Hungry Ghosts

by Susan Dunlap

  Before I could swallow, Jeffrey leaned forward, inhaled, and started flinging out questions. “How do you like your Zen space? It’s a real coup, don’t you think? I tried to get Eamon to turn it into a period bar. He could make a bundle from the tourist trade. The courtyard’s a big plus; tourists adore drinking outdoors. But the key is the tunnel! People just eat up that kind of history, I told him.”

  “You and Eamon are friends?” I asked, amazed. He didn’t respond, not at first. In the flurry over the tunnel and Tia, I’d almost forgotten my original question about our too-good-to-be-true zendo site. “He gave us the space. He did a lot of work—”

  “He got some breaks,” Jeffrey now answered slowly.

  “Breaks?”

  “Permits and things. You know, the kind of breaks you can get when you’re related to the police.”

  The police? My brother John, the detective? So that was his real question. “Do people assume he’s related to my family, the Lotts?”

  “He never says that, but if building inspectors make that mistake, he doesn’t feel called upon to correct their misapprehension.”

  I took a sip of espresso and then another, feeling the rush anew. He was fingering his cup but not drinking. “Jeffrey,” I said slowly. As he looked up a wary tightness flashed on his face and I wondered which question he was afraid of. “Why did Eamon renovate that space for us? It’s a very generous thing for someone to have done, someone who isn’t interested in sitting zazen.”

  “Maybe his reward’ll be in heaven.”

  I laughed. “He’ll have to celebrate alone. We don’t have heaven.”

  “Well, then, you’re in the Barbary Coast tradition.” He almost smiled. “I don’t mean to badmouth him. It’s his money. And he does let me use the tunnel for storage.”

  “Storage? It’s way too damp and the smell . . . It’s like a tomb down there.”

  “Appropriate. It’d be for stuff of my father’s that I don’t want but can’t throw out . . . yet. Lower it down; forget it. My dad died a couple of years ago. Auto accident. Eamon understands. He knew my father back East; he was a recruit helping Dad close up the lab at Fort Detrick. I was still in high school, so it’s not as if I really knew Eamon then. He was just another of Dad’s grunts.”

  “It’s nice you have someone to talk with about your father.”

  Jeffrey’s cup stopped halfway to his mouth. He gave an edgy laugh and his cheeks colored again. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Thing is, I didn’t like the old man. Eamon wasn’t crazy about him either.”

  “Really?” I prompted.

  “Dad was military research, weapons-grade. You only need to look at me to know I’m not weapons-grade. In his eyes I was a chronic disappointment, except when I was an acute disappointment. But”—he laughed with a sort of victorious bitterness—“if he could see that I took my inheritance and opened a frivolous chair shop and it’s making decent money . . . You know, I’d give up a year of my life to see his reaction.”

  “That’ll be your reward in heaven.”

  He was still a moment, then laughed again. But somehow the act of laughing unsettled his hold on the present and I had the sense he was back in his shop worrying about the arrangement of chairs on his floor grid.

  “Jeffrey,” I said, pulling him back, “what’s going on with Tia? That whole thing in the tunnel—”

  “What happened down there?” Suddenly he was all alertness.

  “She ran off into the dark, hit her head, and freaked. You saw her carried out. And then, for no reason, she shoved you. Is that in character for her now?”

  He leaned forward over the small table. “No. No. I’ve only known her for a few years. But no.”

  “You’ve been dating all that time?”

  “No . . . no. I . . . I was going to say we’ve been friends for those years, but really it’s that I’ve been her friend. She had a temp job at Letterman in the Presidio when I was working there and we saw a lot of each other. When she moved on, we’d get together for coffee every couple of weeks. I was the confidant, the sidekick like in the movies, the pal the girl tells about the guy she’s hung up on. There was always some guy. It was like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s Five Steps for the Romance-Addicted: new excitement, getting serious, things are nice, getting bored, gone.”

  “What step is Eamon?” The words were out before I thought about how unkind a question it was.

  “Eamon? Oh, she’s not attracted to him,” Jeffrey said, as if discussing her taste in porch furniture. “He’s peaked; he has no potential. It’s potential that hooks Tia.”

