The House That Whispers

LOOKOUT

MY OLDER SISTER TALIA TURNED THIRTEEN THIS YEAR, WHICH means that now, whenever we’re driving someplace with only one of our parents, she gets to ride in the front seat. It’s something that’s come up a lot more over the past couple of months. Whenever we’re riding with Mom and Dad, Dad usually drives, and Mom sits up front, and then Talia, Rose, and I cram shoulder to shoulder in the back seat like sardines. It’s awkward and annoying, and I always used to complain about it.

Now, though, whenever the back holds just Rose and me, the car feels a little empty. Like it’s too big for our family.

For the trip to Nanaleen’s house, Dad is driving, and Talia’s riding up front.

“You’re kicking my seat,” Talia tells me, frowning back at me over her headrest.

“Oh, sorry,” I say. I make my feet stop moving. I hadn’t realized I was kicking.

Talia sighs. “It’s fine. I know how you are on long car rides.”

She means that on long trips, I get so bored and fidgety I about crawl out of my own skin. We’ve been stuck in the car for over two hours now, which in my opinion is two hours too many.

“Now you’re tapping your fingers,” Rose complains from the other side of the back seat.

I clench up my hands to stop, but that just makes my fingers want to move even more. I stuff my fists under my legs. Dad’s leaning forward against the steering wheel with his shoulders rigid, squinting along the foggy road up ahead. It’s Sunday afternoon. Usually when we visit Nanaleen’s, the fog would’ve melted away by this time of the day. Summer afternoons in Kentucky are too hot for fog. But it’s October now, not summer, and this isn’t our usual visit to Nanaleen’s.

“Cool it, Bradleys,” Dad says without taking his eyes off the road. Sometimes, when he’s stressed out, he calls us all by our last name like he’s a cranky camp counselor. “If y’all are bored, you can help me watch for deer.”

It’s not the right time for deer to be out, probably, but the fog makes Dad worried. If an animal runs out in front of the car, he’ll barely see it coming. Then again, it’s probably not the fog’s fault that Dad’s worried. He’s probably just worried because he’s always worried.

“Sorry,” I say again.

I really am. Right before we’d left home, Mom had told me, “Don’t make trouble for your dad, okay? He’s stressed.” I stick my face against the window for deer lookout duty.

In the front seat, Talia’s turned back to her phone already. She’s barely looked up from it this whole drive. She’s been texting somebody, but I can’t see who. Talia just says, “Mmm,” not even paying attention to me anymore.

I let my forehead rest against the glass so that every bump in the road makes my teeth rattle against each other. No deer. There’s so much fog that everything outside the car looks blurry and white. Twenty feet around us in any direction, the world dissolves—there’s trees, and there’s trees, and then there’s just nothing.

Nanaleen’s house is deep in the woods. It’s a mile outside the closest town, five miles from the closest Walmart, and a hundred fifty miles from our house back in Louisville. I feel my legs starting to swing on their own, and I have to stop my foot just before it kicks the front seat again—the seat where Mom should be sitting.

We’re almost a hundred fifty miles from where we left Mom.

GHOST TOWN

OUR GRANDMOTHER NANALEEN LIVES IN THE OLD FAMILY HOME outside Misty Valley. The town isn’t far enough east to be in the actual Appalachian Mountains, but it still has some impressive hills. Nanaleen says the town got its name because of the fog. When the mist rolls in from the actual mountains, it gets penned into the valley by the hills on all sides and covers up the whole town in a cloudy blanket.

During the summer, the fog usually clears out before the sun’s even finished rising. Misty Valley is always busy in the summertime. That’s when we usually come to stay with Nanaleen—the whole month of July, every summer of my life. The town is right beside a lake, and as soon as the weather starts warming up, it gets flooded with families coming to camp or hike or fish or swim. They rent out the fancy vacation cottages down by the lakeshore, and there are kids on the beach from sunup to sundown. The shops on Main Street are always packed.

As our car pulls onto Main Street now, I keep expecting the fog to disappear and the street to fill up, but it doesn’t. Most of the shops are closed for the off-season. Beyond the empty buildings, I catch a glimpse of the Scooper Dooper, which is the little blue ice cream shack down by the boat ramp that we always ride our bikes to. On nice days, you usually have to wait in line for twenty or thirty minutes just to get a cone. But now the Scooper Dooper is boarded up and empty.

Frazer’s Market is still open, though, which is good, because Dad has to stop for gas. Frazer’s is the only gas station in town, right in the middle of Main Street. There are days when it’s nearly impossible to get a pump, but today we’re the only car in sight. Dad eyes the price on the sign, frowning.

