Unbroken (5 page)

“You can say that again,” Rebecca muttered. She couldn’t help noticing that he had a beautiful smile, though.

“I looked for you the November just gone, but Lisette didn’t make her walk then, and the other ghosts were saying she was no longer with us. So when I saw you in New York, down where the docks used to be, I knew it was a sign.”

“I’m not sure I believe in signs,” Rebecca said. She glanced over her shoulder once more, worried that her dad and Ling were looking for her out the window. “Look, I really have to go back now.”

“Back to New York? But you just arrived!”

“Back to my house,” she told him. “The place I’m staying. I snuck out, and my Dad’ll freak if he realizes I’m not there.”

“Freak?” Frank asked.

“Get all upset.”

“Rebecca,” Frank said. Her name sounded unfamiliar in his soft accent — as entrancing and seductive as his deep blue eyes. “Please. You have to help me. I’ve been waiting for a hundred and forty years. I may never have this chance again.”

“But you haven’t told me
why
you need to get this locket,” Rebecca whispered. “Or what I’m supposed to do with it.”

“Please,” said Frank, his gaze practically splitting her in two. “I thought you’d understand. I broke my promise. I should have taken the locket straight to the house on Esplanade Avenue, but I didn’t. Lying under those floorboards, the locket is as good as stolen. Until it’s given to its rightful owners, I’ll be stuck here in the afterlife, condemned to be a ghost for all eternity. Please — you have to help me!”

Rebecca thought of Lisette, desperate to escape the relentless loneliness of the world of ghosts. All Lisette wanted was to see her mother again, to rest in peace. Lisette had been trapped by a complicated curse, but all Frank needed was the rescue of this locket — a locket that lay undisturbed, he said, in an abandoned house just a few streets from here. It seemed like such a small thing to do. How could she say no?

“I’ll find you again,” Rebecca told him, backing up a few paces. “I don’t know when, but I’ll come looking for you. Then you can show me the house.”

T
he next day was beautiful, sunny, and much warmer than in New York. Not a day to be thinking about ghosts and buried lockets, but the conversation with Frank was still on Rebecca’s mind. She hadn’t been able to shake him from her thoughts all through dinner last night.

Now, she stood on a grassy bank looking out at Lake Pontchartrain, its water metallic blue, ruffled with white by the breeze. In the distance, the long bridge called the Causeway stretched toward the North Shore. Seagulls cried overhead and a pelican soared past, plunging into the water to scoop up a fish. Sailboats lurched by, puffed with wind.

Really, it would have been an idyllic scene if Rebecca weren’t practically knee-deep in garbage, pulling bottles and cans out of a ditch clogged with mud and sand.

“Hey, look!” Ling shouted from farther down the shorefront. Like Rebecca, she was wearing shorts, a red T-shirt that read FRENCH QUARTER TRADERS ASSOCIATION, and a pair of oversized gardening gloves. “Another one!”

Ling was heaving a rusted shopping cart — her second of the day — out of the water, to the cheers of the workers around her. Rebecca raised an empty soda can as a mock toast to Ling’s efforts, and then crammed the can into the trash bag tied to one wrist. She couldn’t believe how much garbage people threw into the lake, or hurled into one of the storm drains. In addition to the hundreds of squashed cans and broken bottles, they’d pulled out plastic bags, cell phones, a decomposing baby stroller, assorted shoes, an LSU flag, and a crumpled car bumper.

Almost two thousand people were taking part in the Big Sweep today, they’d been told, working in teams on both sides of the lake. Anton was here, somewhere, with his soccer team, but Rebecca didn’t know how he’d ever find her.

Ling clambered up the bank and together she and Rebecca stood watching one of the women in their team pull a barbecue grill out of the water: It was ensnared with weeds, twisted plastic bags, and — unbelievably — a broken string of silver Mardi Gras beads.

“Hang on to that grill, baby!” The overenthusiastic zone captain walked up, his gloves stuffed into one pocket. He was bald, chubby, and any age between forty and maybe sixty. He owned a restaurant on Bourbon Street. This guy had organized the group, handed out the red T-shirts they all wore, and had insisted that everyone call him Z-Cap. “We might need to cook us some lunch on it. Right? Right?”

