The Ghost Notebooks

by Ben Dolnick

  That was all that was written on one page. The handwriting was still Hannah’s, but different somehow, more fluid. I made a meaningless line in the margin. My heart had started to pound. I turned a couple of pages ahead.

  You are in the backseat green car a blond boy is driving pressing stereo buttons large square fingers the girl next to you is smoking out the window you see the moon low and red over the CVS you feel suddenly like crying but instead you cough…

  And a few pages after that:

  You are lying sideways on a twin bed with rumpled sheets the room is dark there’s another girl on the bed across the room who is doing something with her bare feet against the wall hanging Oberlin: Learning & Labor a boy is on the floor between you resting his head you know he would like to kiss you he has been looking for opportunities all night the lights are off the speakers are balanced on a milk crate…

  The entries were getting longer and longer—some of them were multiple pages now, but I was, for whatever reason, only capable of reading a few lines at a time; I felt like I was racing through a gauntlet of sharpened spears.

  You are standing in spotted shade you are facing your husband he is almost your husband your friends your family are sitting in chairs on logs they are fanning themselves your grandmother tiny and ancient is perched in the first row the rabbi is going on too long…

  You are walking down a brick path your hand is trailing on a black metal gate you are watching your baby he is squatting in rubber boots white wrinkles of diaper fat pale thighs he is digging for something in the dirt his little nails the sprinkler is turning slowly over dry hostas…

  You are sitting in a hard chair next to your dad who is in a high beige plastic bed your mom is by the window other buildings rows of windows the nineteenth floor she says to no one this is absolutely ridiculous these windows must have been designed by Rube Goldberg…

  If my skin had been attached to sensors, the temperature readout would now have fallen below freezing. My body, some animal thing in me, had worked out already what all this was.

  You are standing at a metal sink in a white kitchen scrubbing a pan that won’t come clean the party is still going you hear the laughter like a lapping tide you hear your husband’s voice come in here you watch the water turn white you scrub until your fingers ache…

  You are propped up in a small bed the sheets are tight around your legs a nurse leans toward you with a spoon says come on now you’ve got to eat you tighten your lips she pries them open your throat is dry the food tastes like something you can’t remember she says that’s it that’s right you close your eyes…

  My brain had now caught up with my body; the feeling was like an elevator reaching the ground floor too fast, that sickening thud. These were Hannah’s stories; this was Hannah’s life. That wedding was the wedding we would have had. That baby was the baby we would have had. I can’t explain how clearly this all came to me, how simple it seemed—it was as if something were pushing me toward the realization, and maybe something was. Your girlfriend was possessed by spirits and night after night, while you slept downstairs oblivious, she wrote out the story of her life. Spirits would show you a vision that would drive you insane, Jim had said, and here it was: your past and future laid out before you like a book.

  I don’t know how many times I read through the notebook, once I understood—I was fully sobbing now, so the words kept disappearing into a blur. Here was our first dance, here was our son discovering his feet, here was Hannah plucking her eyebrows in front of a hotel mirror, here was her fiftieth-birthday party on the deck of a boat, here was the morning in line at the airport, here was the nursing home. Are we going to be okay? Are we going to have a happy life? I kept wiping my eyes with my sleeve, senselessly repeating Hannah’s name. So this was the horror that had overtaken her, this was the vision she hadn’t known how to bear. “Do you ever get scared just of being alive?” she’d asked me once, mid-breakdown. I’d asked her what she meant but by then the window had closed, it was too late.

  For a while, sitting there in the storage room, I tried to write down my best guesses at places and dates next to each entry, to impose some kind of order on the flood that was swallowing me, but by the third or fourth time through I’d given up and was just making lines, little dashes of protest and heartbreak. My nose was running freely to my lips. My candle had burned down to a puddly stub.

  Finally, when I didn’t think I could read through it another time, I sat back against the wall, limp, with the notebook open to the last page in my lap. The shadows now covered almost the entire walls. My muscles were relaxed, in the way that someone’s muscles are relaxed after a lobotomy. My mind was empty, in the way a town square is empty after an atomic bombing. And so, if I’d been capable of thinking clearly, I wouldn’t have been surprised by what happened next. My body started to fill up with something both strange and deeply, cellularly familiar. I felt both terrified and liquidly calm. I was, I realized, some part of me was, not myself: I was Hannah walking across a field at dawn. The rest of me, still on the floor with a pencil in my hand, sat up and began to write.