“Twenty cents more than it was in Campbellsville,” he mutters as he digs out his wallet.

“Can we go say hi to Mr. Ben?” I ask. Mr. Ben is the owner of Frazer’s. I’m trying to wave at him through the front window of the store, but I don’t think he’s seen me yet.

“Not today. I’m sure you all will come visit him this week.”

“Can I go use the bathroom?” Rose asks.

“No.” Dad swings himself out of the car, but then he seems to think again, and he ducks back in through the opening. “We’re two minutes away from Nanaleen’s,” he tells Rose. “Just… everybody stay put.”

He closes the car door harder than he has to behind him. He’s got his phone out now, and he’s tapping something out on the calculator. With the engine off, the car is clicking a little as it cools down.

Don’t make trouble for your dad, okay? I wait till I’m sure Dad can’t hear us before I say, “Why can’t we get out?”

Talia swivels around to look at me over her headrest again. “Because if you go inside, you’re going to ask to get snacks.”

“No, I won’t,” I say, even though I was definitely going to ask to get snacks.

“And Dad doesn’t want to have to say no.”

I shrug. “Well, then, he could say yes.”

“Just wait and eat something at Nanaleen’s,” Talia says, frowning back down at her phone. “He’s already having to pay for gas.”

Dad’s still calculating something, and I realize he’s figuring out how much gas he’ll need to drive back to Louisville. Getting gas didn’t used to involve math—Mom and Dad would just keep pumping it till the tank was full.

I lean my face against the window again and peer down Main Street. With the shops all closed up, with the fog everywhere, it feels like the end of the world. It feels like we’re the only people left alive.

Mom has always said that Misty Valley becomes a ghost town from September until May, but I never really believed her. When I was little, I thought she meant it literally. I thought ghosts and spirits would start roaming around town every fall. Now I know she just meant that most people leave. Only the permanent residents stick around, like Nanaleen now, and like Mom and her sisters when they were growing up here.

For the other three-quarters of the year, the town feels lonely and empty. Like it’s full of holes.

THE OLD O’HAGAN HOUSE

DAD PUTS EXACTLY TEN DOLLARS OF GAS IN THE CAR BEFORE we set off down the highway toward Nanaleen’s house. He turns into Nanaleen’s long driveway and starts inching up the gravel at a snail’s pace. I’m about ready to explode from being stuck in the car, and Rose has her legs crossed tight in a way that means her question back at Frazer’s wasn’t just an excuse to go inside—she really does have to use the bathroom. Dad flicks the brights on to cut through the fog. They hit the old house at the top of the driveway like a spotlight.

Nanaleen’s is the oldest house I’ve ever been inside. It’s a big two-story farmhouse with a wraparound porch and a rough stone chimney attached to the front, poking up over the roof like a tower. The outer siding is faded, and the paint on the window frames and porch columns has started peeling off. But you can still sense that the house was impressive back in the day.

All the year-rounders in Misty Valley call it the old O’Hagan house, even though none of us has the last name O’Hagan anymore. But our great-great-grandfather did, and he was the one who built it.

Dad parks beside the front porch, and I’ve started unbuckling before he even turns the car off.

“Scoot, scoot, scoot,” I tell Rose, because the door on my side of the car always gets stuck. Dad tried to fix the latch himself, but when that didn’t work, he told us to just live with it and use the other side to get in and out. Rose opens her door, too slow, and slides out of the car, also too slow. Finally I can clamber past her and flop down on the driveway outside.

“At last,” I say, pretending to kiss the gravel, like I’ve washed up on a desert island after months at sea. “At last.”

Talia comes around the front of the car and peers down at me. “You’re so dramatic,” she says, but she has to try hard not to smile.

“Bathroom,” Rose says. She takes off running for the house.

“I’m not bringing in your bag!” Talia yells after her, along with a name I’m not allowed to say.

“Talia,” Dad says. “Cool it.”

“What?” Talia says innocently. She pops open the trunk and drags her duffel bag out of it with one hand, and then she uses the other to pick up her winter jacket, which Mom made her bring. “I don’t have any extra hands,” she explains.

Dad sighs. “Simon, can you take Rose’s bag?”

He doesn’t say “Simon,” of course. He doesn’t know my secret name. Nobody except me does. But I change his words in my head, and then I say, “On it,” and hop up to grab Rose’s suitcase out of the back.

By the time I’ve dug out my own backpack and slung it over my arm, the house’s front door is wide open, and there in the doorway is Nanaleen.

