The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen (21 page)

“I'm not sure how we're going to get you in,” I say in a low voice, so the security guard won't hear me.

“What do you mean, get me in? I'll walk.” She gestures with a sweep of her hand at the open atrium, which is crowded with people coming and going, the beeps and swipes of bags being checked and book spines being run over demagnetizing strips.

“No,” I say. “You have to have an ID.”

“A what?” She looks confused.

“An ID. You know, like a driver's license, but for school.”

“Like a . . . Wes, what are you talking about?” She folds her arms and stares impatiently at me.

Her mole looks really cute when she's impatient. Okay. So they don't have driver's licenses in the olden days.

“Look,” I say, producing my NYU student ID. I hate the picture of me on this, my hair is sticking up and my nose is humongous. I'm grinning so big that I look about fifteen years old. “See? It's got a picture of me and my name and everything. And there's a magnetic strip on the back, so they know it's not fake. It's an ID. You have to have ID for everything here.”

She looks wonderingly at the card, brushing a fingertip over the photograph.

“Why, it's a perfect likeness of you,” she breathes. “How extraordinary! I've seen credible portrait miniatures, but they were never so like.”

“Annie!” I'm getting impatient. I don't have time for her to be all time-traveler about it. It looks pretty suspicious, us loitering out here. They'll call security if we don't act normal.

“And you say I have to have one of these, or they won't let me in? Are you sure?” she asks. But now she's looking at me with an impish expression on her face. A wrinkle forms on the bridge of her nose.

“Yeah. See?” I gesture to the signage over by the security desk, which is very clear about ID and library access and bag searches and all that stuff. Maybe I'm getting paranoid, but I'm pretty sure the guard is staring at us. He's definitely closed his magazine, anyway.

Annie pauses, staring down the security desk and chewing her lower lip.

Then she marches straight over to the security guard.

“You think they won't let me in?” she calls back to me, taunting. Her voice echoes in the library vestibule.

“What are you doing?” I shout-whisper, flapping a hand at hip level to try to beckon her back.

Instead she gives me a lopsided smile, plants her hands on the guard's desk, and leans into his face.

“Hey!” she shouts at him. “You really won't let me in?”

The guard doesn't respond. He's still looking at me, though. He moves his magazine slowly to the side, and folds his hands.

“Annie,” I say, getting desperate. “Seriously, stop it!”

She waves her hands in the guard's face, inches from his nose. Then she turns back and smiles at me. I'm about to pass out from
anxiety as she climbs up onto the guard's desk on her hands and knees.

“Hey, YOU IN THE HAT,” she shouts right up next to the guard's ear. “I'M GOING INTO THE LIBRARY, ALL RIGHT?”

The guard's face remains impassive as he rolls a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. With a last long glance at me, he resettles himself in his seat and picks up his magazine. He turns a page with disinterest.

I stifle a laugh of disbelief.

“ALL RIGHT THEN!” she hollers, jumping up and down in front of him. “I'm going in! Here I come! No ID! Just into the library, happy as you please!”

Annie vaults over the turnstile at a run, lands on both feet, dashes into the center of the atrium and turns a completely awkward cartwheel, flashing everyone with old-timey long white bloomers. I can't help myself, and crack up, burying my laughter under my fists. The guard glares at me.

Annie whoops in triumph and yells, “Come on, hurry up!”

She flops to the floor and sprawls on her back in the atrium, lying splayed like a starfish across the tile pattern that's supposed to look like giant spikes. People keep walking past her, stepping right over her, and nobody so much as looks twice.

I try to compose myself, swipe through the turnstile with a polite machine beep, show the guard the inside of my camera bag, and walk over to where Annie is lying, out of breath on the atrium floor, grinning up at me.

H
ow did you know he couldn't see you?” I whisper as we meander through the library.

She chuckles, skipping alongside me. How can she be so happy? She's . . . She's . . .

