I Am the Ghost in Your House Read online

Except not entirely alone. We had each other, at least.

  That was all we had.

  Panicked, I clutched at the empty air where my mother had been. But it wasn’t empty. My knuckles collided sharply with her shoulder.

  She stuttered back into view.

  “You hit me,” she said, brows furrowed.

  I gaped at her. A moment later, she doubled over and vomited onto the floor.

  We always spoke quietly to each other on trains. The muted rush of air and clatter of wheels on tracks was usually enough to hide our words. But Mother’s retching sounds were loud. A sharp acrid odor jammed itself up my nose.

  “Aw, hell no,” said the woman in the seat behind us. “Riley, you being sick over there?”

  “Nuh-uh,” called a kid from across the aisle.

  I shoved the ginger ale into my backpack. My mother had figured out a system years ago: we cut slits in the shoulders of our shirts, then threaded the backpack straps through so they would touch our skin at all times and thus keep the packs (and everything in them) invisible.

  My mother was wiping her mouth with a shaking hand. I waved urgently toward the far end of the train car. She nodded and followed me down the aisle into the larger of the two bathroom compartments. I slid the heavy door shut, latched it.

  “What the hell is going on?” I asked her, trying to keep my voice level.

  She leaned against the wall by the sink, eyes shut, one hand on her stomach. The train lurched back into motion beneath us. Going the right way this time, it felt like.

  “Mom?”

  Her eyes fluttered open. She reached toward the sink, cupped her hand under the faucet. “Turn it on for me, will you?”

  I wanted to refuse, to yell at her for scaring me like that, but I knew that was a selfish, childish way to act. I was seventeen, nearly an adult now, so I reached forward, pressed the faucet button. Water dribbled out, gathering slowly in my mother’s glassy palms. She rinsed her mouth. Rinsed it again.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” she said finally, straightening up. “I guess I got motion sick.”

  Which was bullshit. I’d been riding trains with her all my life, and she’d never gotten motion sick. We rode for days sometimes. Weeks.

  “You disappeared,” I said accusingly.

  “Oh.” A series of expressions ghosted briefly across her face. “I didn’t realize.”

  I realized, though. Understood those flickers of emotion. She wasn’t shocked, wasn’t panicked. She knew. This wasn’t the first time. I felt a flicker of rage.

  “This has happened before?” I asked, far louder than usual. Loud enough that someone could have heard. I knew I wasn’t being fair. She was sick, obviously. Something was wrong with her. I should be nice to her, not angry with her.

  She frowned, seemed to consider lying, which was answer enough.

  “When?” I demanded. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Keep your voice down.”

  “You’re the one who puked loud enough for the whole train car to hear.”

  She sighed and rubbed her eyes. Was she more translucent than usual? I wasn’t sure. I could read the be considerate of your fellow passengers, don’t leave a mess sign clearly through her left shoulder.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said, another obvious lie. “I just need to rest.”

  We had been moving around a lot lately. But that wasn’t unusual.

  We are restless people by nature. We roam, from one house to another, one city to the next. There is a limit to how long we can stay somewhere before people start to notice. Even when we find an empty house, there is always the risk of the owners returning, or new buyers moving in, or (as happened exactly once) waking up to a wrecking ball smashing through the front window.

  “You aren’t fine,” I told her. “That was scary.” An understatement.

  “Pie,” she said, which is what I went by, since the name she gave me was too sad. “We can talk about this later.” Her voice took on the hard edge of a maternal lecture, the same tone in which she had so often said, We are never going back to that city, Pie, and you know why. “Let’s find a house as soon as we get in. I feel like I’ve barely had time to close my eyes the last few weeks.”

  I frowned at her. Three weeks ago had been my birthday, which we’d celebrated on the coast of California in a condemned beach house. My mother had gathered seventeen miniature cakes from various bakeries, and I’d taken a single bite out of each.

