Towering Page 6

  “I only want what is best for you. I only . . .” She broke down, crying. “I can’t lose you, Rachel! I can’t. I have already lost so much.”

  Her face looked so old and sad that I began to weep too. I wept so easily lately, wept reading books, even books I knew very well.

  “I’m sorry, Mama. I don’t want to leave. I am happy here with my books and with . . . you. I just wondered . . .”

  “What, Rachel?” Her face was stormy. “What is it you wonder?”

  “It’s only that the books I have, I have read so many times. Not that Mr. Dickens and the Brontë sisters do not seem like old friends, but I thought, perhaps, there might be different books, newer books.”

  It is not what I wanted. I wanted what I had said I wanted, to know what year it was. To know who I was. To know where I was and when I would be released. In many ways, I could see I was becoming a young lady, old enough to marry and have children perhaps. In other ways, though, I was a child, a child who knew nothing and had everything kept from me, and I was sick of it. But I was also trapped, trapped and at her mercy. I couldn’t have what I wanted, so I would have to settle for newer books until I found a way.

  She paused in her brushing, and I heard her take a deep breath in, then out. “Oh, is that all? I can get you new books, all you want. How thoughtless of me not to realize that an intelligent young lady must have some occupation for her mind. What sort of books do you want?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t know what kind there were. “I want books . . . that show what it is like to be human,” I said, “because I am not sure I know. And if the author is alive, I would very much appreciate it.”

  “Very well,” Mama said. “Should we have dinner now?”

  I nodded. Our days were a routine pattern. She came to visit me in darkness. She brushed my hair. We ate dinner, played chess or cards. I sang to her and played the harp. I had taught myself to do both, and I practiced day and night, even if it was only to please her. She said my voice was beautiful. That used to be enough.

  But then, I stopped singing, stopped playing the harp when Mama wasn’t around to hear. What was the point, I reasoned, of singing when no one was there to hear? Who knew if my singing was even real and not a figment of my imagination? Who knew that I, my entire existence, was not a figment of my imagination?

  Then, she left, leaving my breakfast for the next day and taking with her my chamber pot, which I was old enough to be embarrassed by. That was all.

  Wasn’t there more to my life than that?

  “I brought ham, your favorite.” She smiled and nodded, inviting me to do the same. “I want you to be happy.”

  I smiled back at her. “Thank you, Mama. I am.”

  When she left, I began to sing again, and to play my harp. Even though no one was there.

  Strangely, I felt that someone could hear me.

  And, last night, when I was singing, I thought I heard a voice in my head.

  11

  Wyatt

  New Year’s Eve, the night was clear with so many stars it looked like the sky in the movie Titanic, when the ship had gone down, and they were waiting in the dark water to die. It was just as cold too. The idea of spending the two-degree night in what Josh called a three-season house (the three seasons being spring, summer, and fall) seemed a little crazy, but the idea of spending it alone, watching Times Square on TV, seemed worse.

  Last year, we’d gone into the city. This wasn’t a typical thing Long Island kids did, but Tyler had suggested it. One day, during winter break when we were bored, he’d said, “Hey, let’s go to Times Square tomorrow.”

  “I never want to do that, man,” I said. “I hear it’s suffocating there.”

  “Never’s a long time, MAN,” he said. “You want to be one of those people who live in New York your whole life and never see the Statue of Liberty or the Macy’s parade or New Year’s in Times Square?”

  “Well, I’ve seen the Statue of Liberty,” I said, “on any one of five field trips with five different teachers who thought I needed to learn—yet again—about how they dewormed the immigrants at Ellis Island. As far as Times Square, if it means getting felt up by street people in twenty-degree weather, I’d seriously rather eat glass.”

  “Not me,” Tyler said. “It’s on my bucket list.”

  I shrugged. “You’ve got time.”

  But he just kept pushing, pushing, pushing, and finally, when he said his sister, Nikki, would go with us, I gave in.

