Ghost Songs

by Regina McBride

  She does not look up but sits with her hands folded on her lap and hidden in the drapes of the sleeves. She is a plain, dark-haired woman in her late thirties or early forties. I can tell that she is different from everyone else here. Some sit hunched and open-mouthed, their chests caved in, while others radiate an angry energy, as if they’re on the edge of something, waiting to be pushed off. The woman in the kimono is self-contained, thoughtful. There is a steadiness to her.

  Though an orderly checks in every few minutes, the meeting is moderated by patients. One woman speaks the most.

  My roommate, Mary, leans close to me. “That’s Patricia, the permanent fixture,” she says in a drowsy voice. “When I was here more than a year ago, she was here then, too.”

  “Hello, Mildred,” a meek man in the back says as an old woman slides noisily in on paper slippers. She ignores him and sits in a chair outside of the circle and close to the door. Whenever someone speaks she crumples a piece of cellophane. A few people roll their eyes and smile, but no one gets angry.

  When a thin young man speaks in a halting voice about how sad he feels, Mildred coughs, then grabs a small plastic wastebasket near her chair, hacks, and spits loudly into it.

  •

  The lights are low and the curtain is closed between my bed and Mary’s. I hear the wheels on the medication cart as it goes from room to room. I’m very tired and wonder if I’ll fall asleep before the nurse comes with my Thorazine.

  “My parents,” I say to myself. I like saying parents, making them one being instead of two.

  On the verge of sleep, I feel a pleasant sensation of relief as if what happened in my family was fate. As if it was all meant to be and my parents have found each other and everything is finished. Peaceful and settled.

  I hear the squeak of the wheels as the cart rolls into the room.

  •

  The doctor comes to see me on my second morning in the ward. I sit up on the bed, disheveled, and glance at my brush on the nightstand, thinking I should run it through my hair, but the memory of it moving across the desk feels too fresh. I don’t want to touch it. I leave my hair a mess.

  “I had a dream.”

  “What was it?” he asks, settling into the chair.

  I tell him that it had to do with an old movie, The Uninvited, about a house haunted by a mother who had committed suicide, and how her disembodied voice filled the rooms as she cried for her daughter.

  “I wondered what the ghost wanted,” I say.

  “You mean the one that stood at the foot of the bed in your uncle’s house?”

  I quake a little. “No.”

  “What did the ghost in the movie want?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. I never watched the whole movie, but I think that ghost felt guilty.”

  “Do you think that maybe the ghost you saw was your mother coming back because she feels guilty?”

  “No, I don’t think that it was my mother, and if my mother feels guilt it wouldn’t be toward me.”

  “Why not?”

  “I caused a lot of trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  I shake my head. “I was drinking a lot and cutting class.” I explain that my mother blamed it on the friends I had and arranged things so that instead of going for my senior year, I took two college classes in the summer when I was sixteen and earned my high school diploma. I don’t tell him that I drank and cut class in college too.

  I sit in silence, staring at the peaks and folds of the off-white blanket on my lap.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “I don’t like saying my mother or my father. I’d rather say my parents.”

  “Why?”

  “When I say my parents it feels like they’re together. Like they drifted apart and it took their suicides to find each other again.”

  He gives me a searching look.

  “Do you understand?” I ask.

  He nods.

  “The ghost at the foot of my bed—maybe it was both of my parents mixed together.”

  A look of cool skepticism crosses his face.

  Talking with the doctor exhausts me. I want him to leave, but he’s settled into the chair and writes with determination.

  “That ghost—” he begins, sitting forward.

  “It was probably no one,” I say, “just some random ghost passing through.”

  He stops pushing me and allows a long silence.

  I am the one who speaks first. “My youngest sister woke up one morning and my mother was standing at her door holding a gun.”

  The doctor waits for me to go on.

  “When she saw that my sister was awake, she left.”

  “Why do you think she was holding the gun?”

  It shocks me, the insinuation in his voice, as if the answer is obvious. It’s there too, in the way he’s looking at me. I can tell that he thinks my mother intended to shoot my sister and then herself.

  I scowl and shake my head. He takes note of my reaction by scribbling something. I tell myself he’s wrong—it couldn’t have been that. But I begin, almost against my will, to fathom the possibility. Shoot Sheila then herself. Right there in Sheila’s room. Right there where Tracy would have to find them both.

  I feel a surge of hatred for the doctor, but instead of strengthening me, the anger drains me. I stare down at the damp ball of Kleenex in my hands and say nothing.

  •

  The nurse brings me my pill. I take it and everything around me blurs. I feel like I will throw up.

  •

  I wake to the sound of my sisters saying my name.

  I sit up in my hospital bed, looking for them in the overcast afternoon light.

  •

  We are visiting my parents’ friends who have a first-floor apartment just outside of Yonkers, with access to a backyard. Their son ignores Jerry and me because we are too little, but their daughter, who wears a red hair band and is eight years old, tells my mother she will play with us. We follow her out into the backyard. Through the screen door of the kitchen, I can still hear my mother’s and father’s voices mixing with the voices of the other adults. Now and then they burst into loud, uproarious laughter.

