She tried to scream, but couldn’t, as if she were still sleeping. She managed a kind of strangled cry, but he sat impassively. He flickered in and out, as if he were a radio with bad reception, but it was him for sure. Not because it looked like him, necessarily, Leah would explain, or try to explain, to Charlotte later that day, but just because it WAS him. She couldn’t be clearer about it. Just, she knew it was Nathan, she knew he was there, she knew it was for real.
And after that, he was always with her. At first, having him around was great. Leah felt like she could take incredible chances, and Nathan would look out for her. It was a feeling she had of invincibility and divine intervention in her stupid, messy life. She tested this feeling by stepping into the road without looking both ways, and was exhilarated when cars screeched to a halt for her. Charlotte pointed out that this was likely because she lived in Halifax, where drivers would stop if a pedestrian so much as looked at the curb, and not because her dead brother was watching over her. But Charlotte was occasionally tediously attached to empirical evidence, as Leah did not hesitate to point out, and Charlotte was hard pressed to argue with her on that front.
Most of the time, Nathan kept to himself. She couldn’t always see him, but she had a sense that he was there. And most of the time, she found it comforting. She experimented a little with talking to him, but she wasn’t sure what she should tell him or what he’d want to know. She’d asked him things occasionally, like why he was with her and not at home with Rebecca, but Nathan would flicker out under questioning, and Leah didn’t like to upset him, so mostly she didn’t say anything.
She thought about explaining where her head had been those last six months he’d been alive, but every time she tried to tell him, it came out wrong. Nathan would just hold his hands up in front of him each time another of her ham-fisted explanations started. He’d hold his hands up and look away, look down, off to the side. It was disconcerting. Leah remembered reading somewhere that if you were visited by a ghost and you wanted them to leave, you just held your hands up and said, no. That’s what it looked like Nathan was doing. It was upsetting for both of them, and eventually, she stopped trying.
Her failure ate away at her though, in a way it hadn’t before he’d started hanging around her. She did her best to put it out of her mind, but she could feel him standing behind her, or moving around her almost all the time, and it was difficult to forget something that had proved to be so formative. It was starting to make her edgy, keeping it inside, but eventually Leah got busy with more recipe work, and that made it easier to forget what she was convinced she had to forget.
And then, his presence was upsetting in other ways. She could feel him tensing up every time she drank a cup of coffee even though she’d switched to decaf after her visit from Psychic Sue. She bought sweet potatoes and left them under the counter till they smelled like vodka. Then she’d put them in the compost, go to the grocery store and buy more. She wore black turtlenecks in spite of him, but every time she did, she felt cross and out of sorts for no good reason.
She’d start to masturbate, then imagine him on the chair beside her bed and stop short, too ashamed to carry on.
“And god forbid I should bring anyone home,” she bitched to Charlotte on the phone one day. “I mean, how can I? How can I have sex in my room while my dead brother watches?”
“Hmmm, that’s a toughie,” Charlotte said. “Honestly, I don’t know what to tell you about that one, except that, oh, he’s a ghost, and you’re alive, and sweetheart, a woman has needs, you know what I’m saying?”
“Yeah, I know what you’re saying,” Leah said, twisting the cord around her finger till the flesh at the fingertip went white. “I’m too guilty to masturbate, remember?”
“It’s not perfect,” Charlotte admitted. “But what are you going to do?”
“Excellent question,” Leah said. “I wish I knew.”
The next day, at the library, Leah put aside her research on Indian cookery. She leaned back in her chair and sighed. The library was usually a refuge for her. She easily lost herself there in the lemony smell of well-thumbed paper and the murmuring of street kids warming up in the magazine room. But she couldn’t concentrate. She had Nathan on her mind.
She got up from her chair, leaving her stack of books, her fine tipped sharpie, her notebook. The various tools of her trade. Her scarf hung on the back of her chair, a deflated, forgotten streamer. At the computer terminal she hesitated for just a minute, her fingers itching over the keyboard. It wasn’t logical, what she was about to do. And yet, what choice did she have? She looked furtively over each shoulder. And then she typed “ghosts.”
