My Ghosts (27 page)

Lately Lizzie has been doing research, starting with the names on the back of that old photograph, with others Clare remembers and her best guesses at dates. It was another of their old arguments—she could never
believe
how little Clare knew. “It just wasn’t something we talked about,” Clare had said. “All that family history—it just wasn’t important.” She knew it sounded feeble, but it was true. The last time Lizzie was home she’d smoothed out a roll of photocopies, records of births and marriages and burials, written out by a long-dead hand. “Keep
them for a while,” Lizzie said, “you’ll get interested,” and Clare thought it unlikely, but was grateful. It surprises her, always, this kind of evidence that Lizzie has been thinking about her, worrying about her maybe. That their roles have been—not reversed, but somehow balanced out.
Leave, but don’t leave me
; there’s a thought she can’t quite catch hold of, but it’s something to do with the pieces Lizzie has put together, throughout her life, with the idea that all along Clare has been leaving clues for her daughter to find. That Lizzie will have fit them together in a picture that may be very different from Clare’s own idea of herself, but just as real.

On that same visit they made a lemon cake from an old family recipe and watched a long movie about a woman in a coma; they were both disappointed but Lizzie thought it was interesting, the way the whole thing was done without flashbacks. And then she told Clare about an idea she was working out, though she wasn’t sure yet what she’d do with it. She said it had come to her in the library while she was looking things up, all around her people Clare’s age or older who were doing the same thing. She’d been struck by how excited they got, and how they talked about their ancestors as if they were people they really knew.
Oh look, here’s Thomas
, they said,
and his wife Bessie Anne. And this Thomas must be their son, who was the minister—now didn’t he go to Ohio?

Lizzie said she could see it as a one-woman show, just her on a bare stage with a heap of brightly coloured cloth, maybe dresses or maybe just wraps of some kind. And it would be about a long line of women through time, she wasn’t sure how far back, and with each one she’d wrap herself in another layer until she’d be so swaddled she could barely move. “And at the
very end,” Lizzie said, “I’m not sure what, maybe music, some kind of music playing very fast and I’ll start whipping those layers off, one by one, and they’ll end up in a pile on the stage again, but it will be a different pile, do you see?”

Before she could stop herself Clare said, “You’ll be
naked
?” and Lizzie gave her a look, but let it pass.

Since she did that first commercial Lizzie keeps her hair cut short, and the sticking-out ears that used to cause her such anguish have become a kind of trademark. For all the histrionics, for all her tales of woe, she is living a life that suits her, the life she wants; she has an uncanny ability to make people laugh, to draw them to her. Things happen, men come and go, but she bounces back; she’s not a brooder, and Clare realizes that she’ll be fine, that she
is
fine. In spite of me, she thinks, and she remembers, as she sometimes does, walking with Lizzie on a windy day. Her shaky toddler legs, one hand folded in Clare’s and the other clutching the ratty grey cloth that she wouldn’t be parted from. There was a sudden vicious gust, a bit of grit in Clare’s eye, and she must have forgotten for a moment, she must have let go. Lizzie set loose and falling, hitting the hard pavement and rolling away from her.

It’s a moment she’s never told anyone about, but of course everyone has those. Moments of guilt, but also things that are too trivial to mention. The memory of dappled light through a breeze-blown curtain or a sentence a teacher once said, a brown horse dipping its head. But if they’re so meaningless, why haven’t they vanished completely? Why does her mind snag on them, again and again? Maybe they’re not trivial at all, she thinks. Maybe those moments are clues, a string of essentials that make a story that weighs you down, like a backpack
stuffed with everything you own, like an anchor heading for the bottom. Somehow they become that heavy, all these tiny things that float within easy reach.

