The Vanishing Season Read online

  The house was silent and dim from the coming storm. Maggie showered, changed, then grabbed a book at random from a pile by the study door and took it out onto the back porch to watch the dark clouds blowing in. She’d tried to avoid these moments of sitting still all week; these were the times she found herself getting overwhelmed by homesickness. Now she was thinking that she’d never sleep in her apartment again, never spend Saturday mornings in cafés with Jacie, talking over lattes. It was an unsettlingly weightless feeling, at sixteen, to have everything she’d known her whole life end so abruptly.

  The book she’d picked—she saw, glancing at the cover—was nonfiction; it was about butterflies and moths. She flipped through the pages, reading snippets and only half paying attention.

  Suddenly a voice to her right startled her. Maggie jerked and turned.

  “Sorry, I scared you?”

  The girl stood with one foot uncertainly on the bottom stair of the porch; she was wiry, all gazelle-like limbs and long, unkempt, deep-brown hair. She had something—some kind of moving, squirming thing—in her hands. A big, rangy, slobbery hound dog was trailing along behind her. It was the girl Maggie had seen from far away that first day, on the beach.

  “Pauline,” she said, stretching out her fisted hands as if to shake Maggie’s. Maggie leaned forward in her chair. Pauline turned to her dog. “This is Abe, my soul twin.” She freed one hand again and patted Abe’s snout.

  Pauline climbed up the stairs now more confidently and peered into the house curiously. “You know, I always think of this as the haunted house. I’m glad you’re here; you’ll chase out the ghosts,” she said, turning back and coming to sit beside Maggie, without waiting for an invite.

  “I mean, it’s not like I really think there are ghosts. I’m not stupid. But it’s hard not to wonder. I’ve seen lights on over here sometimes.”

  Maggie didn’t believe in ghosts. She’d read somewhere that sightings of ghosts were the result of magnetic fields. Or carbon monoxide poisoning in old houses. Pauline jerked open her hands to reveal a duckling.

  “I’m taking it to the rescue, but I thought you might like to see it. Crazy, a duckling born this time of year. Maybe its mother left it behind.” Pauline stroked the duckling’s head gently, a little longingly, with her skinny thumbs. “Ducklings are so cute, they make my eyes water. Do you ever have that happen?” Maggie shook her head. “Where’d you move from?”

  “Chicago,” Maggie said, unsure of what to make of her new, duckling-loving neighbor who kind of believed in ghosts but not really.

  “Moving must suck.”

  Maggie wasn’t really willing to say whether it sucked or not to someone she didn’t know, but Pauline didn’t wait for an answer anyway.

  “It’s a small town, but it’s okay. It’s boring, but . . .” Pauline stared around, gesturing to the lake. “There’s stuff to do on the water. Summer’s great except for all the tourists. Winter feels like it will never end. But besides that . . .”

  Pauline turned in her seat toward Maggie and pulled up her knees. She shifted the duckling to one hand and held out a long thread of her hair against Maggie’s with the other. “Almost the same color,” she said. Pauline’s was longer and messier, while Maggie’s was neatly combed. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be overly enthusiastic. I’m just glad you’re here. We’ve never had a neighbor on this side.”

  Maggie was used to girls like Pauline—strikingly beautiful girls—being a little aloof. Pauline was the opposite; she came across as sweet, eager, and a little lonely. She gazed around at the crumbling deck, then smiled brightly at Maggie.

  “Did you get the tea?”

  “Yeah, thanks . . . I’ve never gotten . . . tea as a present before.”

  “My mom’s family has a tea company, Tidings Tea. So we get a ton for free.” Maggie had seen the brand in grocery stores; she’d seen ads for it on TV. Tidings Tea was a big deal.

  “Wow.”

  Pauline seemed to sense she was overwhelming Maggie, and she sank back, stretched like a cat, and lapsed into silence for a few moments, studying the yard and the lake and then the house.