  In fact, it hadn’t been cold. Far from it. Millions of pressing bodies had taken care of that. But everything else had pretty much come true. We were shoulder to shoulder with sweaty strangers, no bathrooms, no food. People who got there after us tried to shove in front.

  “Really,” a nasal-voiced woman said, “we’re meeting friends.”

  “Yeah?” Tyler said. “Call them on your cell phone and have them raise their hands.”

  The woman called Tyler a word I don’t even say.

  “Happy New Year,” I told her.

  Tyler and I were tall, so at least we could see and stuff, but his sister, Nikki, was smaller. “I can’t even breathe,” she said.

  “Like that’s important.” Tyler rolled his eyes.

  But I said, “Are you okay? You want me to put you on my shoulders?”

  “I can’t ask you to do that. There’s still an hour until midnight.” Around us, people were gyrating to music we couldn’t hear over the talking. Someone jostled me, separating me from Nikki.

  “Wyatt!” Her voice sounded panicked, yelling for me, not her brother. I reached through the crowd. I’d taken off my gloves because of the heat, and I felt for her nubby wool coat. My hand brushed another hand. “Is that you?”

  I felt her fingers grip around mine. She squeezed hard.

  I couldn’t see Tyler. There was someone separating us. I moved closer to Nikki. Finally, I shoved past and found her. “You want to leave?” I asked.

  “How can we? Besides, Tyler really wants to stay, but all these people are making me dizzy. Can you just . . . hold my hand? It makes it easier to breathe.”

  “Maybe if you closed your eyes,” I said, “or looked up? Maybe if you didn’t see everyone.”

  “I’ll try that.” She tilted her head back and looked straight up. I did too, so I could see what she saw. The sky was clear but starless. The buildings cast too much light. She squeezed my hand harder, then looked me in the eyes. “That’s way better. Thanks.”

  I squeezed her hand back, and in that moment, I knew something had changed. She wasn’t the girl I’d grown up with. She was someone else.

  But the next day, when I’d asked her out, she’d said no.

  “I don’t want to complicate things. I like what we have. I don’t want to ruin it.”

  It made sense, of course. I was friends with Tyler, and Nikki was his sister. Awkward didn’t begin to describe it. Still, it felt like a rejection.

  Not that it mattered now.

  Josh was picking me up, good since no way could Mrs. G’s car navigate the hills in the dark and snow. Still, I figured I should clear it with her. I mean, maybe she’d wanted to watch New Year’s Rocking Eve together.

  But when I asked her, she said, “Oh, no. You get to a point, at my age, where one year seems pretty much like any other. I’ll probably just go to bed early.”

  For some reason, rather than making me feel better about ditching her, I felt worse, like I should be the thing that made this year different. She’d been alone so long. Of course, I wasn’t her kid anyway. I said, “You know, I was thinking, if you wanted to get a dog, I could walk it or something.”

  “Oh, you’ll only be here a bit longer.”

  “I guess. I don’t know. I sort of like it. Maybe I’d go to college up here.” It was the first time I’d thought about it. A lot of my friends would go to the same college, room together, make college more like thirteenth grade. I wasn’t sure I’d want that.

  The old woman smiled. “Y
ou must miss your mother, or maybe your friends.” She stopped. She knew about Tyler.

  I shook my head no. The only friend I missed was Tyler, and he wasn’t on Long Island. I wondered if she felt that way about Danielle. “Sometimes, it’s good to make a fresh start.”

  Josh picked me up around ten. I was the eighth person in a car that would have been crowded with seven. “I don’t see how we’re going to get up the hill with all these people,” one of his friends, a guy named Brendan, griped.

  “Some of us will have to get out and walk,” Josh said. “Or you could walk now. It’s my car.”

  That shut him up. I squeezed in, trying not to sit on anyone’s lap.

  “Everyone, this is Wyatt,” Josh said. “He’s from Long Island.”

  “You’re staying with Old Lady Greenwood?” said a girl I could barely see under her scarf and hat. “Creepy.”

  “What’s creepy about her?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. That old house. We used to dare each other to ring her doorbell on Halloween night, then run away.”

