by Sara O'Leary
“Of course,” she says.
“Have you seen other ghosts?” I ask.
“You’re my first.”
This house was built nearly a hundred years ago. Can there only be one ghost in a house at a time? Has my arrival evicted some previous spectral tenant? And if so, why did they never make themselves known to me when I was living here? Maybe, as Dee suggests, ghosts only appear to you if want to see them. But there must be something more—otherwise, wouldn’t it just be like rush hour on the metro everywhere you went? But maybe you need to be open to the possibility. And Dee was. But what about Alec?
I feel dizzy and look down at the cards in my hand to try and persuade myself this is real. I am really here. Playing cards is oddly relaxing. I used to play gin rummy with Gran when I was small.
“Do you have a grandmother?” I ask.
“Not really,” she says.
“Not really?”
“One lives far away, and we never see her because she hates my mom. And the other one is kind of a veggie.”
“A vegetarian?”
“No, a vegetable.”
When I was a child, my grandmother was the one person I could count on to love me unreservedly. When I was a child, being with her was the safest, warmest place in the world.
“I was thinking,” says Dee. “You’re kind of like my stepmother, aren’t you?”
“What?”
“Well, you were married to my stepfather.”
She smiles.
Okay then. I smile. Okay.
“Why bring me back?” I ask. “If you really were the one who did?”
“Because…” she begins, and then stops.
There is a long pause and I do my best to wait it out.
“Just because.”
“Because why?”
She looks at me. Looks away.
“Because you thought it would be cool to talk to dead people? Because you thought Alec wanted me back? Because you were lonely?”
“Yes,” she says.
My grandmother once told me that she’d lived with my grandfather nearly fifty years, but that he’d only been alive for twenty-two of them. At the time it didn’t mean much to me, but now I understand. I understand too why she refused to sell her house. Why she wouldn’t move somewhere more practical. As long as she was still there, so was he.
She was just short of eighty when she died, and I was just short of twenty. Looking back, it seems like I could hardly have been myself I was still so young. Nothing had happened to me yet. I’d never been in love (not really), never been away from home (not for long, and not very far anyhow), and, in truth, I’d never really questioned anything. I was an unbaked version of myself. But she used to look at me like she could see me at every stage of my life, from my babyhood straight on through to the bits that hadn’t happened yet. I wish she could have met Alec. I wish he could have heard how the way she said my name was not the same as anyone else. I wish she could have seen that I’d found someone to love me as much as she told me I deserved when I was thirteen, when I was convinced that no one would ever love me at all.
She came to Canada from Scotland when she was young, and I often wonder what she must have imagined during those days and weeks she spent aboard the ship. I asked her once. She said she’d never met anyone who’d been to Canada before she came here because when people left they didn’t come back. It must have been like going to the moon, I’d said. No, she told me, it was different. She had seen the moon.
I wish I could speak to someone else who understands that everything good that will ever happen has already happened. If I were with my grandmother again I wouldn’t be afraid. I wonder if she is waiting for me on the other side.
CHAPTER FIVE
DEE AND I would not get along as well as we do if I were alive. I wonder if this is as obvious to her as it is to me. I wonder if she knows that I’m only talking to her because I can’t talk to Alec. That I hope by sticking around I will find a way to reach him. That she can be of some use to me.
“Dee,” I say. “Tell me how you brought me back.”
“Do you really want to know?”
I think if I allow myself to look too interested then she will go back to withholding.
“Only if you want to tell me,” I say.
“I can do better than that,” she says. “I can show you.”
She pats the edge of the futon so I will sit beside her. When I do she opens up her phone and holds it up so I can see. Text Messages from Beyond the Grave. She taps it and a Ouija board appears. Like the ones we used to fool around with when we were kids.
“It’s an app,” she says.
What I think but don’t say is: How perfectly ridiculous. What I say but don’t think is: “That’s amazing.” She looks pleased. “But why did you choose me?”
“I think you know why. Plus, you are the only dead person I know.”
Just when I was getting an inflated sense of my own importance.
“She still loves my dad.” Dee’s voice sounds younger than usual.
“Did Alec split your parents up?”
“Oh, no,” says Dee. “They haven’t been together that long.”
“How long?”
“Only a year. Maybe a bit more. Anyway, Dad and my mom and I hadn’t lived in the same house together since I was small. But that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have gotten back together. I know she misses him really. Probably she wants to tell him that she’s made a mistake. Probably she wants to ask him to take her back. They were probably too young when they got married. That happens.” She speaks with all the wisdom that thirteen can muster. She is pulling the tips of her hair down in front of her eyes to check for split ends. She picks up nail clippers and starts snipping away at individual strands.
I take a good look at her. She is wearing a threadbare Snoopy t-shirt, too small for her and coming apart at the seams. Maybe it’s one she wore when her family was intact. I realize that she may have been a happy child once.