“You made it!” she says. Rose gives her the quickest hug in history before rushing inside for the toilet. Nanaleen waits there on the porch for the rest of us, her pink, veiny hands propped on her hips as she watches us unload. “How was the drive?”

“Not bad,” Dad says. I’m pretty sure even if we’d gotten into a five-car pileup, he’d answer that question in the same way. Dad’s a worrier, but he never wants anyone else to worry.

“Good, good,” Nanaleen says.

Nanaleen is Mom’s mother, our grandma. Her real name is Rosaleen, but when Talia was little, she got confused about why she was supposed to call her Nana when grown-ups would sometimes call her Rosaleen instead. So Talia combined them. We’ve all been calling her Nanaleen for longer than I’ve been alive.

I tuck Rose’s suitcase under one arm and pull my backpack onto the other. Then, for good measure, I grab Rose’s pillow and my pillow and my extra pair of sneakers that I couldn’t fit into my backpack, and I stagger up toward the house.

“You grew,” Nanaleen tells me, beaming, when I get to the front porch. She wraps me and all my bags up into a hug. Nanaleen gives the best hugs. Her skin’s pale and soft and feels like well-used tissue paper. She’s old, obviously, but she’s never seemed old. She’s always excited and full of energy and wants to do eighteen different things at once. Mom says I’m just like her in that way.

“You just saw me in July,” I remind her.

“That just makes it more impressive. And your haircut! It suits you.” She gives my hair a ruffle, even though she’s already seen the pictures.

“Thanks.” I can feel myself grinning. Mom let me cut it short at the start of this school year—she probably would’ve let me longer ago, but that was when I finally asked. Mom calls it a “pixie cut.” I think that’s just what people call short hair when it’s on someone they think is a girl.

“And here’s Talia!” Nanaleen hugs Talia next, and Talia lets her, even though Talia would probably bite almost anyone else who tried that.

Dad’s hauling everything else from the car up the porch steps, panting a little. He always likes to carry everything inside in one trip. He says he likes the challenge of it.

Nanaleen peeks over his shoulder at our now empty car. “Where’s Tessa?” she asks.

Tessa is our mom. Just like that, as soon as Nanaleen asks that question, this cold feeling starts in my throat. It pours down through my chest and into my arms and legs, flowing too fast to stop, like the water from the garden spigot when you turn it all the way up. I swallow hard to try to push it back.

Dad’s blinking at Nanaleen. “She stayed back at the house, remember?” he says. “I’m driving back tonight. It’s just the kids this visit.”

Nanaleen’s smile slips as she blinks right back at him, confused. Her skin looks more papery than it did when we were here in July—more transparent.

“Oh,” she says. Then she smiles again and her face smooths back out. So fast I think I imagined it. I tell myself that I probably did imagine it. “Oh, right. Of course.”

“Take your stuff upstairs, okay?” Dad tells Talia and me.

I don’t need telling twice. I swallow again and then one more time until I can push the cold feeling out of my body. I pull out a smile. “Sure,” I say, and I squeeze past Nanaleen toward the door.

But Talia hasn’t moved. She’s still on the porch, frowning at Dad and Nanaleen.

“Talia,” Dad says. “Go get unpacked.”

Talia makes a huffing sound, but then she follows me inside. “I know when I’m being dismissed,” she mutters. Whatever that means.

When we visit Nanaleen over the summer, Mom always comes with us for the whole month. But this trip, everything’s turned crooked, like I’m looking at it all sideways. It’s fall break instead of July. Talia, Rose, and I are staying here, and Mom and Dad aren’t. They’re both spending the week back in Louisville and then coming back to pick us up next weekend. Dad keeps saying they need a “reset.” Mom says they “need time to talk.” I guess they can’t reset or talk to each other when we’re around.

I think about the extra seat in the car on the drive here—the empty space between me and Rose in the back because Talia was riding up front in what should’ve been Mom’s seat. The car without Mom feels too big and empty and lonely, like Misty Valley in the off-season. We’ve got holes of our own. A ghost family.

SMELLY TOWELS

AS SOON AS I’M INSIDE THE HOUSE, I CATCH THE SMELL.

Nanaleen’s house always has a specific smell: musty and old, but not in a bad way. Usually it smells like when Mom used to take us with her to the huge university library and I’d find the oldest book I could and stick my nose inside the pages. Dusty and almost a little sweet. I always notice it when we first come to visit, even though once we’ve been inside for a couple hours, it kind of fades.

