Homecoming by Amber Benson

pressed against the wooden wainscoting.
    She opened the book to the first page, and written along the corner of the cover, in her mama’s curling cursive writing, was a name:
    May Louella Eames
    Her mother.
    Underneath it, in the same swirling cursive, there was another name, and a date:
    Eleanora Davenport Eames—b. January 9th, 1944
    Davenport was her father’s last name. Her mother had been unmarried when Eleanora was conceived but had still seen fit to give the baby its father’s name—despite the fact that the mighty Davenport family would not lay claim to the child.
    The bastards,
Eleanora thought.
    There were more names in the Bible, but she didn’t concern herself with those for the moment. Instead, she ran her fingers across her mama’s flowery cursive, as close as she could get to actually touching the woman who was now only a memory, a ghost from Eleanora’s childhood.
    She sat there in the fading afternoon light for a long while, fingers gently caressing their names:
May
and
Eleanora
—twined together forever in the pages of an old Bible.

Lyse

    M ind still reeling from her strange encounter with the mute girl outside the coffee shop, Lyse returned to the house with two bottles of red wine from the bodega wrapped up in a brown paper bag. She didn’t know what possessed her to buy them, but the urge had been overwhelming. Now she set them down on the kitchen table and shrugged out of her great-aunt’s shawl, hanging it up on a peg by the back door.
    â€œEleanora?” she called, flipping on more lights as she left the kitchen and walked through the bungalow. “Are you here? I’m back!”
    She turned on the lights in the living room, and though the space was devoid of human life, she took a moment to stand in the doorway, admiring it. With its vaulted ceiling, many windows, and three oblong skylights cut into the drywall overhead, the room possessed an airy, open quality that made it the centerpiece of the bungalow. As a teenager, she’d spent many an afternoon sprawled out on the hardwood floor, her homework spread all around her as she daydreamed about making out with
this
movie star or
that
famous musician.
    She smiled, thinking how her adolescent fantasy life had been so much more exciting than her real life. Setting thoughts of sexy rock stars aside, she let her mind drift back to Eleanora. She didn’t know how it was possible to live under the same roof as another human being and not know everything there was to know about them—yet Eleanora seemed to have all sorts of secrets: odd facets to her personality, friendships Lyse knew nothing about . . . And then there was the whole thing with the airport this morning: How
had
Eleanora known when she’d be arriving at LAX?
    Lyse figured there had to be a logical explanation for Eleanora’s appearance that morning, but no matter how hard she tried to piece it together, the answer eluded her.
    Lyse turned off the overhead light, plunging the living room into darkness again, and continued her search.
    As she moved down the unlit hall that led to the bedrooms, she felt the night burrowing in around the house, trying to swallow her up. She’d never thought of Eleanora’s bungalow as spooky before, but being here alone in the back of the house was kind of unsettling. Even as her eyes adjusted to the lack of light, she still had trouble seeing what was ahead of her. Shadows loomed in the distance, their humanoid shapes startling her—and she actually stopped dead in her tracks at one point, sure she’d seen something nasty skitter across the hall in front of her. After a minute spent frozen in place, staring blindly ahead into the darkness, she decided whatever she’d thought she’d seen was gone, or had never existed at all.
    She navigated her way down the rest of the hallway without incident, until she found herself standing in front of Eleanora’s