“You sound like Dad. He says I need to stop whining and toughen up.”
“You don’t need to be tougher,” I tell him, which is also true. Toughness is wasted on humans. It gets them killed by people like me. “You just need to know what to do if someone tries to hurt you.” Another human, I mean, although I don’t say that.
Oliver rolls his eyes again, then pushes the page aside. This one shows a table with an ice cream sundae, the ice cream colored in rainbow markers and topped with a dollop of whipped cream and, of course, a fire-engine red cherry. “The ice cream shop in Pinella,” Oliver says excitedly. “My mom dropped me off there while she was messing around with something for Owen.”
I smile at that. Oliver first started mentioning the ice cream shop a month ago, along with the fact that his mother had forbidden him from trying it. Apparently, he managed to find a way around the ban. “Was it good?”
“The best!” He gives me a huge grin. I flip to the next page.
It’s a woman. Just her face, with a dark fall of hair, although there’s something sweet in her expression. Oliver is good with portraits. Better than a ten-year-old has any right to be.
“Who’s this?” I ask him, studying his face as I sign. I think I already know, even though I couldn’t get a good look at her face, not from this distance.
“My new neighbor,” he signs back.
My heart pounds in my chest, and I look back down at the portrait. She’s lovely. Oliver didn’t add much color to this one; just the dark brown of her hair and the lighter brown of her eyes. It’s sketchy, perhaps a bit rushed, but I can clearly see the woman in the messy lines on the paper.
Oliver taps on my hand, getting me to look at him again. “She moved in yesterday,” he signs, brimming with excitement. “Her name is Chloe!” He signs the name out, letter by letter, and Isuck in a sharp breath. Her name. I wanted her name, and now I have it.
“And she knows ASL!” he continues. “Maybe we can all be friends?”
My pulse thunders. Is that why I was so drawn to her, this Chloe, sitting with her legs dangling into the water? Did I sense it, somehow? That she wouldn’t laugh at me, like the girls in Veritas did? That she would speak to me, and be able to see me speak, too?
Oliver’s staring up at me expectantly, waiting for my response. I swallow. It doesn’t matter if she knows ASL; I can’t bring a grown woman across the lake. She’ll know what I am the second she sees me. A predator, a monster. Women see it much more easily than men, and certainly more easily than children.
“Maybe,” I sign. Oliver frowns, and I add, “I’m not sure she’ll understand.”
“Understand what?”
I grit my jaw. “That I’m a ghost,” I finally say, even though I don’t like lying to him. Then, on a whim, I add. “Like your mother wouldn’t understand.”
That was the wrong thing to say, of course. Oliver shakes his head furiously, and his hands and arms fly out. “No, she’s not like her at all! She’s nice!”
Something pangs in my chest. Sympathy, I suppose. I don’t feel it often—certainly not for humans—but it’s easy to feel it for Oliver. Oliver’s mother is not like my mother, from what he’s told me. She’s not kind. She’s the sort of mother who, in my day, would have shipped a boy like us off to a boarding school so she wouldn’t have to deal with him. That sort of thing was more common in the fifties. Not so much now. Now, women like her are expected to raise the children they think are broken.
Still, I can’t have this Chloe meet me. I don’t want to break Oliver’s heart like that, to have him learn that his only friend out here is, in fact, not a ghost but a living murderer.
“Why don’t we wait?” I say, forming the words slowly. “Like I told you, I have to be careful who I let on my property. People don’t always understand.”
“She will,” Oliver insists.
He’s not usually this stubborn. I sigh. “At least wait a few weeks,” I finally say. “Give me a chance to clean up my house.”
Thatfinally mollifies him. He sighs and rolls his eyes and huffs a little. “A haunted house doesn’t have to be clean!” he signs, stabbing decisively into the air with his small child’s fingers. I give him my best approximation of an indulgent smile.
Mostly, though, I hope in two weeks’ time, he’ll move on to something else.
At least our conversation moves on, this time to a movie Oliver watched a few days ago—he’s always telling me about the movies and TV shows he watches. The video games he plays, when he’s able to play them. Bringing the world to me. I pay attention, as I always do, but it’s harder than usual. My thoughts keep wandering to Oliver’s new neighbor.
Chloe, with the long auburn hair and the long legs she splashes in the lake.
I know she won’t accept me. I’m nearly 80 years old at this point, even if I still look 30. I know what I am, and what humans are, and what our relationship is. Predator to prey. Killer to victim.
But I think of my father, and the tenderness he had for my mother—enough tenderness to let her live, to send her envelopes of cash every six months, to warn her what her son might turn out to be—and I wonder if maybe I could find that tenderness, too.
4
CHLOE