The screen filled with titles. Kids’ books, volumes of maritime ghost stories, something called “Ghost of a Chance,” which seemed to be a romance novel with a paranormal twist. Leah refined her search. Ghosts, nonfiction, she typed. Dealing with them.
This time, there were fewer titles. She scratched down the call numbers of a few on a scrap of paper, cleared the computer screen and went into the stacks to take a look.
The first one she put her hands on was a fat hardcover with no dustjacket. The spine was green, with black letters. “How To Deal With Ghosts.”
“That’s to the point.” Leah muttered as she drew it from the shelf. The pages inside were buttery soft, polished by hands and time.
How To Deal With Ghosts, the title page read, by Peter Pietropaulo. The chapters were equally straightforward. What are ghosts; Why do they stay on earth; How do I know if I have a ghost; How can I get rid of my ghost; What if I decide I want my ghost back?
Energy can be neither created nor destroyed, she read. And so it stands to reason that when we die, our energy remains. And sometimes, that energy takes a ghostly human form. Sometimes we actually see spirits; they appear as flickering, thinner versions of themselves. Other times, we may simply feel their presence — a cold or hot spot in a room. We may hear spirits knocking or wailing. Some spirits manifest as an odour. Roses, sulphur, chicken soup, coffee. Lights may flicker. Appliances may turn on or turn off, on their own. We will discuss these symptoms of a haunting in depth in the chapter entitled “How do I know if I have a ghost?”
“No mystery there,” she said. “I definitely have a ghost. I’d say seeing him is a pretty clear symptom.” An old man who was browsing in the stacks gave her a dirty look and held his finger up to his mouth. “Sorry,” she whispered, then rolled her eyes when he turned away.
She hurried back to her seat with the book. Her stack of cook-books sat naggingly beside her notes. She had a deadline she’d already pushed three times. She cracked the cover of “How To Deal With Ghosts” and spent just enough time reading it to formulate a plan. At five o’clock, before Joan shooed her out and locked the doors behind her, she borrowed the book and stowed it in her bag, alongside her recipe notes, her plan for freeing Nathan humming in her mind as she rushed from the library.
“I have to tell Nathan his story,” she told Charlotte over a very spicy caesar at the Fish Tank.
“Surely to god he knows his own story,” Charlotte said. “He’s a ghost for the love of Mike, don’t they have access to everything?”
“Not according to this book,” Leah said. “Not if they’re just hanging around. It means they’re a bit lost, a bit confused. I mean, if he were haunting his own house, that’d be understandable, you know? He should want to be close to Rebecca, he should want to watch over her. But he’s thousands of kilometres off course even for that. Let alone for just settling easily into the afterlife.”
“What about the all-night card parties?” Charlotte said, “what about the endless meatballs?”
Leah grimaced, sipped her drink. “Yeah. You know, I think I extrapolated that stuff.”
“Extrapolated,” Charlotte said, blinking. “You mean the pennies from heaven are not falling from some cosmic Rummoli game?”
“Are you making fun of me now?” Leah asked. “I can never tell if you’re fucking
making fun of me.” She turned on her high chair.
“Can I get another drink?” she said to the passing barkeep. “I’m going to need at least another drink, here.”
Nelson nodded and looked at Charlotte, who nodded back. “Yeah,” she said, “looks like it’s fixing to be a long night.”
“Look,” Leah said, as patiently as she could. “I don’t know about the meatballs, okay? I don’t know about the white clothes, and I don’t know about the heavenly Rummoli game. I would like to think things work that way, but I can’t be certain. When I really think about it, I’m pretty sure all Psychic Sue told me was that when he got there he was sick, and they looked after him till he got better.”
“Who’re they?” Charlotte asked, slurping caesar through a straw. She coughed. “Gah. Spicy.”
“I don’t know who they are. Could be my grandparents and my aunt Mary, could be angelic paramedics, could be God himself for that matter. Sue didn’t elaborate and I didn’t ask. She did say Mary came to get him, because my grandmother was getting things ready. I took that to mean meatballs and Rummoli. I don’t think that’s out of line, frankly, and I have to say, it’s an image I like. So, I don’t know. If that’s what the afterlife was like and I had the option, that’s where I’d stay, especially if my grandmother was doing the cooking.”
