A Skeleton in the Family Page 6

  Passing up music and his favorite movie. “Come on, Sid, I want to talk to you.”

  “I told you I’m reading.”

  I bent over to check the crack under the door. “With no light on?”

  “Are you worried I’ll ruin my eyes?”

  It was an invasion of his privacy that I knew I’d feel guilty about later, but I tried the doorknob anyway. Alas, it was wasted guilt. Locked. “Unlock the door and come out or else!”

  “Or else what?”

  “Or else I’m going to get the screwdriver and take the hinges off the door, probably breaking every one of my fingernails in the process and getting half a dozen bruises.”

  “Yeah? I don’t have much trouble with fingernails and bruises.”

  “I’ll never get the door back up by myself, which will mean that you’ll have to hide if Madison comes near the attic, which means that you won’t be able to eavesdrop. And we’ll either have to get Deborah to come fix it, which she won’t make a priority, or wait until my parents get back from sabbatical, or hire somebody I can’t afford to pay. Is your sulk really worth all that trouble?”

  A few seconds passed, but finally Sid unlocked the door and opened it.

  “I’m not sulking,” he said. “I’m thinking.” He turned to go back up.

  Now I knew something was wrong. When Sid was in a good mood, all his bones were tightly connected as if still fastened by invisible tendons, but when he was down, the connections were loose, as if it weren’t worth the trouble it took to hold himself together. He occasionally left behind a metatarsal if upset, like when I went to Europe for a month, and the day Deborah announced that she didn’t want to talk to him anymore, he left two finger bones on the couch. This time, as I followed him up, I saw no fewer than a dozen tiny bones left on the stairs. I collected them as I went.

  When I got upstairs, he’d collapsed on the chair, looking more like a pile of bones than he’d been when stuffed into his suitcase. I put the pieces he’d dropped next to him, but he didn’t even bother to put them back into place.

  “Talk to me, Sid. Why are you upset?”

  “Who said I was upset?”

  “Come on, spill your guts.” With his love of straight lines, he should have responded They’re already spilled, or maybe There’s nothing left to spill. Instead he just shrugged. Given that he’d been acting odd as early as Saturday, I made an educated guess. “Did something happen at the con?”

  “No,” he said in a tone that any parent would have recognized as a lie.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing happened.”

  I waited him out.

  “It’s something I saw. Someone, I mean. I recognized somebody.”

  “Okay. Was it one of Mom and Phil’s friends or what?”

  “No. I remember her from before.”

  “From before what?”

  “From before I was . . . like this. Georgia, I recognized a woman from when I was alive.”

  10

  “From when you were alive?” I said stupidly. “Are you sure?”

  “I think so. Yeah. Only she looked older.”

  “That stands to reason. I mean, you’ve been living with us for thirty years.”

  “Maybe I’ve been here that long, but I haven’t been living here. I am dead, you know.”

  “Mom always says you’re in a different state of consciousness.”

  “Yeah, the dead kind.”

  “Whatever you call it, you’ve been part of this family for that long, so if you remember that woman from before, she would have to be older.”

  “Even if I’m not.”

  “So, who was she?”

  Sid shrugged with a careless clatter. “I don’t know. It’s just that when I saw her, I felt . . . something.”

  “Happiness? Sadness? Love? Hate?”

  “Fear.”

  “You were afraid of her?”

  “Not exactly, but seeing her made me afraid. Like a flashback. You remember that time you slammed your finger in the car door and had to go to the emergency room? For months afterward, you flinched every time somebody shut a car door.”

  “I still do.”

  “Well, it was like that. Seeing her reminded me of being scared.”

  “But you don’t know why?”

  He shook his head, his skull rattling alarmingly. “How can I be afraid of something I don’t remember? There was something else. I felt guilty, too, as if I’d done something I shouldn’t have or hadn’t done something I should have. What if I did something bad when I was alive, Georgia?”

  “The statute of limitations has run out for anything you could have done,” I said, trying to make a joke and failing miserably. The fact was, we really didn’t know who Sid had been before he was Sid.

  It wasn’t as though my family hadn’t wondered who he was or where he’d come from, but he’d never been able to remember anything about his past. He knew how to walk, talk, and read, and his knowledge of current events and popular culture was no more than a year or so out of date, but that was it. Though Phil had quizzed him about the experiences of death and his bony rebirth, his earliest memory was the first moment he saw me.

  Mom and Phil had spent quite a lot of time theorizing about his origins, deciding that he was either a ghost haunting his own skeleton, a vegetarian zombie, a government project gone very wrong, or the most amazing shared delusion ever. None of the explanations stood up to scrutiny, of course, but I hadn’t really cared where Sid came from and Sid didn’t seem to, either. Sid was just . . . Sid. As I told my parents, I could always count on him, even if I couldn’t account for him.

  And right now he was upset and in danger of falling apart. Unlike most people, when he fell apart, he really fell apart.

  “Tell me about this woman,” I said while there were still enough pieces hanging together for us to carry on a conversation. “What did she look like?”

  “Tall. Older—like in her sixties. Jeans and a down jacket. Outdoorsy looking.”

