My Ghosts

by Mary Swan

  She’s got rid of the Bodum pot to make room for Lizzie’s roll of photocopies; now everything just fits in the last box, and Clare feels a brief pat of satisfaction. All along she’s been waiting to feel the pang of leaving, but it seems now that it may not come at all. The street has changed, trees grown taller or cut down, houses sold and sold again. Even the doors she was always going in and out of have been painted different colours, the lives behind them no longer things she knows anything about. The heaving sidewalk where Lizzie fell and chipped her teeth has been replaced, marked with the initials of younger children who have themselves grown up and moved away. Women whose kitchen cupboards she knew, whose rueful laughter she shared every day, have become people she runs into so rarely that there’s no point in even pretending to catch up. The dismantled house is not a thing there’s any good reason to miss.

  It was supposed to be filled with children, this house with its flowing rooms, and they assumed it would happen easily. When it didn’t they talked about tests and treatments, but while they talked their lives grew busier, and Lizzie grew older, taking up more and more space. “It’s all right,” Clare said. “It doesn’t matter. We’re fine just as we are, aren’t we?” She meant it when she said it, and she still does, really. But as the house returns to what it once was, bare floors, bare walls, empty windows, she keeps catching flickers of movement from the corner of her eye. All those ghostly possibilities, with nowhere left to hide.

  Checking her watch, she sees that the scalded spot on her wrist is barely visible and that she has the timing just right. Soon the big truck will come rumbling down the narrow street and it will be all noise and movement, strong men with steel-toed boots making everything happen quickly. The cleaning company she’s hired will come later to take care of the dust and debris that’s always left behind, and she’ll become one of those neighbourhood faces that has disappeared. A background face; one day you notice it’s missing, and realize you have no idea how long it’s been gone. Lying in the dark these last nights, listening to the song about ticking away, she’s sensed the piled boxes looming around her and thought there’s probably an equation for it, the way things accumulate over time, while people disappear. Something else she could have asked John, something he would have enjoyed working out. The kind of problem he might have added as a bonus question on a final exam.

  And it wouldn’t be as tidy as an equation, but she wonders if there’s some kind of rule for how long you keep seeing the dead, wonders if it’s the same for everyone. How long before you stop following a familiar back in a crowd, before a profile no longer makes you blink and stare. She thinks it must be a progression, the way they retreat from the real world but still stroll through your dreams, fitting themselves to whatever is happening there. Sometimes they wear clothes you don’t recognize, as if wherever they’ve come from is a place with shopping, and you wake up wishing you could ask them. And then one day you realize that the dreams have gone too, leaving only an occasional ambush.

  In the story about the rains things were beginning to fall apart, but Clare had to close the magazine before the end, and next time in the waiting room she didn’t think to look for it. She knows it’s not important but it nags at her now, and she wishes she could know what happened. It must be on her mind because of the rain and the reminders she’s uncovered, her old backpack and the bits and pieces in a dusty box of souvenirs. She barely recognizes the girl she was, who moved so easily through the world. The girl who coped with languages and currencies and climbed onto boats and trains, stepped off them into whatever was going to come next.

  In the packed-up house Clare turns off lights and takes a last walk through each dim room. She trails her fingers over the tops of the sealed boxes and thinks about the magazine, wonders if it really matters how those pages unfolded. There’s a rumbling sound outside; it might be thunder, or it might be what she’s waiting for. And it occurs to her, quite suddenly, that she can make the story end any way she wants.

  II

  (1990)

  On the last day they went to the more expensive taverna on the hillside, found a place on the terrace that jutted out over a tumble of rocks and looked so precarious, when seen from the beach below. Their table wobbled and John reached into his pocket for the folded bit of cardboard, bent to jam it under one of the legs. Looking through the space he’d left, Clare saw the rippled sea and a few faraway boats. The flaming sky caught in the long moment before day tipped into night, before the strings of lights above their heads took over, erasing the rest of the world.

  “You look lighter,” she said, when John sat up again. His hair was ruffled and his eyes bright in his tanned face. “Before-and-after picture,” he said, reaching for her hand across the steadied table; Clare said, “After what?” and then was sorry.

  When he’d called the trip a second honeymoon their daughter said, “Gross,” and wrinkled her nose. John told her it was a joke, that there hadn’t been a first, just one night in the cheapest motel in Niagara Falls, and Lizzie crushed her ears with her hands. From the moment the airport doors slid apart Clare had missed her daughter terribly, although she knew that she had some younger, gentler Lizzie caught in her mind. Not the one who knew they didn’t understand a thing. Not the one who had appeared so suddenly, scowling as she crumpled a misty kitten poster in her hands.

  “It’s normal,” Clare kept telling John. The misery, the sulks and rages. “I was like that too, inside I was.”

  “I know, I know,” he said, but he didn’t, not really, and he kept on using the same steps, as if the little jokes and suggested outings would eventually produce something other than a withering look. He said he found it hard to concentrate with all the turmoil and he started going back to his office in the evenings to mark exams, work on his textbook chapters. Sometimes he woke up there in the morning, he said, with his face on a pile of papers, the red pen still in his hand. The transatlantic flight was the longest time they’d spent together in months, if you didn’t count thinking.

