The Ghost in the House

by Sara O'Leary

  “That sounds so boring,” I say.

  “It was.” He smiles reminiscently.

  “I’m here now,” I say.

  “Yes,” he says. “You’re here now. But for how long? And how will I bear it when you go again?”

  Once I bought an old copy of To the Lighthouse at a second-hand store and when I opened it a newspaper clipping fell loose from between the pages. Novelist Missing, said the headline. It went on to describe the disappearance of Virginia Woolf.

  Missing, I thought. Not dead. Not yet dead. Perhaps, I thought. Perhaps she may still be found alive.

  Hope. That mad, unquenchable thing.

  “What shall we do with our day?” asks Alec.

  He opens the fridge and stares into it for a moment. When we were young we lived in an apartment so small that you could see the kitchen from the bed. I think of it now and realize that we had everything we needed there, and I just didn’t know it.

  Finally, he takes out the milk and puts it down on the counter. He fetches a box of muesli out of the pantry.

  “Want anything?” he asks over his shoulder.

  I don’t answer.

  “Oh,” he says. “Of course not.”

  He reaches up to the cupboard and takes down a bowl and pours out the muesli and I feel a moment of intense pleasure at the familiar sound.

  “Remember our first night together?” I ask.

  “What a question. As if I am ever likely to forget.”

  He sits down across from me at the table with his breakfast. How many times did we sit together just like this? How many times did I waste these precious minutes thinking ahead to some small task or some petty annoyance involving the day ahead?

  “My favourite part was waking up with you. Waking up with you sleeping beside me. And this strange feeling. This sort of relief.” He says this and then seems to hear himself say it. His eyes fill with tears.

  “Yeah, but the sex was good too,” I say, and he laughs.

  I felt it too. That I’d found the person I was going to spend the rest of my life with. And I did.

  We’ve moved into the conservatory and are bathing in the afternoon light. I can almost imagine the warmth of it on my skin. It’s a perfect day.

  “Tell me something,” I say. “Tell me what’s been happening with everybody we know since I’ve been gone.”

  And so, he does. He tells me about how Mira had kept coming around and wanting to talk to him after I died and how finally he’d had to tell her he couldn’t stand the sight of her anymore. That he’d meant to say something polite to make her go away, to offer up some platitude, but instead he’d simply said: “I can’t stand the sight of you,” and then realized he’d said something irrevocable. “It was true. I shouldn’t have said it, but it was true.”

  Poor Mira. I wonder who listens to her bang on about her life now that I am gone.

  He tells me about his brother Jake and how he lost his teaching job because of something that had never come out. He’d done something. Nothing serious enough for a criminal charge. Something serious enough to get him fired. His wife had left him, and his teenage son wouldn’t talk to him. He was working night shifts in a gas station over on the east side. I think of how smug Jake had always seemed, and how hard it is to imagine him with all that self-satisfaction knocked out of him.

  He tells me about how his first editor—the one who hired him and brought us out here—has developed early-onset Alzheimer’s, that it’s now reached the point where he thinks Alec is someone different every time he visits. That our friends Bill and Billie divorced and then, after selling their house and getting rid of practically everything they owned, decided to get back together again and are now living on a houseboat down at Deep Cove.

  He tells me about how my friend Carly developed Lou Gehrig’s disease and how her ex-husband moved back into her house to look after her. I’d been wondering about Carly. I’d known her in high school and started running into her all the time when we moved back here. Suddenly she was nice to me and it was unsettling. She’d been one of the cool girls. The girls I envied and sort of despised. And then when we met as adults I realized what a lovely person she was. And how her life had only ever seemed perfect.

  He tells me that the old woman who’d moved into the Vancouver Special I grew up in died, and how the next day one of her daughters pulled up with a moving truck and emptied the house before the other sister even knew her mother was dead. That the house was sold for an outlandish sum and was then knocked down. The house that went up in its place was twice its size and the colour of a bridesmaid’s dress. Somebody owned it, presumably, but nobody lived there.

  “Tell me something real,” I say. “Something that matters.”

  He tells me about my mother. How she was so heartbroken in the beginning that she couldn’t bear to be in the same room as Alec. How she blamed him without any real reason. Well, except that she needed someone to blame. “I understood it,” he says. “I wanted someone to blame too,” he says. They don’t talk anymore, he tells me. It’s too difficult.

  Thinking about my mother hurts. My death one more sadness in her life. “Tell me something else,” I say. “Quickly.”

  He tells me my sister has two little girls now. Joni they adopted from China four years ago, and then Fay was born last year. A surprise baby after all those years of trying. “Named after you,” he says, as though I might not have guessed.

  The whole time I was growing up I wished I was Vicki. My beautiful, brilliant sister. I grew up wearing her hand-me-downs. She was always taller, more developed, more mature. More everything. She was always that one step ahead. Got married before I did. Bought a house before I did. But I died first and left her behind. The only time I beat her.

  “Stop,” I said. “Stop now. Don’t tell me any more.” It hurts to hear about all these people, to still feel close, knowing they all think of me as gone.

