Excerpt: Ghost Wind

The year it all changed, my Mallory was becoming my Malcolm. I had cried for most of January, when he told me that he couldn’t keep living as a girl, but by October we had both come to terms with the needs of a transgender child. For Halloween he was hosting a party, and he and his boyfriend were resplendent in matching horror host costumes. Mal was dressed as The Crypt Keeper, in a mask he had designed himself, and Thompson was Dr Paul Bearer, the original horror host. They had descended on my house hours early and transformed it into an amazingly spooky palace. There were odd pictures all over the house that linked to some puzzle game where the guests matched a list of clues (“I am the master of modern horror”) with pictures (Steven King, holding a clown mask.) There were spooky foods and a punch that smoked, and through the middle of the night I got them to play Jeff Wain’s “War of The Worlds.” Ooooo-laaa!
Come midnight, we were in the misty field behind the house, playing zombie tag. Well, the teens were playing tag, most of the older set, we parents in sensible shoes, were watching from the edge of the field, drinking coffee and brandy. A wind had been blowing, strong and steady, for hours. I remember that, remember how strange it was for a wind to blow like that in the fall, in Florida. Our winds are rarely steady, they are more the playful breezy things, and the fall isn’t really a time for winds, not for us. But there it was.
And then it wasn’t. In that stillness, when the wind dropped abruptly like a ball from the hand of a distracted child, the field of dashing zombies, Hogswart students, hippies, murder victims, super heroes and fairy princesses froze in place, looking around in confusion. There was a feeling like you get in that first moment of an orchestra taking off, as if everything in you is lifting, and I saw more than one child, more than one adult, smooth goose pimples down suddenly chilled flesh. I wondered if there was a tropical storm forming that I hadn’t heard about. Rare in October but not impossible. I started to move forward, to call them all in, but they were coming in on their own even as we adults moved closer together, instinctively huddling as if from the cold.
“How many are there?” my friend Amelia asked, and I counted 12, then 9, then 14, before I gave up.
“I can’t tell.”
We watched in silence then as the kids filtered past us and the still field filled with mist.
“I’m going in,” Amelia said abruptly, “this is too creepy.” I looked around and it was just her and me out there under the oaks at the edge of the light from the porch. I shivered and nodded, but didn’t follow her. I couldn’t say it, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that one of the kids was still out there, lost in the mist at the back of the field.
I watched the field, as fog poured in from the same direction the wind had come, in thick white billows, and I desperately wanted to run inside, but someone needed to save whoever it was that was lost in that fog. I took a tentative step in that direction then backed up again.
“Penny, get in here now!” Judith’s voice shook me and broke me out of that cycle of forward and back, to and fro. I hurried in and we pulled the French doors closed behind us, shut out the fog. I counted the children over and over, then the adults just to be sure, but we were all there. We were all there.
But something was lost in the fog. Even over the music, even over the too feverish laughter, even through the closed doors and the drawn curtains, I could hear it cry.