by Ronald Malfi
At one point in the evening, a woman appeared on the porch dressed in multicolored silk robes and wearing a pleated floral-patterned turban on her head. Jewelry jangled from all her limbs, and when she walked, it was like the clinking of castanets. She was Madam Golganor, seer of futures, rider in the chariot of the cosmos. A robust and red-faced woman, she downed several drinks, told a number of sexually explicit jokes, then ultimately settled down at the Duvaneys’ dining room table with a crystal ball that very clearly had a MADE IN CHINA label stuck to its wooden base. For a shot of bourbon, she’d impart wisdom; for a shot of rye, she’d divulge the secrets of the universe; for a Tom Collins and a slice of cake, she’d tell you what your future held.
Your coworkers all took turns with the increasingly intoxicated Madam Golganor. Riches were in store for some; true love on the foreseeable horizon for others. I’ll admit, she was a riot, and her injection of dirty limericks between each telling only added to the absurdity of it all.
When it was your turn, you refused. Politely, demurely—but a refusal. Instead of forcing you, they turned to me. “Go on, Aaron,” Bill Duvaney said, clapping me on the back. His face was flushed and I could smell the alcohol seeping from his pores.
I sat across from Madam Golganor at the dining-room table. She waggled bejeweled fingers over the glass orb. My future was predictably hazy at first, but then Madam Golganor’s eyes widened, her red, clownish lips formed a circle, everyone erupted in an “Ooooooh,” and then one of Madam Golganor’s stubby little fingers popped up. The room went silent.
“I see… I see,” she said, closing her eyes now. Her hands swam across the globe of glass. “I see… a woman.”
“Ooooooh,” went the crowd.
“A woman… in a red beret,” said Madam Golganor. “She is there but she is hazy. She is trying to speak. She is trying to tell you something. I fear I may require an additional libation in order for your destiny to be fulfilled.”
Someone set a glass of amber liquor in front of her; Madam Golganor’s eyes flipped open and she downed the shot like someone about to be marched out in front of a firing squad.
“Ahh,” she said, her eyelids settling closed again. “There. There. Yes, she is hazy, this woman, but I can hear her. I can hear her warning for you, Aaron Decker—because that is what it is, I fear. A warning.”
“Ooooooh,” went the crowd.
“What is it?” I asked, playing along. I saw you smiling darkly at me from across the room, a glass of red wine in your hand.
“This woman in the red beret says, ‘Don’t. Open. The. Door.’”
“Ooooooh,” went the crowd.
“What door?” I asked.
But something funny had happened to Madam Golganor’s face then. A stiffening of her features. When her eyes opened, they were strangely sober. Fearful, almost. She looked at her crystal ball then up at me and then back at her crystal ball again. Then she sparkled back to life, clapped her hands, and shouted, “There once was a man from Nantucket!”
Finally, you told the others you weren’t feeling well and got us both the hell out of there. Instead of driving back to either of our apartments (this was before we had moved in together, remember), you took me to a firehouse carnival where, in our nice dinner-party attire, we’d bought wristbands and rode on all the rides twice. You won me a stuffed panda by tossing rings onto bottle spouts. Then you drove us out to Manresa, which was an old Jesuit retreat renovated into an assisted living facility on the Severn River. You steered your car down a narrow gouge in the trees until we emptied onto a flat scrim of land overlooking the river. On the other side of the river, the lights of Annapolis burned like sodium flares. I assumed you would park facing the water, but you didn’t. You cranked the steering wheel and spun the car around until the river and those hazy pinpoints of light were at our backs and we were facing down that narrow chasm in the woods through which you’d just driven us.
You shut down the engine and turned off the headlights.
I rolled in your direction. Kissed your face, your neck. “This was a fantastic idea,” I mumbled around a mouthful of your lower lip.
