The Ghost in the House

by Sara O'Leary

  “What are you doing in my house?”

  Dee makes an impatient little noise.

  She’s so young. I’d like to know how she died but it’s not the sort of thing you ask someone, is it? She’s thin to the point of frailty, and I can’t help but wonder if she starved herself to death. “How old are you?” I ask instead.

  “I’m thirteen.” She shifts herself on the futon like she has grown bored with me and is preparing to leave.

  Thirteen.

  Thirteen years ago, what I lost was just a collection of tissue, a mass. That’s what I always told myself. Cells. But now I think about those cells taking shape, becoming a living, growing organism, with a smile that reminds me fleetingly of someone I’d once been.

  I search her face for proof.

  Try to see Alec. Try to see myself. She has the same Scottish fairness that Gran did. The gold in her green eyes could come from Alec.

  I reach out to touch her face, but before I make contact a blue flash passes from my hand.

  “Ouch,” she says. “You gave me a little shock. I didn’t know you could do that.” She shivers.

  “Neither did I,” I whisper. My child. I want nothing more than to take her in my arms, but she is somehow both right there in front of me and beyond my reach.

  In another life Alec and I had three children—two close together and then one years later, an unexpected gift. A girl and then a boy and then another girl. When the first was born we were newlyweds—still just getting to know each other—and so the three of us have been together nearly as long as the two of us. Our daughter, our darling first-born, hates us. But we know that this is just a phase and we are prepared to wait it out. Our middle child, the boy, is sad more often than we would like. And as much as we want to see this as something that too will pass, it appears unlikely. He is who he is, and we fear for him. Our last-born is wild and fearless, and she is both the best and worst of us combined. We feel so much for her that we can barely stand to look at her.

  We take far too many pictures of them at all their different ages and stages. We are trying to fix them in time. Sometimes we look at pictures from when they were younger and miss them even though they are still here with us. They were each so fiercely themselves at birth that our parenting feels practically irrelevant, as though we are merely here as witnesses.

  Sometimes I wake in the night and forget that I have borne children, and then it all comes rushing back to me and I smile into the dark. I can never be as close to anyone as I am to this person who has made these people with me. We are a family—ourselves and larger than ourselves.

  This is our other life. The one we never lived.

  I need to talk to Alec, to tell him about how the child we lost may have been here in the house with us all along. I can see her. But why now? Has she been waiting for me all this time?

  I was twenty-four when I got pregnant. It was over almost before it began. An ectopic pregnancy. Such a strange word. In the wrong place.

  Termination was the only option. I had the injection rather than the surgery.

  Everyone said, “You’re young. There’s plenty of time.” And there was. But then suddenly I was thirty, thirty-five, thirty-seven. And when I think about all that time, all that plenty, I can’t be sure where it went.

  But that lost pregnancy. Our lost baby. She was no hypothetical child. She was real and then suddenly she wasn’t. But what if there is some other reality where that child lived? Where she grew. Where she and I are now together.

  Nothing makes any sense. All the rules I thought applied were wrong.

  I’m sitting on the stairs and staring at the front door. There is a puddle of late-morning light at my feet and I’m being lulled into a hypnotic state by the motes of dust slow-dancing through the air. I think about the word suffused. I am suffused with calm.

  Then a woman walks into the foyer from the dining room. She is youngish, thin, blonde—all sharp edges. I’ve never seen her before.

  “Are you there?” she calls out. She doesn’t look in my direction.

  She’s dressed in close-fitting black clothes. Very trim and elegant. She turns her back on me—cool as you like—then opens the hall cupboard and takes out a trench coat. Beige. Definitely not mine.

  She turns and calls down the hallway, “I’ll be back in a few hours, sweetheart.”

