She Is Haunted

by Paige Clark

  The devil says, ‘Go, cat, go!’

  But I return as a bird, just in case. My daughter is allergic to dairy and to cats.

  From my perch outside the chapel, I watch my son decorate the funeral parlour with carnations. But, like I said, I can forgive anything.

  As the guests arrive—there are no red envelopes—my son paces in the entryway tailed by his wife and the undertaker. His wife is a modern Asian woman, all bones and higher degrees. The undertaker has walked these paces before, the carpet threadbare beneath his polished shoes.

  They know what I do. She won’t come. But he looks for her anyway—his little sister, his mui mui.

  I am waiting too, so close, yet so far away from paradise.

  When I was in high school I fell in love with a boy who thought he was Elvis. His father was the warden at the state prison. His mother did her shopping at our supermarket and was polite and slightly nervous around the other customers. Her husband employed half the town.

  This boy spent most of class in the bathroom, running a comb through his slick black hair and crooning to himself in the mirror. I sat in class and fantasised about him, his lips parted, his eyes locked with the mirror. The teachers reported his behaviour, afraid he had a serious bladder infection. Though the doctor’s results were inconclusive, I knew his problem well. It was mine too.

  We were stuck here.

  I permed my hair for the homecoming dance and dressed like a cupcake. The boy was made out of icing in his powder-blue suit. I wanted to lick his delicate eyelashes that, rumour had it, were so long he had to trim them.

  ‘Wanna dance?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t dance with people,’ he said, ‘like you.’

  But I saw him look me up and down and the satisfied rise of his eyebrows.

  Over the loudspeaker, there was Elvis, small and grainy. Everyone on the schoolhouse block danced to the Jailhouse Rock.

  I wasted too much of my time worrying about Mui Mui. She sang to herself constantly—in the shower, over breakfast, while she was falling asleep. Her thin child’s voice kept me up at night. I would lie paralysed in bed, the cool of the TV washing across my body.

  As a teenager, she spent too much time on the internet. Her head craned towards the screen like a flower reaching for the sun.

  ‘Mui Mui! Goose neck!’ I said.

  ‘I’m typing,’ she said.

  She did not know how to take care of herself—her body ripe, a body like mine. She grew soft where she’d once been firm, weight stuck to her middle and to her thighs. Hair sprouted from her upper lip and between her eyebrows.

  ‘Eat six small meals a day,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not like you,’ she said. ‘I’m not a bird.’

  I tried to help her. If she’s not happy now, that’s not my fault.

  To hell with her! I think.

  She doesn’t show, but am I surprised? When disappointed, don’t I take it on the chin?

  I do appreciate the service. It is Christian, non-denominational and matter-of-fact, the work of my daughter-in-law. She wears sterling silver crosses in both ears and around her neck. If her God is real, then I’m in—

  Heck, I’m no sinner. But I’m no saint either, not according to the devil.

  ‘You think you’re an angel,’ he said once, ‘but I’m wise to you.’

  ‘Please,’ I said, ‘you’re the devil in disguise.’

  ‘Heaven only knows what lies you’ve told me,’ he said.

  What does he know? He’s been here since 1977, ethereal and bloated. After all, I was there. Did I not clean up every puddle of sick and wipe every wet nose? What makes up a life, if not the facts?

  After high school, I moved to Northridge and lived in an apartment of windows. Instead of curtains, I glued coloured tissue paper to the glass. I worked as a waitress during the summers when I wasn’t in class. I slept in and the morning light feathered across my naked body.

  I drove by that apartment after the earthquake in ’94 and, although the building was standing, every single pane of glass had shattered.

  Mui Mui fell in love in high school too. I didn’t disapprove of him on purpose. But he thought he was a rapper! Even though he drove a Jeep Grand Cherokee and lived in a house in Pacific Palisades. Even though he was the son of the local mayor. Even though he kept his hair neat and was the pitcher on the baseball team.

  ‘Find someone nice,’ I said, ‘someone Catholic.’

  ‘He is Catholic,’ she said.

  ‘You’re too young to have sex. You don’t understand your body.’

  ‘He doesn’t want to have sex with me anyway.’

