Dani was six when she learned she could talk to the dead. It was the summer her mother stopped being a mother. The house they were renting had moldy ceilings and no television or air conditioning. Maylis’ stream of clientele was beginning to dwindle; more and more time was spent locked in her room with the shades drawn and her orange bottles of pills piled on her nightstand. She took them three at a time with a glass of tap water, morning and night and sometimes somewhere in between. The summer chugged on scorching and lazy, dragging its feet to the buzz of cicadas. Dani had made a few friends in kindergarten, but none of them lived nearby and she had no way to call them because Maylis kept the phone unplugged from the wall. Besides, she doubted Maylis would take her to play with them anyway because she was usually too tired to drive anywhere except the grocery store or WalMart. So she spent most of her days at the park near the house, playing with rusted cars in a grimy sandbox under the shade of a willow tree. The heat hung in the air viscous and syrupy and inescapable, sweating into her pores and clogging her lungs. The tar shimmered with imaginary puddles of water. It smelled like freshly mowed lawns and overripe cherries. Dani was scratching stick figures into the sand with a sharpened stick when the girl appeared. She was pale and towheaded, wearing a pink dress with a print of dainty white flowers. Every inch of her was soaking wet. “Hi,” Dani said. She pressed her bare toes into the grass. “I’m Maisie. Do you want to play?” Dani considered. She stood and brushed the sand from her knees. “Okay.” Maisie made an excellent playmate. Every day, after her solitary breakfast of Eggos, Dani went out the back door and walked down the street to find her waiting in the sandbox. They played house and hopscotch, hide and seek and charades. When they were tired of games, they sat on the curb and watched the fireflies. Dani sucked on popsicles, but Maisie never asked for one. They were too sweet, she said, and they made her brain hurt. Dani almost ruined it all one day, when she asked if they could go down to the pond at the end of the street to hunt for tadpoles. Maisie shook her head rapidly, pigtails swishing back and forth, and ran down the street. She wasn’t waiting in the sandbox for the next day, or the next. He was just beginning to wonder if he’d said something awful and she hated him now, was never going to come back to play again, when there she was again, same damp dress, same pigtails. She didn’t ask where she’d gone, and she didn’t tell her, and that was that. Children rarely held grudges. It was the happiest Dani had ever been. Maylis saw them playing in the sandbox one Saturday towards the end of July. She came flying out of the house in sweatpants and a bathrobe and wrenched Dani up by her arm. “Get away from her!” Spittle flew from her mouth. “Go! Get out! You’re not welcome here!” Maisie turned even paler, paler than Dani thought possible. Maylis hurled a handful of sand at her. “Go!” Maisie ran. Dani shut herself in her room and cried into her pillow until she ran out of tears to cry. That evening, Maylis told her that Maisie wasn’t a girl at all, not anymore, that in 1956 she drowned in the pond at the end of the street and now she was a ghost and she wasn’t allowed to play with her anymore, because living children didn’t belong with dead ones. That seemed like a reasonable explanation at first, but when she thought about it in bed it seemed unfair. Maisie couldn’t help being dead any more than she could help being alive, and there was no reason she could think of that something like dying should keep someone from wanting a friend. The rest of the summer was miserable. Maisie didn’t wait for her by the sandbox anymore. She watched cartoons and ate popsicles alone on the front steps every night, long past the point of hoping Maylis would come out of her room and sit down to join her. She was getting bad again, more frantic and erratic. Dani heard her pacing upstairs, mumbling to herself about voices and pale faces and hands. At the end of September, two weeks before her seventh birthday, Maylis told her it was time for them to move again. Dani went found her waiting on the curb in front of his house, his old house, instead of by the sandbox. Same dripping pink dress, same pigtails. Now, though, she looked much paler and less substantial, like someone had sucked the warmth from her. The edges of her shimmered like a mirage, and when she lifted her hand to wave, the tips of her fingers were nearly transparent. She wondered if she’d always been like that, or if she was just noticing now because she knew the truth about her. “Are you leaving?” Her voice reminded her of the breeze rustling through the reeds at the edge of the pond. Dani looked down at the asphalt. “I have to,” she said. Maisie’s shoulders drooped. “I knew you would. They always do." She didn’t sound angry, just tired. “You know, don’t you? About me.” Dani nodded mutely. Dani took a deep breath. “Did it hurt? When it happened?” She was afraid she would get angry and run again, like she had when she mentioned the pond. She didn’t, just tilted her head a little to the side and lowered her eyebrows. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I can’t remember. I don’t think so, though. Mostly I think it was peaceful. Like how when you go to bed you can’t remember the moment when you fall asleep.” They were both quiet for a moment. Dani struggled to word her next question. The corners of Maisie’s pale blue lips curved up. “I know what you’re thinking. I can't tell you, though. I’m not sure why I’m still here.” She looked down at her fading hands and seemed troubled by them. “It feels like, sometimes, like I have somewhere to go, but I can’t figure out where or how to get there.” Dani swallowed. “And I’ve started to forget why I’m here, too. Just now and then. That’s the scary part.” She looked up at her with hollow eyes and a hunger that scared Dani. “I think that’s why I liked playing with you so much. You help me remember.” “I’m sorry I have to go,” Dani said quietly. Maisie reached out a fading hand to her cheek. Her touch felt like a cold breeze, nothing more. “So am I.” Maylis called for Dani from the kitchen window. She turned to tell her she was coming, just a minute, and when she turned around, Maisie was gone with the puddle of pond water that had been collecting at her feet. Maylis piled everything into the car that night and took Dani away from the house with moldy ceilings and a sandbox under the willow tree, away from Maisie’s hungry eyes and the pond that had swallowed up all of the warmth in her on a summer day in 1956. AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview.
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