The people who have bought Clare’s house will be moving from another province and the woman, Beth, called occasionally to check a measurement, or to ask a question about local renovators. She sounded nice enough, said she hoped Clare didn’t mind, didn’t feel as if Beth was nudging her out, or taking over before time. She sounded nice, but of course it’s hard to be sure, over the telephone. For all Clare knows she could be a vampire; there seem to be a lot of them around these days. That’s the kind of thing she would have said to John, who would have put on a professorial voice and asked for her evidence, and she would have told him how Beth always apologizes for calling so early, how she claims to still be muddled about the time zones. She would have told him it’s more likely because it’s almost sunrise, where Beth is, that she hangs up the phone just in time to close the heavy lid of her coffin.

Those calls were a nuisance, but Clare knows it’s better than if Beth lived nearby, if she dropped in from time to time with her own measuring tape. It’s better than if Clare had actually
seen
her; then she would have to picture her in the house, all its spaces filled up with unfamiliar furniture, a jumble of strange shoes by the door. She would have to picture Beth flipping pancakes at the new stove she’s told Clare about, carrying plates to the square table that, yes, will just fit where she wants it to go, while her husband and her rosy-cheeked sons beam up at her.
You can’t judge a book by its cover
; Clare thinks about Beth and she thinks about the TV girl and how strong those skinny arms really were, how easily she lifted the
set with its trailing cords and settled it into the wagon. And she wonders why she assumed a life of misery; it could be that they have great jokes and games, the mother and the shuffling boy. It could be that she twirls and dances in a sunny room while he beats out the time with his spoon and grater, until they can barely breathe for laughing.

The towels are all packed, so when Clare turns off the tap she pats her wrist dry on the bottom of her green sweatshirt, doing it gently, as if the red splotch from the boiling water hurts much more than it actually does. The CD has finished, rain falls past the tall windows, and the spoon is loud against the side of her cup. She packed the calendar too soon and has been having moments of panic, wondering if it really is Tuesday, or Wednesday, or whatever day. Moments when it seems that she could have easily lost track, that whole days, even weeks could have passed in the packed-up house without her noticing.

They’ve always happened, she realizes, these moments when she seems to wake up and wonder where she’s been, sometimes for years. I’m a ghost haunting my own life, she thinks, and then she says, “What on earth does
that
mean?” It sounds like something her mother might have said, after her mind began to fray. When all kinds of things came spiralling out, but not in a way that made any sense. Cryptic phrases, names and fates that for all Clare knew could have belonged to characters in a book she had once read. “Promise me you’ll shoot me first,” Clare said, every time she came back from the seniors’ home, and John poured her a glass of wine and promised he would.

She knows it wasn’t a bad place, not really. Bright murals and posters on the walls and all the staff patient and upbeat.
The food was decent, even Clare’s mother said that, and though she avoided the crafts and card games there was often something going on in the big day room, with its view of endless rooftops and the green hills of Moss Park in the distance. Clare remembers that room, and the way sunlight fell through the long window. The old people in their chairs, all waiting for yet another singalong, for the paunchy magician with his dusty top hat, and his patter. He had a few good tricks, that magician, but she remembers thinking how cruel it was, when he waved his wand and they had to watch more things vanish.

One day the entertainment was a storyteller, a soft-spoken woman in a hippyish long dress; she had trouble with the microphone stand and a red flush flamed out across her cheeks. She sang a song she said she’d learned at her grandmother’s knee, though Clare had her doubts about that, and told a long story that had something to do with a black stone and a feather. Then another song she said they’d all remember from when they were young, and some of them did.

When the voices trailed off, the woman clapped her hands and said she’d create a story on the spot, just for them; she asked everyone to tell her one happy memory. Clare’s mother raised a shaking hand, obeying some long-ago rule, and said something about skating on a river, the smell of a boy’s leather jacket, but it didn’t sound right, and Clare thought she must be making it up. Or if not that exactly, then maybe it was someone else’s memory, slipped from its moorings and drifting until it had found a space where it could nudge and nestle its way in. A strange thought, but a thing that seemed quite possible, in that stuffy, brightly lit room.

