Before and Afterlives (27 page)

Yours sincerely,

Mary Caldwell

Her father laughs after finishing the e-mail. His smile grows long and wide. “Eight hundred dollars,” he says, leaning over the keyboard. “Eight hundred dollars will be just fine.”

“She sounds upset,” Sylvie says. She sits on the couch in the li
ving room where she can still see her father in the little cubby hole room he calls his office, and eats a French fry.

“Sh
e
i
s
upset, Sylvie!” her father says, turning around as his sentence comes to a close on her name. “And people who are upset are our bread and butter. Without them, we wouldn’t have this fine new house, now would we?”

Sylvie looks up and around along with her father after he says this, taking in the rooms that they’ve both looked at a hundred times in just this way over the months since they moved in. Each time her father feels she doesn’t understand how much he does for them, for her, for their better life, he’ll talk about the fine new house and look up and around at the ceiling and walls of whatever room they’re in, as if this is necessary to pay your respects d
utifully.

“Well, I think it sounds sweet,” says Sylvie.

“What does?” her father says. He turns back to the computer to begin a reply e-mail to Mary Caldwell.

“The baby,” says Sylvie. “Why would they want to get rid of it?”

“It’s not eve
n
thei
r
baby, honey. And even if it were, people just want to live a peaceful life. Ghosts make that impossible. Don’t judge so harshly.”

Sylvie drops her French fry on the plate. She stands up and e
xcuses herself, and her father asks why she hasn’t eaten all of her lunch. “I’m full,” says Sylvie, and leaves the room, her chili dog half uneaten.

The crazy mumbler, the silly girl in pigtails, the annoying policeman who is always pointing his finger and shaking it, the rich woman in the fur coat and hat with the golden pin of a butterfly on one side, the confused dog who runs in circles after his own tail, the maid who is always offering tea or coffee, the old man dressed in a severe black suit with tails and top hat, his long white mustache drooping over the sides of his mouth and down his chin like spilled milk. Page after page, she turns through them until she comes to the new one, the one her father gave her before sitting down to eat his chili dog and open his e-mail. “Here,” he’d said, holding the photo by one corner as if it were the tail of a dead mouse, and handed it to Sylvie. “For the scrapbook. Keep her safe.”

The old lady looks up and around the frame of the phot
ograph, as if it is a fine new house for her, looks out at Sylvie, furrows her brow, then says, “Child, why have you done this? I thought we were becoming friends.”

“It wasn’t me,” Sylvie tells her.

“She’s telling the truth, my dear lady,” the old man in the suit says from his page directly across. “It’s not our young Sylvie here who has done this. It’s the girl’s father. The ghost hunter.”

“Ghost hunter?” the old lady says. “Is that who flashed that camera at me?”

Sylvie nods.

“Well, I never. What sort of man goes around scaring the living daylights out of you like that? What did I ever do to him?”

“It’s not you,” Sylvie tells the old woman. “It was your son and his family. They moved into your place after you died two years ago. Remember?”

The old lady’s face grows more pinched, more confused, her wrinkles deepening. “Why no, I don’t remember that at all!” she says. Then: “Wait. Oh, yes. You’re right. The
y
di
d
move in, didn’t they?
I
a
m
dead, aren’t I?”

Sylvie nods again, trying to look sympathetic. She hates when ghosts realize they’re ghosts.

“Give her some time, Sylvie,” the old man with his milk-flow mustache says. “It would be better if you just let me talk to her.”

Sylvie knows the old man is right, and turns the pages back and back and back again until she comes to the first one, the very first ghost her father captured. The very first entry in Sylvie’s album. “Hi,” she says, her voice almost a whisper, smiling as soon as she sees her mother’s smiling face.

“Hello, my big girl,” says her mother.

There are, perhaps, a few things that should be mentioned about Sylvie’s mother before we go any further. Her name was Anna Applegate, but she was born to the Warners, one of Warren’s well to do families that had kept their ties to the city, even after the manufacturing industry fled to poorer nations. Most of the wealthy had gone with their corporations, or had never settled in the communities who worked for them to begin with, but the Warners had a particular flaw, a flaw that only revealed itself in the receding tide of money: the Warners sometimes showed that they had what some people called “heart” or “feelings”—both enemies of profit, and because they had kept their modest wealth invested in the city, and lived among the people who worked for them, over a period of several decades they eventually “came a cropper”, as Anna’s father liked to tell friends and colleagues at the university in the neighboring city of Youngstown. He was an art historian—a dreamer and a good for nothing, his own father had called him as they had begun to feel the burden of becoming people who were required to think about money in relationship to need for the first time in several generations. He was fond of sayings, phrases and aphorisms from the past. He had a difficult time caring about anything that distracted his gaze from beauty. His family had lost their wealth, but he had not lost the sorts of desires wealth had once afforded them.

Sylvie’s mother had inherited the Warner flaw of heart, and because of this she married Sylvie’s father, a young man whose c
areers had ranged from convenience store clerk to selling cemetery plots to working in a cabinet factory by the time he’d turned twenty. She had married for love, and love led her into a falling-down house with her new husband, already carrying a child. And though the Warner family had come down the ladder, they had not come down so far that they would approve of Anna marrying such a man. “What kind of life can he give you?” her father had asked in the front room of their family mansion that was always cold, even in summer.

Anna had said, “Why does it matter what he can give me? What ca
n
I
giv
e
hi
m
? What can we give each other?”

