Revived Spirits by Julia Watts

so I’ve been waiting for a good time. But waiting is risky.
    Tonight I decide I’ve waited long enough. When I approach the door of her room, I hear her talking and laughing, which confuses me for a minute and makes me wonder if she might have a ghostly companion in there herself. But then I remember her cell phone that she uses to talk to Dave. Only in my house do ghosts seem more normal than cell phones.
    I give her five minutes to wrap up the conversation, then come back to knock on the door.
    “Come in,” she says. Her voice sounds pleasant and calm, which I take as a good sign.
    Mom is propped up on pillows in her brass bed, a half-drunk cup of tea on the nightstand beside a copy of Pride and Prejudice. The walls of her room are painted a soft lavender, which makes me feel like I’m walking inside a giant flower.
    “I was just talking to Dave about Jane Austen,” she says. “She’s his favorite writer, so I’ve been rereading some of her books. I had forgotten how funny she is.” She smiles. “You’ve got to give credit to a man who’s confident enough in his masculinity to admit that Jane Austen is his favorite author.”
    “I guess so,” I say. I’ve not read any Jane Austen yet, but I know her books always have women on the cover. But I’m not here to talk about Jane Austen. Or Dave either.
    Mom pats the spot on the bed beside her. “I’m sorry we’ve not had much time to talk this week. Work has been crazy. I had to place three sets of kids in foster care this week, all because their parents were cooking or using meth. It made me think of your friend Caylie’s situation.”
    “Yeah, I guess she was lucky she could live with her grandparents, even if they are stricter than she’d like.”
    “She is lucky,” Mom says. “Comparatively speaking, of course. None of the kids whose parents use meth are lucky.”
    “The thing is,” I say, “I don’t think Caylie’s mom uses it. Her boyfriend did, and I’m pretty sure he set her up after she dumped him.”
    Mom gives me a stern look. “You’re not getting involved with Caylie’s family problems, are you? Because you’ve got to stay away from anything involving meth. It makes people dangerous and crazy, and even being near it can make you sick. I used to think strip mining was the worst thing that ever happened to Appalachia. But with what I’m seeing at work every day, I think meth might be.”
    “I’m not getting involved,” I say, hoping Mom doesn’t take a peek inside my head. “I actually came to ask you something.”
    Mom smiles. “But I got on my soapbox, didn’t I? Sorry. Ask away.”
    “So Granny thinks there might be a way for me not to lose Abigail,” I say.
    “Really?” She sounds doubtful.
    “Yeah. Apparently there was this woman in east Tennessee in the early nineteen hundreds who was a famous moonshiner. She was a member of some kind of race that starts with an M—Mull something—”
    “ Melungeon ?”
    “That’s it. Well, she was a moonshiner, and she had a ghostly companion—a little boy—who helped her and stayed with her even though she was an adult.”
    “Okay,” Mom says, like she’s not sure where I’m going with this.
    “And so”—I figure I’d better get to my point soon— “this woman’s ghost is supposed to haunt what’s left of her old log cabin. Granny says maybe if we could go there and I could talk to her, I could find out how she managed to keep her ghostly companion and then maybe I could keep Abigail.”
    Mom sighs and strokes my hair. “That’s a lot of maybes. You realize this could be a total wild goose chase, right? We could drive all that way and find ourselves staring at the empty ruins of a log cabin. Or we could find the spirit and she might not want to help us. She might even want to hurt us. Has it occurred to you that she might not be a very nice ghost?”
    “I thought about that,” I say, then I’m surprised to feel my eyes fill with tears. “But I feel like