Page 7 of Some Kind of Haunted

I move closer to peer at the pictures and see it’s not only us on the mantel. There’s a black-and-white picture of two nearly identical women, arms locked, bundled up against the winter around them, grinning at the camera. In another one, more recently taken, there’s a young woman I don’t recognize in front of what looks like an old-timey plane, though she’s wearing modern clothes. There’s another young girl smiling behind a counter holding knitting needles.

“That must be the shop,” Logan says a little gruffly from beside me, taking that picture out of my hand and scowling at it.

But I can’t be bothered by his sudden interest in the yarn shop—not his usual point of focus—because there’s also a picture of our dad looking young and handsome. Next to a wedding picture that he’s also in . . . which, of course, means that the woman in the photo is our mother.

I have seen a different angle of this same moment before, our parents beaming at each other in wedding clothes. Dad has a photograph like this that he never leaves out, but I’ve seen it here and there in various drawers over the years. Enough to recognize it immediately.

Our mother died giving birth to us, so I never really met her. I know my father loved her, because it took him a solid eighteen years for him to even consider going on a date again. He spoke of her, but sparingly. He showed us pictures of her, but he didn’t keep them on display.

He tried to give us pieces of her, but in the end, I think it hurt him too much.

It probably also hurt him that it doesn’t hurt us the same way.

Logan and I miss the idea of a mother, when we are confronted by the fact we don’t have one. But it’s not her, specifically, that we miss. And we have never known anything different.

So it’s beyond strange to see pictures of what I guess is us as a family, scattered about in the house of a woman I never met or heard my father speak of at all.

A woman who, until recently, was alive. Living right here in this tiny house and apparently aware of us all along.

“I thought it was a no-contact situation,” I say to Logan, who is still gripping that knitting photo. But I can see that he’s as shocked and uncomfortable as I am to see a picture of us at ten, posing back-to-back in matching outfits like a pageant of cringe that should feature in a bad sitcom, next to a dual frame with Logan’s law school graduation picture on one side and me at my first design show on the other. “How did she get these photographs if Dad didn’t send them to her?”

“We don’t know when they went no contact.”

“These pictures are only a few years old. He never spoke of her, Logan. And he didn’t want us coming here.”

Our father would never forbid us anything. Obviously, we’re adults now, but he’s always been happy to let us do as we please.

Yet, he was visibly disapproving of this venture. Even when Logan explained that, legally, we’re responsible for everything in this house and all her belongings. Not to mention almost half of the knitting shop and its contents. Because our mysterious grandmother left the shop not just to us, but also to two other people. One who works in the shop and one who’s supposedly a second cousin of ours or something.

I feel myself panicking a little bit—hardly the first time since we got news of this grandmother. “This second cousin. Is that Dad’s side or Mom’s? Was Mom from here?”

“I don’t know. I tried to sort it out, but Dad was unhelpful, and I was a little busy trying to wade through the legality of all this while also arranging time off work to come down here.”

“We should have figured it out before we came. We should have—”

“We’ll figure it all out tomorrow when we meet them.”

Logan is always sure he’ll figure it out. Because he hasn’t spent his life unable to sleep at will and without effort. Because he has never seemed to have dark voices in his head, like some, though I’ve always wondered if that’s just because he has me. I have all those things for the both of us.

Because everything works out for Logan Darling.

If I didn’t love him, I really would hate him.

“For now,” he’s saying, and I watch him place that knitting shop photo back on the mantel, very gingerly, “I want to sleep for approximately ten hours.”

I look around. Dubiously. “Where?”

He shrugs, so we explore more. Off the living room in the back of the house is a compact kitchen with much the same vibe as the living room. Tight, cozy, overstuffed but not . . . elderly exactly. Not terribly off-putting.

We retrace our very few steps to the living room and find a short hallway. There is one door off it. Logan moves forward and pushes it open.

This is the only other room, and it’s a bedroom with a tiny en-suite bathroom.

Logan and I stare at the lone bed in the middle of the room. Except it’s clear it’s not one bed. It’s two twin beds shoved together.

“This could not have been comfortable,” he says.

At the same time I say, “There’s no way I’m sharing a room with you.”