Her father had pursed his lips, closed his eyes and sighed, knowing sense would not reach her. He turned, lifting his hands in resignation, and left Anna standing under the cand
elabra with the wide staircase curling up on either side of the room to the second floor. She shivered for a while in the cold draft that came through the hallways. Then she made a decision. A decision that would take her to Sylvie’s father’s family home, into the ramshackle section of unemployed laborers and their raucous families, where Sylvie would be born eight months later.

“Hello, my big girl,” says Anna. Sylvie wishes she could hug her mother instead of just see her and talk to her in the photo. It’s been so long since she felt her mother’s arms around her. Her father’s hugs are tight and hot, but her mother’s felt like spring mornings, light coming under the window shade, the smell of growing things pushing their way up and out of the earth.

“Hi, Mom,” says Sylvie, though she’s not sure what else to say. How many times has she opened this book of dead pe
ople just to look at her mother? Just to say hello? It’s hard to have a conversation now that her mother’s dead. Sylvie keeps on changing, but her mother will always be who she was when that picture was taken. She will be like that forever.

“What did you do today?” Anna asks. “I thought I’d see you this morning, but it’s already afternoon.”

“Dad had a job. At the Boardman mansion. She’s at the back of the book with Mr. Marlowe. He’s explaining everything to her now.”

Anna sighs and shakes her head, leaning against the border of the photograph. “Your father is doing well then?”

Sylvie nods. “He got another e-mail today too. A baby ghost. Guess it’s crying too much for the woman’s husband.”

“I wish he would stop,” says Anna.

“I wish he would too,” says Sylvie.

“I wish he’d never found out what you can do,” says Anna.

“I don’t mind, I guess,” says Sylvie. “I mean, I just wish he would stop. That’s all.”

“Did you do your homework?” her mother asks, trying not to appear too obvious in her switching of the subject. Sylvie nods, then shrugs and says no. “You better do that, honey,” says her mother. “I know it’s hard right now, but you have to keep stud
ying.”

“What good is it anyway?” says Sylvie. “You’re smart. Where did it get you?”

“Don’t say things like that, Sylvie.”

“I’m sorry, Mom,” Sylvie says. “I just wish you were here. I mean, really.”

“So do I,” says Anna. “But you need to be strong, okay? I need you to be my big, strong girl.”

Sylvie nods, even though she is neither big, nor strong. She kisses her mother’s picture before closing the album and pu
tting it aside to do her Algebra homework. She’s fourteen, neither big, nor strong, but she can at least do Algebra for her mother.

While Sylvie does her homework, while she watches a movie about rich warlocks taking over a town their great grandfathers founded long, long ago, while Sylvie showers and walks around with her hair wrapped up in a towel like a beehive, while she puts herself to bed and falls asleep, while she dreams she is trapped in one of those police department rooms where people can see in but you can’t see out, the ghosts in the photograph album gossip, debate, inform the new ghost—the old woman, whose name is Mrs. Clara Boardman, formerly o
f
th
e
Boardmans of Warren, Ohio—about the general condition of her recently transformed existence. Mrs. Boardman is outraged to discover that Sylvie’s father believes he has freed her from ghosthood, that she’s now resting at peace in some place people imagine to be heaven. “Only Sylvie can see and hear us then?” she asks.

The other ghosts murmur or mumble their confirmations, but Mr. Marlowe adds, “Well, the people we were haunting too. They could see and hear us, of course.”

“It’s why the ghost hunter’s business is doing so well,” adds the annoying policeman, who only the crazy mumbler can see is angrily pointing and wagging his finger as he speaks.

The rich woman in the fur coat and hat with the golden pin of the butterfly on the side of it says, “They’re no longer cr
azy once Sylvie sees the ghosts too. When she’s nearby, she makes us visible.”

“Hence the photos,” says Mr. Marlowe.

“Hence this album,” says Sylvie’s mother. “I’m sorry, everyone,” she says. “I’m afraid I’m the one who started all this.”

“Not at all,” says Mr. Marlowe.

“It’s not your fault,” the mumbler says.

“You didn’t make him capture you, or any of us,” says the p
olice officer.

The little girl with pigtails jumping rope smiles across the page from Anna. The dog chasing his tail barks twice. Anna sighs d
espite their effort to buoy her spirits. “I don’t know,” she says. “If I’d never haunted Sylvie, she might never have been able to see the rest of you. That could be enough reason to lay blame.”

“Pish posh,” says the rich woman, tugging at the collar of her fur coat. “Don’t be silly, dear girl. You could never be blamed for this. It’s not as if you’re a magician who’s given away trade s
ecrets. Ghosts have a right to haunt, now don’t we?”

“Well said,” says Mr. Marlowe, and the dog chasing his tail barks once again.

Their voices seep out of the album while the ghost hunter’s beautiful daughter sleeps. All night long she hears their voices without comprehending them; they are like songs teenagers hear in the buds of their turned-down-low iPod earphones while they dream. They make sense to Sylvie while she is sleeping, but in the morning, when she wakes, they fall away from her memory like sand through spread fingers.

At school Sylvie enjoys a sort of fame that she had never felt before her mother died. Since the journalist from th
e
Warren Tribun
e
interviewed her father, everyone knows he can get rid of ghosts. Sylvie had read the article like anyone else ten months ago, in the Sunday edition. At first she’d been confused. Why had her father allowed a reporter to interview him? But quickly she came to understand that it was money. Money was almost always the reason for anything her father did, probably because he had so little of it.

In the article, he is quoted as saying, “After seeing how much it upset my daughter, after all my family and friends told me I was delusional, I decided to buy the equipment ne
cessary to help my wife on her way to the afterlife.”

This is the part of the interview Sylvie hates most. How he lied about her being upset. And the end of the article a
nnouncing that he could do this for others, that it was a service he could provide.