My Ghosts (10 page)

“And you did,” Edie says, and I say, “Yes, I did.” Telling it like it was a childish prank, tiptoeing down the back stairs when the moon was high, easing open the door. I tell her we went walking through the empty streets, and once all the way down to the lake, the moonlight spreading a silver path, as if that was the point of it all. Not the secret places he led me to, the messages tapped out on my skin. How foolish I was, thinking that I was nothing like the girls who sobbed in the cloakroom. That the things he groaned in my ear were words he’d never said before.

The doctor comes every week, looking so rumpled and tired. All the sickness, in winter, and so much weeping, the muffled
black processions moving past our window when I’m not quick enough to pull down the shade. I know it’s not fair, the way I’ve taken against him. It’s not his fault that there’s nothing to do but wait. “She’s better each time I see her,” he says, but I can’t let myself believe him. Angus does, and if he’s home when the doctor comes they take a glass together, talking and sometimes laughing, that way men do when women are just out of earshot.

If Angus is not there I give the doctor tea at the kitchen table, and stare at his scalp between the strands of white hair, at the purplish lump of his nose. The thick fingers around the cup, that slid the stethoscope down the neck of Edie’s nightgown, that pulled at her eyelid and squeezed all her painful joints. The day she slid to the floor at school, and was carried home limp with fever, I knew that all the fear, all the sorrow I’d ever felt, was only practice.

“Thank you, my dear,” the doctor says as he sets down his cup, and I remember that he has his own sorrows, and a silent house he lets crumble around him. Peeling shutters and cracks in the dark, blank windows. I lift up the teapot, but he has more calls to make; he wraps his long scarf around and opens the door to a slash of cold, blinding light.

Angus is an orphan like I am; he crossed the ocean with one small trunk, and a canvas bag slung over his shoulder, and he used to say that he understood how it was for me. But he was able to pack that trunk, that bag, he was able to choose what to take and what to leave behind; it’s nothing the same. All I had left was my nightdress, pitted with star-shaped holes, and the boots on my feet. My mother’s boots, as it happened, that I must have mistaken in the dark. I also had the mystery of what
I was doing outside in the middle of the night, trying to walk in my mother’s boots, which had formed themselves around her feet, her pathways, her thoughts.

It had happened before, the hem of my nightgown damp when I woke in my bed, twigs in my hair. Sometimes I was missed and searched for, and my brothers found me once by the creek in the dawn. They said that they spoke to me and I answered, that I took their smaller hands and let them lead me back to the cabin, where I asked my mother to sing me a song. I don’t remember any of it, but I believed them. They were terrible liars, my brothers, but only to keep themselves out of trouble, and besides, I liked to think that I was like one of the mortal girls in my mother’s stories, marked out and given an extra, secret life.

So I must have been sleepwalking and that must be why I was standing still in the trees. A ghostly shape found by someone rushing to the creek for more water, although it was clearly too late. The roof crashing in and the walls, and glass cracking and exploding, the windows and all the jars of preserves my mother had just finished laying down against another cold winter. I don’t remember that either, not really, but I must have overheard it in the days that followed. Even now I sometimes dream the sound of that glass, the shape of a man in flames.

“Tell me about coming to the city,” Edie says, and I have to think where to begin. She knows, of course she does, that I lost my family in a fire when I was about her age, and she knows that’s why I still run to stamp out sparks from the hearth, why I check that the stove is damped and check again, before I turn down the lamps. It could have started one of those ways; no one knows for certain. Aunt Kez told me once that they
thought maybe a lantern was knocked over, or a smudge pot left going in the shed. When she said it I remembered a man with a bushy moustache asking me about blackflies. Asking was it my brothers’ job to settle the animals, would that be why they were found there. While I was thinking he patted my head and stood, and his voice far above me said, “Never mind, I don’t suppose it really matters.”

