The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books) (32 page)

There were quilts on the walls of the living room, abstract shapes in forest green, hunter green, tree-bark brown, and shades of grey and charcoal on ash black on burned black. Elle had thrown out Lucile’s lap quilt. There were so many food stains on it.

At the reception in their small home, the ladies from the quilt ministry admired Lucile’s fine work. Cody’s father kept wandering over to the thermostat and pushing it higher. “Mom’s cold,” he kept saying. He would glance over at the recliner like a dog that has lost its owner and is keeping vigil for her return. Of course Cody’s mother would not have stirred from the chair to turn up the thermostat herself. She would have told one of them to do it.

With the fire in the fireplace and the heater blazing away, perspiration beaded on everyone’s foreheads. Cody assumed that the funeral reception guests became uncomfortably hot, and that was why no one stayed long. That was fine with Cody. He was exhausted from monitoring his father. Cody had been afraid he would do something like take off all his clothes or dip his finger in the punch. But Kenneth had wandered back and forth from the thermostat to the fireplace, fretting and half-broiling everyone.

“No one ate anything,” Elle said, but the truth was that no one had stayed long enough to put a dent in the food. Elle had bought too much, and the church ladies brought covered dishes. People did things like that in the Midwest.

Cody and Elle saved everything they could, refrigerating the cheese logs and dip five seconds after the last guest had shut the front door. The sooner they got the cold food colder, the longer it would last. They froze the casseroles. Elle said they would have sandwiches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner until the cold cuts were gone.

That done, the dishes washed, Kenneth, Elle, and Cody went into the living room to watch the news on TV. Brother and sister traded looks when their father sat in Lucile’s recliner. It creeped Cody out. On the sofa, Elle distractedly went through the contents of her purse. She threw her unused tissue in the fire.

No one really watched the news. No one spoke. Cody was thirty-seven. He had gone to college, then came home to help his father work the farm. But two years in, his parents figured out how to apply for subsidies for not planting any more of this, then that, and that; and as the dairy cows died, they were not replaced. Soon, there was no farm. There was fallow land and subsidy money. His parents owned their house and they drew social security. He could have left, but by then, they had begun to develop health issues. He found that caring for them took up most of his time.

Elle, who was older than Cody by three years, was the one who had left. She’d been a librarian in a high school in Milwaukee. Then the economy had taken its toll, and she had come home while she job-hunted. Six months stretched into a year, and then into five. Cody thought Elle was relieved that she’d been forced by circumstances to retreat. She said that high-school students were messy and rude. Cody thought there was a failed romance somewhere in there, too. He didn’t know, though. They never talked about it. Now she did copyediting online. She was always on her computer, with her door shut.

Ghosts of happier times did not linger in the house. They realized they were in the wrong place, and faded away.

A death in the family could have been messy, but Elle made all the arrangements. Cody’s task was to watch their father. Their father didn’t have a task.

They went to bed. Cody was sweating, wrapped in his sheets like a shroud. Their mother had been found frozen. The morgue had been refrigerated. He hadn’t asked if there had been a procedure to defrost her but there must have been. Was it important to do it in some special way? How long did it take? It must have worked; otherwise the funeral director wouldn’t have been so eager to make up her face.

It bordered on sick, this train of thought. But he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He wondered what was happening in the graveyard. If the flowers on top of her grave were freezing. If below the piles of snow, inside the coffin,
things
were happening to her body. He found a symmetry – he beneath his pile of quilts; she beneath the ground. If she’d died just five years ago, they would have had to wait until spring to bury her. But the funeral parlour had invested in the equipment to cut through the frozen ground. People who didn’t live anywhere near the parlour were getting buried in the local graveyard.

Lucile’s clothes had not been returned. The old jeans with the stretch waistband, a large black-and-red flannel shirt, her sheepherder’s jacket, were gone. The funeral home had given them back her big boots. Elle had put them in a white plastic trash bag, then into the trash.

Cody peeled back layers of quilts. He was so hot he felt a little ill. The Magnusens paid for their oil at the beginning of winter. With the heat up this high, they were going to have to buy a refill. Cody got up to turn it down, and heard his father talking behind the closed door of the master bedroom.

Cody pressed his ear to the door.

“OK,” Kenneth was saying. “I’m coming.”

Then Cody heard the whine of the mattress springs, his father shuffling through the room. Cody glanced down. There was no sliver of light beneath the transom. His father was moving through the darkness, alone.

“Dad?” Cody called.

There was no answer, just more shuffling.

Cody knocked softly. “Dad?”

Nothing.

Cody turned the knob and pushed the door open. Moonlight spilled into the room, shining on his father’s hair as he stood in front of the bedroom window.

His mother’s ghost was staring through the glass. Her skin was mottled blue, grey, brown. Her blue eyes were bloodshot and shone like mirrors as she glared at Cody’s father.

Kenneth’s hand was on the window latch, preparing to open it.

“OK,” Kenneth said. “OK, OK.”

“Oh, God. Oh my God, Dad,” Cody whispered. His heart stuttered as he stood on the threshold. Then as he took a step forward the ghost disappeared. There was only moonlight on the snow, and beyond that, the heavy wooden fence.

“Cody?” Sounding uncertain, Kenneth lowered his hand from the latch.

“Dad,” Cody said, rushing into the room. Trying not to look at the window; unable to do anything but look at the window.

I didn’t see that
, he told himself.

“She’s so cold,” Kenneth fretted.

Cody didn’t know what to do. It had to have been a waking dream. A trick of the light. A guilty conscience.

“Come to bed, Dad. You had a bad dream.”

Cody glanced uneasily around the room. It was chillier than the rest of the house. He could almost see his breath.

