My Ghosts

by Mary Swan

  Sometimes a tiny moment is all that it takes, and braided time begins to unravel. It was Halloween and the streets were filled with wet brown leaves, with ghouls and tiny angels, and on her front porch three children stood in a pool of light. Tangled long wigs held on with flowered headbands, tie-dyed shirts and strings of bright beads, medallions around their necks. Peace, man, one said, making the sign someone had shown him, guaranteed to get a laugh and an extra handful of candy.

  The children clumped back down the steps, their wigs askew and their fluorescent peace signs bouncing. All of it as remote, as dated for them as those movies that pop up on television in the middle of the night. The ones with cardboard scenery and improbable dialogue, a conniving woman with sharply drawn eyebrows and an innocent one in soft focus. She thinks now about how time does that, by moving on; you glance back and so many things seem as ridiculous as the ancient belief that the sun was a fiery chariot, dragging the night across the sky. That a person could sail to the edge of the flat world, and just disappear.

  She still has her own, real beads and they’re very different; they made a delicate rattle in the bottom of a box when she lifted it down from the closet shelf. It’s not very big, that box, but it holds a lot. Those tiny black and blue beads and the frayed string that once held them, a hard-covered notebook and a sifting of flimsy tickets from buses and boats, sugar cubes crumbling in their wrappers. There are several matchboxes, one filled with soft sand, and a dried-out leather bracelet. A handful of washed-out photographs, the harsh wake of a boat and rough hills set against a clean sky, the blue shutters that frame a window with a long view to the sand and the sea. Things the girl she was had thought were important to capture, and she tries to imagine herself looking through the lens of her cheap camera. The sun hot on the top of her head and a slow clatter of goat bells the only sound.

  There aren’t many interiors or night shots, because of the expensive square flash cubes. There’s a peeling, whitewashed room with a fluttering curtain, and a picture of a group of long-haired people in a bar, flashed bright and clear and smiles on all their faces. Behind them a tray seems to float in the air, the person who holds it lost in the shadowy background. For a long time her memories were tied to these frozen photographs and she would have thought, if she’d thought, that the rest had faded to nothing. Then a boy flashed a cheeky peace sign under her yellow porch light and they began to stir. Rousing like a ragged ghost army and falling into place, the whisper of shuffling feet taking on a marching rhythm.

  The last place was a small white village on a small island, twisting narrow lanes that all somehow ended at the tiny square where the old men sat, saying things in a grumbling tone. Some of us had rooms in Adelpha’s house at the edge of that village, the main floor a long corridor with doors opening off, rusting metal bed frames where we were always stubbing our toes and a tiny room somewhere in the middle with a toilet and a shower, a drain in the floor. The water a thin spray that was never more than warm and with our long, salt-crusted hair, everything in the room dripped wet by the time we were done, and when we wiped the crooked mirror our sun-browned faces startled us, made our eyes seem so much brighter, looking out, looking in.

  Adelpha knew some German but most of us didn’t; she carried paper and a fat green pencil in her apron pocket and wrote down numbers, sometimes drew stick figures to explain that we should never take our clothes off on the main beach or that the taverna by the port was not a good place. Every Freitag we climbed the outside stone steps to the rooftop, through the hot buzz of wasps that hovered over a spread of drying figs, and Adelpha smoothed out our crumpled drachmas and made checkmarks in a little book. She lived up there in summer, behind a curtained doorway, with a family we could only guess at by the things they left behind, a school book splayed open or an abandoned glass of coffee, part of a small footprint in a mess of squashed fruit. Sometimes we saw her in the village with other women dressed in black, crusty bread or paper-wrapped packets in the string bags that dangled from their hands. Kalimera, we said, or kalispera, and sometimes they nodded, but there was a way they turned their heads, just the tiniest bit; we noticed that but didn’t think it was anything that really mattered.

  The place she’s rented in this little beach town is more like a cabin than a house, tucked in behind cedars and facing a quiet street. Out the back door there’s a clump of tall bushes, their leaves already fallen and blown away. There’s a tangle of garden and scruffy grass, and a short flight of steps that leads down to the beach where she walks, in all kinds of weather. She’s been told that the town is bustling in summer, but it’s hard to imagine that now. Hard to picture bright towels spread out on the sand, and women bending to squeeze water from their hair. Children squealing and jumping in the waves, slapping at the surface with the flats of their hands.

  She came here on a whim, that’s what she said. A name that popped into her head when there were complications, a gap between closing dates and a burst pipe in her new place, all the damage the previous owners left behind. It made sense to have the repairs done before she moved in, and though she agreed with her friends that it was so frustrating, in a way she’d been quite relieved. Glad of an in-between time when she could finally deal with things and work out how to go on, but that hasn’t happened yet. Instead she’s surrendered to the place and the season, to the thoughts that float through as she walks the long shore, or looks out at the changing lake. They’re not the thoughts she expected to be having, and she doesn’t know where they’ll take her. All these stirred-up memories of what it was like, to be young, with a brimming heart.