  Maggie tried to think of something to ask her. Finally she said the first thing that came to her. “What’s all the hammering in the woods?” she asked. “Beyond your house?”

  Pauline seemed to puzzle over this for a second, and then her eyes lit up with recognition. “Oh, that’s my Liam, Liam Witte, our neighbor on the other side, but much farther down Water Street. He’s our age. He’s building something between our houses, so we can meet there in the winter.” She wrapped her arms around her knees. “He knows I hate the winter, and he says it’s a surprise and I’m not allowed to go back there. You should definitely go and say hi.”

  “That’s really sweet.” Maggie knew guys were always quick to do favors for beautiful girls. Not that she didn’t benefit from the rule now and then, but she wasn’t nearly Pauline-beautiful. Girls who were Pauline-beautiful, Maggie knew, had the world open up its gates for them wherever they went. Girls like Maggie were noticed once people looked closely, but most people didn’t look that close.

  “It’s just me and Liam. And the adults. You should come canoeing with us this Sunday afternoon, before the weather turns cold. It’ll happen faster than you think.”

  “I can’t swim,” Maggie said. She didn’t add that she hated water in general, except to drink. She’d always had a fear of drowning.

  “We won’t swim,” Pauline reassured her, as if the trip were already decided. She asked if Maggie had read about the girl they’d found in the lake.

  “Yeah,” Maggie said. “Sad.”

  “Scary,” Pauline said, low. She pushed her wild hair back over her shoulders from where it had crept against the sides of her face. “They haven’t found who did it.”

  “I thought it was an accident or suicide or something.”

  Pauline shook her head. “They said that at first. But no. My cousin in Sturgeon Bay knows a cop. They just haven’t released it in the papers yet.”

  Maggie felt a chill run down through her feet. “That’s horrible.”

  Suddenly Abe planted his paws on the swing and licked the duckling.

  Pauline let out a laugh—so screechy it could scrape paint off a car. That was the first moment Maggie started to like Pauline—the moment she heard her rough, husky laughter that wasn’t beautiful at all.

  “Well,” Pauline said, standing, peering up at the sky as the first drops fell, “I’m gonna take this little guy to the vet before it pours. Come over anytime. And welcome to the neighborhood, blah-blah-blah.”

  “Okay, thanks,” Maggie said, standing.

  Pauline waved over her shoulder as she walked down the stairs. Rather than taking the driveway to the road, she waded straight toward her house through the tall grass, parting it as she went and leaving a river of flinging grasshoppers and Abe bounding behind her.

  That night, as heavy rain streaked the windows and thunderclouds settled over the house, Maggie was exploring the small, empty back parlor for remnants of past residents (all she found was a matchbox) when she stepped on a rotten plank and broke through a hole in the floor. For a terrifying moment, one leg dangled into the emptiness of the cellar below the house, the cool, stale air running up her legs. Catching her breath, she yanked her leg out and found her dad in his study, sitting cross-legged on the floor arranging his shelves.

  “My foot broke through the floor. I almost died,” she teased. But she was shaken.

  “So you’re saying you want to be able to walk around your own house without feeling that your life’s endangered.” He nodded, his glasses glinting in the lamplight. “Okay, I can do that, but it seems a little demanding.” Maggie smirked at him.

  He promised to go into town and buy some supplies the next morning to fix the floor. Then he stood, put his hands on her cheeks, and rubbed them hard, something he’d done ever since she was little. It was his weird dad way of showing affection.

>   Maggie crawled into bed that night feeling more at home than she had the night before. Knowing one person made more of a difference than she would have guessed. She liked Pauline already. It usually took her longer to form an opinion on people.

  Unable to sleep, she peered out into the dark yard. Across the field yellow light from the white house’s windows shone through the rain, giving off a comforting sense of safety and the feeling that someone else was out there in the world besides just her and her parents.