Things came back to me like that, in patches, and time moved as it does in a dream; I found myself in one moment or another with no link between them, no steps to trace. Opening my eyes in a strange room I wondered where and who I was. And wondered, since I knew that the room was strange to me, who I had been before. Then the door opened slowly and I saw the smooth face of Mrs. Wroth, and knew that I was in the pastor’s square frame house in the centre of the village. The bed dipped when she sat on the edge and it was hard to breathe when she wrapped me in her plump arms, tried to rock me like a little child. My hands were lost in the sleeves of the large, scratchy nightgown she said was hers, my own ruined, she told me, beyond any saving. So all I had then were my mother’s boots, and after she’d left me to dress in the clothes she’d brought, I took the little scissors from the dressing table and scraped at the ridges in the soles until I had a small mound of earth. The last my mother had trod on, the last I had, mixed together.

I had nothing to put the earth in so I cut a piece from the runner on that same table, tied it tightly with another thin strip so that nothing would leak through. I arranged the silver tray with the brush and comb so it didn’t show, and I thought that when Mrs. Wroth discovered the damage, as she was bound to, she wouldn’t say anything about it, not to me. She
would maybe think I was
maddened by grief
; that phrase came into my head and rolled around there, rolled right over the leap of shame that came when I looked at the clothes she had left. The moment’s delight at the stockings and petticoat, the soft patterned dress, far prettier than anything I had ever owned.

It belonged to Amy Wroth, that dress; I knew because she’d worn it in church some weeks before. The pastor’s daughter, with her pink cheeks, her neat blond hair, her cruel tongue. She had spread a story about me once, or maybe I had spread one about her. Whichever way it had been she was all sweetness those days I stayed in their house, filling my water glass before it was empty and buttering my bread, as if these were things beyond me. I joined them at the table, where the talk was mostly of the weather, and when Mrs. Wroth said, “You must be tired,” I thought that perhaps I was, and went back to the cool spare room, pulled up the soft covers and stared at the lacy shadows moving over the far wall, the ceiling above my head, until she came to bring me down to another meal. It was like being under an enchantment; days and nights passed and I felt nothing, not even surprise when Mrs. Wroth pinned up my hair and led me down to the parlour, where a bearded man stood to greet me, and said my name.

The story I tell Edie starts here, with my uncle Ben appearing as if by magic. Which is how it seemed to me, although later, of course, I understood that telegraph messages would have been delivered, some in the city and some to the pastor’s house while I floated in the shadow-filled room upstairs. Details tapped out, decisions made, a life arranged for me. My uncle said that I was coming to live with him, or rather, beside him; I didn’t understand exactly. There was a train to catch, a buggy
and driver waiting to take us to the station. He was sorry, he said, but there was no time for the offered tea, though he took the cakes Mrs. Wroth wrapped up, tucking them into the small bag at his feet. I stepped up into the waiting buggy and the turning wheels rolled me away while I smoothed the flower-sprigged dress with my hand.

Edie has known the station here all her life, and even before she knew all her letters Angus taught her to tap out her name on the old key he kept on top of his desk. This past summer she and her friends met every holiday train, their wide eyes taking in all the fashionable ladies, their enormous hats and the trim on their slippery gowns, and the handsome sons and brothers who raised a hand to help them down from the carriage. Once, in town, I saw her with her friends strolling slowly past the wide veranda of the Lakeview Hotel, their arms linked and their giggly faces close together, and I thought,
Oh my
.

I’m sure that what I’ve told her is true, that I hadn’t seen a train myself until the day my uncle came, although I must have sometimes heard them calling. We had to hurry from the buggy and across the platform, and he touched my elbow as we went, making me jump. “Well,” was all my uncle said, when we were settled in our seats, and he put up a hand to fiddle with his spectacles, which sat a little crookedly on his face. He took them off and played with the metal arm, said, “I’m always bending and breaking them,” and he smiled when he said it, looking at me with his bare and softer eyes.

I knew nothing about him beyond his name, and the fact that he was my father’s younger brother, though he looked older than my father would ever be. There were other brothers,
and sisters too, and I tried to remember how many, and if I knew what they were called, while my uncle settled his glasses and patted his lumpy pockets, took out a thin pencil and a small notebook with a blue leather cover. I noticed these things, but my mind felt small and muffled, no words I could think of saying.

