Nothing but Ghosts (7 page)

F
lying down the hill past the twisty trees and the stone posts and the black gates and the gardens, scanning for the bottom parts of irises because now I just can’t help myself, I suddenly remember the day before Barcelona, when Jessie and Ellen showed up early and told my mother that they’d come to kidnap me. Mom was out in the garden with her nightgown on, which was more like a slip, which made me think, whenever she wore it, that if she hadn’t
grown up with so many horses, she’d have grown up a ballerina. Her arms were long and really thin and pale, and her bracelets were always flinging off and bouncing straight across the floor—too loose for her super-tiny wrists. The diamond she wore on her left hand slid around and around beneath her knuckle, so that most of the time it looked like she wore a simple golden band. She went barefooted in the house and in the garden, too, and she always watered before the sun was too high, holding the hose close to the roots of things, plucking out weeds, picking out a table bud, and never, ever worrying about her hair, which was always lopsided when she climbed out of bed. My mom loved yellow flowers, too. She liked the surprise, each year, that burst from bulbs.

When Jessie and Ellen biked up, she said, “Girls,” and hugged them both, like they were her other two daughters, which you could kind of say they were, because they’d been my friends since kindergarten,
since bus rides and since Brownies, since the camping trip where it rained for three days and we all—my dad, my mom, my friends—sat in a tent telling each other stupid stories. “Girls.” I was downstairs in the kitchen, and I saw them out there, my two best friends with their wind-mussed hair and my mom with her nightgown and garden hose. They talked a lot before my mom showed them in, and then we all sat around having breakfast, and this was all forever and ever ago, when my dad still slept upstairs and had his pancakes waiting for him, his toast in the toaster, his Claire in her own chair, and he’d come down late, with his floppy hair, and say, “Morning,” putting on a pair of glasses to see what he could see.

After that, Jessie, Ellen, and I biked up the hills and soared down the hills into town, single file. Town around here is just an intersection with shops stretching over and then the other way, but mostly it’s this one corner with two benches where everybody goes,
and somebody always has a guitar or a harmonica or something, and we all stand around drinking coffee from the Gryphon, the local coffee shop. There’s a movie theater right there, three doors down, which was once, I think, an opera house or something, decorated and fancy, and in the morning, in the summers, they open up for Kids’ Club, playing old kid-rated movies for free.

The day before Barcelona, the three of us went to the movies at ten o’clock—stood in line with all the little kids and their moms and their nannies, because it was ridiculous and we knew it, because it was cool inside and hot everywhere else, because we could sit in the back with our shoes kicked off and a bucket of popcorn and a box of Skittles between us. The thing is, I can’t remember the movie we watched, I can only remember us laughing, Jessie laughing so hard that she almost fell to the floor from her chair and Ellen saying, “Oh my God Oh my God Oh my God,” like she was
trapped inside a giant hiccup.

I was the luckiest person in the whole wide world, and I didn’t know it, and here’s what I hate about being so smart: My smartness counts for nothing. I didn’t know, I couldn’t guess, that that was to be the last easy fun I’d ever have with the two best friends I’ll ever know. Two days after we got home from Barcelona, my father took my mother to the doctor—piled her into the car because she couldn’t fight him anymore, because she couldn’t keep her secret any longer. Four weeks after that, the doctors were sure. Everything looks like caution afterward, everything inside me feels old and used and cracked, and people say, “Oh, Katie, you’ve handled your mother’s passing so well,” and I think,
Handled. Handled? I’m barely breathing, can’t you tell?
And somewhere out there Jessie and Ellen are laughing, just the two of them, in the back of an old theater, and they think that I’ve forgotten them, maybe, but I haven’t. I never
would—they just remind me of my mother, they just ask about my mother, and that’s not a question I want to hear, even if I knew how to answer.

My mom would know how to break the painting code.

My mom would know where the yellow flags grow, and why a woman who could have had anything would carry them into her debutante ball.

T
he weekend’s rain steams up from the ground, like dragon’s breath. I veer inside the entrance gates at Miss Martine’s, swoop across the macadam, hop off the bike, and start walking, taking longer breaths now to slow my heart down. I pass Amy on my way to the machine shed, and she waves her hat at me. Yvonne’s a little way off, with buckets in her hands that look full of squirming green snakes, but actually, I see it now, they’re only full of
ferns. “Girl!” she yells up at me, since she can’t wave, and I say, “Good morning, Miss Yvonne. What did you think of all that rain?”