  “But he did drive her home.”

  His eyes widened, and it was a moment before he could force out, “After the tunnel?”

  I nodded. Damn, how insensitive was I? But I needed to know what the hell was going on before I turned up at Tia’s house for lunch the next day. “Tia’s accident, Jeffrey, what was it?”

  “You don’t know? I thought everyone knew.”

  “No.”

  He lifted his cup, drained it, and looked coldly at me. “A cable car hit her. She fell and it rolled over part of her pelvis.”

  “Omigod!” I couldn’t . . . anything. I couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Everything stopped. The paralyzing shock and horror of it turned me icy cold. The scene rushed over me: the brakeman frantically pulling back the lever, passengers screaming. Lucky to be alive. The trite phrase floated in my mind. Lucky? Maybe. Lucky because she made herself be.

  “You okay?” Jeffrey was asking.

  I stared down at my coffee. Finally, I managed, “How? Why?”

  “How come it hit her? She was running and she slipped.”

  My cup was rattling now. Running and she slipped; it was too mundane. “How—”

  “She said a man was chasing her.”

  “Who?”

  “She insisted she didn’t know.”

  I was still staring, but now I was seeing Jeffrey more clearly, and the distinct lift at the corner of his nose. “But you don’t believe she didn’t know.”

  “Oh, no. I do not.”

  “What do you think happened, then?”

  Jeffrey put down his coffee and looked directly at me, as if he was suddenly seeing something he hadn’t quite expected. He gave one of those little nods that indicates decision. “You want to know what I really think? I think she did it on a dare—”

  “Someone dared her to run in front of a cable car?” I asked incredulously.

  “Not someone. A sort of self-dare, to see if she could. Maybe it was a spur-of-the-moment thing; maybe she was running from someone, and when she got near the cable cars she saw a tow truck with a slanted ramp, and on impulse she ran up it and leapt for the top of the cable car. And missed.”

  I dropped my cup. The heavy ceramic bounced once. The dregs splattered. I watched, numbly. My great cable car stunt.

  Jeffrey was saying, “I don’t know why she even thought she could leap on a moving cable car.”

  I knew why.

  I had made it look easy.

  It’s possible that there were worse moments in my life, but I can’t remember one.

  CHAPTER 7

  EARLIER, LEO GARSON had watched Tia Dru drive off with Eamon Lafferty and he had wondered. Then he watched Darcy go off with Jeffrey Hagstrom and noted the pang in his chest. Ghosts come in different forms, ghosts of the past, ghosts of the hoped-for. He hadn’t realized that he had assumed Darcy would hang around and that they’d celebrate the opening of the zendo with a stroll into Chinatown for the kind of dinner he’d been dreaming of for six long years. Assumptions, the ghosts of the future.

  Now the zendo was empty, the rug and chairs and giant tetsubin gone, the room cleaned, and the zabutons stacked in one corner. The cleaners had waxed the floor before their departure and the smell of lemon wafted invitingly. He could light the oil lamps and the candle and sit in meditation, sit with his ghost.

  It was tempting to linger here in this beautiful room with all its pot
ential still ahead. As Eamon Lafferty had said in his initial letter, With a location like this, on the edge of downtown, a block from the Financial District, from Chinatown, from North Beach, a meditation hall could serve hundreds of San Franciscans. The letter had not added the obvious: Its abbot could become quite the powerful man, not merely in the city, but in the Zen hierarchy. Lafferty might well have assumed that Leo would be anxious to get even for his six-year exile in the woods. Leo smiled. How often had he told students that guilt does not erase a person’s desire for revenge, however undeserved; it merely makes the guilty work harder to justify their desire. He had learned that by looking in the mirror. To study the Buddha is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self.

  He let the heavy door shut behind him and stood in the courtyard watching the fog push in like a rug being unrolled across the sky. Fringes of it were beginning to cling to the potted trees—as if he needed reminding of the ghosts of the place, the ghosts of his desires.

  Most religions had stories of hungry ghosts, huge-bellied, toothpick-throated creatures—some who fed off the living, some who robbed the tombs and ate the bodies of the dead, but almost all were driven blindly by their greed and thwarted by their self-deception.

