My Ghosts (7 page)

The space between them now is tumbled with separate memories, from the time Nan was gone, and with their separate thoughts. But in those days they were together all day and all night and Kez says, “How can you not remember that, when I do?” She thinks how most of the pleasure goes out of the remembering when there’s no one to really share it with. Something like the way that long-ago war changed when Peach’s mind began to go. Too easy then, the salt in her teacup, her nightcap wadded up deep in the bedclothes.

In the early days, when they still thought something might be gained by complaining, their mother scolded them for their lack of charity. “She doesn’t mean anything by it,” she said, and told them they needed to look through to the good heart within. When the wandering started, Kez wondered if that was what happened when you became old. If something was sloughed off, like the cocoon they watched, deep in the leaves of the currant bush in the yard. The thing that would be a butterfly emerging, all folded and wet and trembling in the air.

She and Nan talked about it; they would have, in those days when they spoke every thought aloud to each other. Falling about laughing as they pictured Aunt Peach flapping bright wings and wafting away. It didn’t fit at all with her clouding eyes, the hairs poking out of her chin. The confusion maybe more like something that slowly settled from above, blurring everything, the way a gentle and steady snow mounded and softened the prickly holly bushes that grew by the cemetery gate. Whatever the cause, how could you keep
hating an old woman who got lost on the front walk? Who gave the sweetest of smiles to whoever took her hand to lead her home.

Kez thinks that she could ask Ben about the war; it was his idea about the privy, after all, so he must remember. But he and Edith are still making their way back from their honeymoon, now visiting with her aunt in Chicago. According to their last telegram they won’t arrive until moving day, when there’ll be too many other things to do and talk and laugh about.

It’s still strange to think of Ben as a married man. He’s been known to dance the Racket in the kitchen, and to honk like a goose or eat a spoon of salt when he loses at Forfeits, but he’s always been steady and serious, and quite matter-of-fact about what fills his mind, everything he calls
Science
, though it’s more like magic. Electric sparks and wires, and words that float for miles through the air. They never really thought of him as a man who would take the time to find and court a woman, and the first they knew of Edith was when he told them he’d invited her for tea. Nan opened her eyes wide and said, “Today? You great
gauk
—today?”

“You don’t need to fuss,” he said, but the more he told them, the more they did. Miss Edith Patricia Anderson, daughter of the man who owned the telegraph company where Ben had always worked, and properties all over the city besides. The man who had always taken an interest in Ben, and even paid for the patent for the new relay system he’d invented. Mr. Anderson sometimes invited Ben to dine at his fine house, and when they remembered that, they realized that he had, in fact, mentioned Edith before. They’d waited up for him the first time but he didn’t remember much about the food, said
he tried to keep his eyes on the daughter, who sat across the table, so he would know which fork, which spoon to use.

They were expecting someone like Lisbet. Someone holding up fancy skirts as she crossed the threshold, someone looking down her nose and not caring that they knew it. But there was no side to Edith at all, no airs. By the end of that first visit they were all half in love with her, her easy conversation and the way she laughed so often. A real laugh, not one that sounded like tinkling spoons. She seemed to fill the room, even being so small, barely up to Ben’s shoulder, and he not a tall boy. Tall man.

Edith knew things about them all that Ben must have told her, which meant, they understood, that they’d spent a great deal of time together. And somehow the things she knew and the things she asked about made them sound, made them
feel
, so interesting, so unique. They were still buzzing when Ben came back from walking her home, had replayed the whole visit while they filled the dishpan and brushed up crumbs from the lemon cake she had said was the best, just the best. “What did you think?” he said. “That I’d fall for some fizgig?”

Awake in her bed that night, Kez wondered what it would be like. To be a person that everyone wanted to be close to, like a magic spell cast but with nothing bad behind it. A person any hero would ride miles to rescue. When she was young, and even not so young, she used to climb to the attic, with its window that showed a view over the tumbled rooftops, of a river and far-off green. The place he would come riding from, a speck growing steadily larger and bringing the green fields with him. All the sooty brick and stone dissolved as the spell was broken, all the people revealed in their true, hideous forms,
scurrying away to hide from the pounding hooves, from the clods of earth spinning in the horse’s wake. And she herself revealed in all her beauty, the one he’d been searching for the whole world over, the one he was always meant to find.

