Haunted by Lynn Carthage Read Free Book Online

said the same thing now.
    I felt a rush of frustration and rage, my cheeks flaming. Why didn’t they listen to me? Because it was my fault we were here?
    Mom used to listen to me, used to lay her cheek against mine and sit quietly while I told her things. Even when I was big, she’d pull me onto her lap and wrap her arms around me from behind. But that was before Tabby was born.
    â€œYou guys are just evil!” I said. “You don’t—”
    Before I could finish the sentence, something awful happened. Something wrenched me out of that kitchen and whistled me through time . . . backward .
    I wound up back in California, a year or so ago, back in the same discussion I had been thinking about. The conversation about my fainting.
    My breath halted in my throat.
    What was going on?
    Mom and Steven didn’t react. To them, it was as if this were happening for the first time. They had the same expressions. Mom was wearing the Allo Oiseau dress she’d bought at the designer’s rack sale, and her hair was falling out of her clip as she lightly scolded me.
    â€œMaybe you should think about why this happened to you,” she was saying.
    What? Why I had just traveled through time to this weird memory?
    No . I put my hands over my face. She meant I should think about why a fainting spell happened to me.
    Panic welled up in me. Surely I was still in the Arnaud kitchen, telling them about Madame Arnaud? But this was San Francisco, with our sunny kitchen window giving a view of the backyard eucalyptus tree sloughing off its aromatic bark. I couldn’t understand why I was stuck in some old, totally unimportant memory.
    â€œWe need to leave,” I pleaded.
    â€œ. . . need to take better care of yourself, Phoebe,” Steven was saying. “What did you have for lunch?”
    The words came automatically to my mouth, although I wanted to talk about Madame Arnaud, and not what I’d eaten so long ago. “I bought a Caesar salad, but what does that have to do with anything?”
    â€œYou’re not eating well,” Mom agreed. “It’s easy to get light-headed if you’re just eating lettuce.”
    â€œHave chicken on it next time,” said Steven. “You’re an athlete; you’re burning calories.”
    â€œAnd remember to breathe,” Mom teased, “when you’re talking to a boy.”
    I felt helpless. The fainting had nothing to do with food, with excitement. It was something my body did inexplicably. Listen to me, I tried to say, but Tabby derailed everything, like she did then, like she was doing now . . .
    She had tried to get out of her chair and fallen, hitting her forehead on the table edge. Now she was crying wildly, while Steven hugged her and Mom leaned across the table with her arms extended, so he could hand her over.
    Time skipped again while she leaned.
    Her Allo Oiseau dress morphed into the simple red Old Navy sweatshirt she was wearing on top of jeans. The bright sunlight faded. The table was no longer our blond wood one that she and Steven had put on their wedding registry; it was now the dark oak of the Arnaud kitchen’s. I was back. We were all back.
    Steven handed Tabby to Mom. She soothed her youngest daughter with new words: words that hadn’t come from previous conversations, from a different country.
    I sank down into a chair opposite Steven. I was going crazy. I must have just had a psychotic episode. A memory had taken me by the throat and yanked me back to the past, while the present had become filmy, stepsister to the real.
    What had happened here in the last ten minutes was just as terrifying as what had happened—if it did—with Madame Arnaud. I was losing my mind. I was losing my freaking mind.
    Reeling, I watched them continue their everyday talk. And after I’d made sure the present was staying, and I wasn’t going to shift somewhere else, I rose and went quietly back to my lime green