  The trip had all been John’s idea; he came home with a clutch of brightly coloured brochures, fanned them out like a card trick and said, “Let’s go to Greece, let’s just go.” She knew it was bravado, the bounce in his voice, knew that she could puncture it with a word, but where would that leave them? So she began making lists: check passports, try on bathing suit, buy new sunglasses. She arranged for her mother to stay with Lizzie, who said she’d die if she had to eat those casseroles for ten days, her grandmother’s Waste-Not-Want-Nots. “You probably won’t,” Clare said, but she bought a stack of pizzas for the freezer, a big jar of popcorn for all the late movies she knew they’d watch, school night or not. She felt the familiar, childish niggle when she thought of how flexible her mother’s rules were when it came to Lizzie, how she had always praised every cartwheel and report card, clapped loudly at school concerts and plays. But there was so much to organize that there wasn’t much space for other thoughts, and then the taxi doors slammed and the familiar streets fell away so quickly behind them.

  The airport itself was a dislocating swirl of colour and movement and echoing sound. Everyone in a hurry, it seemed, tapping heels and a bombardment of scents, power suits and gelled hair. In the middle of it all there was a young man, a boy, standing with his back firm to a round pillar. Not dressed for the weather, maybe that’s what caught her eye, buffalo sandals and frayed jeans, a tie-dyed T-shirt and long, straggling hair. He’s on a bad trip in 1969, she thought, and once she would have said it to John, but she didn’t. As they settled into their seats and buckled their belts she thought about that boy, and wondered if he was still there. Thought about his absolute stillness and his stunned eyes, and how he’d seemed like someone who’d been flung through time, suddenly awake in a world where no one could possibly know him.

  They landed in a diesel-scented morning, two days in Athens climbing and wandering and dodging scooters, and John bought her a silver ring, delicately fretted and wrapped in a twist o
f coloured paper. She bought him a pair of sandals with a loop for his big toe and his feet got terribly sunburned; the next day Clare wandered alone, in a trance, peering through iron grilles at hidden courtyards, trailing her fingers over the dusty leaves of flowering bushes while John read and made notes in their noisy room, wet towels draped over his feet. Then the ride to the port and a trim white boat gleaming against the water. The end of the journey, a room with pale walls, with blue shutters that could open or close, and nothing to decide but which beach to go to, what to order from a tattered menu. On the second day she reached for a bitter dark olive through the dappled light, and felt something surrender. Felt it as a loosening in her shoulders, down her spine, as sudden as an unexpected blow.

  John swam in the early morning, hiked in the dusty hills, and sometimes Clare went with him, but more often she tucked a beach mat under her arm, along with a fat paperback she rarely opened. “Alone with my thoughts,” she said, although she knew that wasn’t the right word for the lazy meanderings in her head. Day after day, balanced on the edge of sleep on a mat on the hot sand. Sometimes the oily putt of a boat’s motor, then only the water rippling onto the shore. And the sound of goat bells coming closer and then receding, a sound so particular that it brought an image, behind her closed eyes, of the bells themselves, of the goats’ brown bodies in the warm sunlight, the way they trotted together and their strange, mournful faces. A sound she had first heard on this same island, maybe this same spot, so many years ago.

  She thought about soundscapes then, and wondered if anyone else ever had. Tapes, CDs that could spin on a rack beside the postcards, that would bring everything back much more clearly than any photograph. Goat bells and the thump and splash of an octopus being beaten on the rocks at the water’s edge. The clicking of worry beads and backgammon pieces in the little square where old men still leaned back in their chairs in the drowsy afternoons. Not the same old men, surely not, but with the same flat, vaguely hostile look she remembered from before, when she sat at a battered round table with a girl named Iz, drinking milky Nescafé and smoking Recor cigarettes and sharing every secret corner of their hearts.

  Sometimes in those days, when the afternoon began to soften, a short man with a white apron would step out of a doorway, tip his head back and begin to shout. Long, rolling sentences rising and falling, and no one looked up, but the clatter of tiles stopped until he had finished, and then vanished as suddenly as he had appeared. They decided, Clare and Iz, that he must have been offering comfort of some kind. A reminder that the season was changing, that soon all these tourists, all these filthy hippies will be gone and nothing to do then, my friends, but sit back and count our money. Thinking about it now Clare wondered if it had really happened over and over, or just one time. And had it been this island, or had she transposed the man, the apron, from some completely different place? All these random thoughts; sometimes she wasn’t sure what year it would be, when she finally opened her eyes.

  By early afternoon the beach was more crowded, chattering families and young men batting balls back and forth, children shrieking in the water. Then she rolled up her mat, shook sand from the splayed book and began the walk to the blue-shuttered room. She kicked a ball back to a curly-haired boy and thought of Lizzie running, her ponytail switching and the fierce, rapt look on her face and how that was the point, the whole point of the piles of laundry, the rushed meals and the shouting from the bottom of the stairs. They were always on the verge of being late, always missing something, even when Clare ran through the checklist. Have you got your uniform, shin pads, shoes, have you got a headband?

