My Ghosts

by Mary Swan

  In the evenings he sometimes went walking, to help him fall into a clean sleep. In the house he left behind, Jane was making the next day’s lunches or scouring the kitchen sink while his daughter did her homework, and he knew they’d be there when he came back, and there if he never did. I walk by night; he tried to remember the whistled tune that opened that old show but he couldn’t get it started, and he thought how strange it was, how you could go years without thinking about a thing, but then it popped up.

  Usually he walked the path that ran beside the last row of houses, and carried on into the long grass of the open fields. Fireflies flickered, like stars fallen down from the sky, and the damp, weedy smell made him think of Edie, blinking in the harsh indoor light. He thought he understood it now, the instinct and the quiet bravery that sent her out with her trowel in her hand. There were flashes in the distance, the lighted windows of the late train, trailed by a mournful wail, and he remembered the coins he’d once laid on the track, remembered how they’d emerged, pressed smooth and shiny and new.

  III

  … whatever

  returns from oblivion returns

  to find a voice

  —LOUISE GLÜCK

  WISH YOU WERE HERE

  I

  When the rains came, they all moved on, skipping from island to island like smooth stones over water, looking for the sun.

  A sentence she read in a waiting room magazine, from a story by someone she’d never heard of. That was months ago, but perhaps Clare thinks of it now because rain is falling outside the tall window, because the CD has finished and there’s silence in the room where the overhead lights burn. The room where the rug is rolled and tied with strong cord, where boxes are piled everywhere, most taped and labelled, but a few with gaping mouths. Things have reached that stage where order has broken down and random, unrelated objects are tossed, unwrapped, together. The key rack in the shape of a house, hooks jutting out from a picket fence, and the mosaic trivet they bought on their trip to Greece. Three pens that still work, a battered frying pan, an old egg-shaped paperweight. “Too much stuff,” she says aloud, a thing she’s been doing more and more. So far it hasn’t happened outside these walls, except for once pushing a cart in the grocery store. Something she said about the price of coffee, in a crotchety, startling voice.

  There is too much stuff, even after all her sorting and weeding, but she knows how it happens, the longer you stay in one place. Things of your own and things that have passed down. In her parents’ little house every inch of space seemed to be filled. So many things it was hard to turn around, hard to take more than a tiny step.

  She’s told herself that she must keep things for Lizzie, no way she can know what her daughter might miss in five years, or ten. Maybe John’s telescope, or the silver napkin rings that came from his great-aunt. Maybe the old quilt made with such tiny stitches, or the flattened coins Clare’s father had put on the train tracks when he was a boy. Lizzie travels light but she’s already taken the thumb-worn telegraph key, a perfect prop for a play, and the faded photograph that hung in the spare room. Two groups of people sitting on the steps of two joined, peaked houses, names written on the cardboard backing in a spiky, old-fashioned hand. When Lizzie wrapped it up she told Clare that she used to try to imagine herself inside that photograph. A girl with a long dress and button boots, a girl with a large, happy family.

  It feels as if this day has been coming forever. Notes on the calendar these past months, red steps marching as the pages turn faster and faster: time to start collecting boxes, to buy markers and string, to disconnect the phone. Clare made up notices for a garage sale and tacked them to telephone poles, trying not to cover up the other, faded ones. So much loss, dogs and cats, car keys and necklaces, and even a photocopied woman, her smudged features difficult to make out.

  Lizzie missed her bus, so that windy Saturday Clare stood alone behind the piled table in the driveway while strangers picked things up and turned them over in their hands. Someone’s grandmother scooped up the board games, and a short man bought all the Halloween decorations; before he took out his wallet he flicked the switch on the toy broom and everyone started at the sudden witchy cackle. Clare was glad to see it go, along with the flashing plastic pumpkin and the wadded mass of fake cobwebs. The older she gets the more uneasy she is at opening her door to whoever has thundered up the steps, the youngest children baffled and the older ones loud, most with the barest suggestion of a costume. Packs of them, jostling under the yellow porch light.