  My birthday gift, she told me, was that I could choose where we went for a while. Which was unusual. I was used to my mother being in charge. Always following her where she wanted to go, following her many rules to keep us safe and undetected.

  Do not wander off. Do not walk in snow or sand or gravel or mud or loose dirt. Do not exhale too much outside when the temperature is below freezing. Avoid walking in precipitation of any kind. Avoid smoke. Never get in a pool or other body of water in view of others. Do not sit on a soft surface unless alone. Never touch anything with an ungloved hand when someone is looking. Never move anything with a gloved hand when someone is looking. Do not take anything with a security tag. Do not take anything too personal or too ostentatious. Take only what you need. Be quiet, be quiet, be quiet. Never speak when someone can hear you. Never touch them. Never let anyone, in any way, know that you are there.

  Somebody jiggled the bathroom door handle. My mother flinched. My anger died, guilt creeping in to fill the empty space. I’d been dragging us around the country at breakneck speed. Maybe this was all my fault.

  “We’d better go wait between the cars,” my mother said. She’d seemed normal the last few weeks. But maybe I hadn’t been paying enough attention. Not a grown-up at all. Still just a silly selfish kid.

  Probably the fact that she’d agreed to go back to Pittsburgh, even for a day, should have told me something was wrong.

  Is that why she’d agreed? She was just too tired to argue?

  It should have been enough that she still let me have Halloween, still let me bend the rules on that one day of the year. Pushing for Pittsburgh had been ungrateful.

  Especially given what I’d been planning to do once we got there. What I was still planning to do.

  “Okay,” I said, deflated. “Yeah. Ready?”

  My mother nodded. I took a breath, unlatched the bathroom door, slid it open. The Mennonite woman I’d noticed before was waiting just outside. She looked up, confused. I slipped past her, barely avoided brushing her arm.

  The woman peered into the bathroom. “Hello?” she called.

  I pressed the door panel at the end of the car, and my mother and I were lost to the screaming metal, the clanking floor, the rattling walls, the lonely wailing wind.

  Anywhere with a Station

  I’ve spent half my life on trains. Sometimes I wake up in a house and feel confused about why we aren’t moving, why I can’t hear the rattle of the tracks.

  We once spent a whole month riding around the country in big loops, setting ourselves up in empty roomettes on double-decker sleeper car trains.

  I learned to understand the world in terms of distance. How far are we from New York? I asked my mother once when I was young, pestering her when she wanted silence. How far from California, from the moon?

  As an answer, she grabbed a jewel-handled hairbrush from the dressing table in the rich lady’s bedroom where we were staying, plonked it at the upper-right corner of the four-poster bed. New York City, she said, pointing. A pill bottle placed on the lower-left corner became Los Angeles. A pair of silk panties retrieved from a drawer, the entire state of Florida. The Mississippi River she made from a robe tie. A pillow was the Rocky Mountains.

  She kept adding more objects, naming them. It was magic to me. I studied that map for hours while my mother rested. Drove a train made
of an empty box of raisins from one end to the other, over and over.

  I often thought of the country as a big bed when I was watching it rush past out a train window. The low rolling mountains of the East were a lumpy blanket. As the train moved west, the blanket was gradually ironed out, neatly pinstriped with rows of plants, until finally it grew so flat, the elevation so unceasingly even, that even a hill twenty feet high seemed like Mount Ararat, a miracle. If we kept going, the blanket crumpled up again, dotted with linty shrubs and then suddenly: mesas! buttes! The toes of giants sticking up beneath the covers. The craggy peaks of their knees. Their hips and shoulders, their faces. Active-volcano noses. And finally, the foot of the bed, untucked blanket trailing gently down to the ocean floor.

  My mother and I have visited a lot of cities, sure, and even some smaller towns, but most of what I’ve seen of this country I’ve seen from the window of a train.

