A Curious Tale of the In-Between (13 page)

It was her third day with Lady Savant. At least, she
thought
it was three. Her memory had become unreliable, just like her ability to reason dreams from reality. Thinking of Clarence still provided her with clarity, but her memory of him was becoming unreliable, too. She had been sure his hair was curly and light brown, the color of honey, but now she wondered if it had really been dark like oak, or blond like lemons.

And Felix was even blurrier. If she wanted to think of him, she had to first go back to a memory of one of the afternoons they’d spent lying in the sunlight, when his skin felt warm and real. But she was losing the sound of his voice, and with that, the things he’d said to her.

Finley and Adelaide were nice company, at least. Finley told jokes and sometimes danced and sang, and Adelaide played games. There were whispers in the wallpaper, old echoes in some of the rooms from ghosts who had long since moved on but left their thoughts behind. Pram talked to the echoes, and to Finley and Adelaide, and sometimes to herself.

But she was always silent around Lady Savant.

At first, Pram had thought silence was the best revenge against a woman who used her words against her, but Pram had overlooked something important: Lady Savant was the only living person Pram encountered—aside from the man with the thick arms, who never spoke to her and didn’t seem to care whether she spoke to him. And
though
Finley and Adelaide were kind to her, Pram was lonely for conversation with someone from her own side, who still found relevance in the time of day. She missed the “Good mornings” and “Good nights.” She missed “Have you done your lessons?” and “It’s bath time.”

Without these things to mark the hours, Pram was beginning to feel that she, too, was becoming a ghost.

And so she decided it was time to speak.

She said, “What time is it?”

Lady Savant, who was biting into a croissant, raised her eyebrows. She took a moment to chew and swallow daintily before looking at her wristwatch, which was gold. “It’s quarter past noon.”

Pram stuck out her tongue to catch a snowflake that fell all alone from the sky. “Thank you,” she said. She also missed manners.

“You are most welcome,” Lady Savant said. “Would you like some tea? I’ve brought a jar of honey.”

Pram was hungry, and now at the mention of tea, her tongue longed for the taste of it. She nodded and crawled through the snow, bringing herself onto the picnic blanket. “Why am I not cold?” Pram said.

“Would you prefer to be cold?” Lady Savant asked.

Pram shook her head. Ever since the day the cat tore into her pillow, she’d wished real snow could be as warm
and
as soft, so that she could enjoy it without having to also endure a runny nose or red fingertips.

“Is this weather everything you’ve wished for?” Lady Savant said, as though she was reading Pram’s mind. “It is cold, but you don’t want to feel it, and so you don’t. You’re more powerful than you realize. I’d bet no one has ever told you that, because all that the world sees when it looks at you is a little girl.”

Not everyone
, Pram thought. There had been a boy and a ghost who saw something more when they looked at her, and she’d seen something extraordinary when she looked at them.

Their names escaped her, and after much furious thought, she remembered. Felix and Clarence. They’d left her. They didn’t want her anymore.

No, that wasn’t right—

“Try the tea,” Lady Savant said.

Pram took a sip. It tasted like hot blackberry cobbler, unlike anything she’d ever experienced. She finished it in seconds.

“You’ve been seeing ghosts for as long as you can remember,” Lady Savant said. “But it began with the insects, yes? And then people much later?”

Pram nodded. When she was eight years old, one of the elders read a chapter of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
to
her
each night before bed, and Pram had especially loved the Cheshire Cat, who was sometimes embodied as a mischievous grin. It had reminded her of the boy by the pond.
Felix
, she made herself remember.

“Seeing ghosts is only a small part of it,” Lady Savant said. “As my protégé you’ll learn how powerful you truly are.”

Pram thought about the caravan ride a few days back, when she began to see the spirit world. “Can I go there?” Pram asked. “To where the ghosts are, I mean.” She bit into a lemon scone.

“You can’t stay there for a very long time,” Lady Savant said. “Only for as long as you’re able to hold your breath, and then you’ll be pushed back into the living world. The spirit world knows who does and does not yet belong there.”

Pram finished her scone and reached for another. She had never in her life been so hungry, and food had never been so delicious. She was sure she could never go back to regular oatmeal again without being disappointed.

Lady Savant smiled in a fond way, unlike the exasperated, worried smiles of Pram’s aunts. And Pram wondered if this might be how a mother smiled at her child. She had no way of knowing.

“If I can’t stay long, then what’s the point?” Pram asked.

“
It’s a gift,” Lady Savant said. “Don’t you want it?”

Gift.
Hadn’t there once been a boy who told her she had a gift? She could no longer remember. “I’ve never thought of it as a gift,” Pram said. “No one gave it to me. It’s just the way I am.”

“Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong,” Lady Savant said. “You may have been an ordinary girl if only things had gone differently the day you were born.”

“If my mother hadn’t died, you mean?” Pram said.

“Yes,” Lady Savant said. “Life and fate are fragile. Once things have happened, it’s almost impossible to appreciate how easily they could have never happened.”

Pram had thought about this. She wondered what it would have been like to have been born someone else entirely, or born a hundred years ago, or never born at all.

But there was one thing she wondered about more than all the rest. “Was my mother like this?”

Lady Savant’s smile turned sad. “No, Pram. I’m sure she was ordinary. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t give you this gift.”

Pram lowered one eyebrow in confusion. “I don’t understand.”

“No one has ever told you about your mother?” Lady Savant asked.

“
Not very much,” Pram said. “Her name was Lily and she liked to swim, and she died because of me. And she’s unhappy with me for that.”

“Is that what you think?” Lady Savant said.

“She must be,” Pram said. “Why else would she come to you and not me?”

