by Paula Guran
She smiled, picturing her mother in one of these shirts, remembering one afternoon with a warm nostalgia rare for her childhood. She must have been about five. Her parents had taken her along to an afternoon party. Someone’s huge backyard, views of Lake Erie, bright autumn leaves, a real popcorn machine. Phoebe had a hot dog and a Hires root beer. Mother and Daddy sat on the stone patio together, laughing. Phoebe got to run around. When it got dark, Daddy carried her piggyback to the car.
What beautiful soft wool. She stroked the top shirt, tempted to try it on, then looked at the label. Size six. She wouldn’t even get an arm in. Mother had weighed 108 pounds the morning Phoebe was born, full-term. She had taken after her father’s side of the family: sturdy and solid. Another memory surfaced, not warm and fuzzy, a trip to the department store downtown, sixth grade, Mother frowning at the size 12 tag on a dress as if Phoebe were the Incredible Hulk.
With a sigh, Phoebe lifted the stack of shirts and set them on a chintz-covered chair. They looked distinctly out of place. Did Sarasota have a vintage clothing store? Someone would drool over these. She turned back to close the bottom drawer, and saw a small bag tucked into a corner. Fist-sized, blood-red velvet. She’d never seen it before.
As a child, Phoebe had occasionally, secretly, looked in her mother’s dresser when she knew she was alone in the house, curious about what went under grown-up women’s clothes. Mysterious garments that her Barbie hadn’t come with, full of hooks and clasps and odd bits of rubber, scary and fascinating.
She picked up the sack. It was full of—what? Spare pearls? No, not round. Loose diamonds? Yes, please. She loosened the satin drawstring, opened the sack wide, and tipped its contents into her palm. She stared down at a dozen blunt whitish objects. “Jesus,” she said aloud. They were teeth.
Well, of course Mother had kept her baby teeth long enough to do the pillow thing, but saving them? Phoebe shuddered and tipped her hand over the trash bag. The teeth rattled like tiny hailstones against the black plastic, followed by the velvet bag.
Body parts. Remains. She thought about the canister in the kitchen. What was she going to do with Mother? Maybe a road trip, scattering her along the way? She’d always wanted to travel. Perhaps a spoonful in each of those logo-stamped ashtrays they had at fancy hotels, next to the elevators? A smidgen in the planters of the smoking lounge of the golf club? Vibby and “the girls” had played bridge in that room every Wednesday for the last twenty years. She ought to feel right at home there.
On second thought, the ashtray thing was probably a little too irreverent. Phoebe didn’t want to be any more haunted than she already was. What about their old house, back in Shaker Heights? No. Mother hadn’t been happy there. Had she been happy here? Phoebe wasn’t sure.
She threw a tangled nest of pantyhose into the trash and began dragging pairs of dainty shoes out of the closet, putting them into the second bag. Size six here as well. Black heels, low; black heels, high; white heels, satin; pink and white running shoes; a pair of buff-colored bowling shoes. Bowling shoes? When had Mother ever bowled?
When the bag was full, she tied its handles shut and put it by the hall door. Getting rid of shoes was satisfying and easy. Figuring out the appropriate way to dispose of Mother’s ashes, not so much. She needed to say goodbye. Forgive her? Tell her off? The memorial service had been lovely, but formal. Very high Episcopal, which had suited the white-haired mourners much more than Phoebe.
Her therapist had encouraged her to spend as much time as she needed, to find closure and a way to move on. Phoebe wanted to call her, get some sensible advice, except Patricia was at a conference all week. Another woman was covering the practice, but it wasn’t like she’d lost a filling and any old dentist would do. Patricia had been seeing her for years, knew all her pillow-thumping, Kleenex-soddening stories and secrets.
Phoebe took a break mid-afternoon and dropped off three bags of clothes at the Goodwill store she’d passed on her errands that morning. To reward herself, she went into the bakery next door. Glass cases held cupcakes, pumpkin cookies, and elegant fruit tarts. She bought one of those, and a muffin for tomorrow morning. On her way back to the car, she glanced down at the box of pastries and the grinning black jack-o’-lantern rubber-stamped on the pink cardboard.
