My Ghosts (22 page)

The music would be louder, up there where she was, and I thought maybe she could see the waves crashing, but only
imagine the sound they were making. I’m the same person, I know that, but it was as if she was hovering at the edge of my vision, where I couldn’t quite see her. I thought of all the things that had happened, and all she remembered. I thought of all the times she imagined a flicker of white sail, far out where the water is a clean line at the sky, and suddenly there were no gaps, everything flowed, and the ship was right there, or we were. Blue sky and the sound of a sharp prow, swishing through calm water, and the sun shining down on the spray that seemed to hang in separate droplets in the air. Nothing but light, and then we’re skimming along too, with that spray in our hair, we’re sailing away.

That summer she sometimes came home in the long dusk, with her fingers stained green from pulling weeds in other people’s gardens. A small trowel held loosely in one hand and limp bits clinging to her shoes, threaded through her grey hair. “There you are, Edie,” Uncle Robbie said, “just in time for
The Whistler
.” As if he hadn’t been pacing, and peering out the screen door. As if he hadn’t just finished saying, “Another ten minutes, son, and we’ll go find her.”
I’m not your son
, Alan thought, though it didn’t matter. Uncle Robbie wasn’t even his uncle, Aunt Edie not his aunt, but some kind of cousin on his father’s side. His mother had explained it when she drove him to the station, but he’d been too angry to listen.

I am the Whistler and I know many things
,
for I walk by night
. He sat on the floor, close to the radio, and it was a good story,
nothing quite as it seemed. The Whistler knew everything, he always did, but he revealed it slowly and in the end no one was blameless, everyone got what they deserved. When it was over Alan said good night and they smiled up at him from their chairs, the batty old woman and the one-armed man, and he didn’t know how he’d survive it; the war was over but he was a prisoner in a town so small he could walk down every street in less time than it took to go around a city block, trapped in a strange house with people he’d never heard of, who didn’t know a thing about him either. He climbed the stairs into stuffier air and his hands hung heavy at his sides, as thick and clumsy as his father’s were, his brain just as empty.

There were fathers who had come back with medals and fathers who hadn’t come back at all, and then there was Alan’s father, sometimes sleeping in his hospital bed and sometimes sitting in a chair in the noisy room at the end of the dull green hallway. He was still a big man, his knees bumping the underside of a muddy brown table, the top of it scraped and scarred. His thick white fingers pushing around the oversized pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes he said
horsey
and sometimes
yup yup yup
, but mostly he said nothing at all. Most times he didn’t even look at them, not even when Alan’s mother said his name, touched his cheek with the palm of her hand.

Once a week, for as long as Alan could remember, his mother painted on a bright red smile and backed the big humped car out of the garage while he stood behind, directing her right and left. Sometimes he thought about doing it wrong, thought about the screaming scrape of metal on brick, but his mother was counting on him; she told him so all the time. On those days the hard knot in his stomach was there when he
first opened his eyes and clenched tighter and tighter as they crept through the streets, his mother hunched, peering through her thick glasses with her chin almost touching the steering wheel. His job to call out the street signs, although she had to know the way by now. “Here we are already,” she always said, when the hospital came into view, dark brick and creaking trees and sometimes people outside, nodding and drooling in their chairs. That was the only good thing about being sent away, Alan thought, not having to go through those Sunday visits.

What happened first was a fight in the schoolyard, a boy with crooked teeth who questioned Alan’s story about the charge on the Nazi machine gun, his father the last one standing, with enemy bodies thick on the ground. That boy had whimpered like a girl when the principal rolled up his sleeves, and if it had been one of those sappy stories their teacher made them read, the strapping would have been a bond between them. But it wasn’t like that. The other boy whimpered but Alan stood straight while his palms burned white-hot, not able to make a fist for a week. Stood straight like a proper soldier, not one who fell from the back of a truck and hit his head on a rock in the road. One who didn’t even make it out of the country.

