Pretty Marys All in a Row Page 3

  Head humming, I slip through the van and back onto the road. Their screams hang in the air around me, and I smile as they speed off into the night. Not only did I dine well this evening, but my free-wheeling meal tickets will now have a most charming ghost story to pass down through the patchouli-soaked generations.

  “Attend all the best activist rallies for peace and love,” they’ll tell their progeny at bedtime, “or else the evil Mary will get you.”

  This makes me grin wider, the thought of my name being evoked for the sake of social causes. I don’t know why the other Marys are coming up short on scares. There are certainly enough unsuspecting victims on the highway. Surely, in the gardens and funeral homes and far-flung neighborhoods, Mistress, Mack, and Lew can find someone to haunt.

  My belly fizzling and full, I skip along the highway, giggling like an excitable schoolgirl, my heels dipping in and out of potholes, until headlights flash against my skin. David’s dinged-up station wagon coasts to the shoulder. I don’t wait for the door to open before I slide inside.

  He nods at me, his face more lined than usual. “Where to?” he asks.

  “Anywhere you want,” I say and wish it could be true.

  We drive for a while, the tires singing an elegy beneath us. David grips the wheel with one hand and clasps a small yellow matchbook with the other. I gaze at the faded logo on the paperboard: an old motel on Route 1 that’s probably been out of business for a decade. His eyes still on the road, David plucks out a match and scrapes it against the book to light it before drawing it to his lips and blowing it out again. The air in the car blooms with the loneliness of sulfur and smoke. Sometimes I think he only collects matchbooks to keep himself occupied, his fingers always fiddling with them when he’s nervous.

  I lace my hands together and wonder what’s bothering him tonight. After all, it’s a perfect evening, crisp and lovely and cold. Too cold. The last time I was here, it was the debut of spring, but now it feels later in the year.

  I hesitate, gnawing my bottom lip. “How long has it been?”

  David gives me half a smile. “Not long,” he says and does his best to sound cheerful about it. “Only three months.”

  My breath heaves in my throat, and the contact buzz from those hippies melts away. It’s been a quarter of a year since yesterday. Three months that feels like a single night. Time for me is malleable and cruel, and I hate it, how life slips away like grains of sand in an open palm. I blink, and it’s gone.

  Sometimes it’s one month. Sometimes it’s three. Sometimes it’s more. And I never know for sure until I come back and ask David.

  And that’s only if David is around. Once, I had returned to this highway, and he wasn’t here. I passed dozens of nights without him, my chest twisting tighter each evening.

  When he finally showed up one Sunday night an hour before dawn, I thought the worst was over—all the wondering, the what ifs. The car edged to the shoulder like always, and I smiled at him through the smudged window, but his ashen expression didn’t change.

  We drove in silence for a while. That was the first time I saw a photo taped to the dashboard. There was only one then—a pocket-sized glossy featuring him stone-faced in a tux and a girl in a white veil that looked like me.

  “I didn’t think you were coming back,” he said as though he was obligated to explain. He wasn’t. I would never expect that from him. I only had one question.

  “How long?” I asked, not looking at him.

  “Long enough,” he said. “Too long.”

  Five years. It had been five years since we’d seen each other. For months, he’d returned to the highway, but I never appeared, and eventually, he resigned himself that I wasn’t coming back.

  “I’m only here tonight,” he said, “on a whim.”

  He told me he’d been married six months, and he smiled a little when he confided about his daughter, already curled up and dozing in his wife’s belly.

  “Congratulations,” I said and meant it. He deserved it. One of us should have a life. That was only fair. And it’s not like he and I could be together. No courthouse is eager to issue a marriage license to the dearly departed.

  I never cried about it. Ghosts don’t cry. But that night at the dinner table, the smoke poured from my hands in long, chartreuse tendrils.

  “Exotic flavors,” my sisters said, and that was when I learned what sorrow tasted like.

  David leans back in the driver’s seat, his brow damp and heavy. “I’ve missed you,” he whispers.