Dee has finished with her split ends and I realize she is watching me.
“What?” I say.
“Are you sorry you came back?” she asks. “This must not be how you expected it to be.” She seems to be seeing me for the first time. I catch in her little face the realization that I am a person. Was a person.
“No,” I say. “I’m not sorry.”
I’m alone in the conservatory. Sitting in my chair.
I have my eyes closed. I’m waiting.
“I’ve brought you tea,” he says. “I’ll set it down here by your book, shall I?”
“Please,” I say. I don’t open my eyes. “And thank you.” For years he has been bringing me cups of tea with milk in it. I like my tea clear and yet now I drink it this way because he has made it for me.
I hear him settle into the chair beside mine.
“Should we go for a walk?” he asks.
I open my eyes. I look at him and he looks at me and it still feels just the same way it did the first time.
“Yes,” I say. “Let’s. Later.”
I put my feet in his lap, and he rubs his knuckles right into that spot where the nerve runs straight up my spine.
“Bad day at work?” he asks.
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” I say. “That’s a strange phrase, isn’t it?”
“You could always do something else, you know. If you wanted. You can stop anytime. We’ll manage. I don’t want you doing that job if you don’t want to. We’d be all right.”
“The mortgage,” I say.
“We could sell the house,” he says. “It’s just a house.”
“I love this house,” I say. Last year for our anniversary we bought each other a new roof. Who says romance is dead? “You know I love this house.”
“And I love you,” says Alec. He smiles at
me. “Come here,” he says. And I do.
I sit in his lap and nuzzle into that spot in his neck that always feels like home to me.
“Shall we go upstairs?” he asks.
And just as I am tingling with anticipation it all vanishes.
I’m alone.
I’m looking for all my things. My computer was up here in the attic and my books and my sewing machine and all my art supplies. All the projects that I never got around to finishing. A load of wooden build-your-own-dollhouse kits. Mini flat-pack furniture. Dollhouse-sized rolls of wallpaper made from photocopied images. Sample pots of paint from Farrow & Ball. Twenty-two blues. A quite decent camera I could never use properly. A storehouse of broken dreams. The last few years I hardly came up here because it reeked of failure. I wonder where it has all gone.
Dee comes in and looks surprised to find me.
“What are you doing in my room?” she asks.
“Your room?” I say, taken aback.
“Alec had it done up without asking when we moved in,” Dee says. “Janet said I couldn’t say anything because I’d hurt his feelings.”
She lies down on her bed with her head at the foot end and gently kicks her feet against the wall. My desk used to sit on this side of the room. There was a cork board right where she is tapping her heels and it’s hard not to imagine she is kicking against all my inspiration pins.
“You don’t like it?” I look around, registering how little of her personality is imprinted on the room.
She rolls her eyes at me. Points to the open stairwell. “There’s no door. How am I supposed to live in a room with no door?”
It’s true. It wasn’t a big deal for me, but then, I wasn’t a teenage girl.
I suppose doing over the room was Alec’s way of saying he wanted her here. But there was a perfectly good bedroom at the back of the house on the second floor. They could have asked Dee what she wanted. That’s what I would have done. I think.
“Is Alec a good dad?” I ask.
“He’s not my dad,” says Dee. “I have a dad. Alec is married to Janet. That has nothing to do with me.”
“But you like him? Alec?” I can’t help asking.
“He’s okay, I guess. Kind of boring.” She is lying on her back smiling up at the ceiling, and she cuts her eyes sideways to see how I react to this. I do like to see her smile, even if it is at my expense. Alec has always been one of those people who others want to be around. He made me laugh more than I ever had. He wrote little haiku dedicated to parts of my anatomy. He wrote my name in a big heart on his chest with a permanent marker. He sang silly love songs to me in public places. He made me happy.
“When you were my age things were different, right?” asks Dee.
I look at her. Does she think my childhood was all Anne of Green Gables or something?
“I mean like when you were alone, you were really alone. Like there was no social media then, right?”
Dee is even more fascinated than I am by the idea of how much things have changed in the five years since I died. She shows me things on the computer and apps on her phone and asks me about television shows. Five years seems like an almost unimaginable passage of time to her. Five years ago she was a child and now she feels like she is someone else entirely. I have to keep reminding myself that she is a teenager. In her reality she could go to school wearing the wrong pair of jeans and suddenly feel like the world is crashing down around her.
Dee is still talking. “…this boy from my school. I mean, I don’t know him, but he goes to my school, this boy. And he said that he was going to kill himself.”
“What?” I ask. Startled awake.
“It was the middle of the night. He said he was going to take pills. And somebody commented and told him to go ahead and do it and he did.”
“What? That’s awful.”
“I didn’t see it; I mean I saw it, but not until after it happened.”
“You wouldn’t do that, right?” I say.
“What? Take pills or tell somebody else they should take pills?”
“Either,” I say.
“Don’t be stupid,” says Dee.
