“Sorry,” Ruthie said, feeling like shit. With Mom gone, she was all Fawn had right now.
She knew she hadn’t exactly been the best big sister, even from the very beginning. Ruthie had been obliged to be at Fawn’s birth. The midwife had handed her a drum—the beat was supposed to help keep her mom focused in labor. Ruthie thumped at it halfheartedly, feeling out of place and awkward. When Fawn came out, she was squalling and scrunch-faced—not at all precious or beautiful, despite what her parents and the midwife said. She’d reminded Ruthie of a grub.
As Fawn grew, Ruthie would occasionally play with her—dolls, dress-up, or hide-and-seek—but only because her parents made her, not out of sisterly love. Not that she didn’t love Fawn—she did—but their age difference seemed to put them on entirely different planets.
“All this is just making my head spin, you know?” Ruthie explained. She looked down at Thomas O’Rourke’s driver’s license again. “This is old. It expired, like, fifteen years ago.” She tucked it back into his worn leather billfold, put both wallets back in the bag, then carefully placed the bag right back in the shoebox.
“If Mom gets back, we have to pretend we never found any of this, okay? It has to be our secret.”
Fawn looked like she was about to cry.
“Come on,” Ruthie said, smiling like a cheerleader. “It’s not that hard. You can keep a secret, right? I know you can. You won’t even tell me where you and Mimi were hiding.”
“You said if,” Fawn said.
“Huh?”
“You said, ‘If Mom gets back.’ ” Her chin quivered, and a tear rolled down her left cheek.
Ruthie stood up and took her little sister in her arms, surprised to find her own eyes filling with tears. Fawn felt small and hollow. She was burning hot. Ruthie hugged her tighter, cleared her throat, and shook off the urge to cry. She needed to take Fawn’s temperature, get some Tylenol into her if it was as high as it felt. Poor kid. What a shitty time to be sick. Ruthie tried to remember everything Mom did when Fawn was sick—Tylenol, endless cups of her own fever-reducing herbal tea, piling the covers on Fawn, and reading her story after story. It was the same stuff she’d done when Ruthie was little.
“I meant when,” Ruthie whispered soothingly into Fawn’s ear. “When she shows up. Because she will.” Fawn didn’t hug back, just stayed limp in Ruthie’s arms.
“What if she doesn’t? What if she … can’t or something?”
“She will, Fawn. She has to.”
She pulled away, looked down into Fawn’s face. “You feel okay, Fawn? You have a sore throat or anything?”
But Fawn’s glassy eyes were focused down on the secret hole in the floor.
“I think there’s something else in there,” she said.
Ruthie dropped to her knees and reached in. The edges of the compartment went farther back than she’d thought. Tucked against the far corner was the squared edge of a book. She pulled it out.
Visitors from the Other Side
The Secret Diary of Sara Harrison Shea
It was a worn hardcover with a faded paper jacket.
“Weird,” Ruthie said. “Why hide a book?” She picked it up, studied the cover, and started to flip through. Her eye caught on the words in the beginning diary entry: The first time I saw a sleeper, I was nine years old.
Ruthie scanned the rest of the entry.
“What’s it about?” Fawn asked.
“Seems like this lady thought there was a way to bring dead people back somehow,” she said. Kind of creepy, but, still, why would her mother keep it hidden?
“Ruthie,” Fawn said, “look at the picture on the back.”
There was a blurry black-and-white photo with a caption beneath it: Sara Harrison Shea at her home in West Hall, Vermont, 1907.
A woman with wild hair and haunting eyes stood in front of a white clapboard farmhouse that Ruthie recognized immediately.
“No way. It’s our house!” Ruthie said. “This lady lived here, in our house.”
Katherine
Katherine believed that when the work was going well things just fell into place, as if by magic. It was the artist’s job to open herself up, let herself be guided to whatever the next step might be.
Today was not a day when things were going well.
Work on the new box wasn’t off to a great start. She was having a hard time making any kind of decisions: Should she use a photo of Gary, or make a little Gary doll to sit at the table with the gray-haired stranger? And what would she put on the table? It seemed a huge responsibility, choosing his last meal. Of all the scenes she’d re-created so far, this one relied the most on her imagination.
All morning, she’d felt Gary’s presence so strongly there with her that she was sure he’d been watching over her shoulder, mocking her. She could smell him, almost taste him in the air around her.
What do you think you’re doing? he asked as she stared dumbly at the empty wooden box she’d just made.