Ghost Hedgehog Page 2

  “Sorry. He stopped in a store to get coffee and got shot. And I see ghosts, and he’s here, and he’s so worried about his mom. Mrs. Rivera wouldn’t tell us where they took her.”

  “What?” said Deborah. “What? Are you insane?” Then she hung up.

  I punched the Off button on the phone and shrugged at Roger in the mirror. I felt tired and sad. And weirdly alone for someone in a small room with two other people.

  Someone pounded on the bathroom door. “Jack, what are you doing in there?” Amy yelled. “What is it with you and the bathroom? Are you on the phone? I need it!”

  “I’m sorry, Roger,” I muttered. I unlocked the door and handed the phone to Amy. Leaving the plate of fruit and vegetables on the counter, I grabbed my notebook and backpack and headed for my room, towing my ghosts. What with the nightmare, I hadn’t slept well the night before. I was starving, I had new ghost trouble, and all I wanted was a nap.

  “But I—” Roger said, and “Shh,” said Mrs. Jernigan, and then I was on my bed below all my flying things, and I fell asleep. No dreams.

  Mom woke me at suppertime. When I sat up, I saw Roger and Mrs. Jernigan sitting on my desk. I lifted one shoulder and then the other. The two spots where I connected to them were still cool and tingly, but now Roger had a longer leash. He still looked sad, but not like he was about to cry.

  “We’ve had a nice talk,” Mrs. Jernigan said. “We’ll work something out.”

  “Good,” I said, and went downstairs.

  I knew they were still with me, but I guess Mrs. Jernigan taught Roger some ghost tricks, like going invisible, and getting farther away from me. They stayed quiet and unseeable during dinner and the two hours of TV Mom and Dad allowed me and Amy if we’d finished our homework, which I hadn’t.

  Back in my room at curfew, Mrs. Jernigan appeared long enough to tell me she’d be watching my dreams, and then she faded.

  The next day my ghosts kept their distance and talked quietly to each other. When I got home, Mom said I had a phone message from some Deborah, and who was she?

  “She’s my friend Roger’s sister,” I said.

  “Who’s Roger?” asked Mom.

  “A guy I know,” I said.

  “Well, she sounded crazy, but she wants you to call her back—if it is you—some kid who called from this number was what she said. It was you, right? She said she thought it was a boy.”

  “It was me,” I said.

  “What is this about, Jack?” Mom asked.

  “I’m trying to do my friend a favor,” I said.

  “You’re not pestering this woman, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Is she pestering you?”

  “Not yet. Mom, could I please call her?”

  She stared at me, then handed me the phone and the message slip. I went into the front hall closet, turned on the light, and made the call. Roger and Mrs. Jernigan were present but not visible, so I didn’t know quite how they squished in there among the coats with me. At least Amy wouldn’t get after me for being in the bathroom if I was in the closet.

  “Mr. Wronski?” said Deborah when she answered.

  “My name’s Jack,” I said.

  “How old are you?”

  “Eleven.”

  She took a big breath, then said, “Okay, Jack. Sorry I hung up on you yesterday. I called a bunch of places trying to track down Roger, and I found out you were telling the truth. I don’t know why you called me—“

  “Roger thought maybe you could find out about his mom, where she is and if she’s okay. It’s, like, haunting him.” Ha ha, I thought. So few people got my idea of a joke. One of the tragedies of my life. Kind of a small one, considering. I switched the phone to speaker and set it on my dad’s rubber boots. Roger and Mrs. Jernigan appeared, him half in the wall and her half in the door. They both bent closer to listen.

  “Well, okay,” Deborah said. “Mom’s in Green Haven Rest Home now, and it sounds like they’re taking good care of her. She’s confused about why she’s there, but what can you do. I’m flying out tomorrow to check on that and make arrangements for Roger’s—Roger’s—” She stopped talking and sniffled. “I can’t believe I’m telling some kid these things.

  “He’s not the only one you’re talking to, Pidge,” Roger muttered.

  “Roger says I’m not the only one you’re talking to, Pidge,” I said.

