The Girl, the Ghost, and the Kill

As Jess approached her mother from behind, she admired their reflections in the pane of glass behind the kitchen sink. The moonless sky outside, combined with the recessed lighting above the workstation, encouraged their images to glow with the foggy depth of an antique mirror. She wrapped her arms around Cass’ waist and, hoping to inhale the scents of hairspray and perfume, tucked her nose into the loose knot of hair that her mother had tied up before starting the dishes. Standing behind Cass, then, Jess gently rocked back and forth until Cass joined along, and the two of them enjoyed a tiny dance to the pulse of the sink gurgling water down the drain.

In the window’s reflection, the pair appeared as opposites. Jess in her bare feet had to crouch slightly to embrace Cass, despite her mother’s perpetual three-inch heels. Jess, with straight hair that shaded to brown in the summertime before returning to black in the winter, versus her mother’s platinum locks and black roots and purposefully lazy curls. And, Jess, always without makeup, could no longer be recognized through her mother’s plumped lips and enhanced bosom and refusal to leave her bedroom without a fully made face.

“My baby is going to be eighteen tomorrow,” Cass whispered.

Jess nodded. “I wish we weren’t having such a big to-do,” she whispered back. “I just wanted the two of us to spend the day together. Go shopping… have a nice dinner.”

“Oh, poor little princess,” Cass cooed while patting the back of Jess’ hand, “having a great big party thrown for her...”

“You know what I mean,” Jess stated, jerking upright from the embrace. “I never asked for it. He only wants to show off for his friends.”

Throwing a wink at her daughter, Cass wagged a finger as she sashayed out of the kitchen and into the great room where her husband sat a few dozen yards away.

Jess startled at a snap behind her, and she glanced back at the empty window, which clicked once more.

This earned a furrowing of Jess’ brow.

Again, she thought, it’s there, and she peered hard at the glass, as if a specter might finally glare at her from the outside… but Jess was greeted only by her reflection, and she again resigned herself to the understanding that nothing so ethereal would present itself that easily.

She never does, Jess thought.

Then, Jess returned her attention to the great room.

Reclining in his big chair, Seth rested on an elbow, gazing at an old coffee table book about Ferrari racing teams, a grin forming at the side of his mouth. He lifted a lowball to his lips and sipped a bourbon from one of the eight bottles of Blanton’s lining the wall behind the standing bar at the back of the great room. With one knee crossed loosely over the other, then, his raised toe swung in the air like a maestro waving a baton as he admired the single photograph of himself.

A low, involuntary rumble emanated from Jess’ throat as she watched her mother lean over him from behind. Cass released the knot of her platinum locks to cascade around Seth’s head as she mimicked the hug that Jess had given her at the sink.

Jess’ eyes lingered on Seth, grunting and swatting away Cass’ hair as he fought to concentrate on the photograph… and a burst of heat flushed across Jess’ skin. She grabbed the collar of her shirt and stretched it down and out, fanning it against the patina of sweat on her chest.

Even after sunset, the July air still hung hot, and so Jess stood in bare feet and wore an oversized T-shirt that almost hung below her shorts and threatened to expose a shoulder from its stretched neck. Contrastingly, Cass displayed herself with a crop top and slashed denim shorts that clung to her curves, which were further accentuated by a pair of sharply wedged sandals.

Why couldn’t we live in a normal house with an air conditioner? Jess bemoaned.

Built a century prior, in the hills that separated the southern facing beaches of Malibu from the northern ranches of Simi Valley, the Frank Lloyd Wright estate’s only cooling system was night air and ocean breezes. Thus, the wood-framed house continually creaked with the expansion and contraction of the days’ temperatures which, for now, seemed to be an unrelenting drone of hot.

Seth wore his usual fare: a slimly cut Hawaiian shirt, white linen pants, boating shoes, and no socks.

Magnum P.I., Jess thought, even though she knew that he was actually emulating the look of an original Alberto Vargas painting that hung in their guest bathroom.

So fake…

Yet, Jess groused, Seth pulled this look off with so much… ease. His blue eyes paired with a naturally trim frame, topped with a soft face and jet-black hair that refused to grey, thus ensuring him a lifetime of compliments about looking a decade younger than his actual age… which was further aided by the maintenance of a wife who was far more than a decade younger than him.

Cass kissed the top of her husband’s head and ruffled his hair before performing her best Marilyn Monroe walk in front of him, swishing her heels across the hardwood flooring and flirtatiously tickling the leaves of a fake ficus as she stopped in front of the stereo.

But before any music sounded, Jess caught her mother glancing slyly back to Seth… and Cass’ gaze cast downward when her husband’s eyes never shifted from the book. Cass smacked her hand atop the stereo without bothering to turn it on, and she stomped across the great room to stare out the slider at their lit pool, shimmering under the stars. Cass peeked back at Seth again—no movement—and she whacked her wedding-ringed hand against the slider, sending the hum of vibrating glass through the room.

Still no movement from Seth, and so Cass crossed her arms with a huff and stared blankly out at the pool house, looming on the far side of the water.

