by Deb Caletti
“You’ve never seen any ghosts before?” I tried to make my voice sound joking, but I really wanted to know. “On the water? The lighthouse? Your own house?”
“We find our washing machine in the middle of the floor sometimes, but that’s usually after the spin cycle.”
I grinned.
“I laugh my ass off whenever I see that. It reminds me of some kid who partied too hard and wakes up wondering, how’d I get here?” The group approached. The woman in velour pulled her jacket closer to her body. “They’re going to freeze their butts off,” Jack said. “Okay, time to play captain.”
Everyone came aboard and found seats on the padded benches and the bow of the boat. Finn untied the ropes and Jack eased us out of port with the motor on. The sun was setting, and the sky turned shades of sherbet. Finn gave his safety talk, and then, as the land fell away from us, he lifted the sails. He grabbed the rope in his two hands and pulled down hard until he was on his knees. The tip of the white sheet touched the sky, you’d swear, rising with clangs and clatters of metal rings against the mast. Jack was right—the summer day fell away sure as that land, and the air was all at once cold.
The magenta-haired guide, Beth Louise, waited until we were underway before she began to speak. She stood near the wheel, off to the side so Jack could safely scan the waters and steer. Jack and Finn had their own shorthand communication, a nonverbal language of nods and gestures and decisions that sent them moving in tandem.
“First of all, you must know that in sailing legend it is bad luck to have a woman aboard ship. . . .” Beth Louise said. Everyone twittered.
“Bad luck’s been good to me,” Jack sang, and the passengers laughed.
“And a sailor’s death at sea will always be avenged, even if this is from the other side.”
One of the Bellevue High girls giggled. I wanted to as well. Finn was back again and he must have seen my mouth turn up. He kicked my shoe softly with the toe of his own, made his eyes spooky big. The sun dipped on cue. An older couple wearing matching jackets scooted closer together, and he took her hand.
“You wonder, do you, why seashore towns and lighthouses always have ghosts? Because this is where the violent seas meet turbulent shore, where ships of men leave loved ones behind, witnesses to storms and loss and the drowning and crashing of that loss. There are hundreds of dead sailors right here, right below us in these waters. This was a major shipping channel back in the time of the tall ships, and the high winds here made passage deadly. Many ships went missing. The SS Highport, the Williamson, the Queen Victoria, to name just a few. Is it any wonder that the paranormal activity here is so great? Tragic loss and great fear means unsettled spirits.”
Beth Louise stopped. You couldn’t help yourself. You looked out onto those waters. You imagined.
“The sailing vessels, well, let’s come back to those, because right now we are over the spot of a tragic shipwreck that took place on April 1, 1921, the wreck of the SS Governor, where the lives lost were not seamen, but a family. The Washbourne family, Harry and Lucy asleep on one side of the cabin and their two young daughters on the other. Imagine the dark night, the deep waters, cold, cold. The family was sound asleep the moment that the captain of the SS Governor confused the running lights of the West Hartland for the inland light of port and proceeded forward, until the bow of the West Hartland slashed through the ship and divided the Washbourne family cabin right in half.”
“Oh, God,” the woman with the long hair said. Her friend had her hand to her mouth. I didn’t feel like joking anymore. Beth Louise’s voice was calm and undramatic. None of this seemed silly. This was a real and tragic event, and her voice reflected that. Even Beth Louise herself was not as silly as she first seemed.
“The crew came quickly to their aid, but the young girls were trapped, unable to be freed. Water was coming in. Water everywhere. Harry was brought up top, and, against her will, so was the now hysterical mother, Lucy. The crew worked to move the rest of the stranded passengers of the now sinking ship quickly as possible to the West Hartland. But while they were distracted, Lucy broke free of her rescuers and ran to be with her children. She was never seen again. The ship sank within twenty minutes.”
Beth Louise looked grim. Now the Bellevue High girls were holding hands. The sky was dark. A half circle moon hung high. Those black waves—they did look so, so cold.