  . . .

  I walked out of the house across the field I was barefoot the sun hadn’t risen I had made up my mind I was so tired I was afraid I couldn’t find the courage to live my life I crossed the hills this is the last grass the last sky the last morning I came to the riverbank the sun was almost up the trees were still wet I dragged the canoe red and heavy down through the grass pushed it out into the water upside down I wanted you to be okay I wanted you to think I had been okay now the air was aerosol the sky was scraps of cloud the edge of the river was reeds cold mud I walked out barefoot god it was cold not as cold as the air somehow I kept taking steps the water to my knees then my thighs I did have second thoughts I did shiver I could still feel where you’d touched me finally my waist finally deep enough that to go deeper I’d need to swim cold is just sensation I raised my arms plunged forward something screamed no but something else lowered my head under the surface the water was dark green-brown the river was deeper than I thought faster I told myself not to fight I was in a new sort of space I would forget and then remember and then forget and then it was like falling asleep I could feel my thoughts turn strange I couldn’t remember the last time I’d breathed I felt my mind nestling into something I couldn’t find the surface with every second I knew it would be harder to break out something in me wanted to break out something else was so content I let myself sink and sink I swallowed water freezing mud pain is just sensation my lungs didn’t hurt anymore I was slipping down and down regret is just sensation my body wasn’t me anymore I was leaving and leaving and then it was just a scarecrow that drifted down got caught on a branch I’m sorry I was already gone already here the pain was gone I didn’t know there are worse things than pain didn’t know I would be trapped here Nick every day and night I live my death I walk into the water I’ve waited for you please help me I don’t know how but Wright did please help me please help me please

  . . .

  By the time I woke up with Hannah’s notebook in my lap—I must have fallen asleep, or anyway into some sort of state in which time didn’t register—the sun was already going down again. My mouth was so dry that I could feel all the slight sandpaper variations inside. My body was excruciatingly stiff, and not just from having spent the past however many hours sitting up against a wall. I thought, honestly, that I might be dead, and that these might be the sensations I was stuck with for all time. The memory of having been Hannah had already slipped behind a dark curtain, as if I’d been under anesthesia.

  I stood up, propelled like a sleepwalker or a risen corpse, and stumbled my way downstairs. I didn’t have a candle anymore, so I was navigating mainly by leaning against the wall. I made my way out the front door onto the porch—there was a thin line of paler cloud behind some hills where the sun was setting—and I understood, from the way the wind hit my skin and my head ached, that I was in fact alive, however feeb
ly. I knelt down and drank a few freezing hand-cups of filthy water from the culvert next to the driveway. There was no one else out, but walking out onto the road, turning right at the Stop sign, starting almost at a jog along the gravel shoulder up the hill, I knew I wouldn’t have cared even if someone was.

  I don’t think I could have directed someone else to Butch’s house—I’d only been there a couple of times when he worked at Wright. And I don’t think I was conscious either of why my legs were carrying me there—this plan must have been hatched while I was asleep, or wherever I’d been. My mind had been stirred like a drink and the ice cube that was now bobbing on the surface was one I’d forgotten about completely: buried, not burned. So I walked up Cold Spring and left on Amenia and then back into the little tract of houses on the dirt loop that didn’t have a name. A tall gray dog was going insane behind an electric fence. A black horse in a plaid jacket was standing staring from the top of a hill. My ordinary consciousness was slowly coming online and I thought it must have been close to five o’clock now; I was aware, walking across the little yard and up the couple of cement steps to Butch’s front door, that I might present an alarming sight.

  His wife answered the door—I knew it was his wife despite never having met her. She had a long, hawkish, wary face, and she wore a black turtleneck. She called for Butch and he came to the door in a dark green work shirt and stained jeans. His hair was grayer than I’d remembered, or maybe I just wasn’t used to seeing him without a hat. I could hear the TV on somewhere behind him. He looked surprised but in no real way distressed to see me. He told his wife to bring me a glass of water, and while I drank it he put a hand on my shoulder—I don’t know if this was to stabilize me physically or mentally—and then gave me a look that meant, Well? He kept glancing off over my shoulder, as if I might have been trailed.

