Sarah Lean - 3 Book Collection

And sometimes he would. Well, he used to. He’d get his guitar out, sing a song or just play a tune. Sometimes me and Mum sang with him.

Dad laughed softly. He looked into my eyes. “That’s what she’d say,” he said.

We stared into the drawing, as if we could still see her hand holding the pencil. For a minute he looked like he really remembered her, like he knew the winter was over.

“I wish your mother was here right now,” he said. “She’d know what to do about you.”

33.

MORE RAIN GUSHED DOWN THE WINDOWS, filled up the drains and made great puddles and ponds in the road and on the common. Mrs Cooper said, “Absolutely not in this weather,” when Sam asked if we could go to the common. We wanted to find Homeless and make sure he was safe; find Jed and ask him, somehow, about Mum.

“I don’t ever remember so much rain,” Mrs Cooper said, looking into the sky, “not this time of year. The river in town will burst its banks if it carries on like this. And besides, you can’t go out, you’ve got another hospital appointment later, Sam.”

We sat together on the window seat, played hand-clapping games.

“What is a ghost?” Sam tapped on my hand.

“A dead person come back,” I spelled.

“Can you touch them or smell them?”

“No, you can only see them. But you can sort of hear them, like a …”

I realised Sam wouldn’t understand TV because he couldn’t hear or see one. The Coopers didn’t even have a television set.

“You know what a telephone is?” I spelled.

Sam smiled and put his hand by his ear, pretended he was holding one. He explained he could tell when the telephone was ringing. They had a telephone with really big numbers. It rang like a bell and buzzed so Sam could feel the vibrations. He spelled that sometimes his mum gave him messages from people who rang up.

“A bit like that,” I tapped.

You can tell when Sam is trying to work things out or remember something. He hangs his head; his long black fringe falls over his face. The only thing that moves is his bony-thin chest and you can just hear a little wheeze at the end of his quick breathing.

“Like a message,” he spelled. He leaned back. “Can you phone them?” he tapped.

Sam isn’t like ordinary people. He thinks about things differently. Maybe it’s because he can’t see or hear, but sometimes what he said just made me feel like my brain and heart were exploding. In a good way. I wanted to tell him he was magic because he made me feel like I wasn’t weird or mad or stupid.

All the time I had been waiting for Mum to come, like the day she died. Me and Luke waited and waited after school for her to come home and cook our tea. The house still smelled of the pancakes we’d had for Dad’s birthday that morning; his birthday cake was on the kitchen table, but Mum hadn’t iced or decorated it. She must have forgotten something because she drove the car out of town. She was coming back, but … there was a crash.