Ghost Hand (7 page)

“The cemetery,” my mother said, shaking her head. “This is getting ridiculous, Olivia.”

“What is ridiculous about the cemetery?”

“Oh come on. We both know you just go there to be dramatic and get under my skin.”

“Really? Because I thought I was going there to visit Dad,” I said, yanking my hand out of hers.

“For clarification, you visit his grave. You don’t visit him. He’s gone. But that’s not what I was referring to, and you know it.”

“What were you referring to then?”

“I was referring to your unhealthy, romanticized attachment to the idea of death.”

“The
idea
of death? Don’t you mean the reality of death? People die, Mom. Dad is dead. It isn’t just some crazy idea I have.”

“Yes, death is a reality, but obsessing over it isn’t mentally healthy.”

“Don’t analyze me. I’m not one of your clients. And at least I’m not wallowing in denial.”

“We weren’t talking about me. We were talking about you. And what you just did is called avoidance. Rather than face your own issues—”

“Oh please, save it for the office! You and I both know I’m not the only one in this family with issues about death.” So, we were fighting again. We always fought. It was one of the few things I could count on.

“Again, that’s avoidance,” she said. “As long as you keep putting your grief and anger back on me, you’re never going to be able to deal with it.”

“Deal with it?
You
think
I’m
not dealing with it? I visit him. I talk to him. I miss him. And yes, I’m extremely pissed at the universe for taking him away. But that is NOT avoidance. Avoidance is constantly analyzing your daughter’s feelings so you never have to face your own. Avoidance is hiding his life’s work in a shed in the back yard. Avoidance is refusing to mark your husband’s grave and never visiting it because you’re afraid if you face that reality you’ll end up being the mental patient, instead of the doctor. Oh, believe me, Mom, I know all about avoidance. I see it every day. I live with it, and eat with it, and talk to it, and fight with it. It’s practically my mother!”

Her eyes widened with shock. I saw pain, for a moment, tremble at the corners of her lips. For a split second, I thought she was going to slap me. And I wanted her to. I wanted her to hurt and cry and break into a million pieces with me. I didn’t want to be alone anymore, feeling everything for both of us. I wanted it so badly, I could feel it in my face, my throat, my chest, my arms, my hands.

“Olivia!” my mother yelped, looking down at my hand.

“It’s fine. I told you. It’s just a scrape,” I said dismissively, looking down too. But my mother wasn’t looking at my injured hand. She was looking at my ghost hand and the PSS that was seeping out of the tattered satin glove in spiraling tendrils.

“What is that?” she asked, backing away a step.

I turned and ran down the hallway into the bathroom, slamming and locking the door behind me.

“Olivia, are you all right?” my mother’s voice came through the wooden door. “What is wrong with your hand?”

I leaned against the door, panting and looking down at it. “Um, I’m fine. Yeah, it’s fine. I just need to get cleaned up.” She wasn’t going to buy it. She was majorly paranoid when it came to my hand. How was I going to explain this?

Beyond the door there was a long silence.

“Well, don’t make a mess,” she said. “And after your shower, we still need to talk.”

I heard her walk away, her footsteps receding down the hallway and back to the living room as if nothing had happened.

She had seen my hand whacking out right before her eyes, and she had just walked away. Something was seriously wrong with me, and she knew it, and all she had said was, “Don’t make a mess in the bathroom.”

I grabbed at my wrist and ripped off the tattered satin glove, the glow of my hand reflecting off white tile like cold starlight. I could tell it was already on its way back to normal. I was beginning to get a feel for its new weirdness. But this time it hadn’t given me any warning of heat or warmness before it had changed, and that was bad.

I crossed to the sink and looked in the mirror. My face was scratched and bloody. I lifted my ghost hand and watched its reflection move and twist, coming back into shape. It almost looked like it was doing sign language, like it was trying to tell me something.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked it. “What do you want?”

But it didn’t answer back.

I flipped on the light over the mirror and took a better look at my face. The scratches were long, but not too deep. Blood, now mostly dry, made maroon tear-tracks down my cheeks. One of the tracks curved, running right into the seam between my black lips. Wow. The Manic Black lipstick I’d bought online was really as long-lasting as they said it was. Several other blood trails went all the way under the curve of my chin and down behind my neck because I’d been lying on my back as I bled. Lying on top of Marcus.
Don’t think about that. Don’t think about him
.