  I told him, in what must have been the clumsiest and least lucid string of sentences ever assembled, what it was I needed to do.

  “And you’re sure this’ll do something for you,” he said.

  “I think so.”

  He nodded, nodded again, and then went to the closet for his coat. A person’s quality is inversely proportional to the quantity of explanation he demands before agreeing to help a friend in need.

  It was Butch’s idea, once we were in his truck, for us to pick up his son. Bryce might have some better tools, Butch said, plus he was stronger than either one of us. There was an apple in a bag on the dashboard—this might have been another provision from his wife—and while we drove Butch insisted that I eat it; I had to stop myself from eating the core.

  Bryce only lived five minutes away, in a one-story house with an aboveground plastic pool in the yard. He climbed into the car, after a short conversation with Butch and a rummage through his own truck. I hadn’t been in this car, I realized, or seen Butch’s son, since the day we’d found Hannah. Those hands of Bryce’s had been the first ones to touch her. None of us talked, except to murmur slightly when a deer ran across the road. We pulled into the driveway at Wright, the flatbed clattering with shovels, just at the point when it was getting cold enough to see your breath. I led them back through the yard and into the woods and over to the clearing where the Wrights were buried. The ground was covered in feathery gray leaves. The gravestones looked like crooked front teeth.

  “So we’re gonna do this,” Bryce said.

  It wasn’t really a question, but I nodded. I don’t know how but Wright did please help me please. “Well,” Butch said, “something’s needed doing for a long time.”

  He went and pulled his truck into the yard, so he could shine his headlights on our work; Bryce disappeared for a while and then came back with a pickaxe, a cluster of shovels, and a few pairs of yellow work gloves.

  If your only experience with hole digging comes from sandcastle moats, or from burying tulip bulbs, then you can’t possibly understand what it was like digging our way to Wright’s coffin. The ground was almost frozen, for one thing, which meant that once we’d cleared away the leaves, we spent the first couple of hours of work—hours—smashing away at the grave with the pickaxe and shovels. Having never held a pickaxe before, this was, for a few minutes, satisfyingly brutal work. But cold ground, especially cold ground embedded with roots and stones, is an astonishingly unyielding substance. We pounded and pounded, dug and dug, and only communicated via grunts and nods, shifting around each other occasionally, kneading our arms, flexing our hands. For the first time in days, I wasn’t cold. I had taken off my wool coat and pushed the sleeves of my shirt up almost to my shoulders. Butch’s shirt was soaked with sweat. Bryce had taken off both of his shirts—his physique was like a carny’s, somehow—and now steam was rising off of his actual skin. Still, by nine o’clock, when the moon was racing to the peak of the sky like a white balloon someone had lost hold of, we had succeeded only in making a hummocky mess of the grave’s top layer. By ten we had dug out maybe another foot and I had done something to my right shoulder that sent a searing, unmistakably nerve-related pain across the entire length of my back with every stroke.

  But desperation—the conviction that someone you love’s well-being depends on your finishing—is an astonishing taskmaster. I thought I’d known determination from music, or from college papers written the night before they were due, but these had been nothing, Christmas lights beside bonfires. So with my burning shoulder, and with popped blisters underneath both of my gloves, and with Butch and his son working just as hard on either side of me, I dug. And dug. And dug. There’s a hypnotic aspect to any action that you repeat for long enough; I was actually in more pain, I realized, whenever I stopped digging. The hole was taking on an impressive shape, with walls that barely tapered. It was midnight and then it was one in the morning, and we were down, finally, in the heart of the ground, deep enough that someone could have hurt themselves by stumbling in. And we were getting better at it, too; I was, anyway. Sometimes I stabbed the point of the shovel into the wall of the hole in order to dislodge a rock or to cut through a root. Sometimes I focused on flinging out the backfill. The ground gets softer after the first few feet, it turns out. And body pain transforms itself eventually into a scary sort of lightness—not that it ever became easy, exactly, but just that exhaustion stopped being something I was struggling against and started being the mildly acidic substance in which I was floating. I was in a kind of fugue when Butch finally said, “I think we’ve got to stop for the night.” His son was up at the truck, drinking something from a thermos.

