by Nancy Thayer
It frightened him that she was there. But she was not in herself a frightening sight. She was so small and so pretty, and the look on her face indicated that he was the one with the power.
John forced himself to look at the woman, not to look away. He was shaking so hard with fear that his whole body reverberated against the wooden steps, making small hitting noises, and his heart thudded loudly in his chest and ears. She was there. She was there. He was not mad. She was really there.
“Fuck,” John whispered. “Jesus.”
Now that the woman saw that John was looking at her steadily, she stopped battering the panes with her hands and leaned down close to the glass of the skylight. Some of her dark hair fell over the side of her face; he could see the wavy sheen of it, the lustrous texture of it, as clearly as he could see the grain in the wooden steps.
Her mouth was half open, as if she meant to speak. Her eyes were the eyes of a real woman: dark and wide and luminous, filled with a message.
“Let me in,” she called. “Please. Let me in.”
He heard her clearly. Her voice was like music.
He thought, Well, this will prove something one way or the other, before he said aloud, “All right. Stand back.”
John backed down the steps, grabbed up some rags he used to wipe his brushes, and wrapped them around his hand. Then he climbed back up the steps. The ghost was still there. She had moved back, just slightly, so that he could still see her.
He raised his arm and drove his fist upward through the skylight, smashing it so that the glass shattered and fell in fragments and shards all around him. Much of it stayed anchored in the frame, so that the center, where he had struck the blow, was now a jagged hole and the chilly winter night air whooshed in through this hole, passing over his body so suddenly that it was as if he had plunged headfirst into a swimming pool; he had the sensation of falling, of being surrounded by cold, and he lost his breath with the shock.
The woman was no longer there. He heard a tinkle as one last splinter of glass hit the wooden floor. He felt the cold air blowing evenly now through the broken glass, hitting him in the face. He stared, he waited, but the woman did not return.
“Fuck,” he said under his breath.
He backed down the leaning steps, unwrapping the rag. In spite of that precaution, one knuckle was bleeding, and his whole hand ached from the impact. He stood at the bottom of the steps and carefully picked pieces of glass from his hair. The temperature was falling rapidly now in the attic, and the floor around the steps was a dangerous mess of glittering broken glass.
“Intelligent, John,” he said to himself. “Fucking brilliant.”
It wouldn’t do to let the wind and damp get into the attic. Even if what he had done was worthless, there were still all the new canvases. He ripped a heavy moving box so that he had a section of cardboard suitable to cover the hole and found a roll of masking tape with his other supplies. He climbed back up the ladder and covered the skylight with the cardboard, taping it tightly to the wooden frame. It pulsed slightly from the beat of the wind but did not give. He would have to get a carpenter here as soon as possible.
And tell him what? And tell Willy what? Christ, he was a fool. If only that—if only he weren’t losing his mind.
He backed down the steps again and stood looking at the sparkling glass that glinted from the floor. That could wait until tomorrow to be cleaned up. He’d have to bring the vacuum up to get every tiny bit of it.
A movement, a shadow passing, startled him, and he looked up. The young woman in the black cape was standing at the top of the stairs leading down to the second floor. She had loosened her cape slightly so that he could see the gray worsted stuff of her dress, which fell in folds to her feet. Now that she was inside, there was color to her: Her lips and cheeks were a tender pink. But her eyes and hair were still black, and her skin very white.
Again John’s heart started up its drumming against his chest. His mouth went dry. He was too alarmed to speak, even though he opened his mouth. He felt frozen in his terror, as if he were in one of his most awful nightmares, where he could not move.
“Thank you,” the woman said sweetly, simply. She smiled. “For letting me in.”
She turned and went down the steps to the second floor. He heard the latch being lifted on the door between the attic steps and the second floor, but he could tell from the way the light did not change that the door had not opened. Yet when he managed to move forward a few feet to stare down the stairway, he saw that the woman had gone.
“Dammit!” he yelled. “Where did you go?”
He thundered down the wooden steps and opened the door himself—the handle was not a new round one but rather a wrought-iron latch contraption that had to be lifted up and out of a little iron notch.
On the second floor the hall was empty. John ran from room to room, looking, finding nothing. He opened the closets.
Nothing.
He ran back up to scan the attic.
No one. Nothing.
He ran down the stairs to the first floor and looked through all the rooms and all the closets and cupboards in all the rooms.
He heard footsteps and turned, gasping.
“What on earth is the matter, John?” Willy asked, coming up to him as he stood nearly panting in the front hall. “My God, look at you.”
For his hair was wild, hanging in his eyes, and one hand was bruised and clotted with blood.
“She’s here,” John said. “She’s inside. I let her in.”
Willy looked at her husband, and the worry on her face only enraged him. “Who’s here, John?” she asked gently.
“The ghost, dammit!” John yelled. “Willy, you’ve got to believe me. I bashed open the skylight. I let her in. I saw her on the attic staircase. I heard her speak. And then she went down to the second floor and went through the door—and disappeared. She’s somewhere in the house, and I can’t find her. Dammit, Willy, I’m telling you the truth.” He was nearly sobbing with fear and frustration.
