Authors: Lois Ruby
Rebel Spirits
I CAN
NOT
BELIEVE
we’re moving into that creaky old bed-and-breakfast,” I mutter for about the hundredth time. The Taurus is stop-starting in morning rush-hour traffic heading toward I-76. We’re leaving
home
in Philadelphia, driving to
not-home
in Gettysburg. My parents have this insane whim that we need a real picket-fenced house in small-town America.
My dog, Gertie, and I are sandwiched between U-Haul boxes and Mom’s Tiffany lamp that’s mummified in bubble wrap. Gertie’s got her paws on the window longingly. She
doesn’t want to leave Philly any more than I do. I speak for us both: “You bought the place without my vote.”
“Lorelei Cordelia, be rational.”
I open my mouth in rebuttal, but Dad’s quick.
“You’re sixteen years old.”
“Nearly seventeen,” I snap.
He catches my eye in the rearview. “Your input is always valuable, but your mother and I make the final decisions.”
I sigh. So, what good has it done me living in Philadelphia, the home of the cracked Liberty Bell, when I have no liberty? My big brother, Randy, escaped this disastrous move by going to Ghana with the Peace Corps. Easy way out.
“Honey, it’ll be so nice at the Coolspring Inn; you’ll see,” Mom says.
Nice
pops up in every third sentence because Mom herself is so … nice.
“Small town,” she goes on, “lovely salt-of-the-earth people, a beautiful old house with rich history. Our bed-and-breakfast will be filled with fascinating guests from around the world.”
“Tourists.”
“Guests in our home, Lori,” Mom reaffirms.
“With the nineteenth-century plumbing. Is there even an indoor toilet?”
“Several. It’s got fully reconditioned plumbing,” Dad says merrily. “No outhouse.”
Mom croons, “And you’ll have such a nice, memorable school year.”
Senior year as a total stranger. How could they do this to me?
“You didn’t like it when we moved from that Harrisburg hotel to Philly,” Mom reminds me, “and look how well it turned out.”
Mom and Dad met in college as hospitality industry majors, so Randy and I are hotel rats, living in one hotel after another. Until six o’clock this morning, my home was the New Century Plaza in downtown Philadelphia. There was a fitness center, a rooftop pool, and a presidential suite — never actually used by
the
president. Our apartment was on the sixteenth floor. My best friend, Jocelyn, and I practically lived on Cheetos and peanut-butter crackers that we got for free out of the vending machines.
“That’s awful,” Jocelyn had moaned last month when I’d told her about the great injustice my parents were doing me. “Gettysburg is totally the anti-Philadelphia. You’ll wilt like lettuce out there in the boonies, Lori. Besides,” she’d added, sniffling back tears, “how can you leave the love of your life?” A joke, since I’m sort of crazy about Danny Bartoli, but he thinks of me as furniture — comfortable, but not the kind you’d
want to have in your room. Oh, well, he’s a Napoleonic five foot five, and I’m at least three gigantic inches taller. I’d end up a hunchback from stooping to dance with him.
“I’ll leave Danny to you in my will,” I told Jos, laughing through my own tears. But to myself, I said,
I’ll die if he hits on her.
Jocelyn has been my best friend since the seventh grade. We first bonded over our shared interest in the sisters Margaret and Kate Fox. Way back in 1847, they were not much older than us, and already famous for holding séances in their front parlor. Meaning they talked to the dead, who answered back.
So what if they were total frauds? We didn’t care. We wanted to be just like them. We wanted to
be
them: outrageously rebellious free spirits. They were my consolation as I began towering over the gnome-sized boys in sixth and seventh grade.
So, Jos and I found a Ouija board at a garage sale, and we ordered a genuine fake crystal ball online. We hung black sheets over the windows in her basement and put ghoulish-green lightbulbs in the lamps, and perfected corny voices somewhere between Yoda and the
Sesame Street
Count. We charged everyone fifty cents for a glimpse into their future, a dollar if they wanted to hear actual knocks and squeals from the dead. We told them the names of boyfriends who’d adore them in
high school and how gorgeous (not to mention rich) they’d be after their braces came off and they got modeling jobs. Guys, too. Everybody knew it was a game, and it financed trips to the mall and iTunes purchases for Jos and me. It was way more fun than babysitting.