I can't bring myself to say it, even inside my own head, where nobody can hear me. Shouldn't she be sad? Or scary? Why am I not scared of her? Okay, sometimes I'm sort of scared of her. But not for the usual reasons.

She glances up at me from under her eyelashes, and her eyes glitter.

“Lucky guess?” she suggests.

I stop and fold my arms. “Come on,” I insist. “How'd you know?”

She laughs, and her laughter sends a shiver of pleasure up to the roots of my hair. Whenever she laughs, I find myself staring at her mouth. Her little bow-shaped mouth, with that mole.

Can you kiss people who are . . . who are . . .

Who are Rip van Winkles?

The moment the thought blooms in my mind I try to crush it. That's insane. Right? It couldn't be any more insane. For one thing,
she's older than my gran. Actually, she's
way older
than Gran. I cast a quick glance over at her, at the creamy line of her collarbone where it disappears behind velvet ribbon at her shoulder. Then I immediately stare up at the ceiling.

And besides. What about Maddie, who I'm supposed to be seeing later? It's not like she's my girlfriend or anything, but even so. She was just in my room, last night. I flash to a memory of the stark outline of her black lace bra against pale skin in the night shadows of my dorm room. The thought makes me stare even harder at the ceiling.

“For the most part,” Annie is saying, “I'm pretty sure nobody can. Not here, anyway.”

“But that doesn't make any sense,” I insist. “I can see you!”

She looks at me strangely.

“So far, you're the only one,” she says, her voice quiet.

“But that can't be right,” I insist.

A cute Asian girl in cutoffs and flip-flops walks past us going the opposite direction, her shoulder bag heavy with a laptop and books, and Annie shouts, “Hey! Put some clothes on!” right in her face.

The girl doesn't even so much as glance in our direction.

“See?” Annie says pointedly.

“But I don't get it. Why would I be able to see you, and not her?” I ask, looking back at the girl in flip-flops.

It's not just me, I realize with a rush of certainty. It's also Tyler. And Eastlin. Tyler actually saw her first. I was already thinking about her, the night we filmed the séance for
Shuttered Eyes
, but Tyler's the one who made me go over and ask her to sit down. When I remember the séance, my heart turns over in my chest so hard I have to cough to get it going again.

God. What if she was . . . I don't know. Summoned. Or something. What if that's why she's here? What if it's all my fault?

“Annie,” I start to ask her if she knows. Why she's here, right now.

Annie, oblivious to my thoughts, watches the girl in cutoffs over her shoulder, muttering, “Bare legs. In a library.” Then she turns back to me. “Why? I don't really know. Maybe they're just not looking right.”

She pauses, and I wait to see if she's going to elaborate on this idea. Instead she glances back at me.

“You're always trying to find the right way to look. Aren't you, Wes.”

I stare down at her, wanting to finger the soft curls over her ears. But I don't. Instead I swallow, and say, “I guess.”

We arrive at a bank of computer terminals, and I wiggle the mouse at one of them to wake it up. Annie is behind me, peering over my shoulder with a mixture of interest and anxiety.

I open up Google.

“So, what was your thing called again? That party you went to?” I ask, ready to type.

Her eyes jump between my fingers and the screen, baffled.

“Um,” she says. “The Grand Aquatic Display.”

Obediently I type the phrase into the search engine and hit enter. In my ear, Annie whispers, “My goodness. Will you look at that!”

But nothing much comes up. There's a lot of random stuff that doesn't seem to have anything to do with what she's talking about, and a scanned version of some guy's memoir that mainly talks about who all the aldermen were who were involved, and what all the different committees were in charge of, and it's all really dry and boring.

“Is that . . . is that a book?” she asks with wonder, reaching a hand out to touch the computer screen.

“I guess,” I say, clicking through the other results. There's nothing much useful, but I'm not sure what else to do.

“Does it talk about anything strange happening, at the Display?” she asks.

