My Ghosts (31 page)

When she was first here she fell heavy into sleep at any time at all, waking sweaty and confused like someone with a terrible fever. No more tasks, no more lists and no pattern to anything, the days and the nights. Once, through a window, she saw the moon moving quickly through the black sky. Watched it slip into the water, a last silvered bubble on the ruffled horizon drawn down like a setting sun. It didn’t seem like something that should happen, but there was no one to ask, and in the middle of the night it seemed quite possible she’d arrived in a place governed by completely different rules.

That’s a hard thought to shake even now, when she’s made herself a kind of routine. She sleeps soundly through the night and wakes just before dawn, coffee poured as the first gulls wing out over the lake. They come in groups, maybe families, another thing that she hadn’t known before. Snowy white, or darker, or streaked, in quite separate bunches with pauses
between, always moving in the same direction. If the wind is against them they just flap harder, and their shed feathers are scattered along the shore.

Things call to her on her beach walks and she picks them up, bits of water-smoothed wood and those feathers, smooth stones that glow richly, then fade. She drops them in a pile by the back steps and thinks one day she’ll spread them all out. See how they fit together, these shapes and textures that for some reason have caught her eye. Back inside she makes notes on the calendar each day, just the weather and the colour of the water. Slate grey, as a rule, but once a dazzling Aegean blue.

Every day on the island
the sun was hot and the water barely rippled. Every day the same, waking late, a cup of coffee, then the winding path to the main beach where we spread our fraying towels on the sand. It was hard to imagine that there had ever been anywhere else, that we hadn’t always known each other, and sometimes we talked about that, how it was quite possible that we’d once sat on different benches in the same station, or passed each other on a narrow sidewalk without even a flicker.

There were no clouds
in the sky but there were other patterns, lazy smoke rings rising and thinning or the way Douglas and Robert moved chess pieces on a swollen fold-out board. Even the puckered scars running up Robert’s right arm that we thought were from Vietnam, though he never said. He didn’t say much, ever, but Robert really hated to lose, crashed a fist that sent chess pieces flying and once a white queen splashed and sank to the bottom of Jen’s tall glass. She brushed droplets
from the fringed vest she swore Jim Morrison had given her, warm from his own body, drained the glass and caught the queen between her straight white teeth.

Jen hooked up with
Carly and Jackson in Marseilles after a bad ride, her palms and shoulder still scraped from hitting the gravel road. She had silver rings on every finger and rows of bangles, an open look, and the room they shared was the biggest one, chained cupboards on the wall and a chipped stone sink that had a pink tinge, when the light was strong, from when one of them rinsed out Jackson’s favourite red shirt. Jackson said he’d once played an angel in a movie and we could see it, his smooth cheeks and his flowing cornsilk hair. He and Carly met on a commune, maybe in Vermont, but something happened and they flew away. They travelled light, worked in bars and on farms and picked things, sold things—earrings made from twists of wire and the strips of leather he plaited into bracelets that stained and tightened in the sea. He said he knew all kinds of knots from those years he was in the navy; that was after the time in jail and the summers in the fire tower but before the movie and the ranch, and the year of riding freight trains. It was hard to believe he was old enough for all that, but when someone said no way had he run away with the circus Jackson jumped up on the narrow stone wall by the graveyard and walked it backwards, finishing off with a perfect handstand, a deep bow.

Carly may have known
the truth of it, but she was hard to reel in. Everything about her seemed to float, her long skirts and trailing sleeves. Stray cats rubbed against her, caught their claws in the filmy fabric when she crouched down to give them bits
of food she’d been saving for them. Once she stood between a man and a pus-eyed dog he was kicking, and she cried when the fishermen beat small octopus on the rocks near the water’s edge, though Douglas told her they were already dead, and it was just a way to make them tender.

Douglas knew things
like that, and about the Muses and the Furies, but he said he wasn’t really that kind of teacher anymore. He dropped acid at a concert in Hyde Park and it changed everything, and he’d had to leave his wife and son behind too. Whenever he could he came to the islands with a portable easel strapped to his back, because he’d learned he had an artist’s soul. Mostly he sketched but sometimes Douglas painted flowers on our cheeks, bright colours that wore away slowly until they looked like bruises. He went for long walks with Iz and sometimes with Clare, to the end of the white beach and out of sight, and he was always writing down the titles of books they should read, things about the soul, and how to be OK. “Here comes your father-figure,” Hans used to say, but Iz told him it was nothing like that.

Hans said he was
in a band back in Yde, and if only he’d brought his guitar we’d be amazed. Sometimes he pretended, moving his fingers in silent chords and stopping and starting again. “I
always
have trouble with that one,” he said, and Robert did the spooky chuckle,
The lun-a-tic is in my head
, and it may have been true. Hans called himself The Joker, but no one laughed much at the things he did and said, passing on fake messages and making up stories about people he’d seen, sneaking around places they shouldn’t have been. Sometimes he offered a box of matches with a little shake to show it was full, nothing but burned ends inside and he thought that was so funny. He did
it again, saying, “For real this time,” and we took it again and he laughed even more; we kept on falling for it, so willing to be convinced each time he said, “No, this time I really do have some, I swear it’s not like all the other times, I swear.”

