Nothing but Ghosts

T
here are the things that have been and the things that haven’t happened yet. There is the squiggle of a line between, which is the color of caution, the color of the bird that comes to my window every morning, rattling me awake with the hammer of its beak. You would think that the glass would break, or else that dumb bird’s beak. You would think that I could think myself right on back to sleep, because I am sixteen, a grown-up, and I know things.
But this is the start of every day: being rattled awake by the world’s most annoying bird.

“Hey,” I say, sitting up in my bed, smoothing the hair from my face. “Cut it out.” The finch pops me an odd look, then hammers some more. I say, “Go.” It goes nowhere. I stand and press my nose against my own side of the glass, but that bird just hangs there, just hangs there and hammers. “What is
with
you?” I say, then flop back down across my bed. I can’t smother the noise with my pillow.

It is only six fifteen. A little patch of my brain feels like sizzle, but if I close my eyes now, I’ll never get to work on time. Downstairs an orange is being peeled; I can smell it. The coffee machine has gone into its huff-and-steam routine, and I picture Dad and how he’ll be—his extra-large T-shirt hanging down past his boxers, his super-nerdy glasses catching the sun that comes in through the window above the sink. He’ll have the newspaper spread out on the table like a
cloth, his hair sticking up like rooster feathers. In the morning Dad is not what anyone anywhere would ever call pretty.

“You’re kind of freaky looking,” I decide to inform him.

“House only needs one beauty queen, Katie,” he says.

Our house is too big for us, and also too old. Even when my mother was alive, I would feel lost in the oversized rooms with the dark furniture that had been here forever and ever. It is an heirloom house, passed on by my mother’s mother, whose own mother (there is a picture in the stairwell) had gotten married on its lawn. Years ago someone painted the red-brick facade white, and the white remained, flecking off in places beneath the ivy but thick most everywhere else, so that even in summer the house looks like it has been caught in a late-winter storm.

Across the driveway from the house is the
studio—converted stables with an office up on top and a gigantic, open room below, which is where my father works on the paintings he restores. He sits there with the special lights beaming; the jars of resins and gesso on a wheeled white table; paintbrushes in coffee cans, vases, pencil holders; the stretcher wood stacked like tinder; the big, crinkling rolls of Mylar leaning into a corner. People come from all over to see my funky-looking, super-nerdy dad. Paintings arrive by crates, in trucks, on canvas rolls—favored paintings, paintings with stains and tears, paintings smoked all over by a fireplace fire or left in somebody’s basement, forgotten by everything but the thick, black mold. He studies what comes through his pairs of glasses—the thousands of pairs that he wears on his head or around his neck when they aren’t on the bridge of his nose.

“You only have one pair of eyes,” I reminded him once.

“Yeah, but so much smoke and time to see through,” he said.

My dad has this knack for lighting the darkness, for uncracking all the cracks that break images apart, for returning the disappeared to the land of the living. Except for Mom, who disappeared just three months after she’d been officially diagnosed. Three months. Ninety-something days. Science, chemistry—that couldn’t save her. Preservation genius counted for zip. Extra, extra-special eyes had no impact. I blamed Dad for a while, and then I stopped. He’d loved Mom more than anything. I’d seen that for myself.

My mom vanished the day before Christmas, and of course there was no Christmas after that. There wasn’t my birthday, which was February. There wasn’t Easter. When I won the high school essay award, Dad took me out to lunch, and that was nice and sweet and all, but Mom? Mom would have filled the house with peonies, because peonies are the world’s sweetest,
dearest fat flower. They have personalities, Mom said, and feelings—the red ones bold and the peach ones shy and the purple ones adventurous. That was Mom’s opinion, one of the zillion things about which she was sure. She’d call her flower news up the stairs for me to hear, then go out to the studio to tell her favorite art restorer.

You can’t be as alive as Mom was, and then be dead. You can’t be singing so that your voice fills every room in a hand-me-down house, and then not be heard at all. The math doesn’t work. I went kind of crazy with the wrongness of it for a while, and then Dad and I talked and he said he knew no cure, the only thing he knew was the power of staying busy. I took on more school projects. I joined more clubs. I stopped hanging out so much with my two best friends, Jessica and Ellen, because I didn’t feel like explaining, I didn’t want to answer their questions or to feel their pity. I got a job at wacko Miss Martine’s estate the day we finished finals.

Dad works on the paintings ten hours a day, then makes like a master chef at night. He isn’t really a master, and you can’t call him a chef, but he reads the cookbooks and he chops and he stands at the stove and stirs. “What’re you making, Dad?” I have learned to ask him.

“The best roast chicken you’ve ever had,” he’ll say. Or “Hamburgers au gratin.” Or “Barbecued pork not a second past juicy.” I roll my eyes. He doesn’t care.

My job is cleaning—the roasting pan, the basting brush, the cutting board, the carrot tops, the stalks of the Italian parsley, the plates, the silverware, the grill. By the time I’m done, Dad’s on the couch, in the dark, in the blue light of the TV, where he falls asleep halfway into David Letterman’s Top Tens. He won’t sleep in his own bed now. I’m the only one on the second floor, and yes, sometimes I hear the sound of flutter. It isn’t the bird and it isn’t a bat. I haven’t bothered Dad with this fact.

