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It’s unnatural, I know that. But, as if she were a small, skittish bird, I don’t want to frighten her by letting my apprehension show, so I pull her closer, relishing the familiar yet somehow different feel of her against my body.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” I tell her. “I’ve missed you more than you can know.”
“I don’t like that hill,” she says. “It’s cold and dark, and I would rather be with you.” Her voice is watery, and though she has the same high, light tone that she always did, there’s something harder around the edges of it now. Something adult and knowing.
I hesitate. “But how, Emeline? How did you come here?”
“Didn’t you want me to come? Isn’t that why you gave me this?”
She holds something out in her damp little palm. I reach out, and then catch my breath. It’s the lock of hair, tied in a faded red ribbon.
“Where did you get that?” I ask in a whisper.
She gives me a queer look. “You gave it to me.”
“I...” I did give it to her, when she died. “I saw it in your trunk.”
“Sometimes I keep things there.” She regards the hair gravely. “But sometimes I like to take them out and carry them.”
How long has she been lingering at Willow Hall? How long has she shared the same halls, the same rooms as me since she died and I haven’t known?
The candle flickers across her pale little face, her skin dewy as a rose petal. The air is suddenly thick with all the things I have wanted to tell her, to ask her, since she left. I measure my words, cautious that saying the wrong thing might make her disappear as suddenly as she came.
“Why did you go away? Why did you leave me here? You knew that it was always supposed to be you and me, together.”
My arms are wrapped around her, but rather than making her warmer, she’s making me colder, and I let out an involuntary shiver. A hurt look comes over her face.
“You would have left me someday though. You would have gotten married and gone away and left me all alone.”
“Oh, Emmy, I would never do that.” Though as soon as I say it I think of Mr. Barrett and shame flushes through me. “Besides,” I say, “one day you might have met a nice man and you wouldn’t want your older sister hanging about as you tried to kiss him, would you?”
She screws up her face at the thought of kissing a boy and laughs. I smile too, though it’s difficult, knowing that she will never fall in love, never start a family of her own.
“You don’t need to worry about me.”
“But I do,” I say. Tears are welling up faster than I can blink them away. And then I finally ask the question that has tortured me, “Oh, Emmy,whydid you do it? You must have known better. How could you have been so careless?”
She regards me for a moment with her bottomless gray eyes, and then shrugs in my arms. “It was the little boy,” she says. “The little boy told me he would show me the mermaids.”
I suck in a breath. “What little boy?”
“The one in the water. He said he wanted a friend and that he would show me the mermaids if I was his friend.”
She says it so matter-of-factly. A shiver runs down my spine. “Is the little boy like Wicked George? Can only you see him?”
When Emeline was very young she had an imaginary friend who was always getting into trouble. George—or Wicked George, as he came to be known by Mother—was responsible for all sorts of things that were suspiciously like the kind of trouble little girls might get into. Could she have dreamed up a new imaginary friend that she never told me about?
“How should I know if you can see him or not?” This line of questioning is obviously tiresome to her and she gives a little yawn, her chilly breath scented with pond water.
I hesitate, wanting to hear more about this little boy, but I know better than to press Emeline on something she doesn’t want to talk about and risk her shutting down completely.
She shrugs. “I thought I could get back out, that the boy would help me, but he didn’t. I didn’t mean to.”
I can hardly breathe. “Oh, Emeline.”
“You tried to find me, didn’t you? You came into the pond to try to find me.”
“Yes,” I say. “I did.”