  When almost everything on the table had been sold, a thin-shouldered woman appeared from around the corner. A girl, really, with wispy long hair and a filmy skirt tangling around her calves. She was pulling a rattling wooden wagon, a small, unblinking boy riding on top of a mound of floral curtains, clutching a spoon and a cheese grater. “Have you got any TVs?” the girl-woman said, in the most wistful voice Clare had ever heard. And as she watched them making their slump-shouldered way down the street, out of sight, she thought that it could easily have been a young Lizzie, half-heartedly waving the wooden spoon in the scented air. It could have been their life, trailing through more fortunate streets, with a squeaky-wheeled wagon nipping at their heels.

  The day after the sale she walked the neighbourhood and pulled her notices down, leaving little white flags fluttering. She sent a cheque to Lizzie inside a card with a picture of blue shutters, an explosion of red geraniums. She stripped the beds and filled bags with clothes to donate to places, thinking of one of her mother’s rules: Not worn for a year, doesn’t belong here. Clare long ago extended the rule to five years but still always finds herself missing the donated skirt, the sweater, the week after it’s gone. Sees it in her mind and knows it would be just the thing and she wonders if that’s the real point of the rule, to teach you that life is like that.

  There seemed to be rules for everything in her parents’ house, and she still hears blue and green should never be seen when she pulls on John’s old sweatshirt with her jeans. There was another rule about hangers in the closet, although it didn’t have a rhyme; something about them facing one way or another, in case your house burns down. There’s a family story about children dying in a fire, but so long ago that the details are lost and besides, Clare thinks, what kind of person would spend time scooping clothes from a closet, when everything around them was in flames.

  In the room with the rain-streaked window there’s a couch with a pillow and a tangle of sheets, and an old wicker chair that used to sit on the porch. When she wants to sit in the chair she softens it with the pillow from the couch; when she wants to sleep she moves the pillow back again. One of the packed boxes makes a table where she can put her mug and her ticking travel clock. The last box she seals will contain the sheets, the pillow and the kettle. The mug and spoon, the small Bodum pot she hates cleaning out, and Lizzie’s old Discman with the tiny yellow speakers. Clare thinks she should label it: All I really need.

  Lizzie calls her a dinosaur, sometimes lightly, sometimes not, and she says that Clare is literally—literally—the only person she knows without a cellphone. When she came to help, weeks ago, she kicked the box of CDs and said, “You could have all these on an iPod, I’ll even do it for you. You could sell these, and all that old vinyl, you could give away the cassettes to others of your species.” There was a time when things would have veered off then, and settled in the grooves of familiar and pointless arguments. A time when Lizzie would have said it was ridiculous, the things Clare held on to, when she’d packed her own mother off to a Home. But both of them are older now and when Clare said, “I don’t see the need,” as she always does, Lizzie let it go and turned to open another dresser drawer. “My God, how many sweaters do you have?” she said. “And you taught me the packing rule. Remember?”

  Lay out everything you must pack, then be sure to put half of it back. Of course she remembers, both the rule and the day. The lowered blinds and the squeaking fan pushing at the thick air while
she helped Lizzie get ready for her first overnight camp. She remembers being ambushed by tears, going into the bathroom more than once to splash her face with cold water. And she remembers that while they were arguing about how many pairs of shoes, she told Lizzie about living for almost a year with what she could carry in a pack on her back. But her daughter’s lips were set in that way and she carried on cramming things into the small flowered suitcase, her hot hair stuck to her forehead.

  What she told Lizzie that day was true, she did once live for a year with what she could carry on her back. Hitched around Europe with two friends, using most of the money her father had left her, as she thought he had intended her to. So long ago but there are still times, when she’s standing at a busy intersection and the weather is just right, that the smell of exhaust fumes sweeps her back to that wide open feeling. So many places, so many people they met along the way, some of them popping up again at a hostel or outside a post office in a completely different country. They made their way through Spain, through France and Germany, Switzerland and Italy. And then to Greece, where it rained, though not at first.