The last two weeks had been so busy, full of phone calls and flight arrangements, insurance forms, funeral homes, and selecting hymns. She’d completely forgotten about Halloween. She pulled out of the parking space.
Maybe that was the answer.
One of the academic books she’d recently copyedited was a treatise on Celtic rituals and modern society, and there’d been a long section about Samhain and All Soul’s Day and Halloween. A liminal time, when the boundaries between this world and the next were more—permeable. In the north of England, around the ninth century, as she recalled, people in mourning had baked “soul cakes” for the occasion. Children went begging from door to door, promising to say a prayer for every cake they received.
“Trick or treat,” she said aloud.
Not that she was going to hand out anything homemade at the townhouse door. The neighborhood watch would be on her in a flash. But baking sounded both soothing and appropriately domestic. Tomorrow she would make a soul cake and have a ritual feast, then scatter the ashes into the eternity of the sea.
Yes. She smiled as she pulled into the townhouse carport. It was just the sort of custom Mother would have liked. A dyed-in-the wool Anglophile, she doted on Lord Peter Wimsey and Twining’s Tea, Tiptree marmalade with her breakfast toast.
As for the cake itself, Phoebe imagined it should be like the ones that travelers carried with them in fairy tales, wrapped in a bindle with a bit of cheese, sent off with the prodigal in search of fortune. When she had first encountered those tales in kindergarten, she had imagined a sort of medicinal Hostess cupcake—without the white squiggles. Brown and dry and herbal-tasting. Indestructible, but nourishing.
Inside, she ate half the fruit tart and opened her laptop, searching for a soul cake recipe. There were dozens. Irish, gluten-free, even one from the Hallmark Channel. Some were gingerbready, others more like scones or biscuits. They all seemed to call for nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger. Autumnal flavors, the cakes traditionally set out with a glass of wine. That appealed, too.
Mother didn’t have a printer, so Phoebe got her notebook and copied out the recipe that seemed the simplest. She finished the fruit tart and nodded to herself. Things were coming together, and it was a real tradition, not one she was making up on the fly. When dealing with the dead, a do-it-yourself ritual seemed a bit risky.
Energized by the clarity of a decision, she got back in the car and drove to the Publix, so she’d have everything on hand in the morning. Butter and vanilla. Eggs and spices. Plus another bottle of wine and a small frozen pizza for dinner tonight.
Now that she had a plan, she felt more relaxed. She opened the wine—a red blend this time—and sat and watched the sunset on the patio while the pizza heated in the oven. After dinner, she put the plate in the sink, topped off her glass, and settled into the beige recliner in the living room. She’d brought a collection of Angela Carter stories to read on the plane and it had been a week since she’d had time to get back to them. After about twenty pages, she was yawning, the effort of all the completed tasks catching up with her, and she gave in about 9:30. Retrieving the red folder, she tucked it under one arm and headed upstairs to bed, turning off the light only after she’d zipped the brontosaurus into a compartment of her suitcase.
Phoebe woke in the middle of the night. It took her a minute to orient herself to the unfamiliar pattern of light and shadow. She turned over, kneaded the pillow, and was almost asleep again when she thought she heard the soft metallic snick of a Zippo lighter opening, somewhere downstairs. A minute later she smelled cigarette smoke.
She sat bolt upright, her heart pounding in her ears with sudden adrenaline, eyes wide open, staring at nothing. Those same acrid menthol fumes
had wafted up to her childhood bedroom so many nights when Mother couldn’t sleep.
No. Mother’s dead, she thought. She almost said that out loud but knew that the word “dead” in the silent darkness would terrify her. She bit a knuckle to stop herself.
Then came a sound that raised every hair on her body.
Whirrr . . . , snap. Whirrr . . . , snap. Whirrr . . . , snap.
A deck of cards being shuffled, and then the unmistakable slap, slap, slap of a game of solitaire being laid out on a glass-topped table.
That was impossible.
Yet the sound continued, soft and regular.
Phoebe pulled her knees to her chest, curling up around herself, and tried to slow her breathing. It was only her imagination. She was alone in a strange house after a long, emotional day. Of course she was thinking about Mother. All she needed to do to reassure herself was get up, go downstairs, and turn on the kitchen light.
She couldn’t move.