Maybe it was a similar thing
, the way we kept going into the water although the sea in the little bay was not much cooler than the air and it only made us thirsty, whatever bottles we’d brought with us always almost empty. Someone said that if we had money we could open a café right here, just a little one, just essentials, and even though we knew that would spoil everything we made lazy plans for the Bare Minimum Café, and everyone had a different list of the things they couldn’t do without.

On the spindly hall table there’s a guest book going back years, signed by brief summer renters who write
Fabulous!
and
Those sunsets!
after their names. On some pages children have drawn pictures, stick figures jumping from boats and fat yellow suns, and some of them have printed their names in crooked, wavering letters. One snippy entry mentions mice but she hasn’t seen any signs, not even in the tilting shed that’s filled with fishing poles and beach chairs and old cans of paint. A bicycle with a rusty chain leaning against the far wall, plastic shovels and pails and even ice skates hanging from a hook, damp red mittens wadded up inside.

Most of her things are in storage but she has what she needs, and the cabin is furnished with the kinds of things people move up from. There’s a bed and a kitchen table, there
are chairs. There’s a heavy old couch, and a bookshelf with a few glossy magazines and fat paperbacks, and war stories and books on sailing. There are crosswords, mostly filled in, and a collection of fairy tales for children, some battered board games that release a musty smell when she lifts the lids. On top of the bookshelf there’s a clunky old radio; it looks as if it would play music from the 1940s, if it actually worked.

A small room at the back gives the best view of the lake, through a new, long window. She’s not the first one to notice; there’s an old armchair pulled up to it, draped with a bright quilt, and a strange low table, shellacked plywood on a wobbly driftwood base. Sometimes she reads there but mostly she just sits looking out, the soft cushions moulding around her and her feet propped on the shallow, cold sill. Lately she’s been wondering what it would be like to stay on here through the winter. To find out if the whole lake freezes over, and to see, really see, the small changes that lead into spring. She mentioned it to Bonnie, who gave her one of her squint-eyed looks, as if she were hearing a foreign language and it took time for the meaning to filter through. “Put that thought right out of your head,” Bonnie said. “Winters are terrible here, you have no idea at all.”

Bonnie is the woman in large sweatpants who met her with the key. It’s not her house, but she’s something like a caretaker, she said, for an old woman who’s been in the Lakeview for years. “You know, the retirement home, though Lord knows why we call them that, those places. As if they’re somewhere people look forward to, can’t wait to be.” Bonnie cleans at the Lakeview three days a week; she says it isn’t bad but really, wouldn’t you rather be dead?

From the start it was clear Bonnie is someone it would be hard to edge away from. She loves to talk and to find things out, asks questions that need some kind of answer, mixed in with details of her own that would be confessions, if they weren’t so casually said. Already she knows much more than she wants to about Bonnie’s husband and his bad back, her son’s piercings and her own
female troubles
, and how she’s been here fifteen years but there are still people who won’t give her the time of day. Even worse is knowing she herself has a place now, an existence inside Bonnie’s head.
Think I’ll check on the widow tomorrow
, she imagines Bonnie saying, as she serves up the family supper. Probably some kind of patterned paper on the kitchen wall, and a clock with knife and fork hands. Maybe there’s a grunt from her husband, who’s not much interested in conversation, while the pierced son asks if there’s any more bread.

Some of the mismatched furniture must belong to the old woman in the Lakeview, maybe the radio. Some perhaps dumped by the feuding nephews and nieces Bonnie’s told her about. “They’re just waiting for her to pop her clogs, and then there’ll be fireworks,” is what she said. It could be that some of the touches are Bonnie’s, the plastic flowers in the vase with the smudged flea market sticker, the dusty bowl filled with scentless potpourri. A few pictures on the wall seem likely too, a girl with a watering can and bonnet, a brown horse in a misty field. There’s another of a shouting woman, just her face and her wobbling chins. Maybe some kind of joke, that one, and somehow it fits with Bonnie’s contradictions. Her rough red hands and her blunt way of talking, the frills on her blouses and the pink earrings that shiver when she moves her head.

In the hot afternoons
we climbed back to the village and some of us slept and some of us lay down together. A faint smell of drains in all the dim rooms and thin curtains hanging limp, the loudest sound the rasp of a sandal outside, someone moving carefully through the narrow white streets. Later maybe voices and the rattle of iron grilles sliding up and we drifted back to the square, feeling hungry and rested and so easy in our bodies. Most times we took the path to the best place to watch the sun go down and stayed there until the sky was dark, all those stars like a flung-out net, and we talked about the universe and our tiny place in it, said that everyone ever alive had probably done the same, seen the same, and how amazing was that.