There was a twig, jutting like a single antenna out of my dyed-black hair. I reached up and pulled it out, watching dirt, leaves, and grass rain down into the sink and on to the tile floor. My shirt was torn a little at the shoulder. And my whole body was beginning to ache, but it was nothing compared to the stinging of my injured hand.

I shrugged off my backpack and tossed it in a corner. What I needed was a nice hot shower. After that I could deal with all the other stuff—my mother, my ghost hand, the bag of blades, and the CAMFers. While I waited for the water to get warm, I undressed, more forest debris raining down on the bathroom floor. So much for not making a mess.

Just as I opened the shower and stepped into its warm billowing steam, I heard the distant jingle of the living room phone. It stopped midway through the second ring. My mother must have picked it up.

Hot water pummeled my back and ran down my arms. Wherever it hit, the scratches, scrapes and wounds burned, but in a good way. Until I picked up the soap. That stung like hell, but there was no getting around it.

I hadn’t been in the shower five minutes when there was a knock on the door.

“What?” I yelled, hot water cascading down my face and into my mouth.

“I have to go,” came my mother’s muffled voice. “Client emergency.”

“Okay,” I sputtered. That was weird. I couldn’t remember the last time my mom had been called away at night, even after she’d started working part time at the hospital in addition to her private practice. People in a small town like Greenfield tried very hard not to call one of their neighbors away from home and family after hours.

“Don’t wait up,” she said. “We’ll have to talk later,” and shortly after that, I heard her shut the front door on her way out.

I turned off the shower and stood for a moment, listening to the water drip off my body. I was home. Alone. A state I normally reveled in, but it was dawning on me that my mother probably hadn’t locked the door on her way out. And there were men out there who wanted to take me, or my PSS, or whatever. And one of them had been watching me for a very long time, which obviously meant he knew where I lived.

A SLIGHT BREACH OF SECURITY

I clambered out of the shower, pulled my robe off the door hook, and threw it on. Dripping all the way, I raced down the hall into the entryway and locked the front door, both the handle and the deadbolt. I’d never locked the deadbolt in my life. On the way to the back door, I checked windows, making sure they were locked, but throwing the final bolt in place on the back door didn’t make me feel any better. My heart was hammering in my chest. I had to take deep breaths on my way back to the bathroom, telling myself to calm down. I was locked up safe in the house. Besides, the blades would warn me if the CAMFers were coming. I just needed to stay calm.

I grabbed the backpack off the bathroom floor and went to my room, tossing it on my bed while I dug in my dresser for some clothes. As I pulled on my panties, I noticed a nasty looking scratch on my thigh. Something back in the cemetery must have gouged me right through my jeans. I marched back to the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet, looking for the antibiotic ointment and the Band Aids. There was plenty of ointment, but the box of Band Aids was out of everything except small circular dots. I applied ointment and a line of dots to the scratch, then stuffed the Band Aid box back in the cabinet. Wiping the steam from the mirror, I checked my face now that it was clean. It still looked like a cat had tried to climb it. I swabbed ointment on a few of larger scratches, and frowned at my reflection.

What was the deal with Passion’s blades? They just kept getting weirder and weirder. How could something like that even come out of someone? Obviously, they hadn’t come out of her body. They had something to do with her cutting—with her psychological issues, and they’d come out of that. A few months ago, when I’d been grounded and dying of boredom, I’d read an article in one of my mom’s psych journals about something called burdens. A burden was a negative thought or experience you carried around inside you, almost like a souvenir. I guess the common term for it was “baggage.” Anyway, according to this article, the author had developed a new therapy model to get rid of burdens. All you had to do was imagine your negative thought or experience as a physical object, like a heavy chain weighing you down, or an ugly purse, or a tangled ball of string. Once you imagined the object and it felt right, you went somewhere in your mind, like to the edge of a cliff or something, and you threw the thing off of it. And Voila! Problem solved and burden gone.