Clare found her there once, after it had become her room, and Kez was glad of the clean nightdress she held in her arms, snapped that if it was privacy Clare wanted she could do her own washing and tossed it in a heap on the floor. Downstairs she rattled the poker in the stove, though it was burning just fine, and Nan said, “What now?”

Later, when Clare said she was sorry, Kez said, “That’s all right then,” and that meant she was sorry too.

When they’ve eaten, Clare settles at the table with her books and Charlie says he’s off to a performance at the Opera House. “Ooh, I’m so
cultured
,” Kez says, standing behind him at the little mirror and mimicking the way he smooths his eyebrows with a licked fingertip.

“Will you just
leave
it,” Charlie says, his words as sudden as a slap in the face, and he bumps out through the door, still pulling on his coat.

Kez catches Clare’s eye, says, “Oh pish, he knows I’m only teasing.”

“You are always at him about it,” Clare says. “What do you expect him to do—stay in and watch us putter around?”

“Don’t be silly,” Kez says, as Clare begins to gather up her things. She tells Kez she’s going to read in bed, where it’s warmer, which is ridiculous; surely no place is warmer than this kitchen, with the stove burning high and the kettle steaming.

Of course she was only teasing; Charlie knows that, everyone does. She doesn’t mean anything by it, she’s soft as butter
inside, they all know that. These people who are the only ones in the world who really know her. She crashes the dishes in the basin, and the thought comes,
What if they don’t?
What if she’s all wrong about that as well? She feels suddenly dizzy, staring down at her red hands in the hot water as if they are strange objects belonging to someone else, but she closes her eyes for a moment, and the feeling passes.

Maybe she does ride Charlie for his gadding about, but why would that matter? Maybe she’d like to go along to the Opera House herself, would he ever think of that? Or to that play he said was so hilarious. There used to be more to
do
, that’s all, they were always going somewhere for tea, or meeting up for a picnic, or to hear that soprano—what was her name? Months ago, that was. She tries to remember the time before that; before she can stop it the memory slips through the door. An evening in the Misses Simp’s fussy house, with a few people from the church, little cakes and cups of tea and Mrs. Tolton, as usual, singing that German piece, while her husband played the piano. Then some games that perked things up; it was even quite fun for a while, with Hunt the Ring, and Do As I Do, and even Twenty Questions was lively, with everyone trying to guess first. Until they were narrowing down an animal, and someone said, “Are my ears big or small? Oh, sorry, are my ears enormous?” A voice shouted out “Keziah!” just as someone else said “Elephant!” and everyone laughed, and she did too; what else could she do? And her treacherous sister reached over and squeezed her hand, a thing anyone who was looking would have seen.

“One thing I won’t miss is that privy,” Nan says, as she comes in the back door, blowing on her hands. “The luxury of a water
closet—can you believe it?” Then she says, “Oh perk up, Jug, why don’t you. Just one more night of this muddle, and anyway, you were the one first keen on it.” It’s true that she was; swept up in Edith’s enthusiasm, how could she not have been? The words tumbling so fast from her lovely mouth, and the way she clasped her hands together beneath her chin and said, “What do you think—isn’t it a marvellous idea?”

They were sitting around the kitchen table after a cold supper, the windows pushed wide to catch any bit of breeze, Edith so frequent a visitor by then that they never went near the parlour. She’d been to see a house her father owned, several blocks to the east. Two houses, actually, that had at some point been joined across the front but were otherwise quite separate. Edith’s idea was that they should all move there, like the one big family they would soon become. She and Ben would have one side, the rest of them the other, and when the children came, wouldn’t it be grand to be living like that, so much easier for her to call on them if she needed help, and to visit back and forth.

They needed a little fixing up, these houses, but it would be so much better, didn’t they think, than her father’s plan to build on the lot on Grosvenor. “That will take forever,” she said, “and Ben will get quite tired of me while we’re waiting, and marry someone else.” They knew she didn’t mean that, the part about Ben, but Nan thought her father would be sure to object. “Maybe a little,” Edith said, smiling her sweet smile. “But he’ll come around.”