  I realize it’s past the time when Janet and Dee should be home.

  “They’ve gone out,” he says, finally. Stating the obvious. “Janet took Dee out somewhere for dinner. Maybe a movie. No idea when they’ll be back.”

  This time is a gift.

  “She’s unhappy because I won’t tell her why I’m unhappy,” he says. “This is impossible.”

  “Are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Unhappy?”

  “Only when I’m not deliriously happy,” he says. “You’re back. You came back. The thing that is never supposed to happen happened.”

  “Amazing, right? This is my idea of perfect happiness,” I say. “Now. This moment. And this one. And this one.”

  Alec begins to laugh.

  “Life is wasted on the living,” I say.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  AS A FAVOUR to me, Alec is calling my mother.

  He says that he hasn’t seen her in a long time, even though she lives only twenty minutes away. I just need to see her once more. I hear him on the phone explaining that he has something he wants to give her. Something he thinks I would have wanted her to have. I’ve asked him to give her the photos he boxed up after I died. It was the first I’d mentioned knowing about them, and I saw a flicker of pain in his eyes as he remembered packing them away.

  “I’m sorry,” Alec says into the phone. There is some response I can’t hear but then he catches my eye and nods. “I know,” he says. “No. Just me…Good. See you in an hour or so.”

  I didn’t think she would come so soon. I don’t know if I’m ready for this.

  I watch as Alec takes the banker’s boxes out of the study cupboard and stacks them neatly alongside his desk.

  “Alec,” I say. Louder than I meant to.

  He turns to me, startled. “What?” he asks.

  “Nothing. Nothing, really. Nerves, I suppose.” For a moment I was suddenly afr
aid I might vanish again. I needed him to look at me so that I knew I was here.

  When I was small, I had a fear of dying—of the earth opening up and swallowing me whole—but this stopped after my father died, and was replaced by a fear of my mother dying.

  I used to go in and watch her when she was sleeping to make sure she was still breathing. One time she woke up and saw me standing there in my nightgown and screamed so loud she woke up Vicki. She made me promise not to do it ever again. But it took me years to trust that she would still be there in the morning. And when she left the house I would be uneasy until she returned. When I was away from her I imagined all sorts of terrible things happening to her. Once I saw a woman hit by a car and the noise that it made—the way the sound of the impact was both solid and liquid at the same time—stayed with me, and it seemed to me that my mother was impossibly vulnerable. Anything could happen to her.

  I lie down on the psychiatrist’s couch and listen with my eyes closed to the sound of Alec shifting the boxes. He is humming something, but so quietly that I can’t make it out. He knows I am anxious and knows me well enough not to tell me not to worry.

  The doorbell rings and I’m still not ready.

  “Wait here,” says Alec. “Do you want me to tell her? Prepare her? What should I say?”

  “Don’t say anything,” I tell him. “Just bring her in here.”

  He goes out, and in a sudden fit of nerves I find myself hiding in the cupboard, leaving the door open just enough so that I can see into the room. I’m not ready to be seen by my mother, or worse still, be not seen. I think about the word ajar to stop myself from crying. Some joke from when I was a child about when is a door not a door.

  And then the door opens again and there she is. She’s older too. I’d forgotten that would happen. She’s cut her hair short and is wearing glasses that make her face look completely different. Or maybe her face is completely different. Her expression is more closed than it used to be. Guarded. I could pass her on the street and not know her, I think to myself.

  “Sit down,” says Alec, gesturing. I see him looking around the room and then registering the opened closet door.

  She ignores him and crosses the room and vanishes from my line of sight. Is she over by the window? I’m tempted to push the door forward so that I can see. But Alec throws a glance in my direction and I hold still. Then he disappears too.

  “Please,” says Alec. “Sit. I have something to show you.” I see her again and Alec is gently cradling her elbow, guiding her in the direction he wants her to go.

  She sits. She’s lost some weight and is just generally smaller. I could pick her up and carry her from place to place.

  Alec crosses over to the desk and I can’t see him, although I hear a drawer opening. He crosses back with a large plastic bag in his hand. I recognize the yellow-and-black logo from the photo store up on West 10th.

  “The family pictures that used to hang in the stairwell are all in these boxes. I can carry them out to the car for you. Maybe Vicki would like them? For the girls? These are just snapshots. I had copies made for you ages ago,” Alec says to my mother. “Any of the pictures I could find with her in them. Some of them you probably have. I copied everything. To be safe.” He’s having trouble talking and he’s not looking directly at her. This is costing him. My mother has tears in her eyes.

  “I should have given these to you sooner. I should have called,” he says. “I’m sorry. I…” He stops. Takes a breath and starts again. “I wish we’d taken more pictures. I should have taken her picture every single day I knew her. I have them all up here,” he says, tapping his temple. “But those are harder to share.”

  I see my mother breathe in and consider what to say.

  “When my husband died, I thought I would die too,” she tells Alec. “I didn’t know how to be on my own. I didn’t know how I would raise my girls all on my own. And I felt guilty.”

  Alec starts to say something but holds it back. He nods instead and waits.

