Grandghost

by Nancy Springer

  Back indoors, I scrawled it with a Sharpie on a scrap of origami paper. Dr Wengleman. There. But where could I put it so that it wouldn’t get away from me in the mysterious way that my notes to self often did? After some thought, I placed it under one of my many fridge magnets: rainbows, butterflies, daisies – this one happened to be a hummingbird. Then I stoked my old four-cup coffee maker and fired it up, got myself a bowl of Special K for breakfast, and while I ate, I studied the rather slender phone book serving Skink County. Sure enough, Dr Wengleman turned out to be the county coroner. I planned to contact her the minute she got back to her office, where presumably the sheriff couldn’t tell her what to do.

  Meanwhile, a cup of coffee and my studio awaited me …

  Or so I thought, before I heard the kitchen screen door squeak open. Even before she rapped and her reedy voice called, ‘Beverly? It’s Wilma Lou,’ I knew who it was. The media lined up across a drainage ditch from my front yard couldn’t get to me, not yet, but apparently the cops had neglected to station an officer to keep my nosy neighbor from intruding.

  After arranging a smile on my face, I let her in. ‘Coffee?’ I offered without much enthusiasm. OK, I had moved to the Bible Belt of my own free will, and OK, I got along fine with most people here, and they didn’t have to know I rolled my eyes at their bumper stickers. But for Wilma Lou I made an exception: I didn’t want to get along, no thank you. Wilma Lou prayed aloud on every possible occasion; if she dropped a package of eggs, she stood and prayed that they would not be broken. Heck, she prayed over road kill. At Halloween she prayed over the children as she gave them lollipops wrapped in Bible verses. And I couldn’t seem to keep her from sticking her long nose into my business. She just plain irritated me.

  All hunched and earnest, ignoring my offer of coffee, she scuttled into my personal space and laid a twiggy hand on my arm, peering up at me. ‘Beverly, is it true what I heared – they found a body in y’alls’s backyard?’

  Grabbing on to me worse than a wisteria vine, she brought out every bit of my innate perversity. I stiffened. ‘How did you hear such a thing?’

  ‘Well, it’s true, ain’t it?’

  ‘Was it someone you knew?’ I gave her a pretty hard counter-peer, but she didn’t retreat. I should have known I couldn’t faze her that easily. Wistfully, I imagined having someone else – maybe a nice, quiet drug dealer – as a neighbor. ‘How long have you lived over there, Wilma Lou?’

  ‘Since my wedding day in 1956, and my husband put the brick facing on it for me, unlike this house which Papa was building at the same time, and I ain’t hardly never had nothing but good Christian neighbors over here.’ Evidently, she meant this as an appeal to my better nature, for she grasped me with her other hand as well. ‘Y’all are a Christian, ain’t y’all?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  She gasped, let go of me and jumped back as if dropping a rattlesnake. I wasn’t expecting such a reaction; I had answered her question gently enough.

  ‘But … then …’ she stammered, squeaking. ‘But then what are y’all?’ Her horrified gaze scanned the children’s book art on the walls of my house wildly, as if she had just realized it conveyed some dread significance.

  That did it. My perverse sense of humor took over. ‘Zen Shinto,’ I told her promptly. ‘I worship animals. Are you sure you won’t have some fresh coffee?’

  ‘N–n–no, thank you, I better go.’ She scuttled toward the door in reverse as if afraid to turn her back on me. Once outside, she blurted, ‘I’ll pray for y’all!’

  ‘You go ahead and do that. No offense taken. Have a good day,’ I called after her as she fled toward her property line. I imagined I wouldn’t find her on my side of that line again anytime soon, and my mood improved immediately.

  Smiling, I filled my favorite mug, then headed for my studio.

  THREE

  As I’ve tried to say before, I am one of those fortunate individuals for whom going to work gives more than it takes away, completes me more than it depletes me, builds me up more than it wears me down. I go to work for recreation, to create again, to restore myself.

  So I walked into my studio to look at the portrait awaiting me on the easel, the one I had just started. But when I saw it, such a shock gobsmacked me that the earth seemed to quake. I backed off, set my mug of coffee down on the table so I wouldn’t drop it, and plopped on to a chair so I wouldn’t fall over.

