A BABY’S CRY WOKE ME. I blinked into the darkness, thinking I was in Nebraska and the kids were still little —Zoey, a five-year-old with eyes that were summer-sky blue, and J.T., just a few weeks. Zoey had been such an easy baby, and thank goodness for that, because when she’d come into the world, I was a nineteen-year-old college dropout, on my own after a literature professor, who swore he loved me, dumped me at the doors of an abortion clinic with a wad of cash in my hand.
Where Zoey had been the perfect baby, her brother was colicky and hard to handle. J.T.’s daddy was getting restless about family life. I could feel it. He was tired of working every day to pay the bills. He missed traveling and rodeoing the way he had before we met and I got pregnant. . . .
I stood on the deck and waved good-bye as he left in his pickup, but when the dust cleared, Iola Poole’s big house was there. The front door hung open, the soft glow of a lamp seeping across the salt-weathered porch, bleeding through the railings, tumbling into a spray of overgrown white roses.
A figure moved past a window along the porch. Someone was in there. But it couldn’t be Iola. I’d found her lifeless in her blue-flowered dress . . . hadn’t I?
Had I only dreamed it? Was that real, or was this real?
I tried to make out the face of the woman setting a teapot and cups on the little table in the bay window. Was it Iola? Through the wavy glass and the lace curtains, I couldn’t tell.
I wanted to walk closer, to cross the lawn, but my legs were like lead, refusing to take me even as far as the driveway.
Suddenly I was in the towering white house, walking from room to room. “Hello? Is anyone here?” Lamps burned bright and fires crackled in hearths as if the house had been prepared for guests. Yet each shadowed corner, each hallway, was empty. “Hello? Iola Anne Poole? Iola? Who’s in here?”
The question was answered only by timbers groaning and wind whistling through window sashes. The baby was crying again, but farther away this time, somewhere outside. Whose baby? Was it wandering toward Mosey Creek or the sedges, in danger of falling into the water?
I was in the upstairs hall, but I couldn’t remember how I came to be there. I stood among the bookshelves, reached for the door to the blue room. The one-eared cat jumped from a shelf, hissing. The bedroom door fell open, and a warm light radiated into the hall. The light grew brighter, blinding, mesmerizing. Compelling. Someone was standing within it.
“Iola?” The word was little more than a breath. “Iola Anne Poole?”
“Mama?” The answer seemed wrong. The wrong voice.
J.T.’s voice. Was he in the house with me?
“Mama?”
Something grabbed my shoulder, tried to pull me back from the door. I raised my arm, felt my elbow strike flesh and knock the hand away. I wanted to look into the room, to see who was inside the light.
“Mama!”
The light, the room, the door —everything faded. I was in bed in the cottage.
J.T. stood over me, a silhouette against the glow of an old night lamp featuring the Virgin Mary clasping her hands in prayer. He rubbed his arm. “You hit me.”
“What?” My mouth was dry, my throat filmy and swollen. “What time is it?”
“I dunno.”
The small pearl-cased alarm clock read three in the morning. “Why are you out of bed?” J.T. hadn’t gotten up and wandered around the house like this since we’d moved into Trammel’s enormous home after the accident. Trammel had taken up residence on a cot beside my bed, seeming devoted to my recovery. It wasn’t long before he let J.T. know that he was too old to be coming into my bedroom at night. Trammel and I disagreed about it at the time, but Trammel had insisted that there were things women just didn’t know about how to make a man out of a boy.
It never even crossed my mind that Trammel wasn’t the kind of man I wanted my boy to be.
“You were talking,” J.T. whispered, still rubbing his arm. “I tried to wake you up.” Shivering a bit, he squeezed his elbows in tight against his body. “You said that lady’s name. The lady from the house. I think she’s out there.”
“Who?” The window heating unit kicked on, puffing out an initial gust of cold night air, wet with fog and salt spray. A chill ran over me.
Glancing toward the yard, J.T. kneaded his elbows with his fingers. “The old lady. Iola Poole. She’s a ghost now. I think she’s out there. She wants us to get away from her house.”
