Sylvie and the Christmas Ghost

by Foxglove Lee

  Had the ghost in my dad’s house been wrong? Did he think I was somebody else? Or was he really my grandfather?

  As I looked from the picture of Gerald Rawley to my father standing right there beside me, I started to see the family resemblance. They had the same nose, the same forehead, the same eyebrows. Gerald Rawley’s hair was slicked back while my father’s did its own thing. Gerald Rawley had a slim moustache. My dad didn’t.

  “He never came home from war,” my father mumbled.

  “That’s right,” Mr. Dempsey replied. “He’s buried in Holland, I believe. I can look up his place of rest, if you like.” Glancing at his watch, he said, “But it’ll be after the holidays. I’m taking a couple days off to visit my daughter.”

  “That sounds lovely,” Amy said. “Wish her a Merry Christmas from me, will you?”

  “Of course, of course.” They kissed on the cheek and then Mr. Dempsey asked me, “Aren’t you a busy little bee, doing research right up to Christmas! I wish our kids here in town had half your gumption.”

  “Thanks,” I said, because I worried it would disappoint the old man if I told him we were following up on gossip I’d heard from a ghost.

  “Are you looking up Gerald Rawley for a school project?” Mr. Dempsey went on.

  “No,” my father cut in. He had tears in his eyes as he grasped my shoulder. “That man in the picture, the hero who died for his country—that man was my father.”

  Chapter Nine

  We talked about him for two hours: Dad’s dad, my grandpa, the man we never knew. Why hadn’t Grandma told anyone about him? Was it because of the colour of his skin? That was terrible! But my dad said back when he was growing up, pretty much everyone in Erinville was white. A lot of people were “prejudiced,” as my father phrased it. They didn’t say “racist” in those days, but it amounted to the same thing.

  “What about Great-Aunt Esther?” I asked. “Was she prejudiced?”

  “You can ask her yourself,” my father said, looking at his watch. “It’s about that time.”

  I looked at my father’s wrist, where he’d drawn back the cuff of his shirt to check the time. His skin was a little darker than mine, and certainly darker than my mother’s, at least in the winter. In the summer, my mom spent a lot of time in the sun and then their skin tones matched up a little more. So I guess I always thought of my father as having a year-round tan.

  “Well, Sylvie?”

  “Huh?”

  “Are you coming to visit Esther? You can tell her what we found out today. It was your research that led us to Gerald Rawley.”

  I rolled my eyes. “It wasn’t research. It was spiritualism.”

  My dad picked up his coat off the back of a chair, but he didn’t stop staring at me as he put it on. “It’s Christmas Eve. Esther keeps asking when she gets to see you. I can only keep making excuses for so long.”

  It made me feel kind of bad that my dad had to lie for me so my great-aunt’s feelings wouldn’t be hurt, but every time I thought about those old people with their see-through skin and their gross blue veins it made me sick.

  “I can’t go,” I said, latching onto a fairly solid excuse. “Celeste is coming over.”

  My dad furrowed his brow. “I wouldn’t mind meeting this Celeste you keep telling me about. I’m starting to think you made her up as an excuse not to visit your aunt.”

  “Dad! I’m way too old to have an imaginary friend.”

  “I’m not saying she’s an imaginary friend, just an invention of convenience.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant by that, but I wasn’t going to ask. He seemed… not mad… just really hurt that I didn’t want to visit a family member who meant so much to him.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” I said. “Anyway, Celeste and I can string these cranberries Amy brought us, and pop the popcorn kernels. See how sad our tree looks? It needs decorations.”

  He wasn’t buying it, but he didn’t bother arguing. He just warned me to keep an eye on the fire. Then he looked at me for a long time. I thought he would ask me again to come visit Great-Aunt Esther, but he just sighed and left by the kitchen door.

  When he was gone, I went to the window seat in the front room and looked out across the yard. How long were all those people going to spy on my dad’s house? There must be something good on TV. Anything would be more entertaining than staring at this old place.

  Shaking my head, I said, “Small towns are so weird.”

