I OPEN MY EYES, AND EVERYTHING SLOWLY COMES into focus. I’m lying on my bedroom floor, staring up at the wooden beam stretching across the ceiling. The one that I . . .
I push myself up onto my knees. How long has it been since I was sitting on top of the lighthouse? An hour? A day? A year?
I crawl on the floor over to the wall and sit with my back up against it.
This room was once full of my things. A closet packed with dresses and skirts, sweaters and shoes. A bookshelf lined with paperbacks. I had school notebooks and pencils and homework. A quilt on my bed. Pretty trinkets I arranged on my dresser just so when I moved back to Jar Island.
It looked like the bedroom of any teenage girl.
Except now I see the truth. The empty closet. The bare bookshelf. A stripped mattress without pillows or sheets.
I used to think that this was the room I lived in. But it’s not.
It’s the room I died in.
It kills me all over again, thinking back to how knowing the truth weighed on Aunt Bette. I basically drove her crazy. Her dead niece, haunting her house. Except I didn’t know that was what I was doing. I really, truly believed that I lived through my suicide attempt. I thought I was alive.
I look down at myself, at the clothes I’m wearing. I’m the Mary I should be, seventeen, in a navy-blue sweater and a pair of jeans. Thin. But how? How did I fill this room up, my life up, with things that don’t actually exist?
I close my eyes, concentrate hard, and try to put my things back in my room the way they were before New Year’s Eve. The quilt, the clothes in my closet, my pink terry-cloth robe. I envision everything in my mind. I need something back. One little thing. A stuffed animal. One of my old books. I can’t exist like this.
When I open my eyes, the room is still empty and dark.
And I swear I feel my heart break.
I get up and walk out of my room, down the hall, and linger in the doorway of Aunt Bette’s room. It’s total chaos from when my mom came and took her away. The floor is covered with her collection of those old occult books.
I remember the fight we had, after I found out she was doing those weird spells on me. Burning those herb bundles in teacups, making string webs on our shared wall, trying to trap me in my room. She was afraid of me, of what I might do. She knew I was the one who’d caused that fire at homecoming, even though I didn’t.
I take a step inside, then a second, then a third. I hold my hand over a red cloth book teetering at the top of the stack closest to me, and wiggle my fingers. It flips opens to a random page. I used to think I had special powers, that I could move things with my mind. I was kind of right about that, I guess.
Some spirits are prone to unrest. Often they stay close to this world to resolve things they left unfinished.
Yes. Yes! That’s it. Exactly.
I flip to another page.
Under no circumstances should one ever inform a spirit that they are, in fact, deceased. It is better for them to remain ignorant of their plight and ignorant regarding the extent of their capabilities, which they will almost certainly use maliciously.
I stare down at the word “maliciously.” It scares me. What I could be capable of. But these books are my only hope. And that’s so much better than feeling hopeless.