“In the back, mister,” you said, already climbing over the console and squeezing between the two front seats. I wasted no time following your lead, already shimmying out of my pants as I passed from the front of the car to the back, crashing on top of you in a heated little twist. You were in a gown that zippered in the back. I tried to get it undone; “Fuck it,” you’d breathed into my ear, and hiked the hem up past your hips.
Afterwards, we curled together on that tiny back seat like a couple of lazy kittens. I dozed a bit, lulled into peaceful slumber by the sound of your breathing, and awoke only when you extracted yourself from my embrace and climbed back into the driver’s seat. I tugged on my pants and followed suit, spent and weak and satisfied, spilling myself into the passenger seat as though I had been liquefied.
You swiped a hand through the fogged windshield. A black arc appeared on the glass. “You know,” you said. “I own a red beret.”
“Yeah, but you’re not a ghost.”
“Who says ghosts are confined to one particular place in time? What if ghosts are able to transcend? What if once you become a ghost, you have always been a ghost, and you can go anywhere, uninhibited by space and time?”
“Like you coming back from the dead to talk to me at a dinner party where you also happen to be, quite alive,” I said.
“Ghosts are time travelers,” you said.
“Maybe they are.”
“Bloody Mary,” you said, changing the subject. “Do you know it?”
“The drink?”
“The game, dummy. Didn’t you ever play it when you were a kid?”
“That thing where you look in the mirror and say her name three times?”
“Yes, only when I was a kid, we said it five times.”
It wasn’t exactly like Bloody Mary. You had another name for it, I think—Headlight Ghosts? Yes, that was it. You explained the rules, even though there really weren’t any rules. You even said so yourself: “There really aren’t any rules. You go with your gut.”
The game was to sit in silence and stare at the darkness ahead of us through the windshield. Convince yourself there was a ghost out there. Imagine the ghost standing just beyond your line of sight, melded with the shadows and the trees, a dark figure out there in the night. Visualize the specter in your head and force your eyes to see it. Force them. Then, very slowly, you counted out loud from ten down to one. If you were with someone in the car, you counted in synch with them. Like a chant. A prayer. And you let the tension build as you counted. The anticipation of what could be out there in the dark.
“And then on one—” you said, flipping on the vehicle’s headlights.
The tree line flooded with light. The wooded passageway through which we had driven seemed to open like an aperture.
“Did you see one?” you asked me.
“A ghost?”
“You didn’t, did you?”
“No.”
You weren’t disappointed. “Let’s try it again.”
We must have sat there clicking those headlights on and off for close to an hour that night, Allison. Finally, in the end, I screamed and pointed and stomped my feet and said, “Oh my God it’s a ghost look at it oh my God it’s coming for us!”
You laughed and slapped my arm. But you remained staring at the mist that swirled within the glow of the car’s headlights.
“What?” I said. “What did you see?”
“Two figures,” you said, your voice low. “Holding hands. Just for a moment—there and then gone.”
I followed your gaze. For a moment, I even convinced myself that there were figures hovering out there in the darkness, shifting beyond the reach of the headlights, forms created from shadow and fog and imagination. Two distinct figures, just as you’d said. But there was nothing there, of course—just the swirl of mist, the sphere of light, and a world of darkn
ess beyond.
You took my chin in your hand and turned me to face you. And then you kissed me. Then you started the ignition again.
“You don’t really believe in ghosts, do you?” I asked as you drove us back through the woods.
“It has nothing to do with ghosts,” you told me. “It’s a game all about the power of perception. If you can visualize the ghost strong enough in your mind, it’ll be there for a split second when you first turn on the headlights.” But then you turned and stared at me, your eyes wide in mock horror. “But don’t be fooled, Aaron Decker—I’m haunted as fuck.”
“You’re freaking crazy, too, lady,” I said. “And keep your eyes on the road so we don’t smash into a tree.”
“Oh, brother, I’m gone,” you said.