  We climbed out—Butch pulled me by the wrist—and we were standing near the edge of the woods when Butch said he wanted to tell me something. I thought, from the way he was looking at me, that he might be about to hug me.

  “Hannah asked me a question a week before she died,” he said. “About the Kemps. Said she wanted to know if I knew anything more about what happened. I told her I didn’t.”

  I nodded.

  “It wasn’t true,” he said. He wasn’t looking at me while he spoke. “I never told anybody this. A little bit before Mrs. Kemp disappeared, my brother told me something that one of the Kemp girls, Marjorie, had told him. Mrs. Kemp had started seeing her future, he told me. Having visions every night of herself as an old lady. It was driving her crazy, Marjorie said. I should have told Hannah that.”

  “It’s—” I started to say, meaning to express that it was okay, that it wouldn’t have made any difference, that he’d done enough.

  But he wouldn’t hear of it. Bryce appeared from the other side of the truck and draped his T-shirt over his shoulder before giving me, or the grave, a half salute. Butch plunged his shovel into the dirt as if it were a bayonet. They both shook my hand and climbed in the car.

  I never really considered giving up for the night after they pulled away. I understood, I think, that I was down to my last days, or even hours, at the museum and so I’d better not put anything off. My shoulder had stiffened up, just in the time that I’d been standing by their truck, so
I had to do most of the rest of the digging with my left arm. It was harder to see without Butch’s headlights but I knew the hole more or less by feel now. I would work at one end for half an hour and then move over and even things up at the other. There was much less left to do than I would have thought, anyway; I wondered if Butch had somehow known this.

  My shovel tapped wood for the first time just before it started to get light out, or just when the darkness started to have an edge of blueness to it that I guess was the pre-roll for its getting light out. The hole couldn’t have been much deeper than four feet by then, so at first I thought it was another rock, an enormous smooth rock that I would now have to lever out, jumping and jumping on my blade, but I leaned closer and I saw the grain of the wood, the splinteriness of it, and I had to struggle not to fall over. It took until full-on sunrise, an oil spill of color behind the woods, for me to get the coffin’s whole surface exposed. It was a no-nonsense coffin: solid as an oak door, with black metal handles on the sides. I tossed my shovel up out of the pit. Until right that minute, I realized, I hadn’t fully reckoned with what I was going to do. It turns out that you can distinguish the heart racing caused by exertion and the heart racing caused by terror, even when both are going on simultaneously.

  I pried open the lid—it came away easier than I expected, because the hinges had fallen off—and the first thing that struck me was the smell, which was…intense, complicated, yellow somehow, but not unbearable, just dense with the information that I shouldn’t be there. I was standing straddling the coffin now, leaning down over it like it was some sort of horrible bassinet. It was full of brown stringy tatters, a whole layer of them, and it took me a minute to realize that these must have been Wright’s clothes, or a fabric that he’d been wrapped in. I wondered if his body had somehow been shredded too, if this was all that was left of him. I was breathing hard, and entirely through my mouth. I dug gently through the tatters for a minute, an activity like clearing away packing peanuts. And then I froze (even through gloves it was unmistakable): I’d touched bone. I’ve thought since then how it is that I don’t have a better visual memory of that first moment of glimpsing Wright’s body, his skeleton, but it was still semi-dark down there, and I was averting as much of my attention as it was possible to do without actually closing my eyes. I do remember the position of his hands, right over left, and the surprising length of his finger bones. And I remember accidentally shifting him at one point, nudging him with the back of my hand, and realizing that his body, what there was of him, was as light as if it had been made of straw. But I barely had to touch his body, once I’d finished clearing the tatters away, because there beside his head (all I remember about the skull is the size of the eye sockets) was a long wooden box with a brass pattern inlaid. I knew—the thing that been steering me all night knew—that this was what I’d been looking for.