My Ghosts (26 page)

The camera Clare had then was a cheap one, and all the photos are a little hazy. Not out of focus, exactly, but not sharp and clear either. The colours muted, the blue skies nothing
special; even Jackson’s bright red shirt is a washed-out maroon. It’s as if the years have spread them with a softening glaze, and the thought reminds her of the old people she interviewed for her thesis, all the stories they liked to tell about dances and picnics and loving, loyal animals. Many of them had trouble with her questions about what day it was, what year or which prime minister, but could describe every detail of their first dance. The dress their mother had made, right down to the colour and shape of the buttons, the fancy stitching around the neckline. The way the school was transformed, streamers and sweet punch in a bowl, and the smell of all that pomade and flowery talcum powder. The whorl of hair beside the small mole on the neck of the boy who was dancing with someone else.

She learned though that if she let her tape recorder run long enough they would talk their way back through the skating parties and hijinks, past the ponies with bright ribbons braided in their manes. Back to what happened with that boy with the mole, to betrayals, large and small. Back to deaths and unjust punishments and pain that was just as sharp as when it was fresh and unexpected, pain they had felt and pain they had caused. She saw it so clearly then, how sometimes the smallest-seeming hurt can have an enormous effect. Can still tip you right over, even if the weapon is long gone, like the dagger of ice in that guessing game she tried to remember for Lizzie. The game she used to play with her fellow travellers on docks and beaches, and in peeling rooms filled with the sound of rain.

On the phone, when there was still a phone, Lizzie asked about the packing and Clare told her that she’d become an archaeologist after all, that she had scraped off all the top layers and was getting down to the evidence of earlier civilizations. “I even
found the key to your Peter Rabbit bank,” she said. “The one we had to break. It was in the toe of one of your baby shoes. You must have hidden it there, I don’t see how else.”

“Maybe,” Lizzie said. “I sort of remember that.”

And Clare told her about the fine white dust that covered the tops of the boxes on the high closet shelf, said, “How long ago was it, when your dad tried to drywall the bathroom? You probably weren’t even old enough to remember.”

“What was in the boxes?” Lizzie said, and Clare said, “Old stuff, just more old stuff. But that dust, I can’t believe it. It must take years to settle.”

Lizzie offered to come for the last day, said she’d skip the audition, she probably wouldn’t get a callback anyway, but Clare said, “Don’t you dare.” She said, “I’m playing that CD you gave me, can you hear it?” and Lizzie said, “It’s that ‘Time’ song, isn’t it? I didn’t think you had that many clocks.” It was ridiculous, the way Clare had cried when she got out the old record and found it so badly warped. She tried anyway, hooking up the turntable, but the needle bucked and skipped, spitting random smacks of sound. The CD Lizzie bought the next day had been digitally remastered, had a slightly different cover, but it was close enough.

Clare kept the Peter Rabbit key, dropping it into a pouch with a jumble of single earrings. It will be in one of the
Misc
. boxes, maybe the one with Lizzie’s small handprints on a sheet of faded construction paper and the tissue-wrapped ivory hair combs. The one with her father’s fake glasses and a sea-stained leather bracelet, a picture of an octopus draped over a hanging line. What would someone make of that assortment, if they opened the box, like a time capsule, in a hundred years?
As baffling as the things in the small wooden chest she came across when her mother was moving. Underneath the tax receipts and documents were more of those train-flattened coins and a sheet of paper with sunset times from some long-ago year. A rusted penknife and a few ticket stubs, and a small photograph of a man holding a laughing baby on his knee. “Your father’s things,” Clare’s mother had said. “They’re no earthly use to me.”

It was like that after he was gone, as if the way he died erased everything else about him. His things bundled up so quickly, her mother’s hangers spread out in the closet, as if there’d never been an empty space. “He made fools of us,” she said once, her lips a sharp line in her face.

Lately he’s been popping up in Clare’s mind, but only in bits and pieces. When it happens she thinks of random synapses firing, flashes like lightning that are all that are left from the pathways she should have tended better. The straight part in his hair and his kind eyes, his strong arms lifting her up at the circus. The scent of his aftershave when she buried her face in his neck, frightened by the trumpeting elephants. When she tries to remember more she usually thinks of him in his office, the easy way he talked to people, the little jokes he made, and the way they thanked him. She remembers spinning in a black chair, and watching how lightly he settled glasses on a small boy’s face. How he adjusted the arm and the nosepiece and then settled them again, said, “Oh that’s very good.”

