The Unfortunates

Halley knew everything that went on in the Bolet mansion.

She’d watched the last five families move in and live their lives for a short while, and in watching she had deduced one thing:

Anyone of Bolet blood was bound to an extraordinarily unobservant, or unlucky group of people.

Of course, she had to lump herself into that lot as well, as she was perhaps the most unlucky of them all. Quite frankly, she blamed her father.

-x-x-x-

The first family was her own, a lovely, dysfunctional group of individuals who rarely agreed but loved each other anyway. Her mother was an elegant and exotic woman, a tiger lily gracing the garden of New Orleans society. Her father spoiled the women in his life mercilessly, including his wife and daughter, two mistresses, a first wife, and three other daughters of questionable origin. Her mother pretended to be ignorant of these affairs, and Halley didn’t know what else to do but follow her lead. The other women posed no threat to her, either way, so why should she care?

Until, of course, the Depression sent everything crumbling around her ears.

The majority of Halley’s family fortune had been won in the 20s, underground in a world of illegal speakeasies, dance halls, and opium dens. Halley knew the locations of them all by the tender age of eight, and she frequently helped balance her father’s accounts for an extra dollar or two to buy candy. But after the stock market crash, the income from the shadowy underbelly of the Big Easy plummeted, and Halley’s father was hard-pressed to provide for a scattered family of nine. The mistresses and other daughters clamored for financial support, and became too loud for Halley’s mother to ignore. For the first time in a seven-year marriage, Halley’s parents fought.

When these storms would hit, Halley fled to the garden, a spacious expanse of foliage that bloomed like a contained rain forest. A decrepit playhouse was tucked away in the corner, and it quickly became Halley’s favorite hiding place when the thunder and lightening of her parents’ competing voices became too much to bear. Shingles were missing from the gingerbread roof, and the walls were bowed and cracked in places, but Halley saw a castle, a fortress against the evils of the world. Her dolls hid there with her, guarding her against the storms of her parents’ arguments and keeping her company against the loneliness of her sheltered little world.

And then, one night, in the midst of a vicious argument over the mistresses continued demands of financial support, Halley ducked out into the garden. The rain was beating on everything, thunder rolling and crashing like a tide far overhead. She crawled into the playhouse anyway.

The storm had weakened the already fragile structure of the playhouse, and the small loft above the tea set that once had only precariously held her weight was now too weak to hold a doll, much less a girl of eight-and-a-half, small for her age though she was.

In her unease over her parents’ argument, Halley heeded none of this. She crawled up onto the loft, curling up to have a good cry.

The loft creaked, and groaned, and cracked, and collapsed onto the tea table with a crash that was drowned out by foliage and thunder from the storm.

When she was found six hours later, her leg was broken, she had cried herself to sleep, and rainwater was caught in her lungs.

The doctor came and bent over the child’s bed in the upstairs bedroom, prodding and humming and listening intently. He emerged from the room, bag and coat in tow, and shook his head gravely.

Eight days later, the distraught parents laid Halley’s earthly remains to rest.

Unfortunately, Halley’s soul couldn’t bear to leave.

-x-x-x-

The second family consisted of one of the questionable sisters, her husband and a son just past his sixth birthday. Halley had never particularly liked boys, and boys under the age of ten, especially.

But the boy--her nephew--was sweet, and shy, and lived in fear of his father going off to fight in another war. Halley couldn’t help but grow attached.

She sat in his bedroom as he slept, at first, silent and invisible. She watched him play from the windows, until he turned around and saw her staring.

And he smiled shyly and waved.

She learned how to scribble messages on his slate board, and they would tell each other stories, and play card games long after bedtime, and lay down together until the boy fell asleep. Halley listened to him worrying over the meaning of Heidi LaChance’s Valentine, even though she was a fourth grader and was it wrong to date an older woman? Halley scribbled an “I don’t know?” on the slate board and hoped he knew that she’d be there for him, either way.

