Revived Spirits (6 page)

“He’s still here.”

Her eyes widen. “Really?”

“He and Mom went to see the chickens.”

“Miranda!” Granny’s voice carries up the stairs. “We’re fixing to have dessert!”

Abigail lets out a girly little squeal. “Is he down there?”

“Yeah.”

“Take me to look at him,” she says. “I’ll get in the mirror.”

“And how do I explain why I’m holding a hand mirror when I go down for dessert?”

“You’ll think of something. Please!”

It’s hard to resist a begging ghost. I set the mirror on the floor, and she disappears into it. When I walk downstairs, mirror in hand, Granny and Mom and Dave are settled in the living room with cups of tea. A tray sitting on the coffee table holds the buttermilk pie Granny made this morning.

When I walk in the room Dave is saying “You have so many lovely antiques,” and a moment of inspiration hits me. I make a beeline for him. “Here’s a piece that might interest you,” I say. “It’s a silver-framed hand mirror that dates from before the Civil War.” I give him the mirror so he can have
a good look at it and Abigail can have a good look at him.

Mom shoots me a knowing glance.

“Nice,” he says, sounding a little confused. He gives it back to me, and I set it on the end table. This means that Abigail will be staring at the ceiling for the rest of the time she’s here, but at least she’ll be able to eavesdrop on the conversation.

Mom serves the pie, and for a while we mainly talk about how good it is. But then we’re interrupted by a squawk and the cry, “There’s a fox in the henhouse!”

Dave looks around, really confused this time, but Mom and Granny and I know the source of the sound: Methuselah’s cage in the corner. Granny draped it with a sheet in hopes that he’d be quiet, but no such luck.

“That’s my mother’s parrot, Methuselah,” Mom says. “He has to butt in on every conversation.”

“A parrot?” Dave says. “May I see him?”

Granny doesn’t have to be asked twice. She rises and lifts the cover from Methuselah’s cage and opens the door. She holds out her arm, and the ancient bird steps onto it.

“Amazing!” Dave says. “Would he sit on me like that?”

“We could try and see,” Granny says. “He
ain’t
used to being around men, though.”

She brings Methuselah over to Dave, who holds out his arm. Methuselah cocks his head, curious, then steps onto Dave’s wrist. He edges his way up Dave’s arm, lets out an ear-piercing screech, then lunges forward and rips out a clump of Dave’s beard.

“
Ow
!” Dave grabs his plucked chin, and Methuselah flies back to his cage with beard in his beak.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” Mom says, hovering over him.

“He never did take much to men,” Granny says, shaking her head.

At first I’m afraid Dave might be crying from pain, but then I realize he’s laughing. “I wonder if pirates ever had that problem,” he says.

“I really am so sorry,” Mom says. “Can I get you anything?”

“No, I’m fine. It’ll grow back.” He’s laughing so hard that Mom and Granny and I have to join him. When I glance into the mirror, Abigail’s laughing too.

I’m sitting at Adam’s and my table in the cafeteria, but there’s no Adam. He had an orthodontist’s appointment today, so his mom picked him up right before lunch. Sitting alone at our table is grim. But with Adam moving soon, I guess I’ll have to get used to it.

I’m just about to dig a book out of my backpack when I see
Caylie
coming out of the cafeteria line. She’s sat with Adam and me a couple more times, but I haven’t seen her at lunch lately. I wave to her and motion to my empty table, hoping I look friendly instead of pathetic.

She sits down across from me. “Hey,” she says. “Where’s your right-hand man?”

“Getting the screws tightened on his braces.”

Caylie
winces. “I’m just as glad my family can’t afford them things. They’ve
gotta
hurt.”

“Adam says they do,” I say, peeling my orange. “He has to eat soup and oatmeal for a couple of days after they’re tightened.”

Caylie
is opening packets of ketchup and making a big red puddle next to her
french
fries. “I like my teeth just fine where they are.”

“Me, too.” I pop a wedge of orange in my mouth. “This is the first time I’ve seen you in the cafeteria in a while.”

She swirls a fry through her puddle of ketchup. “Yeah, well, just between you and me, some days I’ve been going to see the school counselor at lunch. Because of my ‘troubled home life.’” She wiggles her fingers to make quotation marks.

“Oh,” I say, remembering the images I saw in
Caylie’s
head the day I met her: the woman being led to the police car telling her daughter to be good.

“Miranda,”
Caylie
says, now looking me in the eye. “Is it all right if I talk to you? I mean, like, really talk to you?”

“Sure.”

“I’ve wanted to for a while now, but I didn’t want to make Adam feel weird. You know how boys are when it comes to talking about stuff that matters.”

I nod.

She looks back down at her tray. “The reason I’m living with my
mamaw
and papaw right now is because my mama’s in jail.”

“Really?” I say, like this isn’t something I’d already figured out.

“Yeah.” She looks back up at me. “Do you know what meth is?”

“My mom’s a social worker, so I’ve heard her talk about it,” I say. Every story she’s told that involves meth has been tragic: children neglected by their parents and put into foster care, parents who go to jail and get off the stuff only to start using it again as soon as they’re free. “She says it’s the worst drug there is—that it tears people apart, tears families apart.”