She has one clear memory of her father and mother together, an unlikely one, and that has always convinced her that it’s real. She’s not very old and she’s digging in the sand with a red shovel, making a house, she thinks, for the seagulls who strut along, tipping their heads and staring with their
blank, black eyes. There’s laughter and she looks up through the dazzle of sunlight, sees her parents waist-deep in the lake. They are windmilling their arms and splashing each other, and the water hangs between them in arcs, in separate, glittering sparks that are suspended before they fall.

In the same box with the handprints and the woven bracelet there’s also an old address book with what’s left of a wild paisley cover. On the first few pages there are random contacts, doctors and dentists and Lizzie’s old piano teacher, friends and colleagues. But the rest are filled with older names, some written with a stub of pencil, faded to grey smudges, many with the green felt pen Clare used to carry in a special pocket in her backpack. There are entries decorated with peace signs and flowers, with drawings of trains and tiny houses, smoke curling from chimneys. On one of the inside covers there’s an ink sketch of figures diving from a decrepit, sinking boat, although that never actually happened.

She had a brief thought, the day she came across it, of writing to all those people she hadn’t thought of for years. Like a message from the future; she would buy postcards, and she pictured them dropping through mail slots all over the world. No picking and choosing, that would be the rule; she would send a card to every one. Even the soldier who gave them a ride from Malaga, a wild guitar tune sweeping them along the coast road. Even that crazy Scot they met, when they were stranded in Lyon, and the girl who had cried in the youth hostel in Geneva. But as she turned the pages, counting how many cards she would need, the flare of the idea fizzled out. So many of the entries were completely mysterious, even the addresses giving no clue, and she thought of all the places she’d written her own
green name. Thought of how many people would pick up her postcard, turn it over and shrug. How many would say, as she was saying,
I wonder who that was
.

John gave her a new book, the one she still uses, their first Christmas in this house. She remembers the tall tree with its coloured lights, can imagine it in the corner of the room where she now sits. Thick snow falling past the bare windows and the rolled rug spread out, soft and new and covered with scrunches of red and green paper from Lizzie’s frantic tearing. There was a gritty feeling behind her eyes, “Jingle Bells” playing on the tape deck, and she remembers thinking how silly it was, the time and care spent on wrapping, tucking the corners in just so. She remembers too the stab of anger when she opened John’s flat box, the way she assumed it was not a gift but a demand, his way of making her draw a line through her life and set aside all that happened before they met.

It was unfair, of course, and even at the time she knew it was unlikely he was sending her a hidden message. John was the most straightforward person she’d ever met, genuinely baffled by any kind of subterfuge, by people who said one thing but meant another; in those days, if she was sure of anything, it was that. Probably he had been looking for a number and noticed how little space was left in her old book, noticed the tears and ripples, the coffee stain that had seeped through the alphabet. Probably he thought she’d be pleased that he
had
noticed, that he’d chosen a new one with a sturdy leather cover. When they first met they walked down city streets with their fingers enlaced, and while Lizzie was being born she squeezed his hand so tightly that she left small bruises, left crescent-shaped gouges on his palm. And it happened so
slowly that maybe neither of them noticed how much that grip had loosened.

That’s not anything she wants to be thinking about, though, and she wipes her face and says, “Too much time alone,” in her briskest voice. It’s what Lizzie is always telling her and she knows it’s true, but she wonders why solitary thoughts always lead you to a dark and lonely place. Wonders if there’s anyone who spends their time remembering jokes they’ve heard or slapstick movies, chuckling in an empty room.

Before she gave away the television Clare used it, along with a few glasses of wine, to help her sleep. Once she forgot to press the mute button before she drifted off and woke to a woman’s scream, but usually it was just to the comfort of the flickering light. And the moaning and creaking of the house, sounds that have become more sudden and mysterious as it slowly empties and make her think of that crazy play Lizzie was in once. The tiny theatre dark except for one tall candle at the edge of the low stage, and nothing but sound to tell you what was going on. Ticking clocks and a tinny bell, a motorboat, or maybe it was a chainsaw. Bird calls, a crying baby, smacks that might have been a fist fight, and every so often a different voice intoning:
The white lilacs. Flame. Sorrow
.

