A Curious Tale of the In-Between Read online

  For Riley, who believes in things

  before the rest of the world can see them

  Nothing comes to us too soon but sorrow.

  —Philip James Bailey

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  CHAPTER

  1

  Pram died just before she was born. It was a brutally hot August, and the dogwood tree was parched. Its white blossoms had gone weary and brown without rain. The nurses pitied it. In fact, that was how Pram’s mother was discovered. A nurse filled up the janitor’s mop bucket with fresh water, and she went outside to water the dogwood tree, as unconventional as that might have been.

  Instead, the bucket fell at her feet, and the water spread around the parking lot, never quite reaching the grassy island that contained the tree. For there was a woman hanging by the only branch that looked sturdy enough to support her weight. She was almost too unreal to be a woman at all, if not for her pregnant stomach.

  In the next instant, there was a gurney and shears severing the rope, hands easing the woman down with great care as though she could be saved. Pram was inside her, already dead. But doctors aren’t put off by the finality of death. They believe it can be negotiated. If they can pull the right strings at the right time, they can make dead things breathe again. So Pram lived after all.

  Pram, orphaned right at the start of her life, was inherited by two very practical aunts. They ran the Halfway to Heaven Home for the Ageing out of their two-hundred-year-old colonial house. According to Pram’s books, “aging” was misspelled, and Pram noticed only when she first learned to read. She climbed on a chair and scratched the unwanted e from the sign with a black crayon and was promptly scolded. The crayon mark was scrubbed down to a dull scar.

  Pram wasn’t told the story of her birth. But even as a very small girl, she felt deep in her chest that she was alive and dead at the same time.

  Pram’s aunts had no idea what to do with a little girl, much less how to love one. They did give her the very best things they could think of: a name, for starters. Pram was short for Pragmatic, because after much deliberation, they agreed it was a sensible name for a young lady. It was also a trait her mother had lacked.

  They gave her a bedroom in the attic. It overlooked the pond where her mother had liked to swim, and had bright daisy wallpaper, and teddy bears that wore dust hats and dust sweaters. For dessert she was often permitted slices of cake with whole strawberries inside. They gave her a plaid jumper, and Aunt Dee ironed the pleats while Aunt Nan starched the white blouse that went under it. They shined the pennies in her loafers, and they gave her stacks of books to read. Sometimes the books had missing covers or torn pages because they had come secondhand from the charity store in the church or they had been left on the doorstep. It was a small town and everyone knew that Pram liked to read. Before she was six, she had reenacted the great works of Shakespeare with her button-eyed dolls. She would recite Ophelia’s final words aloud and pretend to drown herself in the old claw-foot tub.

  It was all this reading that made Aunt Dee and Aunt Nan overlook Pram’s eccentricities. She was just imaginative. Plus, she entertained the elders. She performed for them, and always with a flair for the dramatic. The elders treated her as a sort of pet, asking her to sit with them and read, brushing her hair, offering her cough drops (as that was the closest thing they had to candy). They shared their watercolors with her during arts and crafts, and asked the aunts to tape her pictures on their bedroom walls.

  It wasn’t until the boy came around that the aunts began to suspect something was wrong.

  Pram first spoke about the boy during an evening bath. She was five at the time.

  Aunt Nan dumped a cup of water over Pram’s white hair, caramelizing it. “I’ve made a friend,” Pram said. “A boy named Felix.”

  “Have you?” Aunt Nan said, lathering Pram’s hair more roughly than Pram would have preferred. “A grandchild of one of the elders, then?”

  “I don’t think he is,” Pram said.

  “Where was he?” Aunt Nan asked.

  “In the pond,” Pram said.

  “In the pond?”

  “At first. Then the wind picked up a bit, and the light on the water changed, and he came out of it.”

  “Is this something you’ve read about in one of your books?” Aunt Nan asked.

  “No,” Pram said, scowling as her hair was scrubbed by her aunt’s chubby fingers. She could sense that she wasn’t going to be believed.

  “If you see this boy again,” Aunt Nan said, “tell him that pond’s not for swimming. It startles the fish.”

  “What is it for, then?” Pram asked.

  “Thought. Out of the tub with you now. It’s bedtime.”

  Pram dutifully performed her evening rituals and climbed into bed.

  The attic had one small, circular window that seemed to align with the moon on clear nights. The daisies on her wall had gone silver; the button eyes of her bears and dolls stared with astonishment as the shadows of trees bounced across them.

  There was something about trees that made Pram especially sad.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Every September, there came a knock at the front door that carried a certain authority. Pram knew who it was. So did the elders—some of them, at least. The others merely played along when she hid at their feet, thinking this was another of her games.

  When the knock came late in the morning, Pram hid under Edgar Frump’s wheelchair. It was a gamble, she knew, as Edgar was not especially lucid. But he was closer than the dining room table, which wasn’t crowded enough to hide her. The tablecloth had been removed after a prune juice accident just moments before.

  “I’m not a dog house, child,” Edgar said. “And you’re not a poodle.”