  What I observed was impossible. The painting was mine. As uniquely my own as my handwriting. Every brushstroke testified that it was mine, yet I didn’t remember having done it that way at all. My concept remained clear in my imagination, but the portrait … instead of being a classic oval, the face seemed pinched at the top and square at the bottom. The eyes I intended to be wide and innocent still greeted me with their vestigial gaze, but were now deep-set and shadowy under straight brows – no way had I made her eyebrows so straight! And I knew I had painted a soft mouth suggesting just a wisp of a smile, not a grim one as uncompromising as the brow line.

  Yet it was not as if some vandal had broken into my studio and messed around with my work. Everything was just as I had left it. The portrait on my easel, all the brushstrokes ineluctably mine and not a single one added – the painting remained just as I had left it, but eerily different.

  I stood up. ‘You are supposed to be my granddaughter,’ I whispered to the sepia face in protest, and the sound of my own voice broke me wide open. ‘Please tell me I’m not losing my freaking mind!’ I strode over to the easel and reached up to rip the painting off it, tear it to shreds, trash it and start over. But, just in time, wisdom of experience overruled me. This peculiar artist’s wisdom is to be found, I’m sure, in painters, poets, songwriters, creative people of all sorts everywhere, and the wisdom is: when the work starts to push back, be humble. Submit. Let the unconscious mind take over. Sometimes it knows better than you do.

  Evidently, my first grandchild was not going to be exactly what I expected. And wasn’t that a rule of life? What could be more true of a real child?

  My life-sized child was still a life-sized child.

  Did I want my grandchild to be real or didn’t I?

  ‘Whoa,’ I muttered. ‘I’m crossing a big, fat, hairy line here.’

  I hesitated a few moments longer. But finally, because my fingers itched to paint, I shrugged off my misgivings, sipped my coffee, then started to sort through my paints, mulling over my palette: a hint of pale carmine for the light areas of blond hair, a trio of indigo, violet and viridian for the scrumbled background, raw umber and cadmium yellow and cobalt blue …

  I planned where my darkest darks and lightest lights had to go, then started, as always, with the deepest shadows, laying in broad strokes along the neck and one side of the face and nose, obediently following the mysteriously modified contours. I set off the head with the beginnings of background, going very gently around the hair, trying not to be sudden. I laid in the medium planes of the face and the buttery sheen of the hair, toning down the golden yellows with just a hint of blue. And I roughed in the eyes – a wisp of raw umber to outline, a touch of thinned violet for each iris, burnt umber mixed with indigo for the pupils, but nothing more; I needed to take care not to get lost in details at this stage. I needed to see the portrait as an organic whole, not as structural parts. Midtones, not lines, gave me the shape of the face and nose.

  To an onlooker, this might have seemed like not much progress, but it took hours. When the light changed to gray in preparation for the standard Florida mid-afternoon thunderstorm, I was ready to quit. My straining eyes and my aching shoulders told me I had done enough for one day. I put the brushes I had used in a pan of soapy water in the kitchen sink, made sure the lids were tight on my paints, cleaned up the inevitable mess around and under the easel and the worktable that stood beside it, then turned away.

  Stretching, I wandered over to the window to see what was going on in my backyard.

  The wind was rising, ag
itating the crepe myrtle bushes and the hair of the four people who remained. Three of them – the tall, angular woman and the two men who had been helping her – were loading boxes into the back of a white van. And the other one – the no-neck sheriff – started to tear down the crime-scene tape.

  Aha! I scooted out the door and trotted down there, invigorated by the smell of ozone and the sound of distant thunder, brushing past the sheriff to have a look at the hole in my yard. But that’s all it was – a large, empty hole with a couple of beetles exploring it and a copious number of bricks piled around it.

  ‘Where is she?’ I demanded.

  ‘The skeleton?’ Dr Wengleman turned to me, holding down her flailing hair with both hands, her smile worn-out but friendly. ‘All boxed up to go to the morgue.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then we lay her out on a table and try to figure out who she is and what happened to her.’

  ‘Murder is what happened to her,’ said a sour growl behind me – the sheriff. ‘People don’t just plant young’uns for fun. And whoever done it, they been getting away with it fifty, sixty years.’ The large man looked grim and very sweaty. ‘Somebody help me take down this so-called canopy?’