  “Did you talk to her?”

  “No!”

  “Could you read her name tag?”

  “She wasn’t wearing one.”

  “Really?” Security at the con had been kind of tight—I was surprised they’d let anybody into the building without a tag.

  “I don’t think she was attending the con. She was looking around like she was confused, not turning her nose up or anything, but she clearly just didn’t get it.”

  “Then what?”

  “That’s it. She walked through the main hallway looking around, and I saw her meet some young guy and they left. And before you ask, I didn’t recognize the guy and he didn’t have a name tag, either.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “And that’s why you didn’t want to go back to the con Sunday.”

  “Yeah. I was afraid I’d see her again.” He paused, drumming his fingers noisily. “Now I don’t know what to do.”

  “You don’t have to do anything,” I pointed out. “As long as you stay away from campus, you’ll probably never see her again.”

  “Maybe, but now I know she’s out there. I’ve kind of got memories.” He shook his head. “Not exactly memories, but a feeling. It’s like there’s another person inside me, and I don’t know who that person is. I don’t like it.”

  “Sid, there are two choices. One, forget it ever happened. Two, we try to find out who that woman is.”

  “We?”

  “Well you don’t think I’d leave you alone with this, do you?”

  “But you’ve got so much going on. It’s not fair for me to ask you.”

  “Did you ask? Unless you don’t want me to—”

  “No! I want you to.”

  “Okay, then.”

  �
��So . . . What do we do first?”

  Never have I been so grateful to be interrupted as I was in the next second—I didn’t have the slightest idea of how to start.

  “Mom! Mom!” Not only was Madison home, but she was on her way up the stairs.

  “Shit! I’ve got to go.” I practically ran down the attic stairs, and was grateful I didn’t fall down them. I got the door slammed behind me just in time.

  “Another bug?” Madison asked.

  “No, but I thought I heard a squirrel up there—I may need to get a trap.” Before she could object, I added, “A humane one.”

  “Good.”

  “Why are you home from dinner so early? Did you and Aunt Deb have a fight?”

  “I never fight with Aunt Deb.”

  “Right, that’s me.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Aunt Deb got an emergency call from somebody who’d forgotten the code for his alarm system, so we ate fast and she dropped me off on her way.”

  “And you came running to find me because you missed me?”

  “No, look! I made Kevin Bolk’s Tumblr!” She waved her phone at me, and I had to take it to hold it still long enough to see the photo of her standing next to Bolk, proudly holding the sketch she’d commissioned from him.

  I thanked the powers that be for Kevin Bolk’s Tumblr—now I had a suggestion for Sid. “I guess there must be a lot of pictures from Mangachusetts on the Web,” I said loudly, assuming that he was eavesdropping.

  “Oh, sure. I’ve put some up on Facebook myself, and Samantha took a lot of pictures for her blog.”

  “I’ll have to go Web surfing and see if I can spot some of the people I saw there.”

  “I’ll send you some links,” she promised.

  I didn’t actually get to my computer until after Madison went to bed, but when I logged on, there was an e-mail from her with a dozen links. Many of those led to more, and I soon decided that I was the only attendee who hadn’t taken and posted pictures. My original plan had been to print out any promising photos or group shots, but given the sheer numbers, I gave up that idea—there wasn’t enough toner in the house to print that many. Instead, I tiptoed up to the attic and lent my laptop to Sid.

  Though he’d rarely had reason to use a computer, he picked up the basics of Web surfing surprisingly quickly. As he smugly said, watching all those TV shows and movies of people using their laptops must have paid off. I just hoped he wouldn’t somehow erase my hard drive or start World War III while I was asleep.

  The next day, my laptop was outside my bedroom door with a sad note from Sid that had only two words: NO LUCK.

  11

  I felt terrible for Sid, so once my morning class was over and I’d spent a few minutes answering student questions, I decided to devote some time to his problem. Since I had a couple of spare hours, I spent it at the adjunct office looking through photos from Mangachusetts until the normal clothing of the adjuncts started to look odd to me.

  There must have been fifty different sites with photos for Mangachusetts, including quite a few shots of Sid as Shinigami. I kept hunting through them for a woman who fit Sid’s description, but as far as I could tell, she was the only person at the convention who didn’t appear in pictures. There were even shots of me at the deli.

  Just when I was about to give up, Fletcher came in, sat down at his desk, then swiveled his chair toward me.

  He said, “Hey, I really owe you one! I told my class I was looking for people to cover the soccer tourney for extra credit, and I got enough volunteers to cover every single one of the playoff games. All I’m going to have to do is take pictures.”

  “That’s great,” I said. Then one word he’d said sank in: pictures. “I read your article about Mangachusetts in Sunday’s paper. Nice job.”

  “Thanks. I think I captured some of the experience.”

  “Definitely.” Of course, Madison had turned her nose up at his obvious unfamiliarity with manga and anime, but I’d thought he’d done a decent—and most importantly, respectful—job. “Good pictures, too, but I was expecting more, given what you said Saturday.”

  “Oh, I had far more than I could use.”