“Lucy is said to haunt the area,” Beth Louise said. “She has been seen numerous times, by sailors and fishermen and locals. The Pigeon Head Point Lighthouse keeper at the time, James Shaw, witnessed the accident. Today, members of the U.S. Coast Guard have made reports about seeing the woman in her white nightgown hovering here and at the lighthouse itself, going inside, disappearing. Searching.”
Obsession sliced through the waters, and then Jack called “Come about!” to Finn, and there was the clatter of boom and sails as the boat turned to parallel the shore. We could see the lighthouse up ahead, and then nearer and nearer it came, looking eerie against the backdrop of that story. Its tall white column held another story now, Lucy Washbourne’s, and another, James Shaw’s. It was stupid, but I shivered. The whole thing was stupid, but she was a real mother and they were real children. As the boat slowed in front of the lighthouse, I thought of Sylvie in there. I wondered what she and Roger were doing at that very moment. The house looked dark. I thought of Sylvie’s own loss, and about loss itself. What loss can do to us. What even the threat of loss can do.
“And now we move to what is perhaps Bishop Rock’s most famous spirit, Eliza Bishop. Her husband, Captain Bishop, was one of the town’s early leaders. His ship, Glory, was hit by a sudden storm right here in front of the land named for his father. It was a terrible wind. The rain slammed hard, waves overtook the boat; the boat, heavy with water, tilted toward the sea. Desperate men were running and clinging and sliding down the slanting floorboards, screaming. Many of the townspeople watched the terrible wreck from the windows of the old meeting hall, which no longer stands. Eliza herself ran through the storm to the hall. She saw that ship sinking, and it was obvious no man would have made it from that wreck alive. She could see the men, her husband somewhere among them, flailing but unable to be rescued in the terrible waters just out of reach. She ran to the lighthouse. The keeper tried to stop her racing up those stairs, to the upper level, but she stepped outside onto that deck and leaped to her death on the rocks below.”
“Jesus,” the man with the big belt buckle said.
“She has been seen for years at the lighthouse, and the ghost ship Glory has been witnessed often, sailing these waters with no crew aboard.”
Jack and Finn came about again, the whip and rattle of the sails causing the woman in the expensive hippie sandals to jump and then laugh at herself. Beth Louise was silent. No one else spoke, either. It seemed the respectful thing to do. Eliza and Captain Bishop—they were once living people who felt and loved and who had slept together in their safe bed. The waves looked tipped in silver as the moon glowed on and on and on.
Jack glided the boat back into port. The jovial mood that everyone came with seemed to return once we were off those waters, back in the safety of harbor. People were joking. Someone asked the Bishop brothers whether they had ever spotted any spirits out there, and Jack joked that, no, he hadn’t, but he’d once seen the Virgin Mary in an abalone shell.
I tried to shift gears, to pick up the new mood, but I felt weighted down. The deep feelings of other people’s grief and passion and tragedy—we drew those things to us; we made them romantic and dreamlike and luridly fascinating. We made them into stories. You could forget, then, that a girl, a real girl, could stand at the banks of Greenlake with her heart beating in her throat, her shoes sinking into the mud. You could forget that Mrs. Bishop felt her life was over. You could come to think that real fear, real danger, was a faraway thing. Romantic and dreamlike and luridly fascinating, but not real, even as you felt it, the phone vibrating in your pocket right then.
>
Three calls from Christian and one from my father.
Finn jumped from the boat. Took my face in his hands. “I didn’t hear a word of any of that, because all I could think was how beautiful you looked in that moonlight,” he said.
I smiled. “Kiss me, because I’d better get home,” I said.
He did. His face was cold against my cold face.
“Thanks for putting up with that just to see me,” he said.
I pretended I thought it was stupid, too. I didn’t want to confess that it disturbed me. “So, Mr. Finn. What do you think about all of that? If there are ghosts, why are there ghosts?”
He kissed the tip of my nose. “People who can’t let go?”
“We feel sorry for them, though. They’re ‘tormented’ . . .”