  She waits, as though expecting an answer, re-adjusts her purse so it’s sitting higher on her shoulder. I walk over to where she is standing, looking at herself in the mirror, so that I should be right there in the reflection with her—no reaction. No flicker in those grey eyes. I look and see myself, which is worse than not seeing myself. The woman steps away and I am left staring at my bedraggled reflection. My hand goes up to the pearls around my neck. What has happened to me?

  She opens the front door and steps out without a backward glance. When did I last leave the house? Not since I found myself on the piano.

  I can’t hear anyone else in the house. That “sweetheart” hangs in the air.

  I look at the light streaming through the window in the front door.

  I consider the door. Imagine it opening.

  I am looking for Dee. I want to tell her that she’s safe with me. That no matter what is going on in the house, no matter who that woman was, no matter what’s wrong with me, I can look after her. She needs to know she is safe.

  I wonder if she’s in the cellar and if I can get from the living room to the kitchen and then down there. One doorway, one door and one flight of stairs.

  There’s a flickering light coming from the bottom of the cellar stairs, and I slowly make my way down toward it. As I turn the corner, I see Dee. She has one of those craft knives with the click-up blades and she is using it to cut not paper but her arm. And that isn’t even the most shocking bit: she’s bleeding. The ghost girl is flesh and blood.

  She’s alive.

  Now I’m standing in the foyer, and I have the funniest feeling I’ve forgotten something. That there’s somewhere I’m supposed to be. The house is quiet. It’s daytime now. The next day?

  Then I remember the girl. I saw her, what she was doing. And then I faded. She needed me and I did nothing. I’m suddenly frantic. I only hope I’m not too late.

  Not a ghost. Not my child. But a child who needs me.

  I wrench open the door to the cellar, hoping to find her there—hoping she’s all right. Hoping she’s still alive. And then comes the realization that if she is alive then I am the ghost.

  There are no stairs and I feel myself begin to fall. Panic builds and I scream but I am a tree alone in the forest. No one hears.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE DARKNESS RECEDES and I find myself in the conservatory again, but I’m not alone. Alec is sitting in his chair. Staring into space. I look at him and feel a wave of grief. I want to drop into his lap, nuzzle his neck, inhale his familiar scent. I want him to reach out for me, make a space for me to move into. I stand directly in front of him. Yearn for him to see me. He tilts his head back so that his gaze points upward.

  “Look at me,” I say.

  He closes his eyes.

  And then, with a jolt, I remember Dee. The glossy red beads of blood on her arm. The blankness of her face looking up at me.

  When I finally get myself down the cellar steps I find Dee lying on the futon with headphones on. I say her name three times before she opens her eyes.

  “Oh,” she says, taking off the headphones. “Hey.”

  She is not my ghost girl. She is not my anything. Still I am so relieved that she is alive.

  “Are you okay? I was scared to death.”

  She laughs.

  “It’s no joke. Show me.”

  I make her pull up her sleeve. Pencil-thin lines score her flesh. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything so desperate.

  “Wh
y, Dee?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she says.

  I wonder what she would think if she knew I’d mistaken her for a ghost. I suspect she’d be pleased.

  I sit beside her and try to work out what I’m supposed to say.

  Dee edges away from me. “You’re cold,” she says.

  I wonder if this is true or if she’s just trying to distract me.

  “Why?” I ask. “Why would you do that to yourself?”

  She shrugs and pulls her sleeve back down. “I’m a cutter,” she says, like it’s some club she belongs to.

  She spends several minutes examining the cuffs of her shirt as if she’s written answers there to questions she’s still waiting to be asked. I watch her and think how badly we are put together.

  “You are never, ever, to do that again,” I say in the firmest voice I can muster. I am absurd.

  Dee rolls her eyes. “Who do you think you are? Do you think you’re something just because you were married to the sad widower guy who married my mom?”

  It all takes me a moment to grasp. This child now lives in my house with her mother and my husband.

  “How did I die?” I ask her. I immediately want to take back the question. I’m frightened. It’s not the sort of thing you should hear about yourself. I don’t want her to tell me. And yet I do.

