The Ghost in the House

by Sara O'Leary

  Dee reaches into the bag like an amateur magician and pulls out a hairbrush. I can see strands of my hair still caught in the bristles and think about my DNA and how it stops with me.

  “Put it away. Please,” I say. I can’t look at it anymore. It’s all so trivial and familiar, and if this is all that’s left of me, then I’d rather not know.

  “There’s more,” says Dee. But then she looks at my face and puts everything back into the bag and pushes it back under the bed. There is a little worried number 11 forming between her eyebrows. She is too young to know that one day she’ll look in the mirror and that line will be there permanently. She is too young to know anything.

  I’d like to know where all of my pictures have gone, the family photos that hung along the stairwell.

  In the cupboard of Alec’s study, I find a stack of neat white banker’s boxes. On the lines marked “Contents,” Alec has written KEEP. I lift the lid off one box and, sure enough, there are my photos, still in their frames and wrapped up in tissue paper.

  It’s the tissue paper that gets to me. The idea of Alec planning this. Buying the boxes at the stationery store and bringing them home. Going back out to buy the tissue paper he wouldn’t have thought of on the first trip. Sitting alone in this room and wrapping up my past.

  It doesn’t take me long to find the photo from our wedding day because it is right on top. It’s a terrible photo. We are slightly blurred and looking at each other instead of the photographer. Above our heads is a sign listing the price of gas at the station next to the restaurant we were going to. It doesn’t look like anybody’s idea of a wedding photo. I couldn’t love it more.

  I sit down at his desk. The pen feels unwieldy, but I manage. I write what I said to him the first morning we woke up together in this house.

  Hello, my life.

  I place the note on his desk, underneath the photo of the two of us. And then I go.

  I am waiting patiently when Alec comes into the study. He spots the items I’ve left for him. He walks over to the desk and picks up the note. I see the confusion on his face as he reads it. And then he breaks. That’s the only way to describe what happens. He breaks wide open and a sound comes out of him like an animal in pain. He folds in the middle as though he’s been struck.

  When Alec and I first moved in together there was a period when it was a running joke to be surprised to find the other person there when you came home from somewhere. Like you’d found a stranger in your house. Goldilocks sleeping in your bed. Part of the game was pretending to be angry or frightened or just unhappy about this sudden other taking possession of your home. And underlying all that, of course, was a nearly uncontainable happiness. We had found each other. Here we were.

  It was that joy of discovery that I was hoping for now and instead I have provoked its direct opposite.

  When I come back I find myself in the kitchen. It’s night. The same night? I am bathed in misery. I sit and gaze at a crystal bowl in the middle of the table, full of fake-looking pomegranates. Mind you, even real pomegranates look fake, so it’s hard to tell. I reach and pick one up. Throw it across the room to see if it smashes. It bounces. I pick up another and do the same. It lands in the sink and clatters all the dishes sitting in the rack. A third hits the top of the fridge and then rattles down into the dead zone behind it.

  Almost instinctively I raise the bowl above my head and smash it to the ground.

  The hall light snaps on and I hear two voices on the stairs.

  When Alec comes into the room he has one arm thrown protectively behind him. Signalling to Janet to stay back.

  I’m a threat.

  I wait for him to say something to me, to look at me, to react. But he doesn’t.

  “There’s no one here,” he says. “Go check on Dee. I’ll clean this up.”

  Alec turns to Janet. She’s wearing an apricot silk nightgown that looks like something out of a glamourous old film.

  I look at the shards of broken glass on the ceramic tile floor and feel like I could shatter as easily.

  Alec sighs as he goes to fetch the broom and the dustpan. He looks tired and I feel guilty for having woken him, for having caused this commotion. He looks around the room and I feel his eyes pass over me. Did he pause?

  Janet comes back down the stairs a few minutes later.

  “She’s in her bed, Al. Sound asleep. It couldn’t have been her.”

  Alec dumps the contents of the dustpan into the garbage under the sink. He looks around the room, and I see his hand go up to cradle the nape of his neck like it does when he is uneasy.

  “Nothing to worry about,” he says. “It must have been the wind.”

  Then I’m forced to watch the two of them go up the stairs together. Alec’s hand just below the small of her back, dark against the pale silk.

  That hand, more familiar to me than my own, resting on a body that is not mine.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I’M LYING ON the psychiatrist’s couch in Alec’s study, thinking about Alec’s hands and what I would give to feel them on me again. I’m so busy not thinking about the fact that he is upstairs with a woman that is not me that I don’t hear the door open.

  Alec walks into the room.

  I stand up wanting to go to him but I’m frozen in my uncertainty.

  And then, quite shockingly, he looks at me. His eyes meet mine and I feel the same charge I felt the day we met. “Fay?” he says.

  He sees me. I veer toward the ecstatic and then am brought back to earth. He is shaking his head at me. There is no joy on his face.

  “This isn’t possible,” he says. “You can’t be here.”

  “I’m here,” I say.