  And what have I seen? Put into words, it doesn’t seem like much. A sofa on the bank of a river. The sun setting against red cliffs. Watercolor skies reflected in flooded fields. A family of elk pausing beside a mountain lake, glancing up. A whole rodeo, for a moment. Children running in the streets, waving. Backyard pools sparkling turquoise. Two piebald horses standing side by side in opposite directions, so they looked like one creature with two heads. Wildfire smoke in the distance.

  A whole lot of landscape, a whole lot of nothing. A lot of big empty land and wide lonely sky with nobody living in it, nobody even looking at it. Nobody but me.

  The vestibules between train cars are mostly doors. One at each end, leading to the passenger cars. And then two exit doors on each side, leading out to the rushing landscape, to freedom/certain death. Out the dirty window on the way to Pittsburgh, I watched the river swish by a third time, glittering now with dappled sunlight.

  My mother was sitting against the opposite door, hunched over, forehead resting on her knees, arms wrapped around herself.

  I turned every few minutes to check that she was still there. It kept hitting me like little shock waves, that moment when she’d been gone. When I thought: My mother is dead. I’m alone now. More alone than I’ve ever been.

  Which was saying something.

  If there was a contest for the loneliest person in the whole world, I’d often thought I could win. You don’t get much chance to socialize when no one but your mother can see you.

  I am used to loneliness. I am good at it. It is a skill I have mastered. Loneliness is a part of who I am, a well so deep it could never be filled.

  Occasionally people passed through the train vestibule on their way to or from the café car. If they’d reached out their arms, they could have touched us.

  But, of course, they never did.

  As we got closer to Pittsburgh, the scenery changed. Trees gave way to power lines, rivers to paved expanses, littered with brightly colored trucks and beams and shipping containers, brushed with rust, as if some giant child had left its toys out in the rain.

  I rolled up one glove and checked my watch. It had a diamond for twelve o’clock, and Mother had been angry with me for taking it from the jewelry store in LA, because it set off an antitheft alarm on our way out and alarms give her headaches. Our train was running more than an hour and a half late. I told myself it didn’t matter, not really. That it wasn’t a sign, wasn’t a judgment from the universe.

  I wasn’t usually impatient. You couldn’t be if you rode trains. But in a way, I’d already been waiting for two whole years. Waiting to go back to Pittsburgh. Waiting to see her.

  Tess.

  Though, of course, she couldn’t see me.

  It was too loud to hear in the vestibule, so I leaned over and tapped my mother on the knee. We’d lived for several months, once, at a school for the Deaf. Since then, we’d kept up a study of American Sign Language. It was beautiful and useful.

  “You okay?” I signed.

  “I’m sorry,” she signed back. “Let’s find food, a house. I’ll sleep. We can still go to that place you like. Tonight.”

  I hadn’t told my mother the real reason I wanted to go back to Pittsburgh. I couldn’t. My mother didn’t even know about Tess. Didn’t remember her name, probably. There’d be no reason to.

  She was just a girl whose house we stayed in once.

  Nothing more.

  So I’d lied, told my mom I was absolutely dying to return to this museum, the Mattress Factory. The building used to be a warehouse, but now it housed experimental-art exhibits.

  And look, it wasn’t a total lie. I genuinely loved that museum. Last time my mother and I visited, it was featuring art made of light. In one of the galleries, I stood in the middle of a piece and the multicolored beams of light projected from the wall pierced my stomach, went right through me.

  A train door hissed open, and I jumped back. The conductor strode through. My mother and I shuffled awkwardly around to avoid him as he peered out the window, speaking on his crackling radio to someone at the station.

  The city came rushing up around us. It opened its mouth of tunnels and highway bridges and swallowed us whole.

  The train groaned slowly to a halt in the station. When the conductor unlatched the door to the outside, we wriggled past him, hopped down to the platform, and hugged the far wall while passengers flowed off the train.