“Man, we really got to do this in New York when we get back,” Ling said, tugging on her gloves again. Fearlessly, she reached into the storm drain and pulled out a dripping, empty cigarette packet. “Maybe we could adopt a stretch of highway, like Bette Midler did.”

“Rebecca!”

Rebecca heard a familiar girl’s voice and blinked into the sunlight.

Her cousin, Aurelia, was thundering toward them along the bank. “Rebecca!” she called.

Rebecca reached out her arms, which was just as well: Aurelia tripped on an exposed concrete pipe, staggered the last few steps, and almost fell on top of her.

“Oh my god I can’t believe I found you,” Aurelia said in one breathless rush, turning her fall into a crushing hug. “We’re way, way down there, and Miss Shaw is so mean — she wouldn’t let me come look for you even though I said you were my cousin and all. But then we fished out a body, and she got sick and had to lie down in the back of her car. So I ran off to look for you.”

Rebecca felt a chill. “You fished out
a body
?”

“We thought it was, but it was just a nappy old wig and a tire with a coat hanger sticking out of it.”

“
This
is your little cousin?” Ling asked, laughing.

Rebecca could understand Ling’s reaction. Aurelia was thirteen now, and she’d grown an implausible amount in the past
year. She wasn’t the little cousin with a swinging ponytail anymore. Her dark curls were shorter, and she looked taller and skinnier. She was still just as affectionate and exuberant, though, hugging Ling as a greeting, and then hugging Rebecca again even tighter.

“I wanted Mama to bring Marilyn over to your house yesterday, but she said no,” Aurelia told them.

“Is Marilyn your friend?” Ling asked.

“She’s the cat,” said Rebecca. “Fluffy and silly, just like Aurelia!”

Aurelia beamed. She
did
look like a fluffy chick today, in her yellow TEMPLE MEAD JUNIORS T-shirt. She was also wearing the pair of denim shorts that Rebecca had left behind last May. Aurelia had sewn a purple patchwork square over the torn pocket. It looked suspiciously like the fabric of Marilyn’s cat blanket.

“Are you on spring break, too, this week?” Ling asked, and Aurelia shook her head, rolling out her bottom lip in mock despair.

“We had it already. But maybe I can come down to the Quarter after school one day to see you?”

“Any day you like,” said Rebecca, squeezing Aurelia’s bony shoulders.

“And Uncle Michael said I could come with you all to Jazz Fest on Friday.”

“We’re going to Jazz Fest on Friday?” Ling screeched. Aurelia clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes wide with horror.

“It was supposed to be a surprise,” she whispered. “Don’t say that I told!”

“We won’t,” Rebecca promised her. So that was why her father had changed the subject so quickly in the cab. He’d been planning it all along.

“I better go back,” Aurelia said, frowning again. “Claire’s covering for me.”

“As usual.” Aurelia and her friend Claire were longtime coconspirators.

“Whatever! Hey, have you seen Anton Grey yet?”

“Um — no,” Rebecca said, trying to sound casual. “I’ll probably see him later.”

“You
wish
you could see him later.” Aurelia giggled. “’Cause you have mud all over your face! And he’s walking over here right now.”

“She’s right,” Ling agreed. “In your hair, too. And on the seat of your pants.”

Rebecca cringed. Earlier that morning she had been trying to free the pieces of an upside-down plastic chair from its muddy grave, and had ended up sprawled in the dirt, a broken chair leg in hand. Z-Cap, wandering by, had shouted “Looking good, baby! You show that chair who’s boss!”

There wasn’t any time — or place — to get cleaned up now.
No sooner had Aurelia scampered away, disappearing into a sun-blurred crowd of workers, then Anton materialized, walking toward her like someone emerging from a mirage.

