Read The Window for Free Online Page A

maybe the Ouija board is nonsense.
    A while later we're lying a few feet apart in twin beds. I'm wondering if Hannah is asleep when she says, "Mandy, wouldn't it be great if you really could ask about the future and get answers?"
    "Maybe," I say.
    "My dad says his dad saw a ghost once, who warned him not to go fishing and he did anyway and almost drowned."
    When I don't say anything, she asks, "You ever know anybody who saw a ghost?"
    "No," I say. And then, I don't know why, maybe because I've never before in my life stayed overnight with a friend, talked in the dark like this, I say, "but there's this girl, Gwen..."
    I tell about the lace curtains, about the voices, about Gwen and Abe and Paul, and Hannah doesn't think I'm crazy. She says what happens—how I lean out the window and become Gwen, become her and watch her at the same time—is one of the most exciting things she has ever heard.
    "Sometimes when I'm doing something I get the feeling I'm watching me do it," she says. "Is that how Gwen is?"
    "Sort of," I say, looking for a better way to tell her. "More like when you read a book, and you're seeing what the main character is doing, but you're inside and thinking her thoughts at the same time."
    "Do you think Paul's going to come back? Or Gwen's dad?"
    "I don't know."
    Then Hannah says, "You must miss being able to read, if you used to do it a lot."
    "There are substitutes," I say. "Books on tape. Braille, if I ever learn it. But, of course, it's not the same thing."
    And a long time later, Hannah says, "I wish something like Gwen would happen to me, but I guess it won't. I'm too ordinary."
    And the way she says it, I realize she means I must be somebody special. That she wishes, at least for this, that she could be me.
    And, lying in shared darkness, I take that thought and turn it over, and don't try to throw it away.
    Sometime later, I don't know how late, we fall asleep. I wake up once, listen to Hannah's slow, quiet-whistle breathing. What a nice, nice night.

    In the morning Hannah and I sit around the family room in bathrobes, drinking hot chocolate while her father reads the funnies. Every few minutes he laughs and says, "Girls, listen to this."
    Hannah's brother must be sitting next to him. "Dad," he says a couple of times, "you're leaving things out."
    I think we're all sorry when Hannah's mom comes to tell us we can't wait any longer to dress. "Mandy," she adds, "we'll drive you home before we go to church, so no one has to come for you."
    "Thank you," I say, "if it's not any trouble."
    "Certainly, it's trouble, but I wouldn't have offered if I weren't willing to take the trouble." The way she says it makes me flush and wonder how I was rude.
    When they let me off, Hannah asks me, "Can I come over later?" but her mother says, "Not today. I need you at home today, Hannah."
    It's not until a couple of hours have gone by that I realize I wasn't rude asking how much trouble it would be to take me home. It was Hannah's mother who was rude, with her answer.

    I try to do homework in the afternoon, but I can't concentrate. I end up standing at my dressing table. I find the photo of my mother, move my hand to the smaller frame next to it, the one of my grandfather in his airman's jacket. I run my finger down until I'm touching right where his face, blurred and almost lost in shadow, would be. "That's you that didn't come home to dinner?"
    Except as soon as I say it, I know I'm wrong. The photo is of my grandfather. The man whose dining room chair stayed empty, Gwen and Abe's dad, and Gabriel's, he would be my great-grandfather.
    It's hard to keep straight.
    And where was Margaret, my grandmother? Why hadn't she been at the dinner table with the others? Had she already left home? Gone off to have the baby she would put up for adoption? The baby who would be my mom.
    "Mandy," Aunt Emma calls, "would you like some hot chocolate with us?"
    "Yes, please," I call.
    I think again of asking the uncles about Gwen. If