My Ghosts

by Mary Swan

  They hear Charlie’s stumbling footsteps on the stairs as they get ready for bed. A muffled curse and the sound of him throwing himself down on top of his covers. “I hope it works out,” Nan says, meaning the man with the cart who owed Charlie a favour and has promised to come in the morning, promised to move their things cheaply.

  “If it doesn’t,” Kez says, “we’ll make a parade.” She pictures them marching through the streets, carrying their beds, the kitchen table, beating the big kitchen pot like a drum. Like the circus, with a bedecked elephant leading the way—no, not that. Maybe a camel, or a dancing bear.

  “Didn’t Mam always love a parade,” Nan says, and it’s true, though Kez had quite forgotten. She’s been dead seven years now, their father longer, and longer still since Ross walked away. One of her stories about Wee Alan, who died, was how he marched up the ship’s gangway and gave a salute, like a proper little soldier.

  If anyone asked, their mother could tell them everything about Wee Alan. The colour of his eyes and the way they dipped down a little at the outside corners, the way he held his crossed hands out to catch a ball of yarn. She didn’t often say, because it was rare that anyone mentioned him, but the details must have been so clear in her mind, as if they were always there, just waiting to break through. Clare said maybe that made it hard for Ross, who came right after, but Kez said, “And so? Everybody’s got things that are hard for them.”

  Even though they turn it every spring and every fall there are hollows in the mattress from the weight of their sleeping bodies. Like an embrace, the settling in, but the years of moulding also mean that it’s impossible to feel comfortable any other way. There’s a sudden thump above their heads, which will be Clare’s book falling from her drowsing hands, a thing that will rouse her enough to blow out the light. I’ll never hear that again, Kez thinks. That exact sound, and knowing what it is. The room Clare has chosen in the new house is on the same floor, at the other end of the hall from theirs. The one with windows on two sides and the best view of the night sky. From what the others have described Kez pictures a very long hallway, lined with closed, properly fitting doors. There could be anyone doing anything behind them.

  “Remember that game?” Nan says, and of course she is already thinking about it. The first night Clare was in the house she was put to bed between them, and she didn’t make a peep, but they could feel how her whole body trembled. So they told her about the rule, how in this bed, if one person wanted to turn over, they all had to do it together. They had to say one two three, they had to say one two three—whoops! and roll over at the exact same time. “Do you hear me, Clare?” Kez said, and she had to say it again before Clare answered with a soft yes. “And do you need to turn over, Clare?” Nan said, and she said yes again. So—one two three whoops!—they all rolled over, and said it and did it again, and again, until Clare had tired herself into sleep with her giggling. A thing they did night after night after night, for who knows how long.

  Just talking about it makes them both need to roll, and Kez wonders why that is. Why is it that once the thought comes into your mind you can’t possibly be comfortable the way you were. And that makes her think, of course it does, of the summer before Clare arrived, when Nan eloped and she had the whole bed to herself, the first and only time. She remembers tossing and stretching, and often lying flat like a corpse in a coffin, but with open eyes looking into the dark.

  “I thought I saw him today,” Nan says now, their minds in the same place yet again. “Just for a moment I thought it,” she says. “I was looking out the front door for you and there was a man walking down the street, and just for a moment I thought it was him.” Tam O’Malley, charmer and thief, cause of all kinds of destruction. Ashes in his wake that drift through the air, through the years.

  He was the older cousin of a boy they knew at school, come to visit for a while. They met him by the lake on a first mild day of spring when so many people had gone down to look out at the open water. Tam had money in his pocket and a store of jokes and riddles; he bought them warm buns and walked them partway home, had them laughing until they ached. They were fourteen, they were fifteen that spring, felt itchy and dangerous, and their mother often scolded them for taking so long with any errand, not knowing how far they ranged to pass by places he’d said he might be. Tam was always glad to see them, swept off his cap with a flourish, and he always had stories to tell. “I’m not shocking you now, am I?” he said, though he would have known he was.