Halley watched him grow up into a sweet, shy teenage boy, while she stayed nine years old and intangible. She watched him fall in love with that “older woman,” watched them share their first kiss under the loquat tree in the garden, watched them say their vows feet away from the playhouse rubble that had claimed her life so many years before. The boy she’d watched grow into a man drove from Baton Rouge to inform her of his new bride’s first pregnancy. She rejoiced with him, and made him promise to bring the child down to meet her. She was going to be a great aunt, spectral or not.

And then, on his way home to his pregnant wife, he neglected to look right when driving through an intersection. According to the obituary, he died instantly.

Halley had no idea ghosts could feel so heartbroken.

-x-x-x-

The third family moved into the mansion, and brought with them the whirlwind tie-dye and political protesting change of the 1960s. The girl, Halley’s great niece, was ten when she move in, and already complaining about not having the right fashions and trying to get a boyfriend. Halley disliked her almost instantly--what an insult to the memory of the boy she had helped raise.

But besides the little girl that Halley wanted nothing to do with, was another daughter by another husband, who was about to turn four and had not yet lost her eyes. Halley loved her almost as much as she had loved the first boy to occupy her nursery, and she vowed to help raise her to be the wonderful woman she was destined to be. Halley watched her learn to read, talked to her as she had talked to the boy a lifetime before. The girl grew up with the ghost in her room, like it was the most natural thing in the world. She was horribly confused when everyone looked at her like she was delusional--didn’t everyone know a ghost? “They’re incredibly helpful, I don’t know why they don’t have one,” the girl told Halley indignantly one day during third grade. “They don’t know what they’re missing.”

When the little girl grew to be a bigger girl, hanging off the precipice of her teenage years, her mother grew concerned about the stories of the ghost in her daughter’s room. This was the 70s, and well adjusted children weren’t superstitious about anything. They knew ghosts weren’t real, and they didn’t talk to themselves in the middle of the night, or pretend that they hadn’t written the messages on the ancient slate board.

The girl talked to a psychologist, and came back unwilling to talk to Halley. “You’re not real,” the girl said, turning her back on the hovering chalk. “You’re just a figment of my imagination. I’m malnourished and not getting enough sleep, and that’s all you are.”  

Halley was heartbroken, but in a different, more icy way than when the boy had died. Upset, she retreated to the rotting remains of the playhouse, and stayed there for the next forty years.

She didn’t even emerge for the little girl’s funeral four years later. It wasn’t her fault that she hadn’t listened--Halley had told her that the attic was unsafe.

-x-x-x-

The next family was nice enough, but never home--Bolets by love affair, even if they didn’t know it. Halley watched but didn’t make contact--she shied away from the three children who ran through the garden, stayed outside the patio where the parents watched and called out warnings over glasses of lemonade.

She watched through the neon and cigarettes of the 80s, and the acid washed jeans of the 90s. Only once did she nudge the father into looking for water damage--she knew how to predict the creaks in the parlor better than anyone else. But other than that, she refused to come out of the rotting remains of the playhouse, overgrown with carpets of crawling plants and hidden by battalions of bushy trees.

The children somehow survived an accident prone childhood (they had Bolet blood, after all), and moved away, and had families of their own, none the wiser to the ghost who hadn’t put all that much effort into hiding. They didn’t believe in ghosts, anyway. Well, too bad, Halley thought bitterly at one point, watching them giggle and scream their way through a Halloween party. I don’t believe in you, either.

The parents moved to Texas, to a nice retirement community far removed from the collage of crime, voodoo, and gumbo that was the Big Easy Halley loved. They rented the mansion out for what was, apparently, horribly cheap--Halley was still used to the pricing of the 1920s. After she died, the interest in economics deteriorated somewhat.

A single mom and a boy of about eight hesitantly unpacked plates and clothes and a humble collection of well-loved books to fill in the spaces on the bookshelves in the study. The boy brought with him a flashlight, a Swiss Army knife, and a deep-set interest in lost things. Halley watched with interest, but didn’t get close. She’d let them alone, and hopefully they’d let her alone.