  She gasped and dropped the phone. We waited.

  “Tell me your address,” she said.

  I looked at Roger and he nodded, so I told Deborah where I lived and she said she’d see me tomorrow.

  The next day was Saturday. Mike came over to play basketball in our driveway the way he usually did on weekends, his ball and our net. I was so happy to be doing something normal I played a lot longer than I usually did. I was afraid that as soon as I stopped, I’d get into ghost business. And I was glad Mike was coming over again after the freeze he’d given me when I told him about Mrs. Jernigan’s ghost.

  Mike had lunch with me and Mom and Dad—Amy was at the movies—and Roger and Mrs. Jernigan, though he didn’t know that part. They sat on the stove, anyway. The rest of us sat around the kitchen table eating sandwiches we’d put together from ingredients Dad had lined up on the kitchen counter. Dad asked Mike what kind of trouble he’d gotten into lately at school, and Mike had plenty to say, and he made it all funny.

  Mrs. Jernigan had said lots of mean things to Mike while she was alive, but she hadn’t managed to wilt him much, whereas, when she had said stuff to me about not being any stupider than I had to be, I crumpled up and stopped raising my hand in class. She’d eased up on the name-calling since she died. A few times when she muttered something about could I find a dumber way to do something, or did I know what an idiot I was being, I stopped talking to her for a while. I had leverage. The silent treatment worked pretty well, since I was the only one she could talk to who heard her.

  During lunch, she said Mike was a nicer person than she remembered.

  Deborah knocked on the kitchen door while we were eating brownies. She was thin, like Roger, but her hair was dark. She wore gray slacks and a darker gray jacket, and she carried a big purse. She looked like someone who didn’t know how to relax.

  Mom let her in without asking too many questions and gave her some brownies, but then Mom said to me, “Deborah’s your friend Roger’s sister? How old is Roger?”

  I glanced at Roger. “Twenty-three,” he said, and I repeated it.

  “Jack, where did you meet him?” Dad asked.

  If they only knew how stupid it was to worry about stranger danger now. I heaved a sigh. “I met him yesterday by the Seven-Eleven. He’s been dead since Monday.”

  “Oh, Jack,” Mom said, “not again.”

  I knew she’d say that.

  “If you’re starting up that dead stuff again, I’m leaving,” Mike said, which was different from what he said when we were at summer camp telling ghost stories around a campfire. Maybe it took burnt marshmallows to make it okay.

  Deborah took a notebook and a pen out of her purse. “Can you tell me what kind of memorial service Roger wants?”

  I glanced at Roger. I was getting used to the red stain on his shirt. It almost looked like a flower to me now. “I’d like if she’d get the album out of the cupboard under Mom’s TV,” he said, “and find the pictures of when we were little, before Deb told me she’d never speak to me again. If she could look at those, and maybe light a candle, that would be good.”

  I repeated all that. When I got to the part about her never speaking to him again, she covered her eyes with her hands and asked me to stop. In a little while, she let me finish. Mom and Dad stared at me. Mike stood up, but he didn’t leave.

  “Does he have friends he wants at the service?” Deborah asked.

  “That is so sweet,” Roger said. “There are three people who might care. Can you write down their names and phone numbers for me?”

  I got a pad of paper and a pencil, w
rote down what he said, and handed the paper to his sister. “Did you see your mom yet?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “She’s okay?”

  “She’s not okay, but she’s being taken care of,” she said.

  “Could you take me to see her? Roger did this thing where he’s—” I looked at my parents and Mike. I didn’t want to say this in front of them, but I couldn’t think of a way to talk to Deborah alone. “He’s with me. I don’t think he can get there on his own.”

  “Would that be okay, Mrs. Wronski?” Deborah asked.

  “None of this is okay,” said Mom.

  “Do you really believe the fantasies of a child?” Dad said.

  “How did he know my childhood nickname? How does he know—” She stared down at her hands, one of which clutched the piece of paper I had given her. “About our photo album? I do believe.”

  “Jack,” said Dad.