  “How should I know?”

  I look at her. She has pressed her hand against her mouth as though stopping herself from speaking. I think she knows and just isn’t saying. It makes me want to shake her.

  “Okay, but when. You must know when?”

  “Ages ago,” she says. “Five years, maybe.”

  Five years! The world has kept on turning without me for five years. Suddenly my brain is caught in one of those old exam problems: Imagine Fay is travelling on a train going sixty kilometres an hour while Alec is in a car travelling one hundred kilometres per hour. Will they ever arrive anywhere together ever again?

  Dee’s right. I am nothing here.

  Alec is alive and I am somehow dead. When we were kids, Mira’s grandmother used to stand on the street corner waiting for the bus to heaven. They said she had dementia but now I’m not sure. Now I feel like there was a bus and I missed it.

  I am the ghost here, and instead of being in the next life with people who loved me, I am haunting my own house and my husband is living with someone who is not me.

  I think of all the squandered days—days we spent apart, days we turned away from each other in anger. If I added them all together and had them to re-live now, how much extra time would that give us? Time to do ordinary things. We were going to get old together. He was going to go bald and I was going to “let myself go” and start wearing kaftans, and it wasn’t going to matter because we’d always see each other as the people we were when we met, when we first understood that the days and nights of being alone were at an end. That was the bargain.

  That was the future I’ve lost, but it feels like the past has been taken away from me as well. How long have I been gone? How soon did he replace me? I remember the day I realized that I was done. I wasn’t looking anymore. I had found what I wanted. And when I told Alec he said he felt the same. Nothing in my life ever mattered to me the way that mattered. And now I have been replaced?

  I need to learn to control when and where I fade in and out and I have to talk to Alec. It seems to me that I’m most likely to be alone with him in his study. So I try as hard as I can to visualize myself there: the deep merlot leather psychiatrist’s couch, the beautiful saffron swirl in the astrakhan carpet, the pewter tankard full of pens on the desk, the maple shelves filled with row upon row of books.

  Instead I find myself in the last place I want to be. I’m in my darkened bedroom, standing at the foot of the bed.

  I loved my bed. It was one of the first things I bought for this house after we moved to Vancouver with all our bits and bobs from Montreal. I found it in an antique shop up on Main Street, and I bought it with my first month’s pay from my wretched temp job, even though I’d taken the job so we could manage the mortgage. The bed was enormous. Made from iron, which seemed to me to imply stability and longevity, or at the very least something difficult to destroy. It was four-postered and grand. French, the fellow told me. Probably nineteenth-century. It had found its way to this particular part of Vancouver all the way from Paris, perhaps from a home where generations had been born and died—and then somehow the bed had found me. I ordered blue linen sheets and a silk eiderdown. I bought colourful Kantha throws for it. It was like sleeping in a fairy tale illustrated by Dulac. But now my bed has been replaced with something sleeker, more modern.

  I am trying not to register that there are two people sleeping side by side. I can’t bear to look, and yet I do. A woman’s fair head rests on the curve of his upper arm and her hand is on his chest, curled protectively around his heart. They are nude from what I can see. The moonlight makes them look as though they are made of marble. The sheets are tangled around them as if sleep found them unawares. At least she sleeps on the wrong side.

  I wonder if he ever wakes surprised that there is someone not me in his bed. I wonder if we’re still married in his dreams. If I am still alive there.

  Alec used to tell me there was nobody but me for him. And I used to believe him. But now I would tell him otherwise: You like someone to sleep with and you also like someone to wake up with. You like pressing your body so close to another’s that your bones knock together. There are lots of things you like. Being alone isn’t one of them.

  In the early days of our marriage it was all soft-focus romantic talk. All that a little girl with your eyes, a little boy to play catch with. Dream children. I don’t think either of us believed in them. Not really.

