The Ghost in the House

by Sara O'Leary

  He looks at me. Really looks at me. Shakes his head. “That’s not what I mean. I want to believe you are real. You look so young. So beautiful.”

  “You look like hell,” I say.

  “I’m fifty. Fifty. Can you believe it?”

  I will never be fifty now. I suppose there are worse fates than being thirty-seven forever. Twenty-nine was a particularly bad year. And if I had to be thirteen again I’d kill myself, even if I were already dead.

  “You don’t look fifty,” I say. I realize I am lying as I say it. He does look fifty. Fifty-something even. “You just look like you,” I say.

  “I never expected to have to live without you,” he says. “Being older than you should have given me a sort of insurance. I should have gone first.” His voice breaks and becomes a wrenching sound like something has pulled loose inside of him.

  “That was the worst—” he says. He stops, takes a ragged breath and starts again. “—the worst thing to ever happen to me. When you died I was sure I would die too.”

  I can see it on his face. The traces it left behind. All those new lines around his eyes, cross-hatched with suffering.

  “I didn’t mean to leave you,” I say. “I didn’t mean to die.”

  “People use language so lightly. But I really was. Lost. Without you. For a long time I just went on. Day after day after day. I wasn’t really living. Just existing. Waiting to be with you again.”

  “In heaven?”

  To my surprise Alec says softly, “I never said I didn’t believe in heaven.” This is an old argument. Perhaps one he expected to never have to revisit.

  “You never said you did. I always believed we’d be together again one day.”

  “I wanted that too,” he says.

  “Wanting isn’t believing,” I say.

  “I wanted to believe. But in my wildest dreams, I couldn’t ever have imagined something like this. Life after death.”

  “And now?”

  “Now?” he says. “Now you’re here with me.”

  I want to take a fingertip and smooth out his new lines like a hot iron over silk. But I don’t dare touch him, much as every bit of me longs to do just that. I pull myself over to sit beside him, leaving a safe distance between us. I think about how his neck used to smell.

  Then he looks back at me and smiles that old smile.

  “I am so happy to see you again,” he says.

  Maybe it’s best to think of this quotidian time with Alec as a gift and just enjoy it. Quotidian. I never considered the beauty of that word before.

  “Don’t leave,” I say. “Stay with me.”

  And for a spell, he does.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WE ARE IN the study. This could be the world to me, I am thinking when suddenly the door swings open. No knock.

  Dee steps into the room and closes the door behind her.

  “We can hear you,” she says. Alec looks deeply uncomfortable to be in the room with the two of us. I realize that I am more real to him because someone else sees me.

  “What?” Can Janet hear me now too?

  “Not you, Fay,” Dee says. “Just Alec. When Janet comes downstairs she will hear you in here talking to yourself.” She looks at Alec, puts a finger over her lips, and nods solemnly. “And if she comes in and sees that guilty look on your face, I don’t know what will happen.”

  “This is an unusual situation, Dee,” Alec says.

  “No kidding,” says Dee.

  “You have to know I would never betray your mother,” says Alec.

  Does she have to know that? Do I? Dee makes a who-cares shrug. I’m trying to work out what she does care about. Why did she come in here?

  The door closes softly behind her.

  “What was I thinking?” says Alec.

  I put a finger over my lips, reminding him. Then I take a notepad from his desktop and write a question for him. “What was I wearing the first time you saw me?” I ask. I’m ready for a change of subject.

  He looks at the paper. Writes: Dress. Blue. Flowers.

  There is no way I was wearing a flowered dress. I look at the paper too. Think. I remember an old floral silk robe I wore for the few years we were together. It came from a thrift store and was so old that the silk was falling apart but it was also so soft and so beautiful.

  “No,” I say. “No, I was not wearing a flowered dress, you fool.”

  He smiles. Writes: Something on your head?

  I had a fedora in those days. It was a man’s fedora and I wore it constantly until the night I left it in a bar and never saw it again.

  Alec’s pencil moves across the page and I see he has sketched me there. Naked. A flowerpot on my head with an enormous daisy sprouting from it.

  I have no idea what I was wearing. When I remember that day I see only him.

  Alec looks at the picture and smiles. Then he takes back the pencil and rubs it rapidly back and forth until the page blackens. He looks up at me guiltily.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I’m still here.”

  I’m following Janet from room to room. She seems to be looking for something. Or maybe she’s trying to get away from me. She never looks behind her, but once in a while she runs a hand over her nape as though something has made all the hairs stand up there.

  I am making an inventory of missing items in my head. And then there’s the fact that everything has changed colour, everything muted down to these stiflingly boring neutrals. Like a show home.

  She straightens things, seemingly involuntarily, as she goes. Nudging the dining chairs into place with her hip, centring the basket for keys on the table in the foyer, picking up Alec’s mail and shuffling it into a neat rectangle. I follow behind her and undo all that she does.

  I look in through the French doors and see them sitting on opposite sofas in the living room. Man and wife. Janet has her arms crossed defensively in front of her chest. Alec looks like hell. Bleary-eyed and miserable. No sign of Dee.