“Well,” Ben said again, as the train began to move with a lurch, and I turned my head to the window and watched everything I knew slip away. I stared out the window and we went faster, sometimes slower, and stopped at platforms where people stood with bags and bundles. Sometimes, as we slowed to a stop at those stations, there were people standing without any bags and through the window I watched their faces change. Watched everything about them seem to lighten as their mouths moved into smiles. The first time, it was a woman with a jaunty hat, holding a small boy by the hand, and I thought she was looking at me, smiling at me. Until a tall man stepped into my view, set down his satchel and swung the boy up through the air. His hand on the woman’s cheek, in the shadow of her hat, before they all turned their backs and walked away together. I thought that here was a thing I might never have known. How many people there were, on any day at all, who were waiting for someone. And waiting for someone who would never be me.

There were many of those stops throughout our journey and I watched the waiting faces from my hiding place, and in between the countryside began to change, to soften and blur around the edges, the trees and the hills and the rocks. Even the light was changing, becoming golden and then the softest mauve, until I understood that really I was travelling through time, that the train was rolling into night as if it was
a completely different country. So many thoughts I’d never had before and they tired me out, my eyes heavy and closing again and again, but each time I opened them the changes were so small that I had no idea if I’d been asleep for moments or hours. The lamp glow in the carriage and my uncle with his open notebook, drawing lines and scribbles and tapping the centre of his forehead with the chewed pencil end. “Off to
Tir na n’Og
,” my mother used to say, chivvying my brothers up the steep stairs with the promise of a story about Oisin and his battles, about the Land of Youth, where three hundred years passed in the blink of an eye.

Angus is Irish, like my mother, and when he’s tired it’s even thicker in his voice. He was named for his father, who was named for his, and all the way back to the first gallowglass Angus, a fierce, wild fighter who crossed the Irish Sea. That first, stormy winter in this town we piled the quilts and I lay with my head on his chest while he told me stories. Most of them were very close to the ones my parents used to tell in turn, those days when the wind and snow raged around our cabin and we all huddled together, with the white words hanging in the air. Drifting into sleep with Angus, I felt just that happy, that safe.

But that time was far from the train rolling on through the night, the window that showed only my own blank face, and my uncle’s eyes meeting mine. “I’m sorry, you must have questions,” he said, but not one would form in my head. Instead I stared at his fingers, that were tapping on his right knee. His fingers with their broad nails like my father’s, like my own. My uncle’s fingers were tapping the same pattern over and over, and when he noticed me looking he said
sorry
again, and
curled them into his palm. He explained that it was a habit, that tapping, that he’d had since he was young and learning to work the telegraph key; he said usually he didn’t even realize he was doing it.

“Would you like to learn?” my uncle asked, and he said that he could teach me my name. Not Isabella, that was too long to be starting with, but they called me Iz, didn’t they, and I wondered how he knew. Two quick taps, and then three more. “That’s far too easy,” he said, though he praised me for it, as if I were a tiny child. “Let’s try Bella,” my uncle Ben said, and that was just right, a mixture of long taps and short ones, and he gave me his notebook to rest on my knee, so I could hear it better.
Bella Bella Bella
—I tapped it out, mile after dark, rolling mile, and by the time we reached Toronto I had a new name, and a secret way to say it.

The station was overwhelming, soot and steam and noise, and more people than I’d ever seen at the same time. Outside we passed all the cabs in a line and I stumbled in my too-big boots, shook my right foot to settle the wrapped earth more securely under my instep. Soon we’d left all the bustle behind; we turned, and turned again onto a dark street, the only sound our tapping feet that could have been a message, though I hadn’t learned enough to make it out. And then there was another sound, growing steadily louder, and a kind of displacement of the air. A shape growing out of the dark, a shape that was my brother Little Ross, with a grin on his face and his arms thrown wide, and I thought I might die for joy. But in the same instant I realized the boy wasn’t running to me. He had a look of Little Ross, but darker, straighter hair—another child entirely. “This is your cousin Bella,” my uncle said, when
he’d scooped the boy up, but I couldn’t even smile, knew only my thumping heart.