Other people said other things, and the storyteller assembled her new story; there was a tiny baby and a warm leather
jacket, there was a cake and a party and a beautiful sunset. She turned on a little silver tape recorder before she started, and Clare realized that was how it worked, that another group of old people in a similar room had offered up a black stone, and a grandmother’s song about the rain. And though she knows it wasn’t the same day, that’s how she remembers it, the final stroke that left her mother glaring and silent. At the mercy of strangers who rolled her and diapered her, rubbed scentless creams and powders into the pale folds of her skin. Yet another thing Clare doesn’t want to be thinking about now and she wishes, suddenly, that Lizzie had come anyway. Had thrown open the door and dropped her bag with a thud that filled up the empty hallway.

She’s got rid of the Bodum pot to make room for Lizzie’s roll of photocopies; now everything just fits in the last box, and Clare feels a brief pat of satisfaction. All along she’s been waiting to feel the pang of leaving, but it seems now that it may not come at all. The street has changed, trees grown taller or cut down, houses sold and sold again. Even the doors she was always going in and out of have been painted different colours, the lives behind them no longer things she knows anything about. The heaving sidewalk where Lizzie fell and chipped her teeth has been replaced, marked with the initials of younger children who have themselves grown up and moved away. Women whose kitchen cupboards she knew, whose rueful laughter she shared every day, have become people she runs into so rarely that there’s no point in even pretending to catch up. The dismantled house is not a thing there’s any good reason to miss.

It was supposed to be filled with children, this house with its flowing rooms, and they assumed it would happen easily.
When it didn’t they talked about tests and treatments, but while they talked their lives grew busier, and Lizzie grew older, taking up more and more space. “It’s all right,” Clare said. “It doesn’t matter. We’re fine just as we are, aren’t we?” She meant it when she said it, and she still does, really. But as the house returns to what it once was, bare floors, bare walls, empty windows, she keeps catching flickers of movement from the corner of her eye. All those ghostly possibilities, with nowhere left to hide.

Checking her watch, she sees that the scalded spot on her wrist is barely visible and that she has the timing just right. Soon the big truck will come rumbling down the narrow street and it will be all noise and movement, strong men with steel-toed boots making everything happen quickly. The cleaning company she’s hired will come later to take care of the dust and debris that’s always left behind, and she’ll become one of those neighbourhood faces that has disappeared. A background face; one day you notice it’s missing, and realize you have no idea how long it’s been gone. Lying in the dark these last nights, listening to the song about ticking away, she’s sensed the piled boxes looming around her and thought there’s probably an equation for it, the way things accumulate over time, while people disappear. Something else she could have asked John, something he would have enjoyed working out. The kind of problem he might have added as a bonus question on a final exam.

And it wouldn’t be as tidy as an equation, but she wonders if there’s some kind of rule for how long you keep seeing the dead, wonders if it’s the same for everyone. How long before you stop following a familiar back in a crowd, before a profile no longer makes you blink and stare. She thinks it must be a progression, the way they retreat from the real world but still
stroll through your dreams, fitting themselves to whatever is happening there. Sometimes they wear clothes you don’t recognize, as if wherever they’ve come from is a place with shopping, and you wake up wishing you could ask them. And then one day you realize that the dreams have gone too, leaving only an occasional ambush.

In the story about the rains things were beginning to fall apart, but Clare had to close the magazine before the end, and next time in the waiting room she didn’t think to look for it. She knows it’s not important but it nags at her now, and she wishes she could know what happened. It must be on her mind because of the rain and the reminders she’s uncovered, her old backpack and the bits and pieces in a dusty box of souvenirs. She barely recognizes the girl she was, who moved so easily through the world. The girl who coped with languages and currencies and climbed onto boats and trains, stepped off them into whatever was going to come next.

In the packed-up house Clare turns off lights and takes a last walk through each dim room. She trails her fingers over the tops of the sealed boxes and thinks about the magazine, wonders if it really matters how those pages unfolded. There’s a rumbling sound outside; it might be thunder, or it might be what she’s waiting for. And it occurs to her, quite suddenly, that she can make the story end any way she wants.