Her last complaint was delivered with such an indignant wail that it was all Charlie could do not to laugh. He sobered quickly enough, regarding her with steady eyes.
“You know it wasn’t easy, birthing you,” he said. “Your mother thought she’d lost you, a whole bunch of times, both before and after you were outside her belly and looking at the world. If she’s a little protective, you can blame it partially on that.”
“But I didn’t do that,” said Aracely. “It’s not my fault if I was sickly when I was born. I didn’t decide any of that, and it’s not fair to keep holding it against me. I’ve never done anything wrong, not on purpose. I just wanted to see the house.”
Charlie stilled. Finally, in a soft voice, he asked, “The house?”
“On the other side of the field. I met the girl who lives there. She didn’t know we were coming. Charlie, did we not pay our rental fees? Are we here when we’re not supposed to be?” Aracely looked at him anxiously. “I don’t want to have to move along when we’ve just gotten everything set up, but if we don’t have permission, I guess that could be what we have to do.”
“There’s no house there,” said Charlie, voice still soft, like he was afraid that to raise it would be to shatter some thin and impossible peace. “This field . . . the people who owned it all died. The bank owns all the land for almost a mile, and we did all our rental paperwork through them, exactly as we’re meant to do. I don’t know who you met, girl, but there’s no way she lived in a house that doesn’t exist, and there’s no way she gets to say whether or not we’re allowed to linger here.”
Aracely stared at him, eyes gone wide and heart gone narrow until it felt like it was barely beating at all, like she was on the verge of toppling over. Then she turned and fled, not deeper into the midway, but out, toward the boundary line, toward the vast and formless freedom of the fields behind. Charlie swore and ran in the opposite direction, fleeing toward Daisy’s tent.
Two figures running, both as fleet as fear can make them, one heading for a secret, the other for a story. See how they run, these children of the carnival sky! The man, with his fresh tattoo still aching on his skin, who remembers rumors, yes, stories that will linger after he is gone, who knows that everything is about to change. The girl, as guarded and sheltered as any hothouse flower, perfectly adapted to the climate of the carnival, where walk things that are neither here nor there, now nor then . . . living nor dead.
She ran not because she knew the shape of the story she was becoming, but because she didn’t know it; because she was afraid, as all sheltered things are, of the aching unknown.
He ran because he understood.
Aracely was younger, more frightened, and less aware of her own limitations; when she ran, it was with the wholehearted abandon of a young thing, and this time, when she crested the ridge and saw the house set out before her like the shadow of a dream, she did not lose her footing. She ran, and ran, and ran, until her feet were pounding up the front steps of a house that shouldn’t exist, until her hands were hammering on the door. Was this how people knocked? She had seen it in movies and on television, but she had never really had the chance to try it for herself. Doors in the carnival worked a little differently. Knocking on a tent could knock it over; knocking on a tin-walled trailer was loud and hollow at the same time, taking so little effort that a child could do it.
Knocking on wood was different. The house felt solid, like she was beating her fists on bone, and when she pulled back for another volley, the skin on the sides of her hands was red and hot.
The door swung open. Joanna stood framed in the entryway, only blackness behind her, a quizzical expression on her beautiful, scarred face. “Aracely?” she asked. “What are you doing here?”
“Are you real?” Aracely blurted.
Joanna’s confusion melted into sad resignation—and yes, acceptance. “Ah,” she said. “Someone told you. I guess that was going to happen, once you went back to your carnival and told people you’d seen me.”
Aracely said nothing.
“I’m real. I was real, anyway, before the fire. I don’t know if you’d consider me real now. Are ghosts real?” Joanna looked at her, sidelong and thoughtful. “Are you real? The living can’t see the dead, usually. They sure can’t touch us. You didn’t have any trouble touching me.”
“Dead?” whispered Aracely.
“In the fire,” said Joanna. “We all died. I woke up alone in the ashes. I think . . . I think I stayed for my horses.” She waved a hand, indicating the rear of the house, the fields that rolled on behind it. “They died so quickly that they didn’t realize it had happened. They’re all still here, with me. I guess they will be until someone comes along and paves these hills to build condos or shopping malls or something. Even ghost horses don’t want to stick around to argue with bulldozers.”
“What happened?”
“Bad wiring in the walls. It was over a century old, and I guess every generation had decided it could be somebody else’s problem, until the place went up in the middle of the night, and no one made it outside to watch the burning.” Joanna reached up and touched the scar on the side of her face. “I could wish these away if I wanted to, be the girl who’d never known what it was to burn, but it feels like that would be cheating, somehow. If I get to stay here, I should stay here as the aftermath, not the anticipation. How is it that you don’t know this?”
“Why should I know it?” asked Aracely. “I’ve never been outside the carnival before.”
Joanna hesitated. Then, without stepping out of the entryway, she extended her hand toward Aracely. When the other girl took it, she sighed, the sound as soft and sad as wind rustling through the boughs of an old oak.
“I thought you knew,” she said. “Aracely . . . did none of them ever tell you that you were dead?”
* * *
Charlie burst into Daisy’s tent to find her sitting with an open bottle of wine and a book of baby pictures, drinking from the one as she wept over the second. Her head was bowed, her shoulders slumped; she looked years older than she had when they’d rolled into town, a comfortable caravan that carried its secrets inside closed boxes, where no one would ever have to see.
“She gone?” Daisy asked, not looking up.
Charlie stopped. “Daisy,” he said. “What did you do?”
“You were with us,” said Daisy. She turned another page. When was the last time he’d seen that book? When was the last time he’d seen a camera pointed at Aracely, for that matter? “She was such a beautiful child. Remember? Always running around like she thought she was going to get her feet nailed to the ground. So busy. I used to watch her go and wonder what it would take to make her stop. Seemed like it would need a miracle.”
Charlie frowned. “Daisy . . .”
“Didn’t take a miracle. Not unless you think ‘miracle’ is another way of saying ‘truck.’ Only mercy was that she didn’t see it coming. She ran out into the road so fast, and the brakes were old, and there wasn’t time for her to suffer.” Daisy looked up, a tear running down her cheek. “Guess there wasn’t time for her to notice, either, because she came running straight over to me, little pigtails bobbing in a breeze that blew right through her, and she didn’t seem to realize her body was lying in the dust, like a ticket stub at the end of the night. She asked me to play with her.”