Rebecca rubbed sweat out of her eyes with the back of a grubby hand — how could hands get
so
dirty when they were inside gloves? — and tried to ignore her flip-flopping heart. Seeing Anton for the first time in all these months was always going to be weird, but it was even harder with thousands of people around, and Ling standing right next to her. Anton also had a friend with him — a blond, stocky guy.

Rebecca felt intensely self-conscious, and not just because she was half covered in mud.

Anton’s dark hair was more closely cropped than before, maybe, and he looked almost dorky in his Big Sweep gear: purple soccer shorts, and a black T-shirt that read ST. SIMEON’S SERPENTS. But not so dorky, Rebecca thought, her stomach clenching with nerves, that she could just look at him calmly, like a normal person.

“Hey,” they both said at the same time. Anton took another tentative step forward, as though he was going to kiss her, but all he ended up doing was sort of clasping her shoulder and leaning vaguely in her direction.

Not that I’m any smoother
, Rebecca realized. She just stood there, her arms like lead weights, her feet glued to the ground. It was hardly a romantic reunion.

“I’m kind of muddy,” she said, by way of an apology. Anton flashed her the briefest smile, and she thought that maybe he was as nervous as she was.

“This is Phil,” he said, gesturing at the blond guy next to him. Phil had a wide, completely non-nervous smile. He stepped forward to shake Rebecca’s hand, and then Ling’s. Rebecca was so tongue-tied, Ling had to introduce herself. Anton wasn’t doing a much better job with conversation, but luckily, Phil and Ling seemed ready to fill the void.

“It’s so cool that you’re doing something like this on your spring break,” Phil said to Ling. “You just down here for the week? I’m only here for the semester. We’re going back to Portland as soon as school’s out.”

“Portland, Oregon? Hey, my sister went to Reed!”

“No way!”

Phil’s father was some kind of medical specialist, and he had a gig, as Phil called it, at Truro Hospital. Phil was attending St. Simeon’s this semester, and it seemed as though Anton was his only friend.

“He’s good with waifs and strays,” Phil joked. “People from foreign lands. Other states, anyway.”

Rebecca and Anton grinned at each other. Phil was right: Anton had been really good to
her
when she was a waif and a stray.

“Hey,” said Ling, nudging Phil’s arm. “Want to see what we just pulled out of the lake?’

Rebecca felt a wave of gratitude toward her: Ling clearly realized that Anton and Rebecca were going to keep standing around awkwardly, saying as little as possible, until they were alone. Before Ling and Phil were halfway down the bank, Anton stepped closer to Rebecca.

She caught her breath, and wondered for the second time in the space of a few minutes if he was going to kiss her.

“I wanted to tell you,” Anton said in a low voice. “I saw Toby Sutton.”

“He’s
here
?” Rebecca looked over her shoulder, in case Toby was creeping up at this very moment.

“I’m ninety percent sure I saw him in the parking lot when we got out of the van this morning. Maybe he’s sleeping in his uncle’s boat in the marina. You know, he’s kind of unhinged right now. He’s really angry about having to move away and go to another school.”

“As opposed to the school he once tried to burn down?”

“Better the devil you know, I guess,” said Anton with a wry smile. Rebecca had seen that smile hundreds of times in photos — on Facebook, on her phone — but in person it had a very different effect. No wonder all the Temple Mead girls were so outraged when she’d “nabbed” him last year. They were
not
going to be happy when she turned up by his side at the Spring Dance this Thursday.

“Sometimes it’s hard to break with the past,” he was saying.
“Old habits. Old friends. I guess we’re all loyal to people and places even if …”

“Even if they suck?” Rebecca fanned herself with her gloves. Either she’d had too much sun today or she was blushing. Whatever had kindled between them last year was still smoldering; she’d known that all along. But really, she had to get a grip.

“Just don’t wander around anywhere alone, OK?” Anton looked her straight in the eyes, and Rebecca felt herself melt a little. So much for getting a grip. For a moment, she considered telling Anton about Frank, but she held her tongue. Not here, not now. Even
she
wasn’t sure how to make sense of her conversation with the ghost.

“Be careful,” Anton added. “Maybe don’t go to the cemetery this time, just in case.”