“Your drawing looks so good,” he said. “Keep going.”
He was adding color to his own now, making careful marks and blending them with his finger. I almost cried as I watched him. How easily he had brought me back. How safe and strong I felt with him next to me.
“Do you want to know something?” I asked, roughing out a figure on my paper, confident now.
Eagerly, Lee nodded.
“All right. But first a question. Had you seen ghosts before coming here?”
“No.”
“Well, I had. Just one of them. She was my very own ghost and I knew her name and everything.”
“Her name?”
“Yes.”
“Wow,” he said. We worked for a little while in silence before he asked, “Will you tell it to me?”
“Sure. Her name was Lorna. She haunted the street corner below the place where I lived.”
“What did she do?”
I was adding her details—her nightgown, her eyes.
“She mostly stood around. She held different things in her hands. She stared in my direction.”
“She didn’t do much, then.”
“Not very much, no.”
My drawing was finished. There was Lorna, my ghost, holding her plastic flowers. I had drawn her as well as I knew how. She was just marks on a page; nothing more.
Lee shivered.
“It scares you?” I asked.
“No,” he said quickly.
“It’s okay to be afraid,” I said. Now was my moment. I thought carefully, took in a breath, and began. “I spent a really long time, years and years, trying to forget about everything that scared me. And then, my first day here, I sat next to you—right in this chair—and told you a secret from my past.”
“Your ear piercings,” Lee said.
“Yes.” He was leaning toward me, a worried line between his brow. “The thing is,” I continued, “I’m learning that it’s good to think about what scares you. To bring it into the light. Even to hold it in your hands, if you can, and feel how it can’t hurt you anymore. To think of it and say, ‘I am not afraid.’”
Lee watched me so closely. I could tell he understood.
“It takes away its power, to look at it that way.”
“So I should look at my ghost?”
“Yes,” I said. “And other things, too. Here, I’ll show you.” I drew in a breath, felt the racing of my heart. “I was living in a bad place when I saw Lorna. It was a hard time. It was a bad time. It was . . .” I closed my eyes, let out a slow breath. “At first, I was frightened by the sight of her, but the longer I looked, the less frightening she became. And even though everything else was hard, everything else was bad, she was only herself, and I found comfort in her.”
I felt calmer, breathed easily again. “Do you understand what I’m saying, Lee?”
“I think so,” he said. “It’s just . . .”
“What is it, Lee?”
“Nothing,” he said.
I placed my hand on his shoulder and smiled. “You can tell me.”
“It’s just . . . ,” he said. “It was never this way with Samantha.”
“What way?”
“Samantha never told me about her life. We just did lessons.”
My cheeks burned. A vision of Samantha came to me—a confident girl, an easier, better girl than me—sitting with Lee and helping him learn. He probably trusted her enough to make mistakes. But what was he trying to tell me? Was I sharing too much?
I was only trying to help him. I was helping him the best that I could. I took my hand off his shoulder. I shifted my body away. I felt my posture stiffen and I tried to think of something to say but couldn’t.
“I don’t mean it in a bad way,” he said.
Could that be true?
“Oh no,” Lee said. “I think I said it wrong. She never cared that much about me. That’s what I was trying to say.”
I turned my gaze to his—his face upturned, his wide brown eyes confused, concerned. I could have cried with relief. It was all a misunderstanding. I was being too sensitive again.
I exhaled, my body softened. “Oh, Lee,” I said. “It’s fine.”
“I’m sorry if you thought . . .”
“We don’t have to say another word about it.”
* * *
___
After dinner that night, Julia asked me to go with her to the flower tunnel. “I need to teach you more of the names,” she said “We won’t have long before it gets too dark, but I have to cut stems for a friend’s dinner party in town. Might as well teach you something as I do.” We stepped in, all soft light and color and fragrance. “Do you remember the names of these?” she asked, pointing to the bruise-colored flowers I had loved from before.
“Anemones,” I answered.
“Good girl.”
She showed me the heirloom chrysanthemums, the Henriette dahlias, the zinnias. “That’s all I’ll ask you to remember for today,” she said. “A few at a time, over time, does the trick. Now help me cut. The best harvesting times are very early morning and night. The heat of the day shocks them, shortens their life. We want them to last several days cut, if not even longer.”
A pair of sharp scissors in my hand, I cut where she told me to and set the stems in buckets of water. We worked quietly for a little while, and then I confessed, “I read about you in the newspaper.”
“When?”
“Before I came. An article from a long time ago.”
“They like to romanticize us,” she said.
“Like a fairy tale,” I said softly, more to myself than to her.
But she heard me and agreed.
“Very much like a fairy tale. Yes. Fairy tales are full of orphans and mistreated children. The movies make them romantic, but the original stories are not. And there’s nothing romantic about giving a home to young people who need one. It’s a necessity, and it’s something Terry and I like and are good at.”
“So, a new fairy tale,” I said. “Except with ghosts.”
She brushed a white curl off her forehead with a gloved hand and paused. “Are there no ghosts in fairy tales?” We thought and thought and couldn’t think of any. Not in Snow White or Cinderella. Not in Sleeping Beauty or Rumpelstiltskin or Rapunzel. Not in the Twelve Dancing Princesses or The Goose Girl.