  It wasn’t clear just when he made a choice. “All for one,” he’d say when they were out walking. “Do you know that story?” Brandishing an imaginary sword, swishing and lunging, and laughing at the sour look from an old man who had to dodge his flailing arm. On the narrow pathways in Victoria Park, sometimes one was behind, sometimes the other, and Kez only remembers one time, when she’d tripped and twisted her ankle, that they settled her on a bench and went on for a while alone. Fool that she was, no more prepared than their parents were for the empty half of the bed, the note on the kitchen table.

  “I didn’t tell you so you wouldn’t have to lie to anyone,” is what Nan said when they were alone on the rainy day she came back. “I was thinking of you,” Nan said, as they settled to sleep that night, and what could Kez do but believe her. Choose to believe her, though she has always known how her sister, with her round, kind face, can say anything at all and not be doubted. If Lisbet’s mother had sent a policeman to their door, that long-ago day, it’s Kez he would have come for, not Nan, who always looked like butter wouldn’t melt. The same way it was Kez that Aunt Peach pointed out with her crooked finger when someone kicked her shin hard, beneath the kitchen table.

  Over the years she’s come to believe that it was an accomplice Tam was looking for, not a wife, and at times she’s been close to saying it. She’s not used to holding her tongue, but she knows that would be a step too far, that it would undo all the careful mending between them. Nan has told her some of it, but even Kez doesn’t know everything she got up to, those months she was gone. “I would have followed him anywhere,” she said. “Done anything. I did.” Travelling from town to town, following the fairs, any spectacle. Jostling through each crowd, leaving empty pockets in their wake, and spending every cent on meals in fancy dining rooms, dressed up like dandies. “Such laughs,” Nan said. Until the day she got careless and stopped to watch the rope walker dancing his little jig in the sky. A hard hand coming down on her shoulder, her panicked eyes catching the back of Tam’s new brown jacket as he walked quickly away.

  Exactly what came after is a thing Nan has kept to herself. At some point it involved their parents, and a fine they could ill afford, but the apologies and forgiveness stayed between the three of them. “They were softer than I thought,” is all she’s ever said. Kez planned a frosty silence, but it didn’t last beyond the first meal, everyone else carrying on as if there’d never been an empty space at the table. She was still determined not to ask a thing, but before they slept she found herself telling Nan about the ribbon she won at the picnic on the Island, and the time just that week she saw Ross walking arm in arm with a woman, her hips sashaying like anything.

  When she said that, Nan told her they’d had it all wrong, the things they’d wondered about men and women. “There’s all kinds of ways,” she said. “Like that,” Nan whispered once in a shop, nodding toward the grocer’s wife who was bent over, scooping apples from the bottom of a barrel. “Like a dog?” Kez whispered back, the strangest picture forming in her mind of the fat grocer with a spaniel’s head. Sometimes Nan just raised an eyebrow when they walked past a kneeling housewife rubbing hard at her brass doorknob, or a man with a hosepipe spraying the dusty street. At moments like that, when their shaking shoulders bumped and they tried so hard not to look at each other, when their laughter finally spurted out—at moments like that they were as close as they ever had been.

  Things work themselves out if you leave them alone; that’s what their father
always said. A thing that drove their mother mad, and madder still when he was proved right. A man settling a forgotten bill just before the rent was due, a neighbour gifting them with a pair of shoes her daughter had outgrown. She and Nan have found a way to go on, without ever saying, and it’s been so long now that Kez wonders sometimes if she only imagines the difference, though she has no idea why she’d do that. Surely it’s real, what you think and what you remember. Otherwise you’d be as scrambled as Aunt Peach was at the end, as loony as that professor of Clare’s, who told them in the first class to imagine a world where nothing that they thought they knew was true.

