G is for Ghosts

by Rhonda Parrish

  Hold on, a voice faintly said, as if from a long ways away.

  Harry burst into tears. He pressed Mr. Palmer’s hands over his eyes, then wrapped his arms across his face and breathed deeply, over and over. When he looked again at Anne his eyes were red. “Everything smells like Tim,” he said, and began sobbing harder.

  I did bathe, Mr. Palmer said, more distinct now. A cloud of grey was coalescing beside them. You never said how hard it was to keep still! I keep floating every which way.

  “Of course you bathed, you utter—” He broke off and sat upright, looking around wildly. “Oh no. Oh no. Oh God—”

  “What is it?” Anne asked, laying her hand on his arm. “Wait! Don’t break the circle yet. What’s wrong?”

  “The ring!” He pointed at the sideboard. “We forgot to bring it in! He’s not anchored to anything! We have to bind him somehow—”

  “Harry.”

  “It’s why he’s drifting! The moment we break the circle I’ll lose him—”

  “Harry!” She caught his arms and gave him a shake. “Harry, it’s all right. I know we didn’t have the ring. It’s all right.” When he only stared at her, his eyes wide with terror, she managed a tentative smile. “Harry, I bound him to you. I bound him to this body. He can manifest anywhere you are; in fact, you’re kind of stuck with each other, now.”

  You did what? Mr. Palmer cried, while Harry stared at her incredulously. That’s not what we agreed upon!

  But she could not reply, because the man who had been Timothy Palmer and was now Harry O’Brien had flung himself on her in a bear hug, toppling them over and wrecking her neatly drawn circle. “You marvelous, marvelous girl,” he gasped. “We are going to pay you so much money.”

  Harry, are you sure?

  “Of course I’m sure!” He shook his head, as if overwhelmed by the absurdity of the question.

  You’re going to take me abroad, aren’t you? Mr. Palmer’s voice was resigned.

  “I am going to take you all over the world.” He sat up on his heels and his expression softened. “Bloody hell. You’ve gone younger, darling.”

  As you always looked to me.

  “You all right then?” he asked gently.

  It will take some getting used to, but I’ll be all right. Are you all right?

  He nodded, but he was weeping again; he wiped his eyes roughly with his sleeve. “No one has ever… I mean, what you’ve done…” He looked up, then laughed and held out his hand, as if wiping tears from the darkened air.

  You are worth it, Mr. Palmer said, and his voice was stronger now; Anne could almost see his earnest expression, the gleaming eyes. You were always, always worth it, Harold O’Brien, no matter what your mother said. And then, before Harry could reply, just remember you promised to prune my roses.

  “More tea, vicar,” Harry replied with a sob, and they all laughed at that, Anne too, laughing through her own tears; Harry glanced at her, then leaned over and squeezed her hand. “I’ll make the entire damn garden nothing but roses,” he said, his voice quavering. “The neighbors are going to hate us for all the bees. It’s going to be marvelous.”

  INTERVIEWER: Tell us about that second summer.

  PALMER: Well, my roses were blooming [laughter] so I decided to travel a little. I never toured abroad in my younger days; I always thought of myself as an English comedian, that my humor would only really land in England.

  INTERVIEWER: But something happened while you were traveling, didn’t it? Something changed you.

  PALMER: Well, I had already changed, I was changing. But when I started traveling, I saw all these young people, not just sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, but fighting to be honest about themselves, fighting to make the world better. Being themselves in public and saying “this is who I am, I have a right to love.”

  And I thought of all those lost in the war, so many young men gone. What did they die for, if not the right to love? How was I honoring their memory by hiding? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret hiding, nor do I think anyone hiding right now is foolish for doing so. I never would have had this career if I’d been out, as they say.

  INTERVIEWER: You’re saying that people wouldn’t have hired you, knowing you were homosexual?

  PALMER: I’m saying people wouldn’t have hired me if I spoke about it publicly. You could be, you know, swishy, but you could never talk about it. But now here I was, secure for the first time in my life. Career, finances, in myself: I have everything I need right here now. [touches chest] I don’t have to fear anymore. I can do as I please. I can even support the Sexual Offences Act. [applause] [to audience] Go forth and vote, my children! [laughter and applause]

  INTERVIEWER: I must say, when I interviewed you, what, eight, nine years ago? I never imagined we would be having this conversation now.

  PALMER: Well, that time away helped me feel whole again, for the first time in years, decades even. And I realized what I truly wanted was to help others have it easier than I did. Leave the world better than I found it, right? [applause] Love can do impossible things, John. I’ve seen it firsthand. But it begins with believing that it’s real and you’ve a right to it, whatever form it takes.

  O is for The O’Brien and Palmer Show

  Laura VanArendonk Baugh

  Emilie noticed it first.

  “Daddy, don’t you think that looks like a person?” she asked at dinner.

  I turned and looked across the room. “What does, honey?”

  “That shadow. See? It’s looking at us.”

  I saw no shadow but the blocky shade of the refrigerator on the wall, straight edges drawn by the undercabinet light. “I don’t see it. Hey, what do you think about ice cream tonight?”