  When she was first here she fell heavy into sleep at any time at all, waking sweaty and confused like someone with a terrible fever. No more tasks, no more lists and no pattern to anything, the days and the nights. Once, through a window, she saw the moon moving quickly through the black sky. Watched it slip into the water, a last silvered bubble on the ruffled horizon drawn down like a setting sun. It didn’t seem like something that should happen, but there was no one to ask, and in the middle of the night it seemed quite possible she’d arrived in a place governed by completely different rules.

  That’s a hard thought to shake even now, when she’s made herself a kind of routine. She sleeps soundly through the night and wakes just before dawn, coffee poured as the first gulls wing out over the lake. They come in groups, maybe families, another thing that she hadn’t known before. Snowy white, or darker, or streaked, in quite separate bunches with pauses between, always moving in the same direction. If the wind is against them they just flap harder, and their shed feathers are scattered along the shore.

  Things call to her on her beach walks and she picks them up, bits of water-smoothed wood and those feathers, smooth stones that glow richly, then fade. She drops them in a pile by the back steps and thinks one day she’ll spread them all out. See how they fit together, these shapes and textures that for some reason have caught her eye. Back inside she makes notes on the calendar each day, just the weather and the colour of the water. Slate grey, as a rule, but once a dazzling Aegean blue.

  Every day on the island the sun was hot and the water barely rippled. Every day the same, waking late, a cup of coffee, then the winding path to the main beach where we spread our fraying towels on the sand. It was hard to imagine that there had ever been anywhere else, that we hadn’t always known each other, and sometimes we talked about that, how it was quite possible that we’d once sat on different benches in the same station, or passed each other on a narrow sidewalk without even a flicker.

  There were no clouds in the sky but there were other patterns, lazy smoke rings rising and thinning or the way Douglas and Robert moved chess pieces on a swollen fold-out board. Even the puckered scars running up Robert’s right arm that we thought were from Vietnam, though he never said. He didn’t say much, ever, but Robert really hated to lose, crashed a fist that sent chess pieces flying and once a white queen splashed and sank to the bottom of Jen’s tall glass.
She brushed droplets from the fringed vest she swore Jim Morrison had given her, warm from his own body, drained the glass and caught the queen between her straight white teeth.

  Jen hooked up with Carly and Jackson in Marseilles after a bad ride, her palms and shoulder still scraped from hitting the gravel road. She had silver rings on every finger and rows of bangles, an open look, and the room they shared was the biggest one, chained cupboards on the wall and a chipped stone sink that had a pink tinge, when the light was strong, from when one of them rinsed out Jackson’s favourite red shirt. Jackson said he’d once played an angel in a movie and we could see it, his smooth cheeks and his flowing cornsilk hair. He and Carly met on a commune, maybe in Vermont, but something happened and they flew away. They travelled light, worked in bars and on farms and picked things, sold things—earrings made from twists of wire and the strips of leather he plaited into bracelets that stained and tightened in the sea. He said he knew all kinds of knots from those years he was in the navy; that was after the time in jail and the summers in the fire tower but before the movie and the ranch, and the year of riding freight trains. It was hard to believe he was old enough for all that, but when someone said no way had he run away with the circus Jackson jumped up on the narrow stone wall by the graveyard and walked it backwards, finishing off with a perfect handstand, a deep bow.

  Carly may have known the truth of it, but she was hard to reel in. Everything about her seemed to float, her long skirts and trailing sleeves. Stray cats rubbed against her, caught their claws in the filmy fabric when she crouched down to give them bits of food she’d been saving for them. Once she stood between a man and a pus-eyed dog he was kicking, and she cried when the fishermen beat small octopus on the rocks near the water’s edge, though Douglas told her they were already dead, and it was just a way to make them tender.

  Douglas knew things like that, and about the Muses and the Furies, but he said he wasn’t really that kind of teacher anymore. He dropped acid at a concert in Hyde Park and it changed everything, and he’d had to leave his wife and son behind too. Whenever he could he came to the islands with a portable easel strapped to his back, because he’d learned he had an artist’s soul. Mostly he sketched but sometimes Douglas painted flowers on our cheeks, bright colours that wore away slowly until they looked like bruises. He went for long walks with Iz and sometimes with Clare, to the end of the white beach and out of sight, and he was always writing down the titles of books they should read, things about the soul, and how to be OK. “Here comes your father-figure,” Hans used to say, but Iz told him it was nothing like that.

  Hans said he was in a band back in Yde, and if only he’d brought his guitar we’d be amazed. Sometimes he pretended, moving his fingers in silent chords and stopping and starting again. “I always have trouble with that one,” he said, and Robert did the spooky chuckle, The lun-a-tic is in my head, and it may have been true. Hans called himself The Joker, but no one laughed much at the things he did and said, passing on fake messages and making up stories about people he’d seen, sneaking around places they shouldn’t have been. Sometimes he offered a box of matches with a little shake to show it was full, nothing but burned ends inside and he thought that was so funny. He did it again, saying, “For real this time,” and we took it again and he laughed even more; we kept on falling for it, so willing to be convinced each time he said, “No, this time I really do have some, I swear it’s not like all the other times, I swear.”