“What’s going on?” his father asked. He looked around as if he had just woken up, blinking his rheumy, icy eyes.

“You were dreaming.” Shaking, Cody stood beside him. His father blinked several times, glancing at the window, then down at his hands, then back at the window.

Cody didn’t remember the last time he’d touched his father, or the last time his father had touched him. He couldn’t remember a handshake. He lightly brushed his father’s arm, surprised by how thin it was.

Cody hadn’t seen her face there. It had been a trick of the light. A bad dream of his own. His heart pounded. His hands shook.

“Now climb into bed, Dad,” Cody said. Cody’s back was to the window. He could almost feel someone looking at him.

Her, looking at him.

“I’m so cold,” Kenneth said sadly. “I’m cold to my bones and I’ll never be warm again.”

“Here, get under the quilt.” Cody peeled back the bedclothes. For one heart-stopping moment he thought he saw a leg; then he realized it was his mother’s “body pillow”, purchased to help her with her hip aches.

He glanced back at the window. All he saw was the moon on the snow, the fence, and some trees. More times than he could count, he had gone outside in the early dawn, trying to find his mother’s footprints so he could figure out what she was doing at night in the frigid darkness. He had tried to talk to Elle about it. She had pursed her lips and said, “She’s just as crazy as he is.”

Now, as his father stiffly sat on the edge of the bed, Cody realized that he couldn’t leave him in this room, unattended, when his mother’s face might reappear in the window.

It wasn’t there. I imagined it
.

But still, he couldn’t. And he wouldn’t stay in this room himself.

“Dad, let’s go watch TV,” he said, because he didn’t know what else to do. “We’ve got all those great leftovers.”

He flicked on the light so that his father wouldn’t be tempted to lie down. The window absorbed the reflection, so that Cody couldn’t see anything in it except the painting of birds on the wall above the bed. He’d turned on the light so that he could fool his father into forgetting that he had been planning to go back to bed. It worked; Kenneth shuffled barefooted down the hall. Usually the floor in winter would be too cold to walk on barefoot, but the thermostat was up so high that it was like walking on freshly turned summer earth.

Cody headed for the kitchen. But his father went into the living room and sat in the recliner. Cody opened the refrigerator and recoiled from the chill. Everything in there was rotting, slowly.

“What’s going on?” Elle asked, belting her robe and yawning as she came into the kitchen. She looked younger without her make-up.

“Dad had a bad dream,” he said, avoiding her gaze.

“I guess that’s to be expected,” she replied. She reached out a hand towards the refrigerator and he saw that it was shaking. Like his.

Tell her
, he thought. But it was too complicated, and he didn’t want to upset Elle. He hadn’t really seen his mother.

“Cody,” she said, and sat down at the kitchen table. She looked down at her hands. Then she said, “I’m going back to bed.”

Tell her
. But he never told her anything.

“Good night,” he said.

He pulled out a casserole, then put it back and shut the refrigerator door. He glanced at the blank kitchen windows. What if his mother’s ghost went to Elle’s window next? He hurried down the hallway to his sister’s door and knocked softly on it.

“Come in,” she said.

The dark blue drapes were pulled across her window. He tried not to imagine his mother’s mottled face, her shiny eyes, on the other side the glass.

I didn’t see her
.

Elle looked at him. Then her gaze slid down to the floor. “Cody,” she said again.

He took a deep breath. “Did you see her?” he asked.

She cocked her head. “When? The night it . . . happened?”

The night it happened, their mother had gone out into the dark forest without her flashlight. It had been snowing. She was found in the morning beside the fence, the gate frozen open. Cody had found her.

She had been lying face down. He hadn’t turned her over. He had kneeled in the snow to check her pulse. But he already knew. He could tell. Her skin was shiny, like ice, and—

“I went into Dad’s room,” he began, meaning tonight. Just now.

“So did I.” She clenched her jaw. “I saw.”

He suddenly had the feeling they were talking about two different things. He glanced at the closed curtains.

Then he smelled the smoke. It was thick and oily, and it was rolling down the hallway.

“Dad!” he shouted.

Together he and Elle ran back down the hall. The quilts on the living-room walls were on fire. The recliner was ablaze, and Kenneth was staggering through the smoke, coughing hard.

“I’ll get water,” Elle said, as Cody ran for his father. He took his hand and hurried him to the front door. He threw it open and—

She was standing there. His dead mother, skin blue and brown and red. Her dark blue polyester top over a long black skirt he didn’t recognize. Her eyes were like cracked marbles. Her mouth hung slightly open, revealing only blackness.

“She’s cold,” Kenneth said.

“The ceiling is catching!” Elle cried. “We have to get out!” The house was making a whum-whum sort of noise as the fire grew, flames crackling and snapping. Cody heard the kitchen door slam shut. His sister had made it outside.

Lucile faced Cody and Kenneth, her face a rictus stare. Heat brushed against Cody’s back.

His mother took a step forward. Her eyes blazed with fury.

“She slapped me,” Kenneth murmured. “Hard.”

She headed for them.

Before he knew what he was doing, Cody grabbed his father’s hand and raced back into the living room. The recliner was going up, and all the quilts. The skin on his arms began to pucker. He felt as if someone was pressing heated spoons on his arms.

“Hot, hot,” Kenneth wailed.

Cody stepped on something burning. His foot cramped and sizzled. He raced into the kitchen. The ceiling was burning. Smoke slammed into his throat and expanded into his lungs.

Hacking and coughing, he clung to his father’s hand. He reached the kitchen door and threw it open. They ran into the snowy backyard. Snow tumbled down; ghosts darted and swirled among the clots of white: the ghosts of secrets.

“Elle!” Cody shouted. “Elle!”

The fence gate was open, as it had been the morning he had found his dead mother.