  “Very true.”

  My heart jumped into my throat as I turned to find Celeste standing by the fire. “Oh my God, you almost gave me a heart attack! Where did you come from?”

  “From outside,” she said.

  “You could have at least knocked. This isn’t your house.”

  Celeste pointed to the kitchen. “I came in the back way and there was nothing to knock on.”

  That was true. The gap in the door where a window should have been was still covered in plastic.

  “Are you terribly upset with me?” she asked.

  “No, but it’s rude to just walk into someone else’s house like that.”

  Her eyes got all watery and she said, “I apologize, Sylvie.”

  I didn’t want her crying and spoiling Christmas Eve, so I said, “It’s no big deal. Want me to hang up your coat for you?”

  She wrapped the red velvet cloak tighter around her body. “I should like to keep it on. Your father’s house is dreadfully cold.”

  “Sit by the fire, then.” I showed her the cranberries and popcorn Amy had brought us. I’d only ever made popcorn in the air popper my mom had at home. Celeste and I went through the storage boxes until we found a big metal pot and then she showed me how to make it over open flames. My dad would have freaked out. It definitely wasn’t the safest thing to be doing unsupervised. I nearly burnt myself more than once, but it was still as much fun as watching movies with my brothers and sisters.

  “I wish my whole family could be here. I miss them a lot,” I told Celeste. “It would be so much fun if my mom, my dad and all my siblings were decorating the tree together.”

  “Would you still want me around?” Celeste asked. “Even if your brothers and sisters were here to amuse you?”

  “Of course! I think you’d really like them, and they’d like you too. My family is pretty cool.” As I said those words, I realized I hadn’t told Celeste my big family news, which she’d helped me discover. “Oh, Celeste, you’re never gonna believe this…”

  As she threaded two needles, I told her about going to the library. While we strung berries on one cord and popcorn on another, I told her about the book Mr. Dempsey had shown us, and the picture of my grandfather, and the story of his life and death during the war.

  Celeste didn’t look at all surprised. She said, “Your grandmother must have met him in town while he was training new recruits. Often, the boys spent their Saturday nights at the dance hall here in Erinville. Local girls fought tooth and nail for a young man’s affections before he went off to war. Did you know that?”

  “No. How would I know a thing like that?” I asked. “In fact, how do you know a thing like that?”

  Her eyes widened for a moment, and then she shrugged and looked down at her train of popcorn. “Local history, I suppose. One hears such stories around town.”

  “Not everybody does, obviously, because nobody could tell my father who his dad was. Even my great-aunt who raised him never knew.”

  Smirking, Celeste said, “Your fingers have gone all red.”

  “It’s the cranberries.” I looked down at my light blue snowflake sweater to find it splattered with tiny red droplets. “Aww crap!”

  Celeste laughed at me as I went to the front hall and climbed up on the bench to get a full length look at myself in the mirror. The red cranberry splatters were obvious, but it was too cold to take off my sweater even long enough to throw another one on. Anyway, it wasn’t like my dad had a washing machine. I’d just have to live with the stain.<
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  “What are you doing out there?” Celeste called to me.

  “Nothing.” But my reflection caught my eye and I looked deeply at myself in a way I never had before. My skin glowed a little more golden and my hair shone a little darker. I stood a taller as I gazed at my reflection. “Have you ever had a moment where you felt like you finally knew who you were?”

  “Yes,” Celeste replied.

  I jumped down from the bench and walked into the front room. “No, I mean, like, for the first time in your life you really knew who you were?”

  “I understood the question very well, thank you.” Celeste didn’t look up from her needle and thread. “People come to that realization for a variety of reasons.”

  I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant, but when she didn’t explain, I just asked, “What’s your family doing for Christmas?”

  Celeste shrugged. “Nothing.”

  “Oh. Sorry. Are you Jewish?” That thought hadn’t even occurred to me.

  But Celeste said, “No.”

  “You just don’t celebrate Christmas?” I asked.

  Celeste shrugged, but said nothing.