  Maybe it was a similar thing, the way we kept going into the water although the sea in the little bay was not much cooler than the air and it only made us thirsty, whatever bottles we’d brought with us always almost empty. Someone said that if we had money we could open a café right here, just a little one, just essentials, and even though we knew that would spoil everything we made lazy plans for the Bare Minimum Café, and everyone had a different list of the things they couldn’t do without.

  On the spindly hall table there’s a guest book going back years, signed by brief summer renters who write Fabulous! and Those sunsets! after their names. On some pages children have drawn pictures, stick figures jumping from boats and fat yellow suns, and some of them have printed their names in crooked, wavering letters. One snippy entry mentions mice but she hasn’t seen any signs, not even in the tilting shed that’s filled with fishing poles and beach chairs and old cans of paint. A bicycle with a rusty chain leaning against the far wall, plastic shovels and pails and even ice skates hanging from a hook, damp red mittens wadded up inside.

  Most of her things are in storage but she has what she needs, and the cabin is furnished with the kinds of things people move up from. There’s a bed and a kitchen table, there are chairs. There’s a heavy old couch, and a bookshelf with a few glossy magazines and fat paperbacks, and war stories and books on sailing. There are crosswords, mostly filled in, and a collection of fairy tales for children, some battered board games that release a musty smell when she lifts the lids. On top of the bookshelf there’s a clunky old radio; it looks as if it would play music from the 1940s, if it actually worked.

  A small room at the back gives the best view of the lake, through a new, long window. She’s not the first one to notice; there’s an old armchair pulled up to it, draped with a bright quilt, and a strange low table, shellacked plywood on a wobbly driftwood base. Sometimes she reads there but mostly she just sits looking out, the soft cushions moulding around her and her feet propped on the shallow, cold sill. Lately she’s been wondering what it would be like to stay on here through the winter. To find out if the whole lake freezes over, and to see, really see, the small changes that lead into spring. She mentioned it to Bonnie, who gave her one of her squint-eyed looks, as if she were hearing a foreign language and it took time for the meaning to filter through. “Put that thought right out of your head,” Bonnie said. “Winters are terrible here, you have no idea at all.”

  Bonnie is the woman in large sweatpants who met her with the key. It’s not her house, but she’s something like a caretaker, she said, for an old woman who’s been in the Lakeview for years. “You know, the retirement home, though Lord knows why we call them that, those places. As if they’re somewhere people look forward to, can’t wait to be.” Bonnie cleans at the Lakeview three days a week; she says it isn’t bad but really, wouldn’t you rather be dead?

  From the start it was clear Bonnie is someone it would be hard to edge away from. She loves to talk and to find things out, asks questions that need some kind of answer, mixed in with details of her own that would be confessions, if they weren’t so casually said. Already she knows much more than she wants to about Bonnie’s husband and his bad back, her son’s piercings and her own female troubles, and how she’s been here fifteen years but there are still people who won’t give her the time of day. Even worse is knowing she herself has a place now, an existence inside Bonnie’s head. Think I’ll check on the widow tomorrow, she imagines Bonnie saying, as she serves up the family supper. Probably some kind of patterned paper on the kitchen wall, and a clock with knife and fork hands. Maybe there’s a grunt from her husband, who’s not much interested in conversation, while the pierced son asks if there’s any more bread.

  Some of the mismatched furniture must belong to the old woman in the Lakeview, maybe the radio. Some perhaps dumped by the feuding nephews and nieces Bonnie’s told her about. “They’re just waiting for her to pop her clogs, and then there’ll be fireworks,” is what she said. It could be that some of the touches are Bonnie’s, the plastic flowers in the vase with the smudged flea market sticker, the dusty bowl filled with scentless potpourri. A few pictures on the wall seem likely too, a girl with a watering can and bonnet, a brown horse in a misty field. There’s another of a shouting woman, just her face and her wobbling chins. Maybe some kind of joke, that one, and somehow it fits with Bonnie’s contradictions. Her rough red hands and her blunt way of talking, the frills on her blouses and the pink earrings that shiver when she moves her head.

&nb
sp; In the hot afternoons we climbed back to the village and some of us slept and some of us lay down together. A faint smell of drains in all the dim rooms and thin curtains hanging limp, the loudest sound the rasp of a sandal outside, someone moving carefully through the narrow white streets. Later maybe voices and the rattle of iron grilles sliding up and we drifted back to the square, feeling hungry and rested and so easy in our bodies. Most times we took the path to the best place to watch the sun go down and stayed there until the sky was dark, all those stars like a flung-out net, and we talked about the universe and our tiny place in it, said that everyone ever alive had probably done the same, seen the same, and how amazing was that.