  ‘He’s not a rapper,’ I said.

  She went to every baseball game, and afterwards she and her friends hung around the drive-in waiting for the team to show up. She would come home late, wet-eyed. She always smelt like hamburgers.

  One night, when she thought I was asleep, she snuck out her bedroom window. I waited, stiff, until I heard the sound of the door.

  Her lips were puffy from French kissing and she was wearing heavy eyeliner, smudged. She looked like she’d been in the trash.

  Such a disobedient girl! I slapped her hard across the face.

  ‘Why do you do this to me?’ I asked.

  ‘Go to fucking hell,’ she said.

  Well, here I am. And why should I regret a thing? Because I was looking out for her. And in the end, the boy was a bore.

  The preacher is droning and the audience is sedate. They look sufficiently bereaved. My son twitches in his seat. His wife, rigid and alert, places a narrow hand on his arm. Nothing compares to the comfort of a mother’s touch. The carnations droop in the heat. My cousin Doug bends the funeral program into quarters and I examine my face. I look old, contorted.

  I have to remember to tell the devil about Doug. His wife Mabel took him out to a field with a shotgun and left him for dead. Notice I said wife! That’s the kind of confidence Doug has. She’s here with him today and she looks more sorry than she did that day. I know what that damn devil would say, something or other about fools rushing in.

  At the end of the service, the choir sings ‘I’ll Fly Away’ and my son takes the solo, his voice devilishly good.

  Leaving, I smell them before I see them—birds of paradise! Sent to the funeral home by my daughter.

  After my children were born, nothing happened in the stucco house. It was like I never left Corcoran or that room with the papered windows. Every day was the same—made up of the monotony of buttering burnt toast and quartering grapefruits.

  I swear I loved them both. I never held a grudge.

  And if I did, could you blame me? I was born in a house with no flowers.

  Before I died, I saw my son once a month. His wife would cook a dinner of baked salmon and red rice. We dined early and she made sure I knew she had to get up early in the morning for work. She was always polite and formal, even though my son told me she was funny.

  ‘It’s called dry humour, Mom,’ he said.

  ‘She’s dry alright,’ I said.

  I saw Mui Mui less frequently. Sometimes there was an email with a brief update or a photograph. She travelled to Australia once without telling me. She just got on a plane and went.

  ‘They sing that song at every funeral,’ the devil says. I am back after the long flight. I tell him about the wake. He is formless again and floating above his blue, flickering feet.

  ‘How was the flight?’ he asks.

  ‘Smooth,’ I say, ‘but my arms got so tired, I think they fell off.’

  ‘You must be thirsty,’ he says.

  ‘Parched.’

  Mui Mui visited me at the hospice one time, when she thought I was already gone. She drank refrigerated water from a styrofoam cup and calmed her nerves with quick, neat bites around the rim. She thought I did not see her, but I am her mother.

  ‘Go, Mom,’ she said. ‘Go.’

  But how can I without saying goodbye? Because I tried my best and it wasn�
��t good enough. But what could I have done differently? What would I do differently?

  Or the real question: what wouldn’t I do for a cool drink of water?

  SNOW ANGELS

  They made the exchange at a house party and agreed to meet the next day to swap back. Bethie had admired Stirling’s coat since the start of semester but it had taken two bottles of wine between them before she had the nerve to ask to borrow it. Stirling said yes, of course. She was as obliging as Bethie knew a person to be. Both girls were originally from warmer climates where folks said yes out of habit alone.

  Bethie herself was a bad Southerner. She kept the favours she did for others filed away for later. Like with Stirling. She had borrowed Bethie’s book and got spots of coffee on the cover. In return, Bethie asked for the pea coat.

  It looked fantastic on her. Everyone at the party said so. It was made of fine yellow wool and ended at the exact narrowest part of Bethie’s waist. A girl at the party with one hand of long, manicured nails and one hand of nails clipped short asked Bethie to do a twirl, and she did.

  ‘It suits you,’ Stirling said afterwards.

  ‘It suits you more,’ Bethie said.

  ‘You’re beautiful.’