  Her prize ribbon turned up when they were going through the little room off the kitchen. Kez poked it deep into the fire, watched it twitch and shrivel. Such a silly thing to have been proud of, but it was the first time she’d won anything, hopping over the line with her ankle tied to Mabel Crichton’s from school, instead of always hobbling in third with her own sister. She wore Nan’s pale green dress that day; served her right for leaving it behind. And a little straw bonnet that covered her ears, and though she hadn’t even wanted to go to the church picnic, on the ferry ride to the Island she felt a little buzz of excitement, as if wonderful things could happen.

  After the races, as she was making her way back to where her mother had settled with their food, she stumbled over a stone, and a warm hand clasped her arm and kept her from falling. A young man a little shorter than she was, with slicked-down hair and a smooth face. When she met him again later, as it was growing dark, it was only natural that they should begin to walk together, their steps somehow taking them away from the circle of light and sound, and into the sighing trees. She thought it was going to happen, and it did; he took her hand and they stopped walking, his lips bumped into hers and stayed there, and she thought, So this is what it’s like. Not much to make a fuss about really, this kissing, but nice to be able to say that she’d done it. She couldn’t wait to tell Nan, then remembered that Nan was gone.

  Well, that’s enough of that, was her next thought; it was getting late and her mother would be cross if they had to go looking for her when they were ready to leave. But the young man pressed on with his wet lips, his fingers digging into her shoulders, and then, to her astonishment, she felt his foot hook around the back of her calf. She knew that move, a girl who grew up with three wrestling brothers, and she pushed hard on his chest and gave him a good crack on the nose with her sharp elbow. The sound of his curses fading to nothing behind her as she walked quickly back to the light. “There you are,” her mother said. “Help me fold this blanket.” Then she said, “What have you been doing? Your nice ribbon’s gotten all crumpled.”

  That’s how she remembers it, that’s what happened; it must be, or why would she remember it? When she told Nan, long after, she said she’d seen him again in the ferry line, with his nose all purple and swollen. She didn’t think she really had, but she might have. “Good for you, old Jug,” Nan said. “Good for you.”

  The dream announces itself as it always does, with the sound of a horn, with far-off music and laughter. This time she’s in a boat on a river and her father is rowing, his face tilted up to the sun. Ross is splashing beside them, with a streak of soot on his face, and then everything changes. She needs to wake up; there’s a smell of damp earth as she struggles with her heavy eyes, and they open in the dream just before they really do. She sees the giant face and knows she’s deep in the fairy knoll, where Thomas the Rhymer is rousing himself for battle, his heavy head propped on his enormous, stony arm, and she is so tiny beside him.

  In their bed Nan snuffles in her sleep and Kez knows she’ll be awake now for hours, at the mercy of the thoughts in her head. Unreasonable expectations—the phrase floats up and there’s no escape from thinking about what a fool she’s been. A fool, and a thief and a liar besides; she should be locked up in jail, it’s what she deserves. Going along like an idiot child who believed all those stories of rescue, of transformation.

  In the dark she slaps her cheek, thumps her chest, and though the clipping no longer crackles, she imagines the sound. She’s been wearing it next to her skin for weeks, tucked into her chemise. The newsprint now soft as flannel with bits rubbed away, but she folded it carefully, to protect the important part. She could burn it too, but she thinks it more fitting to leave it where it is, blackening her skin as it shreds away to nothing.

  You make your own luck, her mother always said, and that’s what she thought she was doing. Breaking a spell that might have been cast at the moment of her birth, or later, when Peach took shape in the gloom. It was an evening like any other, with an autumn tang in the air. The rest were all in bed and she was tidying up a few last things, folding the newspaper Ben had left spread out on the table. The picture caught her eye, above the advertisement for the Electro-Therapy Institute, on Church Street. A drawing of a woman’s head, in profile, who looked so serene, so happy. The smiling curve that was half her mouth, and her hair dressed to show the flattest, most delicate swirl of ear.