  Maggie dreamed that night about the lake, black and shining in the dark, with angels spreading their wings on its surface. Open and closed, open and closed, like the wings of moths.

  * * *

  I’m part of this house, and the residents can hear me in their sleep. I rattle the dishes and creak along the floors in the dark. I turn on the lights downstairs, though they’re sure they turned them off when they went to bed. I watch a leg crash through the ceiling into the darkness and I reach out to touch it. But I have no hands, no arms, nothing I can see. I wonder if I ever did.

  All I know for sure is that I’m timeless: I drift in and out of the past as easily as if I were walking from one room to another. Moments reach out and pull me in. Without meaning to, I’ve visited centuries in this very same spot. I’ve watched the building of ships in the harbor. I see things in colors that couldn’t possibly be. (The past has a shimmer. Different moments and feelings are colored differently.) I can hear the motion of stars above the house. This is what a haunting is like for the one who haunts—it’s like being everywhere and nowhere at once. Time layers on itself, present and past. But this is what time keeps bringing me back to: this house, this peninsula, these people, this girl. It seems I’m stuck to Door County and pinned to Water Street. I can move over other towns, but I end up back here—as if a magnet’s pulled me home. And I don’t know why.

  I search my soul for what I know about ghosts, though I can’t remember where I learned it or who I was when I did. Ghosts come back for revenge, or they linger to protect someone, or they stay because of some unfinished business. And I wonder, if I’m a ghost, which kind of ghost am I?

  Every day I wait for heaven to open its pearly gates or for a great white light to swallow me. But nothing yet. It makes me think—or maybe only hope—that there’s something I am here to do.

  I’ve been noticing moths lately. They seem to congregate wherever I am, alighting on my invisible frame. Outside the cellar window, I watch the souls of owls and trees and spiders for some sign to tell me where to go, another soul like me to tell me what to do. The house breathes while the town is dark, but there is no one here to answer me. I’m the definition of alone.

  * * *

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  3

  WHEN MAGGIE WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD, A DRUNK DRIVER HIT THEIR FAMILY CAR while they were on their way home from ice cream, and Maggie—who’d just unclipped her seat belt to pull on her jacket because the ice cream had made her cold—went flying between the two front seats and hit the dashboard headfirst.

  The doctor at the ER said she was made of rubber, because she didn’t have a scratch on her. But for Maggie it was the first time she’d ever realized—or at least really believed—that she was breakable.

  Sometimes she wondered if the accident hadn’t happened if she would have turned out differently, a little more reckless like her friends: Jacie, for instance, seemed to think she could never get hurt and that adulthood would never arrive. But Maggie thought of the future all the time. And for college, life, all the stuff coming her way in that future—she needed money and a job.

  Gill Creek—she noticed on her first trip into town that Monday on the job hunt—was a white town: white houses, white boats, white curbs, white outfits. It seemed to glow and reflect off the rippling, sparkling blue of Lake Michigan, dotted only with the changing colors of the leaves that lined the crisscrossed streets. Late-season tourists meandered up and down Main Street, strolling into poky, old-fashioned candy shops; pastel-washed clothing stores; fish boil restaurants (a local specialty her mom had threatened that they’d try); and cafés. Shops had started putting pumpkins by their doorways and hanging stalks of colored corn on their doors. It took about an hour for Maggie to size up the town—to measure its width and length and breadth against where she’d come from—and to know life was going to feel small here.

  “Fudgies.” That was what Elsa, the woman who stood before her, called them, but Maggie had to ask her to repeat herself. “Oh, that’s a word for the tourists. For some reason, when people are on vacation, they love to buy fudge. You would not believe how much fudge Fudgies will eat any given summer.”