  ‘Don’t worry. We’re just having a one-night stand.’ Bethie hugged the coat close.

  ‘You’ll take care of it?’

  ‘I’ll take care of it.’ And she kissed Stirling on the cheek and they went their separate ways.

  The next morning, waking up in the big brownstone she rented, Bethie did not feel as beautiful as she had the night before. She’d fallen asleep with the coat on and cast it off in her dreams. Then the dog—not her dog, her roommate’s—had made the coat into a bed. Bethie was mortified, until she remembered the rubbed bits of the cover of her book where Stirling had tried to dab off the coffee. Also, Stirling liked dogs.

  Now the dog hopped into her bed and looked at her in the way dogs do. It made her feel beautiful again. Not as beautiful as she had the night before, but still pretty. Bethie groaned, stretched out her arms and said to the pooch, ‘You smell, oh you smell, you smell.’

  She kissed the dog on the head and, immediately, recalled both bottles of drunk wine. And she was almost sick right there in bed. The sickness bloomed in her wet mouth—too wet for a mouth. ‘Oh, puppy! I’ll be sick!’

  She ran to the bathroom, tripping over the coat. She spotted a small brown stain on it where the dog had slept. Shit! she thought and she made it to the toilet in time to expel an unsatisfying dribble of bile. Oh shit, she thought, oh shit, shit, shit.

  Bethie and Stirling arranged via text message to meet at a pizza parlour halfway between their brownstones. Trudging there now through ice, on the road that ran parallel to the river, Bethie thought about how positively wrong she’d been about snow.

  During the first snowfall of the year, Bethie had managed to spend the entire evening outside in nothing but a sweater. She and Stirling made snow angels in the street until long after the streetlamps turned on. It was only when Stirling encouraged her inside and wrapped her in a blanket that Bethie noticed in the mirror that her lips were blue and her top drenched through. Stirling wrung out her sweater like it was wet laundry.

  In the distance Bethie could see Stirling and she waved. Just ahead of Stirling was a man, who appeared to be in quite a hurry. He trudged towards Bethie as if he were planning on bowling her over. Bethie decided she was not afraid and kept walking, towards Stirling and towards the restaurant where a slice of pepperoni pizza awaited her like a gooey hug. Still the man was getting closer. Really quite close. She could make out his moustache now, light in colour. Oh, he’s playing a game of chicken, Bethie thought. And she loved to win games. She kept on and there was Stirling, who seemed concerned. Maybe about the coat, about whether it actually did suit her better than it did Bethie. Or about that unmistakable stain, rising off the skin of the wool like a birthmark.

  At the exact moment that her path was due to cross with the man’s, Bethie stepped out of his way. He swung and punched her in the arm, hard.

  ‘Oh!’ she said.

  Bethie saw Stirling sprinting towards her, her own coat dragging behind her friend as she ran. Stirling looked ridiculous, like two children stacked on top of each other. The man did not stop, and by the time Stirling reached Bethie, he was at the bridge. Together they watched as he crossed over the river, which did not ever freeze.

  ‘It’s going to leave a bruise,’ Bethie said. ‘I just know it!’

  Stirling had been particularly hungry, but by the time she got her friend inside the pizza shop, which was warm and smelt of cheese grease and sports-themed, she’d lost her appetite. She and Bethie ordered a couple of slices and slid into one of the plastic booths. They sat on the same side and Stirling held Bethie’s hands, which were still in their mittens, and tried to console her friend. She helped her take off the coat and whispered things to her. To herself she thought, I’ll eat the pizza and I’ll be fine. I won’t be silly and I’ll wear the coat home. But she really wasn’t hungry. She pictured the melted mozzarella sticking to the sides of her stomach, burning ulcers into its lining. She glanced at the sports paraphernalia on the walls, at the cheerful men with hockey sticks beaming from inside their glass cases.

  ‘It’s the coat,’ Bethie said. ‘It provoked him.’

  ‘Unlikely,’ Stirling said.

  ‘Like a matador.’

  ‘Like a bull?’

  ‘Or maybe a ghost.’

  ‘It didn’t have anything to do with the coat.’

  ‘You haven’t read much Gogol, have you?’ Bethie asked.

