My Ghosts (29 page)

But it’s not that far away, what she thinks of as the night of the ambush. The night of the department party, when she opened the wrong door to a startle in the dark, a smooth-haired woman who sidled past, not meeting Clare’s eyes. On the drive home she stared at John’s hands on the wheel, so many things chasing through her head that when he said, “Say something,” she felt that she already had. They sat in the car in their driveway while the engine ticked itself cool; light glowed in every window of the house, the way Lizzie liked it when she
was home alone, and Clare thought of all the things waiting inside. The clean clothes in a jumble in the blue basket, the permission form to fill out for the field trip, and it was her turn to drive to early practice in the morning. Things that wouldn’t change, no matter what happened in the car, what they said to each other. She thought of another cliché then, about people who stayed together because of the children, and understood that it was the whole fabric of their life they were clutching in their hands.

Before they glued things back together there were weeks when they barely spoke, when they stepped so carefully around each other. And there were nights when John was somewhere else, nights when Clare washed the kitchen floor and all the dishes in all the cupboards. A glass of wine on the counter beside the tape player, hitting rewind again and again to hear the woman singing about walking on a wire, about the bottom of the sea. The volume turned up to cover the harsh, unreal laughter that came from the family room, where Lizzie watched shows about people getting themselves into all kinds of zany, avoidable predicaments. Sometimes she carried the bottle in there after Lizzie had stomped off to bed and drifted in the flickering light, waking hours later into the past. The black-and-white face of her mother’s favourite actress or a seventies family strutting through a seventies living room, pausing to put hands on hips and shout at each other. A show that had fascinated her the first time around, watching it in her parents’ house where so little was said out loud.

In the taverna on the hillside Clare realized that she’d missed that final, tipping moment from day to night; now the strings
of lights glowed white and all the tables were filled, people eating and drinking and laughing, a crashing of sound. Strange to think that in twenty-four hours they’d be back in their own house, their own time, that another couple would be sitting in their place at the crooked table. Talking about people she and John had never heard of, or staring right through each other. A vision of her own house slid into her mind, empty rooms in rainy light, bare floors and the brown couch with the silky grey throw, waiting for her to sit down and reach to pick up the magazine from the coffee table, to begin again as if nothing had ever stopped.

She tried to see herself there, but like the island itself there was something askew in her picture of those rooms; they were familiar but not exact. She had the feeling that something had been torn and she had stepped through, like one of those old stories about a hidden, magic world. No wonder she surprised herself in the mirror, these last days. Gave herself little tests and tried to remember, without looking down, what shirt she’d put on, to remember herself doing it. Tried to picture the ring John had bought, in its twist of bright paper, when all she could feel was the weight on her hand. On the beach she was just a woman on a straw mat, invisible to the young ones running, kicking a ball so close that a spray of sand caught in the fine hairs on her arm. No mystery in the fact that no one met her eyes, that no one noticed when she waded out into the water, stirred it slowly with her browned hands. Days when she wandered without John she hardly spoke, although she heard things. “It’s paradise,” people said to each other, standing at the postcard rack, or when their steps matched on the road to the beach. “It’s a little slice of paradise—I’d love to stay forever.”

“Be careful what you wish for,” she said once, but no one seemed to hear her. A good thing too; what would be the point in setting those words loose on a perfect, sunny day? What was a thought like that even doing in her head?

John had made a good plan. The overnight boat to save the price of an Athens hotel, the last lazy dinner, the bottles of wine to help them sleep. Much nicer, she told him, than the way they used to do it, with cheap Valium from someone’s stash washed down with cheaper retsina. Walking the slope to the port they held hands at first, but had to keep letting go to switch their bags, which seemed so much heavier, even though the things they had added were very light. Hauling at her slipping purse strap Clare wished that she’d looked harder for her old metal-framed backpack, wished she hadn’t decided that it would be a silly way for a woman her age to move through the world. A woman who had a house and a family and shopping lists stuck to the fridge, her mother’s maxims sometimes tripping, appallingly, from her own lips. Lizzie was quite right to sneer at
Time heals all wounds
, or the one about breaking eggs for an omelette, and hadn’t she done the same? There were things she’d been so certain of, in those long-haired days on this island, about where she would go and how she would live. As she watched John smooth out the last of their crumpled drachmas and tuck them into his wallet, giving it a little pat, she knew she would never have imagined herself arriving here.

She knew, of course she knew, that it hadn’t all been wonderful, that earlier time. The pack that she carried had been heavy and awkward and the splinter of her father’s death was still jagged and close to the surface. She’d been confused and angry,
and she’d often been hungry and tired, been ill or desperately unhappy. But when she thinks of that time she also remembers a feeling of
loosening
. She remembers running with the others down a steeply winding pathway, dark and slick with rain. Maybe here—had it been here? A cruise ship had docked, blazing with light, and there was shouting, there were braying donkeys and men with sticks, and she remembers the panicked, lined faces of the passengers in their bright clothes as they were hoisted onto those donkeys and carried away. All that colour and noise, that confusion, and she knows it’s not likely, on that crowded, rain-slicked path, but she remembers them holding hands and running right through it, as if nothing could ever stop them. And she remembers so clearly that it was like running in a dream, the feeling of those long strides, her feet barely touching the ground.

