by Sara O'Leary
PRAISE FOR
THE GHOST IN THE HOUSE
by SARA O’LEARY
“I so loved this deeply moving tale of loss and acceptance. A ghost stuck in her house, haunting her husband and his new family. ” —Edward Carey, author of Little
“Sorrowful, lovely and funny in equal parts, The Ghost in the House depicts overwhelming love in heartbreaking counterbalance with an inescapable loneliness.” —Lynn Coady, author of Watching You Without Me
“Sara O’Leary opens the front of Fay’s dollhouse life to examine love and grief as only she can, with a penetrating view of the smallest things that make us eternally loving, endlessly lonely, and forever indelibly ourselves.” —Marina Endicott, author of The Difference
“The Ghost in the House is a beautiful reverie on how we live and love, a dream of a novel that left me stealing furtive glances at my loved ones, willing myself to appreciate them more and tell them so while we’re all still here. If you’ve lost someone you love, or wondered what it will feel like when it happens, O’Leary’s ghost will haunt you—in the best way.” —Jessica Francis Kane, author of Rules for Visiting
“A thirty-something ghost yearning for her life, a teenage girl toying with ending hers. Can they help each other to move on? This is the extraordinary premise of Sara O’Leary’s The Ghost in the House, a novel written with such aching delicacy it will haunt you long after you’ve turned the final page.” —Esta Spalding, author of the Fitzgerald-Trout series
“Sara O’Leary’s The Ghost in the House, riven by ambiguities and dissolutions, is a story of both love and profound solitude. Piercing, disorienting and tender.” —Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Copyright © 2020 Sara O’Leary
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: The ghost in the house / Sara O’Leary.
Names: O’Leary, Sara, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20179049151 | Canadiana (ebook) 2017904916X | ISBN 9780385686259 (softcover) | ISBN 9780385686266 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8579.L293 G46 2020 | DDC C813/.54—dc23
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover and book design: Kelly Hill
Cover images: (silhouette) msan10; (pattern) ba888, both Getty Images
Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
a_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0
For the ones I love—trusting that they already know.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Acknowledgements
About the Author
CHAPTER ONE
IN THE MIDDLE of my life I find myself alone in a dark room. I am lying on top of the piano. I must have been drinking, and if I was drinking I may have been singing. Never a good idea. Did I black out? The house is silent. Am I alone?
“Alec,” I call. I want him to come and help me down. I want him to tell me what I’m doing here. I want him.
But Alec fails to appear. Shaking, I crawl down from the piano and look around. It’s night. Late. That bit when it’s almost morning. And instead of being tucked up in my own bed I’m waking up in the living room wearing nothing but a white shirt belonging to Alec.
“Pull yourself together, Fay,” I say out loud. This is something my mother used to say to me, and I would picture myself like an old-fashioned doll with loosely strung limbs, glassy eyes wobbly in my poor little head. Pull yourself together.
I need to find Alec. I call out his name as loudly as I can, but the air absorbs the sound. It’s like a reverse echo. I do it once more and the same thing happens and then I’m too frightened to try a third time.
I will have to go and find him. I walk through the open French doors and step into a swallowing fog.
The next thing I know I’m standing at the top of the stairs.
I look down at a little rectangle of light where the streetlamp shines through the window in the front door—a cross in the middle where the four panes meet. X marks the spot. How have I never noticed that before? I glance behind me, toward our bedroom. Why is the door closed? It’s never closed. Then I look down the hall to where the stairs lead up to the attic and see a shadow moving stealthily toward me.
“Alec?”
The shadow pauses. It has a shape but no features.
I hold still. I am dreaming. Perhaps if I wait then I’ll wake and be back in my own bed. I try to imagine Alec’s body close to mine…the warmth he gives off like a furnace both winter and summer, the smell of his neck, the tickle of his curls against my skin.
Wake up, I tell myself. It’s time to wake up.
The shape solidifies into the form of a young girl. She has white-blonde hair and pale eyes and there is something wistful about her.
She sees me. She’s saying something but I can’t hear her. It’s like I am too far away even though she’s right there, close enough to touch.
And then everything goes black. I wait and wait but the light doesn’t change, and the morning doesn’t come. I think about what Gran used to call the loneliest hour of the night and how I’ve never really understood what she meant until now.
It’s light again. Thank God.
I’m in the kitchen and it’s morning and this should feel normal, but it doesn’t. The house is empty, but Alec has left a radio playing. There are two dirty plates on the table, one of them with a lone triangle of toast. I try to pick up the toast, but it slips through my fingers. Then I lean close to smell it, but it has no scent. I find that I am unbearably hungry—the way we are as children but hardly ever as adults. I think I might cry I want that bread so much.