  I wondered why, but I didn’t want to pry so I sat silently in front of the fire and continued stringing cranberries and ruining my sweatshirt.

  “Are you giving your father a gift for Christmas?” Celeste asked after a while.

  “Of course I am. We make each other gifts, in my family, so my brothers and sisters all spent a Saturday making my father’s favourite salsa. It’s got tomatoes, onions, green pepper and spices. We made a huge batch and canned it in jars. We used to make it every summer with my dad, but… not this year.”

  “What a thoughtful gift,” Celeste said. “He will surely love it.”

  “Sorry I don’t have anything for you.”

  Gazing into the fire, Celeste smirked. “Not even a kiss?”

  I got a weird feeling when she said that, but not the same weird feeling I’d had that time in the woods when she actually did kiss me. That kiss had come out of nowhere. It took me by surprise, and the fact that I didn’t see it coming made me angry. This feeling was something else altogether. It was a kind of queasiness, like butterflies in my stomach, same as I got before a school play.

  “You want a kiss?” I asked, staring down at the bag of cranberries in my lap. “That’s all you want? Just a kiss?”

  “Preserves would have been lovely,” she replied. “But I hardly think you’ll have time to prepare them for tomorrow.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, especially in a kitchen that barely has countertops.”

  She laughed too, and we didn’t mention the kissing idea the whole time we finished stringing popcorn and berries and decorating the tree.

  When Celeste said it was time to head home, I told her, “If you’re not celebrating with your family tomorrow, why don’t you come over here on Christmas morning? My dad won’t mind. He wants to meet you.”

  “Thank you,” Celeste said. “I believe I will. Perhaps you’ll even have a gift for me.”

  She smiled coyly. As she took off into the gloaming, I imagined giving her what she wished for. There was something exciting about knowing someone wanted to kiss you so much they were willing to wait for it. They were willing to go away and come back, when all that time you just knew they’d be thinking about it. They’d be thinking about you.

  It was only a few minutes later that my father came through the kitchen door. He was carrying two big paper bags, but I didn’t even let him put them down before dragging him into the front room. “Look at our tree! Look how Celeste and I decorated it! Eww, did you bring us old people food for dinner?”

  My dad’s smile fell.

  “Sorry,” I said quickly. “I meant to say thank you, father dearest, for providing a healthy meal for me on this, the holiest of eves. Amen.”

  Rolling his eyes, he set both bags on the kitchen table. “One bag is food. The other one’s Christmas decorations your great-aunt Esther’s had since she was your age.”

  “What do I get if I guess which one’s which?”

  “You get to not eat tree ornaments for dinner,” my dad replied with a smirk.

  “So funny I forgot to laugh.”

  My dad handed me one of the bags and said, “Be careful. They’re glass and they’re old.”

  I opened the bag while my dad set the table with paper plates and plastic cutlery. The ornaments had been carefully wrapped in white tissue.

  “We’ll add them to the tree after dinner,” my dad went on. “Oh, and I almost forgot about these.”

  As I sat across from him, my father took a rectangular box out of his coat pocket and slid it across the table. I asked, “What is it?”

  “Open it up.” He took Styrofoam containers out of the paper bag while I carefully removed the box top. “Remember those?”

  “Slides?” I asked.

  “Yup, just like when you were little and we’d get out the projector.”

  “Do you have one here?” I asked.

  “Yup. I thought we’d take a look at those after we were done with the tree. They’re from when I was growing up, believe it or not. Lots of Christmases on there.”

  I wondered if this was some underhanded way of guilting me into visiting my great-aunt, but I really couldn’t blame him. I asked, “What did Great-Aunt Esther say when you told her about Grandpa?”

  “You should have seen the look on her face!” My dad imitated it: mouth open, eyes wide.

  I laughed. “Dad, you look so lame.”

