he touched me, I was surprised to feel what I had felt before when he had held my hand: a feeling of urgency. His touch was light and elusive, like something that might blow away, be taken from me. His hand felt not quite real. “Tom,” I said. “In China, they treat strangers like ghosts.”
“What do you mean?”
“My great-grandparents both emigrated. My grandma was the first to be born in this country. And in China, before you know a stranger, it’s like she’s not even there. Like she’s a ghost to you. I thought my grandmother was doing that to me. I thought she was mad at me, that I had offended her somehow. We didn’t have …” My voice trailed off. “It was hard with her before. She was really sad about my mom, and I don’t think she wanted two little kids around, suddenly. And then we left. We never visited. My sister took me away. We barely even called. I thought I was a ghost to my grandmother. And it’s like I am now, Tom. My sister hears me, but my grandmother can’t.”
Tom looked down at his hands. They were raggedy, the nails short and torn and dirty. Black with earth. He spoke into them, avoiding my eyes. “We think your grandmother might … notice things sometimes.”
“Notice things? What things?”
“The work Martha does around the house. Martha thinks your grandmother knows about it, appreciates it. Maybe Martha just needs her to.”
I thought of the girl, not much older than me, who had taken care of me, the girl who had apparently made my bed and cleaned my room without me even knowing she was there because her work kept disappearing. “What happened to Martha?” I asked.
Tom stood. “That’s a story for her to tell you.”
I looked up at him. I knew I might be ending the conversation. But I had to ask it. I had to know. “What happened to you, Tom? How did you die? What killed you, Tom?”
But he wouldn’t tell me.
I’m not sure what was harder to believe: that no one could see me except my new friends—or that all of my new friends were dead.
I didn’t want to scare my grandmother, not like Clara had done with the eggs, but I hung around her, following her into rooms and lingering near doorways. I barely dared to speak to her, beyond calling her name. I had no idea what to say, how to even start to explain what was happening (what was happening?). Still, the evening that I hurt my arm, I tried.
I wrote her a letter.
I ripped a sheet of paper from a school notebook and found a pen. I sat cross-legged on my bed. Dear Grandma, I began. I’m here but something’s the matter. I’m sick or I’m … I couldn’t finish the next thought. I didn’t know what I was going to say, what excuse I was going to try to give.
But it didn’t matter. Because the words faded. They disappeared.
I shook the pen. I dug through my bag and found another. That one didn’t work either. Another pen, another. I tried a pencil. It wasn’t the ink, I realized. It wasn’t the lead.
It was me. I wasn’t going to be able to get the words out. Even if my grandmother had owned a computer and I could have typed her letter, I knew somehow it wouldn’t have worked. I couldn’t make myself be seen.
And I couldn’t make myself be heard. Or read.
I was trapped. Something had snared me. I willed my grandmother to notice me, just notice me, sense me. I waited for her to turn around, to turn off the TV, to see me.
She never did.
“I wanted that too,” Clara said, simply. We were sitting at the end of the driveway, in the grass by the mailbox. “I thought if I just shouted,” Clara said, “if I just made my voice loud enough, if I screamed.”
“It didn’t work?” I asked.
“I just screamed myself hoarse. I can make objects seem to float, and that’s entertaining, but no one sees my hand holding the candlestick.”
I looked away, down the road. Clara made me uncomfortable, but I couldn’t seem to shake her; she could appear and disappear where she liked. “Where’s Tom today?”
She shrugged. “He had a hard night last night.”
“How can you have a hard night? You don’t sleep. What do you do all the time?”
Clara stood. “There are ways of entertaining oneself. Like this.” She nodded toward the road. “Here he comes. Just like I told you.”
The truck pulled to a halt in front of the mailbox. In the front seat, a man in glasses sorted through a stack of envelopes. I felt nervous, like I was about to get in trouble, about to get caught. I didn’t really trust Clara. But Clara said I couldn’t get caught.
She pushed me forward and I tripped against the truck, grasping at the open window frame to steady myself. The man in the truck—the mail carrier—didn’t notice. I said hello. He didn’t notice.
I stood right beside the truck. I took the letters when he stretched them toward the mailbox. I was shaking so hard, I knocked them out of his hands.
He looked up, but not at me. He looked past me, right through me. He didn’t retrieve the mail that had fallen. He didn’t even get out of his truck. “Haunted house!” he said, and yanked the truck into reverse, moving away from us, as fast as he could.
I watched the truck careen down the road, then I picked up the mail from the mud.
“Good work,” Clara said. “Now you know the post office can’t see you. Oh well for your pen pals.”
“You don’t have to be so mean, Clara,” a voice said—and Tom was there, at my side in the way that he and his sister and Martha had, appearing without warning.
I turned to him, and my smile at hearing his voice fell away. On his face, there was a bruise, a huge purple circle blackening his eye, bleeding darkly onto his skin.
Tom said it didn’t hurt, but he wouldn’t let me touch his face, or get an ice pack.
Or Martha. “It’ll fade,” he said. “I promise it will.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I thought you couldn’t bleed. I thought you couldn’t get hurt, couldn’t get bruised. I thought that’s how you knew I wasn’t dead.”
“We can’t get hurt,” Clara said. “Unless—”
“Clara,” Tom said.
She shrugged and turned, skipping back up the hill to the house.
“Tell me about the mailman,” Tom said.
I couldn’t look at Tom with his bruised eye. I looked at the ground instead. “He didn’t see me. He cursed and ran away, said my grandmother’s house was haunted. Do people know, about you and Clara and Martha? Does everyone in town know?”
“I don’t know. There have been stories about this house for a long time. People say it’s cursed.”
“Did you live here? Was Martha your maid?”
“Oh no. We lived down the hill.” He turned and pointed across the road, to an empty field. “There was a little shack there, by the railroad tracks. It was torn down, years and years ago. We had a view of the mansion on the hill, and at night, Clara and I talked about what it might be like to live there. But we didn’t see anything or hear anything strange around the house before…”
“Before you died.”
“Yes.”