  “I wish you would tell me what’s bothering you.” This is Janet’s voice. She sounds serious but not emotional, a tone I’d never managed to master. “I know you say you’re fine, but you’re not, really. It feels like you’re somewhere else.”

  I lean forward, worried I will miss something.

  Sensing that I am there, Alec looks up and shakes his head slightly—not so you’d notice, unless you were looking straight at him. But I can see that he is sending me a message. Go away. You’re not wanted here.

  I walk straight into the room and stand directly behind Janet.

  Alec’s jaw clenches and makes that clicking sound that signals anger. Janet looks up at him in surprise. He puts his face in his hands and I know he is trying to force himself to relax.

  “I can’t talk about it just now.” He is struggling to look her in the eye.

  I know he wants me to leave but I don’t. Instead I move closer to Janet, so close that she would feel my breath on the back of her neck if breathing was something I still did. She shivers. Alec looks at me with something perilously close to despair. He really doesn’t want me here.

  Maybe I want her to know I am here. I am tired of this sad dance. It takes two to tango but three to do the butterfly. Whatever that means.

  “Al,” she leans forward, takes both his hands in hers. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” he says, standing to embrace her. “Nothing is the matter, sweetheart.”

  Sweetheart. I know that is to punish me. And so, I go.

  The house is dark and quiet when I return. I have to circle through the main floor before I find Alec sitting on the piano bench, his head cradled in his arms which are resting on the closed keyboard. It is all I can do not to rush toward him. Let’s not rush things. I remember how easy it used to be. To be embraced and enclosed.

  “
So,” I say.

  He looks up at me. Hurt and pain in his eyes.

  “I shouldn’t have intruded that way,” I say. “I was being childish.”

  Alec shakes his head.

  “Why is this happening?” he says. “What did you come back for?”

  I don’t have an answer for that. Try to think what he might want to hear.

  “To have just one more day with you? To say goodbye?”

  “I loved living with you. But this, Fay? I had to say goodbye a long time ago. This is cruel. Some sort of cosmic joke. I feel as though I’m being punished. Is that what that is?”

  Unable to answer him, I fade.

  “Where does Janet go?” I ask Dee. We are down in the cellar. Dee is doing something on her phone.

  “What do you mean where does she go?”

  “Well, does she have a job? She goes somewhere all the time. Does she work?”

  Dee looks at me blankly. This odd little girl. What does she really imagine is happening here?

  “She has a gallery,” she says. “That’s where she goes. Mostly.”

  “A gallery? An art gallery?”

  “Is there some other kind?” asks Dee.

  Janet. She has the life I always wanted.

  Dee puts down the phone and looks at me appraisingly. “Is that your real hair colour?” she asks. “Is it what they mean when they say auburn?” Clearly time to change the subject.

  “I don’t even remember what it was,” I say. “Something mousy. I don’t know.” I’ve been dyeing it since high school. I can’t imagine what it would look like if I’d left it alone.

  “I thought I’d stop colouring it when I turned forty—or fifty, maybe. Aging with dignity and all that.” Not something I need to worry about now.

  I think of Alec saying to me, “When I look at you I just see you.”

  “Janet colours hers, too,” says Dee, as if this is some fascinating thing that we have in common. “I think most older women do. It’s weird, isn’t it? Like you’ll see someone from behind and think maybe she’s your age, like young, and then she turns around and there’s like all this loose wrinkly skin and that. I think it might be better to dye it grey when you’re young, and then when you turned around people would be shocked at how young you look in comparison.”

  I suppose there is a logic in this. I feel a flush of shame at my own vanity, and a pang of sadness that I’ll never see my hair turn grey the way my mother’s did.

  “Janet’s not as old as you, though,” says Dee.

  “I’m only thirty-seven,” I say. “Or I was. How old did you think I was?”

  “Oh, I dunno,” says Dee. She squints at me. “Forty-something? Fifty?”

  Fifty. Thirty-seven always seemed old to me. On that downhill slide to forty. I cried on my last birthday. But then I always cried on birthdays. When I turned twelve, I cried so hard and then blew my nose in the twenty-dollar bill my father had given me and without thinking threw it in the wastebasket. Later, it took hours to find it again.

  “Janet’s thirty-two. She’s younger than you,” says Dee. And then, twisting her knife, she laughs, “And she’s alive.”

  Morning. Alec and I are alone in the study. We are ensconced. I look around, trying to work out why I feel safe here.

  “This room looks the same,” I say. I force myself not to let my eyes stray to where the picture of the two of us should be.

  Alec’s eyes flick around the room as though he is seeing it for the first time.

  “I didn’t change anything anywhere in the house for the longest time,” he says. “I wanted it all to stay the same. Only it wasn’t the same. The taste of the air, the quality of the light, the weight of the atmosphere. Nothing was the same.”

  “So, it was—” I break off, reluctant to say her name aloud. As though it might conjure her up somehow.

  “It was for my own good,” he says, like he is answering a question I haven’t asked. Then, as if realizing what I have been thinking. “No, it was me. I did it. I couldn’t live with living without you day in and day out. Every time I opened the freezer and your pint of dark chocolate sorbet was sitting there waiting for you it would make me cry like it was the first day all over again.”