“She’s right,”
Caylie
says, like somebody who knows what she’s talking about. “My mom got busted for meth. The cops found the stuff you use to make it in the trunk of her car. But she says the stuff wasn’t hers. She did used to have a problem with it, but she says she’d been clean for six months when she got busted. She swears it was Daryl, her ex-boyfriend, that set her up. He’d been living with us and cooking meth and using it till Mom finally got the guts to kick him out. She says Daryl planted the stuff in her car.”

“Do you believe her?”

“I don’t know.”
Caylie’s
eyes well up. “I want to believe her. Before she started using, she was a really good mom. But when the drugs started, so did the lies. I guess I don’t know whether or not I can trust her again.”

I nod. What a sad thing for a kid to have to say about her own mother. “When she got arrested, did the police do a drug test?”

“Yeah, and she didn’t pass.” She looks around, then leans across the table. “But I’ll tell you something. When the cops took me out of that house, I couldn’t pass a drug test neither. If you’ve lived in a house where somebody’s cooking, the meth gets everywhere—in the walls, on the furniture, on your clothes and hair, and on your plates and cups and forks. So even if you
ain’t
using it, it still works its way into your system. The police had to burn all my clothes, all my blankets, even my stuffed animals I’d had since I was little. It was all poisoned.”

I reach across the table to pat her hand, and when I do, her pain roars through me like a speeding train. I see two female police officers dressed in hazardous material gear, ordering her to strip, turning on a hose, and telling her to wash with a special decontaminating soap. They turn the hose on her again, and across the yard, I see her clothes, her bedding, and her teddy bears all in a burn pile, her childhood going up in flames.

When I pull my hand away, it’s shaking. “I can tell you’ve really been through a lot,” I say.

Caylie
nods. “I’m still going through a lot. I shouldn’t complain about living with
Mamaw
and Papaw. Their house is clean, and
Mamaw
cooks me a good breakfast and supper every day. But they
ain’t
used to having a young person around all the time, and they think that everything that’s of this world’s a sin. My mom was raised that way, and she left the church as soon as she left home. She said she was gonna raise her daughter to believe in God but also to know how to live in the world.”

“And now you’re having to live the same way she did growing up.”

Caylie
smiles a little. “No fair, huh?”

“Nope. Do you ever get to see your mom?”

“Yeah. The jail allows visitors on Sunday afternoons. So every Sunday we go to church, then we eat lunch, and then we go see Mama out at the jail. She don’t hardly look like herself. She can’t wear makeup, and the color’s growing out of her hair. She has to wear this ugly orange jumpsuit.”

I try to picture my own mother under those conditions. “I can’t imagine what that would be like.”

Caylie
looks right at me. “But you could if you looked inside my head, right? Is what people say about you true—that you can look inside people’s heads and see the truth?”

“I can look inside people’s heads and see what’s there. I don’t guess that means it’s always the truth. Why do you ask?”

“Because there’s something else I wanted to ask you. I was thinking...if you was to come to the jail with us one Sunday, do you think you’d be able to see into my mama’s mind?”

“Why would I do that?” I ask, surprised and uneasy.

“Because,”
Caylie
says, her voice choked, “I want to know if she’s telling the truth when she says she’s innocent, that she was set up. I want to know if she means it when she says she wants to be a real mother to me again.” A tear runs down her cheek.

“Those are the kinds of things I might be able to tell if I met her,” I say.

Caylie’s
eyes shine. “So you’ll come with us on Sunday?”

There’s a hitch in this plan that
Caylie
doesn’t seem to have thought about. “
Caylie
, your grandparents know who I am. They warned you to stay away from me. So how are they going to feel about the Witch Girl showing up to visit the jail with them?”

“Oh,”
Caylie
says, like I just hit her in the stomach. “I hadn’t thought about that.”

“Is there any way the two of us could go there by ourselves?”

“No. It’s a rule that kids can only come when they’re with the adult relative of the prisoner.”

So much for that, then. “Okay,” I say as the bell rings, signaling the end of lunch. “I really do want to help you, but I need a little time to figure out how to go about it. Is it okay if I talk to Adam about this?”

“Doo
dee
doo
doo
, doo
dee
doo
doo
.” Adam and Abigail and I are singing along with the theme song of
The Twilight Zone
, which Adam has brought over for us to watch. Being the classic horror nerd he is, it’s hardly surprising that he has every episode of the show on DVD.

“Do you want to watch another? This one called ‘The Eye of the Beholder’ is good,” Adam says, looking at the DVD’s menu. We have to watch DVDs on Adam’s laptop since my family has just barely worked its way up to having a VHS player. Adam says it’s still progress—at least we’re living like it’s the 1980s, not the 1880s.

“I would watch another,” says Abigail, who’d be happy staring at moving pictures all night every night.

“I would, too,” I say, “but I also want to talk to y’all about something.”

“What’s that?” Adam grabs a handful of popcorn.

“You remember
Caylie
from school, right?” I say.

“Yeah. The girl who reminded me that appearances are deceiving.” He tosses up a piece of popcorn and catches it in his mouth.