  When it was time to deal with the basement Clare found her old backpack, stashed behind the heavy wooden doors in a web-covered corner. The doors she and John took off when they first moved in, to make the rooms flow. The metal frame still bright and solid and the tough green nylon barely damaged, just a melted hole on the flap where someone had dropped a cigarette, and a few streaks of tar from the beach in Naoussa, or wherever it was. The small Canadian flag sewn on with her neat, tight stitches, although the white is now marked by rusty brown streaks where water must have dripped. Or maybe just all those years in the damp basement, chilling and warming, all those changes that were going on while her footsteps crossed the floor above. She and John used the pack the only time they went on a canoe trip, in Algonquin Park. On the second day, John knocked himself out, his head hitting a rock when he tripped on the steep portage path. The weight of the falling canoe dragging Clare to her knees.

  Because she had to start somewhere one of the first boxes she packed held the photo albums from the shelf in the spare room. There were faded pictures of houses and people whose names she’s not sure of, and a few black-and-white snaps of her parents, looking so young. One in their wedding clothes, and another in a driveway on a treeless street, holding baby Clare beside an enormous finned car. There’s one of her dressed up for her first day of school, one of her holding a bicycle, and another of her gowned for graduation. Then the books she filled after Lizzie was born, all the birthday parties, the outings, the friends. Lizzie has the same big grin every time, although she’s told Clare more than once that mostly she felt sad and all alone. The last picture of John was still loose at the back of an album; he’s sitting in a lawn chair, looking off to the side, a blanket around his legs and the summer breeze ruffling his patchy hair.

  There weren’t as many photos from that long-ago trip as she’d thought, and most of them could have come from any postcard she’d sent home. The entrance to the Prado, gondolas in Venice, a rough-hilled island rising from the sea. There were several looking down from the path to the broad crescent sweep of beach, but only one of the ragged group sitting around a table in the bar called Plato’s Cave. Ashtrays overflowing and bleary eyes, heads together and a cluster of empty retsina bottles. Gerard, who owned the bar, played Pink Floyd over and over, and the bracelets on his wrist chinked as he popped the tops off bottles. Breathe, breathe in the air; there was always music and always laughter, and the French girl who might have been his wife flicked her hair back when she stood with an empty tray, her long skirt drifting and a yellowing bruise high on one cheekbone.

  The camera Clare had then was a cheap one, and all the photos are a little hazy. Not out of focus, exactly, but not sharp and clear either. The colours muted, the blue skies nothing special; even Jackson’s bright red shirt is a washed-out maroon. It’s as if the years have spread them with a softening glaze, and the thought reminds her of the old people she interviewed for her thesis, all the stories they liked to tell about dances and picnics and loving, loyal animals. Many of them had trouble with her questions about what day it was, what year or which prime minister, but could describe every detail of their first dance. The dress their mother had made, right down to the colour and shape of the buttons, the fancy stitching around the neckline. The way the school was transformed, streamers and sweet punch in a bowl, and the smell of all that pomade and flowery talcum powder. The whorl of hair beside the small mole on the neck of the boy who was dancing with someone else.

  She learned though that if she let her tape recorder run long enough they would talk their way back through the skating parties and hijinks, past the ponies with bright ribbons braided in their manes. Back to what happened with that boy with the mole, to betrayals, large and small. Back to deaths and unjust punishments and pain that was just as sharp as when it was fresh and unexpected, pain they had felt and pain they had caused. She saw it so clearly then, how sometimes the smallest-seeming hurt can have an enormous effect. Can still tip you right over, even if the weapon is long gone, like the dagger of ice in that guessing game she tried to remember for Lizzie. The game she used to play with her fellow travellers on docks and beaches, and in peeling rooms filled with the sound of rain.

