The Nobodies Album by Carolyn Parkhurst Page B

background of “Farm Funnies.” I’d gone through it all a thousand times, and there was nothing new to know about any of it.
I looked out at the sea. There was a young man out there with a wooden board, gliding over the surface of the water. I didn’t understand how he didn’t get swept under, and it made me very uneasy to watch. How would it feel to stand on the skin of the waves, to ride the galloping ocean as if it were a beast? I felt a lick of panic run through me, and in the tensing of my body, a memory clicked into place.
“I know what it was,” I said to Cecily. “That day in the theater, when I saw the card.”
“What about it?”
“Well, remember I said I’d been reading the papers before the show started, and there was something that had left me feeling troubled?”
“Yes?”
“I couldn’t think what it was, but I knew I’d been feeling worried about something before the cartoon even started. Well, I just remembered—it was a story about the tidal wave, do you remember? The one in Japan, that wiped out all those villages?”
She nodded. “That was awful.”
“That’s what it was. I had just read that the number of lives lost was much higher than they’d thought, somewhere around fifteen hundred. And you know, fifteen hundred, that’s the same number as … well, those lost on the Titanic .” I felt embarrassed, as if by mentioning this unpleasant bit of my past, I was emphasizing a character flaw.
She was looking at me a little doubtfully. “I’m not sure I understand you. That’s a coincidence, certainly, but are you saying that reading that article had something to do with the picture of the bell appearing in the cartoon?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Just a minute ago, it had seemed like a momentous revelation, but now I wasn’t sure. It was hard to put into words, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. But to say I’d felt “troubled” was not quite accurate. What I’d felt that evening, as I thought about that sudden rush of water, whole families drowned in their beds, was a sudden, welling terror, almost as if I myself were in danger of being crushed by a wall of water. I nearly left the theater, because I felt I couldn’t breathe in that crowded space, the air weighted with popcorn grease and smoke. So when the lights went low and the projector started its rattle, I could barely even watch the cartoon, the figures I myself had drawn and coaxed into motion. Until I saw the playing card, and I remembered the way my brother, Archie, used to call me Ace. And I felt as if I’d just stepped onto solid ground.
“I’m being haunted,” I said suddenly. Neither of us had spoken for several minutes. It was going to be dark soon, and cold, and it would be time for us to leave this place and ride the train back to the city, with all of its loneliness and gaiety.
“Haunted?” Cecily repeated. To her credit, if she felt any dismay at my words, her face didn’t betray it. Or maybe I just couldn’t see it in the shadows.
“Yes. Or maybe, anyway. I think I’m being haunted by my brother, Archie.”
If I had heard myself saying these words a mere two months earlier, I would have wondered about my own sanity. But it made a certain amount of sense to me now. Tidal waves, scientists say, are sometimes caused by the eruption of an underwater volcano. An explosion beneath the surface, unsettling everything that lies submerged. Think what’s down there, never to be seen by human eyes: treasure ships and the carcasses of sea monsters, the empty bones of sailors and pirates and virgins offered up in savage rites. Our glorious rescue ship, the Carpathia , is under there somewhere, torpedoed during the World War and gone to her rest. And, of course, the Titanic herself, broken in two and sunk in some forgiving patch of silt. If a single twitch of the earth can raise a wave as big as the greatest buildings men have ever made, then who’s to say it can’t also wake the dead?
“The playing card,”