Alice and Carver didn’t remember why we moved, but it was because of me. Because one night, when I had been pulled out of bed by a mischievous young spirit, I had found myself wandering toward the basement.
“Are you sure this is your unfinished business?” I had asked the ghost. “To see—to see you?”
He had smiled at me. “Absolutely—I wanna see. I have to see,” he said as he led me down into the mortuary. I had gone down there a few times with Dad, but never alone. It was where the dead were stored in narrow freezer boxes until their funeral came. I didn’t know the facts yet. I just knew Dad prepared them for the rest of their journey—like Charon over the river Styx.
There were only two guests in the mortuary that night—Dad called them “guests.” They were bodies. Obviously. I had guessed the right freezer box on the first try, and pulled the drawer out. On the narrow table lay a boy who looked a lot like the one who stood beside me. Young—twelve, maybe. Dad had already fixed him up, painted his blue lips tan, and covered the bruises on his neck.
“Does that help?” I asked the ghost—and he looked . . . “Are you okay?”
“I wanted to wear my Transformers T-shirt,” he replied, and looked away. “I’m really dead, aren’t I?”
“I’m sorry.”
He took a large breath （or as much as a large breath looked）， and then he nodded—just once. “Thanks—thank you.”
And like the dozens of ghosts before him, the sparkling bits that made him began to break away like dandelion tufts, and dispersed into the room—and he moved on. A firework there, then gone. And I was left alone in the frigid mortuary.
I climbed the steps to the door again, but it had locked itself when it closed the first time—I had forgotten to unlock it. I pushed on it—once, twice.
Banged on it—called for help.
Nothing worked.
Dad found me the next morning. Apparently, they had looked everywhere once they realized I was missing, until they finally came down into the mortuary and found me curled up on the steel table in the middle of the room, a blanket over me, asleep.
Mom and Dad decided that maybe—just maybe—raising a family in a funeral home might not be as eclectic and wholesome as they were expecting.
Luckily, there was an old two-story house down the street, built in 1941, so it gave Mom things to renovate and fix around the house as we grew up. That was her college major—architectural renovations. She was really good at it, too. I used to wonder if she ever regretted marrying Dad, and moving to a small nowhere town with nowhere people, but she never gave the slightest hint she did. She took unloved things, like the stained glass window above the door in the funeral home, and the stone and brass fireplace in the new house, and turned them into wonders.
The new house was less showy than the funeral home. It sat on a side road off Main Street, beside the Gulliver family and the Mansons, built with old crumbling bricks as red as clay, and pristine white shutters. But at night, when Carver and Alice’s respective room lights were on, the house looked like it had eyes and a grinning red mouth for a door.
The house was exactly as I remembered it as we came up the cobblestone pathway. Bare threads of ivy clung to the brick walls, and a lone spider hung from the sconce beside the door. Alice’s red convertible was in the driveway, though it looked a lot worse for wear these days, beside Mom’s unassuming SUV. Dad had a motorcycle, though I didn’t see it in the driveway. I wondered where it was.
“Ah! That thing,” Mom said as she fished into her heavy purse for the keys. “He took it to the shop this week before . . . well, you know. Before.” She smiled, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. “I’ll ask Seaburn to get it tomorrow.”
“I’ll get it,” Alice said.