5
Thinking of that night, I drove out to Manresa and out to that plateau of land that overlooked the Severn River, this time in your Subaru. It had been years since we’d come out here, and it was closing on midnight, so it took me some time to locate the rutted dirt passageway that cut through the woods. In fact, I feared it might have become overgrown and vanished altogether over the years. But no—the Sube’s headlights caught it, a narrow black tunnel boring through the trees. I spun the wheel and drove into the woods, tree limbs scraping along the sides of the car. As I drove, a lump formed in my throat, one that gradually swelled to the size of a grape then a strawberry then a plum. There was the pang of heartache in my chest to accompany it, too. By the time I came out the other side, onto the flat grassy ledge that stood high above the river, my face was hot, and the palms of my hands had grown cold.
I did just what you did on that night—I turned in a circle until the car faced the way I’d come, that black tunnel in the trees. Then I turned off the headlights. Darkness fell around me like a black cloak. In the rearview mirror, I could see the shimmery diamonds of light across the river.
Despite the blinking closet light, was this something you would have wanted me to pursue? Or was I about to become a grave-robber digging through the memory of your work? I had come to an impasse that was cluttering up my mind. My heart, too. I closed my eyes. Felt my whole body shaking. I’d asked if you believed in ghosts and you had said, It has nothing to do with ghosts. It’s a game all about the power of perception. Which, I realized now, wasn’t exactly an answer to my question.
I opened my eyes and began to count down from ten. My voice cracked on six. A single tear, hot as magma, seared down my left cheek on three. The word “one” issued from me in a breathy whisper.
If you can visualize the ghost strong enough in your mind, it’ll be there for a split second when you first turn on the headlights…
I turned on the headlights.
What was out there in the darkness was a vaporous cloud of mist that swirled and roiled and appeared to struggle to take on solid form. I watched it undulate within the glare of the headlights. A second tear spilled down my face. My breath was fogging up the windows.
You were not out there. There was no ghost. Even that spectral mist, I realized, was just exhaust spouting from the tailpipe and swirling in the breeze around the car.
A sob ruptured from my throat. My breath had laid a sheen of fog across the windshield, and just as I reached out and cranked on the defogger, I saw a handprint right there on the inside of the windshield, just slightly to the right of the steering column. A handprint. Your handprint, Allison. A print that had been there for months, surely. Because to think otherwise would mean—
The fog began to fade, causing your print to dissolve into the clearing glass. I quickly turned off the defogger; the fan died with a wheeze. Your handprint remained until it slowly receded back into the glass, blending there, fading in the shifting temperature and moisture inside the car.
A handprint on the glass. Much like a hand extended, as if in welcome. As if to beckon, to speak. Not just to send me forth on my own—
(come with me)
—but to join you on your journey.
PART TWO
THE FLOATING WORLD
CHAPTER FIVE
1
Furnace, West Virginia, looked as if the apocalypse had come and gone. It was only about a two-hour drive from our place in Harbor Village, but in actuality, it was on the dark side of the moon. I made the drive in your Subaru, Allison, while ingesting a steady diet of your eighties rock, which were the only CDs you had in the car. Your fascination with this music always astounded me. Christ, you were born in 1989. I’d always found it uninspiring and silly, but something about those sappy tunes kept me alert and on point and—saccharine as it may sound—as if you were right there in the car with me.
I drove across a stone bridge that arced over the roiling, slate-colored waters of the Potomac River. I could see the town of Furnace from this vantage along the opposite bank, visible as a collection of tiny train-village houses and storefronts and at least one church spire. Hills rose up in the background, brown and cold-looking, connected in places by the oxidized blue girders of ancient train trestles. Chimneys exhaled white smoke into the overcast sky, where it seemed to get snared like cotton in the leafless canopy of trees.