  I wish I could say the same. I wish I’d had enough time to miss him. But this only feels like tomorrow. It’s only a moment to me.

  The sedan halts at the cemetery gates, and we take our usual path, past the headstones with names etched deep in granite. Being here is always the same. It feels like walking in circles but worse. It’s walking nowhere at all.

  I kneel before a tombstone and trace the letters with my fingertips, pretending I can feel the grooves, cold and deep beneath my hands. How strange that the most permanent part of most people’s lives are the monikers they leave behind in stone after it’s too late to matter.

  “I almost remember it, you know.”

  David looks at me. “Remember what?”

  “What it felt like to be alive. To see morning come.” My hands clench into fists so tight my fingers ache. “Sometimes the almost-remembering is so much worse than the not-remembering.”

  The moon dips in the sky, and my home tugs at me. But I’m not ready yet. I don’t want to return to the darkness, to the place where the voice discovered me yesterday.

  I want to stay here, I think. Without looking at me, David nods.

  “So do I,” he says, answering words I never spoke.

  I move close to him, and his breath fogs straight through me.

  “David,” I say and clasp my hands in front of me to keep myself from shivering. “Could you do something for me?”

  He searches my face, the hopefulness in his eyes almost too much to bear. This is something I’ve never done. Before now, I’ve never asked him for anything.

  “Name it,” he says.

  I hesitate. I always promised I would make no requests of him. It seems silly to me, how the living become indentured to the dead, doing their bidding, fulfilling their unfinished business. I’ve never wanted to shackle him to me. But this request is a small one.

  “Could you bring something? A book maybe or an old newspaper article? Something about this cemetery or the highway . . . or me.”

  I’m asking him to find a ghost story for a ghost.

  “Rhee,” he says, and my name sounds all wrong on his lips. “I’ll try, but it’s not easy. People aren’t sure that you’re even . . .”

  I stare at him, dread burning in my guts. “That I’m what?”

  “Real.” His cheeks redden, embarrassed that he accused me of not existing. All the bright hopefulness behind his eyes is gone. “But I’ll try.”

  I smile. “Thank you.”

  From far away, my family beckons me.

  “See you soon,” I say to David and hope it’s true.

  As I drift toward home, falling between here and there, my body weak and watery, I strain against the darkness. I don’t want to hear the voice from yesterday, coaxing me with its worthless words, and I don’t want to meet its face as it floats toward mine. But as I spark and fold onto myself, I see nothing, hear nothing. No voice croons in my ear, and nothing dances in the gloom around me. For an instant, I think I’m lucky. I think I’m alone.

  But a flash of something formless twists around me, and I can’t move or think or scream. The thing in the darkness isn’t drawing nearer. It’s already here with me. I know because I can hear it breathing, faint and hot and wet against the back of my neck. And its arms don’t need to emerge before my eyes because they’re already around my waist, looped in a ring, not quite touching my skin but near enough to embrace me if it wanted. And perhaps that’s the point: to show me that it ca
n take whatever it wants.

  I’m still waiting for that dance, the voice says, but I don’t reply, my tongue shapeless and numb in my mouth.

  When I’m deposited back on the front step of the house, I’m breathless and nauseous and turned inside out, but I have no time to gather myself together. The horizon is pink with dawn, and Mistress is already waiting on the porch.

  “You’re late,” she says, and her vine slithers toward me and wraps itself loosely around my ankles. “You’re really late this time. We have no time for dinner now.”

  “I’m sorry.” I stumble into the house behind her. “I didn’t mean to.”

  For once, this is the truth. I never used to be able to stay so long with David.

  At the table, Red and I offer the sustenance we gathered from the evening. Lew, Mack, and Mistress have nothing to share. They won’t look at us when we ask why not. They say nothing in the dining room, but afterward, as I grasp the mirror and head toward the master bedroom with Red, the three of them conspire in the corner.

  “Go ahead,” Mistress says when I hesitate on the stairs. “Get tucked in for the morning.”