  “I’d love to see them,” I said, trying to put just the right touch of admiration into it.

  “All of them?”

  “I was hoping to find some photos of my daughter and her friends to send to my parents. They’re dying to see how she’s settling in. So I’ve been checking the Web, but I haven’t had any luck.” Other than that extremely good shot of Madison on Kevin Bolk’s Tumblr, but my legs were crossed, so it didn’t count as a fib. “Unless there’s a rule about showing them.”

  “No, it’s just that there are a lot of them. The best way to get publishable photos is to take a bucket load of shots. I filled up most of a memory card.”

  “I have a gadget I can plug into my laptop to look at memory cards,” I said. A former boyfriend who’d been a fan of computer gadgetry had given it to me after watching me spend half an hour hunting for the right cord to transfer photos from my camera to my computer.

  “Yeah, okay, then.” He rummaged around in his leather backpack to find the memory card while I dug around in my satchel to find the gadget. We emerged victorious at about the same time, and Fletcher rolled his chair over to my desk so we could look at the photos together.

  “I’m really not that great a photographer,” Fletcher warned me as we started, and I had to admit he was being honest. A lot of the pictures were no better than what I took with my phone, and many were far worse. There were more images of his thumb than of the Sailor Scouts.

  Still, it was kind of cozy to flip through them together, and I liked the way Fletcher was willing to laugh at his own photography skills. I liked it even more when Sara came by and gave us a remarkably dirty look—if I’d had a camera handy, it would have made a terrific photo.

  About two thirds through the directory of files, I finally found what I was looking for. At least, I thought I had. There were four shots of an older woman without a Mangachusetts name badge who looked like the woman Sid had described.

  “Who’s that?” I asked, hoping I sounded nonchalant. “That’s not a costume I recognize.”

  “Oh, I remember her. She’s dressed as Eminent Scholar, but it’s not a costume.”

  “Okay, now you’ve got me curious.”

  “She was there to meet somebody and got caught up in the festivities.”

  “Her face does have that ‘what an interesting specimen’ expression, with just a hint of ‘I hope they don’t bite,’” I said.

  “When I realized she knew even less about manga than I did, I figured I didn’t need the picture for my story.”

  “It’s a nice shot, though. What’s her name? Now that I look at her, she looks kind of familiar. Maybe she’s a friend of my parents.”

  “I’d have to check my notes.” He rummaged some more, pulled out a notebook, and flipped through it. While all that was going on, I surreptitiously copied the photos of the woman to my hard drive.

  “Here we go. Dr. Jocasta Kirkland. Is that the one you’re thinking of?”

  “I’m not sure. What is she a doctor of?”

  “No idea.”

  “Does she teach here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Isn’t finding stuff out your job?”

  He shrugged. “Once I found out I couldn’t use her for the story, I lost interest. Call it journalistic tunnel vision.”

  I must have been suffering from a bit of tunnel vision myself. I was thinking so hard about getting the picture to Sid so he could verify if that was the right person that I almost missed Fletcher’s next words, which were an invitation to dinner and a movie on Friday night. Fortunately I realized what he was saying quickly enough to enthusiastically accept.

  I had to leave for my after
noon classes after that, and went straight home afterward. Madison was there, which made it awkward to go up to the attic, so I printed the best picture of Dr. Kirkland, slid the printout and a note under the attic door, and tapped a couple of times to get Sid’s attention. A few minutes later, I got a note back: THAT’S HER!

  12

  Sid and I really needed to talk that night, so I had to come up with a way to manage it without arousing Madison’s suspicions. Though I admit my method was inelegant, I categorically denied his subsequent accusation that I was going out of my way to annoy him so he’d let me tell Madison about him. As I reminded him, I’d been annoying him for years without a hidden agenda.

  What I did was put the laundry basket inside the attic door. It was empty except for a blanket and a note telling Sid to climb in and pull the blanket around him. Then he was to tap on the door for me so I’d know to come carry him into my room. He weighed about twenty-five pounds, which was heavier than the average load of laundry, but well within my carrying capacity.

  As it turned out, when we made our move, Madison was downstairs watching TV and texting while playing Minecraft on her laptop. He could have walked past in slow motion with a dramatic soundtrack and she wouldn’t have noticed. Once I had him in my room, I yelled down, “I’m working—emergency interruptions only!” and locked the door. She may even have heard me.

  Sid untangled himself from the blanket with the picture of Dr. Kirkland in his hand. “That’s her, that’s her, that’s her!”

  “Do you remember anything else?”

  He stared at the picture unblinkingly. Well, he never blinked, but he looked at it intently enough that, even if he’d been a blinking kind of guy, he still wouldn’t have blinked. “Not really.”

  “Well, we’ve got a name: Dr. Jocasta Kirkland. That’s a start.” I went to the McQuaid Web site but didn’t find her listed as faculty or staff. “I suppose it would have been too easy if she worked someplace handy. Let’s try Google.” I entered in her name. “Okay, she’s a zooarchaeologist, whatever that is.”

  “A zooarchaeologist studies animals that lived at the same time as early peoples,” Sid said.