Page 115

“Why?”

Nora’s lips parted. “I don’t know. I asked her the same thing. But she doesn’t remember much about what she did. Or being in the house at all, really. It was like—” Her voice dropped. “A dream. Or possession. Or something.”

“By what?”

Nora shrugged. “Hard to say. Anything was possible there. It scares me to think about it, so I don’t.”

“Did your mother see ghosts?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“My mother saw her sister. Ada.”

Nora nodded. “I think my mother saw hers.” She pulled her jacket around herself.

“I didn’t see anyone.”

“But you saw the vines early on.”

“I didn’t feel the earthquakes, though.”

“Maybe we were all haunted by different things.”

The sun had disappeared now, and the sky was streaked with red. Madeline watched the deft way Nora’s fingers played with a blade of grass. Silence stretched between them. She caught a flash of a white scar on Nora’s hand. On instinct she reached for it and held it up. The long, jagged mark split across her palm.

“I had to get you out,” Nora said.

Madeline swallowed. “Does it still hurt?”

“Not anymore.”

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“I feel like you kept getting hurt because of me. For me.”

“I’d do it again.” Nora smiled. “For you.”

Madeline looked at their hands and focused on breathing steadily, waiting for Nora to unlace her fingers, but she didn’t. She looked up and Nora was staring at her with a curious expression, her dark eyes unreadable in the waning light.

And then Nora leaned in and kissed Madeline, a long, slow kiss, her other hand brushing Madeline’s cheek. Madeline kissed her back, herheart racing, and let herself fall, unreservedly, one more time. For a moment they were extricated from their families’ shared past. They were just two people who wanted each other.

Nora pulled away gently and stood. “I have to go, but I’m glad you’re doing okay now. And that you’re here.”

As Nora crossed the park, she looked back and grinned. Madeline pressed the back of her hand to her lips and knew with a small certainty that they would see each other again. There was still so much she wanted to know. She wondered if they woke from the same nightmares, turned the same events over and over in their heads. These things snag and startle and ebb and consume. The grief, the healing. In between, now, maybe, a beginning.

Madeline was shivering from the cold by the time she unlocked the door to her house. She turned the lights on and slung her cardigan over a chair. Both her roommates were out.

She went to the bathroom and washed the dirt off her hands. She kept thinking about what Nora had said.Maybe we’re all haunted by different things.

They’d each seen someone—something—in that house. What had Aunt Rennie seen? She was the only one who had been honest about it with Madeline. What wasshehaunted by? What made her do what she did that night? Madeline tried to walk back through each moment with her eyes shut. She remembered her aunt clambering down from the second-story windowsill and falling to the bushes. Madeline had screamed her name in horror, then. But after a minute, Yí Ma had stood. She had started running toward the garden, her skirt billowing, without looking back. Why hadn’t she run toward her family, toward escape?

The icy water began to numb her fingers as a new thought unfurled in Madeline’s mind. She steadied herself on the sink with her hands. Her breath rose rapidly in her chest.Unless she didn’t escape.

She looked at her own reflection, at the shock in her eyes, at the dark circles underneath, at the color seeping from her cheeks.

She looked like she had seen a ghost.