  I’ve always loved the moment of disembarking, the excitement of entering a new city. Even when the city isn’t actually new, somehow stepping off a train makes it feel that way. This should have been exciting, returning to Pittsburgh, but I felt uneasy.

  My mother took my hand, something she hadn’t done since I was a child. I led her out of the station. She walked slowly, trailing me across the street beneath a highway bridge.

  I tried to remember the layout of Pittsburgh as we walked. The main part of the city is basically shaped like a slice of pizza. Three rivers meet at the point of the slice.

  The thought of pizza made me hungry. I should have grabbed something for myself from the café car.

  We’d need to catch a bus as soon as possible, get away from downtown. Find some big old Victorian house in a rich part of the city. A house with more rooms than anyone could ever use. Baroque curtains. Plush cushions everywhere. Fainting couches. My mother loved a good fainting couch.

  Maybe it was like fainting, the thing that had happened. Sure, in seventeen years I’d never seen anything like it, but what did I know? Not enough.

  I turned to ask my mother what she thought about the fainting idea, but she wasn’t there.

  My heart turned over. I sucked in a breath too fast, nearly choked on it.

  She was there, though, even though my eyes told me otherwise. I was holding her hand. I squeezed her palm. Hard. Harder. I could feel her, but I couldn’t see her.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes?” she said, and like blinking, she was back.

  My pulse didn’t slow. I waited for her to say something, anything, to acknowledge what had happened. Was she aware of it? She gave me a thin smile, said nothing.

  Up ahead, a familiar neon sign glowed against the gray dawn sky.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked. Maybe food would help.

  “Sure,” she said.

  Sometimes we waited outside doors until someone opened them and we could slip in without drawing attention, but I was in a full panic, so I pushed right through the doors of the McDonald’s. A few customers turned to look, but luckily most people would rather ignore unexplained phenomena. It’s easier than admitting to themselves that the world makes no sense.

  “I’ll have fries,” my mother said. “I need the restroom.”

  I watched her go, my heart still racing. Something was wrong and I didn’t know what it was and I didn’t know how to help and I didn’t know why she was pretending it was fine.

  I hurried past the line of customers to an e
mpty stretch of counter, swung myself up, slid across, and hopped down on the other side.

  Back in the humid kitchen, a boy who didn’t look any older than me lifted a basket of fries from the fryer, scooped them into cardboard sleeves with a swift flick of the wrist, placed them onto a rack. I pulled off a glove, grabbed one.

  I was only touching the cardboard, not the fries themselves, but it was enough to turn the whole carton shimmery. I couldn’t control my power, not consciously, but it still relied on what I perceived as the boundaries of an object. That was why the backpacks worked. Or why, when I held a glass, the liquid didn’t just appear to be floating uncontained in the air.

  I snatched one fry out of the cardboard sleeve with my teeth and ate it, trying to concentrate on the taste instead of my fear. The salt buzzed on my tongue.

  My mother and I had waltzed into five-star restaurants, lifted dishes from celebrity chefs. We’d had sous vide veal with white-truffle aioli. Mille-feuille brushed with gold leaf. People notice when a plate of duck confit or foie gras goes missing. At McDonald’s, no one noticed some missing fries. Or if they did, they didn’t care. They weren’t being paid enough to care.

  I sidled carefully but quickly through the cramped kitchen, reached out to the rack of freshly wrapped burgers between the kitchen and the counter area.

  With my bare hand, I grabbed a burger—

  And dropped it in surprise as a cashier on the other side of the rack screamed.

  The instant I’d touched one wrapped burger, the whole rack had gone transparent. Only for a few seconds. But that was long enough.

  “Jesus!” I heard the cashier saying. “You see that, Cheryl? Am I having a stroke?”

  I was startled. But this, at least, I understood.

  It had happened once before.

  It was some side effect of stress and adrenaline. In my panic, the effect of my touch got stronger, less discriminating. I needed to be more careful, needed to slow down, to breathe, to focus. Not let things get out of hand.