She knows that it’s been studied and proved, this thing that’s obvious to everyone about the memories of youth and how clear they are, how real. Researchers with tape recorders sat down with the elderly, pretending to have a visit, a chat, feigning interest in the content when really it was all about measurement. About producing charts and graphs of the number of adverbs and adjectives, the only importance of the details being their number. All that time and trouble to conclude that the reason for the vividness of those memories had something to do with
intensity
. Strange to think that if she lived to be very old she might forget her daughter’s face but remember leaning on the chipped rail of a ferry boat, her hair tied back with a shoelace, and the sound of a strummed guitar. That she might remember a moment running through night rain while every trace of John and Lizzie vanished, as if they’d only been imagined, all the years of their lives.

The boat was late, two hours, then three, and if it had been more comfortable she would have fallen asleep on the bright yellow bench, leaning on John’s warm shoulder. “I’m regretting the wine,” he said, rubbing at his temples. Clare started to tell him about a game they used to play, to pass the time, but realized that she’d forgotten most of the details. “Something about a detective,” she said. “And he sees something, or knows something, and there are clues. But just tiny clues. And then you ask me questions until you know the truth. Or not that exactly, but until you’ve figured it out.”

“Sorry—what?” John said, when she nudged him.

Looking up from the dock it was impossible to tell where the rough hills met the night sky. Only a few circles of light marked the road, marked the tavernas and the guest houses that were themselves invisible, even under the bright stars. There had been faint music for a time, but it had stopped and the others waiting, six or seven of them, were mostly silent now too. They had all passed beyond jokes and complaints, had entered that state of waiting that feels eternal, although flickers of hope ran through them at every flash far out in the dark. Once there was the unmistakable sound of an engine coming closer, then cruelly fading. John began to explain the formula for calculating the horizon’s distance to a man in a plaid shirt who had said something about it. “I don’t get it,” the man said, and turned away to peer again into the empty ticket office.

“Might be worse than, don’t you think?” John said when he sat down again, and it took Clare a moment to remember the holiday that had been
her
idea. The place they’d rented on Lake Huron when Lizzie was four or five, a stretch of beach Clare
remembered from a holiday when she was about the same age. Though they only did it once she still thought about the endless sand and the glittering stones she collected in a plastic pail. The tented kindling her father had set up so carefully and her parents’ faces lit warm by that crackling fire.

She should have known, of course, that it wouldn’t be the same. Their own time was a week of foul weather, a few crashing thunderstorms that knocked out the power, and it didn’t take long for them to turn into a different family. A couple who bickered about who had forgotten the flashlight and the coffee, with their unreasonable, fractious child. When John said another game of Snakes and Ladders might actually drive him mad Clare found a deck of cards and tried the waterfall shuffle. Tried the Mad Hatter’s trick that her father had taught her, but the cards were old and sticky and it didn’t work properly. Lizzie said it was stupid, everything was stupid. She jumped down from her chair, landing on a stray green Monopoly house; there was a tiny bead of blood, and she would not be consoled.

That week had become their benchmark for the unbearable, their shorthand for occasions when something happened to time itself, each moment stretched out to an age. On the dock Clare thought that must count for something, the fact that there was no one else in the world John could say that to, and have it be really understood. No one else who could answer, “Oh, worse than. Definitely worse.”

When lights finally did appear on the horizon, growing steadily brighter and casting shivers on the dark water, John helped her to her feet, moved his shoulders around the way he did before setting out on a long run. The boat chugged closer and
it was like something sailing out of the past, rust-covered and smaller than it had seemed, gouges and bits broken off the gangway the sailors threw down with a crash that made them all jump. They were in a great hurry, the sailors, shouting to each other and nudging everyone up onto the deck that was slick and slippery, as if it had come through some completely different weather. Clare had imagined herself leaning on the rail, feeling the last Aegean air on her skin and saying some kind of proper goodbye as the darker huddle of the island fell away. But the sailors herded them all toward an open doorway, she and John the last to make their way down the vibrating metal stairs, descending into murky yellow light.

The noise of the engines grew louder as the boat began to move and they rocked into each other, bouncing apart again. John’s face was a sickly colour, sweat on his forehead and a sudden look in his eyes. “Go, go,” Clare said, and he dropped the bags at her feet, stumbled away into the gloom. Her fault; in the taverna she had teased him about the Gravol, another moment of exasperation that they both knew had nothing to do with seasickness, and he had tucked the package back into the first aid pouch. Said, “Here I am, then, taking a chance.”

The boat began its shuddering turn and Clare lurched, recovered and looked for a familiar face, comrades from the waiting time who had come down the steps just before them. They would roll their eyes at each other and one of them would help her find seats, a place to put the awkward bags. But there was no one standing, no one looking to recognize her as a fellow traveller. The sides of the space were filled with short rows of seats that looked as though they might have been salvaged from a train crash. Each heaped with something or
someone, asleep or feigning sleep, and she wondered what the point was, of all that waiting, if this was where it brought her.

In the centre there was a raised area, a waist-high platform, covered with a rubber tarpaulin. A group of women had occupied it and they also seemed to have stepped out of time, long dark dresses, and scarves wrapped tightly around their heads. She realized that the drone of sound was not just the engines; the women were talking to each other in a language she didn’t recognize, a nasal, complaining tone although some of them were smiling and one was rocking and laughing, her hands pressed to her mouth. There were baskets and cloth-wrapped bundles that some were using as pillows, their legs drawn up with only the dusty toes of their shoes showing beneath the folds of black. Food spread out on creased paper, olives and bread and strong-smelling cheese, little round cakes dusted with sugar.