The sting of interrupted sleep cleared slightly from my eyes. I started to pull the covers down and let J.T. slide into bed with me like the old days. But in the back of my mind, there was Trammel complaining that Zoey and I babied J.T. too much. Ross said the same thing. He thought J.T. should be out duck hunting or throwing a football instead of hanging around in the house playing video games, reading books, and drawing animated superheroes with magical powers.
“J.T., no one’s out there.”
He inched closer to the bed. “I heard the cat screaming in the yard.” His eerie whisper raised the fine hairs on my skin. “They do it when there’s a ghost. I saw it on the sci-fi channel.”
“J.T., ghosts aren’t real. Zombies aren’t real. Vampires aren’t real. It’s all just TV stuff. You know that.” Sighing, I sank back against the pillow. In the morning, I had to go over to the church first thing, and if it all worked out, I’d get started cleaning early, before the sun fell behind the vine-tangled oaks, melting long shadows over Iola’s house. The last thing I needed before going in there was a little boy filling my head with crazy ideas about ghosts. “Go back to bed, okay?”
He shifted from one foot to the other, ducking his chin like he was trying to make himself as small a target as possible. His hands fiddled with the hem of his T-shirt. “Some people turn into ghosts when they die.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Do people turn into angels sometimes?”
“I don’t know.” On nights like this, I felt weary and empty, like I had one foot in the grave at thirty-three. I didn’t want to be the person who was supposed to have all the answers, who was supposed to handle everything, to figure out where we’d live and how we’d live. I wanted an OxyContin so bad I could taste it on my tongue, feel it sliding down my throat with a gush of water, my body relaxing in anticipation.
“It’s three in the morning, J.T. Go to sleep.”
A shiver and a little shake of his head, an almost-involuntary act of defiance, answered. “What if she’s mad nobody found her before she died? The kids at school said she stayed locked up in her house because she went crazy.”
I thought of my dream, of seeing Iola inside the house. An uneasy feeling seeped through me, stirring up nerve endings. “When people die, they go to heaven, all right? Especially people who played the church organ like Iola Poole. They don’t wander around the yard at night.” Sometimes you’ll say anything to end the questions —even something you don’t really believe. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in heaven. Pap-pap’s little white church was a refuge where we were loved and saved, but bouncing around from place to place with Mama and Daddy, I’d learned that the people you meet aren’t necessarily good just because they darken a church door every Sunday.
J.T. glanced at the window again. “Am I gonna die pretty soon? A kid drowned last summer. I heard people talkin’ about it at the beach. I dreamed that I drowned, and then they found me in my bed, like the lady in the house. Do you think I’ll ever drown?”
I felt a stab in the tender place that mothers have, even lousy ones. “What? No, of course not. You’re just nine years old, J.T.” Pulling the covers back, I scooted toward the middle of the big bed. “You’re not going to drown. Here, climb in.”
J.T. was beside me in two seconds flat, his legs tucking under the covers. His feet were cold from the floor, and he made a satisfied sound as he pushed his frozen toes my way. I closed my eyes, enjoying the feeling of him snuggled in, enjoying the comfort of not being alone. So much for making a man out of him.
“Mama?”
“Ssshhh.”
“But what’s heaven like? Do you have to be a ghost a long time before you go there?”
“There are no ghosts. Go to sleep.” I let my arm fall over my eyes to block out the glow from the night lamp, hoping sleep would come.
But when it did, I was in Iola’s tall, white house, whether I wanted to be there or not. The light in the blue room was bright and blinding. I couldn’t see past it or into it, but it was all around. It was so beautiful, I could only stand and stare.
By morning, I felt like I’d been run over by a bulldozer. Sleeping in a bed with J.T. was like trying to catch forty winks in the monkey cage at the zoo. He’d somehow turned sideways, and even though I was all the way at the other end of the queen-size mattress, he’d been chasing rabbits and stomping ants on my back for an hour before Zoey came and woke him for school. They were so quiet, I barely heard him slipping out and following her to the kitchen. As usual, Zoey took charge. One thing about Zoey, she was reliable. Easy. She took care of everyone around her. Where she got that from, I couldn’t imagine. Gina and I were never like that when we were kids.