Page 34 of How to Fake a Haunting

The beeps and whirs of the machines disoriented me, tricking me into thinking I was hearing the mind-numbing trills and sonic booms of Callum’s video game.

If I kept my eyes closed, I could travel to the place inside me where those noises lived, to the living room of my mind.

From there, I could make my way up the stairs to Bea’s room, find her leaning over a raised planter, her hands wrapped around the painted body of a wise-looking wooden tortoise, a smile on her sweet and trusting face.

In the house in my mind, where all my hopes and dreams for my daughter lived and grew, I believed Bea to be as insulated from the dangers of the outside world as if she were in an actual fairy garden, protected by magic.

But then, as I watched, the faces of friendly trees and wise owls grew pinched and twisted.

Toadstool cottages moldered around the gnomes within them, and animals lay in discarded heaps of glass and plaster.

Above the poison garden, the little girl who’d once watched over them was gone.

Even in my mind, the place in which I kept Bea safe was haunted.

I opened my eyes, and the vision disintegrated, not gently like dandelion seeds but like dust motes before a vacuum.

Bea lay in a hospital bed, her face as milk-white as the bedsheets shrouding her body, her dirt-marred koala bear tucked beside her head.

A purple cast cocooned her left wrist, and her head was wrapped, mummy-like, around the bumps and cuts she’d sustained.

What the wispy gauze wouldn’t help, the doctor had informed me, was the concussion Beatrix had suffered in the fall.

Speaking of the doctor, how much time had passed since I’d seen her?

In the stillness of the room, time was like wax that pooled around a lit candle, accumulating and persisting as much as burning away.

I felt as if Bea and I had been deserted at the bottom of the ocean after being thrown overboard by a cruel and negligent captain.

I shifted where I sat, the gauze around my wrist tight and uncomfortable.

The nurses had tried to convince me to remain in my own hospital bed across the hall but had decided to “expedite discharge proceedings” when it became clear I wouldn’t accept being away from Beatrix.

I wouldn’t even use the bathroom in the back corner without leaving the door open, too worried about who might storm into Bea’s room if I wasn’t there to stop them.

It wouldn’t be Callum, of that I was certain.

Callum wouldn’t come to the hospital until he was sober enough to pass a breathalyzer, which would be late tomorrow morning at the earliest. He’d told the EMTs he’d be right behind the ambulance in his truck, but that, of course, was a lie, and everyone present had known it.

This time, sleeping it off wasn’t only preferable, it’d be legally necessary.

I wasn’t sure how Callum had gotten so drunk in such a short amount of time, short of some frat party–worthy guzzling .

. . or something supernatural. No, it wasn’t Callum I feared would materialize in Bea’s hospital room doorway .

. . It was someone whose motivations I dreaded far more.

Sometime after the last of Bea’s neurological tests had concluded, Bea’s door had opened again, revealing a young woman in colorful scrubs. The woman had been jumpy and on edge and had looked down the hall both ways before closing the door behind her.

“Lainey. Lainey Taylor, right? I’m Veronica Schumann.”

At my blank expression, she added, “Adelaide Benson’s ex-girlfriend.

Listen, I’m not supposed to be in here, and I can’t stay.

Joey de la Cruz, one of the EMTs who brought you in, he called in a report to DCYF against your husband.

Joey spoke with the doctor who saw you in the ER to let them know it had been done. ”

“DCYF?”

“Sorry, Department of Children, Youth, and Families.”

She must have realized I was still having a hard time following, because she asked, “Lainey? Do you understand what I’ve told you so far?”

I nodded, but my brain was both on fire with questions and numb with fear. Was this good for my long-term plan to divorce Callum or bad for Beatrix overall?

“Okay,” Veronica continued, “because the next part is very important. About forty minutes ago, your mother-in-law walked into the hospital. She disappeared into a room with the ER doctor who treated you and Beatrix when you arrived, and when she came out, she looked as high and mighty as ever. Gossip spreads in an emergency room like nowhere else, and from what I’ve heard, Rosalie forced the doc to give her the name of the EMT who called in the report.

” She stared hard at me, letting that information sink in.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” she said, looking over her shoulder to the door, “but if I had to guess, I’d say Joey is going to find himself embroiled in some sort of slander case. Either that, or the whole thing will disappear like it never happened.”

And with that, Veronica turned and put her hand on the door.