“I believe you, John,” Willy said quietly. “I believe you. Do you want me to look for her with you?”
“Yes,” he said.
So they went through the house together, slowly, but found nothing. They found no one and no sign of anyone, no sign that anyone else had been in the house. In the attic, the cardboard John had taped to the skylight pulsed gently with the wind.
“Christ, Willy,” John said, leaning against the wall. “I’m scared. I’m really scared.” He managed a grin. “I’m more scared now that she isn’t here than I was when she was. I don’t want you to think I’m … going mad or something. Jesus.”
“I don’t think that,” Willy said. “I promise you, John. I don’t think that. Let’s go to bed now. Come on.”
“Bed?” John said, as if the thought were foreign. “Willy, I won’t be able to sleep.”
“No, probably not,” Willy said. “But it’s so late now. We can just sit in bed and talk. Relax. I’ll get us some brandies.”
Willy and John sat together in their bed, leaning against the pillows they had propped against the headboard, and the air of the room was gently steady and brightened by their bedside lamps. John felt safe inside the light’s protection, in the way a child feels safe.
He described the scene again to Willy, carefully providing every detail he could remember. He had heard her voice. Several times. Had seen the material of her dress so clearly that he could tell it was scratchy, heavy, weighted. Had seen her face so clearly that he could tell her skin was creamy and that her cheeks were flushed rosy with fear or excitement or—or something.
“She was very beautiful,” John confided, embarrassed by this detail.
“Well, at least there’s that.” Willy smiled. “At least she’s not some creaking skeleton clanking chains around. Or some old ghoul. It could be worse.”
“Tell me what you think, Willy. What you really think about this.”
Willy sipped her brandy, pull
ed her knees up to her chest, and wrapped her arms around them. She was wearing a pair of John’s pajamas, striped red and white; she wore these when she was in her period or sick and wanted to be sloppy and comfortable. Now the sight of Willy in them was somehow comforting to John. She looked sensible. Comradely.
“Here’s what I think,” she said slowly. “The truth. It’s one of two things, I think. Either it’s a trick of your mind—now wait a minute, let me finish! A trick of your mind. Because you’ve sort of gone cold turkey on people, you know. For years you saw hordes of people every day, and now you see only me, and for the past few days you’ve spent more time alone than with me or anyone else. Maybe it’s like a mirage, like someone crawling through a desert dying of thirst, seeing a pool of water in the distance. It could be something like that, John.”
She could tell John was not happy with this explanation. “Or,” she went on, “it could be a ghost. I didn’t really believe in them, and you didn’t, either, but we could have been wrong. I mean, why would people talk about ghosts for centuries if there wasn’t some kind of truth to it? And this is an old house. People say that old houses do have ghosts. It probably really is a ghost—and that’s sort of neat, don’t you think? I mean, as I said, it seems like a nice kind of ghost, a pretty woman instead of some creepy old thing that wakes us in the night with hideous laughter. Maybe it’s some woman who used to live here. Anyway, if it’s a ghost, I’m bound to see her sometime, too. Then you’ll know you’re not nuts.”
John looked at his wife. Her hair was unbraided and fell, thick as honey, all around her face and shoulders and arms. “Do you have any idea how much I love you?” he asked.
Willy smiled. She set her brandy on the bedside table and scooted over to wiggle herself inside his arms. “Umm,” she said.
“… how much I need you,” John said, almost whispering.
“I think I know what will help you fall asleep,” Willy said.
And a while later, she proved right.
Willy was sensible. She had assumed from the start that during their marriage she and John would have to endure crises. Perhaps work, or in-laws, although John had none, because her family was all dead, and she liked his family very much. She assumed they would have their share of arguments over children, when to have them, how to raise them, over all the decisions of a shared life. She had never expected their lives to be perfect. She had always known she would have to face problems. But she had not counted on something like this—a ghost. Who would plan for that?
Willy had even gone so far in her mind as to admit to herself that perhaps there would come a time when John or she would feel drawn to another person. She could imagine it, oh, sometime far in the future, when John turned fifty, for example, or when she was overcome with the frantic practicalities of raising a family, for she had seen such things happen to friends. She had imagined that one or both of them at some time might become infatuated with someone else, and she had known she could endure this, too. Because she was so certain that she and John would never separate. They loved each other too much. She did not think either of them would actually be unfaithful to the other; they weren’t the type. But they might want to be unfaithful someday—that was what she had thought could happen—and had planned on dealing with that, too. Then they would go away, for a long vacation. They were lucky enough to have the money for such things. Or they would do something drastic—move, have a child, spend a year in Europe, build a house, take up judo together, something, she couldn’t know so far in advance just what—that would prevent any danger to their marriage, that would end the infatuation.
But she would have staked her life—in a way, was staking her life—on the belief that she and John would always stay together. They had been so lucky to find each other. They needed each other so much. Their desires and likes and dislikes and needs and eccentricities all fit together so well, and at the foundation of it all was the irrational, furious, magical, sexual, endless electricity of love and lust that had drawn them together and continually surged through and around them, keeping them together, keeping them alive. They truly had found—or had been found by—that thing in the universe that was so rare and so huge, that made their sum more than the total of their parts.