  On the phone, when there was still a phone, Lizzie asked about the packing and Clare told her that she’d become an archaeologist after all, that she had scraped off all the top layers and was getting down to the evidence of earlier civilizations. “I even found the key to your Peter Rabbit bank,” she said. “The one we had to break. It was in the toe of one of your baby shoes. You must have hidden it there, I don’t see how else.”

  “Maybe,” Lizzie said. “I sort of remember that.”

  And Clare told her about the fine white dust that covered the tops of the boxes on the high closet shelf, said, “How long ago was it, when your dad tried to drywall the bathroom? You probably weren’t even old enough to remember.”

  “What was in the boxes?” Lizzie said, and Clare said, “Old stuff, just more old stuff. But that dust, I can’t believe it. It must take years to settle.”

  Lizzie offered to come for the last day, said she’d skip the audition, she probably wouldn’t get a callback anyway, but Clare said, “Don’t you dare.” She said, “I’m playing that CD you gave me, can you hear it?” and Lizzie said, “It’s that ‘Time’ song, isn’t it? I didn’t think you had that many clocks.” It was ridiculous, the way Clare had cried when she got out the old record and found it so badly warped. She tried anyway, hooking up the turntable, but the needle bucked and skipped, spitting random smacks of sound. The CD Lizzie bought the next day had been digitally remastered, had a slightly different cover, but it was close enough.

  Clare kept the Peter Rabbit key, dropping it into a pouch with a jumble of single earrings. It will be in one of the Misc. boxes, maybe the one with Lizzie’s small handprints on a sheet of faded construction paper and the tissue-wrapped ivory hair combs. The one with her father’s fake glasses and a sea-stained leather bracelet, a picture of an octopus draped over a hanging line. What would someone make of that assortment, if they opened the box, like a time capsule, in a hundred years? As baffling as the things in the small wooden chest she came across when her mother was moving. Underneath the tax receipts and documents were more of those train-flattened coins and a sheet of paper with sunset times from some long-ago year. A rusted penknife and a few ticket stubs, and a small photograph of a man holding a laughing baby on his knee. “Your father’s things,” Clare’s mother had said. “They’re no earthly use to me.”

  It was like that after he was gone, as if the way he died erased everything else about him. His things bundled up so quickly, her mother’s hangers spread out in the closet, as if there’d never been an empty space. “He made fools of us,” she said once, her lips a sharp line in her face.

  Lately he’s been popping up in Clare’s mind, but only i
n bits and pieces. When it happens she thinks of random synapses firing, flashes like lightning that are all that are left from the pathways she should have tended better. The straight part in his hair and his kind eyes, his strong arms lifting her up at the circus. The scent of his aftershave when she buried her face in his neck, frightened by the trumpeting elephants. When she tries to remember more she usually thinks of him in his office, the easy way he talked to people, the little jokes he made, and the way they thanked him. She remembers spinning in a black chair, and watching how lightly he settled glasses on a small boy’s face. How he adjusted the arm and the nosepiece and then settled them again, said, “Oh that’s very good.”

  She has one clear memory of her father and mother together, an unlikely one, and that has always convinced her that it’s real. She’s not very old and she’s digging in the sand with a red shovel, making a house, she thinks, for the seagulls who strut along, tipping their heads and staring with their blank, black eyes. There’s laughter and she looks up through the dazzle of sunlight, sees her parents waist-deep in the lake. They are windmilling their arms and splashing each other, and the water hangs between them in arcs, in separate, glittering sparks that are suspended before they fall.

  In the same box with the handprints and the woven bracelet there’s also an old address book with what’s left of a wild paisley cover. On the first few pages there are random contacts, doctors and dentists and Lizzie’s old piano teacher, friends and colleagues. But the rest are filled with older names, some written with a stub of pencil, faded to grey smudges, many with the green felt pen Clare used to carry in a special pocket in her backpack. There are entries decorated with peace signs and flowers, with drawings of trains and tiny houses, smoke curling from chimneys. On one of the inside covers there’s an ink sketch of figures diving from a decrepit, sinking boat, although that never actually happened.