  My heart in my throat, I trudge up the winding steps with Red in my arms. Behind us, the other Marys whisper their barbed secrets. Something is wrong, and they won’t tell us what. Dust and fear crawl down my throat, and I choke on the musty air.

  In the bedroom, I hang the mirror on the wall, but unlike most evenings, I don’t skulk away to my prison. The voice will be there again in the ballroom, my unlikely partner as I dance to music no one else can hear. And I won’t run to it. I’ll stand here, firm and stubborn against the night. If the darkness wants me, I’ll make it wait.

  “Rhee?” Red presses her hands into the glass. With blood dripping down her body like brackish water, she resembles a harpooned mermaid peering through a porthole. “What’s wrong?”

  “What do you think they were saying downstairs?”

  She laughs. “Are you worried they were talking about you?”

  “No,” I say. I’m worried they’re talking about something else. Something worse. Something that would explain why the voice is speaking to me and why Red and I are the only ones with successful haunts.

  Red shakes her head. “How bad can it be? I mean, the worst must be over. We’re already ghosts.” She grins at me, and I smile back at her. She won’t let me be upset. If I start to look too glum, she’ll joke or keen banshee-sweet or drag her fingernails across the underside of her own reflection until her own ears bleed.

  “What does a ghost need blood for, anyhow?” I used to tease her, and she would ooze red out of her eye sockets just to spite me. I was the first one to call her Red. We all have nicknames now. Five Marys in one house are bad enough, but five Marys without nicknames are downright confusing.

  But these days, we don’t feel like five Marys anymore. We barely feel like anything at all.

  “I asked David to bring me something,” I say. “A book. About us. About me.”

  Red hesitates. “Do you think it will help?”

  I shrug. “It can’t hurt.”

  She runs her hands through her hair, thick with blood, and a narrow river of red seeps down the glass. “The twins have found a dozen books about me. About the Bloody Mary folklore and its origin. It never tells me what I hope to learn.” She laughs. “And none of the illustrations ever look like me either.”

  I shake my head. “Maybe what David finds will be different.”

  “Maybe.” Red smiles again, and I reach out to say goodbye, the way I always do. Only this time, the glass between us ripples at my touch.

  I jump back, the muscles across my shoulders tight with surprise.

  Red gapes at me. “What was that?”

  I breathe in, and the air that fills my lungs is light and sweet as dew. “I have no idea.”

  I touch the mirror. It’s solid again.

  “Rhee,” Red whispers. “What’s happening to us?”

  I only wish I knew.

  * * *

  David arrives early on the highway. I don’t ask him how long it’s been. The snow coating the trees like powdered sugar tells me it’s been longer than I’d like.

  He brings me a crumbling book, an encyclopedia of oddities, and opens it to a two-page entry on Resurrection Mary.

  “This is the best one I’ve found,” he says as we nestle in the frozen grass, close but never touching.

  I run my fingertips over the black-and-white face of a girl, dour and wide-eyed and no older than twenty. This is supposedly me, the dearly departed all the scholarly folklorists claim I am.

  “We don’t even look alike,” I say and think of what Red said last night about the illustrations of her.

  David plucks a piece of grass between his thumb and forefinger, avoiding my gaze. He knew I’d be disappointed. As though it’s his fault nobody knows more about a ghost.

  I keep reading. “They aren’t even sure what happened to her,” I say and catch myself. “What happened to me. This says I died in 1934. Or 1927. Or maybe another year altogether.”

  David shrugs. “That’s the way it works, I guess,” he says. “With ghosts, I mean. The details are always sketchy. People can’t narrow it down. In the appendix, though, it says that there have apparently always been hitchhiking ghosts.”

  I chirp out a tiny laugh. “Is that what they call me? A hitchhiker?” I curl my legs into my chest, envisioning myself as a Dust Bowl waif, bindle on my shoulder, thumb stuck out to the wind.

  David’s face flushes as though he’s the one with the reason to be embarrassed. He doesn’t stand accused of vagrancy.

  Because my hands are worthless here, I stare at this same page for an eternity. “Where did you get this book?” I ask, desperate to fill the empty space between us.