I move away from the table and that is when I notice what’s coming out of the radio. I had thought it was one of those morning call-in shows. It’s something even worse. Voices are being interrupted by other voices: shouting, swearing, pleading.
“Are you there?” one man repeats, while an older woman says: “I don’t know where I am.”
A child’s voice, soft and confused, keeps saying, “Hello?” A heart-breaking question mark at the end.
I put my hand on the radio to switch it off and it sparks and goes dead.
I’m alone in the conservatory. In the one place I would most wish to be were anyone to ask.
The odd thing is that I can’t smell the flowers, or the warm fug of damp earth. I look around me and everything is thrivi
ng and blooming just as usual.
The girl appears suddenly in the doorway. I’m trapped in the room with her and involuntarily back up. I fight to swallow the rising panic.
“Who are you?” I ask. I pull myself upright.
She is perilously thin and more of a teenager than a child. Her eyes are heavily rimmed in black, but the rest of her face is bare. She’s a little Goth Alice. Her lips are pale and chapped. It hurts to look at them.
I cross my arms in front of my chest. I am the adult here.
“What are you doing in my house?”
She laughs joylessly. I can hear her now.
I step back. A void divides us.
We are being haunted, that much seems clear. And this idea, outlandish as it is, is easier to accept than the possibility that a rogue child is roaming around my house.
I try to think of everything I know about ghosts. Hamlet’s father. Jacob Marley rattling his chains. Scary movies when I was a kid. Twins holding hands in a corridor. Things coming through the television: “They’re here.” Gran believed in ghosts but in a matter-of-fact way. Why would you ever be afraid of a ghost? she said. Someone who would never hurt you in life wouldn’t think of starting once they’re dead.
Though even a poltergeist doesn’t explain what is happening.
I don’t know this child. I don’t know where she has come from or what she wants. And why this haunting now? We came to this house nearly fourteen years ago.
And then I seem to be slipping through time, suddenly unanchored.
It has been a long and stressful day. The moving truck from Montreal hasn’t arrived with our furniture, although we’d been promised it would be here. It is the sort of thing that would usually drive me mad and yet I am at peace wandering through the empty rooms of our new home. Our things will come or they won’t. We’re fine. We’re home.
We spread all the clothes from our suitcases into a nest on the bedroom floor and sleep there—skin to skin, exhausted and sated. This is happiness.
How I want to be back there. In that moment.
Sunshine pours in through the window above the kitchen sink. Morning? I can’t feel the warmth on my skin. The cedar chairs at the back of the yard where Alec and I like to sit look weathered. Sadly empty.
I can feel the house is empty but even so I stand still for a few moments to listen for sounds. I look at the clock: just after ten. Alec should be at the newspaper. Unless it’s the weekend. The last morning I remember clearly was Monday—wasn’t it? Or maybe Tuesday. But how many days have I lost since then? There’s a calendar on the wall, but for some reason it frightens me. There’s something threatening in those neatly squared-off segments of time.
I feel oppressed by the silence.
Where have I been?
Why am I wearing nothing but my string of big black pearls and a rumpled white Oxford shirt of Alec’s? I think I went to bed wearing the pearls but am less sure what happened after that.
And a ghost. Did I see a ghost?
I stretch out on the sofa nearest the window and close my eyes to think. I try to pin myself to the sofa, to the room, to the day. I want to be here when Alec comes back from work. I need to talk to him.
I have never felt so alone.
I open my eyes and realize the strangest thing. The walls should be wallpapered. That lovely, dark-blue damask. Instead, they’ve been painted a colour that can only be described as greige.
Someone has been in here and changed things. My overflowing magazine rack has vanished. Our battered burgundy leather Morris chairs are gone. In their stead, a pair of slipcovered wing chairs the colour of the smudge you leave behind when you erase something written in pencil. My dark-red velvet sofa has been replaced with a non-colour one, somewhere between stone and sand. Everything in the room has been made neutral. Neutralized. I feel like I’m in one of those crappy home-redecorating shows where the woman comes in at the end and all she can do is say “Oh my god” and cry.
Alec comes through the front door.
He’ll know what’s wrong. He’ll know how to fix this.
“In here, Alec,” I say.
I wait but he doesn’t come into the room. Since when does he ignore me? “Alec!” I call again. I can hear him walking down the corridor. Away from me.
I get up to go to him, but as I cross through the doorway I slip into nothingness.