“Not really.” I frown, scrolling through the dense memoir on
Google Books. “It just says there was some huge party celebrating the opening of the Erie Canal. The Aquatic Display started in Buffalo and came all the way down the canal and then the Hudson to the city. Is that true?”

That's pretty impressive, given that it took, like, a month for anyone to get a letter back then. And no electricity. They basically lived in the Dark Ages. It must have truly sucked.

“Yes. Papa's in charge. They've been preparing for months. It's all anyone can talk about. Yesterday there were these men with him, in his study. And someone stabbed a letter up on our door.”

“Someone stabbed a letter onto your front door? Are you serious?” I ask, eyebrows rising. “That's so metal. What'd it say?”

“I don't know,” she says. “I never read it. But they panicked. Even Mother. That night we left the house and went to stay with my aunt Mehitable. Just before I found you, I'd sneaked out of the house to talk to Herschel, and tell him we're removing for Hudson Square. But I never found him.”

“Hudson Square?” I ask. “Where's that?”

She gives me a wide-eyed, puzzled look. “Why, where it's always been, I imagine.”

Great. That's so helpful.

I scroll through a few pages of the guy's memoir, which looks like it was written right around then. He talks about how during the construction of the canal there were a couple of explosions that seemed deliberate, but it didn't hold up the construction any. He doesn't talk about anything weird happening at the Grand Aquatic Display. What a name. They couldn't just call it a barge party? It's kind of stiff, how the memoir's written, but even I can tell it was an epic scene. I imagine I can see it, the flotilla of barges all lit with oil lamps and sparklers, drifting sedately down the river with Indians in canoes on either side, flags flying.

Annie's eyes are wide and blinking as she watches my fingers move on the keyboard, and the changing letters on the screen. It must look like magic to her. I can't wait to take her to see a movie. Maybe I can take her to something tonight. I should rent
The Others
and show it to her! That would be hilarious. No, that might be too intense. We'll go for some big monster CGI-type thing, something that will really blow her mind.

“Let me try something else,” I mutter, typing quickly. Maybe I'm showing off, a little.

“You play it like a pianoforte, almost,” she says.

This time I try searching her last name,
Van Sinderen
, and
cameo
.

She claps her hands with delight when pages of cameos on eBay and Etsy come up. Some of them are kind of pretty. For the name, there's a street in Brooklyn, and a book award at Yale founded by some dead guy. But nothing that shows both terms together.

I click through pictures of cameos, rings and brooches. They're pretty old-fashioned. But seeing Annie's face alight with pleasure gives me a shiver of satisfaction.

“Are any of these yours?” I ask.

She squints at the screen, her nose inches away.

“No,” she says at length. “None of them.”

I must look disappointed, because she quickly adds, “They're quite nice, though!”

I drum my fingertips on the desk by the computer, thinking.

“The Society Library always had the daily newspapers for anyone to read. They were laid out on a large table in the center of the reading room. And they'd keep them, for a time. Does this library subscribe to the penny papers?” she asks, her fingertips together in front of her mouth.

I laugh through my nose. Like NYU is going to have newspapers from two hundred years ago, just lying around. I'm sure they were all
wrapped around fish and then thrown into the garbage within days. All the newspapers that might tell us what happened are in the bottom of Fresh Kills landfill, or maybe even at the bottom of the sea. Or they've been burned to cinders and we're breathing them right now.

“Annie,” I say, trying to be patient. “Do you have any idea what year it is? Right now, I mean. What year I live in.”

A weird expression crosses her face, and she moves a little bit away from me. Her hand gropes over to the counter, lands on an abandoned pencil, and picks it up to fiddle with it.

“I think,” she says, without looking at me, “that we might ask someone. About the newspapers. I think that's what we should do.”

I peer at her. Isn't she curious? That'd be the first thing I'd want to know, if I was a Rip van Winkle.

Maybe she doesn't want to know.

