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Same as you want. Why.
“Jesus, I do not understand this. ”
Caroline came into something like a solid image then, looking out the window through the gossamer layer of white curtains beneath the darker lining. She wasn’t gazing at anything in particular that I could see, not peering down to the streets below where the dead things crept towards us, only avoidable and not at all stoppable.
It was a mistake. It was a lie.
“I don’t understand,” I said again.
My sister didn’t really go to marry the newspaper man’s son. I said it to be mean. I didn’t know anyone would go there, to the church. I didn’t know Julene was there.
“Julene?” Ah, a name for the small zombie queen. “She wasn’t your sister, was she?”
No. Her mother worked in the laundry. Not “seemly. ” Should play with little white girls, but there weren’t too many then, not here.
She sounded positively lucid, and it unnerved me more than when she behaved like a madwoman. “Let me get this straight—your sister, was she older than you?”
Caroline nodded, not turning away from the window. The way the light came in, watery and sick though it was, almost made her more rounded, more solid, when it hit her face. More real.
“And you were jealous, or angry, so you told someone that your sister was going to marry the newspaper man’s son—at the church there? At the First Congregationalist . . . ?” I let the title die in my mouth. I didn’t need to say it, she knew it already. And the only thing we knew about the old newspaper was that it was owned by a black family.
Outside the door the dragging footsteps neared.
“You were lying, but someone took you seriously. And it was someone with connections to the Klan. ”
Everyone had connections to them back then. I shouldn’t have said it. It was a mistake. Sister wasn’t even there. She was on the riverboat with a boyfriend she kept secret. And all that time, I’d wished he was mine.
And I heard it, in a flash—I saw it, with a flicker. Caroline, flesh and blood and maybe twelve years old, all knobbed knees and folded arms. “She keeps it secret because she doesn’t want Daddy to know. It would make him crazy to know. You know who it is? That newspaper man’s boy. That’s why she keeps it quiet. She’s going to marry him in that church, you know the one. ”
Behind the girls, a door closed quiet, like someone was shutting it and not wanting to be seen—not wanting the people in the room to know that they’d been heard.
It was a mistake.
We were both repeating ourselves then. Both of us running out of things to say, but the dead things were still coming and our talk wasn’t going to slow them down. So why was I bothering? From that flawed logic, I think—the kind that says, “If I understand how this works, I can fix it. ”
But the more I listened, the less confident I grew.
“What does she want, then, Caroline? Revenge? She can’t very well kill you, if that’s what she wants. ”
I thought, though, of that moment of contact Julene had made with me down by the ball park. It was so blind, her anger—her hatred. Driven like an infuriated child, and I imagined that when she reached this room, nothing she’d find would satisfy her. Just as a child will scream for a toy so long that when she receives it she doesn’t want it anymore—that’s what this would be like.
And I heard a scratching at the door.
Caroline backed away from the window to sit on the bed. The door would hold a minute more, I thought. I sat down beside her.
“I guess you could apologize. ” It was a pitiful excuse for a suggestion, but she didn’t mind it.
That won’t work, will it?
“It’s worth a try, don’t you think? You don’t want her to burn this place down around you, do you?” Or around any of the handful of people still here, either, I thought. She probably didn’t give a damn who else joined her, but she probably wanted the hotel left standing.
Where would I go?
“I don’t know,” I shook my head. “I don’t know what happens. The only dead people I ever see are the ones like you, who stuck around for some reason. Those who leave don’t ever come back to talk about it; not that I know of, anyway. ”
I’m not ready.
The scratching had turned to banging, which turned to beating, and to the disgruntled squeals of hinges being strained to their breaking point. I looked at the window and thought of the ledge; I wondered if it’d be worth my trouble to try it.