  That was sweet of you. But I said, “She’s okay.”

  “So you’ve actually been inside the house?” Brendan said. “Are there any secret passages? Jars marked Eye of Newt, stuff like that?”

  “Well, I did find this one closet she wouldn’t let me into. I think it’s where she stores the skin of her victims before she uses it.” I noticed the car had gone sort of silent. “Hey, she made me an apple cake.”

  “You shouldn’t eat it,” the girl said. “Haven’t you seen Snow White?”

  “I heard she killed her daughter,” Brendan said.

  “That’s not true.” I remembered how she’d screamed into the night for Danielle. “And I was kidding about the closet,” I added, in case they were too stupid to get that.

  “I knew that,” the girl said. But then, she turned away, talking to the girl beside her—at least, I think it was a girl. Hard to tell with all the coats. Everyone else went back to what they were doing and saying, and I was left wondering about people back home, if they’d noticed I was gone. We were driving through town now, and by instinct, I checked my phone for texts even though it meant jostling three people. One bar. No messages.

  We drove in silence, finally making a sharp turn off the main road onto a side road. Then, there was a dirt path that disappeared down a hill. I wouldn’t even have noticed the path if we hadn’t been on it. I wondered if it was safe. I decided I didn’t care. The trees on both sides of the car came up like cave walls, and ahead, there was nothing, nothing I could see anyway. Finally, the car would go no farther. Josh said, “We’ll have to walk from here.”

  I was glad too. It was hot, and a car feels even more crowded when it’s full of people you don’t know. Their voices drummed in my ears. I pushed the door open and, feeling the rush of cold air, realized I’d been holding my breath. Everyone else clambered out behind me, and we began the work of trudging through the snow toward a house I still couldn’t see. I noticed some people had six-packs or bags of chips. “Was I supposed to bring something?” I asked Josh.

  “Nah, I knew you wouldn’t get out much, with Old Lady Greenwood. I brought some chips on your behalf.”

  One of the guys had a glass bottle of something. “I don’t really drink,” I said. “I mean, I’m not a jerk about it, but I don’t really drink.”

  “It’s okay. You can be the designated driver.”

  “You better designate someone else to pull this car onto the main road too.”

  “Don’t have that on Long Island, huh?” The guy laughed.

  “Nope.”

  We all stopped talking then, concentrating on walking. A lot of the snow had melted, but it was still hard going, and I realized Josh was right. This wasn’t what I was used to. I was a city kid, meant for paved streets and shoveled sidewalks, and the hick kids with their stronger muscles were leaving me in the dust.

  I was at least ten feet behind the last of them, even the girls, when I heard a sound too human to be wind.

  Singing.

  There was no TV showing Star Trek here, and I could almost make out words. I wanted to tell everyone to stop, stop stepping, stop crunching snow, so I could hear. But that would look crazy, so I said, “What’s that?”

  “What?” the girl in front of me said, and they all stopped walking so, for a moment, it was silent, and I could have heard it. But, of course, like all weird sounds, it ceased to exist when pointed out to someone else.

  “It stopped,” I said. “But it sounded like someone singing. I’ve heard it at the house too, but this seemed closer.”

  “Probably a loon,” the girl said.

  “Are there loons in the middle of winter?” Everyone started walking again, driven on by the cold as much as their boredom with the conversation. At least I hoped so. “I mean, don’t they fly south? Besides, this sounded human.”

  “So do loons.”

  I knew what I had heard, but I didn’t pursue it. It wasn’t worth it. Obviously, there was no legendary local ghost everyone had heard of. Maybe it was my imagination. Maybe I was crazy. We kept walking, and a minute later, I heard another sound, an actual bird or animal. Maybe it was a real loon.

  The girl turned back to me. “Was that it?”

  “Probably,” I said, even though it wasn’t.

  “I’m Astrid, by the way.”

  “Wyatt.”

  “I know. You must be pretty bored at Old Lady Greenwood’s. Because, if you are, you should get a lift ticket for Gore Mountain. It’s not too far. We go all season.”