  “I…” He shakes his head again. He does this when I am saying something he doesn’t want to hear. He always has.

  “I don’t understand. It doesn’t make sense.”

  I step toward him and then stop because he looks afraid of me. “It’s me, Alec.”

  “This isn’t real. You can’t be real.” He’s staring at me like I’m a stranger. The corners of his mouth go up and then down again. Alec once told me that he believed that when we died that we just went out like a light and that was it. He’s going to have to re-think all that now.

  “Alec,” I say. “It’s me.”

  “I can’t…” He’s in the doorway now. He’s looking everywhere but at me. “I can’t do this,” he says, and then he’s gone. He’s gone, but I’m still here.

  I find him in the conservatory, sitting with his head in his hands. I sit down in the chair next to him and wait. He looks at me like I’m something that terrifies him. He looks at me like I’m a ghost. Sorrow rushes through me and I’m jolted by it—the almost physical ache—and I wonder if I’m feeling what he feels.

  “Oh god, Fay,” he says.

  “Aren’t you happy to see me?” I try to make my tone light. I try not to let him know that he is breaking my heart.

  “This can’t be happening. I feel like I’m going mad again.”

  “What do you mean again?” I ask. “Has this happened before?”

  “Not exactly,” says Alec. “No. It was more like…” He pauses, rubs the space between his eyebrows. “It was more like I thought you could hear me if I talked to you. After it happened, I used to sit in here and have long, one-sided conversations. After you—” He stops. Swallows hard. Gets up and turns his back on me.

  “That was you,” he says. “The note. The broken dish.”

  “Yes.”

  “It was you. It is you?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Why were you wearing my shirt?” he asks.

  “Why am I wearing your shirt,” I correct. “You might as well ask me who’s on first.”

  “You don’t know?” he asks.

  I shake my head.

  Here�
�s something that you never think about when you get dressed each day. Whatever you put on could be what you will be wearing when you die. If I’d known I was going to die that day maybe I would have put on the new pewter-grey, fitted dress with real steel woven into the fibres. It would have been the perfect dress to die in…beautiful and elegant. Or I could have put on that kimono Alec had bought for me…the one with the cabinet of curiosities on the front and the swan on the back. I could have swanned around in the afterlife wearing that. Ghosts in movies are always wearing something swishy.

  “And now you’re back.”

  Then he looks at me and it’s almost more than I can bear. He reaches out his hand but just before he touches my arm a blue spark travels the gap between us.

  “What was that?”

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to touch me. Or I’m not supposed to touch you. I’m not sure which. I didn’t get a manual. The Emigrant’s Guide to the Afterlife.” I pause, as my joke provokes an expression of annoyance. “This is all new to me too,” I say quietly.

  Alec looks down at his fingertips as though expecting them to be charred.

  “You were gone, Fay.” He draws a ragged breath. “It’s funny how they say till death us do part, but you never really think about what that means, do you? You don’t think it will happen.”

  I try again to imagine what it would be like if I had lost him. If I had lived and Alec had died. When I was alive, I imagined it a hundred different times and a hundred different ways. In the beginning—when we were new—it was a sort of delicious agony. Like probing the spot where a tooth had been pulled.

  “I know,” I say. “I’m sorry.” Sorry for your loss echoes around in my head. Don’t say it. Don’t. “Sorry for your loss.”

  A moment of silence stretched long and taut. Then he laughs. His laugh is warm and deep and if I could take up residence in it I would.

  “Only you,” he says.

  We stare at each other for a while. There’s nothing to say. There’s too much to say.

  “Alec,” I say, finally. “What happened to me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean was I in an accident? Did someone kill me?”

  I’ve been thinking that this must be what happened. There must have been a quick and violent death for my spirit to get left behind this way. I cringe a little at the word spirit. I was never clear in my own mind about what happened to us when we died—where we went or what we became. But I always knew that there had to be something more.

  “Nobody killed you,” says Alec. “You just—” He stops. I see tears coming to his eyes and he blinks them back rapidly.

  “You just died,” he says.

  I just died.

  It is almost morning. We are back in Alec’s study. He is stretched out on the psychiatrist’s couch and I am sitting on the floor watching him fight sleep and lose.

  Janet knocks on the study door and in the moment before it opens, Alec sits up and looks around. He sees me and makes a shooing gesture at me with his hands.

  Janet puts her head around the door. “Al?” she says tentatively.

  “Al?” I say, mimicking her throaty voice.

  “Oh god,” he says.

  Janet comes all the way into the room now.

  “What’s going on?” she says.

  “Tell her,” I say. “Tell her that she is surplus to requirements.”

  He glares at me.

  He looks at her and I can see his mind turning over and over.

  “Not now,” he says.

  “Are you okay, sweetheart?” she asks.

  I echo her again. I’m being childish. I know I’m being childish.

  “Stop it!” says Alec. His voice is harsh. Janet and I both involuntarily take a step back.

  “What’s going on?” she asks. Concerned where I’d have been annoyed. “I’m worried about you. Did something happen? Al?”