  The girl points up at the fire escapes that climb the side of the building. “They look like cages,” she says. Back here it smells of damp red brick and ashes.

  “If you stay up until dark and you sit out here,” she says to Jerry and me, “you can see fireflies.”

  •

  At the party on Park Hill, another man sings, but no one listens to him the way they did to my father. As soon as he finishes, my father is called on again.

  While people gather around him, I follow my mother, who collects glasses, putting them on a tray. I want to help and try handing her a coffee cup, but a lady grasps my mother’s wrist, leans close, and says, “Vincent should have gotten that promotion. It’s a shame. He should have gotten it.”

  “Oh yes,” my mother says and picks up an ashtray.

  “I was surprised you didn’t cancel the party,” the lady whispers.

  My mother shrugs, turns away. I try to hand her the cup again but she doesn’t take it. She stares into the smoke. My stomach hurts.

  She looks at my father, something dark in her face. I run over to him and stand at his leg.

  “Vincent,” she says, no noise of dimes or pennies. “Can you help me with something in the kitchen?”

  A man is in the middle of telling a story. “I’ll be with you in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, Barbara,” my father says, his face red with pleasure.

  “No, Vincent,” she says. “It needs to be now.”

  When my father returns to the room his eyes are glassy, but the guests don’t seem to notice. They crowd him. Would he sing “Whiskey, You’re the Devil,” or the one about Johnny the roving blade?

  But he does not sing. In a hollow voice, he recites Yeats:

  We Irish, born into that ancient sect

  But thrown upon
this filthy modern tide

  And by its formless spawning fury wrecked,

  Climb to . . . our proper dark . . .

  He doesn’t finish the poem.

  No one speaks. The rain has quieted outside, but the smell of it rushes through the metal screens and into the room.

  •

  In group therapy, a young woman named Lily who will be leaving the next day talks about how nervous she is. Though she’s young, her short hair is surprisingly gray.

  “It’s safe here,” she says, “with all of you.”

  Patricia and two other women speak in a chorus to Lily. “We’ll miss you.” “We think you’ll be fine, though.” “Yes, we think you’re ready.”

  A gruff-speaking woman with messy red hair levels her eyes at Lily and says, “I wouldn’t be in your position for all the world. You don’t seem ready at all.”

  Lily starts to cry and Patricia comforts her, but no one addresses the woman with red hair.

  Old Mildred kicks off one of her paper slippers and it shoots across the floor. A choked laugh sounds from the back of the room.

  When another woman raises her hand and echoes what others have been saying, about how safe the psych ward of Hartford Hospital is, how glad they are to be here, I am too disgusted to hold back.

  “I can’t wait to leave this place!”

  They turn their eyes on me. The woman in the kimono looks up for the first time. She catches my eyes, but I look away.

  “How old are you?” Patricia asks.

  “Eighteen.”

  “Are you from Hartford?” she asks.

  “I’m from Santa Fe.”

  “Are there sunflowers there?” a quiet woman named Judy asks with musical inflection.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve seen pictures of sunflowers that are taller than people,” the angry red-haired woman says, as if this is somehow an abomination.

  Lily winces. The thought seems to distress her.

  “Why are you here, dear?” Patricia asks.

  I shake my head.

  When someone repeats the question, Patricia says, in a gentle voice, “She doesn’t want to talk about it right now.”

  When the conversation shifts, I focus on the woman in the kimono. I hope she will look at me again, but she is lost in her thoughts.

  •

  Most patients go to the small cafeteria down the hall. People yell while they eat. People often spill things. The woman in the kimono does not eat in the cafeteria. I, too, ask for my meals in my room.

  •

  Jerry and I are sitting on the living room floor in the big house on Park Hill among all the packed boxes, playing with his builder’s set. “We’re going up in the sky in an airplane!” he keeps saying.

  I want the red plastic hammer, but he won’t give it to me, so I am stuck with the yellow wrench, which is not as much fun.

  In the kitchen, our parents are arguing. My mother says that Nanny has to come with us to New Mexico.

  “For the love of God, Barbara. Your mother and I . . .”

  “She’s an old woman, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I can’t live in the same house with her.”

  “We have to take her. I’m going to have to get a job and we need her to watch the kids.”

  My father lets out a sigh. “For Christ’s sake.”

  “You said you had the job. We’ve been spending money we don’t have.”

  “Barbara, for the hundredth time, I’m sorry!”

  There is a loud noise as if something has fallen or been thrown. Jerry imitates the noise by hitting a box hard with his red hammer. My father walks quickly past us with his head down. I climb onto the couch, look out the window, and watch him drive away.

  When my mother comes in, Jerry asks her if Nanny is going with us to New Mexico and she says yes.

  “Will we leave Daddy here?” I ask.

  “No,” she says quietly. “We would never do that. Besides, Daddy has a job out West. We’re going there together. You know that, don’t you, sweetie? We would never leave Daddy here.”

  •

  The doctor arrives earlier than usual the next morning. His presence makes me irritable. I fidget with a damp Kleenex, bending and folding it over and over, turning it in different directions in my hand. I tell him I was close to my mother until I was about thirteen, but that’s all I can think to say. I have never asked him anything personal, but today I ask, “Are you Catholic?”