  I stood up, my ghosts at my back, and studied my father. There were so many things I didn’t understand, things I ran into every day. Shades I saw but mostly didn’t hear, shades who didn’t notice me, and now two ghosts who lived with me. Dream monsters who left real-world bruises.

  I didn’t know what had connected me to Roger and Mrs. Jernigan, or whether I’d ever be able to get rid of them. They were closer to me than my parents now. I turned to them. Mrs. Jernigan no longer looked quite so mean, and Roger smiled at me, tired, but maybe happy that his sister was helping him do what he wanted.

  I felt like they cared about me.

  Mom was fed up with my ghosts. Dad thought I was making it all up. Mike, my best friend since kindergarten, kept saying he’d leave.

  “What can I tell you?” I asked my father.

  “You didn’t grow out of this—this—” He waved his hand as though shooing away flies.

  That so didn’t work with ghosts. It just made your hand cold if you brushed it through them.

  “No,” I said. “They’re still around, but I learned not to talk about them. This is different.”

  “You’re not taking my son anywhere without me,” Mom said to Deborah.

  “Fine by me,” said Deborah.

  Mrs. Jernigan got me my third ghost on the way to the nursing home.

  Dad was driving. Mom was in the front passenger seat. Deborah sat next to me in the back seat, and Roger was curled up in the cargo space behind me. Mike had finally gone home, though he didn’t seem to want to by the time he left.

  We were passing a big stone church with a square tower. It looked like a castle, kind of a mean one. I noticed a man and a girl on the front stairs, but I didn’t see what they were doing.

  Mrs. Jernigan, who was sitting halfway out the door next to me, stretched away from me, flying like a witch, except she had no broom. She grabbed the girl from the man. The man howled and grew three times his size and came screaming after Mrs. Jernigan, but she tripled in size, too, and smote him. I mean, her arm turned into a giant wooden-looking club, and she whacked him up the side of the head. He roared in pain and flew away like a popped balloon, deflating as he went.

  “Whoa,” said Roger, “how’d she do that?”

  She snapped back to me like she was attached by a bungee cord, the girl still in her embrace. A new spot above my right shoulder blade froze. There was that smack-suck feeling, and I knew someone else was part of me.

  “Stop that,” I said.

  “Stop what?” asked Deborah.

  “I was talking to someone else,” I said. “Stop putting more people on me.”

  “You didn’t see what he was doing to her,” Mrs. Jernigan said. “With us, these things can go on forever. She might never get away.”

  I knew the feeling.

  The girl was behind me, in the cargo space of the station wagon with Roger, I guessed. I didn’t know how much space ghosts actually needed. Mrs. Jernigan was half in and half out of the car again, her face on my side of the window, at least, which made it easier for me to hear her. So she didn’t need to take up much room, but she seemed attached to the shape she wore, except when she changed into a monster, or got bigger, or both.

  “Forever,” I said.

  “You give us the chance to change,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  Mom turned around in the front seat and stared at me. “Is this how you’re going to be now, Jack? Talking to yourself?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Mrs. Jernigan said, “Let’s see how it goes with Roger’s mother.”

  “Did Roger tell you who killed him?” Deborah asked.

  “No,” I said. He hadn’t mentioned anything about the shooting, really, except what he told me to say on the phone.

  “Ask him if he’d know the shooter if he saw them again. Someone should pay,” said Deborah.

  “It was an accident,” Roger said, and I repeated it.

  “It’s never an accident when someone brings a loaded gun somewhere,” said Dad. “I didn’t get the whole story. Did this happen during a robbery?”

  Roger and I said yes.

  “Don’t you want justice?” asked Deborah. “Don’t you want to make sure the killer doesn’t kill anyone else?”

  “I have no focus there,” Roger said.

  I didn’t understand that. I glanced back at him with my eyebrows up, and he said, “I just don’t care about that.”

  I repeated it.

  “Turn here.” Deborah pointed, and Dad turned between tall green hedges into a driveway that crossed lawn and went between trees. It took us to a big pale green building that looked kind of like a school, with a big front entrance covered by a porch roof with white columns, but all the windows had grilles over them. A small sign said GREEN HAVEN REST HOME by the steps leading up to the front door. We parked in a slot marked VISITOR and got out of the car.