  ‘What am I supposed to do with this hole in my yard?’ I asked. I really wanted to know; should I leave it alone for evidence or what?

  But the sheriff grumped, ‘Whatever you want. Use it for a duck pond. In a couple minutes it’s gonna look like one.’

  ‘Yikes.’ Feeling the first big drops starting to spatter down, I ran for my house, waving. ‘Nice to meet you all,’ I called over my shoulder.

  ‘You, too,’ I heard the coroner respond.

  Once I stepped into the kitchen, I felt as if I ought to eat something, so I chomped on an apple as I watched the coroner’s van trundle up my yard and out my driveway – aka the part of my yard that had been naturally paved by pine straw – followed by the sheriff’s cruiser, followed by a similar cruiser that had apparently been parked out by my mailbox to keep the reporters at bay.

  Crap. Here they came. Three vehicles. Local newspaper, local TV, local radio.

  But also here came the rain, pouring, sheeting in the wind, bright as steel needles in the lightning. And here also came thunder, loud and scary as a Howser at close range.

  Those reporters wouldn’t stand in the storm knocking on my door for long. But just so they wouldn’t see me, I ducked into the back room, the studio.

  Lightning flared, and in its explosive light I saw the glare of dark, angry eyes meeting mine. From the easel.

  Just for half a second, while the lightning strobed.

  I stood in the gloom, my heart pounding. No. I hadn’t seen what I had just seen; it must have been an illusion.

  The people at the front door started yelling, ‘Mrs Vernon!’ and pounding, but the thunder volleyed louder – that and the rain drumming on the roof. By comparison, mere pesky reporters at the door seemed puny. I ignored them.

  Lightning crackled again, and again I saw … no, it simply couldn’t be. Forgetting all about concealment from reporters, I flipped on the studio’s overhead light so I could take a good look at the painting.

  My portrait of a sweet little girl – but, inexplicably, her eyes were no longer violet and serene the way I had made them. The brushstrokes were mine, but they depicted a narrow glare. The child on my easel was a sullen stranger. Her hair – I remembered painting smooth, long blond hair, but … how could I be so mistaken? Her hair looked rough, shaggy and the color of a dirt road.

  A thin whimper reeled out of my throat like fishing line, and I started sweating even though the central air conditioning was doing its job. My art – even in artificial light, how could I be so mistaken about my own art? I remembered what hues I had used, or thought I did, but I had no proof, because I had cleaned up and rinsed out the rag and made sure all my acrylics had their lids on tight so they wouldn’t dry out.

  Just the same, I rushed over to my worktable to check the paints I thought I had used – but I found no telltale drips to differentiate what I thought were my palette colors from the others.

  Thought? I should know.

  I didn’t remember painting my precious portrait, my pretend grandchild, this way at all, yet there she stood, unmistakably my handiwork, scowling at me.

  There was something wrong with me, my memory, my mind. Had to be. I whimpered again, then fled, ignoring the voices now shouting at my front door. I locked myself in the bathroom with the lights off and took a shower in the dark, trying to calm down.

  Berthe, call me ASAP. Mom alert level orange, Cassie texted her sister. She always called Maurie ‘Berthe’ to annoy her; Maurie’s legal name was Berthe Morisot Vernon. Cassie’s was Mary Cassatt Vernon. Right from the very beginning, their eccentric mother had made nothing simple for them.

  Eccentric maybe going on cuckoo?

  She was texting Berthe from upstairs. It was a phone call from Mom that had driven Cassie to take refuge in her home above her cafe, Creative Java. Few understood the derivation of the name. When she had first refurbished the tall old fieldstone mill along the Passaic River as an art gallery, she had dubbed it Creative Juices, My Foot! after her mother’s habitual response to that cliché about the artistic process. When the gallery had tanked, Cassie had kept the price-tagged paintings on the walls but retrofitted the place to serve espresso, calling it Creative Juices and Java, meaning fine art and fine coffee. But people, not understanding, kept asking for fruit-based beverages she didn’t serve, so she had been stuck with Creative Java. Well, many forms of pressed coffee were indeed creative. She hoped her teenage employees didn’t get too damn creative – espresso macchiato with frowny faces, with swastikas, with phallic symbols – while she left them unsupervised for what she hoped would be a short time.