But the smell that hits me this time is different. It’s musty and old, and definitely in a bad way. It’s sour. Like an old washcloth. It smells like Nanaleen’s dragged her whole linen closet of towels through the mud and then left them in a pile on the stairs to dry. Which Nanaleen would never, ever do.

It’s just one more thing that’s a little bit wrong.

Talia and I haul our bags upstairs. Nanaleen’s house has a main floor, an upstairs, and an attic. Whenever we visit, me, Talia, and Rose always share the attic bedroom. It’s the same bedroom Mom and Aunt Bridget and Aunt Shannon shared when they were growing up here, and then before them, Nanaleen and her sisters, Margie and Brie. Mom sometimes calls it the Sisters’ Dormitory since it’s had all of these generations of sisters sleeping in it. But thinking of me, Talia, and Rose as “sisters” doesn’t really fit anymore, so now I just call it the Dormitory.

The door to the attic staircase always gets warped and sticks in its frame, but Talia gives it a couple tugs till it pulls open. We have to climb the narrow stairs one at a time, our bags bumping against the walls the whole way up.

The Dormitory stretches the whole length of the house. The ceiling is low and sloped, all yellow-white drywall that’s starting to sag in some places and crack in others. I dump Rose’s suitcase on her bed at the top of the stairs, and then I haul my stuff over to my own bed at the far end of the room. I stick up my hand as I walk, just like I always do in here, and try to touch the ceiling at its highest spot, where it comes to a point in the middle. Even when I’m on my tiptoes, my fingers can’t quite skim it.

I’ll probably be tall enough to touch it by our visit next summer. According to Dad, I’m growing like a weed.

My bed’s just the same as always: same blue-and-purple quilt, same tucked-in sheets, same brownish water stain running along the sloped ceiling just above it. But when I plop myself down, the mattress creaks more than I remember.

Talia throws her bag down on her own bed so hard it bounces. “Home sweet home, I guess,” she says.

“What’re you so cranky about?” I say.

“She’s always cranky,” Rose says, and just like that she pops up the stairs, back from the bathroom. She ignores Talia’s glare and starts unloading things from her bag into a tidy pile on the floor: her notebook, her pencils, a stack of library books about chemistry. Just about every month, Rose changes her mind about what she wants to do when she grows up. Right now, she’s decided to become a scientist. “Mom says it’s puberty.”

“It is not.” Talia sniffs.

Rose shrugs. “Whatever you say.”

It’s still light outside, but in the Dormitory, you can barely tell. The window between Talia’s and my beds at the front of the house is always a little grimy, no matter how many times Nanaleen Windexes it. One of the bulbs in the overhead light is burned out, and the two that are still working flicker for a second. Right after, I hear the furnace all the way down in the basement kicking on. Old electrical system, I guess.

But I can’t help thinking about the summer that Talia, Rose, and me spent our vacation here hunting for ghosts. That was years ago—before I was Simon, before I’d pieced together that sister wasn’t quite the right word for me. When Talia had first made up the game, when she’d suggested we look for ghosts, we all thought it was pretend. Maybe Talia and Rose still do.

But sometimes I wonder.

That cold feeling that had poured through me on the porch is back now, inching up my spine. Ready to take back over me if I let it. I push it back down where it belongs.

“Do you guys want to see if Nanaleen made snickerdoodles?” I ask.

Nanaleen loves baking, and every time we visit, she fills up the kitchen with homemade snacks. Her snickerdoodles are legendary: crisp on the outside and soft on the inside, and always rolled in so much cinnamon sugar that they can make you sneeze.

Rose and Talia both grumble okay and we go down to the kitchen, where Nanaleen brings out the cookie tin and lets us stuff our faces even though we haven’t had supper yet.

So at least some things are the same.

Dad drives back to Louisville that night, right after we eat supper. He reminds us all about fifty times to be good for Nanaleen this week.

“Behave yourselves, Bradleys,” he says, with this frown like he’s trying his best to be stern. Then he plops a kiss on each of our foreheads. “We’ll call every day, okay? Mom will want to talk to you, too. And we’re both gonna drive down to pick you up again on Saturday, okay?”

Whenever he starts saying “okay” like that, I know he’s worrying again. I make myself smile big so he knows we’re all right. “See you on Saturday,” I tell him.

After he’s gone, though, as Nanaleen lets us all three stay up late playing Parcheesi and then as we’re getting ready for bed, I just keep picturing him and Mom back at home, alone. Rattling around a house that’s too big for them without Talia, Rose, and me to help fill it.