Other things happened after that, and when summer came he woke up angry every long day. He mowed their tiny lawn and drank lemonade while his mother answered telephones in an office downtown, threw himself on the bed in his stuffy room, the plaid blanket scratchy beneath his legs. “What did you and your pals get up to today?” she always said, when they sat down at the dinner table, and he shrugged and said, “Just stuff.” He started sneaking money from her wallet, just enough for the bus and a movie, and stood in line with
the oldies with their sticks and canes, their money folded into small squares in little zippered purses. Even the best shows had mushy parts and he made quiet retching noises in the dark, like he would have done louder if he’d had a friend who was sitting beside him.

One Saturday morning he stuffed two comics under his shirt, and tried to saunter out the door of the shop on the corner; the owner marched him home with a tight grip on the scruff of his neck and his mother cried and said she didn’t understand, said it wasn’t like him at all. When the man left she said didn’t she have enough to worry about, couldn’t he think about someone else for a change, and Alan slammed the kitchen door so hard that things rattled on the shelves. He slammed his feet down too, walking around the block, but that didn’t change anything and in the end he threw himself down in the coarse, dusty grass in the vacant lot two streets over, rolled and stared up at the sun in the hard blue sky until he had to close his eyes. When he opened them again he felt weak as a flutter of cloth, walking back past long-shadowed cars in all the driveways. All the fathers home and sitting at the heads of all the tables and mumbling words, maybe prayers, that floated out through the open windows. He would say he was sorry and he
was
sorry, would have said it, but his mother had already made arrangements. She said it would be good for him, a summer by the lake, and they were
family
, these people, not strangers, and happy to have him. The pieces of a fallen teacup were lying on a soft cloth on the table, beside a jar of glue and a little pile of toothpicks, and his bag was already half packed on his bed.

The next day he sprawled in his seat on the train, swearing to himself that he wouldn’t touch the lunch she’d made, but once they’d left the city, clanking between the back sides of
houses, all the mess and clutter, once they’d picked up speed through empty countryside he was terribly hungry and he took out the sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper, wrapped in that special way of hers, folded and neat and no chance for anything to spill out. He had a hard time swallowing at first, but it got easier. The trip took several hours, nothing to see but fields and trees and sometimes a dusty truck, waiting at a crossing as they blasted through. Once two boys and a girl leaning on a fence and waving, as if anyone would wave back. The train slowed for every small station, shuddering along the length of the platform before it stopped, and he saw the people who were waiting for someone, the way their faces changed from nothing at all to spreading smiles, as if a switch had been flicked. The first time his own lips moved, stupidly thinking they were smiling at him.

Every morning now he opened his eyes in a dead boy’s room, though the bed he slept in had belonged to the dead boy’s brother, now a grown man with a family of his own, who lived out on the coast. Mrs. P., who came to clean, told him all about it, swishing a bleach-soaked rag over the countertops while he tried to eat a sandwich at the still-damp table. “Such a tragedy,” she said. “Those four young boys, such good friends. Far out on the ice when they fell through, and only one of them made it back to shore. Patch Coulter, who has the butcher shop, you’ll have seen him.”

“I guess,” Alan said, trying to chew faster, trying not to see the way her fat behind wobbled as she scrubbed at a stubborn spot. The story made him uneasy, reminded him of the nightmare he sometimes had. His arms and legs bound tightly, and cold water flooding into his mouth.

Mrs. P. said what happened to Alan’s father was a tragedy too, and she said she thought she remembered him, from when they were children. Aunt Edie had told him the day he arrived that his father used to come for the summer, and she brought out some old photo albums to find him a picture, turning pages filled with people in old-fashioned clothes. “Now here’s one,” she said, “let’s see if I can remember.” A larger photograph, a group of people laughing on the steps of some building, and Alan didn’t say but he thought they had one just like it, hanging up in a fancy frame. “There’s my mother,” Edie said, “oh, she looks so happy. And Aunt Kez and Uncle Charlie; my great-aunt Kez, I mean. You never knew any of them, of course. And this one’s Aunt Nan—you know, I always had the idea she once ran away to the circus, but that doesn’t sound very likely, does it.”

