by Susan Vaught
I just had to figure out where to start to solve it.
3
GHOSTOLOGY
* * *
Excerpt from Night on Fire (1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 23
Nothing matters but breathing, to be alive. My father forgot about that one rainy September day, when he and his crew pulled up too much wet tobacco during the big harvest. He was drenched from his hat to his shoes when he got home, and fell down drooling and sweating and throwing up. He died before Mama could bring the lady from down the road, who knew about cures and plant medicine. Two men on Daddy’s crew died the same way before the night ran out, even with the Granny Woman’s help.
Green Tobacco Sickness.
If the farmer had waited a day or two, until the leaves got dry, they’d all still be alive—but that would have cost him plants, and cost him money. More than my father was worth, I guess. More than all those lives. Work, or get fired and get no pay, and let your family starve.
It wasn’t even casual cruelty. That’s maybe the worst part, thinking back on it now. Not meanness, or spite, or the darkness of human nature.
It was just life in Mississippi, holding hands with Jim Crow.
WHEN I WAS SURE I had eaten enough salad and organically raised cage-free boiled chicken eggs to please Mom and Dad both, I cleaned up after myself and lugged the dictionary back to its table in the living room, and went upstairs. I wanted to talk to Indri.
I checked my charging phone, but I had no all-clear text from her, which meant she hadn’t spoken to her dad yet. He was serving in Afghanistan, and they barely got any time to speak at all, so I couldn’t tie up her line. She was still off limits, like Worm Dung and Grandma’s purses, only Worm Dung wasn’t here, and the purses were in a closet right next to my room.
After a few minutes of staring at the wall and trying to ignore the purses’ existence, I changed Worm Dung’s ring and text tones and unfriended him on every social media account I owned. That felt pretty good. Except none of that made the purses go away. I went over to the little refurbished school desk in the corner of my room, lifted the lid, and took out a book I hadn’t started. The cover was cream-colored with a picture of a witch riding a unicorn on the front. She was supposed to be a good witch, I guess, because of the unicorn and her glittery golden dress.
I tried to read a few pages, but I couldn’t concentrate. I put back the book and paced up and down across the open part of my room, in front of the windows, going from my closet door past my rocking chairs to my long dresser, the one with my socks in it. Maybe Grandma wrote me a story, and that’s what I’d find in one of her bags, hidden deep in her closet. I’d probably regret it if I read it now.
Closet door. Rocking chairs. Sock drawer.
What if it was a finished manuscript we could sell for extra money to help with her care? Mom wouldn’t have to work two jobs then, and we could hire more help, and Dad could relax, and his blood pressure would probably get better. Grandma might have thought ahead that way, and trusted me to dig through her purses at just the right moment.
Sock drawer. Rocking chairs. Closet door. My socks scooted on the hardwood as I walked.
By the time Grandma moved in with us, she was already getting a little paranoid. I didn’t understand that when I was younger, but I had learned that her suspicion was part of her Alzheimer’s disease. When she lost things and couldn’t remember where she put them, she thought people were hiding her stuff. When she forgot to pay her electric bill and her power got shut off, she thought the utility company was out to get her. She talked about persecution and plots a lot, and stuff she thought she did—so maybe she just thought she hid something in her purses for me to find, or wrote about plots and conspiracy theories or other nonsense.
Nonsense I wasn’t supposed to touch until she was gone, which sort of seemed like a promise even though I never made it. That word again—gone. Was she gone enough for me to see what she left me?
Closet door. Rocking chairs. Sock drawer. Rocking chairs. Closet doors.
I could hear my parents speaking softly to each other as they left Grandma’s room. Last year, I would have heard Grandma too. I would have come home and told her all about Mac, and cried, and she would have wrapped her arms around me and held me tight, and she never would have said I was being dramatic, or getting upset over something that wasn’t a real problem.
