My Ghosts (15 page)

“I remember the ice cream too,” Edie says now. “And how much you laughed at the clowns, with their big flappy shoes.” That’s a thing I’ve completely forgotten; we talk about what else she remembers, and what I do, and I’m reminded of that
game we often played on Pembroke Street. A tray of unconnected objects—a thimble, a pressed flower, three buttons. Maybe a little mound of sugar, and a brass key. All kinds of things gathered and placed until the tray was almost covered. We could look at it for a minute, ticked out on one of Aunt Clare’s watches, and then a cloth was laid over it and we all wrote down how many items we could recall. It was always such a surprise, when the cloth was whisked away, to realize the obvious things you’d not remembered at all.

Jack would have always won, of course, because of the way his mind took pictures, so he was usually the one who set up the tray. And then, more often than not, it was Aunt Clare, who said that the trick was to make it into a story. Say a man with a crumpled flower in his lapel was distracted, and tried to put sugar in his cup with a key; the sugar spilled and trickled down the front of his three-button vest, and his wife noticed that one of those buttons was loose and said if he would just fetch her thimble she would fix it. “You can make anything into a story,” Aunt Clare used to say. “Everything is connected, or at least you can find a way to make it so.”

It’s getting late when the telephone rings, a thing so rare that for a moment I think I’m back at Pembroke Street, where the sound of the fire wagons always made me shake. When I lift the earpiece Aunt Kez is already bellowing, and my voice echoes back to me, saying, “Yes, it’s me, it’s Bella, yes it is. Kez, are you there?”

“Of course I am,” she says, “I’m calling you, aren’t I?” Though that’s always been her objection to the telephone, how anyone can say they’re anyone, and you can never be sure who you’re really talking to.

My heart is already thumping as my slow brain begins to ask what has happened, to ask who. “What about Edie?” Kez roars, and for a cold second I stupidly think that’s the bad news. Meanwhile Kez says that she has to talk quickly since she’s calling from the grocer’s and the old biddy wants to close up. I can picture her, bent over with her lips close to the mouthpiece, thinking no one else hears a thing, as she tells me they’re all coming to visit next week. Well, maybe not Charlie, but she is, and Nan, and Clare has free time for Easter, so she’ll come from Washington, and they’ll take the train together. “The Professor will just have to comb his own eyebrows for a while,” she says, her old joke about why he asked Clare to marry him.

Kez says they’ll stay at the hotel, like always, and when I tell her it’s mostly shut up for the winter she says everything’s been arranged, which explains why Angus hasn’t been down to see what all the noise is about. I tell her I’m not sure it’s a good idea, tell her the house is in disarray, that the weather might be bad, that I’m not in any state for company. “Oh, get over yourself, Bella,” Kez says as she hangs up with a click, and it’s so like her.

There’s a story I used to tell myself, on the edge of sleep, where I thought it would do no harm. A story where something wakes me; maybe a sound, maybe the sound of hooves on a loose stable door. In this story I’m a good girl, I’m a brave girl, and I know just what to do, though the cabin still burns, sparks spiralling up to the moon. The glass still cracks and shatters, the horse still bolts, but we are all outside, safe at the edge of the clearing. In this story I’ve saved everyone, and we are all alive and together.

And sometimes I think, why shouldn’t it be true? I think of the strange way time moves, think of how it feels as if Edie went to bed one night, prattling in her little cot, and woke up nearly my height, with her own secret thoughts and dreams. I think of the fiddlers in the fairy mound, I think of
Tir na n’Og
, and wonder if this life is the enchantment, if it’s the place I came to when I walked in my sleep, a thing I don’t remember having done since. I think of the first months after the fire, the closed and silent world I lived in, though I had no idea, and anything seems possible. I get myself in such a muddle when I start thinking this way, tell myself of course this life is real, but even if that’s so, it could easily have gone a different way. “You’re lucky they were there,” Edie says, when I talk about how I came to Pembroke Street. And it’s true, I was; they could easily have turned their backs, the way they believed my father had done to all of them.

If that had happened, I would have had a very different life. With the Wroths, perhaps, a despised almost-sister to Amy, who would have stopped filling my water glass soon enough. Our evenings spent in prayer, until they could marry me off, maybe to some earnest young preacher, and then a life of more prayer and endless good works. If there was no one to marry I might have stood behind the counter in the dry goods store, boarded in the village and spent the rest of my days with other people’s furniture. Or perhaps I’d have become a teacher, ended up in a tiny school somewhere even more remote, where the winters were even darker. My aunts and uncles and cousins living out their overflowing lives on a busy, bonus wire, while mine was the separate, quiet one, meant for those who didn’t know or want anything more.

I tell myself that I wouldn’t have known what I was missing,
that I wouldn’t even have known to think that way, but I’ve brought myself to a terrible place, one where there would be no Angus, no Edie. Or perhaps they’d still exist, but somehow altered, two people with no connection to me at all. People I might see, passing through a lighted room, while I stand outside in the dark, close to the cold glass.
Oh, for goodness’ sake
, Aunt Kez says then, in my mind, saving me again.

If there wasn’t so much to do I’d be angry about the visit arranged behind my back, but there’s no time to think about that, or wonder how Angus managed it. With Robbie’s help he’s moved Edie’s bed back upstairs, and though I heard her tossing and turning through the night she claims to have slept very well. The larder is filled with things for our Easter dinner, and I’ve mixed up the dough for the crescent biscuits Aunt Nan likes so much. I leave Edie to shape them while I sweep out the empty parlour, and when Angus comes home we’ll put everything back as it should be. The floor is streaked with sunlight that shows up the dust and grit in the corners, and the room is so bare that I keep turning my head to remind myself that she’s not gone, no matter how much it feels that way.