It was a very long play; beside her John slumped into sleep, while she fought with her bobbing head. Jerked upright at a sudden snort that might have been her own, or might even have been part of the play. Could that be it? she wondered in the dark. Were they all supposed to be characters? “Oh honey,” was all she could think to say afterwards, hugging Lizzie who had been revealed at the end in a black cape, two clownish red circles on her cheeks.

Sometimes now Clare did a parallel thing when she opened her eyes in the dark and tried to work out what was unfolding on the silent television screen. It wasn’t so difficult, the same few stories playing themselves out in different times, with different actors. “Don’t go into the basement,” she said to the woman whose hand was closing on the doorknob. “Don’t believe a word he says,” when a slick-haired man appeared with a sheaf of black and white roses. Once there was a news bulletin flashing, a shot of a huge airplane tilting into a ravine, flames from the cockpit and the tiny windows, jets of water and revolving lights. But as she watched she realized that this time it was a different story. This time, through some combination of luck and skill, everyone had made it out alive. Cut and bruised and rumpled, but euphoric, filling up her screen in vibrant colour.

If it had gone the usual way, she thought, there would have been small, blurred photographs in the newspaper, flat words on a page, and she realized that she was seeing the dead, watching them move their mouths, touch their cheeks, brush the hair from their eyes. That tanned teenaged girl, the tall man with his tie askew, the mother holding her baby. So many, more than a hundred of them, who would be able to go on, who would live out the rest of their lives; no need for her to imagine anything at all.

In the kitchen now Clare’s hand slips as she pours from the kettle, and boiling water splashes. As she heads for the sink she stubs her toe on a box of books and hops and curses, reminded of needles in the doctor’s office, the way her mother would pinch Clare’s other arm just as the shot went in. She had been a nurse, Clare’s mother, and though she gave it up when she married, it always showed in the brisk way she tucked the sheet
corners tight, or shook out the thermometer when Clare asked to stay home from school. She liked to say that she had no time for sentiment, and she would have snorted at Clare’s sorting and packing, the time she spent on each decision. When she had moved from her own house to the apartment she tossed all kinds of things into garbage bins with a gleeful flick of her wrist.

What’s done is done
; Clare’s mother never saw the point of what she called rubbishing around in the past, and though over the years she told Lizzie more than Clare had ever heard about her life she still rarely mentioned the rock-strewn farm she came from, the brothers and sisters she never cared to see again. In movies and novels everyone knows that a gruff exterior always hides a soft core, but even now, when she wants to be kinder, Clare suspects that life is different. Thinks there may really be times when what the hard shell surrounds is a stony heart.

She’s thought all along that this business of moving house is something like arranging a funeral. The red notes on the calendar, all these practicalities to focus on and the small, constant decisions to be made. She’s been following those red steps like a sleepwalker, blank-eyed yet resolute, and sometimes she imagines them leading her on, off the page. At her retirement party there were the usual speeches, and jokes about students, and comments about how her door was always open, except when it was closed. They gave her a wheeled suitcase topped with a shiny gold bow, so someone had been listening when she said she might go to Scotland, to Ireland, might prowl through misty graveyards, looking for her roots. A better answer than “I really don’t know,” and an acceptable one these days, when everyone seems to be looking for connections.

People have given her books and she’s read them, knows what every expert says about making drastic changes too soon. It’s written down like a rule, but turn the page and you’ll read that everyone has to make their own way through grief. And anyway, rules are made to be broken, as Lizzie still likes to say. John used to call that her mantra, and it was the title of her first project in film school; Clare remembers her explaining it, at the now-sold kitchen table. Something technical to do with
persistence of vision
, the way the eye sees what it expects to and fills in gaps. She remembers how excited Lizzie was that day, her hands dancing and stabbing at the air. She remembers thinking of all the moments that had brought them to that one, and she remembers thinking of a game they used to play. Not really a game, but a thing they used to do when Lizzie was small, and they walked the gravelled path through the park. Holding hands in their short line with Lizzie in front trying to pull them along, and they didn’t resist but they didn’t make it too easy. “That’s the physics instinct,” John said, as Lizzie bent her little body forward and tugged harder. Their feet suddenly shifting and beginning to move, the three of them stumbling on together.