With a shake of her head, Jess diverted her gaze back to the sink. Just dump him, she thought. Leave him with nothing more than the company of his own, insipid thoughts...

Worst for Jess, though, her mother reveled in Seth’s flattery and braggadocio. “At parties,” Jess once told her best friend Samantha, “Seth wears her like a Rolex.” But what Jess didn’t verbalize was how much Cass prized how much he prized her.

Jess’ stomach tightened at the memory of the old conversation with her friend.

And, yet—Jess reminded herself once again—I should be thankful. “He accepted a seven-year-old into his millionaire lifestyle,” Jess remembered yet another conversation with Samantha, and yet another one where she bit her tongue to not add, “Right alongside Cass, the greasy spoon waitress.”

“But it’s all so… fairytale,” Samantha loved to giggle as a way of ending these conversations.

It always worked, too, because Jess couldn’t counter that assessment: fairytale.

To Jess, the inside view of her mother’s marriage felt as off as the house—a fairytale castle—with pops in the night and rattling doors that could be explained, but didn’t make sense.

This, too, was how Jess viewed Cass and Seth’s union: Explainable, but nonsensical.

There were times, lately at least, when it seemed to Jess that the only way out for her and her mother was for Seth to…

And a shudder ran down Jess’ back, repulsed that her mind would go there at all. Draw the drapes on those thoughts! she reprimanded herself.

With a pump of liquid soap, Jess snapped on the kitchen faucet and vigorously scrubbed her hands into a cascade of suds under a stream of water.

The heat.

Her mother’s affectations.

Him.

Jess needed a good washing.

A shake of the wrists flung off the last bit of soap, and Jess bent over the sink, cupping her hands, and she splashed the cool water onto her face and throat. So hot… she thought with her eyes closed, allowing the liquid to flow from her brow and cheeks, while some dripped off her chin and wet the front of her T-shirt. This, she welcomed, the bit of chill that would linger until either her body heat or the atmosphere evaporated it away. She nostrilled in a deep breath and let it out slowly through her mouth, and she stood and opened her eyes to the face of a woman staring at her through the window.

Screeching, Jess stumbled back against the kitchen’s center island and pointed at the glass. “Somebody’s out there!”

Cass spun from the slider with her hands to her mouth as Seth leapt and rushed to the kitchen window.

“Where— where?” he shouted, craning his head to see around the reflections of the interior. “Turn off the lights!” he yelled.

Smashing down a row of switches next to the front door, Cass bathed the great room and kitchen in darkness, while Jess simultaneously smacked off the light above the sink.

Seth leaned over the sink and squinted into the blackness bathing the yard, but his glare of murder slowly shaded to disappointment.

The window popped with the force of a smack, and Seth jumped backwards with a “Damnit!” He lurched to the side and tore a chef’s knife from its block and sprinted for the front door.

“Seth— what are you doing?” Cass screamed and tried to cut him off, but he shoved her aside and hurdled through the exit. “No, no, no!” Cass yelled, but he was already outside, and so she slammed the door behind him and threw the deadbolt, immediately thought better of it and unbolted it, re-bolted it, and finally left the door locked before waving her hands in harried confusion and rushing to the sink to search for him through the window alongside Jess.

At the sight of Seth’s silhouette rounding the corner of the house, Jess prayed that he’d be safe as a glint of light flared across the eight-inch blade in his hand.

Nearly blinded by the moonless night, Seth jerked from left to right like a fighter in the ring… yet, apparently, an empty one. Reluctantly, he lowered the knife and walked to the patch of grass in front of the kitchen window, scanning the lawn with a disappointment that bordered on anger. Seth glanced at the two women staring at him, and he shrugged.

“Turn on the kitchen lights!” he yelled.

Jess obediently snapped on the light above the sink, and he examined the grass again, now with a soft radiance fanning out from the window… but Seth only grew more annoyed as a haze of gnats swarmed his ears.

“Nothing!” he barked at the moment that a giant moth smacked the glass in front of Jess’ eyes, making her leap backwards at the pop of sound.

With her reflection overlayed onto Seth, outside, Jess squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again, blinking hard to make sure that they were focused correctly.

No… Jess determined, and she shook her head, growing angry at her self-doubt. “I saw somebody!” Jess yelled at Seth through the window. “Right there! Right where you’re standing, but closer. A woman! With her face practically against the glass.”

Seth raised his hands in an exaggerated shrug and then angrily swatted at a bug in his ear. “Well, there isn’t anybody here now!” he yelled, and he spun on his heel and disappeared from the light of the window.

But it was ultimately Cass’ confused eyes that deflated Jess’ shoulders.

“She looked young,” Jess pleaded to her mother. “Like my age, or maybe a little older…”

Cass strode to the entrance. “I don’t know, Jess…” She threw the deadbolt and opened the door for Seth, and as soon as he stomped through, she snapped the lock behind him and rattled the door to confirm that it was closed.

