“Exhausted, huh?” I mumbled to myself.
He was healthy enough to come stare at our windows. I stepped forward, toward the glass, keeping my body against the stone, barely peeking my forehead and eyes in front of the window. I inched closer to the glass and did my best to follow his gaze. He didn’t move his head up and down or side to side like he would if he were watching the house, but forward and backward, like there was something in the yard he was watching. I stared harder—not at him—at the yard. I placed my fingers and forehead against the cold glass, staring down at the leaves on the grass.
Why was he watching our yard and why did he pass out? Somehow the two were connected. They were too odd not to be. I was sure it had nothing to do with low blood sugar, but I had no clue to the answers.
He crouched low to the ground, in the shadows of the trees. A moment later, he was gone … sneaking back to his house.
Ten
It rained all night and most of the morning and while I didn’t mind going out in the rain too much, there was no way to do it and not make it seem like I was dying to see Luca. Which I wasn’t. I was, however, dying to hear his explanation for things. I took the morning and caught up on my schoolwork.
I went downstairs for lunch and ate at the table while I listened to the rain pour like a waterfall from our roof, onto the gravel encircling our house like a moat. The roof was tall and old and gutters couldn’t be added, for some reason or another; hence the gravel which kept the water from washing away the dirt. On the back of the house, there was a sort of stream bed that rolled down into the trees. It was a stream only when it rained, which was fairly often.
“I’m going out to find earthworms,” Avi shouted when she entered the kitchen, already wearing her raincoat and rainboots.
Gigi came in a moment later. She must have helped my sister get her rain gear down from the coat closet.
“What are you going to do with them when you find them?” I asked, between the last bites of a chicken salad sandwich.
“Feed them to the chickens,” she said with a devilish grin she tried to make look innocent.
“You’re so mean!” I said in a scolding tone.
“Says the girl who is eating chicken,” Avi said, sticking out her tongue at me.
I slowly chewed the last bite of sandwich, wishing Avi hadn’t reminded me what I was eating. “Yes, but I don’t take joy in their suffering.”
“I don’t take joy in suffering, I take joy in feeding our chickens a yummy treat,” Avi said defensively, throwing up the hood of her raincoat and opening the door. The clean smell of the rain freshened the kitchen.
“No, Jackson, you have to stay in,” Gigi said as she blocked Jackson from following Avi. “If you go outside now, you’ll be covered in mud.”
Avi kissed him on the head while Gigi held his collar. “Stay,” Avi commanded, and then shut the door. He whined, staring at the closed door, wagging his tail, hoping to be let out.
“How was your sandwich?” Gigi asked.
“Fine, until Avi started talking about chickens,” I said, placing my crumbled napkin on the empty plate.
“It is tricky. We eat meat which sustains us, but a creature died for us to eat it,” she said, coming to sit with me. “That’s life … sacrifice and death are very often part of it.”
“That’s kind of a lot for a Tuesday,” I said, wishing I could go back in time and decide to either eat lunch earlier or later, whatever it took to avoid Avi’s talk of eating chicken and Gigi’s talk of sacrifice and death.
“That’s how life is. One minute it’s all sun showers and flowers, the next it’s death and destruction,” she said, her tone nonchalant. “That’s the way it goes.”
“Umm, okay,” I said, deciding my lunch was officially over. I swiveled in the chair, getting to my feet.
“We need to talk about yesterday, Siena,” Gigi said, tapping her hand on the table, my signal to sit back down.
This was what I wanted—to learn more, to ask questions—but at the moment I didn’t want to deal with any of it. I wanted to go back up to my room and finish my history report. Instead, I sat.
Gigi said, “You put yourself at risk yesterday.”
“I told you I wasn’t going to go inside the inn. For the record, it didn’t look like it was going to fall down. It smelled disgusting and the porch was partially rotten, but the rest of the structure did look very stable, like Thomas said.”
Gigi rubbed her fingers on the table, studying me as she did so. “It is not the physical structure of the inn that makes it unsafe. It is the spiritual structure,” she said, her eyes unwavering as they stared into mine. “It’s haunted.”
“Haunted?” I repeated, almost choking on the word.
“Quite,” she said. Her eyes were expressionless, as if daring me to disbelieve her.
“Dad believes that?” I said, shocked at the prospect of my practical, analytical father believing in spirits going bump in the night.
“Your father’s relationship to that place is complicated,” she said, “but your mother believed it and so do I.”
“How is it complicated?” I asked.
“That’s not for me to tell you,” Gigi said.
“Is it for Dad to tell me?” I was trying to understand what she was implying.
She inhaled deeply, raising her shoulders, and turned her attention to the window.
“I’m not sure who is the one to tell you. All I know is it’s not me.” Her eyes held the slightest hint of irritation and sorrow; mostly, they showed resolve. For whatever reason, she was not going to tell me about my father and the inn—something made me doubt he’d tell me any more than she did.
“Regardless of your father … your mother, grandfather, and I knew the inn to be haunted,” she said.
“My mother believed it?” I questioned, though I already knew that truth. I remembered the fear in her voice when she spoke about the inn.
“Very much,” Gigi said sincerely.
My grandmother didn’t lie to me, but what she was saying didn’t make sense.
“We’re Catholic. We don’t believe in ghosts,” I said.
Gigi laughed. “We’re Catholic. We absolutely believe in ghosts. I’m not sure why you think we don’t.”
“You told me they weren’t real!” I said, trying to comprehend this conversation.
“No, I told you the monster in your closet wasn’t real, and it wasn’t real. This house is not haunted—or not anymore,” she said as an afterthought, “but the inn is, and I’ve never told you otherwise. I don’t believe in lying, you know that.”
“This house was haunted?” I said, suddenly feeling freaked out, the memory of my mother’s words returning to me. She said there had been a darkness here.
“Long before you were born. Your grandfather and I had it exorcised. We haven’t had a problem since,” she said with perfect calmness.
“Why didn’t you have the inn ex-exorcised?” I said in disbelief that we were having this conversation.
“We tried … it didn’t work,” she said solemnly.