  “Please,” Pram said. “If I’m caught, I’ll be taken away. Please.”

  Edgar straightened his blanket across his legs, hiding her. “Since you said ‘please’ more than once.”

  Aunt Nan’s steps were thunderous as she came down the hall.

  Aunt Dee was lighter on her feet, but she fidgeted. “Of all the mornings,” she said. “The house looking the way it does.”

  Aunt Nan opened the doors of the china cabinet and retrieved the pile of textbooks and notebooks. She hastily spread them on the coffee table, nearly spilling a cup of tea that sat near the edge.

  The knock came again, and the aunts stood shoulder-to-shoulder and drew a deep breath in tandem. Pram watched them through a part in the blanket, and in their nervous gestures she could see that they loved her.

  The door was opened by Aunt Dee’s bony fingers—fingers that went about smoothing her apron an instant later. In came a gust of chilled fall air. Three leaves—a red, a brown, and a spotted yellow—swirled across the scuffed floorboards. The schoolmarm’s polished black shoes crushed all of them with their first steps into the house. Pram held her breath.


  “Can we fix you some tea?” Aunt Dee said.

  “Let me take your coat,” Aunt Nan said.

  The schoolmarm, Ms. Appleworth, grunted in response. For a woman who taught so many children the English language and put such emphasis on proper enunciation, she spoke very little. The aunts fussed and stumbled as they led her to the coffee table.

  “We were just about to sit with Pram for her morning lesson,” Aunt Dee said.

  “You only give lessons in the morning?” Ms. Apple-worth said.

  “No, no, lessons all day,” Aunt Nan said. “It’s toast with jam, lessons, a break for lunch, and lessons until dinnertime.”

  This was a lie. Pram’s lessons were scattered throughout the day. She often did her schoolwork alone by the pond. Sometimes she didn’t do it at all; she read things that were not on the lists, things that weren’t supposed to be for young girls, things that were frowned upon and long out of print.

  “Pram, dear,” Aunt Nan called. “Ms. Appleworth is here.”

  Pram could feel her heart within her ears. She thought it strange that she had one heart capable of filling two ears with noise. She often thought the extra heart belonged to her late mother. She knew that the dead hid pieces of themselves in the world. They buried organs in the living. They stuffed memories into trees and clouds and other innocuous things. It wasn’t very often that Pram accompanied her aunts into town, but when she did, she could sense these sorts of things. In shop windows she would see the laughing reflections of the dead. She heard whispers in automobile engines. She could never see these memories clearly, and they disappeared when she blinked, but their existence comforted her. She knew that death was not truly the end and that there was always something left.

  “Pram!” Aunt Dee called, a little too hysterically. She cleared her throat. “Don’t be shy now.”

  “Shy?” Ms. Appleworth said. “If she’s unaccustomed to visitors, some time in a classroom would do wonders.”

  The aunts presented a hasty argument. It was guilt and pity that brought Pram out of hiding. She adjusted the pleats of her plaid jumper and hoped it was neat enough to make up for the calamity that was her morning hair.

  Ms. Appleworth was as gray as her skirt and vest and hair. She was a drawing that hadn’t been colored.

  “Hello, Pram,” she said.

  “Six times twelve is seventy-two,” Pram blurted. “I can spell ‘arithmetic’; would you like to hear?”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Ms. Appleworth said. “Though I’d be interested to hear about your lessons. Do you enjoy learning?”

  This question felt like a trick, and Pram wasn’t sure how to answer. “Sometimes,” she said. “When it’s something in which I’m interested.”

  Ms. Appleworth raised her eyebrows. “Most children wouldn’t know not to end their sentences in a preposition. How old are you now, dear?”

  “Eleven years and twenty-six days,” Pram said.

  “She’s very bright,” Aunt Dee said. “She can recite the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet from memory.”

  Pram would have added that she knew all the multiplication tables, but she could see that it wouldn’t matter. Ms. Appleworth was looking at her the way others had looked at her in the past, when they realized she wasn’t quite normal.

  It was the preposition, Pram thought, angry with herself.

  “Thank you, dear,” Ms. Appleworth said. “You may run along and do your chores.”

  Pram didn’t have any chores, but she went and collected the breakfast plates and brought a soapbox to the sink so that she could wash them.

  Her aunts were having a long discussion with the schoolmarm, and Pram had washed the dishes twice before she heard the front door open and close.

  Hands dripping, she walked down the hallway, clenching and unclenching her fists, splashing the walls.

  “Boo,” Edgar whispered as she passed his wheelchair. He was no longer lucid.

  Pram stood before her aunts for a few seconds and then raised her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I tried.”

  “You haven’t done anything to be sorry about,” Aunt Dee said, but she was wringing her apron. Aunt Nan was frowning.

  “I’ll have to go to school,” Pram said. “Won’t I?”

  “For now,” Aunt Nan said.

  Pram felt sick. “Why?” she asked.

  “You’re getting older now,” Aunt Nan said. “Ms. Appleworth doesn’t think it’s fair that a girl as bright as you is being taught by the likes of us.”