  Stirling focused on the mechanics of chewing. She hated when this happened, when the pleasure of eating was lost and she could feel her teeth masticating. She hated to even think of the word ‘masticate’ while eating.

  Bethie was hungry enough and gobbled down two slices of pizza. A bit of sauce wobbled on her chin while she talked animatedly about the man, the fear draining from her body with every version of the story.

  Well, hadn’t Stirling always thought her friend was silly? Like how during the first snowfall of the year, Bethie insisted on making snow angels long after her sweater was soaked through. ‘Snow is wet!’ Bethie said.

  ‘You goose,’ she replied and wrapped her friend up.

  Now Stirling wanted to leave the pizza shop and get home quick. She made an excuse before her friend ordered another slice.

  ‘Your coat,’ Bethie said.

  ‘Keep it,’ Stirling said. ‘It looks … it doesn’t look as good on me!’

  ‘But it’s yours.’

  They made the exchange there in the shop, and as Stirling put on the coat, she thought about her friend wearing it the night before, twirling as if she were the ballerina in the music box.

  They parted ways not far from the spot where the punch took place. Stirling passed a drugstore and searched for her reflection in its window, framed with ice that had melted and re-melted. There she was in the yellow coat. She longed to scrub herself clean, even though it was just an illusion of the dirty ice.

  Stirling passed over the bridge. She paused and wondered if she should throw the coat in the river. No. She worried about pollution, about some poor, half-frozen perch swimming in that silly coat. She turned back towards where she’d said goodbye to Bethie and waited until she was certain her friend was gone. She took off the coat, folded it up neatly and tucked it under her arm. She noticed then a small brown stain where the man must have punched Bethie with his soiled fist. She would take it to the charity shop. No. She would keep it in her closet. She did not have to put it on again.

  Though the wind was picking up. Goosebumps formed on her arms and she could feel them forming on her legs too, underneath the layers of thermal underwear. The boogers in her nose started to freeze. She sniffed to ward this off, but it was useless. She knew that. Stirling walked and walked, her arms mottled from the cold. She imagined them covered in uneven circles, each one th
e shape of a fist.

  Stirling remembered something then. Last year, on the first warm day, she went to the river. Everyone wore clothes that showed off their winter bodies. But when the sun went down, it was chillier than she expected and she wished she’d brought a jacket.

  Now cars started to turn on their lights. Women in leggings rushed home after taking their dogs out for long strolls. A labrador stopped to sniff her coat, shivered and pulled on his lead. The day was clear with no cloud cover. Stirling kept walking. What she remembered was this—that the wind only gets colder as the light leaves the sky.

  FORTUNE

  Missy and I read each other’s horoscopes. Missy reads mine to know what I’m up to. ‘Did you know I had the stomach flu?’ I ask.

  ‘Mars is giving you real trouble right now,’ she says.

  ‘I had a fever of thirty-nine,’ I say.

  I read Missy’s horoscope because her sign is the same as my ex-boyfriend and I want to know why he’s not calling. I think it’s my fault, but Missy blames the stars. She says I need to be patient and wait until my moon is in Venus. ‘Cancers are incredibly sensitive right now,’ she says. ‘Trust me. I should know.’

  I believe in horoscopes because I only have two ex-boyfriends and they were both born on the fifth of July. When Missy told me her birthdate, I couldn’t not believe.

  Missy says we’re all connected, she knows it for a fact because of Jaspar, her recently deceased black labrador. When Missy took a pregnancy test and the test was positive, Jaspar waited outside the bathroom door. When she hid his Christmas present in her sock drawer, he discovered it and unwrapped it on Christmas Eve. When she decided not to keep the baby, she found the present returned, nestled between a pair of athletic socks and laddered pantyhose.

  At Missy’s apartment, she recovers and I talk about my ex-boyfriend. I tell her about his soft grey hair and nervous hands. How he admired my nose even though it is slightly crooked. I tell her about meeting him at a friend’s wedding but leave out the part where the caterer caught us kissing in the greasy portable kitchen, my hand around his neck. The part where in the morning, he did not mention the bruising.