“Maybe Nathan didn’t have the option.
“Maybe not indeed,” Leah said. “This is what I’m thinking.
“Why don’t you just ask him?” Charlotte asked.
Leah shook her head. “Nah, he doesn’t really like questions. He puts his hands up like I’m the paparazzi or something.”
Charlotte hooted. She looked around. “Is he here now?”
“You gotta quit it with that,” Leah said, shaking her head.
“Come on, Leah. Just tell me, is he here right now?”
Leah took a deep breath, tilted her head down, looked at her friend from under her eyebrows. “Charlotte,” she said.
“Just tell me, and then I won’t ask anymore.”
“He’s not a puppy, Charlotte, chrissakes, have a little respect.”
“I do, dude,” Charlotte said. “I have plenty of respect. But frankly, if I’m going to listen to anymore talk about how you can’t even jerk off in case your ghost is watching, well, I’m going to want some pay-back. So is he here or isn’t he?”
Leah laughed, looked over her shoulder. “He’s sitting back there,” she said, jerking her thumb toward the empty stools at the bar. “And he doesn’t look happy.”
Charlotte took a long swallow, traced letters on the table in the condensation her glass left there. “Do you think he ever fucks shit up?” she asked.
“Fucks shit up?” Leah repeated. “You’ve gotta be kidding.”
“No,” Charlotte said, her face a model of sincerity. “Really. Like, do you think he uses his ghostly status to check out naked chicks or steal money or eat cake?”
Leah rubbed her hand across her face, hard. “No, I don’t think he checks out naked chicks or steals money or eats cake. Charlotte, he’s a frigging ghost, first of all. No corporeal body, you dig? What would he do with money, or cake, for that matter? Or naked chicks? And second of all, you never met Nathan, but he was ridiculously law abiding. Steal cake, for godsake.”
“I would steal cake,” Charlotte said.
“Yes,” Leah said. “Yes, Charlotte, I imagine you would steal cake. Nathan, however —”
Charlotte looked right into Leah’s eyes, raised her eyebrows. Leah sighed.
“Okay, yes, he does fuck some shit up. He moves my keys. He took my iron and kept it till I ran out of clothes I could wear without ironing, waited till I bought a new one, then gave the old one back. He occasionally takes photos of nothing with my camera. Like photos of light, or of the cat a split second after he’s left the room, or of, I don’t know, dust motes, or who knows, other ghosts. One day he moved around all my plants, I don’t know why. No reason, I’m sure.”
Charlotte chewed her straw. “Does it bother you,” she asked.
“A little,” Leah said. “A little bit I wish he’d leave me alone, a little bit I feel honoured that he chose me to harass.” She smiled a half smile, looked over her shoulder. “But mostly I just worry about him. Mostly, I just wish he’d figure himself out and move on, you know?”
“So,” Charlotte said. “What’re you gonna do?”
“Well,” Leah said, straightening up in her chair, “I’m going to try telling Nathan his story.”
“How much do you figure he needs to know?” Charlotte asked.
“Dunno,” Leah said. “Right now, I’m thinking he needs to hear the whole thing, from the time he kind of stopped living in the world, to the time he stopped, well, living.”
“Whoa,” Charlotte said.
“Yeah,” Leah agreed. They sat in silence and worked on their drinks.
“So how do you do that?”
“Not sure,” Leah said. “I guess I just kind of have to start. He’s not crazy about direct contact, you know? He’s kind of sketchy, never looks right at me, that kind of thing, so I think I have to just, I don’t know, kind of talk out loud to him around the house. I mean, I already talk to Neil all the time, so hey, why not talk to the ghost of my brother, as well, you know?”
“No,” Charlotte said, “I don’t. But it sounds like as good a plan as any. Want another drink?”
“Yeah, oh yeah,” Leah said. She looked over her shoulder and signalled to Nelson. And noticed that Nathan was gone.
But that wasn’t the night he went for good. He took off now and again, and Leah wasn’t sure why, or where he went. It was possible, she imagined, that she just lost her ability to see him once in awhile, but she had never been able to work out a pattern, why he was visible to her one minute and not the next. It had never worried her much when he’d disappeared in the past, but the night he took off for good was different. She’d known it that night, known he hadn’t just gone for a stroll.
