Nothing but Ghosts Read Online Free Page A

cricket singing is a big male thing; the females can’t get a note in. “These guy crickets just sit around all day waiting for their chance to sing,” she said, and I remember that she was brushing my hair, that we were sitting out on the stoop together, both of us in our summer pajamas; I might have been six, maybe seven. On the warmest nights, Mom said, crickets chirp the fastest, and tonight being warm, the songs are high and rapid, the songs are swelling everywhere and from all directions.
    Through the door I hear the sound of the TV, the gusts of buggy laughter that have a rhythm all their own. Across the street I hear Mrs. Mack going after Sammy, begging him to climb down from the flat partof their roof. She uses logic and kindness before she starts promising treats, and then she gets into her desperations, her bleating, as Dad likes to say, and Sammy knows it, Sammy’s king, and now Mrs. Mack is going to have to wait for her kid to get bored with her defeat. It’d be better for us all if Sammy’s dad were home more.
    Then again, Sammy isn’t all bad, because he’s dropped some gifts our way, not that he would know it, or understand the irony. It was because of Sammy that Mom said that we’d all had enough. That we had to get away last summer and not just for some weekend at the shore. I was lying on my bed with a book when she poked her face through my door. “Babe,” she said, “I’ve had an idea. Let’s go find your father.” Her green eyes were full of light, the way they got when she was feeling certain. Her auburn hair was knotted back. Mom always wore skirts, even on nothing days. She had on a pair of rhinestone flip-flops.
    Putting the book aside, I followed her down the longhall, down the wide, curvy stairs, which drop beneath the photographs of my mom’s family history, beneath the portraits—bright as candles—of her mother and her father. We cut out the side door and over the drive to the garage, where Dad was at work with the radio on, singing along with some old song. “To what do I owe,” he said, looking up from his bottles, his brushes, the canvas, “the pleasure?” He snapped off the radio and removed his glasses.
    Mom said, “Katie and I have some news.”
    “A conspiracy,” he said.
    I looked at Mom, because I still knew nothing, and because she was keeping us waiting, like she did—everything was a show with her, everything having to sparkle. “Barcelona,” she announced finally. “I’ve already bought us the tickets.” She threw her long skinny arm across my back and pulled me in tight against her.
    “Barcelona?” I repeated, and the word echoed in the bigness of Dad’s work space. “Barcelona?” Isearched my head for something I might know, but in tenth-grade history we’d focused on the U.S. of A.
    “When, honey?” Dad asked.
    “Saturday,” my mother answered. “And it’s entirely unrefundable.”
    “But Claire,” Dad said, glancing back at his canvas with a sudden look of panic. “Claire. Honey.”
    “It’s all right, Jimmy. I called the Kazanjians. They’re willing to wait an extra month. They’re not even going to be around most of the summer.”
    “A month ?” Dad said. “You’ve made arrangements for a month?”
    “One complete Sammy Mack–free month,” she said. “In the very heart of the Gothic quarter.”
    “When did this happen?” Dad asked, still more stunned than happy. “And how?”
    “Google is my new best friend,” Mom declared. Long strands of her hair had gotten loose from the clip. She shook it out, then bunched it up again. She walked between all the jars and brushes and thingsand planted a big kiss on Dad, his forehead first, and then his lips. All I was thinking was how little-girl she was, how she had lately seemed, at least to me, the youngest of us three.
    “I’ve always wanted to see Barcelona,” Dad said finally.
    “Picasso,” she said. “Gaudí. The Rambla.” And the truth is that she was pale even