  “I ski a little, but probably not as well as you. I’d drag you down.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You could take lessons. My older sister goes to UAlbany, and she’s a ski instructor. We’ve got extra skis. How tall are you?”

  “About six feet.”

  And then, I heard it again, not the bird or the wolf or the loon or whatever, the other thing, off in the distance.

  “There! Did you hear that?”

  She shook her head. Maybe I was going nuts. Thankfully, we had reached the house. It wasn’t a whole lot warmer than outside, but there was wood by the fireplace. “Know how to make a fire, City Boy?” Josh asked.

  I nodded. I’d been in Boy Scouts. This, too, reminded me of Tyler. He wanted to get his Eagle Scout and had pressured me to stick with it, to do it together. “Got a lighter? Or do I need to rub two sticks together?”

  Josh handed me a long, blue lighter, and I busied myself, breaking off smaller splinters to use as kindling and arranging the logs just right while, around me, people I didn’t know talked about other people I didn’t know. But I kept listening for the sound from before, which had sounded closer, so much closer, than at Mrs. Greenwood’s house, but now, all I heard was the chattering of strangers and the howling of the wind.

  But it was a voice. A girl’s voice. And somehow, I knew that whoever she was, she was beautiful and also lonely, like I was. I told myself I didn’t want to be around anyone, but that wasn’t true. I only didn’t want to be around people who knew me.

  “Need any help?” Astrid asked. She’d taken off her hood, and I could see she was pretty, auburn hair and cheeks flushed pink from the cold.

  I didn’t really need help, but it was probably better not to be a recluse. Someone had turned on music, loud stuff like Nikki used to like, gothic metal, and someone else was complaining about the music choice, trying to push their own stuff. So I couldn’t have heard an outside noise, even if it did exist.

  Which it probably didn’t.

  But Astrid was hot, so I handed her Josh’s lighter. “Can you hold this, maybe? And could you see if there are newspapers or anything.”

  “You mean like these?” She pointed to a pile underneath all the logs.

  “Oh, exactly like that. Sorry.”

  She reached for the papers. “Any particular section you like? Local? Sports? Looks like the Adirondack Phantoms were having a good season in 2011. Sorry, they
’re a little old.”

  “That’s okay.” I took the paper and started rolling it up.

  “What I said before, I’d be perfectly happy to ski with you even if you completely suck at it.”

  “I wouldn’t say suck.”

  “In fact, if I can be totally honest here, there are, like, seventy-five people in my class at school, and we’ve all been together since kindergarten. It’s nice to have a new face in town. We get so few.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “So, basically.” She put her hand on her hip. “Any guy shows up with all his limbs or maybe even missing one or two, and he doesn’t actually pick his nose in public, he’s going to get a lot of attention.”

  “That’s flattering.” I laughed and stuffed the rolled-up newspaper between the logs. “How do you know I don’t pick my nose in public?” I held out my hand for the lighter.

  “Do you?” She shrugged. “You haven’t so far.”

  Instead of handing me the lighter, she leaned down across me and lit the paper herself. Her hair, brushing against my nose, smelled familiar, and I remembered last year at midnight. Even though I hadn’t told anyone, Nikki and I had kissed at midnight. Would I be kissing this girl tonight? Would something bad happen to her?

  Stupid thought. She was hot. She was coming on to me, and I was choosing to be in bed every night, reading a dead girl’s diary all alone.

  The paper caught, and the flames warmed my face, and she was still there, standing there beside me, warming the other side. “Um, can you hand me the poker?”

  When she did, our hands brushed for an instant. I didn’t feel the spark I wanted. She was pretty and she was nice, but she wasn’t Nikki. I didn’t even know what I wanted, maybe Nikki, maybe no one. But I didn’t want to live with my ghosts forever.

  “Hey, City Boy.” Josh threw a corn chip at me. “I don’t know how you make a fire on Lawn Guyland where you’re from, but here in the freezing north, we do it a little faster.”

  “Yes, sir.” I seized the poker and began moving the logs around until something caught and suddenly there was a good blaze going.