A minute went by. Two. She started to relax, and then:
Whirrr . . . , snap. Whirrr . . . , snap. Whirrr . . . , snap.
A bead of sweat trickled down between her breasts.
Slap, slap, slap.
Phoebe lay motionless, every muscle tensed, willing the sound to stop and trying to hold off the panic that if it did, the next sound she’d hear would be slippered footsteps coming to reclaim her.
Eventually, sheer exhaustion pulled her into a restless sleep. When she finally got out of bed, every muscle aching from being clamped in fight-or-flight tension, morning light streamed through the window. She dressed and padded silently down the thick carpeted stairs, clutching the only weapon at hand, a slender pale-blue Lladró figurine. That was ridiculous, but she felt less vulnerable than if she’d been unarmed.
The kitchen was spotless and empty. Nothing on the table but the FAMILY box and the small pile of objects. No ashtray. No lighter. No cards. A tomato-smeared plate in the sink, the trash empty except for the food cartons.
Phoebe put down the figurine and felt a wave of self-conscious embarrassment. She’d had a whopper of a nightmare. Not surprising, under the circumstances. With the combination of wine, greasy food, and a lifetime of, well—issues—of course she hadn’t slept well. Made perfect sense, now that it was daytime.
Cards had been one of their few shared customs, a bloodsport that Phoebe had been taught as soon as her hands were big enough to hold a deck. How wonderful it had once felt to get Mother’s undivided attention—until their games had evolved into an arena for inquisition. She’d learned to dread the moment that Mother would stop dealing and say, as if it were a casual thought, “Can’t you do something with your hair?” “Have you decided on a major?” “What are you planning to do with your life, Phoebe?”
She boiled water, made a rich, milky tea, and wrapped her hands around the steaming mug. The patio door slid quietly on its track. Phoebe walked out to the end of the narrow dock and stood for several minutes, the air cool on her skin, watching the waves break, over and over. Constant and ever-changing.
Sipping her tea, Phoebe planned her day. She’d finish the bedroom, take herself out to lunch and another run to Goodwill, then come back here and bake. Everything would be ready by sunset, and she’d go down to the water and do what she could to banish her ghosts.
Phoebe had never been big on rituals. She had gone to Sunday School by command, and when she was old enough to choose for herself, chose to worship the heretical god of sleeping in. So there was no religion to fall back on, no Episcopal exorcism. The soul cake was a start, though, a focus. She needed some structure, couldn’t just walk to the end of the dock and fling Mother out willy-nilly, watching the seagulls dive down to nibble at the larger bits before they sank below the surface.
The sun rose fully above the line of palm trees, their fronds rustling in a gentle breeze, and the air began to warm. Phoebe put the mug down and walked along the sand, her hands in her pockets, inviting grief and finding it elusive.
When Mother first got sick, Phoebe had supposed that grief, when it finally came, would be a huge hole ripped out of her life. Instead it was as if some delicate, many-tentacled creature had been attached to a fine mesh, then flown away, leaving a thousand tiny holes. Particles of memory drifted in with no pattern or predictability.
Emotions swirled, chaotic and contradictory. She felt sympathy for the hollow-eyed invalid, felt relief that Vibby Morris’s suffering had ended, but did not miss the cool and critical woman who had raised her. And part of her would always long for a loving mother who might have come to her in the dark when she was small and scared and alone. Who might have rocked her, sung her lullabies, and now never would.
It was almost noon when she finally returned to the townhouse. Instead of going out again, she ate the bakery muffin and heated a can of tomato soup, drinking a mug of it standing up. She spent the afternoon browsing again, gathering her offerings from each room in the house: a little figurine; a deck of cards; a selection of photographs.
One in the nursery, baby Phoebe in her mother’s arms, swaddled and bottle-fed. One from high school, Phoebe wooden, Mother with a little half-smile, her arm around her daughter, her eyes on someone off camera. And one of Mother after the first operation, flanked by Phoebe and two of the “girls” from her bridge group. She had lost most of her hair, so her head was done up in a turban, but she had put on lipstick, and her pearls, of course. Those eyes looked frightened, wary, like an animal caught in an unexpected trap.