  He says he isn’t.

  He asks me if I am Catholic—if my family is Catholic.

  “Suicide is the worst sin,” I say. “That’s the one that can’t be forgiven.”

  I don’t look at him. I press the Kleenex tight into a ball and throw it to the side. “So stupid,” I say. “God forgives torturers and mass murderers, but he doesn’t forgive . . .” I think of the word despair, but can’t say it.

  •

  My mother doesn’t like the idea of moving west when my father is first offered the job as an auditor for the New Mexico state welfare system, but she changes her mind when she finds out that Santa Fe is a place where artists live and work. My mother says that she has no talent herself, but she loves the arts. She had wanted to study art history in college, but it wasn’t practical, so she went to secretarial school. She says in Santa Fe there might be some kind of administrative job she can do involving the arts. Before we leave New York, she sits me down and tells me all about Santa Fe. “There’s a road called Camino del Monte Sol where painters live. And a street called Canyon Road where all the art galleries are. And there’s a famous flamenco dancer who teaches classes for little girls.” She shows Tracy and me pictures of flamenco dancers. “They’re very proud,” she says breathlessly. “And they wear heels and stomp like horses.”

  I contort myself into the extreme, arched posture of the dancers. Heart racing, I watch my mother’s eyes as I throw my head back and stomp my feet.

  •

  My father and I bid farewell to the ocean on Far Rockaway Beach.

  “Are we going to fly that way to New Mexico?” I ask, pointing toward the horizon.

  “No. We’re going that way, to the west,” he says and points in the opposite direction back toward the boardwalk and the place where our car is parked. He crosses his arms and looks a long time at the sea. “There’s no ocean where we’re going, Reggie.”

  My father picks me up and carries me back to where my mother and siblings have started eating their lunch under the big beach umbrella.

  I look over my father’s shoulder toward the sea, searching the horizon for Tír na nÓg.

  •

  Facing each other, holding each other’s hands, Mom and I sway and dance, singing along with the Irish Rovers:

  Her eyes they shone like diamonds,

  You’d think she was queen of the land,

  And her hair hung over her shoulders,

  Tied up with a black velvet band.

  •

  I throw another wet Kleenex to the side. I won’t look at the doctor, but he is waiting for me to speak.

  “I came East to be near my sisters, but I’ve only gotten to see them once.”

  I explain that after our mother’s death, our maternal uncles came to New Mexico, and my uncle Bob from the Bronx took my sisters, who are sixteen and thirteen, back to live with him and my aunt. I didn’t want to be far away from them, but there wasn’t room for me so I came to Connecticut to live with my other uncle, Jack, his wife, my aunt Pat, and their two kids. I tell him how I tried a lot of times to organize things so I could go visit my sisters, but it kept getting put off. Finally they agreed to Thanksgiving, but I was allowed to stay for only one day and one night.

  “Do you know why?” the doctor asks.

  “I’m sure it’s because of Aunt Peggy. She’s nervous. She made way too much food and kept chattering, but never once looked me in the eye.”

  I think of the fun I had with my sisters, staying up late, joking and laughing. Tracy t
alked about her chemistry teacher, Father Slattery with only one hand. She told us that she was going to write a story dedicated to him, called “The Hand That Wasn’t There.” The three of us laughed so hard our sides cramped.

  I tell the doctor how tiny, airless, and gray the apartment in the Bronx is and that it makes no sense that Uncle Bob and Aunt Peggy took my sisters, who should have been living in Connecticut with the uncle and aunt I live with. The house is big and there’s lots of room. It’s a more stable environment. I tell him that Uncle Bob is nice, but that he has terrible dreams and yells in his sleep.

  •

  The doctor is asking me a question about the months between my father’s death and my mother’s, but I cannot concentrate enough to answer it. I am remembering the train from the Bronx back to Connecticut. It passed blackened industrial chimneys issuing smoke into the overcast afternoon. Abandoned skeletal warehouses loomed, hundreds of windows opaque with filth, many of them broken.

  The train took a sudden circuitous path and I was confronted with a glimpse of ocean. Very faintly, through the walls of the train, I felt the water resounding.

  •

  Lying in my hospital bed, I close my eyes, resting my head on my arm, and think about bodies of water: the River Styx, the River Lethe. I think of a book I read about druids. Pagan stories of an afterlife say nothing about punishment. The souls of the dead cross a river at night. There was an etching of figures gathered at a shore. My parents are there together, I tell myself, in the shadows, breathing the ether of that other place. This comforts me. And there I am in the green velvet dress with flowers in my hair, coming out of the woods near the shoreline, watching their souls prepare to cross the water.

  •

  Mary slides the curtain open between our beds as I dial the phone on the nightstand. She wants to know who I keep trying to call.

  I tell her that I have a friend in Hartford named Max, and explain that after I came East to live with my uncle and his family two months ago, I started taking a writing class twice a week. “That’s where we met.”

  She wants me to describe him.

  “He’s tall and has very black hair. We had coffee together after each class and talked intensely about things.”

  “About what?” Mary asks.