“This is none of your business,” Sally tells her daughter.
“Don’t you understand? You make him happy when you fight. It’s just what he wants.”
Sally and Gillian immediately shut up. They exchange a worried look. The kitchen window has been left open all night, and the curtain flaps back and forth, drenched from last night’s downpour.
“Who are you talking about?” Sally asks in a calm and steady tone, as though she were not speaking with someone who might have just flipped her lid.
“The man under the lilacs,” Kylie says.
Gillian nudges Sally with her bare foot. She doesn’t like the sound of this. Plus, Kylie’s got a funny look about her, as if she’s seen something, and she’s not telling, and they’re just going to have to play this guessing game with her until they get it right.
“This man who wants us to fight—is he someone bad?” Sally asks.
Kylie snorts, then takes out the coffeepot and a filter. “He’s vile,” she says—a vocabulary word from last semester that she’s putting to good use for the very first time.
Gillian turns to Sally. “Sounds like someone we know.”
Sally doesn’t bother to remind her sister that only Gillian knows this man. She’s the one who dragged him into their lives simply because she had nowhere else to go. Sally can’t begin to guess how far her sister’s bad judgment will go. Since she’s been sharing a room with Kylie, who knows what she’s confided?
“You told her about Jimmy, didn’t you?” Sally’s skin feels much too hot; before long her face will be flushed and red, her throat will be dry with fury. “You just couldn’t keep your mouth shut.”
“Thanks a lot for trusting me.” Gillian is really insulted. “For your information, I didn’t tell her anything. Not a word,” Gillian insists, although at this moment she’s not sure. She can’t be angered by Sally’s suspicions, because she doesn’t even trust herself. Maybe she’s been talking in her sleep, maybe she’s been telling all while in the very next bed Kylie listens to every word.
“Are you talking about a real man?” Sally asks Kylie. “Someone who’s sneaking around our house?”
“I don’t know if he’s real or not. He’s just there.”
Sally watches her daughter spoon decaf into the white paper filter. At this moment, Kylie seems like a stranger, a grown woman with secrets to keep. In the dark morning light, her gray eyes look completely green, as though they belonged to a cat that can see in the dark. All that Sally wanted for her, a good and ordinary life, has gone up in smoke. Kylie is anything but ordinary. There is no way around that. She is not like the other girls on the block.
“Tell me if you see him now,” Sally says.
Kylie looks at her mother. She’s afraid, but she recognizes her mother’s tone of voice as one to be obeyed and she goes to the window in spite of her fear. Sally and Gillian come to stand beside her. They can see their reflections in the glass, and the wet lawn. Outside are the lilacs, taller and more lush than would seem possible.
“Under the lilacs.” Little knobs of fear are rising on Kylie’s arms and her legs and everywhere in between. “Where the grass is the greenest. He’s right there.”
It is the spot exactly.
Gillian stands close behind Kylie and squints, but all she can make out are the shadows of the lilacs. “Can anyone else see him?”
“The birds.” Kylie blinks back tears. What she wouldn’t have given to look out and find he’s gone. “The bees.”
Gillian is ashen. She is the one who should be punished. She deserves it, not Kylie. Jimmy should be haunting her; each time she closes her eyes, it should be his face she sees. “Oh, fuck,” she says, to no one in particular.
“Was he your boyfriend?” Kylie asks her aunt.
“Once,” Gillian says. “If you can believe it.”
“Is that why he hates us so much?” Kylie asks.
“Honey, he just hates,” Gillian says. “It doesn’t matter if it’s us or them. I just wish I’d learned that when he was still alive.”
“And now he won’t go away.” Kylie understands that much. Even girls of thirteen can figure out that a man’s ghost reflects who he was and everything he’s ever done. There’s a lot of spite under those lilacs. There’s a whole lot of get-even.
Gillian nods. “He won’t go.”
“You’re talking about this as if it were real,” Sally says. “And it just isn’t. It can’t be! No one is out there.”
Kylie turns to look outside. She wants her mother to be right. It would be such a relief to look and see only the grass and the trees, but that’s not all that is out in the yard.
“He’s sitting up and lighting a cigarette. He just threw the burning match on the grass.”
Kylie’s voice sounds breakable, and there are tears in her eyes. Sally has gone very cold and very quiet. It’s Jimmy her daughter is in contact with, all right. Every once in a while, Sally herself has felt something out in the yard, but she’s dismissed the dark shape seen from the corner of her eye, she’s refused to recognize the chill in her bones when she goes to water the cucumbers in the garden. It’s nothing, that’s what she’s told herself. A shadow, a cool breeze, nothing but a dead man who can’t hurt anyone.
Now as she considers her own backyard, Sally accidentally bites her lip, but she pays no attention to the blood she’s drawn. In the grass there is a spiral of smoke, and the scent of something acrid and burning, as if, indeed, someone had carelessly tossed a match onto the wet lawn. He could burn the house down, if he wanted to. He could take over the backyard, leaving them too frightened to do anything but peer through the window. The lawn is rife with crabgrass and weeds, and not mowed nearly often enough. Still, the fireflies come here in July. The robins always find worms after a storm. This is the garden where her girls grew up, and Sally will be damned if she lets Jimmy force her out, considering he wasn’t worth two cents even back when he was alive. He’s not going to sit in her yard and threaten her daughters.
“You don’t have to worry about this,” Sally says to Kylie. “We’ll take care of it.” She goes to the back door and opens it, then nods to Gillian.
“Me?” Gillian has been trying to get a cigarette out of the pack with her hands shaking like a bird’s wings. She has no intention of going into that yard.
“Now,” Sally says, with that strange authority she gets at these times, the worst times, moments of panic and confusion when Gillian’s first instinct is always to run in the other direction, as fast and heedlessly as possible.
They go outside together, so close each can feel the beat of the other’s heart. It rained all night, and now the sticky air is moving in thick mauve-colored waves. The birds aren’t singing this morning, it’s too dark for that. But the humidity has brought the toads away from the creek behind the high school, and they have a sort of song, a deep humming that rises up through the sleepy neighborhood. The toads are crazy about Snickers, which teenagers sometimes throw to them at lunch hour. It’s candy they’re looking for as they wind along the neighborhood, hopping across the squishy lawns and through pools of rainwater that have collected in the gutters. Less than half an hour ago, the newspaper delivery boy joyfully biked right over one of the largest toads, only to discover his bike was headed straight for a tree, which crumpled his front wheel and broke two bones in his left ankle and ensured that there’d be no more newspaper deliveries for today.
One of the toads from the creek is halfway across the lawn, on a path toward the hedge of lilacs. Now that they’re outside, both of the sisters feel cold; they feel the way they used to on winter days, when they would wrap themselves up in an old quilt in the aunts’ parlor and watch the windows as ice formed inside the panes of glass. Just looking at the lilacs makes Sally’s voice naturally drop.
“They’re bigger than they were yesterday. He’s making them grow. He’s doing it with hate or spite, but it sure is working.”