  My father died of an aneurysm. He went in his sleep and everybody always said he wouldn’t have suffered. Wouldn’t have known. And I used to think about that—about him dreaming and the dream suddenly turning into a door. I think about my mother waking that morning to find him both there and gone. The nightmare quality that morning must have had.

  “I would have given anything to have him back. God knows he wasn’t perfect. But he was mine.”

  “I know,” says Alec. He looks over his shoulder toward the cupboard. To where I am hiding. For a moment I think he is going to tell her about me.

  “Thank you,” says my mother, “for these…” She lifts the bag and then lets it drop again. I know my mother. She won’t open it until she is home and can look through them on her own. “And thank you too, for…She knew she was loved, didn’t she?”

  I am nodding my head like a fool in the dark cupboard.

  Alec looks in my direction and he nods too. “Yes,” he says. “She knew.”

  “That’s important,” says my mother. “That’s what we want for our children. But I guess you’re learning that for yourself now.”

  A gentle acknowledgement of his new family. I can see the surprise register on Alec’s face.

  Against all reason I step out into the room so that she can see me. Alec’s head turns in my direction and I see panic in his eyes. My mother looks at him and then turns her head to see what he is looking at. I smile at her but as I do I realize that she sees nothing. She looks back toward Alec inquisitively. I step out and into nothingness.

  When I return, Alec is lying on the psychiatrist’s couch. At first I think he is asleep. Then, without moving his head to look in my direction, he speaks. “You all right?” he asks.

  “I am,” I say. “Thank you. Thank you for doing that.”

  We are silent for a spell. “I wish she could have seen you,” Alec says finally.

  “It was enough,” I say.

  Finally, he gets up and looks out the back window. I go to stand beside him. I look out at the sun playing on the leaves of the arbutus tree. “This is such a perfect yard,” I say. A perfect yard for children, the realtor had told us.

  Alec nods. I know he’s remembering too.

  “We should have named them,” he says. We both look out into the yard. Everything looks tall to me. So lush and overgrown. So alive. “They died too.”

  “Yes,” I say. It takes me a moment to realize he’s talking about the pond full of koi fish.

  “I loved those fish,” I say. I turn back to the window.

  “They were easy to love,” he says. “They never spoke in anger. Always listened to my stories. Didn’t come to bed with cold feet.”

  I laugh.

  “You didn’t come back because you needed to know you were loved, did you?” Alec asks. I turn to him. He is still looking out the window.

  “If anything, it was because I knew I was loved.”

  “This is impossible, Fay. Untenable. I can’t live in this house with two wives, like some Noël Coward character.”

  “So then you’ll have to choose.”

  I leave him alone to think about that a little.

  I should go. Cross over. Whatever it is that people are meant to do when they die. But I seem to lack the will. I try to find my way back to when Alec was mine and mine alone. If I can wander in the past, then why can’t I just open a door and find myself where I want to be? Which is here. In my house with my husband, and alive.

  Instead, I travel back to my grandmother’s kitchen.

  I am sitting at the table and trying to remind myself not to kick against the legs of the chair because she doesn’t like it and she can hear it even when she is in the next room. I plant my feet flat on the floor and feel suddenly taller, older.

  “Will I be tall like you someday?” I ask.

  She co
mes into the room carrying a grapefruit in a white bowl. The grapefruit has been cut in half and she has taken a sharp knife and outlined all the segments. She had special spoons for this and only this.

  “I think you will be taller,” she says, laughing. “And you will live a long, long life and be happy most of the time.”

  “Why not all of the time?” I ask.

  “Because then you would take it for granted,” she says.

  Then I am twenty. Twenty was good—I’d figured myself out and settled down to enjoy life. I stopped buying clothes I would never wear and wearing clothes I should never have bought. I picked a hair colour and stuck to it. I decided I was tired of living with roommates and got a very small apartment of my own. I was in my last year of my degree. I was looking at grad schools. I owned more books than furniture. My closet was bigger than my kitchen and I was up three flights of stairs but once I was up those stairs it was perfect. The living room had windows on three sides, and they all looked out into trees. Not onto trees but into them, because they were right there on the other side of the glass. I didn’t even need to hang curtains. I was pretty happy at twenty. I close my eyes and think about the light coming in through those trees.

  I am lying on my back on the floor of my apartment. I can see several paperback books that have fallen under the sofa and have been there long enough that they are lightly furred in dust. I wonder idly what they are, but don’t care enough to reach out my hand to find out.

  I’m slightly hungover and it’s strange but I like being hungover more than I like being drunk. I like the feeling, the loss of control, that has left me on my living room floor on this sunny Sunday afternoon when I am supposed to be somewhere else. I’m supposed to be meeting a boy. He is a boy, too, not a man at all.

  The way the sun is illuminating the dust motes in the air makes me think of how I used to imagine God when I was a child. I never understood all those pictures of bearded old men or anything else because for me he was clearly that stream of light that you would sometimes see leaking through the clouds. There was no reason for him to ever be any more visible than that, it seemed to me.