  All along he’d sensed this site was too good to be true. But he hadn’t been able to swallow that truth. Now there was nothing to do but what he had said when he believed he had a choice left. Don’t assume.

  CHAPTER 8

  IT WAS 10:00 P.M. when I let myself into my family house. I had one goal: to get to my room without human contact. I couldn’t bear to talk about Tia’s accident, and at the same time couldn’t handle chatting about anything else. The only being who could help me now was Duffy, and as soon as I’d arrived yesterday, Mom had scarfed him up and headed for the Russian River. “A Scottie needs time near the water,” she’d declared, as if San Francisco were not on a peninsula.

  As I eased through the living room I could hear John, Gary, and Gracie bickering in the kitchen. A normal night chez Lott.

  “Dead body,” John was complaining. He’d be straddling one of the red vinyl chairs, arms resting on the back, finger ready to point. “Of course it came to us in Homicide, but it’s not a homicide. Just another homeless guy with the bad luck to swallow who knows what and do it standing next to a third-floor railing of one of those nineteenth-century staircases, the oval ones.”

  “What?” The sharpness of Grace’s voice meant she was standing by the stove heating stew from the pot Mom always left for hungry kids. She’d be staring at John, as if the force of her gaze could compensate for her being not quite five feet tall and nowhere near one hundred pounds.

  “What?” Gary, the lawyer, always pounced on generalizations. Gary was Grace with charm. He’d called her a bulldog; she’d labeled him an opportunistic lapdog. Then he’d laughed at her for her graceless terminology. More than once strangers had said the two of them looked like Russian stacking dolls. They were thin, sharp-featured, with straight black Lott hair and the pale blue eyes Mike had called “executioners eyes.’” With them time would grind grooves between the eyes and creases beside the mouth, dividends of anger, long hours of work, or just determination. They also had overlarge earlobes. Mom thought it an adorable trait, but both of them were sensitive about it, which had been a serious mistake for middle children. Now Gary’s focus would appear to be on his bowl of stew, but he’d be noting John’s every move. “Well, the poison ought to be easy. If your vic swallowed it and dived off the landing, the bottle can’t have gone far.”

  “Gone when we got there. It’s not a high-honesty building. Neighbors had hours to boost anything Norris McMahon, that’s the vic, didn’t crush in the fall. By the time they got around to notifying us, the guy was stiff. Picture it: the vic’s lying at the bottom of the stairs for eight, twelve, twenty-four hours, with all of them stepping around him like he was a pile of shit.”

  “So what did make them call?” Gary asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Why then?”

  John had a way of inhaling like he was dragging mud through a grate. “They said—wait’ll you hear this—they said he fell, just then. Whole bunch of them in on that one. Like the guy got rigor on the way down.” He let out a huge, world-weary sigh. “And they thought we’d believe it!”

  “But if there was a poison—” This from my sister.

  “You’re missing the point, Gracie! It’s not that the vic finds a bottle of lye or who knows what and pops it down—the coroner’ll find out sooner or later; it’s hardly high-priority—the point is that the neighbors can’t be bothered to report a dead body lying by their front door.” John let out another great, oldest son sigh. “Forget I mentioned it; you’ll never hear about this guy again.”

  It all seemed so normal, as if Tia Dru had never heard of my cable car stunt and never tried it. I wondered if they even knew about Tia.

  WEDNESDAY

  I barely made it into the zendo before Leo rang the bell at 6:40 A.M. The only other person there was a fellow sagging into his chair like he’d found a good place to keep warm until Renzo’s opened. He looked as sleepy as I was.

  They say that one of the reasons for sitting in full lotus position—legs crossed, right foot on left thigh, left foot on right—was so the monks could fall asleep and not topple over. I pulled my legs into position, placed my hand in a mudra—left on right, thumb tips barely touching.

  My eyes closed; reality slipped away. I was back with Jeffrey Hagstrom listening to him saying he didn’t believe Tia when she insisted she didn’t know who had chased her. That jolted me awake. I inhaled deeply, hoping the breath would keep me conscious.