  Then I did get pregnant and all of a sudden our conversations were about the next twenty years of our lives. Schools, and daycare or no daycare, and breast is best, and religion, and godparents, and should we make a will, and, yes, of course we should. I worried that we weren’t ready. Alec said we would be fine, that babies bring their own love with them. And he was so happy he convinced me into happiness.

  We were all set to become a family and then it was just us, still. We started talking about trying for another baby. Perhaps I wasn’t ready after all, I told Alec. We’ve got all the time in the world, I remember saying.

  When I was a teenager I was so lonely that sometimes I thought I must have had a twin that died in the womb. Or that I was living in the wrong family or the wrong place or the wrong time. I always felt like other people lived in their bodies and I lived just a hair’s breadth to the left of mine. I would always be covered in bruises from walking into the furniture and doorways, like I couldn’t quite navigate the body I had found myself in.

  It was only after meeting Alec, after loving Alec, that I finally felt that my body was my home.

  And so, it was just the two of us. That was enough. As the years went by it seemed to me more and more that we already had everything we needed. We were happy. I think of all the things I meant to do and the things I actually did do. There was the job I took at Ficciones bookstore when I first moved to Montreal. I loved that one, actually. Might have stayed there forever if the bookstore hadn’t closed. Most days I sat and read and had occasional conversations with other readers. What could be better? Then we moved back here, and I was thinking about art school but then along came Mira’s offer of a job working for her, which was only supposed to be temporary at first. It seemed ludicrous. I was lousy at organising my own house, never mind someone else’s. But I loved the clients—all their needs and neuroses, the stories they longed to tell someone, their funny assortments of treasured objects. And so I stayed.

  How did I go through my life and make all these decisions without realizing they were decisions? Why did nothing ever feel final? Until now. All my choices have been made. I will never giv
e Alec a child. He will never give one to me. We will never give one life.

  I’m sitting in the foyer, waiting for a glimpse of Alec.

  I hear a woman’s voice calling from the kitchen: “Dee! You’re going to be late again. I’ll drive you, but we need to leave now.”

  She walks into the foyer and stands in front of the mirror, putting her lipstick on. It’s a perfect red, the kind of red you spend your life searching for. She puts her hand up to adjust her hair but it is already perfect. Who is this woman?

  And then, her phone rings and I hear her say: “Hi, it’s Janet.”

  Her name is Janet.

  “No, Al’s not here. He’s gone in to the paper,” she says. Al! I don’t think anyone’s called him that in his adult life.

  And then there is a pause before she says: “No, I haven’t left yet. I’m still at home.”

  Home.

  On a July day thirteen years ago, we left our de l’Esplanade apartment as two single people and returned to it married but essentially the same. I kept my name—Fay Turner—it was a good name and it fit me. I had this idea that marriage wouldn’t change us, wouldn’t change me. I disliked the idea of engagements, of being asked, of being chosen. It felt antiquated and ill-fitting. But I came to realize that I really did like being married. I liked the idea that we had chosen each other. That as improbable as it all might seem, all the days before we met had been leading up to that one day that was the start of our life together.

  And then we bought this house in Vancouver, and I felt grown up, married. I was in love with our house. This house that matches the sky on days when it’s bright and clear. This house so different from the ugly, squat, squatter of a house we moved into when I was thirteen. That house was a Vancouver Special—that’s what they called them, although there was nothing the least bit special about it. It wasn’t even all ours. I hated that house. It was only slightly older than I was, but it was rundown and tatty. Cheaply thrown up in a neighbourhood filled with beautiful, solid Craftsman houses.

  As a child, I walked past this house many times, and it had always been my favourite. Partly because of the blue paint, but also because of all that the symmetry of its construction implied. I didn’t know the people who lived here but I pictured them leading perfect, orderly lives. I would stand on the sidewalk and look up, imagining my future. “I’m going to live there one day,” I would tell Mira. Not that either of us really believed it then.