She sighed as she sat there in front of the computer. That night had definitely been different, and she’d wished, time and again since then that she could simply delete all that had gone on. The way she’d talked to Nathan and the chill she’d felt the next morning when she realised he was gone for good. She put her head down on the desk and tried to picture him at the library, receiving her latest missive. She imagined him unfolding the dog, smoothing out the creases, reading the words written there in thick pencil, understanding them as another link in his chain.
*
The morning rush of walkers and buses had mostly cleared out, and Nathan emerged from the bushes. He felt prickly, strange, maybe from being so confined all night. He thought he’d take a stroll through the library, get out of the damp for awhile. Though it hadn’t bothered him much in recent days, he thought perhaps it was now the cause of his unease. He took the steps carefully, protecting his sore body, and waited till a woman in a puffy ski jacket opened the library door, then scooched in after her. He forgot all about the birds as he wandered the stacks, his long fingers tracing the spines of hardcover books wrapped in clear plastic. He loved the crackly sound they made, the surprise of soft pages, the detritus of other readers. A stray hair, a bit of orange pith, a grease stain from some long-ago eaten snack, pages turned down to mark a place forever. He looked at the titles and the authors’ names as he trailed his finger along each shelf. A person could read a book every day their whole life and still never really make a dent, he thought.
*
Henry paid the cabbie with the last of his cash, and struggled to the door with his groceries. He wiggled the key in the lock and finally got the door open — he would have to talk to James about that, he thought. Or you could try to fix it yourself, said a voice in his head and so astonished was he that he turned to see where it had come from. All these voices all of a sudden! Maybe he was finally freaking out. But no, on sober reflection, he recognised the voice as his father’s, and quickly dismissed it. He
didn’t have time to fuck around with the lock. He had songs to write. And groceries to put away. And clothes in the washing machine, he remembered. He ferried the groceries to the kitchen and got them mostly put away, the perishables, anyhow, the dry goods it didn’t matter as much, he’d get to them later. He took the basement stairs two at a time, moved the clothes from the washer to the dryer, and put in his second load. Here he was, getting things done. Tina could go fuck herself, and so could his dad, for that matter, and just for good measure. He was making a change, he thought. For once and for all, making a change.
It felt good to make a decision. He pushed the start button on the dryer, remembered fabric softener at the last minute, opened the door, threw a sheet in, and started the mechanism again. Happy, with the smell of Bounce on his fingertips, he vaulted back up the stairs to the kitchen. He fixed himself a bowl of organic yogurt topped with granola and a sliced banana, poured a huge glass of juice and ate standing up, looking out the window at the backyard. He swore he could feel health returning to every cell with each bite he took. He swore he could feel the hydration expanding his brain with every sip of juice. He swore he was making a change for once and for all, for good. Committing to himself. He was going to run every morning. And every evening. Sure, why not? He was going to eat right, three times a day, maybe more if the running made him really hungry. He was going to quit smoking, as soon as he was done the pack still crumpled in the pocket of his leather jacket. And most of all, he was going to get upstairs and write the hell out of those songs. He downed the rest of the juice and headed purposefully up to James’s music room.
At the top of the stairs, he paused. Maybe he should take a shower. He was kind of sweaty from the run and the shopping, and he reeked of smoke from his night in the bars. He caught his reflection in the mirror. Also, he was wearing fucking sweatpants. Thank god Tina had been too involved in her soy ice cream to notice him at the grocery store. It galled him to think of her pitying him because of his attire. She would think the sweatpants were an admission of failure, of a basic inability to carry on in society. But some people, he thought, his colour rising, some people actually take care of themselves! Some people run to the store for exercise. Well, fuck her. She hadn’t seen him, and anyhow, it didn’t matter. But he didn’t think he’d be able to write in sweatpants. He had to admit; they did feel like giving up. If only it were warmer, he could wear shorts to run in. Maybe James had some of those high-tech spandex running tights. Though those left nothing to the imagination, at least they looked like the kind of pants a person who cared about himself might wear running.
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