Slumber Party

They keep the windows open because the air conditioner is halfway busted but there’s enough of a breeze to keep them alive. White curtains dance with the leaves and branches just outside. The trees have overgrown so much that Sheela could stretch out and grab one, leave indoors for outdoors without ever touching ground. They could make their home in the treetops and build nests of their clothes, her and Dominic. But they stay in. She turns away from him and strips off her shirt, shorts, and underwear, because she has sweat through them all.

“Don’t look,” she says. They are old enough to know some amount of shame. They are old enough to know the slight strangeness of boy-girl sleepovers. But the orderliness of time has collapsed, and Dominic’s mother and father are at the hospital. Sheela has asked him if he would prefer a brother or sister, and he grumbled something noncommittal. He’d take either one, didn’t really matter.

“Don’t look,” she says, but she wonders what she would do if he did. Scream and cover herself, retreat to some corner of the room? Cry, demand justice from her parents downstairs? Stand defiant in front of him, fully naked, egging him on to look. Take a picture, it’ll last longer, said a blond-haired woman smacking gum on TV, and Sheela does not have any gum on her, but she can imagine. She can chew the side of her cheek to get the same effect.

But Dominic does not look. They are in the attic, and he will not look up from the dials on the attic television, an old chunky set no one uses anymore, with dials like a radio. Dominic is convinced that the answers lie in the interstitial space, between channels, some signal in the black-and-white static.

“When someone is born, someone dies,” he says. His voice is low and scratchy. She’s heard this scratch in older boys, signifying change, but Dominic is only six months older than her. He has never lorded this fact over her head, and maybe that’s why Sheela always listens when he talks, even if she doesn’t quite believe.

“People are born and die all the time,” she says.

“Yeah, but—” he lets his sentence trail off and turns his head to the dials. He is searching for omens, for signals, any signs of the person that will die the moment his sibling is born. He is convinced of this synchronicity, that the person dying will be someone he knows, perhaps tangentially, but with some nebulous connection to him and his life. He wants to know for sure.

Sheela admits there are omens everywhere. The wind whipping through from outside, the slow descent into nightfall from dusk, her parents arguing in low voices downstairs. There is no other reason for their presence in the attic, but her bedroom exists just down the hall from theirs, and she does not want to hear the words of their conversation. When it is just sound, she can imagine something else.

“Is there someone specific you’re trying to find?” She considers hunting through the recycle bin for old newspapers, for obituaries, but that would require coming downstairs and crossing the kitchen and facing her parents.

Dominic shrugs. “I dunno.”

He is frustrated, cannot find what he’s looking for in the spaces between the channels. He crouches down, his knees pressed against the hard attic floor. He is without a shirt, and this is not transgression. Sheela can imagine a brother, him in miniature, same buzzed hair, same fixation on the new and glowing. She cannot imagine him with a younger sister.

“The signal’s too good,” he proclaims.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not staticky enough. We’re too high up. We need to take this downstairs.”

Sheela stammers for excuses. “We can’t lift it.”

“Sure we can. Look, you grab this end and I’ll grab the other. We’ll go slow down the stairs.”

“Can’t you just fiddle with the antenna or something?”

“You think I haven’t tried that?”

She is hardly dressed as he speaks, has just managed to pull on a fresh shirt and shorts, and she crosses over to him to signal that he can look now, and of course she’ll help.

First, they have to move the lamp. It sits on top of the TV, and it is a many-handed, many-headed porcelain creature that casts its elongated shadows on the attic ceiling. It is an idol, a relic of the faith her family only practices when visiting relatives arrive. Perhaps one of those relatives brought the lamp, now banished to the attic with all unwanted things.

The lamp’s shadows resemble the tree branches. They blend into the dark.

Dominic takes the far end of the TV, moves backwards down the attic stairs, and Sheela follows. Her feet press hard into the wooden stairs, to make them creak, to make them creak loud enough to jolt her parents into awareness and close their mouths. But as the sounds go on, they take shape into words.

“…going away.”

“where am I…”

“…he…meant to do…”

Half-hearing is the worst state; only catching fragments of her parents’ conversation means she fills doom in the spaces. Once she and Dominic are on solid ground, their arms quivering from the weight of the TV, they scurry into her bedroom and Sheela shuts and locks the door.