But right now it is morning, and Dad’s pouring three or four tiny Rice Krispies into a gigantic bowl of milk. He’s pulled a soup spoon out of the silverware drawer and is standing, the bowl to his chin, at the sink. Four Rice Krispies in an ocean of white.

“There are chairs, you know,” I tell him, and he grunts. “Sitting’s civilized,” I say. He shrugs. I tug open the refrigerator door, draw out a can of lemonade, pluck an apple from the crisper drawer, then stuff both into the canvas backpack that clings to my back like Sammy Mack, the little kid across the street. Dad and I call Sammy “Monkey,” because that’s just what he is. You look up, he’s in a tree. You stoop down, he climbs on your back. He’s only four, and I told his mom he’s headed for the Alps. Either that or the Olympics. His hair is red, the color of flames. His eyes are tiny specks of blue.

“Dad,” I say now, “I’m taking off.”

“Don’t work too hard,” he says.

“Don’t forget your glasses,” I tell him. As if he ever could.

“Don’t forget your lunch.” Yeah, right. Not even an outside possibility.

My bike is the ten-speed, thin-wheeled kind, a perfect silver streak. If you were looking down on me and my bike from a cloud above, you’d think we were a zipper. That’s how fast we go, how straight down, all the way to Miss Martine’s.

Chapter
Two

G
ardeners are crack-of-dawn people. That’s the first rule. You get into place before the sun starts sulking beneath the trees, while there are still cool, dark, shady spots. The best shade at Miss Martine’s is alongside the watercress stream, and that’s where we gather every morning to get our list of chores from Old Olson. What needs weeding, dividing, thinning, staking are the things Old Olson knows. There are year-rounders and then the summer staff,
and I’m the youngest, but not by much, and today, Old Olson is saying we’ll be divided into two. Families, he calls them. Rest-of-summer kin. “We have got ourselves an excavation project,” he says. I’m assigned to the dig.

You have to cross the stream to get to the site. You have to walk across the stones, then make one big leap for the banks, and I’m the last to get across, the shoelaces of my work boots trailing in the leafy watercress, a turtle swimming beneath my shadow. I know that there’s nothing much on the other side but stone-wall crumbles and the busted blues of fat hydrangeas, because I was here yesterday, all alone, listening to the water flowing.

Ida has plopped herself down on the edge of the crumbled wall, her big face and squished eyes catching a cone of slipped-between-the-trees sun. She wears a smashed hat on her fluff of gray hair and shorts that stop too high above the knee. “This would be layers of
history right here,” she declares, from her stone. She likes to think that she knows everything.

“This would be make-work,” says Reny, who is the other long-timer and so scary thin that his pants seem tied on. Some people say that Reny is Ida’s man, but I only ever see them bicker. Of course, Danny and Owen argue all the time too, but that’s different because they’re brothers, practically twins. Danny is headed to college in the fall, taking his big head of lemon-colored curls to Boston U. Owen is going to be a senior with me, captain of the varsity lacrosse team. It’s not like I hang out with them, but I don’t mind them, either, and lately they’ve been calling me Girl. As in, “Hey, what’s up, Girl?” and “Girl, you’re twisted smart,” and “Girl, we’re really sorry about what happened to your mother.”

Now Old Olson is heading our way in his mint-colored converted golf cart—he’d gone upstream, to the bridge, crossed over, driven down. In the back are
the shovels and buckets and sifters and picks for the coming excavation. “Miss Martine’s been wanting herself a gazebo,” he explains. “She has chosen this here as her perfect spot. Only problem is you’d have to airlift a bulldozer in, and that she has decided against. So we’re hand digging—Miss Martine’s special instructions. And we’re hand digging until we are done.”

“That woman is off her rocker,” Owen says.

“She’s the boss,” Old Olson says. “She pays the bills.”

Reny hitches up his pants with his thumbs, doesn’t budge. Ida reaches down into the grass and pulls up a fat blade, begins tearing it into streamers. So it’s me Old Olson starts to study, beneath his worn straw hat. “Step on up, Girl,” he says, “and choose your weapon.” I eye the golf cart, ignore it, walk straight toward Ida. I bend down, select a stone near Ida’s feet. Stone’s as big as a soup pot and heavy. I stagger once, then I stand straight. I’m not letting weakness show.

“Where do these go?” I ask Old Olson, cradling the thing in my hands.

He points past the fat tulip tree where Danny is posted, arm crossed over arm, every single muscle announcing its most beautiful self. “Past the resident workhorse,” he says, tossing a toothy gleam in my direction.

“Girl’s got muscles,” Owen says as I make my way.

“You just going to stand there,” Danny asks, “and watch her?”

“Nope,” says Owen, and now he collects a stone, and now Ida and Reny and Danny are bending down and scooping, too, and now it’s all of us taking the wall away from where the wall had been, so that we can get to the secret earth below. Specks of dust rise up, like pale, winged things. There is the smell of something ancient. A butterfly, a purple one, moves in and out of shadow.

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