least would have accused Miranda of playing a joke on
them.” She sets down the figurine and looks right at Adam. “But you took me at
face value. And I can tell you’re very cultured. Not like most people in this
town. Where are you from in the Orient?”

“I’m
American.  From Boston.”

“Oh, Boston!” Abigail
smiles. “I went there when I was alive! I came from up East, to...Philadelphia.
But then Papa decided to open a store in this dreadful little town, and I
caught scarlet fever and died. But enough about me... tell me about yourself,
Adam. I haven’t talked to a living person other than Miranda since...well,
since Miranda’s mother was a girl.”

“Well...” Adam sputters.
“I’m kind of a...student of the supernatural.”

Abigail laughs. “Are you?
Well, Miranda and I would make excellent teachers. Wouldn’t we, Miranda?”

“I guess we would.” All
of a sudden I feel as happy as I can ever remember feeling, probably because
for the first time I have two real friends.

“Well, you know,” Adam
says, “there is something I’d like to ask both of you’”

“Adam!” Mrs. So’s voice
calls up the stairs. “Your dad’s pager just went off. We have to go.”

Disappointment and
something else worry? show on Adam’s face. He says, “Well, I guess I’ll have to
ask you another time.” But even as he says it, I am seeing into his thoughts: I
have to tell somebody who can help me understand what’s going on, because if I
wait too long it might be too late.

Adam is sitting across
from me in the school cafeteria, dragging a droopy french fry through a puddle
of ketchup. He lifts the fry like he’s going to eat it, then lets it fall back
on his plate.

“So why don’t you tell me
what you were going to ask me?” I say, wadding up my paper lunch sack. “If you
don’t, I’ll just dig around in your brain till I find out what it is.”

“I’ll tell you later.”
Adam glances around the crowded cafeteria. “In private.”

“We might as well be in
private right now. Look around. Who’s paying attention to us?” The popular
girls are all sitting at one table, and the popular boys are all sitting at
another. The poor kids and the kids from way out in the country take up the
rest of the tables. Adam and I are sitting at the only “table for two” in the
cafeteria.

“Well,” Adam whispers,
leaning over the table, “you remember the first time you came over to my house
when I asked you if you believed in ghosts?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, there was a reason
I was asking.” Adam looks around the room, then whispers even more softly,
“Ever since we moved into this house, weird things have been happening.”

“What kind of weird
things?”

“Well,” Adam says, “you
remember when you came over and Mom was painting the living room wall?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that was the third
time she painted it.”

“So? She didn’t like the
color once she got it on the wall. My mom’s like that, too.”

“No,” Adam says in a
regular voice, then looks around to make sure nobody’s listening. “It’s more
than that. See, when we first moved in, there was this raggedy old wallpaper in
the living room. Blue flowers on a white background that had turned yellow with
age. But there was this one place on the wallpaper with two black hand prints
on it. The hand prints were smeared, like a person with dirty hands smacked the
wall and then slid his hands down it all the way to the floor.”

“So? That’s not that
weird,” I say.

“Wait. I’ve not gotten to
the weird part. Mom rented a steamer thing and steamed off all the old
wallpaper so she could paint the wall. She painted it eggshell white the first
time, and as soon as the paint dried, those hand prints came back, right in the
same spot.”

“Okay,” I say. “That’s
weird.”

“It gets weirder. Now Mom
and Dad aren’t superstitious. To them, science and logic can explain anything.
So Mom figured maybe the hand prints were some kind of deep stain she just
hadn’t noticed before. So she painted over them, a shade darker this time. They
came back. Then she tried the mint green. And they came back again. I heard her
tell Dad that she guessed the only way to cover the hand prints was to paint
the living room wall black to match them. Then there’s the bathroom thing.”

The
bell rings, which means we have to stand in line with a bunch of other people
to throw away our leftovers. “What bathroom thing?” I say, wondering if I even
want to know.

“Hey, look,” Cody Taylor
hollers. “Old So What is in love with the Witch Girl.”

“Just ignore him,” Adam
whispers, but instead I look straight at Cody. I take the moon-shaped silver
pendant I’m wearing around my neck, lift it up to my lips, and kiss it. Then I
point my index finger at Cody, who takes two steps backward and bumps into one
of his dumb friends.

“Wow,” Adam says as we
walk away, “what did that mean?”

“Not a thing,” I say,
“but he’ll think it means something.”

After school, I stop by
Adam’s house. The living room walls are still mint green, but there’s no sign
of the hand prints. “I don’t see anything.”

“They’re still here.”
Adam points toward an end table with a tall lamp on it. “Mom just moved that
against the wall to hide them.”

We scoot back the table,
and there they are, a little below midway down the wall, two black hand prints,
fingers spread apart, then hand-sized smears all the way down to the baseboard.
“They’re smaller than I thought they’d be,” I say. “Like a woman’s hand prints,
or maybe an older kid’s.”

I spread out my fingers
and place my hands on the prints on the wall. The second I make contact, pain
pounds through me, a heavy, thudding pain in the back of my head. And fear.
Fear spreads through me until it is even stronger than the pain. But fear of what?
Fear of dying from whatever is causing the pain? No, there’s more to it than
that’a feeling that if I die now, it’ll be much better than what I have to face
if I live.