My dollhouse is missing. The one object I would rescue if the house were on fire, and it is nowhere to be seen. The dollhouse sits on the table by the window—that’s what the table by the window is for. And then I return to the moment I first saw it.
Alec is watching me and smiling. “Thank you,” I say. “No one has ever given me exactly the thing I wanted before I even knew I wanted it.”
It is our house made small—about two feet tall. A miniaturized version of the house we are standing in. It’s just the kind of dollhouse I might have wished for as a child. I walk all the way around it, marvelling at how I have suddenly become some benign giant.
I crouch to peer through one of the windows. A replica of the large living room window we’re currently standing in front of. There’s nothing inside the small house but shadows.
“There we are,” I say. “I can see us there.”
Alec laughs and reaches out his arms for me and the moment shimmers mirage-like, as if we are in both places at once. As he embraces me, I look over his shoulder out the large picture window as though I might see another self, looking in.
I close my eyes and open them again and I am here, and the dollhouse is gone.
Our symbolic home is gone, and there is a large vase filled with white roses in its place. I don’t like fresh-cut flowers as a rule. I have never been able to shed the memory of my mother surrounded by the bouquets that were delivered to the house after Dad died. Crying and saying, “If only we could eat lilies.”
Something has happened. Somehow I’ve been standing still, and the world has moved on without me.
I’m in the conservatory. The walls are that beautiful blue that changes with the light. The colour not of a perfect sky but of a shared one. I look out into the backyard.
There are leaves on the ground, the shrubs are flame red. The flower beds bare and dry.
It’s June. It should be in full June-bloom out there, and it’s not.
There’s a piece of yellow notepaper clipped to a fern hanging down from the ceiling. Why? I pull it down and hold it close to my face to read it.
Ghost, it says.
CHAPTER TWO
USUALLY I KNOCK before I go into Alec’s study. If the door is closed it means that he’s working, and I hate to interrupt his writing. I stop to listen for the sound of his keyboard.
I try to turn the knob and it slips through my hand. Or, to be more accurate, my hand slips through it. Objects have lost their solidity. I concentrate hard, think of the shape of the crystal-faceted doorknob and how it used to feel under my palm. I imagine turning it and find suddenly that I can. The door swings open and I’m rewarded with the sight of Alec there at his desk. I feel a surge of relief.
“Alec,” I say, crossing the room. This has all been some kind of nightmare. Everything will be fine now. “Oh, love. I thought—”
He looks straight through me. I wonder how many times I’ve used that expression without truly understanding how wretched it could feel.
I reach out to touch his shoulder but before I can a shudder runs through his body. I draw my hand back. He looks around the room. His glance passes over me once and then again.
He looks normal. Yet different. His face is leaner—as though the bones have moved forward—and his hair is now greying at the temples. And yet he looks younger too. His hair is longer. It curls over his ears in a way I don’t recall ever having seen before. And he’s wearing a lilac shirt. Lilac!
But he’s
still my beautiful man.
He picks up his book. Alec always has a book to hand. He’s the most well-read person I know. He used to read me whole chapters at bedtime, and I would fall asleep to the deep rumble of his voice. The timbre both stirring and soothing.
I lie down on the couch and look up at a speck on the ceiling. If I stare long and hard enough maybe I’ll become that speck.
Ghost.
A light appears at the top of the cellar stairs and I see a silhouette in the doorway.
A laugh. It’s not Alec. My spine tingles when I realize it’s her.
She creeps down the stairs and turns on the lights and I see that the cellar has changed as much as the upstairs. The walls have been covered with tacked-up batik bedspreads—the kind that looked ridiculously hippie-ish even when I was young. A futon has been pushed into a corner, with an upturned milk crate beside it. On the crate lie an ashtray and an incense burner, and for the first time I’m glad that my sense of smell has been lost.
“Sit down,” she says.
I look around. It’s the futon or nothing, so I sit on the edge of it. She shimmies her skinny little hindmost backwards until she is pressed back against the wall, and then she pulls her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around her shins.
“Can I call you Fay?” she asks.
She knows my name. I nod reluctantly.
“Good,” she says. “You can call me Dee.” She is speaking in what I imagine she thinks of as a grown-up tone. She’s drawn a wobbly black line along her eyelids. She is absurd.
“Why are you dressed like that, Fay?”
I’d kind of forgotten. Being half-naked has been the least of my worries, but now I feel exposed. I pull the shirt closed across my breasts and fumble at the buttons, but they remain undone so I cross my arms.
“I don’t know,” I say.
She tells me that if I want to ask some questions she will do her best to answer them. An urge to laugh competes with an urge to cry.