But then one day I saw something in the crystal ball — a child falling out of a tree. He was twisted and motionless on the hard ground, with his glasses unbroken next to him. I knew he was dead. Jos didn’t see a thing. How could that be? It was as clear as day. The next morning I read the headline on my laptop:
DELAWARE COUNTY SEVEN-YEAR-OLD
PLUNGES TO HIS DEATH
I couldn’t watch the video. I’d already seen enough.
That was ninth grade, the last time we did a séance, but not the last time I peered into some other universe that wasn’t plain old reality. I never told anyone about the other times, not even Jos, and I forced myself to forget them. In fact, I made a big point of being skeptical about unexplainable things.
Now, inching through traffic on our way to Gettysburg, Mom speaks up again, and I’m pulled out of thoughts of ghosts and the dead.
“I’m sure Gertie will love being a country dog,” Mom is saying, “where she can roam free.”
Gertie looks up at me with those sweet blue-ringed Australian shepherd eyes. She takes my side in every family dispute, so she’s dead set against Gettysburg. Earlier this morning I twisted my impossibly straight brown hair into a knot, shaded my hazel eyes with aviator glasses, and took Gertie on a nostalgic strut through Rittenhouse Square. She sniffed every inch of the ground, like she knew it was her last romp through this park. Now she snorts, which says it all.
Dad clutches the steering wheel like it’s threatening to escape. “Lorelei, you know about Abraham Lincoln’s famous ‘four score and seven years ago’ address that he delivered at Gettysburg, don’t you?”
“Yes, Dad. We had to memorize it in eighth grade.” Who knew that four years later I’d end up with a Gettysburg address of my own?
“Good, well, here’s a crash course in local history.”
“Honey, don’t say
crash
while we’re driving,” Mom cuts in.
“Slip of the tongue, Miriam, sorry,” my dad says. He smiles at me in the rearview mirror and I can’t help but smile back, even as I steel myself for his history lesson.
“Plant yourself back in 1863,” my dad begins. “The middle of the Civil War. Nobody expects the Confederates to head so far
north, but sure enough General Lee leads the Confederate army right into the line of fire in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. There’s a bloody battle between North and South over the course of three days: July first, second, and third. By the end, thousands are dead and wounded, but the Rebs — that is, the Confederate army — are forced out in defeat, and the Union stands tall.”
“How
many
thousands dead and wounded?” I ask, shivering.
“Something close to fifty thousand,” Dad replies, braking slowly while the car ahead of us flashes a turn signal. “The whole town of eight thousand citizens was thrown into a tizzy. It’s still recovering from those three days and those lost souls. They reenact the entire battle a couple times a year: uniforms, guns, horses, the whole spectacle, I hear.”
I wonder about this, stroking Gertie’s back. If it was such a horrible battle, why would they want to keep reliving it? “But it’s been about a hundred and fifty years,” I say, calculating. “Isn’t it time they got over it?”
Mom pats Dad’s shoulder and turns around to me, practically bumping into Gertie’s nose. “Honey, be nice. You know we’ve been eager to get out of the corporate-hotel rat race. This has always been our family’s dream, to run our own cozy little inn in a small town with rich history.”
“Humph,” I mutter into Gertie’s fur. My dream is to win a beach volleyball game, and then take a dip in the ocean. Icy
raspberry lemonade will be delivered to me by a surfer boy with golden hair. My dream is definitely not moldering in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, population: eight thousand people obsessed with a bloody past.
I doze a bunch of miles and wake to the
putt-putt
of a lawn-mower. I open my eyes and register that the huge expanse of blindingly green lawn sloping down to the road is ours. Coolspring Inn. Gertie’s wrangling her way around the Tiffany lamp to get a closer look out the window.
Dad slows, as if he’s approaching a sacred shrine. A cold sweat sweeps over me. No turning back now.
The shirtless guy riding on the mower checks us out as we pull into the gravel driveway. He is maybe a year older than me, and as tan as a muffin, with longish blond hair sweaty on his shoulders. He reminds me of a border collie.
“Welcome to Coolspring Inn.” He flashes a grin, overflowing with cheer. “Evan Maxwell, at your service.” He tips an imaginary hat, and his grin widens to an orthodontist’s dream job. “You’re the Chases, right?” He ducks his head to get a closer look. At me? No, at Gertie, who’s halfway out the window. “I’ll be done here in a minute.” More teeth.