“Yeah” he said. “But they scare the shit out of people because they can’t move on. Selfish.”
“Metaphor,” I said.
But Finn didn’t care about metaphors. He kissed me again. “Do you want me to walk you to your car?”
I did want him to, but I shook my head. I wouldn’t let him see how much the dark was scaring me, the sound of the water against the pilings of the dock, the old wood groaning and creaking as it shifted. “See you tomorrow?”
“Great,” he said.
I walked away, turned to wave. I wished I could run to my car, but he was watching and it would have been embarrassing. I wanted to, though. Everything inside was urging. I unlocked my door in a hurry. I got in and locked all of the doors around me. The street was empty and quiet except for the noise that spilled from Butch’s Harbor Bar when a couple opened the door to go in. The steering wheel was cold, the seat, too. I turned on the engine and blasted the heater and drove home too fast, my phone right by my hip in the pocket of Cleo’s jacket, those messages from Christian too close to my body.
I drove through town, down the winding beach road that hugged the coast. I watched my rearview mirror for lights, but it was just all darkness stretched out behind me. I saw the house, our house, sitting at the tip of Possession Point, a yellowish glow coming from the windows. As I approached, a Jeep passed me. Sylvie Genovese going home.
I pulled into the driveway. Smoke was coming from our chimney. My father had lit a fire. Intimate ambience, which could have been irritating, only it wasn’t. The thought of warmth and home sounded like a great relief, a place to reach that I hadn’t yet reached. The distance between the car and the inside seemed so far still, with all that dark space out there, with that endless beach grass high enough to hide in, the black banks of rock, the piles of driftwood right outside my window.
I turned off the engine and looked around before I stepped out, and I almost ran to that front door. I flung it open and shut it hard behind me, safe. I was out of breath. At least, I felt the heaviness in my chest that meant I was trying to get air. Drowning must feel like that.
“Jesus,” I said. I put my hand to my heart, like I’d been chased and now I had made it. I looked around. The fire was still popping and snapping, but sleepily, in that winding down way that meant they’d had a long evening together. There were candles in candlesticks on the table. The wax dripped down; the candles were burned to only a few inches high.
My father was in the bathroom. I heard him. And then he came out and stared at me, and his face looked strange. His eyes looked puffy, small slits. I was glad to see him, though. I needed to tell him.
“He called me again. I know he’s here.”
“We’re going on Monday, Clara. There’s a courthouse in Anacortes. We’re going to get that restraining order as soon as the doors open. But there’s something we need to talk about now.”
I didn’t say anything. My back was still to the front door. I understood something. “Whatever your big secret is, you told Sylvie, didn’t you?”
“Come and sit down.”
It seemed like a terrible disloyalty, him telling her first. Whatever it was, he was my father and this was my business. It didn’t feel safe inside there anymore. Inside, outside—nowhere felt safe. “I don’t want to know your big secret.”
“Clara Pea.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“I should have told you a long time ago, but I couldn’t.”
We stayed there, standing. In the movies, you always see people sitting down for Big News. People always say that, too, they urge you to sit before it comes. But sitting is one step further from the chance to flee. Standing is closer to away.
“Your mother . . .”
“I don’t want this.”
“I’ve lied to you. I’ve got a hundred good reasons why, but it doesn’t change the fact that I never told you the truth.”
“I don’t need the truth.”
“Clara, please.” I didn’t want to be told, but he needed to tell. You could see it. The words had been pressing at him from the inside for so long and long and long like words do, like secret shame does. Words must finally be said; they press their way out. Words came from his fingertips every day, onto pages that were read by thousands of people, but these private words, they stayed inside where they didn’t belong, building strength and weight, shoving harder until they were bigger than he was.
“It’s your problem,” I said. My back was still to the door.
“She didn’t die of an aneurysm,” he said.
“No,” I said. I shook my head. I felt sick. I kept shaking my head. I didn’t want the words to get in. I didn’t want to know this.
“We were away for the weekend. A beach house. Near here, but not here.”
“You went to a beach house after she died to recover from grief.”