“Why do you think the TV will tell you who the dead person is?”

Dominic explains that ghosts like in-between spaces. That they’re omnipresent but only reveal themselves in select circumstances, transitional moments. He fishes in his pocket for a quarter and tosses it up in the air. Instead of landing heads or tails, it sticks sideways in a groove in the wood floor. Sheela gasps.

“Just as I thought,” he says, his voice deep and ominous before it scratches and reaches its usual high tones. “We are reaching the hour.”

In her dim bedroom most of the illumination comes from the moon and stars, and from Dominic’s pale chest. His spine bones are the tines of a xylophone; she imagines they would sing out if she tapped against them. She is not nearly so bony.

The girls on the playground would cackle and goad her if they saw her now, caught her staring.

She likes him, no I don’t, yes you do, I don’t, you do, I don’t, then can I like him, no!

This is the heartbeat of girl conversations, and it makes her squirm. With Dominic she can be silent.

“Got it!” he cries. The exact point of static. Sheela finds an old clock radio and sets it to a similar point of static, one of the unincorporated stations no one claimed.

“Good thinking,” he says. Her eyes lap up the praise.

They debate over the curtains, leave them open to let in the moon or closed, to heighten the darkness. They decide to allow the moon; its celestial spectralness cannot be denied.

“It’s historical,” says Sheela, who once read a book on witches.

They watch the black and white static for a moment, looking for shapes. Scattered words come out of the radio static, so they focus on that, scrawling down what is heard. The voices of ghosts, no doubt.

The doorknob rattles. A hand pounds upon the wood.

“It’s here!” Dominic whispers.

“Sheela!” cries her mother. “Sheela, open this door!”

She scrambles to her feet and her mother is there, slightly bedraggled, but standing in the doorway. She smiles at Dominic with her lips tight and closed.

“Sheela, could you come here please?”

They step out of the room and cross the hall. Her father has made himself scarce for this new, unfamiliar conversation. She knows it is bad news because her mother rarely uses her name, and here it is three times in rapid succession. Normally she is called ponnu or vava or some other curling endearment. Her given name is shrill in her mother’s mouth.

“Sheela, you are not to lock that door, you hear me? It has to stay open and unlocked, where we can see you.”

And now a fourth. “But mom—”

“No buts.”

She cannot cry out that the door, shut and locked, was to block out the noise of her and dad. Even though Dominic had argued that an open door would provide more entry points for the ghost, she’d insisted on a solid wood barrier. None of that could be confessed now.

Her mother looks her up and down, skims over her pajama shirt and shorts, her skinny hips and lumpy chest and her tangle of bones not yet orderly. She is half-grown. At ten years old she is taller than half her classmates, taller than Dominic. Her joints ache sometimes.

“Put on a sweater,” her mother says.

“Mom, it’s so hot!”

“I don’t care. Put on a sweater, you have company.”

Dominic has lived next door since the beginning of time, and for not one moment in the past has he been called company. At his house his mother bakes fish sticks and Sheela and Dominic dig holes to China and brew potions in the bathroom. Time has lurched forward all at once in this room, this moment, and now Dominic is company, and she puts on a white wool sweater so thick, she can feel the sweat pooling under her arms. It will stain the sweater, then what will her mother say?

“Why are you wearing a sweater?” Dominic asks, and Sheela doesn’t know, she shrugs, she settles beside him, and they hunt for the ghost with the bedroom door open.

When her father shouts, they both hear it. Sheela tugs at the excess fabric of her wool sweater, it chafes, it strangles.

“We could go outside,” Dominic says. This is his way of consoling her, of drying her tears now commingled with sweat. “Sneak out through the window?”

“No,” she says. “We’ll get in trouble.”

They do not find the ghost. The baby is born, a girl. Later they find out that Sheela’s old piano teacher died twelve hours later, and Dominic recalibrates his theory of simultaneous death and life, maybe they could be separated by a few hours and still be as legitimate as before. But there are no more ghost hunts. Six months later, Sheela’s father packs and moves to Ocala and she spends weekends there. Friendships cannot survive on just school days, and so Dominic has become as much a specter as the one they tried to find. The transitional moment has come and passed.