  He smiled and went back to opening Styrofoam containers full of mashed potatoes, droopy carrots and slices of honey ham. “I’ll tell you this for sure: she wasn’t keeping anything from me all those years growing up. I always wondered if she knew who my father was and just wasn’t telling me, but I could see it in her eyes—she didn’t know any more than I did. She’d never even heard of the guy. Your grandmother must have kept their relationship secret from the whole town.”

  “Wow.”

  “Wow—exactly.” He served ham onto my plate and his, then licked his thumb where he’d touched the slices. “Keeping secrets isn’t easy in a place like Erinville.”

  “I bet.” Turning around, I gazed across the lawn at all the families camped out there. On Christmas Eve! “Do you think those people will ever go home?”

  “Yup,” my dad replied. “As soon as they’ve seen the ghost.”

  “Should we tell them the ghost is your dad?”

  My father looked around the room, at the peeling wallpaper and cracked plaster. “I don’t think so.”

  We ate our dinner, which was okay for old people food, and then unwrapped the ornaments from my dad’s aunt. Some were plain glass balls. Others were shaped like geese or doves or deer. Some had been rolled in sparkles that had the texture of coarse salt, like the kind they put on a pretzel. Hard to believe these decorations had made it through the generations in one piece.

  After we’d decorated the tree, my dad set up the slide projector. I worried that it would be boring, but it wasn’t. He had so many funny stories about growing up with his aunt Esther. There were lots of Christmas slides with him and his aunt and his grandparents, who had died before I was born.

  It wasn’t very late when my eyes started feeling scratchy. There was something about living in a house with no TV and limited electricity: when it got dark outside, you kind of just wanted to go to bed instead of staying up. Even on Christmas Eve.

  So I said goodnight to my father and went upstairs with a candle to light my way. In my room, I lit a fire and sat in front of it until I felt warm enough to change into my pyjamas. I didn’t change all the way, though. I left my woolly tights on underneath my long flannel nightie so my feet wouldn’t get cold overnight.

  When I was in bed, I thought about the family traditions I was missing out on: leaving milk and cookies for Santa and carrots for the reindeer, hanging stockings on the mantle. I’d already missed caroling with Zachary and his family
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  My bed was bumpy, my room was cold, but did I regret spending Christmas with my father?

  No. Not for a minute. Christmas Eve with just him and me was actually kind of fun.

  As I closed my eyes I could hear two things: the fire crackling and the soft murmur of neighbours chatting outside. In a way it seemed weird that they hadn’t gone back to their own houses yet, but in another way it kind of felt like having a huge extended family right in my own backyard, or front yard, as the case may be.

  Part of me wanted to get up and look out the window to see what they were doing—and what they were eating—but the sensible side of me said, “Stay in bed! It’s cold outside these covers!”

  And so I did.

  But I couldn’t sleep. Ever since I was a little kid, I could never get to sleep on Christmas Eve, but this year’s insomnia was different. My whole world had changed since arriving in Erinville. I’d learned that my father wasn’t coming home. Not just that, but he was dating another woman. We’d never be a family again. And on top of that, my dad and I had found out who his father was after a lifetime of not knowing. And in case that wasn’t enough, I’d had my first kiss with Celeste and I knew she wanted another.

  And now I was supposed to somehow fall asleep in a haunted house? Good luck with that, Sylvie.

  “Grandpa?” I asked. “Can you hear me? It’s your granddaughter, Sylvie. We met yesterday.”

  I stared into the fire, but nothing changed.

  “Are you here in the house? Move the flames to the right for yes and to the left for no. Or, wait, if it’s no just don’t do anything.”

  I waited for a while, but nothing happened. Funny, the place didn’t seem haunted. It didn’t give me that goosebumpy feeling I got when my parents rented Silence of the Lambs and Naomi and I crouched outside the family room to watch it. That was a big mistake, by the way. For a month after that we had to sleep with the lights on.

  Eventually I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I remembered was waking up.

  That’s when I got the feeling: the goosebumpy feeling, the Silence of the Lambs feeling, the feeling where your breath turns to ice and you can’t move, you can’t even blink. I tried to speak, but my mouth wouldn’t budge, so I just thought the word, “Grandpa?”