The Haunting of Sunshine Girl (23 page)

But the bathroom is empty, except for Lex perched on top of the toilet, his new favorite place to sleep.

“You'd tell me if you saw a ghost, wouldn't you, Lex?” I ask, but he doesn't answer. Instead, he opens his eyes and yawns, as if to say,
This is my room. Please go away.

“Some help you are,” I mumble. He blinks his green eyes. Ashley was right—my eyes do look kind of like his. “Maybe I'm part cat,” I whisper. “I mean, that can't be any crazier than what Nolan thinks I am.”

I tiptoe down the hallway and open Mom's door slowly, listening for the steady sounds of her breath. She didn't get home until ten o'clock tonight. She must have forgotten that it's Christmas-time, just like I did.

She's sleeping in her scrubs, pastel peach with dancing teddy bears on the edges of her short sleeves, the kind she used to refuse to wear. She'd always complained that it's difficult for neonatal nurses to be taken seriously when they're wearing scrubs covered in kittens and teddy bears. (The same types of patterns I choose to sleep in, but that's beside the point.) She'd insist on wearing solid-colored scrubs. Why is she wearing these now? Maybe the hospital was out of plain scrubs. Or maybe she doesn't remember that she used to care about things like that.

Her straight auburn hair is spread out messily on the pillow beneath her head. Her breath is kind of ragged, like maybe she's coming down with a cold or something.

I tiptoe into her room and lean over the bed. I expect her eyes to snap open, expect her to say,
What on earth are you doing?
I wouldn't be able to come up with an answer that would satisfy her.
I'd hoped you'd gotten over all that ghost stuff,
she'd sigh, her voice heavy with disappointment.

No
, I'd answer.
I haven't gotten over it. I just found someone else to talk to about it.

Then I'd tell her all about Nolan, about this boy who is so nice and so smart and who laughs at my jokes and doesn't seem to mind that I'm a total klutz. I would tell her that when I first saw him I thought he was very cute, with a nerdy, eighties-movie kind of quality about him. Mom would laugh, and we'd end up talking about all the silly movies we rented on Saturday nights when I was growing up. But after that, Mom would turn serious
and suggest that I call Nolan to apologize. And I'd make a face, but I'd know she was right.

I close my eyes. Wow, is this what I've been reduced to?
Imagining
conversations with my mother instead of actually
having
them?

I don't think I've actually ever felt lonely before. I've heard other people complain about loneliness, I've read about it in books and watched it on TV shows, but I never actually
felt
it myself. It just didn't seem to apply to me. I mean, of course I spent plenty of time by myself, even back when we lived in Austin. As soon as I was old enough not to need a babysitter I became a latchkey kid: letting myself into the house after school, making my own snacks while Mom worked, cooking dinner when she had to work late, dutifully doing my homework without a parent to tell me so.

But all that time I never felt lonely. Even with my mother at work, I never once doubted that she'd come home if I needed her. That she'd always, always be there for me, no matter what.

Now, here she is, just inches away from me, and I've never felt so alone.

My mother grunts in her sleep, and I jump away, my heart pounding. I shake my head; plenty of people make noises in their sleep. I should just go back to my own room, climb under my covers, and get some much-needed sleep.

And I'm about to go do all that—well, try to do all that—when my mother makes another noise. And then another. And another.

Suddenly she sits up in her bed. I jump away in surprise, expecting her to yell at me. But her eyes are closed, her muscles stiff. Her back is straight, her fingers are curled into tightly
clenched fists, and her mouth is open. Ugly, awful sounds start to come out of it. Her voice doesn't sound anything like her voice at all.

I don't think they're just noises. I think they're
words.
But words I don't recognize. Words in a language I've never heard, a language my mother doesn't speak. A language that—from the guttural, hacking, horrible sound of it—doesn't resemble any other language that any other person on the planet speaks.

“Mom?” I say softly and take a step closer to the bed. I should wait. She'll lie back onto her pillows eventually, right? She's probably just having a bad dream or something. Plenty of people make noises when they have bad dreams.

But the strange words coming from her mouth are only getting louder. They sound like gibberish, but angry gibberish—shouts and protestations. She stretches her arms out in front of her and points her finger at something across the room that I can't see. Oscar and Lex are hovering in the doorway, wondering what happened to their friend Kat.

Then she lets out a howl, a scream that makes my flesh crawl.

“Mom!” I scream. I pounce onto the bed and reach for her, ready to grab her arms and wrestle if I have to, ready to slap her across the face if that's what it takes to wake her. But the instant my fingers touch her arm, her body goes slack. The horrible sounds stop coming from her mouth, and instead she lets out a sleepy sort of sigh as she lies back onto her pillows.

“Is that you, Sunshine?” she asks sleepily. Her voice is back to normal now.

“It's me,” I answer.

“My Sunshine,” she says.

“I think you were having a bad dream.”

“I think I was,” she agrees groggily. “But my Sunshine made it go away.” Her eyelids flutter like she's trying to wake up to talk to me, but sleep has too deep a hold on her.

“Don't try to wake up,” I say, reaching out to brush her hair off her forehead. She rolls over onto her side, curling up like a cat. I wait until her breath is smooth and even—not ragged like it was before—and then I get up off the bed and tiptoe back to my room.

Did I do that? I mean, not the scary, guttural-speaking part—I don't know who or what did that—but the nice, peaceful, falling back to sleep part?
My Sunshine made it go away.
Did my touch somehow—I don't know—startle the words out of her throat, ease her muscles into relaxing?

Nolan would say that I did. Because I'm a luiseach. I was bringing light, or whatever it is that we—
they
—do. He would say that my powers were kicking in, just like he'd hoped they would.

But Nolan isn't here to say anything at all.