Some nights they lay in bed just kissing, kissing each other all over. Willy kissing John’s torso from his nipples down along the swirl of hair that led to his belly button, to his genitals, burying her face between his thighs, kissing him there, her long hair sliding over his chest and abdomen, while his back arched slightly in pleasure. Or John kissing Willy on her mouth, her face, her neck, her shoulders, her arms and hands and breasts, while she said his name, said wild things, wild nighttime words of desire and praise. It was more than sex; it was a communion of joy in their mutual existence, an amazed expression of their love.
Willy loved John passionately, and sensibly. But the week after he saw the ghost was hard on her love in ways she’d never dreamed of. John kept seeing the ghost, and Willy never did. And the things John said the ghost did were so very strange.
Every morning John claimed that he had been awakened in the night by the ghost, always the same ghost, the woman. The first three nights, it was only that he awakened from his sleep to find her bending over him, studying his face. He said she had been smiling when he awakened; he could see her smile by the dim light of the room, and when he opened his eyes, she waited until he focused on her, until their eyes met, and that connection was made when two people silently acknowledge the other’s presence. Then, she had vanished. Just vanished, into the air. Now you see her, now you don’t, just like that.
The next two nights, John said, he had awakened from his sleep not only to see her, but to feel her. He felt her hand caressing his face, like a mother caressing a sleeping child, he said. The ghost, leaning over him, had softly drawn her small hands across his brow and down the side of his face. Like someone blind reading braille. She had also lightly, slowly, drawn her fingertips over his mouth. Lingered there. Then vanished. With trembling fingers John had retraced the places on his face where the ghost had touched him.
Now, this morning, John sat at the kitchen table in the clear morning sunlight and looked at Willy and said that last night the ghost had kissed him.
First she had bent over, looking at him; then she had caressed his face with her hand; and then, smiling, she had come closer to him, her long dark hair falling over her shoulders to brush against his face. She had kissed him lightly, sweetly, but firmly.
“Her hair smells so sweet, Willy, like apples, like new-mown grass in the spring—the fragrance is so powerful I can’t believe you don’t smell it, too!” John said.
“Was her mouth opened or closed?” Willy asked, surprising herself by the question.
“Open. Slightly.” John looked away, embarrassed. “I mean her tongue was not in my mouth, if that’s what you want to know,” he said, looking back at Willy, almost angry. “But I could feel her lips. I could feel her breath.” He stared at Willy defiantly.
Willy turned her face away. The morning was brilliant, with a cold sun brightening the room. Her coffee, strong and hot and sweet, sat before them on the wooden table. Her husband sat across from her, telling her he had been kissed by another woman. By a ghost.
“Willy,” John said. “Please.”
Willy looked up at her husband, and her strength returned. “I have an idea,” she said.
So they sat together, making their plan.
That night, Willy had a lovely dream. She was warm, but a sweet cool breeze was blowing against the curtains in her sewing room, and the birds and flowers were coming alive. The bluebirds lifted off the chintz material, carrying the fruits—plums, cherries, tight green pears—in their mouths. They flew about the room and landed on the flowers, which had also come alive from the curtains and grew in elaborate, fragrant twists and arches against the wall. How beautiful the world could be! Willy thought as she dreamed, and felt something pinch her.
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nbsp; She was puzzled. Her mind quickly separated itself into two parts: one part keeping her under just enough to save the dream, the other struggling toward consciousness, alert, alarmed. For a second, her fantasy lapped over into reality, and she dreamed that a bird had nipped her, a thorn from the flowers had pricked her. But finally she came awake and realized that she was lying in their dark bedroom, snuggled under covers.
John was pinching the skin of her thigh so hard it stung.
She looked in his direction. He was awake, staring upward. He kept pinching Willy.
She remembered: This was the plan they had agreed on. When John was awakened again by the ghost, he would touch Willy with his hand, hidden under the covers, covertly awakening her. Willy did not move, but she came completely awake. Without moving, she carefully looked around the room. Enough light shone in through the curtains from the street lamps so that she could see the furniture and the pictures on the walls clearly. She saw nothing unusual.
John kept pinching her.
“Stop it, John. It hurts!” she hissed, her voice barely audible.
But at the sound of her voice, John raised up in bed, turned toward Willy on one elbow. He was smiling, triumphant.
“There!” John said. “You saw her then, didn’t you?”
Willy stared at her husband. For a split second she was tempted to lie, but she had already given herself away. Even in the darkened room, John could read her expression.
“Shit!” John said, and raised his fist and brought it down in such a violent gesture that Willy flinched back, thinking he meant to hit her. But he only pounded the pillow. “I can’t believe you didn’t see her, Willy. She was right there. Standing by the bed, next to me, bending over me, looking at me. Christ, her hair was touching the blankets. She was kissing my face, Willy! Christ, I can’t believe you didn’t see her! Did you look? Did you look hard? Where I told you to look? She vanished the instant you spoke. Did you forget our plan? Did you speak before you looked for her?”