I stopped at my rocking chairs and sat down, heavy with remembering what life was like before my grandmother’s mind hopped a bus for parts unknown. Or maybe I was just waiting until my parents’ voices got quiet and I knew they had gone to bed for the night. Because once they had, it took only a second for me to sneak into Grandma’s room.
Wait, wait. Not sneaking. Sneaking meant doing something wrong, and I wasn’t exactly— Oh, never mind. I was sneaking. On tiptoes and everything.
Grandma lay in her bed, breathing quietly. She didn’t even twitch as I beelined for her closet and creaked open that door as quietly as I could. The inside light flicked on, pitching everything behind me into soft blue shadows just as the smell of her clothes hit me full in the face—light, almost sweet, like flowers, but sharper. It was her perfume, something old she had worn my whole life, called Oh! De London. It made me think of Grandma in pantsuits and lipstick, her hair perfectly in place, fixed up to go write at her favorite desk in her favorite carrel at Ole Miss’s library.
Tears popped into my eyes. I wiped them with the bottom of my shirt, then my face, and did my own quiet breathing. It took me a few seconds to blink away the idea of crying and fix my attention on the section of the closet where her purses hung.
Feeling halfway out of my own body, I opened one bag after the other, glancing inside and feeling around in the pockets. If I didn’t find anything envelope-like, I moved on. The sixth purse, the seventh—maybe this was just stupid, and I’d be standing here smelling perfume flowers when Mom or Dad came in to check, and they’d give me the look, and I’d feel awful, and—
And there. Purse number eleven. My fingers ran across the top of an envelope, and I pulled it out. Hands shaking, I brought it into the light and stared at it. White. Standard business size. The top of it was a little dusty, so I swept it off with my fingertips. There was one word written on the front of the envelope:
Oops.
I tried to breathe, but my throat pinched shut. For a few seconds I could hear the whump-whump of my own heartbeat. My fingers traveled up and down the edges of the envelope, tapping the corners. So, Grandma hadn’t been just talking out of her head. There really was an envelope in one of her purses, and it had my name on it. It felt like it had papers inside and maybe something else, something heavier than paper and all lumpy.
I walked backward out of the closet and let the door shut. It made enough of a noise that my eyes shifted to the bedroom door, and I imagined my parents coming in again. They’d be here to check on Grandma soon anyway. They probably would not approve of me going through her stuff, least of all to get an envelope she had left for me to read when she was “gone.”
Assuming they didn’t kill me straight off, Mom would be all, You’re being dramatic again. You’ve gone to this trouble, so just open it, Dani, have a look, and be done with it.
Dad would be like, She said that’s for when she’s gone. Does your grandmother look gone to you?
And Mac would say, Open it. Jeez. What are you waiting for?
And Indri. She’d think about it, and use her relationship talents to divine what my grandmother really meant, and she’d say something like, How about a compromise? Just glance at what’s inside, maybe read a little bit of it, and get an idea what it’s about. That would totally be Indri.
I liked that idea best of all, but I didn’t like it either, because I just didn’t know what I should do. So, I snuck out of Grandma’s room, still on tiptoes, put the envelope on my bed, covered it with my bedspread, and went and took a shower.
Ghostology
By Ruth Beans
&nb
sp; Seriously, that’s all the first page said.
So much for imaginary-Indri’s compromise. I talked to her after she Skyped with her dad, but we stayed on the subjects of how good her dad was doing, what presents he was sending her, and Worm Dung and her various ideas for getting even with him. I kinda liked the anonymous website involving several embarrassing photos of donkeys, but only in the abstract. I wanted to tell her about Grandma’s envelope, but the words wouldn’t come out.
Until I couldn’t sleep, and everyone else—even my grandmother—could. The entire city of Oxford seemed to be snoring, and I was awake, and I opened the envelope marked Oops, even though I felt totally, completely guilty.
