The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall

 

 

I expected her to laugh again, but she was quiet for a long time and then said, “There are ways. But you can’t simply speak. You must be subtle.”

 

“Subtle how?” I asked.

 

“Subtle,” she said, “in a way that can only come from watching and waiting. Subtle in a way that can’t be explained.”

 

She turned and looked at my mother, puffed up her cheeks, and exhaled a thin whistle of air. Mom shivered and pulled the sleeves of her sweater down over her wrists. Then she hastily gathered her things and went on into the ward.

 

 

 

 

 

In her room, Room 4, Janie sat down on the bed, turned on her music, and closed her eyes. Within a minute or two, the tension went out of her arms and her breathing turned slow and even.

 

Dancing light came through the window and shone on the opposite wall. I looked down to see Theo outside. He waved up to me and then beckoned me to come out. I glanced over at my sleeping sister, then nodded to Theo.

 

The two nightgowned girls were back in the lobby. At the sight of me, they nudged each other until one of them said, in a halting voice, “Who are they? The new ones?”

 

“My family,” I said. “Please leave them alone.”

 

“We leave everyone alone!” the second girl said, and then she giggled shrilly.

 

“What are your names?” I asked. “I’m—”

 

But they’d already vanished.

 

Theo waited for me by the fountain with his hands on his hips and a deep frown etched across his face.

 

“They can’t stay,” he said.

 

“I know.”

 

“No, I’m being very serious, Delia,” he said. “You can’t let them—”

 

“I get it,” I said. “It’s dangerous. Well, I don’t know what to do about that. I didn’t ask them to come.”

 

He gazed at the ground, clearly playing out some internal debate. Finally, he looked up at me with his amber-flecked eyes. “The first time we met, you asked if I ever saw my family after … after. And I said I’d seen my brother. But I didn’t tell you what happened.”

 

I nodded, casting a quick glance up at Janie’s window.

 

“We were twins,” Theo went on. “Theodore and Edward. Theo and Ted. We were best friends; we did everything together. We were working together on the land survey and planning to start our own business, doing that kind of work for private clients—department stores, hotels. About a year after I passed, Ted came back here. I thought he was here to visit the place I had died. Just to say hello. I missed him so much. It felt like part of me was lost.”

 

Theo’s eyes sparkled as he spoke. Then, all at once, the light went out of them, and his expression turned dull and distant.

 

“He came only for himself,” he said softly. “He didn’t really think I was here. But he talked, you know, the way people talk to make themselves feel better. He filled me in: Mom’s roses won at the garden show; Dad was a deacon now … But the real reason he came was … he wanted my permission to marry the girl I’d been engaged to before I died. He told me their plans—his and Barbara’s. He gave me a story about how they hadn’t even seen each other after the funeral, only he ran into her about six months later, and they felt like being in love was the ‘right thing to do’ because in a way it was about remembering me.”

 

I thought instantly of Nic and Landon and wondered if they saw it that way. I wondered if they were still together. If every time they kissed, there was something in it that held a tiny piece of their memories of me.

 

“The dead and the living don’t belong together,” Theo said. “That’s why you hear stories about haunted houses. Because no matter what the living do, they flaunt their life. They can’t help it. And that’s what I thought Ted was doing. So I got jealous. Really jealous. To the point where I couldn’t control myself. And then …”

 

I tore my eyes away from my sister’s window and looked at Theo.

 

“I tried to hurt him,” he said. “I almost did—I would have—if it hadn’t been for the fact that Barbara came after him. She’d been waiting in the car. It stopped me from doing something terrible. But Ted knew. He knew that I was there, and that I was angry. I never saw him again. And I’ve existed since then knowing that the two people I cared most about no longer had their old memories of me. Instead, I’d let myself become a monster. Ted must be dead by now, and he died thinking I was … bad. That I hated him. So you’ve got to make them leave, before the fact of their being alive gets to you, eats away at what you used to feel for them. Do you understand?”

 

Theo’s voice was low and shaky, and I could tell by the roundedness of his shoulders how difficult it had been for him to tell me all this, to confess his misdeeds.

 

“I’m sorry,” I said. “That must have been awful.”

 

“It’s awful every day,” he said.