"Amputation and a prosthetic, is that the best they can come up with?"
Five-year-old Carly frowned as her mother's voice cut through the laughter of the television show. "It's some sort of hysteria, don't you think? From the stress of moving, or losing Bosco?"
Bosco was Carly's beloved cat, who had disappeared during the confusion of moving from Baltimore to their new home in West Virginia. Carly, quietly hiding in her secret TV-listening place near her second-floor bedroom, listened harder to the show so she wouldn't have to remember. Two months was a long time to be lost. She tried to believe her Daddy when he said someone had found Bosco by now and adopted him, but it didn't help her stop missing him.
"Maybe she just believes she can't see her hand, like you thinking you had morning sickness when I was carrying Scott." They were talking about her! Carly stopped listening to the show, which suddenly seemed to be blaringly loud.
"Nobody can see her hand, Lynne," her daddy said. "It doesn't even show up on the X-rays. I'd like to know what they think they're going to amputate."
Her mother didn't reply right away. Three noisy commercials went by. Carly waited. Her listening place was a round hole cut in the floor, a primitive heat duct hidden behind a chimney. If she stuck her head down and twisted it to an uncomfortable angle, she could see the TV screen in her parents' bedroom on the first floor, but she didn't mind just listening. She could make up better pictures in her head anyway.
"Well, what are we going to do?"
Her mother sounded tired, more tired than Carly had ever heard her. Usually she was bubbling over with excitement and fuss about something, like "becoming one with nature" in the West Virginia mountains that surrounded their new home. "Do you think we should take her to Children's Hospital? Maybe we should call a faith healer -- that might work!"
Excitement was back in her mother's voice. Carly was glad to hear her mother sound more cheerful, but she cringed at the thought of seeing any more doctors.
"I think we should give it some time," her daddy said. "Nobody's come up with a rational explanation yet, much less a viable solution, and I don't like the way they're acting. We'll be lucky if she doesn't end up on the front page of The National Enquirer."
Carly nodded fervently in agreement. No more doctors. Good!
"Yes, but what if —"
"No more what-ifs, Lynne. No more fuss. It won't help anyone, especially Carly. Let's just take it one day at a time like an alkyhol, all right?"
Carly giggled, and covered her mouth quickly so they wouldn't hear. Her parents had bought their present home, an old farmhouse in need of serious renovation, from two bachelors, "the last of the seven Sinclair boys," the real estate agent had called them. The two "boys," now elderly men, had helped show Carly's family around the property. They talked with thick southern accents and spit brown streams of tobacco juice everywhere, including big tin cans on the floor in every room of the old house. The cans were still there when Carly's family moved in, surrounded by sticky brown splats on the floor where the old men had missed. Her daddy was always copying the way they talked, even though her mother said it wasn't nice to make fun of people.
The bed creaked heavily, probably her daddy rearranging the pillows. He was big and strong, and needed lots of room to stretch out. Her mother changed the TV channel. No longer interested in listening to television, Carly withdrew from her hiding place. She had a lot to think about. First, though, she'd ask Scotty about those words.
Her twelve-year-old brother was reading in bed. A screaming white skull covered the front of his book; a pale green worm crawled in and out of its eye holes.
"Go 'way, kid, ya bodda me," he said, without looking up.
Carly contemplated him as she wiggled the loose porcelain knob on his bedroom door. Everyone said she looked like her daddy, dark and serious, and that Scott looked like their mother. But their mother was slim and energetic, and Scotty was pudgy and lazy. All he liked to do was watch old movies and read scary books. With a whole West Virginia mountain starting just a few feet from their back porch, Carly found his attitude incomprehensible. She saved books and television for nighttime, when she couldn't see to explore anyway.
"What's amputate and pross-- pross -- prossek?" she asked.
That got his attention, all right, but in a funny kind of way. He looked up from his book, and his face was closed up, like he was mad or about to cry, but Scotty never cried. He was tough. "Where'd you hear that?"
Carly didn't want to say anything that would reveal her secret listening place, so she shrugged. "Just someplace," she said. "I don't remember. But what does it mean?"
"Beats me. Never heard of it."
Carly could tell he was lying, but before she could challenge him, he changed the subject.
"Listen," he said. "I wasn't going to tell you because you're just a little kid, but maybe you ought to know so you won't get scared."
"I never get scared!"
"Yeah, you're okay. But you have to promise not to tell Mom and Dad, because they'll make a big fuss. Promise!"
Carly crossed her heart.
"Good. Now, listen, you won't believe this. We got a ghost!" Scott nodded with satisfaction at Carly's astonished face. "Yep, a real, live ghost. The kids told me at school."
"What kind of ghost? Have you seen it?"
"Not yet, but I'm gonna. It's a crazy lady. She roams the house all alone ... crying and singing." Scotty slowed down his voice so he could sound spooky, like Vincent Price in the movies. "She's looking ... and hunting ... and searching ..." He burrowed under the covers, then rose slowly, swaying from side to side with his blue-striped top sheet draped over his head. "Ooo-ooo, Caaar-leeee, I'm coming for you-ooo-ooo ..."
Carly rolled her eyes at him and went to bed.
"Mommy," Carly said, the next afternoon, "there's a rock lamb on the mountain."
Carly's mother was kneeling on the floor of the living room, scraping faded brown paint off the baseboards. She was determined to rid the house of every trace of those musty old men. The smell of the paint stripper was so strong that it made Carly's nose squinch up, but she liked watching the clean, bare wood emerge as her mother scraped.
Her mother plopped a scraper full of goo into an old coffee can and started on the next section of blistered paint. "A rock lamb? What are you talking about, sweetheart?"
"I found it this morning, on the mountain. It was with some others -- you know, like crosses."
"Oh, dear." Her mother stopped scraping and frowned. "Carly, I wish you wouldn't go off on your own without asking. It sounds like you've found the Sinclair family graveyard, and they specifically asked us to stay away from it."
"Why didn't they get buried at church?"
"Sometimes people were buried on their own land, in the old days. Some of those graves must be over a hundred years old."
"I could read some of the numbers."
"Good for you, but please don't go there again. I don't want the Sinclairs to be angry with us."
"Okay, but what was the lamb for? Did it die? Was it a pet?"
Carly's mother dipped a fresh steel wool pad into a separate can that held clean stripper. "Usually," she said, as she scrubbed at some stubborn paint flakes, "when you find a lamb on a gravestone, it means that someone has lost a child."
"You mean like I lost Bosco?"
"No, I mean that the child has died. But people usually say lost, because it doesn't sound so sad."
This was a new idea to Carly. "But lost is sad, too," she argued, after she had thought about it for a minute or two. "I cried and cried when Bosco got lost."
"I know, but it's the saddest thing of all to lose a child. It must have been an heartbreaking loss if the Sinclairs went to the expense of a special gravestone. I understand that they had quite a struggle to make a living on this farm, even with all their sons to help out."
Carly suddenly felt very hungry. Thinking about new things always did that to her. She scrambled up from the floor where she had been sitting. "Can I have a cookie?"
"You may, and drink a glass of milk with it. It's good for you." Her mother looked worried as she glanced at the sleeve where Carly's right hand should have been visible, but she didn't say anything else.
Carly ran to the kitchen, where she checked the cookie jar. Still boring oatmeal. She took three, to use them up faster, and poured herself a tall glass of milk. If Scotty was a real pig when he came home from school, there might be chocolate-chip tomorrow. She had seen them in the groceries last week when her mother came back from shopping.