When I came back to the living room, there was the ghost of a boy around fifteen or sixteen sitting on the sofa where I’d been looking through the old lady’s scrapbook earlier. He was still gawky, all arms and legs, with features that seemed too large at the moment, but would become handsome when he grew into them. Except, being a ghost, he never would.
Under his watchful gaze, I stepped up onto the coffee table and sat cross-legged in front of him.
“Who are you?” I asked.
He seemed surprised that I could see him, but made a quick recovery. “Nobody important,” he said. “I’m just the other child.”
“The other…”
“Oh, don’t worry. You didn’t miss anything. I’m the one that’s not in the scrapbooks.”
There didn’t seem much I could add to that, so I simply said, “I don’t usually talk to ghosts.”
“Why not?”
I shrugged. “You’re not usually substantial enough, for one thing.”
“That’s true. Normally, people can’t even see me, never mind talk to me.”
“And for another,” I went on, “you’re usually way too focused on past wrongs and the like to be any fun.”
He didn’t argue the point.
“Well, I know why I’m here,” he said, “haunting the place I died and all that. But what are you doing here?”
“I like visiting in other people’s houses. I like looking at their lives and seeing how they might fit if they were mine.”
I looked down at the scrapbook on the coffee table.
“So you were brother and sister?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Does she ever come back here?”
He laughed, but without any mirth. “Are you kidding? She hated this place. Why do you think she joined any school club and sports team that would have her? She’d do anything to get out of the house. Mother kept her on such a tight leash that she couldn’t fart without first asking for permission.”
“But you’re here.”
“Like I said, I died here. In my own room. I got bit by a bee that came in through the window. No one knew I was allergic. My throat swelled up and I asphyxiated before I could try to get any help.”
“It sounds horrible.”
“It was. They came back from one of Madeline’s games and found me sprawled dead on the floor in my bedroom. It did warrant a small notice in the paper—I guess it was a slow news day—but that clipping never made it into a scrapbook.”
“And now you’re here…”
“Until she finally notices me,” he finished for me.
“Why did she ignore you?” I asked. “When you were alive, I mean.”
“I don’t know. Madeline said it’s because I looked too much like our dad. We were in grade school when he walked out on her, leaving her with a mess of debts and the two of us. I guess her way of getting over it was to ignore me and focus on Madeline, who took after her own side of the family.”
“Humans are so complicated,” I said.
“Which you’re not.”
“Oh, I’m very complicated.”