Maybe she can't bear to look at it too closely.

“All right,” I say slowly. “We'll do that.”

She glances at me, and her eyes are wet.

I reach over and put an arm around her shoulders, pulling her to me until the top of her head tucks under my chin. I can feel the soft cloud of her hair, tickling my throat. Her arms go around my waist. I close my eyes, relishing the rhythm of her breath and the texture of her dress under my hands. It doesn't seem possible. She's so utterly, completely real.

“Hey,” whines a voice behind me. “You done yet?”

I glance behind us and find a pimply kid with a mom haircut looking balefully at me. He's holding a spiral notebook.

“Not quite,” I say to him. “Sorry.” I realize he can't see the girl in my arms. I must look pretty weird standing here, cradling nothing.

The kid gives me a sketchy look and goes away.

“Hey,” I whisper into her hair. “It's okay.”

She breaks away from me, wiping her nose on the back of her wrist. She nods.

“Newspapers,” she says, not meeting my eyes.

“Let me just do one other thing,” I say, turning back to the computer terminal. To be honest I haven't used the library for much of anything except checking out DVDs of documentaries that aren't available for streaming. They made all the freshmen do this library orientation thing at UW last year, but I wasn't paying much attention. All I wanted to do was watch movies. And make movies. And watch the movies I made.

I pull up the library home page, and type Annie's last name into the BobCat book search engine thing.

A few books come up by some other guy who's dead, who seems like he was one of those old society gentlemen who sat on lots of committees. But they're all from the twentieth century. Well after Annie's time. I shiver, as that thought passes through me. That even times long ago are after her time.

At the end of the list of stuff by the guy, there's an entry that just says “Ephemera.” It's in Special Collections. Sixth floor. On the reference table there's a stack of Xeroxed pages with maps to all the call numbers.

“Annie?” I ask.

“Hmm?” she says, peering over my shoulder.

“What's
ephemera
? Do you know?” I'm embarrassed that I don't know. But, heck. I don't.

“Ummm.” She furrows her brows. “I think it just means miscellaneous things. Things that exist? But nearly didn't? Like the noun form of ephemeral.”

“Huh,” I say. “So—it looks like the library has a box of random stuff that might belong to your family. Unless there's lots of other Van Sinderens out there.”

“Really? I don't know any,” she reflects. “But then, I'm discovering there's a lot in the world that I don't know.”

We exchange dry smiles.

“Want to go see what's in the box? Maybe your cameo's in there!” I suggest.

At this idea, her eyes brighten. “You think?”

“I don't know. Why not?”

“How do we find it?”

I pull out one of the library call number maps, draw a circle around the area that we want, and write the box's call number down in the margin.

“I guess we just go . . . ask for it,” I say.

Annie bounces on her toes, like she does when she's excited. Knowing she's excited makes my heart rate trip faster. I love seeing her look hopeful and happy. It makes me excited, too. Now I'm really hoping we find it.

At least, I think I hope we find it.

We ride the elevator to the sixth floor in silence, none of the other students taking notice of the strange girl in the tattered antique dress standing in their midst, eyes glued to the dinging numbers in the elevator overhead just like all of ours.

The doors ping open and Annie and I get off, walking faster than usual down the hall to find what we want. After several minutes of me showing my ID, inventing an independent study topic out of thin air, showing the inside of my bag, promising that I don't have a pen, and being led through a couple of glass doors, I'm finally parked at a long library table covered with foam blocks and told to wait a couple of minutes. All the while Annie stays at my heels, sometimes making faces at me over the shoulder of the reference librarian. Once she strides with exaggerated stiffness and formality over to a disused card catalogue abandoned along one of the reading room walls, puts
a finger to her lips, and curls her other finger into the handle of one of the drawers.

Slowly, deliberately, she
pulls the drawer open
. I watch her do it, holding my breath. She skips back to my side giddy with mischief.