Oscar beats me back to my room, using my absence from the bed as his chance to lie down on my pillow, taking up all the space my head previously occupied. Curling around him, I slide back under the covers. I wonder whether I'll dream of the girl again, whispering words I can't hear. Nothing like Mom's shouts.

“Too bad I can't bring you into my dream with me,” I murmur to Oscar. “Maybe you'd be able to hear that little girl with your supersonic dog hearing. Not that it would do me much good, since I don't speak dog and you don't speak English.”

But then I hear whispers once more, the same muffled sounds from my dream. I pinch myself to make sure I'm still awake.

“That wasn't you, was it, Oscar?” I'm only half kidding. If he
suddenly opened his mouth and started lecturing me in a tony British accent, I'm not sure I'd even find it surprising anymore.

The whispers continue.

“I'm sorry,” I say to the darkness, “I still can't hear you.”

I lean over and turn on my bedside light, as though I think that illumination will magically enable me to hear better.

There, peeking out from beneath my worn copy of
Pride and Prejudice,
is a stack of the black-and-white pictures I took back in August. (Wowza, that feels like a million years ago now.) I glance at my camera perched on the bookshelves above my bed. I haven't touched it in ages, just left it all alone, dust collecting in its gears; after the way my mom acted, it felt like all my pictures of this house were worthless.

I push the book aside and gaze at the photo on top of the stack: a picture of this room that I must have taken from the bed. It's a picture of my desk and the window, the shelf with my unicorn collection. I could never forget this picture. Because when I took it the unicorn with the broken horn had been in the back, hidden behind the ones that remained intact. But when I saw the developed photograph, there he was again, this time standing front and center.

“How'd you pull that off?” I say out loud, picking the picture up and studying it. “You know how to work Photoshop or something?” Did her magical ghost powers follow the film to Austin? Did they seep into the machines when the people at Max's developed it?

There's no answer. The nonsense whispers stop.

In my hands the picture grows cold, like it's made of ice instead of paper. I almost drop it, but I grip it harder and lean forward to take a closer look. Beads of water sprout along its edges, like someone with wet fingers is holding it alongside me.

I lean over to place the photo beneath my bedside lamp. The hairs on the back of my neck start to prick and tickle. “What is it? What did you do?”

There. There are words scrawled across my desk. No, not words. A name. I squint, wishing I had one of those magnifying glasses that fit in the crook of my eye like jewelers wear to inspect diamonds for flaws.

I stand up and walk across the room and switch on my desk lamp. As I suspected, the words are traced out of water here in 3-D too. The muscles in my mouth finally, finally allow me the tiniest little bit of a smile.

“Anna Wilde,” I read out loud, and the shelf that holds my unicorns begins to shake. “Anna Wilde,” I say again, louder this time, and Oscar stands up on the bed behind me, wagging his tiny tail back and forth frantically, as though he'd been waiting for me to say that name all this time.

Maybe he could hear her after all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Anna Wilde

I sit down at my desk
and open my laptop. I Google “Anna Wilde,” being careful not to smudge the wet letters on my desk.

Hundreds of matches come up. This must be the opposite of how Nolan felt when he Googled “luiseach” for the first time.

I reach for my phone. It's the middle of the night, but I don't think Nolan will mind being woken up when I have such a big development to share—

No.
I shake my head. For a second there I forgot that we fought earlier. Forgot that maybe he'll never want to hear from me again. Forgot that I was the meanest version of myself that I've ever been, after he'd never been anything but nice to me.

Forgot that I'm on my own now.

I scroll down through the results on my screen. Apparently there's more than one Anna Wilde in the world. I try to narrow it down. I search again, this time typing the words “Ridgemont, Washington” after Anna's name. Fewer results come up, but there's still plenty to choose from.

I click on a link for the
Ridgemont Herald.
I blink at the bold headline scrawled across my computer screen: “Man Discovers Drowned Daughter, Dies from Shock.”

I read that two years ago, a ten-year-old girl named Anna Wilde drowned in the bathtub of her family's house somewhere in Ridgemont. When her father discovered her lifeless body, he had a heart attack and died on the spot. The man's wife and girl's mother, back home from a business trip, discovered their bodies later. A lump rises in my throat as I think about what happened to this poor family, to the little girl who's been my playmate for months now.

I turn around and look at my bedroom door, knowing that the bathroom is just outside. I shiver as I remember the sound of the girl—Anna—begging for her life, splashing against someone's hold.

I turn back to the article. It says that no foul play was suspected. It was just a terrible accident. A family tragedy. I shake my head. What I heard in the bathroom that night was no accident.

I scroll down. There is a picture of an empty bathtub. I lean closer to my computer.

And the lump in my throat shifts. Oh my gosh, I'm going to throw up. Literally.

I get up so fast that I knock my chair over, and the
thump
of it hitting the carpet makes Oscar jump off my bed and hide beneath it. I barely make it to the bathroom in time. It's been hours since I ate anything, so I don't actually have much in me to throw up. Still, my body manages to empty itself, the muscles in my belly spasming and clenching until everything aches.

I crouch beside the toilet and rest my head on the cool porcelain. For the first time in months—outside of Nolan's
presence—I'm warm. Not just warm. I'm
hot.
My face is covered in a sheen of sweat.

I close my eyes.

I've felt nauseated every time Nolan came too close, but that's nothing compared to this. With Nolan I could usually swallow my gags, and I never actually threw up. Most of all, with him I could just take a step away and the feeling would subside.

I wipe my mouth and flush the toilet. I lean over the sink and splash some cold water on my face. When Anna's ghost was locked in this bathroom, was she reenacting the night of her death? Was she somehow forced to relive it? Just the thought makes me shudder with horror.