He started to pace. He ran his hand through his hair. “We’d been having trouble. I’d had . . . I’d been involved with . . . a woman. Women. Rachel—” A sob escaped his throat. He swallowed. He was fighting back tears. I could feel a grief of my own growing, growing, threatening to spill. “Found out. She found out. It was wrong, I know how wrong. I thought I was hot shit, you know? My book . . . First book. Mr. Everything.” He put his palms to his eyes, breathed out, shook his head. “She’d always, she had problems. Depressed. Fragile. It had gotten too much. I felt dragged down . . . She knew. Had known, and we were fighting all the time . . . It was supposed to be some Let’s get this on track . . . Some weekend where . . . But we were sitting, having a drink. I was. All at once, I wanted out. I said I wanted out.”
“No,” I said. “Don’t say it.” The grief rose and spilled. I started to cry. I looked at the floor, the way the slats of wood fit into the other slats of wood. My chest felt like it was sinking into itself. “Please,” I said.
He was struggling. “She stood in the doorway. She just stood, and then she ran. I thought she was just leaving, you know, to get away for a while. But she got in this boat. I saw from the window. The boat—it was right there, in front of the house, on the beach. A rowboat. She dragged it out . . .”
I put my hands over my ears. I was crying. I was crying and shaking my head and my hands were over my ears, but at the same time I was hearing this as if it were a memory, a known thing already, like it was something I had known a long, long time ago and was hearing again. It was searing me, slicing through, a new truth, yet it felt like something I recognized, too. A horrible fact, an ugly deformity that was rising slowly and showing itself again, years later, from behind a mask.
“She got in that boat.” He let out a small cry. An ahh of pain. “Jesus.” His voice was hoarse. “I ran to her. She started it up, and I heard the motor. The boat was going out . . . I went after her. In the water. My clothes on. I ran and the waves were splashing over my head and my clothes were so heavy under the water, and I was yelling and yelling to her and that boat kept going out, and it was so far away but I could see it. I would bob up and see it and scream her name, and I was swallowing water, and then I saw her stand up and go over the side.”
He began to sob. His face was in his hands. “Rachel, Jesus.”
“No.” I saw the boat in my mind, the choppy black waters. The woman who was my mother, throwing it all away. I saw myself in bed at home with some babysitter in another room watching TV. She got in that boat knowing that and not caring.
My father wiped his eyes with his fingertips. He inhaled, exhaled. “I was wrong. What I did was wrong. Clara, I know that. I am so sorry.”
I was crying hard and I felt outside my body and my life and I didn’t know what was real and wasn’t, because I didn’t know who she was anymore or who he was or what our life had been and so I wasn’t even sure who I was or what had happened to me. I felt my insides spinning, and he came and put his arms around me and I didn’t want them there, but I did want them, too, because we were all each other had, really. He was my family and I was his, and my mother had belonged to us both. He was breathing hard; I could feel his arms gripping me, and what had happened with Christian seemed far away, but also closer than ever, because even through my wracking sobs I understood now why my father had insisted we run. My fear may not have been real, but his was, as real as that water soaking my father’s clothes and his screams and that boat too far for him to catch. Fear was the biggest bullshitter, he’d said. But sometimes, too, fear told the truth.
His voice was small. It came from somewhere far away. “I owed her honesty,” he said. “But did I owe her everything? Should I have had to hold her life in my hands?”
We clung to each other, and he rocked me, and the house was quiet except for a ticking clock. What did I owe her? he wanted to know, and I had no answer for him. None. We cried and held each other because we were two sailors alone in this one boat, out at sea. We exhausted ourselves. We had come away from the door. We were inside that house, which was still better than being outside that house.
“But why did we come here?” I asked. “Why did we come by the sea?”
He held my arms and looked at me. “I don’t know.” The words were hushed. I looked back in his eyes, and I realized I was seeing him. All of him, not the joking smart-ass, not the author, not the father, but the man. He looked a lot like me. “Maybe for this,” he said. “Maybe for this right here.”