  “From home,” he says.

  I laugh again. “I mean before that.”

  He hesitates. “The librarian at my high school. She gave it to me at the end of my senior year. Said I’d get more use out of it than her.”

  I watch him. “You’ve had this book that long?”

  He looks down at his hands, fiddling with nothing. “After you and I met, I had to tell someone,” he says, his voice snapping apart. “I figured she’d call me crazy. Instead, she tried to help me figure out who you were.”

  Tried to help. Never succeeded.

  I gaze closer at what is supposed to be my picture. It seems strange not to recognize your own face. In the pixilated image, a haphazard scan of a faded snapshot, there’s a small scar the size of a keyhole over her eyebrow.

  “She was in a fire.” I lean closer to the picture. “That’s where she got that scar.”

  David peers over my shoulder. “Where does it mention that?”

  “It doesn’t,” I say. “I remember her telling me.”

  “Telling you?”

  I swallow hard and nod. This isn’t me. But I know her. Somehow, I know her. I can’t remember anything about myself, but I can remember that.

  “I have a couple other books,” David says. “I’ll bring them next time. They aren’t as good, but maybe they’ll help.”

  “Help me do what?” I ask, the defeat sinking like a quarry stone in my chest. “Be dead?”

  He stares at me, his eyes dark and wounded. “To be wherever you want to be,” he says, and the defeat inside me dissolves, replaced with sour dread. I know what he’s thinking. He wants me to be free, so we can be together. Driving in his crummy station wagon, sitting at home at his dinner table with his daughter and maybe his wife. He forgets I’ll still be me. A ghost, lighter than air and just as useless.

  I’m suddenly on my feet and running through the graveyard, past the obelisks, away from David and his daydreams. It aches inside me, imagining us together. I close my eyes to escape this moment, but in the darkness, something is already waiting for me.

  Pretty Mary. Why are you leaving? Don’t you know I’ll always catch you?

  Shadows dance behind my
eyelids and coalesce into a shape, all dark angles and hideous points. I try to back away, try to open my eyes, but I can’t escape.

  A hand. In the gloom, a hand is reaching toward me.

  You belong to me. All you pretty Marys belong to me.

  The fingers twist toward me, and I’m caught in its grasp. I gag up bile and fear as its cold touch sears through me, down into the bones I once had.

  I wrench away, the might of my own fury forcing me back, and I topple toward the earth. Because I’m not solid, there’s nothing to stop my fall, so my body slips halfway into the dirt before I catch myself.

  David calls my name and rushes to me.

  “I’m fine,” I say and struggle to pull myself free. On instinct, David reaches for me, but his hands slip clean through me. As always. The curse we somehow forget.

  I crawl out on my own, my hands grasping at nothing as I pull myself from the impromptu grave. When I’m on my feet again, I see it. A welt in the shape of five curved daggers around my wrist. Right where the darkness touched me.

  David stares at my arm. “Rhee?” His voice is thin and scared.

  My dry lips purse, but I can’t speak. All I can manage is to rub my wrist, as though the blemish is a stain, not a wound.

  “David,” I whisper, but it’s too late. It’s nearly dawn, and the pull of my sisters is too much for me. I drift backward, folding in on myself, smaller and smaller until I’m nothing at all.

  At the dinner table, I have nothing to share. I was too busy with David to haunt. Other than Red’s offering from the twins, we go hungry. To fill the vacant timeslot, Mistress argues with Lew over her skull, and the rest of us hold our breath.

  “Put it away until later,” Mistress keeps repeating.

  Lew rolls her eyes. “I know you like to pretend,” she says, “but you’re not really our mother. You’re not our sister. You’re nothing. We’re all nothing. You know that, right?”

  “Don’t,” Mack whispers. “Don’t be cruel.”

  Lew’s head snaps toward her, and what’s left of the evening collapses around us. Everybody except me is screaming. Even Red gets in on the action, hollering through the glass about us getting along and how we have no reason to complain.