  A long day of walking had landed Maggie here. She’d filled out three applications—at two restaurants and one kite store—but it was pretty clear that the part-time jobs were drying up now that summer was ending: The clerks had taken her applications as if she were just another one of the day’s hassles. She’d meandered all the way to the uglier end of Main Street—beyond the reach of the tourists’ natural habitat—and arrived at a giant, yellow Help Wanted sign leaned against the side of a low, square, brick building. Only when she’d walked through the front door had she realized it was a sprawling antiques mall. Inside it smelled like dust and mothballs and stale cigarette smoke and old coffee. It was like something out of a Charles Dickens novel: full of nooks and crannies and narrow walkways and pieces of furniture piled crookedly. A sign by the register announced that Elsa’s Lost World Emporium did not take checks without proper ID. Maggie was just turning around to leave when Elsa had approached her and introduced herself. She was plump, moist-faced, probably in her late forties. She had shoulder-length, curly, dirty-blond hair. She wore bright orange-red lipstick and a sweep of sparkly, brown eye shadow with thick mascara.

  “You here about the sign?” she asked. “You don’t look like an antiques hound.”

  Maggie nodded uncertainly.

  “What kind of grades do you get?” Elsa asked, looking her over distractedly and wiping the moistness from her forehead with one long, gray sleeve.

  “As,” Maggie responded. “I’m homeschooled by my dad now,” she added, then speedily threw in, “but I’m self-disciplined.” Was she actually trying to get this job?

  “Have you had a job before?” Elsa fingered the golden crucifix around her neck.

  Maggie shook her head and shifted from foot to foot.

  “Well, this one’s pretty simple—just ringing up customers, keeping inventory, keeping up with the vendors and communicating about their stalls—but I need to know you’re reliable. Are you reliable?” Maggie nodded. She wondered if anyone had ever said no.

  Elsa looked into her eyes as if searching for something. “Yeah, I think you are.” She reached out and shook her hand. “It’s eight bucks an hour. You can work weekend mornings and some evenings if it’s busy. Be here at nine a.m. Saturday. I keep a key hidden by the sidewalk at the side entrance, under the fifth rock from the door, in case you get here before me. I’m your boss.”

  Maggie shook her hand limply, taken aback that Elsa would entrust her with a hidden key so easily. Also she hadn’t even said she wanted the job. And eight bucks was next to nothing . . . which wasn’t surprising, considering it didn’t exactly look like a lucrative place.

  On the other hand, she needed something.

  She walked outside in a daze. Making her way back down Main Street to where she was supposed to meet her dad, she reasoned with herself that she could always quit.

  She met her dad in front of the hardware store—they’d split up to take care of their separate errands. He was looking at the big, grinning pumpkin behind the glass and sipping some coffee. “This town is so quaint, I almost can’t take it,” he said. “Someone made that papier-mâché pumpkin.”

  “Amazing,” Maggie said drily. As they walk
ed back toward the car, Maggie stopped suddenly in front of a boutique with a red-striped awning, struck by a dress in the window. It was a pale, sea-foam green dotted with tiny rust-colored airplanes. Maggie was mesmerized by it. It was the colors she loved: it was rare for them to be just right, but in this case, they were perfect.

  “I want that so much, it hurts,” she said to her dad.

  Her dad leaned close, and she realized he was trying to read the price tag. She leaned in beside him. “Whoa,” she said.

  “The blue one’s cheaper,” he offered hopefully. Suddenly she felt guilty for mentioning it. Just to be polite, she looked closer at the blue one too. It was cheaper, but still too expensive for them, even despite its ugliness. “Actually they’re not that great,” she said, covering. “I didn’t realize it was airplanes; I thought it was birds. Never mind.”

  She started to walk away and her dad followed, but, glancing back, she could see the pain on his face. She wanted to kick herself.

  The first time her mom had gotten laid off, Maggie hadn’t realized how bad things were until she’d opened her birthday present and found a handmade rug that her mom had hooked together herself. “I bought it at Anthropologie,” her mom had said, and she’d pretended to believe her.

  She had to do better, she knew. She had to take care of her parents just like they’d always taken care of her.