It’s not really an answer.
“Is he okay?”
She shrugs.
“Do you talk to your mother?” I ask.
“About what?”
“Anything.”
Dee makes a little noise in the back of her throat.
“You need to talk to somebody. You should tell your mother. About the—” I gesture at my own arms.
Dee makes a noise of dismissal.
You can talk to me, I think of saying. Instead I say: “What do you imagine your life will be like when you’re my age?”
“I don’t expect to live long,” she says. “That’s just the feeling I have.”
And I can remember that feeling too. Not the feeling that there was all the time in the world, but rather that there was so little time really that it hardly mattered what you did.
“But you wouldn’t ever do anything—” I say. I stop. Start again. “You wouldn’t ever harm yourself, would you?”
“No. I told you. No,” she says. I look at her and try to tell if she’s lying.
“Did you and your mom used to get along better?” I ask.
“Did you and your mom used to get along?” she says, mimicking me.
Perhaps this is what parenting is actually like. I’m weary. Dee is making me weary.
“Did you?”
“We were a family,” she says. “Me and my mom and my dad.” Dee looks up and her eyes are shiny.
I’ve never seen Dee without her heavy black eyeliner, but right now she is fresh from the bath and her skin is flushed and she’s beautiful, I realize. She’s a beautiful young girl, and it’s hard to believe I could have ever taken her for a ghost with all that life pulsing through her. Still, there’s something about the fragility of her young wrists that makes me want to weep.
“All that’s gone now,” she says.
A long time ago I read that novel Appointment in Samarra. All I can remember about it is the anecdote at the start about a man who meets death at the marketplace in Baghdad. The man flees to Samarra. Death is waiting and says she was surprised to see him in Baghdad as she had an appointment with him that night in Samarra. That has stayed with me since I read it as a teenager. How neat and how awful it was.
Now I think, what if death had been waiting for me here and I was somewhere else? What if Alec and I had stayed in Montreal and lived a completely other life? Where would I be now? Would we be together still? Would we have a family? Could I still go back? Could I have that life?
“Fay,” says Dee and the way she says it makes me think it is not for the first time. “Fay, pay attention.”
We are the only ones in the house. I’d been wandering, hoping Alec would appear, before finally coming upstairs to the attic.
“Fay, look,” she says. “Look!”
She shows me the red leather satchel that Alec gave me for my last birthday. I love that bag. She takes things out of it one by one and lays them on the bedspread. My string of black pearls is first, coiled and gleaming. I find it hard to look at because it is both lying there and around my neck at the same time.
I pick them up and let them roll back and forth between my hands and remember how they used to warm from being next to the skin and how that made them feel alive. I think of all the sensual pleasures I took for granted for so long and what I would give now for one long kiss from my husband. There used to be more of those in a single day than could be counted, and now I would kill for just one.
“Dead!” Dee says. I look up to see her holding my cell phone. Next she fishes out my wallet—open to my driver’s license (how I hated that photo), and my key chain. Then a bottle of Chanel. These familiar things look odd in thi
s context. Did Alec gather these things together after I died? Or were they just left behind? I suddenly think to wonder if he took my library books back.
“How about if I ask you some questions,” says Dee. “About your life.”
The way she says life—a closed set—makes me realize that I now possess a biography with a beginning and an end. I realize that for the time this child has been living in my house, I must have been a strange sort of story to her. A mystery.
She takes a single gold hoop earring out of the bag—one of a pair that I’d loved and had worn constantly until I lost one. Was this the one I lost or the one that remained? She twirls it around on her finger and looks at me, waiting.
“Tell me. What do you think you’ll be remembered for?”
This is an awful question. A cruel question. I always expected my life to have more shape to it. Like it would be the second act that would give meaning to everything that had gone before. I mean, I’m only thirty-seven. Does that mean I was middle-aged at nineteen? It definitely means that all the things I was going to figure out before I was forty will never be figured out now. I’ll never find out what I’m meant to be when I grow up. I’ll never grow up.
Dee waves her hand in front of my face.
“I was an artist,” I tell her. “I was working on a big show about dollhouses when I died.”
I picture myself standing in a gallery, surrounded by my work. Little houses. One covered in dust, hardened with epoxy. One filled with things made out of other things. One with a giant eye peering through the window.
“Where is it? Your art, I mean?” Dee asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know where it’s gone.”
I don’t tell her that I’d only ever thought about making dollhouses. That I had planned out a whole exhibition of different dollhouses over the last few years. This was after several years where I was obsessed with photographing old photographs and then zooming in until you couldn’t tell what you were looking at. Before that it was a printmaking workshop and a class in making stained glass. But I was sure that the dollhouses were going to be my medium. I was excited about this project in a way I never had been before. I’d bought a number of wooden kits and components, and some of that pressed-wood furniture that comes in sheets. I liked the shapes of the pieces on the sheets. All the potential.