Ghosts and Agatha

V: Two Funerals in One Day

It had been more than five weeks since I had seen Elizabeth on the beach, and Grandmother realised that the best thing for me was to go back to school. There weren't any schools near my grandparents' town so Grandmother decided that I should live with Father until Mother healed completely.

When Edgar was gawking at what I presumed was Elizabeth on the beach a little over a month ago, I thought that he had seen her ghost, too. Although, he had told me that he in fact hadn't, and the reason he looked so alarmed was, according to him, because whenever he was scared he tended to look in the distance, and apparently, the story that I had told him about Elizabeth had frightened him.

The other reason that I knew that I was imagining Elizabeth's presence is that after she had twisted my wrist around, I had quickly shown Grandmother the injury when I had returned to her house. Grandmother just shook her head in response, and I looked down at my arm, only to see that nothing had happened to it. So hastily I had rummaged through my pocket in an attempt at fishing out the note Elizabeth had given me. The slip of paper wasn't there.

I was walking into the kitchen and saw Grandmother seated on her mahogany chair next to the dinner table. She was staring at her cup of tea, which looked as if it had gone cold because condensation was dripping down the porcelain and steam was no longer billowing out of the rim. Grandmother looked as if she was in a daze, and the powder that covered her face was streaked with tears.

"Grandmother," I said. "What's the matter?"

She turned her neck stiffly, and rotated her body around until she was facing me. The breaths she inhaled became more laboured, and I could hear the soft wheezing her throat was creating, like the sound of an old kettle when the water was ready. Grandmother hesitantly fixated her attention on me, her doe brown eyes resembling glass.

"Agatha, something terrible has happened," she whispered, and pushed her tea into the middle of the table. "Your father ... he received the news about Elizabeth's death."

I took a momentary pause from walking around the room and placed my duffel bag onto the floor. "That doesn't seem that terrible to me," I mused absently.

Grandmother gripped the edge of the dinner table so tightly that her knuckles were turning a shade of white. Grandmother looked almost like she was trying to prevent herself from trembling, as she was clutching the table so hard that her head was shaking. "That's not all," she elaborated. "Two weeks after the terrible news was delivered to your father - yesterday, to be exact, he passed away. I'm so sorry, Agatha."

I couldn't process what she was saying. The words 'your father' and 'passed away' in the same sentence seemed foreign on her tongue. I mulled them over in my mind, trying to uncover the meaning.

Although eventually I had managed to make some sense of Grandmother's words, and asked, my voice cracking, "How? How did this happen? Why? I don't understand."

Grandmother shook her head. "How did it happen?" she repeated my question, and then answered. "He was ill, Agatha. Your father died of a broken heart."

❄❄❄

I didn't know Father that well. Mother had left him when I was approximately nine, taking her children with her, and Father moved away to the other side of the country. Elizabeth and I only went to see him in the holidays and so you can imagine that I was upset by the fact that Father died because of Elizabeth; the child that he barely knew.

It was obvious that Elizabeth had always been Father's favourite, although that didn't exactly sadden me. That was just a normal expectation. But the fact that my father had let himself die over the death of his child, and left the other one behind with nothing but a pair of grandparents and a mother who didn't even want to look after her anymore was what left me incredibly upset.