They’ve always thought that Mr. Anderson must have had other plans for his daughter. Wondered if he regrets bringing Ben home, the favour he had always shown him, that maybe gave her ideas before they’d even met. He’s been nothing but
courteous to all of them, and made a nice speech at the small wedding. But it’s not as if they really
know
him, though they’ve heard about the black, brooding moods, the ones even Edith can’t jolly him from. He told Ben once that he reminded him of the boy he wished he’d been, one who didn’t have everything so easy, and they wondered why anyone would wish for something like that.

“Why not?” Kez had said that day, after Ben and Edith left for the recital at the church. Visions of sunny rooms in her head, and babies bouncing on her lap. Wouldn’t it be good to see the back of their landlord, the way he’d been pushing their rent up and up? And hadn’t they been saying that with Ben needing to support his own household they’d have to take lodgers, and wouldn’t it be better to do that in a house with more room, and more rooms? What point could there be against it, except for sentiment, and what was that worth when you really thought about it?

In the end they all agreed, and it didn’t take long to be so caught up in the practicalities there was no room left for doubts. When Kez wrote out her list of tasks, Charlie gave her a mocking salute, and dodged the flat of her hand, but he’s stayed in a few evenings lately to help, and tied on an old apron to go after the cobwebs in the darkest corners. “All hail the man of the house,” Charlie said, as he lifted the corners of that apron and curtsied.

Kez walked by the new place once, in the fall, saw the doors all open for the painters and paperers Edith had hired, heard the sounds of hammering and sawing. But she had no wish to go inside, as the others frequently did, to check the progress and measure the many windows. She wanted to finish with the
old life completely before she crossed that threshold, not trail any of it back and forth to the new. Though she hadn’t been sad, she realized that she hadn’t been happy for years, not like this. Nothing but plans in her head in the night, and the satisfaction of crossing things off her tacked-up list, one by one.

When she dumps the basin from the cold back step, he’s peeking over the fence, that boy. A little hard to make out, with only the light of the moon and the stars, but there seems to be something red on either side of his chin, maybe mittens he’s found for his cold hands. The fence is taller than he is so he must be holding himself up, which would be difficult with his skinny arms, and must be why he drops out of sight so quickly.

The boy comes and goes as he pleases; he always has. Often he’s gone so long she forgets all about him, but then she’ll catch a glimpse as she waits to cross a street, or takes a shortcut through the park. Maybe he’s sitting on top of a loaded cart that goes by, or shinnying up the big tree by the pond. Sometimes he’s standing quite still while all the people move around him; they jostle him as they pass, making him shift to catch his balance, but their minds must be flitting around their own lives, and they don’t seem to notice what they’ve done.

There are times, like today, when he seems to be mocking her, but mostly he’s just there, his expression blank as a biscuit. There’s something sad about his eyes, though she’s not sure why she thinks so; she can’t remember him ever being close enough to see that clearly. Now that he’s back she knows she’ll see him everywhere for a time, and it’s something like that dream she often has, the way she never knows where it starts, but somewhere in the middle she recognizes it, knows what it is and how it will go.

It’s crossed her mind, of course it has, that he might be dead. Maybe one of those babies that made their mother shake her head and say, “That one will never make old bones.” It’s crossed her mind, but she doesn’t really believe it; unlike Clare, she thinks the dead stay where they belong, no point in looking for them in the shadowed corners, or wondering if they’re happy or sad. Her parents up in Heaven, and if there’s any fairness, Peach gone hurtling back to wherever she came from. Besides, what difference would it make? Sometimes he’s there, sometimes he’s not, and she’s far too cold, too tired to spend any more time thinking about it.

They hear Charlie’s stumbling footsteps on the stairs as they get ready for bed. A muffled curse and the sound of him throwing himself down on top of his covers. “I hope it works out,” Nan says, meaning the man with the cart who owed Charlie a favour and has promised to come in the morning, promised to move their things cheaply.