  She tipped her head. “We had ice cream last night.”

  I’d forgotten that was only last night. Time was blurred these days, in our surreal new existence. I was trying to inject joy into our lives while maintaining a sense of normality and routine, but this was surprisingly difficult, and the last thing I wanted to do was invoke a comparison of Then and Now. “Well, sometimes we can have ice cream two days in a row. Not very often. But sometimes.”

  She didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. “I want chocolate.”

  We had chocolate.

  The following night, as I tucked her into bed and settled our old cat Chopin on her feet, Emilie asked me to leave a light on. She hadn’t been scared of the dark for years, but I supposed things might be different now, and so I found a dusty nightlight and put it on for her. I made a note to mention it to her therapist—she didn’t particularly need a therapist, just a precaution I thought it good to take, what could it hurt?—but thought little more of it.

  The next day was weekly art class at school, and she brought home her pictures to proudly display. “This is you,” she said, her finger tracing a tall figure in a blue shirt and a pointy beard.

  “My beard’s not that pointy,” I protested.

  “Yes it is!” she giggled, and she tugged it.

  “And is this Miss Carthage?” I prompted, pointing to a classroom scene.

  “Yes. We’re having science in this picture. See the little bean growing into a plant? That’s my favorite class.”

  It figured, the daughter of an art historian and a music theorist, going STEM. But she was young—and there was less division between STEM and the arts than budget propagandists would have taxpayers believe. “Excellent. And what’s the next one?”

  Emelie went quiet.

  I looked at the picture, a crayon and watercolor rendering of a braided woman with enormous hoop earrings and a pink dress. Danielle hadn’t often gone for dresses, but she had loved pink. “Is that Mommy?”

  Emelie pursed her lips, and after a moment she said, “Do you miss her?”

  “Oh, honey.” I gathered her into my arms with all the fierce protectiveness I could muster. “Oh, I miss her. Of course I miss her. We won’t stop missing her, ev
er. It won’t always hurt so much, but we’ll always remember her and miss her.”

  She nodded. She didn’t cry. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. I knew children processed grief in different ways, sometimes seemingly strange ways. Trying to monitor if this were the correct way would probably lead to madness for both of us.

  “Mommy misses us too,” she said abruptly.

  You think you’re prepared, ready for all the questions, and then kids catch you flat-footed. I didn’t believe in an afterlife, but Danielle had. I tried hard not to think if that had made it easier for me. But I certainly wasn’t ready to explain to my grieving daughter that I thought her dead mother had been all wrong about death and really wasn’t thinking of her anymore. Perhaps it was intellectual cowardice, but I was also a parent—and now, the only parent. “I’m sure she does, honey.”

  I mean, Danielle’s last thought had been of Emelie, so it was at least fair to say that her last echo of energy was missing her daughter, I rationalized.

  Saturday morning I went into Emelie’s room and found her sitting next to her bookshelf, neatly filing books into place. “What are you doing, sweetheart?”

  “Mommy wanted me to clean up my room.”

  My heart froze for a moment. Not that I thought of a ghost—that would have been ridiculous. But I did worry that my child might have fantasized something, and I didn’t know if that was appropriate grieving or an alarming development. Or, she might have just remembered that Danielle had often bugged her about her room, not that she had been freshly reminded, and she was doing it in a sort of honoring the requests of the dead. I didn’t want to probe which. I still needed to call the therapist. “Well, you can clean your room any time. Today we’re going to the zoo, remember?”

  I was going to keep her busy. Not distracted, not really, but with fresh feelings and experiences to process, not leaving just her to dwell. There was a balance, somewhere, and I was doing my best to find it.

  After the zoo, I left Emelie to play with a new panda puzzle, and I went into my study and closed the door. I made a call to the therapist’s voice mail, detailing the nightlight request and the room-cleaning, and asked for a call back when convenient.

  I held the phone for a long time, and then I scrolled to another contact and connected.

  “Hello?”

  I had not heard her voice in three weeks, and its effect was embarrassing. “It’s me.”

  “I saw your name on the phone.” Obviously. There was a pause. “I’m sorry—I should have called. I just—I wasn’t sure…”

  “I understand.” I did. There’s not much protocol in even the best of etiquette guides on handling the death of your lover’s wife.

  “I’d like to see you.”

  “I want to see you, too.”

  There was another pause. This was stupid—if we could have sex while Danielle was alive and could be cheated on, why couldn’t we even talk when she was dead and I was no longer married?

  “Can you come over?” I asked, in a rush. There was nothing to be guilty about.

  “To your place?”

  “I have Emelie; I can’t leave her alone. But she goes to bed by eight thirty.”

  “All right. I’ll—I’ll bring a lasagna.” For social cover, I supposed.

  She had sounded different. Suppressed. She probably thought she was being respectful and careful of my feelings. But I had been through too much to lose this now. The best way would be to rip off the Band-Aid all at once, get back to normal. We would have sex that night.

  Jade did bring a lasagna. She held it out between us like a pasta shield.

  I put it on the counter and took her arm, pulling her toward me. “I’ve missed you,” I said, pressing her to me.