  I hadn’t thought of this. Of him being left with everything and nothing all at once.

  “It’s good you got rid of things,” I say. I don’t mean it, but I think he needs to hear it.

  “Oh, most of it is still here,” he says. “Just not where I have to see it every day. I kept the important things. Packed it all up in boxes.”

  Not all the important things. I think about that old red velvet sofa. The times we’d lain end to end, each reading our own book. How the embossed pattern had been rubbed right off of each of the armrests when we inherited it from his Aunt Maud and how I liked to think of other heads resting where ours now lay.

  I think about our bed and the nights we’d been together there, asleep and awake and alive.

  I’m glad it’s gone. The bed was ours, it can’t be theirs.

  I look at the closed study door and imagine that beyond it each room of our house is exactly as it was when I left. My things matter to me.

  “I told you that I wished I was dead,” he says. I turn to look at him. He’s not looking at me, but over my left shoulder at a spot on the ceiling. “Well, it wasn’t exactly an idle thought. I obsessed about it. For a year or so, I did my best to drink myself to death. After you…when I was…” He stops. I take a step to the left so that his eyes meet mine.

  I find this hard to imagine. We used to enjoy having a drink together, but it was only ever me who had more than two. What’s that old line: you take a drink and then the drink takes a drink and then the drink takes you. That was how Alec felt about drinking. So the idea of him bludgeoning himself insensible with alcohol is shocking to me.

  He goes on. “That old involuntary reflex thing. Breathing. The way that you push yourself to the surface when all you want to do is stay on the ocean floor. The way the body keeps on keeping on even when you will it to stop. I thought I would die when you died. And yet here I am.”

  He sits up. Looks at me properly. Smiles a rueful smile. I always thought that was such an odd expression, but if ever a smile was full of rue it is this one.

  We stay sequestered in the study until we hear Janet come down the stairs.

  “Don’t you have to go to work today?” I whisper.

  “I’m staying with you. We’ll have the day,” he whispers back.

  Noises reach us from the kitchen. Janet and Dee talking about something. The coffee maker. High heels going up and down the hallway. Pausing outside the door and then moving on.

  “I’ll go talk to her before she leaves for work. Don’t go anywhere.”

  “What are you going to tell her?” I ask.

  “What should I tell her?”

  “The truth,” I say. He doesn’t laugh. None of this is funny. Still, I am so happy to have him to myself for the whole day that it hardly matters.

  Alec comes back from talking to Janet and I deliberately do not ask how it went. Janet does not exist. I’m not thinking about Dee. This is an ordinary day. We have been living in this house together and nothing will interfere with that.

  Alec calls the paper and tells them he won’t be in. He tells them he has a sty in his eye.

  “Why did you tell them that?” I ask.

  “First thing that came into my head,” he says. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “You could have said you’ve had a visit from an old friend,” I say.

  “Old friend,” he says, musingly. “Do you realize I’ve now known you for longer than you’ve known me? All those days and weeks and months since you’ve been gone and not a single day where I haven’t thought of you. How do we count that? How do we count the anniversari
es I celebrated alone?”

  He puts his phone down on his desk and goes back over to lie down on the couch. I sit down in the desk chair and pivot back and forth on it. I am getting better at this sort of thing. If Janet happened to open the door right now she would see the chair moving on its own. I see this thought cross Alec’s mind and he scowls so I stop.

  “Do you remember the ladybugs?” I say.

  When we bought the house, it had been painted yellow. A sickly sort of yellow that made the poor house look like it had come down with a bad case of jaundice. The day the realtor showed it to us the strangest thing happened. One whole side of the house was blanketed in ladybugs. It really flustered the realtor, but I thought it was kind of wonderful. It never happened again after we returned the house to its original glorious blue, so I guess it was something to do with the colour.

  “In the verse, you mean? ‘Fly away home’?”

  “No,” I say. But I realize he doesn’t remember, and I don’t elaborate. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t. I can close my eyes and see it either way.

  We are having our coffee at the kitchen table. Alec is having his coffee. I am watching. Everything is fine. I am just happy to be here. Alec hasn’t gone upstairs to shave or get dressed. He says it doesn’t matter. His beard stubble is almost white and it’s like I can see his future self in his face.

  We are silent together for a moment. When I was young I came across the phrase “a companionable silence” in a novel of my mother’s. It had struck me as the saddest thing I’d ever heard. I had no idea.

  “I used to dream,” Alec says. He stops, takes a sip from his coffee, and I think of the way actors use props in films, deliberately drawing out those pauses for dramatic effect.

  I wait. Will myself to say nothing.

  “I used to dream that you hadn’t really died. I’d walk into a room and there you’d be. Peeling an orange or reading the newspaper. Doing something so ordinary that it would take my breath away. Maybe they were memories. Memories of moments that were so unremarkable I hadn’t bothered to register them, but there they were, stored away in my unconscious like I’d recorded them without realizing. One time we were washing the dishes.”