“Got my laundry done, anyway,” she calls back. “But, man, did we get rain-socked.” She nods her head in the down-the-slope direction, and I look with her. From here the grass looks like a little bit of green in a lot of water crystals, and the heads of the flowers and trees are bowing low. The stream is a crooked line of blue-brown that looks wider than usual, spilled out over its sides. Near the hole I make out Old Olson, Ida, Reny, the Santopolos—all of them in a circle, looking down at something.

“What’s going on over there?” I ask Yvonne.

“You’ve got me.” She shrugs. “I’m on dividing duty.”

I roll my bike into the shed, flick down the kick-stand, and cut across the hill, under the sun, soaking the toes of my work boots, hearing the water sloshing
into my socks, looking around for the aftermath of irises, if there are irises at the garden at all. The crossing stones are pretty much sunk below the stream. I have to walk back to where the bridge is, cross there, walk down to the others. The hole looks like the espresso my father makes himself in the morning—caramel-colored. Still, all this time, the team’s been standing there staring, and finally I can hear the conversation.

“Definitely culminating project material,” Owen’s saying. “I mean, it’s gotta be prehistoric.”

“Who teaches science anyway, these days?” asks Ida. “Prehistoric? Are you kidding?”

“When’s the last time you’ve seen a turtle shell this perfect?” Owen asks back.

“Prehistoric does not mean one year pre me,” says Ida, and Reny laughs, a good-for-Ida laugh. She gives him a look that’s a combo of I’ve known you forever and Okay, I admit, you’re half decent.

“Hey, Katie,” Danny says when he hears me sloshing forward. “Check this out.” He steps aside, making room for me in the circle. Owen shoves his turtle shell at me. Half a turtle shell, I guess it is. The carapace.

“Cool,” I say. It feels so good standing right here next to Danny that I could pretty much end up talking turtles all day. “Where did you find it?” I reach for the shell, and Owen lets me hold it in my hands. I turn it over and over—bowl to hill and back to bowl—and only when I turn it a third time do I feel what seems like a prick point in the underside. I trace the indentation with my index finger. I flip the carapace over and read the mark by the light of the sun. Odd, I think. The things you discover in a garden.

“Noticed part of it sticking up over there,” he’s saying, making an exaggerated gesture toward one corner of the hole. “Didn’t know what it was, so started digging.” The mud is still wet on his arms and his knees. He’s got a streak across his face where he must have
smacked a bug. “Pulled it up and nothing’s broken. Nothing. It’s perfect.”

“He’s building his own museum,” Reny says, who’s been slapping at bugs the whole time Owen’s been talking, and annoying the heck out of Ida.

“And he’s charging us admission,” Ida says now.

“You’re just jealous,” Owen says, “because you didn’t find it.”

Danny leans toward me and stays that way. He turns his head, whispers through his curls. “Something else has shown up,” he tells me. “But I’ll catch you later.” He puts his finger to his lips and smiles. I feel a shiver going up and down all the little bone chunks of my spine, and I can’t tell, even within myself, if the shiver is for Danny, for this something else he’s found, or for the mark scratched into the carapace. I look at the sludge of a hole, not pretty, and then at Old Olson, who hasn’t said a single thing all this time about the turtle shell, nor the mud, nor the buckets he’s got piled
up on the back of his cart, which I’m guessing he won’t have to explain; buckets are for scooping rain out of a disgusting hole of mud. What is he thinking? Why does he hang here, like he does, wanting us to dig but nervous with us digging, all stone-cold silent about Owen’s carapace? His eyes are hard as metal; that’s what it is. The blue and the black of them are confused as a bruise.

They’re the color, too, of the old slate tiles that make the roof on the caretaker’s house where Old Olson lives, just down the drive from Miss Martine’s, hidden behind a garden. You’d have to walk under a trellis to get to his front door. Crawl over the window boxes to get inside his windows. His whole little house is so garden protected that the most open-door it gets is by way of its roof, which is so steep and so pitched that even Sammy Mack would, I’m guessing, think twice before accepting an invitation to stomp all over it.