  She might have tossed the paper in the kindling box and thought no more about it. She might have shown someone, shown Nan; no matter what, they’ve always been braver and better together. Instead she let the idea settle and spread, so proud of herself for recognizing the secret sign. It’s Science, of course it is, as Ben always says, that will make everything better. The next day she walked down Church Street, put her hand to the gleaming door and asked the cost, as if she was someone with every right to be there. The next step, simply, to find the three dollars, which was more than Charlie made in a week, but less than Ben did, and not an impossible sum. She thought of looking for some work she could do, but how could she explain it? And how to keep the money for herself, without saying why?

  Kez tosses her head in the dark, and wonders how she didn’t even feel the weave of the new spell settling around her, the evil that she did, telling herself that the others would understand if they knew, all the while being so careful that they wouldn’t. How could she not have heard the gurgling laugh of whatever creature was watching, so delighted to see her plotting, the pathetic excuses she made to herself. Telling herself that if she made sure to eat less, no one else would really suffer for the money she took from the housekeeping jar. “Maybe you’re losing your mind,” she told Nan, who was puzzled when she tipped it out to count. “Soon you’ll be drooling in a chair like old Peach, but don’t worry, Moon, I’ll wipe your chin for you.”

  She kept the coins in a little cloth purse Clare had made when she was learning to sew, adding one or two at a time, and the sound they made when she hefted it was the music of her transformed life. She thought briefly of raiding the box under Charlie’s bed for something to pawn, telling herself that none of it was well-gotten, that he was so careless he wouldn’t even notice; a mercy that she didn’t do it, but that’s the smallest of comforts now. She thinks instead of how she felt this morning, the grand day finally arrived. She slipped out the door, wondering if this was how Ross had felt, how Nan had, walking toward a new life. Thinking already of the welcome she would receive when she came back changed. And somewhere up ahead, a vision of a hazy-faced husband, of children toddling across a gleaming floor. Money enough to spread around, so that everyone would know what a good and kind person she really was.

  In the dark she presses her hands to her mouth. The long moan she’s stifled rolls through her body instead, and she doesn’t know how she’ll survive it. She’s always thought that the worst thing is for others to know; that the pinch could be borne, as long as you didn’t let on. All wrong about that too, this is far worse. She’s shamed herself, in some deep and total way. Fooled herself, caught up in a bubble of hope, as if it would float her away, when all it did was leave something too fragile between her and the malevolent world.

  There’s no stopping it now, the memory of that warm and quiet room. The crackle of the fire, and the soft scratch of the pen as the doctor made her notes. She looked like the dr
awing in the newspaper, except for the spectacles and the hair; her eyes, seen straight on, were so gentle. Beside her desk was the magic machine and it looked, with its wires and dials, like something Ben might have rigged up when he was younger.

  “So you feel generally unwell,” the doctor had said, and she asked Kez to tell her more; it would help determine the course of the treatment. “Well,” Kez had said, trying to think. She began to answer, and before she knew it her mouth got ahead of her. She heard herself saying all kinds of things about the way she felt the cold, and the sleepless nights, about having to take charge of things and the way her brothers and sisters always teased her because of it but really, how else would anything get done? And how this move, which had started out as such a good and exciting thing, had turned everything upside down. Nothing where she expected it to be, not even her thoughts. She said that the way she felt lately, the way it really felt, was like that game they played as children. When they tied a blindfold over your eyes and spun you around, and you bumped hard into walls, and that sent you bouncing into something else, stumbling over stools and rucks in the carpet, and all you could hear was everyone laughing.

  After she’d blotted her eyes she said something about her ears, asked how many treatments it would take before they lay nice and flat. The doctor’s startled blink was like a mesmerist snapping his fingers; in an instant Kez was brutally awake, but with the complete knowledge of the ridiculous, shameful things she’d been saying. The doctor was speaking kindly, saying something about other benefits, about expectations, but Kez could barely make it out; the chair rocked as she stood up and the doorknob rattled in her hand until she turned it the right way. The next thing she remembers is her pounding feet, out in the snowy street, and a voice called after her, but she didn’t stop.