My Ghosts Read Online Free Page A

classroom, Mr. Dunbar’s boots squeaking ashe paced the oiled floor, while her pencil flew over the page. Or the very first one, kind Miss Bell with her pitted cheeks, soft hands. Trailing the faintest scent of flowers when she walked between the rows, or looked over Clare’s shoulder and whispered, “Oh, very good. Very good.”
    Minutes and hours are the same length, and days have twenty-four hours, even when the light changes according to the seasons. The same length everywhere in the world, although Clare knows that the actual hour varies. Knew that even before Ben’s stories from the Telegraph Office, a man in Toronto receiving word of a death in Edinburgh, that in some way hadn’t happened yet. And then there is time that seems to go on forever, yet on looking back has vanished in a blink. For so long the house could barely hold them all, and then it went quiet; she could walk into a room and find no one there. A dancing of motes in the light, disturbed by no one alive, although at those moments Clare has always felt that if she can only listen hard enough, she will hear her mother’s voice. That she has just left the room, a flicker in the doorway, that she’s always almost there.
    It’s not the same with her father. Wherever he is, it’s not here, and she wonders if that means he didn’t love them enough. Or if maybe he’s somewhere deeper, a fold within the fold, another layer where he stays apart with her mother and Wee Alan. Because Wee Alan was the first of them, from a place not even Ross remembers. From a time glimpsed when her father used to play his fiddle, his head bobbing and a lost look on his face. A time when his heart was all open.
    Clare’s friends came calling, she’s been told, when she was far too ill to see them. They still do, though not as often, and shetells Kez that she’s still too tired to see anyone, that she fears a lively visit will wear her out, undo all the slow progress she’s made. Easier than trying to explain how that life they were part of feels impossibly distant. She’s used to her drifting days, doesn’t want to be
cheered up
, to be distracted from things she needs to think about. Though sometimes now her eyes open in the middle of the night. She turns her head toward the window and looks at a sliver of moon, the rest of its pocked, dark circle. Wonders if that’s really what she sees, or if her mind fills in what she knows must be there. It’s terribly quiet and she suddenly thinks that maybe they’ve all gone away. That they’ve either forgotten her or had enough of her, nothing but empty rooms left below. If she could make her legs move down the stairs, there’d be nothing at all to find.
    Or maybe she died from the fever, if it was a fever; maybe she’s as much of a ghost as her mother is, as Wee Alan, as all the wandering souls. She pinches her thigh, but what good is that? Who knows if the dead still feel pain. At those moments she longs to be back in her warm place between her sleeping sisters, even if Kez sometimes flings out a sharp elbow and Nan’s long toenails scrape her shins. She folds her hands together and squeezes, tries to focus on that, and just in time she hears the creak of someone turning in bed, the faraway tick of the old clock in the hall.
    December
    She knows they’re becoming shorter, but the days feel longer. She tries now to keep herself awake, so the nights will be unbroken, sews or reads in the Teacher’s Chair. The bookabout watches, the book about the skies, and even a terrible novel the Misses Simp have sent over, all ringlets and sighs and God’s tests and forgiveness. Her thoughts still go around and around, but they all seem familiar, as if she’s reached the end of where her own mind can take her. When she hears Kez and Nan leave for the shops, the door closing loudly behind them, she stands on stronger legs and carries her tray downstairs, washes the dishes and leaves them dripping in the rack.
    At first she