“Wait,” I said, my voice panicked, “why did you tell me all this? What am I supposed to do?”

She paused, hand still hovering over the door handle, and sighed.

“Dating Adelaide is a one-way ticket to Crazy-town, but she’s a good person, and she thinks the world of you.

I don’t know what you’re supposed to do next, but this is as far as I can go.

Maybe Adelaide can help you think of something.

We all know what a goddamn evil genius she is when it comes to solving problems.”

I sat beside Bea’s bed, Veronica’s words echoing in my ears, and picked up my phone for what seemed like the hundredth time since the doctors removed the spike of wood from my wrist. I kept telling myself it wasn’t the right call, not yet, but with each new weighing of the pros and cons, I was landing less on the side of caution and more on the side of It’s the only way.

Bea stirred, and I jumped, the stitches in my wrist tweaking painfully. Her eyes fluttered, then opened. I slid forward on my seat and readjusted my grip on her hand.

“Mommy,” Bea said.

“I’m here, baby. Are you okay? Are you in pain?” I started to stand, to look for the call button, but she gave me a half smile.

“Nothing hurts. I’m tired.”

“Okay. Okay, that’s good, baby.”

She looked down at the cast on her wrist. “I like the purple, Mommy.” Her voice was soft, somehow more babyish than the way she usually sounded.

“Do you, my love? I picked it out for you while you were . . .” Unconscious. “. . . asleep.”

Her eyes traveled down to the gauze around my wrist. “We have matching Band-Aids.”

“We do, sweetheart. And we’re both going to be fine.”

She looked around the room, and I sensed her question before she asked it.

“He’s not here,” I said.

Her gray-gold eyes held mine, and she nodded.

“And when you’re discharged, I’m taking you to Gram and Papa’s.

” I smoothed the curls poking out of the bandage around her head.

“At least for now. So I can figure out what to do about him.” This was the closest we’d ever come to talking about her father’s problem, but we couldn’t be the family that shied away from the truth.

Not anymore. Callum had crossed a line—again—that there was no coming back from.

There’d be no more pretending, not just on my part, but on Bea’s, that he was a capable, if uninvolved, father.

“He made me ride my bike,” Beatrix said, and I froze, both needing and not wanting to hear what she was going to say.

“I didn’t want to,” she continued. “I wanted to put my pajamas on and get in bed, like you said. He said that it was his fault I could ride a horse and not a bike and that he had to teach me.”

Her beautiful eyes filled with tears, and my heart seized, the sensation so sharp I drew in a breath.

“Oh, honey, it is his fault, but not in the way he thinks. He couldn’t make up for all the time he hadn’t spent teaching you to ride a bike in one evening.

And it was also his fault that he didn’t fix that railing.

But I don’t want you to worry about the things that are Daddy’s fault.

Daddy has to worry about Daddy. I need to worry about you. ”

I stood and pulled Beatrix to my chest. Her cast knocked painfully into my arm, but the pain felt good, awakening the dark and ugly things within me, clearing my mind of everything but love for my daughter and a fierce, primal need to protect her.

Bea’s eyes were drifting closed. I leaned down and kissed her. “You sleep, honey. The next time you wake, we’ll be almost out of here.”

She sighed in the way she did at home before sleep took her. “When we get to Gram and Papa’s, can they sign my cast?”

“Of course,” I replied. I kept thinking she was asleep, but each time I responded, her eyes fluttered open again.

“And then what?” she asked.

“And then . . .” I paused, and realized I knew what would come next.

Had known since the moment I’d watched Adelaide storm out of Beatrix’s room the afternoon of Flypocalypse.

Because there’d been no moment over the last two weeks during which I truly believed Callum was on the path to somewhere better.

There’d been only a breathless, pregnant waiting for him to return to the path on which he’d always been.

Pausing the haunting hadn’t been an end to Adelaide’s grand plan. It’d only been a way to regroup, to catch our breath before a storm for which we’d need all our skill and cunning. That Callum had hurt Beatrix during that period of waiting was something for which I’d never forgive myself.

“Then what?” Beatrix asked again, her voice small in the hospital room, and I leaned down and pressed my cheek to hers.

“Then Mommy will make everything better.”

Bea drifted off in the wake of my answer. Grimacing through the pain in my wrist—and my heart—I pulled my phone from my leggings and found the number I needed.

She picked up on the very first ring.