Pram could no longer remember what it was that Lady Savant had said about her mother’s ghost. Her memory of that night was blurry. Many of her memories were blurry. She tried to think about the boy with the blue eyes (or were they brown?) and the ghost by the pond (or was he a fish that used to swim to her?), but the more she spoke to Lady Savant, the more distant these things seemed. The two-hundred-year-old colonial seemed farther away when she remembered looking at it from the tree by the pond. Had it been white? Yellow? Light blue? She had another sip of tea.

“Let’s talk about something happier,” Lady Savant said. “Have you ever been inside a memory before?”

Pram looked confused.

Lady Savant chuckled and took a bite of toast slathered with purple jam. She swallowed and said, “You can enter the memories of the dead. They don’t mind. They’ve abandoned them. These memories float around in the air like balloons, not attached to anyone.”

Pram looked up at the sky. The edges of clouds were
illuminated
gold with sun. To know that the winter air was ripe with memories made her see the clouds differently, like flowers wanting to be picked.

“How?” Pram said.

“The more time you spend in the spirit world, the more they begin to appear.”

Pram thought of the strange not-dream she’d had in the caravan after she entered the spirit world. She had been a girl with red hair, and someone had been calling her name, but she hadn’t stayed long enough to hear what it was.

Was that someone’s memory?

The idea delighted and worried Pram. “What if I got stuck?” she said.

“You can’t,” Lady Savant said. “If you were to enter the spirit world, it would be very possible to get lost. But you’re entering a memory, and you can only stay for as long as you can hold your breath. Then you’re forced back into the living world by your own desire to breathe.”

Pram had had her fill of scones and tea, and now she drew a tree with jagged and bare branches in the snow. Trees had always saddened her, and at the same time reminded her of her mother, which was strange. Her mother spent time in the water, not in branches.

“How do I go back to the spirit world?” Pram asked.

Lady Savant was brushing the crumbs from the plates
and
stacking them neatly in the basket. “All you have to do is want it,” she said. “Anything you want is yours.”

Pram was dimly aware of her body falling against the snow, her arms and legs crumpled like those of an abandoned marionette. And then in a second she forgot about her body entirely, and Pram disappeared.

She was a man in a hot air balloon, looking down at all the perfect green. From up high, the man thought, the world seemed so planned. Hunks of property fit together like puzzle pieces. The balloon drifted over a farm whose dirt had been combed by a giant rake, a red barn sitting to its left.

How very organized, the man thought. We really do belong here after all.

Pram awoke from the man’s memory, gasping for air. Her eyes were watering as though she’d been in the kitchen while Aunt Dee was dicing onions.

Lady Savant wrapped the picnic blanket around Pram’s shoulders. “Here,” she said. “Your body is cold from the shock.”

Pram felt dizzy, and it took nearly a minute for her to understand that her own body had never left the ground. Astonished, all she could say was, “I was floating.”

Lady Savant looked worried.

But Pram wasn’t worried at all. She could feel sweat pooling on her back and under her arms; her face was hot,
and
it was as if a light had just been turned on inside her, she thought.

She looked at the sky again. She had lived all her life never knowing what more she was capable of. Now that she knew, all she could think about was going back.

CHAPTER

21

F
or the next several nights, Pram lay in the gilded cage and concentrated on entering the spirit world.

Adelaide hopped around the room. “Come out and play,” she said one night, after Pram had been still for a long while.

Pram opened her eyes. Without Lady Savant’s help, she hadn’t been successful in reaching the spirit world, and her head was beginning to hurt. “Adelaide,” she said. “Why didn’t you move on?”

Adelaide twirled and lifted up into the air before her skirt fanned out as she descended. “I was scared,” she said. “I didn’t think anyone would be waiting for me. I thought I could wait until my parents grew old and died, and then I’d go.”

“So did they?” Pram said.

“
I don’t know,” Adelaide said. “I don’t remember them now. Or I guess I do, a little, but they’re shadows.” She pirouetted.

“Do you remember anything about being alive?” Pram asked. “Maybe I can find one of your memories. So far they’ve been random, but if I concentrate very hard, I might be able to find one that belongs to you.”

Adelaide thought. She was quiet for such a long time that Pram sat up and looked for her to be sure she hadn’t disappeared.

“Clickety-tapping,” Adelaide said.

“Clickety-tapping?” Pram repeated.

“Yes,” Adelaide said. “That sound.” Her pale cheeks filled up with pink, and she smiled and continued twirling about the room, singing “clickety-tap, clickety-tap” and clucking her teeth.

Pram closed her eyes.

“You’ve worn yourself out,” Finley said.

She gasped. He was forever appearing places, scaring her out of her wits. He clung to the outside of her cage and caused it to sway. “I’ve seen it happen before.”

“Have you? When?” she said. She already knew his answer and she said it with him: “I can’t remember.”

“Well, I can’t,” he said.

“It was the others, silly,” Adelaide told him. “All the others who lived in this room. Pram is just like them.”

“
I am not like them,” Pram said. “I’m still here.”

Adelaide said, “I hope you stay. I like you.”

Stay.
There was something wrong with that word, Pram thought, like the moment in her dream when she realized nothing she was seeing was real. “No,” she said. “I can’t stay. I have to go eventually.”

“Go where?” Finley asked.

The door to the cage was open, and Pram stared through the space. She didn’t answer right away, because she needed to concentrate so that she could remember. There was a feeling in her chest all of a sudden, a sense of urgency that was painful. Someone was waiting. A boy with blue eyes.

The hurt was unbearable, and Pram immediately forgot it.

“I don’t remember,” she said.

“Play with me,” Adelaide said, holding out her hands and curling and uncurling her fingers.

“Okay,” Pram said.