“Turkey vultures,” my mom said. She gave me a kiss on the top of my head and said, “I’m going to be late. I’ll see you soon, sweetie.”
The vultures hovered for a minute more, and then they started to settle in the tree. Once they were deep in the leaves, I couldn’t see them.
18.
Every day my mom went to her exercise class and then to run errands and I was in charge of Miles.
Every day we did the same thing. We made peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches with chocolate milk for lunch and then we watched a really bad soap opera that my mother would never in a million years have let us watch. But she didn’t know. We pretended we did crafts and played games. That’s what we always said we’d been doing when she came home.
The soap opera was called Times of Our Seasons, which didn’t actually make sense when you thought too hard about it. It always started with the scene of a beautiful woman and a handsome man walking along a beach and then a ticking clock was superimposed over them.
Our favorite character was named Harley, and she had been buried alive (and I mean buried, like in a coffin in the ground and everything) by her archnemesis, Celeste. Inside the coffin, there was this walkie-talkie thing that Celeste used to talk to Harley and a tube where Celeste sent food down. That was it. Harley had to lie inside that box, day after day.
We had to see her get out.
Times of Our Seasons had lots of other drama too. Death and divorce and everything else besides.
You might think this would be a bad choice for two kids who had lost a parent and a sibling in an accident.
But it was so fake it was perfect.
“Hurry!” Miles shouted from the family room. “It’s starting!”
I put straws in our chocolate milk and went in to sit next to him.
Harley came up on the screen. She was still in the box, wearing the white silk dress they’d buried her in when she was unconscious. Harley’s long dark hair spread out on the satin pillow under her head. Her makeup was still perfect—plum lipstick, mascara, eyeliner that seemed to have sparkles in it. She beat her hands against the top of the coffin. “Celeste!” she said. “Let me out! You know this isn’t fair to Rowan!”
(Rowan was the man that Celeste and Harley both loved. He was the reason Celeste had put Harley underground. Celeste wanted Rowan all to herself.)
“Do you think that this time they’ll tell us how she goes to the bathroom?” Miles asked.
“Be quiet,” I said. “You have to listen.”
We thought today might be the day she would get out.
It wasn’t.
But they couldn’t leave her there forever.
19.
That night at work none of the Hellfarts came by and I sold thirty-three programs, which made me so pleased that I bought myself a lemon tart at the end of the night when they went on sale for half price.
Miles waited up so he could tell me that he had sucked his way through an entire Fireball. “Mom saw,” he said. “So it’s documented.”
“What will you do with your life now?”
“Uncle Nick told me that when he was my age he could put one Fireball in each cheek,” Miles said. “And suck on them until they were both gone.”
“That’s insanity,” I said.
“It’s awesome,” Miles said.
I ate Leo’s mom’s lasagna for dinner.
And when I went upstairs, there was something on my windowsill again.
It was a purple toothbrush. It wasn’t in a package but the bristles weren’t dirty.
Just like the screwdriver, the toothbrush was about the size and weight of something that Ben would have liked.
A dark shape flew past the window.
Maybe the birds are bringing them, I thought, as the breeze moved through the room. Sometimes Mom opens the windows in the evenings to let the air in.
I imagined the birds landing, black and swooped, on the windowsill. Looking around my room without me there to say, Go away.
The birds were like ghosts. Coming and going.
I’d never seen a ghost.
But some people believed they saw Lisette Chamberlain’s ghost in the tunnels.
I had a weird thought. What if Lisette Chamberlain’s ghost is leaving things?
I slowly turned around and looked at the door of the room I’d chosen. Purple. Purple was Lisette’s favorite color. And I had chosen this room, even though purple was not my favorite color.
And our initials were the same, but in reverse. Cedar Lee, Lisette Chamberlain.
CL-LC.
You’ve been hanging out in too many cemeteries, I told myself. Giving too many tours about people who are gone. And watching too many shows about people being buried alive.
Birds or ghosts. Neither one made it easy to sleep.
But when I did, my brain kept dreaming about things I should save up for with my money from work. What if I bought boxes and boxes of Fireballs for Miles? What if I bought an entire set of silver spoons for Ben to flip back and forth? Or a brand-new baseball mitt for my father? I didn’t dream about anything for my mom. Or for me.
ACT II
1.
One of the Hellfarts got a job selling concessions a few days later.