  Janet crouches with her face up close to Alec’s. To see them so close infuriates me.

  “No,” says Alec. “Thanks, though. Head. Headache. Brutal. Couldn’t sleep.”

  He looks into her face and I can see what all this is costing him. I can see that he doesn’t want to hurt her.

  “Let’s go into the living room,” he says. He doesn’t bother trying to offer a reason why. Just gets up and walks to the door, all the while quite deliberately not looking at me.

  I could follow if I really wanted to. Surely he knows that. I wait for him to come back to me. I wait and I wait.

  I am alone in Alec’s study. I browse the bookshelves and hum a little tune to myself. Pretend that it is just an ordinary day. I look for the novel I was in the middle of reading. Not really Alec’s kind of thing. Crime fiction. Denise Mina. It was the third of a trilogy and it is unsatisfying to have to leave it unfinished. Not to know how it ends.

  I pull down a copy of Emily Dickinson’s poems. I open it up and there is my name, written in green ink with my self-consciously confident twenty-something hand. I bought this book when I was still in university, at an age when I thought people would find me interesting if they saw me reading an interesting book. When I flip through the pages it falls to the most obvious of all places: “Because I would not stop for death…”

  Then I hear Alec and Janet out in the hallway.

  “Are you sure you should go in?” she asks. “You look awful.”

  “No, no, I’m sure,” he says. “I—”

  He wants out of the house, away from me. I hear it all in his voice.

  “I just need to get something,” he says. “From my study. Stay here. Just a minute. I’ll just be a minute.”

  I know he is coming to check to see if I am still here. If I am real. If last night really happened. What I don’t know is what he is hoping for.

  Alec is gone. The house is empty. I sit down at the piano to wait. I used to lie on the floor and watch my mother playing the piano and the sound of the notes—the way they’d vibrate through my body—got all mixed up with the expression on her face. When she played, really played, no one existed apart from her. She was perfectly alone and perfectly happy.

  I thought that this exalted state of being was something that would come to me with growing up. And now I realize that it never did.

  The piano is here because the thing Alec wanted most of all was for me to be happy.

  But why am I here?

  I’m sitting on the stairs, waiting, when Alec comes home from work. He opens the door and sees me, and I suddenly understand what the word blanch means. He blanches.

  He herds me into his study. Closes the door behind him. Looks at me and I look at him.

  “I mean, this can’t be happening,” he says. “It must be a dream. This is everything I wished for.” He glances quickly at the closed door. “But how? Why? And what’s it got to do with Dee?”

  “Dee? I don’t want to talk about Dee. I want to talk about us.”

  “Fay, why was Dee talking about ghosts? Did she know about you coming back? You haven’t done anything to frighten that child, have you?”

  “Are you kidding? It’s the reverse, if anything.”

  “So she can see you?”

  “I think I’m her new best friend.”

  I should tell him. I should tell him about the cutting. I should tell him she is a sad little girl in need of a family. That she thinks she’s lost hers, that she herself is a little lost. I think about all the things I should say. But instead I say, “So you married her. Janet.”

  “Yes,” he says, unable to look at me as he speaks. “I married her. This summer. Just a small ceremony. We didn’t even have cake.”

  Cake. As if I give a damn about the cake.

  “You’ll have to tell her,” I say.

  “Tell her what?” he asks.

  “Tell her to g
o,” I say. “You’ll have to tell Janet to go.”

  “We’re married.”

  “No,” I say. “We are married.”

  “Fay,” he says. “Let’s not rush things.”

  When you come back from the dead rather unexpectedly, there are certain things you may not want to hear. Let’s not rush things is right at the top of the list.

  “How long did you wait?” I ask.

  Alec sighs. “How long did I wait?”

  “Before you moved on.”

  He sighs again. Pulls at his hair so that it stands madly away from his head the way it did when we were young.

  “Do you remember when we first met?” he asks.

  “Don’t change the subject,” I say.

  “I’m not,” he says.

  I lie down on his couch and cross my arms over my face.

  “When we first met my whole relationship to time changed,” he says. “I’d waited for things before. What is adolescence, after all, but a long train of waiting for things? But I’d never waited days for something, feeling every second in every minute of every hour as painfully and acutely as I had at the beginning of seeing you, of waiting to see you again.”

  “You’ve missed me,” I say.

  “No,” he says. “I remember what missing you was like. Missing you was the fear of not seeing you again and the pleasure of imagining our reunion comingled into one. Sorrow sweetened by anticipation. I understood what it felt like to miss you. But what I felt when you died was something else again. That was something that I didn’t have words for, much worse than anything I could ever have imagined. You have no idea.”

  And I realize that I don’t. I can’t imagine my house without me in it. I can’t imagine Alec here alone.

  “I don’t think she’s right for you,” I say, changing tack.

  “Fay.” His voice is grudging. I am going too far.

  “How can you be with someone who isn’t me?” I ask.

  “You’re not even you anymore.”

  “Thanks very much.”