Reny’s the one who finally says, “Well, the shell sure is a fascination, but shall we get to work?”

Danny tilts in the opposite direction. “Sure,” he says.

I tip back and catch my balance.

“Where’re we floating the old floodwaters?” Ida asks, heading off to the cart to collect herself a bucket.

“Skim the top, take it down to the stream,” Old Olson says.

“Don’t touch my shell,” Owen tells Danny, as he cradles it in between the branches of a tree.

“Wouldn’t think of it, bro,” Danny tells him. Seriously. Sometimes you can’t even believe that the two of them are just one year apart.

We’re so mud mired by the time lunch comes around that we all head off for a wash and then for a break; Old Olson says that we’ve worked so hard he’s going to give
us an extra hour. I’m thinking that he wants that hour to himself, to do his own exploring.

At Miss Martine’s, the hired help has its own lavatory system—a lineup of bathrooms plopped down at the back of the greenhouse that sits right against the property’s edge. You have to go through the greenhouse to get to the bathrooms, and this time of year the air inside the greenhouse is like the place inside a laundry iron where the water you pour in turns to steam. It’s mostly empty buckets and a couple of lemon trees, lots of starter vegetables, and a row of baby seedlings. When we hit the greenhouse, we aren’t talking. We push through the door, single file, into the concrete hall where four doors lead to four toilets and sinks. It’s a unisex operation. You wait in line. I got here last, so I’m waiting. I listen to four spigots going off at once, and now Reny starts singing another one of his tunes, whistling the melody between the words he can remember. I don’t even want to think about what the sinks are going to look like when I get
my turn. It’s only dirt, I tell myself, and water.

Finally Ida comes out looking scrubbed as a pot, the rim of her T-shirt a fresh wet collar. Ida has skin that could be earth all cracked to pieces by summer. The lines don’t resemble anything close to a direction; they just break out every which way, some on the surface, some much deeper. I can’t imagine Ida young, can’t believe she was ever my age, ever doing anything womanlike to get Reny to come over and notice. She’s just a block of who she is, no decoration, and she stares at me like I’m the odd one.

“Girl,” she says, “you could use a scrubbing.”

“Yeah,” I say. “No doubt.”

“Sink’s all yours. Left you a little dab of Ivory.”

“Thanks,” I say, but
Gross
, I think. Soap after Ida. Disgusting.

In the bathroom, I turn the water full blast to wash away the crust of Ida’s cleanup. My face is huge in the narrow mirror, all mud zapped and dried out, and I
start scrubbing. My hands first, then my arms to my elbows, then my elbows to my T-shirt sleeve, then my kneecaps, then up to my face, going real easy on the Ivory, because there’s hardly even a dab; Ida must have really gone all at it. I shake my hair out of Danny’s cap, try to fix it with my fingers, but my hair has a mind of its own—you wouldn’t call it curly, which would be nice, or even wavy. It just doesn’t do what I want it to do, so I roll it back up into Danny’s cap and pull the bill down, snug. I dial the faucet knobs back to off, pull open the door, and there is Danny, waiting.

“Hey,” I say, feeling the warm crawl of a blush across my face, wishing I had the mud back on, to hide it.

“Hey.” He opens the door to the greenhouse, stands back, says, “Ladies first.” I walk the skinny aisle with Danny right behind me. I walk and he’s so close, and the greenhouse air’s so hot, so tight.

“So Owen’s got a turtle shell,” I say, to break the silence.

“Culminating project,” Danny says. “What was yours?”

“I don’t know,” I say, and I’m about to tell Danny something more about my research, all my questions, but he takes the conversation somewhere else.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“Well, I mean, I
know,
but it was kind of strange.”

“So? Tell me.”

“God,” I sigh, and we’re through the greenhouse now, we’re getting to the door, we’re out in the real air, under the sky. Danny steps beside me, and I feel the ache of the morning dig lift away and vanish.

“Come on,” he says.

“Barcelona,” I tell him. “I wrote about it. First-person travelogue.”

“What’s so strange about that?”