The boy unpacked his things in the room that had once been the nursery, and ducked out the back door at dusk to explore the garden, flashlight and Swiss Army knife in tow. Halley watched him stumble through the foliage, finding the long-lost gate to the swamps beyond the garden, a key and a glass eye in the dirt, along with a heart-shaped locket that her own great-grandmother had hid in the garden wall during the Civil War.  She would have been indignant at his meddling, if his intrepid curiosity hadn’t intrigued her so.

He stumbled past the dense foliage that surrounded her overgrown corner of the garden, shining his flashlight around in wonder at the ruin he’d found. “Wow,” he breathed, approaching the remains of the playhouse like it was sacred ground, a temple of the forgotten eras of playtime. He started up the rotting steps to the structure carefully, testing his weight on each step before proceeding.

Halley knew the dangers of the playhouse. She knew that if you stepped on the middle of the floor, it would crack, and send you into a small pool of quicksand leftover from the edge of the swamp. Urgently, she rustled the leaves around the door, clearing off a patch of dirt big enough to leave a message.

The boy turned on the second step--the last one that would hold his weight, Halley knew--and looked around, swinging his flashlight. “Hello?” he called hesitantly.

DO NOT GO IN, she scrawled in block letters, drawing a spectral finger through the mud. She rustled the leaves again to draw his attention downward.

He read the message, lips teasing themselves into a thoughtful frown. “Why not?” he asked, seemingly unfazed by the message that had just appeared.

Halley cleared the letters she had scrawled and dragged her finger through the mud again. YOU WILL GET HURT she wrote this time.

“How do you know,” he said. It sounded like a challenge to her.

BECAUSE I DIED HERE, she scribbled angrily, huffing a small puff of breath into an overgrown patch of English ivy.

“Oh.” He paused, and then stepped slowly down to the mud. “Are you a ghost?”

NO I’M AUDREY HEPBURN.

He laughed. “I’m Matthew.”

DO YOU BELIEVE IN GHOSTS?

“Why wouldn’t I?” He shrugged and looked at the patch just above the message. “You have nice handwriting.”

Halley smiled. Maybe this boy wouldn’t be so bad, after all.

WHAT ROOM DO YOU LIVE IN?

“Um, the bedroom on the landing,” he said, slowly moving to sit on the green carpet.

THAT WAS MY ROOM

“Oh, I didn’t know. I can move my stuff somewhere else, if you don’t want me there,” he offered politely.

NO, IT’S OKAY

Matthew smiled. “What’s your name?”

HALLEY

“Halley,” he tried. “Pretty.”

A few fireflies drifted out from the foliage, adding a feeble golden glow to the light of the flashlight. A woman called Matthew’s name through the thick wall of foliage. “Crap,” he muttered. “That’s my mom.”

Wordlessly, Halley floated to her feet, pushing out a spectral glow that she’d figured out when the first boy had been small and afraid of the dark. Slowly, she pushed through the foliage, leaving a path for him to follow back to the house.

Mathew followed her glowing shadow back to the open patch of grass next to the patio. The orb of light stayed in the bushes, just beyond the glow of the solar lights. “You can come in,” he offered.

Halley smiled to herself and let the glow fade.

“Hey, where’d you go?”

Halley ducked out of the bushes and grabbed his hand. She traced I A-M R-I-G-H-T H-E-R-E into his palm with her finger.

“Oh.” he smiled as she took his hand and pulled him toward the door. “Are you coming in with me? I’m sure my mom would like to meet you.”

She walked him up to the door and traced M-A-Y-B-E S-O-M-E O-T-H-E-R T-I-M-E on his palm.

He sighed and nodded. “Some other time,” he agreed, opening the screen door. “You can come in anytime, though. I mean, it’s your house.”

Halley nodded and glowed a little as she floated down the steps.

“Goodnight,” he called softly into the garden as he retreated inside.

“Goodnight,” she muttered back, even though he couldn’t hear her. They’d be good friends, she felt as she floated back to the playhouse ruins.