  “You’re great teachers,” Pram said, although she knew that she was being generous. Her aunts could barely keep up with her arithmetic worksheets, and they didn’t know the definitions of nearly as many words as Pram did.

  Aunt Dee leaned toward Pram and patted her cheek sympathetically. “Ms. Appleworth just wants you to have a good education. That’s her job, you know: to make sure that children are getting a good education. You’ll start on Monday, and we’ll see how it goes.”

  The air inside the house had grown thin. “I’d like to go outside now,” she said.

  “Brush your hair first,” Aunt Dee said.

  “And your teeth,” Aunt Nan said.

  Pram trudged upstairs, her feet feeling twice as heavy. When she returned downstairs, her aunts presented her with toast and more jam than they’d usually allow. It was the best that they could do.

  She wasn’t hungry, but she understood the gesture and she ate the whole slice.

  Once outside, Pram ran as fast as she could through the fallen leaves. She ran until she reached the pond; she sat at its edge and stared at the green water until her eyes felt heavy with tears.

  “The others will make fun of me,” she said.

  A cloud blocked the sun, then moved away from it, as though playing a game with the light.

  “What others?”

  Pram wiped at her runny nose. “Felix,” she said as the boy sat beside her. “You startled me.”

  “Why are you crying?” he said.

  “I wasn’t.”

  “You were so.” He turned his head to the pond and blew, and the reflection of the leaves turned gold. Pram blinked, and they had changed back to normal. She giggled, and Felix smiled with triumph.

  “They’re making me go to school,” Pram said. “I don’t think it’s a very good idea. I’ve read about how cruel kids can be.”

  “Are you afraid they’ll be cruel, or that being around them for too long will make you cruel?” Felix said.

  “Both, I suppose.” Pram touched the pond with the heel of her foot. “Have you ever been to school?”

  “No,” Felix said. “But I always thought it seemed fun.”

  “It won’t be,” she said. “It won’t take the other kids long to realize I’m strange.”

  “I don’t think you’re strange,” Felix said.

  Pram fell back into the grass, sighing. “You’re a ghost,” she said. “You’re strange, too.”

  “A little rude to bring it up like that,” Felix said, lying beside her. “I still have feelings.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” Pram said. “I’m sorry. But don’t you see? The other kids will catch me talking to myself and ridicule me.”

  “You aren’t talking to yourself,” Felix said, reaching up his arms and arranging his fingers like a picture frame. The clouds took on the shape of dancers; from somewhere far off, Pram heard music before the clouds became normal again.

  “But they’d see it that way,” she said.

  Felix shrugged. “You’ll have to be clever and not get caught.”

  Pram was indeed very clever about not getting caught. In Smith’s tailor shop, where Aunt Dee brought their clothes for repair, there was a ghost named Clara; she wore a burgundy dress and a feathered hat. She knew she wasn’t alive, but she liked to pretend, twirling about the shop, trying to sell Pram bolts of fabric. She spoke to Pram in English, followed by a prompt translation in French.

  While Aunt Dee talked to the
tailor, Pram would hide behind the bolts of fabric and play along with Clara, asking to see the silks and for pricing on buttons. But Pram was very careful, and she had never been caught talking to her. And Clara was a mischievous one; she wanted Pram to be caught, just to amuse herself. As it was, Aunt Dee just thought Pram was fascinated by the buttons pinned to the wall there.

  Felix was the only ghost that Pram saw every day, though, and therefore it was trickier for Pram to keep him a secret. It did help that her aunts thought he was imaginary; to them she was just a child whose imagination was growing with her.

  “Maybe your first day won’t be scary,” he said. “My first day as a ghost wasn’t scary. At least, not that I can remember.”

  Pram turned her head to him. “You’ve always told me that you don’t remember the day you died.”

  “That’s just it. I don’t remember. So how scary could it have been?”

  Pram laughed. “I wonder if you were as interesting when you were alive as you are now.”

  “Don’t know,” Felix said. “But the spirit world probably changed me. It’s quite different here.”

  “How so?” Pram asked.

  “I wouldn’t know how to explain it. Just different. You can see more than regular living people can see—me, for instance. But there are other things you’d have to be dead to see.”

  “Maybe I’ll see for myself when I’m old and dead, then,” Pram said.

  “Don’t be in any hurry,” Felix said. “I like you alive. I like the way you see things. It makes you who you are, the way the spirit world makes me who I am.”

  “I like you, too,” Pram said.

  They watched the clouds for a while, and then, feeling bold, Pram grabbed Felix’s hand. His touch was like the ground on a sunny day—she could feel the warmth from where the light had touched him, but beneath that she could feel dead, earthy coldness. She wished he were alive. She wished that when her heart was beating double, she could give one of those hearts to him and then press her ear to his chest and feel it beating.

  Across the grassy field, in the two-hundred-year-old colonial, Aunt Dee stood at the window, watching Pram, who lay alone by the pond.

  Maybe more time among the living would do the girl some good, she thought.