My mother had hated that article, probably because if people could just throw their problems off make-believe cliffs in their minds, they wouldn’t need her. But I’d thought it was a pretty cool idea. What if the blades were Passion’s burden, and for some reason my hand had reached in and snatched them out of her? Maybe they’d been in a plastic baggy because she’d wanted someone to see her pain and discover her cutting, and so that’s how she’d imagined them. It was an interesting theory, but it certainly didn’t explain why the blades could jam the CAMFers’ minus meters. Or zap someone unconscious.

And what was I supposed to do with them? Marcus had told me to keep them safe and close to me because they could warn me of the CAMFers. But he had obviously wanted them, even though he couldn’t touch them.

At the edge of my vision a shadow fell across the bathroom’s frosted window. By the time I turned to look, it was gone. But the feeling wasn’t. Someone was outside, in the dark, walking past the windows, looking in. The bathroom and my bedroom were at the back corner of the house which bumped up against the wooded outskirts of Greenfield. No one from the street could see someone lurking in my back yard. I lived in a small Midwestern town. No one was supposed to be lurking there.

I crouched down on the floor. The doors and windows were locked. No one could get in easily. Still, I glanced around the bathroom, looking for some kind of makeshift weapon. A hair straightener. Cosmetics. An eyelash curler. Toilet paper. Not exactly a deadly arsenal, but I grabbed my mother’s hairspray from the bathroom cubby. It wasn’t mace, but a shot of hairspray to the eyes was nothing to laugh at.

Think, Olivia. Get yourself out of this.

There had been two CAMFers in the cemetery. If they were both out there, they were probably each covering a door. If I made a run for it, they’d be all over me.

If I stayed inside, they might try to come in after me, but that would make some noise.

I needed to get to a phone and call 911 before they got that desperate. My cell phone was dead, and besides, it was in the backpack with the blades. The blades—Oh shit! They were still in my room.

I got down on all fours and tried to crawl down the hall, thinking it would be stealthier. It might have been, if I hadn’t been clutching a can of hairspray and wearing a bathrobe. My knees kept catching the edge of the robe and making me fall on my face. So, I stood up, jammed the hairspray in one of the pockets, cinched the tie tightly around my waist, and ran down the hall to my room. I scrambled toward my bed and grabbed hold of my pack. The blades inside were making a noise like a broken lawnmower. They were loud, louder than they’d ever been before. How many CAMFers were out there?

Glass shattered, and a brick came sailing through the window and landed at my feet. My bedroom curtains billowed inward, curling away and smoking strangely at the edges, as something else followed the brick—an orange, blurred blob that landed on the throw rug next to my bed with a muffled thump.

I stared down at it—a flaming, wooden torch, its end wrapped with a burning rag. The overwhelming stench of gasoline hit me like a smack in the face.
A torch. Really?
What kind of anachronistic bastards were these CAMFers?

I reached out my ghost hand, grabbed the flaming end of the torch, and chucked it right back out my window.

OUT OF THE FIRE

The torch sailed beautifully, end-over-end, its flame furling in the air as it hit the man standing outside my window. I heard the satisfying thump, his oomph of surprise. The burning end of the torch had smacked him low in the gut, but the momentary glow hadn’t reached high enough to illuminate his face. Whoever he was, he wasn’t as lean as the Dark Man. He must be the spy, or some new CAMFer sent to ruin my life.

The torch fell to the ground, or went out. I couldn’t tell for sure, but it grew dark for a moment just before the man’s shirt caught fire.

He tried to beat it out with several quick slaps of his hand, but the impact of the torch must have doused the shirt with gas, or the material was fairly flammable. Whatever the case, it didn’t work. The flames flared. The man cried out and dropped like a rock out of sight below the window ledge. That should distract him for a while.

My legs felt prickly, and I glanced down to see the cotton rug I was standing on go up in a blaze. I danced away from it. Apparently, it didn’t matter how old-school a torch was; it was as effective as it had ever been. The fire at the window had consumed the curtains and was licking its way up the wall to the ceiling. The flames on the rug greedily climbed to my bedspread. I needed something to beat it out, or douse it, or contain it, before it devoured the whole house. There was a fire extinguisher in the kitchen. I ran for it.