  Jade pulled back. I held her until I heard Emelie’s voice. “Hello, Aunt Jade!”

  Jade turned out of my loosened grip and knelt to open her arms to Emelie. “Hello, honeybear.”

  I put the lasagna in the fridge. There was room for it now; the flood of prepared meals had slowed since the funeral two weeks ago. Emelie and I had eaten takeout General Tso’s chicken for dinner earlier.

  Emelie wanted Jade to play a round of Candyland, and so I left them to their game while I went to my study. My work had stalled the last couple of weeks, for obvious reasons, and my deadline was closing. I could probably have asked for an extension, considering, but competition was fierce and I did not want to lose my place in line, even for such an unassailable excuse as a spouse’s death. I had worked too hard, and I needed both critical mass and momentum of publications. I was so near to a dean’s office.

  I had an enlarged print of The Persistence of Memory mounted opposite my desk—the original is quite small, actually—to set the tone for this project on how the religious delusions of the Surrealists had undercut their potential. I revealed their reliance upon occultic expression and the id even as they claimed to reject religion, demonstrating their failure to see that their reliance upon the subconscious as a sacred force was as much a religion as the faiths they rejected. I speculated on what the greater postmodern movement might have been if Dalí had not been separated and recalled Catholic imagery to his work.

  Danielle, being a member of Second Baptist, of course hadn’t liked it. “It’s not fair to attack the dead.”

  “I’m not attacking them; I’m just calling out their flawed influences. I’m actually complimenting them, pointing out that their greatness could have been greater if not hampered by conventional moralism.”

  “You’re arguing the Surrealists were guilty of conventional moralism.” She rolled her eyes. “And you’re still assaulting their reputations.”

  “Their reputations are fixed in the art history pantheon. Dalí is a household name even today, for crying out loud. His work is parodied in pop culture nearly a century later. I’m doing his reputation no harm—and even if I did, their work would remain, unchanged.”

  “Not unchanged. You’re changing the meaning of their work.”

  “No artist owns the meaning of their work—that is entirely the subjectivity of the viewer. You know that yourself, even in music.”

  “Context and intent matter. You’re taking their voices.”

  “Come on, Danielle, don’t make this about voices and race and whatever.”

  She’d stiffened at that, gotten that tight-lipped expression that always meant she had plenty to say but was choosing not to say it, and had left the study.

  Jade was more reasonable. She was Chinese by descent, but she didn’t try to muck up generations of insight by arguing that they had been racist. She knew Danielle through the university and me through the publishing house.

  Emelie won the game of Candyland. I wrapped up while Jade read her a short bedtime story and turned out her light. Then I rejoined Jade in the living room downstairs.

  She sat at the far end of the couch. “I’m really sorry about Danielle.”

  “Thanks. I am, too, for you. You were good friends.”

  She cringed. “About that… I’ve been thinking. About us.”

  I didn’t like where this was going. “What do you mean?” I suspected—but if she didn’t want to say it, if she wouldn’t say it, then it hadn’t been said.

  “I don’t think we should… Not anymore. Not now.”

  I stared at her. “What do you mean, not now?”

  “She’s dead!”

  “Don’t you think I know that? But you were happy enough about it when she was alive, so why should it make any difference now that she can never find out about it? Do you think you’re more likely to hurt her now than before?”

  “Maybe it was wrong before!” she snapped.

  “Well, after she’s dead is a fine time to decide if it was.” This was ridiculous. After all I’d done—all the hiding, all the lying, and then—

  There was no way she could pull this on me, not now.

  But I played it soft. “Look, you’re just
upset. That makes sense. But this is just emotion. You’ll feel better after you get back on the bicycle.” I gave her a charming, knowing grin. “And I’m a ten-speed, you know, and you can pick my gear.” I slid my hand to her breast and squeezed it. “Ching, ching.”

  She pushed my hand away. “No. I don’t want to. I don’t think—”

  I had been nice. “You’re being over-emotional about this! You’ll be fine once you’re into it. Just let me get you—”

  “No!” Her eyes shifted, slightly widening, and I saw for the first time she considered that I might not just obey her like a well-trained spaniel, that I might be stronger than she had thought.

  I’d never realized she had thought me weak, that she’d thought she could just order me on and off, and rising above her underestimation thrilled me.

  “Stop,” she said, a brittle new edge to her voice.

  But she was done commanding me. I thought of all the videos I’d watched, all the ways I knew Asian women really liked it, how they preferred submission once they were done testing you to see if you were strong enough. She would thank me later.

  “No!” she said, trying to push my hands away. “Stop! Emelie!”

  It was so like Danielle’s last words that for just a moment I did stop. But instead of pushing me away, Jade turned her head toward the hall and stairs. “Emelie?”

  Oh. Oh.

  The steps creaked. I got off the couch and went into the hall, adjusting my stride to accommodate my arousal. “Emelie? Honey?”

  Chopin, the cat, looked at me from the third step. He mewed once.

  A cat’s weight shouldn’t have made the stairs creak. I went up the stairs to Emelie’s room. In the dim illumination of the nightlight, I saw her form in the bed, lying still.

  I went back down the stairs. “She’s asleep.”