The town itself was really just a central cobblestone road, unimaginatively named Main Street, that campaigned between the hills in a serpentine asphalt ribbon down to the river. Storefronts flanked either side of this road—quaint little mom-and-pop saltboxes with large front windows, colorful awnings, and placards of cheery country greetings on the doors. Beyond Main Street, a network of crudely paved roads scrolled up into the hills, where whitewashed houses could be glimpsed between the burgeoning curtain of springtime greenery. According to my internet research, Furnace’s population was around 250 people, which made it even smaller than neighboring Harpers Ferry. It was serviced twice a day by the Capitol Limited, one of only two Amtrak trains that connected Washington, D.C. with Chicago. In the mid-1800s the town was known for its musket factories, the remnants of which were visible from the western Maryland side of the expansive stone bridge, each one looking like a small brick prison.
The official municipal police force was the Furnace Police Department, and it consisted of three sworn full-time officers, two sworn part-time officers and a single civilian employee. According to your notes, you had come out here last summer, after the body of seventeen-year-old Holly Renfrow was discovered by some local fishermen who spotted something pale and human-like snared in the root system of a tree that had fallen into the Potomac River. You had met with the chief of police, Hercel Lovering, but given your minimal notes regarding the encounter, I surmised that Lovering had probably been tight-lipped and hadn’t told you much. Chief Lovering was a tall man with hard-edged features, close-cropped sandy-colored hair, and eyes of such a piercing blue they might as well have been chipped from some priceless gem. He looked like a Marine, or maybe one of those astronauts from the 1960s. He was waiting for me at a booth inside The Foundry, which, at one point in the town’s history, had been an actual foundry, but was now a rustic diner with wagon wheels for chandeliers.
Chief Lovering stood as I approached the table. “Mr. Decker,” he said, and shook my hand. His grip was strong enough to roll my knucklebones. “I’m so sorry to hear about your wife.”
I’d left a voicemail on Lovering’s desk phone the day before—the number had been scrawled on a Post-it note in your handwriting, Allison, and stuck to a photocopied newspaper article of Holly Renfrow’s death—where I found myself rambling after the automated prompt, which, at some point, had unceremoniously yet blessedly cut me off. When he called me back ten minutes later, my face had still been hot with embarrassment.
“I won’t lie,” I said. “It’s been rough.”
“It’s such a goddamn shame,” he said, still squeezing my hand. “This country’s gone to shit.” He released his grip and waved a big bear paw at the table. “Take a load off.”
We sat together at the table. Lovering was in uniform, with patches on the arms that s
howed two rifles crossing each other bisected by a straightaway of train tracks. I could smell his pine-scented aftershave from across the table. I imagined you meeting with this grizzly bear of a man—perhaps right here in this very diner—and could hardly reconcile the image of two distinctly opposite individuals seated across from one another.
“The meatloaf here is fantastic, if you’re in the mood to grab something,” Lovering said.
“I stopped at a Burger King on the drive in. Maybe just a cup of coffee.”
“Even better.” Lovering held up two fingers over his head. I turned around and saw a rail-thin fellow whose body was packaged in a starchy white apron nodding vigorously, eager to please. It occurred to me that in a place like this, the position of police chief was probably right up there next to godliness.
“I appreciate you meeting with me,” I said. “I hope I’m not pulling you away from anything.”
He glanced at his wristwatch—a bulky device, something a scuba diver might wear—and said, “I got a half hour or so. Though I probably could’ve answered whatever questions you’ve got over the phone. Saved you the drive.”
“I don’t mind the drive.”
“So what can I do for you?”
“Well, this is going to sound a little odd, but I’ve only recently learned that my wife came out here last fall, and that she was looking into Holly Renfrow’s death. Do you recall meeting with her?”
“I met with a lot of people last fall, after Holly was murdered. As you can imagine, we were a little busy.”
“Did she say why she’d come out here? My wife?”
“Why she came out here?” He raised an eyebrow. “Said she was a reporter.”
“Allison was a reporter, yeah—for a neighborhood paper out in Maryland. She wrote a column called ‘Allison’s A-List,’ which basically highlighted accomplishments of local teens in our area. She wrote about bake sales and grand openings. Stuff like that.”