  She was doing so, sequestered in her loft-like, secondhand-store-furnished apartment upstairs, because, right from the first hellos, something shadowy behind Mom’s bright voice had alarmed her. ‘I just came out of the shower, where I nearly scalded myself, the water is so hot, but at least some of the reporters have gone away now,’ Mom had chirped.

  ‘Reporters? What do you mean, reporters?’

  ‘News reporters, because yesterday I found a skeleton in the backyard, sweetie. They just took it away, and now I don’t want to turn any lights on. I’m standing here in the dark in case there might still be some lurking in the bushes.’

  ‘Skeletons?’

  ‘Damn nuisance reporters, silly.’ Mom’s laugh had sounded friable, as if it might crumble along with her facade of normalcy. ‘And, oh, just by the way, I seem to have become an old gray mare turned out to pasture. How are you doing?’

  Long accustomed to hit-and-run conversations with her mother, Cassie blew straight past that. ‘What do you mean, you found a skeleton?’

  ‘I mean I found a skeleton under some bricks I was digging because Kim turned down my Six Swans book.’

  ‘Kim turned down your new book?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter now, honey.’ Mom’s voice downshifted, geared for rough terrain. ‘Unfortunately, it was the skeleton of a child.’

  Still uncertain whether the skeleton was a skeleton or a metaphor for the rejected picture book, Cassie replied neutrally. ‘No wonder you sound upset.’

  ‘I’m not upset, not really. I’m just calling for something to do while I wait for the rest of the reporters to go away for sure.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Reporters again. Media meant something must have actually happened. ‘So there was a skeleton in your backyard. And it was the remains of a child.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So does anybody have any clue who he was or how he got there?’

  ‘She.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘Yes, it’s a she skeleton. There were remnants of a dress. As to how she got there, not a clue, but it sure doesn’t look good.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Abuse? Neglect? Murder? How did the poor lit
tle thing get there? We might never know.’

  Cassie took a long, contemplative breath before she said, ‘So, is that what’s “not really” upsetting you, or is it the reporters, or Kim and the new book?’

  In a very, very low voice, Mom said, ‘None of the above.’

  Cassie felt the hair on the back of her neck prickle. ‘Mom? What—’

  ‘Nothing.’ Mom sounded brittle. ‘Never mind. I really ought to get going, honey.’

  ‘Going where?’

  ‘Crazy. No ha ha never mind it must be my imagination I love you bye.’ With scant punctuation, Mom hung up.

  Cassie listened to ghosts tittering in disconnected cyberspace for a moment before she put her iPhone back into the pocket of her jeans. Then, rather than returning immediately to what might well be chaos in her cafe, she stood, thinking. Going crazy, ha ha? And if a picture book rejection was not the foremost of Mom’s problems, then what in the world of Mom could possibly be going on?

  Rolling her eyes, Cassie had then pulled her phone out again to text Maurie. She knew Mom would not phone Maurie because, in Mom’s thinking, Maurie was not to be interrupted. Maurie might be teaching a class, writing something important and academic, or attending some sort of professional lawyer-and-wife function with her husband instead of merely (like Cassie) living over the little business she ran, being single and dependably available. Damn it all anyway, why did older sisters have to be so frigging superior?

  But Cassie thrust that immature sentiment aside at once. Mom didn’t need a pair of bickering siblings; Mom needed a team of grown daughters – or at least Cassie thought she might. She had never before heard her mother’s chipper voice ring so hollow. Mom had sounded almost frightened.

  From somewhere in the woods and weeds behind my house, a whippoorwill called at irregular midnight intervals. From one of the tall longleaf pines off to the side, beyond the open grave in my backyard, an owl offered occasional spectral remarks. Then the coyotes started their eerie chorus of atonal wails. Lying on my bed in the dark, listening when I should have been sleeping, I wondered what else was out there. My brain, always a bit skewed by bedtime, offered an odd thought: how did I know the coyotes were coyotes? Every night I heard them, but I had never actually seen one. Same with the whippoorwill; how did I know it was a brownish bird with a mustache that nested on the ground? I had never seen one of those either, only pictures in books. I had seen owls, but how did I know it was owls making those shiversome sounds? It would have made just as much sense for me to think that something else entirely …