“Nothing like wasting my time,” Seth growled as he walked towards Jess with the knife bobbling on his palm. “I swear,” he whispered at her, “you’re going to be the death of me.”

Jess sneered at him and bit her tongue, though her pride demanded a response. “I saw a woman!” she snapped.

“You saw your own damned reflection,” he answered loudly while whapping the knife into its block. “Or, let me guess,” he said with a cocked brow, “you witnessed your infamous ghost.”

“This house is haunted!” Jess answered back at him, clenching her fists and stomping her foot— and immediately regretting how juvenile she must look.

Cass let out a frustrated chuckle from the other side of the great room as she locked and then jiggled the handle of the patio slider. “I think Seth is right,” she conceded. “You saw your own reflection.” Cass then took a few steps to the side and knocked her knuckles on the wooden bartop.

“Absolutely, I’m correct,” Seth said with an I-told-you-so glance as he strutted past Jess.

Jess started to answer, but she stopped short as Seth disappeared into the first-floor restroom: Jess reminded herself that her stepfather was pathological about always having the last word, and this argument could go all night if she fed into it. Instead, Jess grumbled to herself and crossed to the front door, almost working up the courage to go outside to check for herself… until she allowed her forehead to fall against the heavy slab of wood. It’s pointless, she thought as she gave the deadbolt a snap back and—

A floor lamp next to Jess’ elbow flickered and swayed, followed by another click from a window alongside the door. “There!” Jess gasped, pointing at the lamp when she saw her mother looking at it, too. “You saw that lamp move? You saw that, right? And you heard the window!”

Cass gulped.

The two women stared at each other with Jess raising her brows, expecting a nod or a shrug or anything.

Melodramatically, Cass held her hands out, as if balancing on a beam. “I felt an earthquake earlier today,” Cass offered. “Maybe we had a trembler.”

“What? Right now?” Jess nearly yelled but caught herself with a mental reminder that she was still addressing her mother. “My forehead was pressed against the door, Mom. It was not a temblor.”

Cass scrunched her face, and she walked over to her daughter to pat her arm. “I think I felt a quake, baby,” she said with an artificially reassuring voice, “and you saw your own reflection. Look—” she cut herself off, pointing at the clicking window and a moth fluttering against it. “You know that they’re attracted to the light, right?”

With a sharp huff, Jess turned and stomped to the stairway. “This house is haunted,” she declared while pointing at a double doorway in the center of the house, “and that room—that menagerie of death—is the worst!”

“Jessy…” her mother rumbled with a low voice and narrowing eyes.

“The ghost is punishing me for going in there to get his book for him!” Jess shot a glare at Seth as he stepped out of the restroom, wearing a smirk on his face.

Freshly infuriated by his grin, Jess opted to emphasize the dramatic by clomping up the long ascent of the stairway, pounding her feet down the second-floor hall, and slamming her bedroom door behind herself.

* * *

Jess dropped onto the foot of her bed, and her shoulders slumped as she sat in the darkness. I looked like an eight-year-old, she thought. But what else am I supposed to do?

Spreading her arms wide, Jess collapsed backwards onto the bed and listened to the mattress’ squeaks fade to nothing. Her eyes slowly adjusted to the night—the red glow from an overly bright alarm clock lit most of the room—and she examined the ceiling’s crisscrossing cracks and imagined them to be a roadmap leading to… Somewhere.

A coyote yipped in the distance, lonely for the moon.

For the past weeks, instead of the flurry of college applications and proms and final exams and grad nights and graduation and graduation parties, Jess found herself trapped in her family’s secluded estate, suspended in a constant drone of… nothing. Now, there was merely the promised freedom of college, punctuated by an occasional unexplained noise or swaying object. This, then, became Jess’ only tangible distraction: hints of a ghost and the desire to prove that it existed.

Jess’ observations, though, were inevitably met with an accusation from Seth that this “ghost of yours”represented her disdain for his family’s estate, followed by Jess countering that her belief in a ghost was simply a statement of fact.

“Evil must be identified before it can be driven away,” Jess had once read and made the mistake of repeating to Seth, as it set off another round of bickering…

Jess wasn’t sure if she could take a lifetime of him.

But, there’s Mom, Jess always had to concede, followed by an, “Maybe he not so bad?”

Jess glanced around the darkened space of her room, unable to deny the fact that Seth had accepted her into his life, without hesitation, along with Cass.

I’m the bonus gift, Jess grumbled to herself.

But he’s put a roof over my head, she admitted, and he was my protector tonight…

“Even if it was gross,” she mumbled.

And then there’s college, Jess thought.

The future.

Plans.

Recruitment posters for CalArts decorated her walls, along with prints by Cassat, Pollack, Degas, Rivera, and anyone else whose vibrant colors told a story in brushstrokes. Intermixed amongst the prints were her own canvases, less polished but improving in correlation with Jess’ education.

Which brought another sigh.

“I’ll pay him back the tuition,” Jess said aloud, as if verbalizing the conviction made it more official.

With interest.

“I only need a way out first…”