“It wasn’t the Barcelona that everybody sees. My Barcelona was underground, the place where the city begins.” I wait for him to laugh, but he doesn’t. We just
keep walking, the rest of everybody all gone off who knows where, the trees beside the stream throwing down their shade, and Danny waiting. “My mom and my dad and me,” I start, but I don’t even know where to start. “Last summer,” I say, and he says, “Yeah. I heard. You went away.”

“Yeah,” I say. “We did.” And I know that people talked back then. I know that people talked through the fall and through the whole month of December, when I didn’t go a single day to school, when I stayed home and sat with my mom in her room with the colors. I just didn’t know that Danny had been listening. I mean, I hardly knew him.

“So where does Barcelona begin?” he asks. “Your Barcelona? The one you wrote about?”

I say, “Do you want to sit down for a while?” I start walking toward the stream, and Danny follows. We each find a stone to settle upon. Mine is mostly moss, some granite. Danny’s stone has its back flat against a tree.

“You want to hear the weird thing about Barcelona?” I ask him.

“What’s that?”

“It keeps its ghosts underground.”

Danny laughs. “You know for a fact?”

“I do,” I say. “I saw them.”

Now Danny pushes back against the tree, fits his arms across his chest, and waits for me to explain about the ghosts, which is one of the things that I appreciate about Danny. He’s not the kind who’s always looking for ways to push himself into the talk, not all Look at me, not My story’s better than yours. He has patience, and I like that about him, and maybe it would be okay right now, because it’s just the two of us, and because he asked, to tell him something about the day my mom and I climbed down beneath the streets of Barcelona, to find the other Barcelona, the one the Romans built two thousand years ago, and the Iberians before that. The one I wrote about.

That Barcelona is under glass, inside the thickest walls I’ve ever seen, and cool when up above it’s broiling hot. Everything down there in the ghost world is lit orange and yellow with big glow lights that make it seem like day is fighting with night. Fine lines. They have fourth-century-
B.C.
goddess heads down there. Iron swords. Sewing needles made out of bone. Beds and candles, oil lamps, hinges and locks and keys, and places in the walls where little god statues stood, beckoning to the souls of the dead. What my mother loved, what she couldn’t stop staring at, were the rooms they called the cubicula, tiny private rooms with a bed and a chest and a chair, and the most beautiful, most delicate containers for makeup. There were mortars for mashing colors and spatulas for mixing and carved combs and flasks made out of glass. “Can’t you see them?” my mother said, and I said, “Who?”

“These women,” she answered.

“The Romans?”

She nodded. “Yes.” Her eyes were so wide and her face was so pale and right then she was just as much a ghost as they were. If my mother could have walked through glass, she’d have walked straight through to the other side, to one of those little rooms, and sat right down on one of those little chairs and I would have seen, I swear to God, the Roman women talking to my mother, beauty to beauty, infinitely beautiful, forever. She stood staring at the cubicula for such a long, long time. After that she found a bench.

“You okay?” I asked her, and that’s the thing: She didn’t answer, and she was honest, and why didn’t I notice, why did I say, right after that: “Dad’s probably packing; we should go”?

“Honey,” she said, “remember this. Remember how alive we are now.” I do remember, and that’s what I mean: In Barcelona there are ghosts.

“Well, that was a good story,” Danny says, and I realize that I’ve been sitting here saying nothing. I feel
my whole face turn red, and my neck, also my arms.

“God,” I say. “I’m sorry.” I look straight into his wide eyes and wish that I had a way of explaining, that I hadn’t just been sitting here on a rock, halfway to Barcelona. He looks back into me. Smiles, lifts his shoulders, and shrugs.

“Someday,” I say, “I’ll tell you about Barcelona. I just can’t right now.”

“I’m cool with chilling.” Danny lifts his arm and it falls across my shoulders. He pulls me close and I fold—my bones, my skin, everything I am, pressed up against him.

“You want to hear the other news of the day?” he finally asks.

“Yeah.” I nod. “I do.”

“Headline version,” Danny says. “Miss Martine didn’t show up at her father’s funeral.”

“Wait,” I say. “How do you know that?”

Danny takes his arm from across my shoulders and
digs into his big back pocket, a huge, cavernous space, from what I can tell, where you could pack a picnic and then some. After a lot of shoveling around, he pulls out a square of newsprint.