As I sweep and wipe down the walls I find I’m thinking of all the dark afternoons, the stories Edie wanted and how carefully I told them, how lightly. Uncle Charlie, and the “wild side,” all that was Pembroke Street. And our cabin in the clearing, farther back, things I’d forgotten coming to me, more and more of them. The way my father could change his rumbling voice to an old woman’s quaver, a little boy’s squeak, and how he could make my mother laugh so hard. I remembered the foul poultices when we were ill, and the feel of her chapped hand on my forehead. The way my brothers’ hair smelled,
when they were small enough to be carried about, and how for so long Little Ross called everything
blue
. Even the sun, even our horse and the floppy-combed rooster. I remembered times, when we were at peace, that I helped them with their school work, or untangled a knotted shoelace, and I remembered their smiles, how they looked at me like someone so clever, someone who would always be there. In the empty parlour I think of the stories I picked out to tell Edie and wonder why they should be any less true, less real, than the dark threads I kept to myself.

I look again through the open doorway and see Edie’s bent head, hear the quiet tune she hums, as she often does when she concentrates, and it almost overwhelms me, the thought of how I know her. The tune she hums and the way her hair falls, all the things that make her laugh, and her sometimes unreasonable temper. There’s nothing I wouldn’t forgive her, no need even to call it forgiveness, and I wonder, suddenly, if my own mother felt the same. If she knew more than I thought, understood more, if there was never any question.

When I open the back door to shake out the mats there’s something in the air. Maybe a scent, or something softer in the way it feels, and there’s warmth in the sun. The ice along the eaves is melting a little, drops of water tapping on the wooden railing, and I catch myself in my old habit of trying to make that sound a pattern, a message. I’ve lived here long enough to know that there are still weeks of winter left, but also to remember that a thaw like this can come like a gift, making it easier to survive the rest.

Behind me, in the house, Edie is now washing the bowls, and behind me farther than that, my aunts will be pulling down the shades and getting ready to make their way to the
station, prodding Clare, who still always believes there’s time for another cup of coffee. In a few hours they’ll board the train in a flurry of coats and scarves and bags, bumping into each other and tussling, in a good-natured way, over the window seats. Talking and dozing as the train makes its slow way from small station to station, and nodding to the strangers who board, bringing cold air that rises from their clothes.

There on the back porch I tip my face to the sun, and the movement reminds me of that photograph of Edie and Angus, how I would have seen them exactly like that, if only I’d looked. But like everyone else in the crowd that day, I was staring up. Squinting into the sun while the rope walker stepped out; he had a red sash tied around his waist, and the ends fluttered in a breeze that didn’t touch us, so far below. He started slowly, one foot in front of the other, with the long pole held across his chest, and I remember how he shifted that pole, just a little, to find his balance. The tiniest movements, they seemed from below, but I remember thinking how enormous they would have been, from the high, lonely place where he was.

Someone was saying his name, but not his real name. Someone was saying what his mother called his
paper
name; he could hear it quite clearly when the other noise stopped. Someone was saying his paper name, and that’s how he knew he was dead.

The other noise was somewhere between a bellow and a roar, and he thought it might be important to work out what it was. It made him think of summer when he was small and of the circus, the animals. Not the sleepy-looking lion with its sores and bald patches but the elephant, that was it. The noise was like the elephant when it unfurled its long trunk from between its stubby tusks and trumpeted. His mother had taken a photograph of that elephant and tacked it to the wall by his bed. He could picture it, he was picturing it, but then the noise rolled through again, taking over. Filling up everything, not even the tiniest space left for a thought.

A different voice was saying his paper name, saying, “Francis, Francis.” Not a voice he knew, although he knew a lot of people
who were dead. The elephant began to trumpet again but not quite as loudly, as if it was not right beside him anymore but maybe shambling away. When he thought that, it occurred to him that maybe he wasn’t dead, maybe he was small again and at the circus. Though if he was small again, how would he know it was
again
, and how would he be thinking these thoughts?

He’d lost track, didn’t know if it was the same voice or a different one, but it was saying, “Francis, Frank, can you open your eyes?” He thought he probably could, but not yet; first he had to think about the circus, and he held on to that word until the noise subsided. Then he thought that it didn’t smell like the circus so maybe he wasn’t small, maybe he was dead after all. The circus smelled like hot canvas and sweat and dung, and this was different. Something rotten, underneath a stronger, sharp smell. Clean, but not the clean of a white shirt snapping on a line. “Open your eyes, Frank,” the voice said again, and it was so
annoying
; he wasn’t ready yet. He kept his eyes closed tight and said, “Robbie. My name is Robbie.”

The walleyed nurse wrote the letters for him, and helped him work out what to say. Her name was Janet, but she said all her friends called her Fizz, because of the hair he’d never properly seen, tucked neatly under her cap. She chattered about things like that while she straightened his sheets and changed his dressings and he supposed they were trained to do that, to distract from the pain and keep things civil, but he was still grateful for it. She had a way with a razor too, gentle but not timid, gliding it over his cheeks and chin, and when he heard one of the other nurses making her way down the line of cots
he feigned sleep, a thing he told her once. “Well, I don’t know when I’ll have time to shave you,” Janet said, but he could tell she was pleased, knew that she would find the time, as she did.