I glance up at the house looming ahead — three gloomy gothic stories, and an attic with oval, stained-glass windows and two turrets. At the top is a circular room with a roof that looks like a blue slate dunce cap. Definitely spooky.
“Welcome to your new home,” Evan says.
I study the round room at the top of the house. A shadow passes in one of the windows. Is someone up there, or is it just a trick of the sunlight?
“Let’s go in, Vernon. I’m anxious to see if everything looks the way I remember.” Mom swings her door open, and Gertie leaps over the front seat to be the first out.
The wraparound porch has a bunch of rocking chairs and a two-seater swing with faded, striped seats. Gertie sniffs under them for evidence of a friend, then squats and marks her territory.
“Gertie!” Mom scolds, and Gertie looks apologetic as her shame leaks through a gap in the floor slats.
The front door is fire-engine red. Curious. Everything else is carved gray stone and blue trim, so why would they paint this door red? The only other hint of color is a small red flag the size of a handkerchief hanging over the front door like mistletoe. To the right of the door is a small brass plate, encrusted with age. I can barely make out the words:
VIENNA CARMODY HOUSE
EST
. 1878
“Isn’t it marvelous?” Mom gushes, giving the pineapple-shaped knocker two taps.
“No need to knock, Miriam, it’s all ours, lock, stock, and barrel.” Dad pulls a ring of keys out of his pocket. The fourth one does it. He throws back the door so we get the full effect of Coolspring Inn: gloomy and silent as a tomb. I take in the faded velvet and brocade furniture, the peeling wallpaper, and the threadbare carpeting on the dark stairs that stretch as far as I can see, up to that round room. The air is cloying and thick and smells musty, like a wet winter coat. My heart drops to my ankles. I can’t wake up every morning in a dreary house like this. No wonder the previous owners sold it!
Gertie scuttles up the stairs and peers down at us, as if to say,
Whatchu waitin’ for, cowards?
“Careful, Gertie,” Mom warns. “The bannister’s a little unstable, but the house has good bones, right, Lori?”
“Maybe decaying under the basement,” I agree, snickering. Dad had told me that the house was built over a battlefield hospital, once strewn with bodies. Dead bodies seem to be a feature that boosts the value of everything in Gettysburg.
“Not that kind of bones, honey. I mean the frame, the structure. It just needs a little cosmetic work.”
Dad gazes around and says, “We’ll need to fix up the carpeting and fortify the banister, add a couple coats of paint for the scuffed wainscoting, repair a few boards in the floor, get a few dozen new lightbulbs, and we’ll be shipshape.”
“The freezer’s on the blink, too, don’t ya know.”
We all jump as a woman materializes from a back room.
“Oh, hello.” Mom clutches her throat. “You startled me.”
“This house’ll do that to a body. Name’s Bertha Dryden, and I know who you are: the Chases from Philadelphia,” she says with a sneer. A frenzied bunch of hair wound into a bun sits at the top of her pie-shaped head, above big brown eyes with nearly invisible eyelashes. She’s wearing a green cotton dress dotted with stemmed cherries. The awful thing is tied at the waist, cutting her into two round sausages.
“The realtor didn’t tell us about you,” Mom says, “but it’s lovely to meet you.”
“You are …?” asks Dad.
“Didn’t I just say? Bertha Dryden. That realtor woman musta told you the house comes with a staff.”
“Something about that,” Dad says vaguely. “We haven’t made any staffing decisions yet.”
“None to make. Here before you stands the executive house manager. I’ll tell you up front, I don’t vacuum or wash floors. Windows,
pfft
, forget it. We’ve got a girl from the college, name’s Charlotte, who does the heavy lifting, cleans the commodes and all. I supervise.”
She sure sounds like she does.
“Yes, well …” Dad begins.
“See out there?” Bertha Dryden’s wave directs us to a parlor window.
I think maybe I’ll get another look at Evan Maxwell, but instead there’s a man stooped over a wild profusion of summer flowers. He definitely needs to hitch up the back of his pants. “That’s Old Dryden, my other half. Not the better half, mind you. Then there’s that Maxwell boy who does whatnot on the house computers and calls himself a landscape artist. Ha! The rest of the staff’s Hannah Boedeker, the half-baked cook. She only comes when she’s called.” Bertha’s voice echoes through the empty hall.