From his armchair across the room Uncle Robbie gave Alan a wink, as though he knew what he was thinking, and said, “You’ll be getting the whole family tree, son.”

“Hush you,” Aunt Edie said. “There’s nothing wrong with knowing where you come from. Now this one’s Aunt Clare—such a shame she never had children, she was so good at
understanding
.” Then she pointed to another woman who was holding a fat-cheeked baby, and said, “That’s Edith, I was named for her, but she died young. And Ben beside her, that one with the beard, now he’d be your—what? Great-grandfather, I suppose. And one of these girls is your grandmother, though I guess you never knew her either. Fanny, she was, I think she’s this one.”

Alan looked where she pointed and tried to listen but they were too distant, all these people with their similar hairdos, their long skirts and too-tight jackets. They had to go through another whole album before Edie found what she’d been
looking for, a snapshot of three boys squinting into the sun, with their arms slung around each other’s shoulders. “That’s your father in the middle,” she said. “He was such a nice boy, such a live wire, and the fun they had together.”

On the facing page the same three boys stood beside a contraption that was taller than they were, made out of lengths of wood. “Oh, I’d forgotten that,” Edie said, and she told him it was a catapult that Uncle Robbie had helped them build, that they fired a watermelon clear across the street and made such a mess of Mrs. Todd’s front walk. “They tried to convince her that it was
Science
, but oh my,” Edie said, “wasn’t she cross.”

When he had unpacked his bag that first night there was an envelope with his name on it, tucked underneath his socks, and he thought it would be a note from his mother, telling him she didn’t mean it. Telling him she’d be there in a day or two, and they’d drive back home and everything would be fine.
I’ll be good
, he’d say, and he would be, and things would go back to how they were, when he was a normal boy with normal thoughts, a boy you’d want to have around. But it wasn’t a note, instead it was another picture, the one of his father holding him, a baby, on his knee.

He remembered that photo, from when she used to bring out their own album. He could picture the empty black corners left behind, and the smaller snap below it on the page. He’s not a baby in that one but he’s small, wearing a scarf over his mouth and a snowsuit so puffy that his arms stand out from his sides. “Your father was such a joker,” his mother always said, wanting him to laugh at the rest of the picture. Small pine trees dusted with snow and his father beside him, a mighty axe poised just above little Alan’s unsuspecting head.

The first week he was in Inverhaven some kids had come around; maybe Aunt Edie had set it up. Two freckled brothers, both younger than he was but bigger, and another boy with a twisted foot who was called Gimp. There was a scrappy girl named Bet, and once or twice her sister, Pammy, who had rolling blind eyes and had to walk with her hand on someone’s shoulder. They mooched around for a few days, and one afternoon Uncle Robbie gave them all money for the show,
Phantom of the Plains
, and they sat in a row with their feet up on the seats in front. The others took turns whispering to Pammy about what was going on, not that she would understand it, even if she could see.

For some reason they never went to the lake, but instead waded in the scummy river near the place where it emptied, swatting at bugs and feeling the silt squish creepily between their toes. Once they hiked out of town to the place where there had been a bad train wreck, years before. The freckled boys said they’d find bones, but there was nothing to see except a spot where the bush was sparser and lower, marking the place where three cars had tumbled from the tracks. They told him that sometimes in town you would hear a long whistle, at the exact time, and they told him that once a man who was out near the tracks after midnight had seen a ghost train, all dark, hurtling by at this very spot. On the way back to town Gimp took a few pennies and a nickel from his pocket, and they laid them on the rails for the express to flatten. After it had blasted past they plucked them off, shrieking and shaking their fingers as if they were hot to the touch.