  But my eyes closed again. I was Tia leaping for the cable car and missing. I snapped awake, inhaled, and focused on my breath till my dream-panic settled.

  My eyes closed yet again. I was the homeless victim falling dead over the railing. I bolted awake. After that I wished for sleep, and sat with new waves of guilt. The period lasted an eternity. The guy across from me must have been as relieved as I when the final bell rang. He was out the door before I finished fluffing my cushion.

  I blew out the candle, trimmed the wax, stirred and tamped down the ash in the incense bowl. Straightening the mats took only seconds. I took a last look at the too-good-to-be-true zendo and headed upstairs toward the room I had yet to move into.

  Leo was crossing the upstairs landing. He’d changed to jeans, black sweatshirt, and a watch cap. “Busted! I’ve got a coffee date.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been back in the city how long? You don’t waste any time.”

  He laughed but didn’t respond to my tacit query. “There was something else you were going to ask me, right?”

  I hadn’t planned to mention it, didn’t want to at this hour, didn’t know where to begin. I swallowed and leaned back against the door to my room and wished I could sink through. “Leo—Roshi—you remember the stunt I was telling you about yesterday, the cable car leap?”

  “Yes?”

  “And you asked, and I insisted that it didn’t have any consequences?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, I didn’t intend this, not in any way. I mean, I never even considered the possibility. But still, well, the thing is, after I did it one of my classmates—well, uh, Tia, from last night—I think she tried it. A couple of years afterwards. I never knew. I was gone by then. She tried to jump the cars. That’s how she was injured. The cable car, Leo, it ran into her.” I swallowed harder. I thought for a moment that he’d interrupt, give advice, give solace, but he waited so quietly he was almost not there. “She tried it because I made it look easy.”

  He said, “You don’t know that.”

  “Leo, don’t comfort me!”

  He inhaled and waited till he caught my eye. “I’m not. You don’t know; you only think you know. Maybe your guess is correct, but maybe not. Don’t assume.”

  “I’m going to lunch with her, today. How can s
he look at me and not see that cable car?”

  “Don’t assume.” He put his hands together, bowed to me, and left.

  Don’t assume was small comfort. But then, Leo hadn’t meant it to be.

  I found a gym and worked every machine. Then I downed the strongest coffee I could find. At noon I was outside Tia Dru’s flat, still nervous and guilty and trying not to assume. How do you apologize for creating an illusion that ruins a life? Don’t assume. Still . . . like the header from the turret, I’d push off and deal.

  Tia’s flat perched on the peak of Pacific Heights, the second-story front of a vintage fourplex that must have cost a fortune. Location alone would have done it, but the heavy-on-the-charm couldn’t have hurt. The day was warm for February; the sun was just shoving back the fog that had been tucked around the city. By four this afternoon it would be rolling back across Pacific Heights, heading toward the Barbary Coast to the east. But now, sunlight sparkled off the miniature red roses and the glossy leaves of succulents on the wide tiled steps to Tia’s door. All these steps to pull herself up!

  Don’t assume.

  The door was open. “Tia!”

  “I’m in the kitchen. Come on in!”

  Inside, it was all yellows, and padding: over-wide cushioned armchairs in sunflower prints, thick honey carpet, lemony upholstered ladder-backs at the glass dining table. A foot-square ottoman stood between the armchairs where a person more interested in food and drink than comfort would have stationed a coffee table. Vases of bright red and violet freesias were here and there as if left carelessly by someone with armfuls of flowers, and their deep sweet smell came in whiffs. The whole room was a cheery cocoon created to support Tia the way her cane had outside.

  Don’t assume!

  She walked steadily to one of the armchairs. Had I not seen her last night, I would have thought only that she walked with more awareness than other people. Nothing, not the set of her slim hips in the long brown cotton jersey skirt that was a twin of the black one she’d worn last night, nor the swing of her feet in her narrow-strapped sandals, nor her wide smile suggested she’d had to focus on every step. Had I not studied the out-takes of failed stunts to spot the misplaced foot, the bad angle, the ill-timed acceleration, I wouldn’t have picked up on her deliberate foot placement. I held my breath, waiting till she was seated to say what I had to.