  Deborah led us into the building.

  I hadn’t even gotten a good look at my new ghost. She hadn’t made a sound yet. Roger and Mrs. Jernigan walked beside me. The new passenger followed.

  An older woman with big puffy hair an unlikely color of reddish brown sat behind a desk that faced a small waiting room full of overstuffed furniture, dusty plants, and paintings of little kids in long-ago clothes. The air smelled like air freshener, one of those ones that pretends to be a forest but smells more like chemicals. “May I help you?” asked the woman, and then, “Oh, it’s you again, Deborah. Did you want to see your mother again?”

  “Yes, please. Is she allowed this many visitors?”

  “Of course,” said the woman. She stood. She was wearing a green-and-brown striped business suit. “Hello. I’m Jackie. There’s the door into the home.” It was in an alcove. She pointed to a sign on the wall with numbers on it, near a touchpad with buttons. “If you could memorize the door code, it will let you out from the other side as well, or if you forget, ask one of the attendants. Just don’t tell the residents, all right?”

  “Fine,” said Deborah. She pressed buttons on the keypad. A buzzer sounded and she pulled the door open. We followed her through and she closed it behind her. I looked back. The door had a ledge on it, covered with fake plants. The ledge ran along the wall on both sides of the door so it almost looked like the door wasn’t there, except there was another keypad on this side.

  Mom and Dad and I followed Deborah down a green carpeted hall to the right. There were a few scattered armchairs along the right wall with old people sitting in them, and doors opening off the hall with nameplates on them. Some of the doors were half-open. I saw hospital beds and houseplants, framed photographs, a few frail, white-haired people in bed watching little TVs. The smell was Lysol and pee.

  There were shades everywhere.

  Some of them were in bed with the living people. Some sat in chairs, half in and half out of the old men and ladies. Some drifted up the hall ahead of us or passed through us going the other way. They barely raised a chill in me, and most of them were pretty faded.

  Deborah stopped at a door that
had a handwritten sign taped to it: HESTER McFARLANE. She knocked and walked in. We followed.

  “Mom?” Roger said, rushing to the bed.

  That was when things got really weird.

  The woman in the bed was holding some paper napkins. She had torn them in half, and in half again. She stacked the ragged-edged pieces on top of each other, scattered them, and stacked them. She stared at the pieces in her lap.

  “Mom,” said Deborah. The woman didn’t look up.

  The shade sitting beside her did, though. A colored shade who looked a lot like the live woman. She smiled. She didn’t look as old as her living twin, and her smile was really nice. “Debbie? Roger!” she cried.

  “Mom?” said Roger.

  “Oh, Roger,” she said. “What happened to you?” She stared at the stain on his chest.

  “Mom? What happened to you?” Roger asked.

  The shade stood up. She gazed down at the woman playing with little squares of paper and smiled, patted the woman’s curly white hair. “I got old, sweetie.” She glanced at him. A tear ran down her cheek. “I guess that’s not going to happen to you. I’m so sorry, Roger.”

  “Are you okay?” he asked. He put his hand on her cheek, and she leaned into it and gave him a sideways smile.

  “One way and another,” she said.

  Deborah walked right through both of them and gently stroked the older woman’s shoulder. “Mom?” she said.

  The living woman peered up and smiled. Her eyes looked fuzzy and out of focus. “Is it wisteria?” she asked. “They keep putting the limo in a brown package. I don’t like that.”

  “Oh, Mom.” Deborah gripped her shoulder and started to cry. Her shoulders shook, but she didn’t make much noise.

  “There’s not a lot of me left in there,” said the shadow mother. “Things are unraveling.” She kissed Roger on the cheek. “Thank you for taking such good care of me. I’ll be all right. You go on ahead, now, sweetie. I’ll catch up.”

  Roger hugged her and looked back at me. “Thanks, Jack.” He twisted and spun from a person-looking ghost into streaks of woven light, and then he vanished.

  Warmth stroked up my spine.