Phoebe went up to the guest room and retrieved the bundle of letters from her suitcase. Missives written when she was at summer camp, at college, in Chicago for her first job. All on that same cream-and-blue stationery, the handwriting so familiar, so distinctively her.
Returning to the table, she added them to the photos and put everything into a wicker basket. She tore the recipe out of her notebook and read it through once, then turned the page over and did the math to cut it down from a batch to one single, slightly oversized soul cake. She scribbled numbers, crossed them out, recalculating and fudging a bit to eliminate inconvenient measures like 3/32nds of a tablespoon.
Then she laid out each of the ingredients she’d purchased: vanilla, eggs, milk. Cinnamon, ginger, butter. Baking soda. The recipe called for currants, but the Publix had only stocked raisins. Those seemed too frivolous, so she didn’t buy any. A soul cake ought to be a pastry without indulgence. A final course, but not a dessert.
She opened the first canister, scooped out a cup and replaced the plastic lid, sifting the flour and baking soda into the mixing bowl. She looked down at her altered recipe. One third cup of sugar. She rummaged in a drawer for a smaller measuring cup, and found a yellow plastic one behind a package of cupcake liners and some corn skewers, one of which jabbed her in the hand as she pulled the cup out.
Ow. Shit. A thin line of blood smeared her thumb. She put it in her mouth, then stopped in mid-suck at a sound from the downstairs bedroom.
Whirrr . . . , snap. Whirrr . . . , snap.
Phoebe dropped the measuring cup as if she’d been stung. She picked up the Lladró, holding it like a club, and walked into the hall. Three steps from the kitchen she heard the soft slap, slap, slap of a hand of cards being dealt behind the closed bedroom door.
“No!” she shouted in a burst of bravado. She hurled the figurine as hard as she could. It smashed into the wall beside the door with a crack and shattered, pale blue shards littering the carpet.
The sound stopped.
Phoebe waited, her breath ragged in her chest. Silence. After five minutes, she returned to the kitchen, her thumb throbbing, her attention still on the empty hallway, listening, dreading. Picking up the yellow measuring cup, she glanced distractedly at the recipe—right, a third of a cup of sugar—and opened the nearest canister. She filled the little cup, dumped its contents into the flour mixture, then tossed it back inside and closed the lid, pushing the gold-tone can back against the back-splash with the others.
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br /> She added the spices—a teaspoon of this, half a tablespoon of that—and began to stir. The smooth white flour became darker and rougher, and when it was all a homogenous pale brown, she cut in the butter and an egg, added the vanilla, and used a fork for a vigorous final mixing.
Sprinkling a little flour on the cutting board, she settled the beige lump and rolled it out until it looked like biscuit dough. The biscuits of the dead.
The hallway remained silent.
She turned the oven to 350° and cut out an irregular circle about four inches across. Noting the time on the wall clock, she slid the greased cookie sheet into the oven.
When she checked ten minutes later, the cake was still pale and felt pliant under the pressure of her finger. Ten minutes more and its edges were beginning to tan, and after another ten it was an even, golden brown. She thumped it with a knuckle, feeling a bit like a contestant in The Great British Bake Off, then grabbed a potholder and pulled the soul cake out of the oven. It smelled delicious. She was tempted to taste it, just a crumb or two. No. No such thing as a ritual nibble. She left it on the counter to cool.
As the light outside began to fade, Phoebe dressed in her favorite black sweater and jeans. She put the soul cake in the center of one of Mother’s scarves, tying the corners together at the top. She added that to the basket, along with the funereal gold can, four votive candles, and a box of kitchen matches. She poured red wine into a glass, filling it nearly to the brim, then clicked off the kitchen light. She slid the patio door open with her foot, stepping out into the crisp, salt-scented air of twilight.
The sun was a Fiesta-red ball just above the horizon, flattening slightly as it descended, its surface veiled by a few wispy clouds. Phoebe watched it sink into the pewter sea, then took a deep breath, shifted her basket, and headed toward the dock.
She sat, six feet above the water. Small waves broke in front of her, scattering the surface with undulating lines of orange from the neon-sunset clouds. The basket beside her, she watched the surrounding colors fade. Water lapped softly at the pilings and she heard steady creakings from a few boats moored farther down the shore. Lights came on in houses on either side, reflecting like tiny amoebas in the dark water.