The first thing I got out was the lumpy thing, which was a golden key. It had three loops on the end and a long barrel, like old-fashioned door keys, except smaller, and it was too big to be a diary key. I stared at it for a while and turned it around and around in my palm, wondering what it unlocked. Finally, I tucked it under my pillow, figuring I’d know more about it after I read what Grandma wrote. If I even did read it before, you know, she was actually gone.
Only—what I found on the first page—who even knew what to make of that?
Ghostology.
I sat on my bed in the dark and used my phone to shine light on the first page of the papers inside my grandmother’s secret envelope, and just kept looking at the word. The world hadn’t stopped spinning or exploded when I opened the envelope, but I swear it was like my grandmother was teasing me. If she still had all her wits, she’d probably be laughing her butt off and telling me how much I deserved this confusion and giving me some quote to look up about ethics and conscience, or maybe karma.
I couldn’t go down to the living room to get the dictionary without waking up the whole house, so I used my phone to Google Ghostology and hoped for the best.
Apparently, the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne made up the word in a book called Septimius Felton, or The Elixir of Life. After he invented it, nobody much used it, until in the last few years, when it got related to ghostlore, or the scientific study of ghosts and the supernatural.
Just thinking about ghosts made my heart beat a little too fast, and I had to spend a few seconds shining my phone all around my dark room, chasing away all the shadows.
“Ghostology,” I whispered to keep the silence away from me. Why would Grandma write about ghosts? She didn’t really like fiction books all that much, and she always teased me for reading so much about creepy things and other planets and magic.
I turned the phone’s light back to the page I had pulled out of the envelope. It looked like the beginning of a manuscript. With a sigh, feeling something between surrender and guilt, I pulled out the second page.
The text wasn’t dense. It looked more like a poem than a story. As I read it, my eyes opened a little wider.
For My Granddaughter
I couldn’t find my car at the shopping center, and I walked around for an hour, looking for it and getting madder and madder-and scared, too.
That’s how it starts, Oops.
You don’t think much about it that first time, even if you’ve never had a problem finding your car in a parking lot before.
You don’t worry when you lose your wallet, or you can’t put your hands on the keys you know you left on the table, or when you call a friend by somebody else’s name.
Then it gets worse.
Then it gets more.
Then you know.
And then you’re gone.
-Ruth Beans
At the very bottom of the page, I found a date. It was the year my grandmother found out she had Alzheimer’s disease, before she ever moved in with us. I didn’t think twice before pulling out the next page. In the eerie light of the phone, I read the first page of the thick letter she left for me.
So, my little Oops, it’s like this.
Today, after a bunch of tests, my doctor told me and your father that I have Alzheimer’s disease. There’s nothing they can do for it. It’ll take me in bits and pieces, until I’m no more than a ghost of myself, like in those science fiction and fantasy stories you’re always reading. I don’t know what to say to my boy, because when my doctor explained it to us, Marcus cried. You’re too young to understand right now, but your father realizes that before I die, you’ll all learn the details of Alzheimer’s disease, Oops. He understands that you’ll know my face, and my eyes, and my arms and my hands, and my fingers and my toes. You just won’t know me, and I won’t know you.
So, I want to leave a little bit of myself for you to find. I want you to know me, Oops. The real me, not that ghost you’ll come to call Grandma, and the subjects that are most important to me-our history, and the parts of it that are being forgotten like the United States itself has gotten Alzheimer’s. That’s why I sat down to write this, so you’ll have it, so you can share what you think should be shared with your parents and your friends, even with the world if that’s what you decide. But it’s harder than I thought it would be.
If you could write about yourself and tell your favorite person who you are, what would you say? You should try that sometime, because I have as many pages as I can stay myself to write—and it seems like way too much and not enough, all at the same time.
For now, I’ll just tell you I’m scared.
I’m going to forget everything, but maybe if I get some of myself on paper, you won’t forget me, or how much I love you.
Bear with me, Oops. I don’t want to be just a ghost to you, so I’m going to do the best I can.
