house. Groceries tumbled out over the driveway.
“Clara,” Tom said. “That wasn’t necessary.”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
“You’re a monster,” I said to Clara. “I trusted you.”
“No,” Tom said. “She’s a ghost. Just a ghost. And so are you.”
“You’re wrong. I know you’re wrong.” I picked up one of the items that had fallen from my grandmother’s bag: an apple. Green, like the apple Tom had rolled to me in the cafeteria. A Granny Smith. As Tom and Clara watched, I turned it and took a huge bite. I swallowed roughly, the apple stuck in my throat. “I can get hungry,” I said. “I can get thirsty. That means I’m not dead, right? You said you couldn’t do that. I can sleep. I can feel cold and warmth. My heart beats. I’m breathing. I bleed. I…” I saw a stick on the driveway, one of the many limbs that had fallen around the yard. “I can feel pain,” I said. I dropped the apple and picked up the stick.
It was sharp and curved on the end, like a hook.
“Ez,” Tom said.
In one quick motion, I cut my arm. Blood screamed across the skin. I winced in pain, and Clara gasped, but Tom moved toward me. He took the stick, broke it in half, and tossed it.
I gritted my teeth. “I can bleed,” I said. “Can you do that? Can you bleed, Tom? I’m alive.”
In the little bathroom off my bedroom, Martha the maid found gauze and bandages. I sat on the side of the rusted tub while she crouched before me, dabbing iodine on my arm.
I saw my arm. She saw it. She touched it. How could it not be real? How could I not be? What was happening to me? I felt pain from the cut, stinging from the antiseptic. But mostly what I felt was numbness; I was a doll Martha patted and tended. I was hollow. I didn’t understand what was happening. No, none of this could be happening.
“Clara is a strange one,” Martha was saying.
“I thought she was my friend,” I said blankly.
“She’s changeable. What she’s been through and at her age, getting stuck at that age—well, I should have warned you. But Tom is kind. They will make good friends for you, keep you good company now that you’re….” She stopped.
“I’m not dead, Martha,” I said. “You can see my blood. You can feel my pulse.”
Martha looked away, down at her work. I watched her doctor my arm. She wore a long dress and black leather shoes like Clara’s, only they looked even older and more uncomfortable. She smelled strongly of laundry soap, something harsh and toxic, and of earth. I remembered Clara had smelled of earth too. Like a basement. Like a grave.
Martha unwrapped a bandage and pressed it on my arm. Her touch was warm, as Tom’s had been.
“You feel alive,” I said.
She shook her head. “But I’m not.”
“How do you know?”
She held my fingers to her chest. “No ticking.”
It was startling to lay my hand against a body that was not beating. Her collarbone felt solid, but there was no heartbeat beneath it, no movement, no comforting thrum.
“How did you figure it all out?” I whispered.
“When no one spoke to me. When no one seemed to see me or hear me. After awhile, then you know. You learn.”
“I don’t think I can believe this,” I said. “I don’t think this is real. Maybe I’m asleep. Maybe I’m still dreaming.”
“Of course,” Martha said. She squeezed my hand and I dropped it. “No one prepared you. But this house used to be full of people, children, generations of families—I watched them grow up. But no one ever saw me except the Builder, Mr. Black, Tom and Clara.”
“The Builder?” I asked.
“You’ll meet him. He built this house—and it took him.”
“What do you mean, it took him?”
“He died here, Miss.”
“What is this place, a death trap? Did the house kill you too?”
“Oh no, Miss,” Martha said. “I did that.”
I flinched as if I had been hit. This sweet girl, barely older than me. What had she done? What had happened? “How?” I said. “Why?”
She shook her head. “Not today. That’s a story for another time, when you’re feeling better.” She put the iodine and gauze away in the medicine cabinet. “It won’t last.” She nodded at my arm. “The bandage, the work I did. It’ll be undone by tomorrow at the latest, so you’ll have to watch it. Re-bandage it yourself, now you know how.”
I looked down at the bandage. It seemed secure to me. “Why won’t it last?”
“Because I’m a ghost, of course, silly.” She glanced out the window beside the sink. “That’ll be Mr. Black out there now.”
I rose and stood beside her. The strange man I had seen in the driveway was pacing in front of the barn, hands in his pockets, and kicking stones. He seemed to be talking to himself.
“He’ll be wanting to go down to the pond again,” Martha said. “But don’t you let him.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It’s not good to re-visit the place of your death.”
I felt sickness rising up in my throat. It was too much. It was all too much. I turned away from the window too sharply. The room spun. But a hand was there, a hand at my elbow, lowering me to the side of the tub. Not Martha’s hand.
He had appeared so fast. “Do you feel all right?” Tom asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Thanks to Martha.”
She curtsied and left.
Tom sat on the edge of the tub beside me. “I’m sorry about Clara. She means well. It’s just, we don’t know how to do this. We’ve never met anyone like you before.”
“Like what?”
“Someone who can interact with us; someone who is just like us, except, I suppose—”
“Not dead?”
“Right,” he said.
“So you believe me.”
“I think so.” He sounded like he was talking himself into it. “The eating. The breathing. The bleeding. You’re still cut, right? You still have a wound?”
I looked down at my bandage. “Pretty sure.”
“I believe you. And you believe me?”
I looked at Tom. He wasn’t what I had imagined a ghost would be like. But I had never really thought about ghosts too much before. I didn’t want there to be a middle, a limbo, a world of ghosts. I didn’t want there to be a halfway between the living and the dead. I didn’t want it to be true, what he said he was.
I had a horrible thought. “Tom, my grandmother isn’t dead, is she?”
He shook his head. “No. But she doesn’t seem to be able to see or hear you, and neither does anyone else in this town except us. Did something happen to you before you came here? Something bad? Were you hurt?”
“I got in trouble,” I said. “I hit my head.”
“You hit your head?”
“I didn’t die, Tom. I didn’t hit it that hard. I was in a train tunnel. But I was pulled out—alive—and I got in big trouble. I wouldn’t get threatened with jail time if I were dead, would I?”
“Probably