  Once it was water they’d forgotten and she bought a bottle at the kiosk, carried it over to the players’ side of the field. The air was golden and completely still, the kind of evening when any sound carries a long way, but all Clare heard was the rasp of the short, browned grass on the soles of her sandals. She stopped, her hand cold on the bottle, and looked at the girls, all thirteen, fourteen years old in their red shirts, red shorts, with their hair tied back, their bruised knees. They were completely silent as they took out earrings or put tape over studs, as they unclipped watches and bracelets, reached behind their necks or turned their backs for another to undo a clasp, silver chains rippling as they passed from hand to hand. A ritual she had never noticed from her lawn chair at the far side of the field, and she was pierced by the way they moved through it, by their concentration and their beauty. One girl turned and it was Lizzie; Clare tossed the plastic bottle and it seemed to glow as it flipped through the air and landed lightly in her daughter’s hands.

  It was the same island, somewhere she’d been both happy and miserable, although she supposed you could say that about any place. John hadn’t said and she hadn’t asked, told herself it had to be coincidence. Not the kind of thing he’d remember if she’d even mentioned the name in those early days, when they still had separate pasts to exchange. She’d kept some things vague whenever she talked about her wandering year, though she knows she told him about the arguments with her mother, who thought she was too young. Knows she told him about the money her father had left, and the way his folded glasses sat heavy on the note that didn’t explain anything.

  “I ran her over,” John always said when they were telling the story of how they’d met, and it was almost true. It happened in the parking lot of the nursing home where Clare was working, when she first came back and everything was uncertain. John had been called to collect the effects of a great-aunt he barely knew and he’d been distracted, thinking about the small size of the box he’d placed on the seat beside him. Clare was crossing behind his car and it was the smallest of nudges, but she was startled and slipped, and he helped her up and drove her home, buckling the seat belt carefully over her stomach. He went with her up the stairs and turned on lights in her apartment, propped her aching feet on a thick pillow and made her toast, stayed around.

  “I was smitten,” he always said, making it sound so simple, so inevitable. An easy story to tell, and why shouldn’t it be? What was the point in thinking, as she sometimes did, that if the elevator she’d ridden down had made an extra stop, if John had looked over his shoulder, or thought a few seconds longer about that small, sad box—what was the point in thinking that if almost anything had happened differently, then there wouldn’t have been a story at all.

  It was the same island, she knew that, but after so much time it was like visiting the place as a ghost, or in a dream. Everything familiar yet somehow distorted, extra storeys added to old buildings, two shops knocked into one with a shiny new sign, layers of time. New structures choked the port and surrounded the old town, although the heart of it was much the same, twisting lanes, narrow between whitewashed houses and walls, and the square where the old men sat, the dark doorways of the shops around it. Much the same, but the tree in the centre was so much bigger, throwing down shade where she remembered bright light.

  At the edge of the village, villas marched up into the hills, and John told her there was a narrow road that went right across the island, ending in another cluster of houses, a small shop and a café. On this side asphalt had replaced the path that curved up and around to the bay, but the sweep of the main beach was the same and if she stopped in the right place, looking down, she couldn’t see the row of restaurants, the stacks of brightly coloured loungers. Could almost see herself instead, asleep on a thin green towel, or wading out into the sea.

  She knew that people would have aged, that the waiters in the tavernas would have been barefoot boys that other time, but she did recognize one face. The woman behind the counter in the smaller bakery, where wasps struggled in the pool of honey that oozed around the last pieces of baklava. She was sure that it was the French girl who had helped Gerard in his bar, the one who moved with a dreamy sway while Pink Floyd played over and over, her long skirt brushing the strings of beads around her ankles as she cleared bottles, added smudged glasses to a round tray she didn’t look strong enough to
carry. The one she didn’t give a thought to when she met Gerard outside, the music cut off when he closed the back door, a wash of moonlight falling on the piled wooden crates, on his confident hand moving over her silvered skin. Or all the other times she left the beach early and waited in her room at the end of the dim hall, hardly able to stand it when he appeared in the doorway. His white shirt glowing, a finger to his lips because of the muffled voices, the footsteps that crossed the floor above them. How young she’d been, thinking that only Iz knew, and only because she’d told her. Assuming that he’d also been swept away, that hers were the only eyes he sought out with that clear look.

  The woman in the bakery was older, of course, with better English, with creases and a softer jawline. But she moved the same way as she slid back a tray, folded the top of a warm paper bag and counted coins into Clare’s cupped hand. So this is how it all turned out, she thought. This is who she became. And she remembered that there had been children, two little girls with tangled hair who sat on the counter and sang along with “Money,” and that other song about the dreamer. Girls who would be adults now and surely hadn’t stayed, who would be busy in some city, some other place, and hardly ever visited. It unsettled her, this glimpse of the way other lives had carried on, and on the way back to the room she took a wrong turn and got a little lost, the pastries cold and heavy by the time she got back to John, who was waiting in the slatted light.