Tears made the words look funny, and with just the light of my phone, I couldn’t stand how everything blurred. I smoothed the three pages I had sort of stolen from my grandmother’s closet, and I carefully tucked them back into the envelope. I put the key back inside the envelope too, and I slid the whole thing under my pillow to keep it out of sight, but close to me. Then I shut off my phone and snuck into my grandmother’s room again.
She lay in her hospital bed, motionless and quiet. A night-light glowed beside the table where we kept the supplies we needed to change her, just enough light so that she wouldn’t be totally confused and scared if she woke. Moonlight blazed through the open window, spilling across her feet, and a warm breeze still moved her curtains.
I went to the chair next to her bed and put my hand on her chest. She didn’t stir at all. A second or two later, relief washed through me as her breathing moved my palm up and down. I checked her pulse. Seventy-seven. For now, she was okay.
Sooner or later, Oops, we’re all gonna be okay. I could hear her voice, like she was whispering in my ear, but her eyes stayed closed.
Sometime after that, my own eyes closed. I slept right there until Dad found me. I remember him kissing the top of my head as he carried me to my own bed.
4
BEST FRIENDS NEVER SPEAKING TO EACH OTHER AGAIN
* * *
Excerpt from Night on Fire (1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 74
Mama and her youngest sister, Aunt Jessie, kept trying to talk to me about school. I was past fourth grade. I could earn money if I went on to work in the fields, or cleaning houses. But I wanted learning. I wanted to stay in school.
“You so stubborn, you could argue with a fence post and win,” Mama grumbled as Aunt Jessie nodded.
School might not have taught me everything, but I knew when to keep my mouth shut. I clamped my teeth so hard my jaw hurt from it, tight and ready in case Mama turned loose one of her skin-stinging slaps.
“I don’t have time for this,” she said. “I have to go to work.” She pointed her finger in my face. “And the sooner you start training like I did, the better.”
By training, she meant to farm or clean. That’s what she did, all day, every day, sixteen hours, eighteen hours—it never ended for Mama. Aunt Jessie had lost a foot to the sugar already, so she couldn’t do much other than see to me and the house. Both of us watched Mama walk to her room and slam the door behind herself.
“I don’t care,” I told her. “The books are at school.”
“Old books. Hand-me-downs from some White child who’d spit on you soon as she’d look at you. One teacher for fifty of you crammed into a firebox waitin’ on a match—what’s the point, CiCi? You don’t even have a desk. Only the little ones get desks, right?”
I folded up my arms and glared at my aunt. “Just you wait. One day, I’ll write a book like William Faulkner. I’ll write a dozen!”
“Now ain’t that a big bunch of silly dreams.” Aunt Jessie laughed at me. “Your teacher ain’t got a degree in nothin’, and they can’t pay her—how long you think she’ll stay?”
I WANTED TO TELL MOM or Dad or both of them about Grandma’s envelope. I wanted to tell Indri, or talk to Mac about it, but two weeks ago Mac had turned into Worm Dung, and nobody talked to people named Worm Dung. And Dad’s blood pressure had been going up and down a lot, and Mom was still trying to get used to working her regular job with all the dead people, and also working a second job teaching a class about all the different ways people can die.
Indri—well, she was Indri, but her yellows and pinks had been more blues and browns the longer her dad stayed deployed. Everybody had their own tough stuff to deal with, and they didn’t even ask for their troubles, like I asked for mine by taking things from Grandma’s purse fourteen days ago.
More than anything, I wanted to read more of what Grandma had to say, but I felt guilty about even touching the paper and the key, because it was like admitting I thought Grandma was already a ghost.
The day you were born, Oops, it was the best day of my life. Now don’t tell your daddy that, because you know he thinks his birthday should be the best day. Oh, but you, little girl—you had curls the second you popped into this world. You screwed up your pretty face and yelled yourself purple, and all I wanted to do was kiss your little baby forehead. As of the day I’m writing this, I still see the future shining out of your round brown eyes.