My Ghosts (32 page)

We talked and we
shared things as if we were all in the same place, but Iz knew that Douglas had a thick wad of traveller’s cheques and the place Hans and Robert stayed was almost a hotel, served them breakfast at a table with a patterned cloth. It didn’t really matter and most things were cheap enough, a twist of souvlaki from the fierce man in the grubby apron, plastic sandals from the dusty shop and the lined notebooks Iz bought to fill with all she was thinking about. When she and Clare made their list for the Bare Minimum Café they decided it had to have a lending library, and Iz said that some time before, on a boat or a train, a girl had given her a fat paperback, so many pages the cover could barely contain them. “You can imagine how excited I was,” she said, and Clare could, the two books she herself had packed long finished and traded for a warm green sweatshirt.

The girl who gave Iz the book
said that someone had passed
it on to her in a youth hostel in Germany, saying, “I couldn’t finish it, you’re welcome to it.” A story about models in New York or Los Angeles, and uppers and downers, parties and schemes and betrayals, all kinds of shallow thoughts. Desperate as she was, Iz said she couldn’t finish it either, left it in a dark room in Venice for someone else to pick up. Clare said she’d thought it was a rule, said she’d never left a book unfinished, no matter how much she didn’t like it, but Iz said, “Not this one. Not even you.” And they imagined that book moving around from place to place, hand to hand, the back-stabbing models living out their crazy, drama-filled lives, their story not completely known by anyone. Maybe for years, even decades, the pages more worn and damaged, the book split into smaller sections and the people who came across them having to make up their own stories about what came before and after.

Sometimes they did it
themselves, that way they talked with their thoughts bumping into each other and bouncing off, ending up in some crazy place. “This is the story of Celeste,” Clare said, “this is what happened. It was terrible, she got leprosy somehow,” and Iz said, “No, that’s not it. She was in a fire and left terribly scarred, but it made her a better person. And what about Auburn?” “She bumped her head,” Clare said, “and had amnesia, so she didn’t know any better when she ran into a creepy older guy who said that he’d make her a star. But she must get her memory back.” “Of course she does,” Iz said. “She bumps her head again when Jade trips her on the catwalk, and remembers everything about the life she was meant to be living. And she goes back to her kind, patient husband and lives happily ever after, because someone has to, don’t you think?”

Clare’s father
had left her some money, a note that said,
See everything
, so she tried to. She started out in Spain with two friends from school, more friends of each other than of hers, but she was used to that. On the ferry from Brindisi the friends met two boys from Calgary and she settled her pack on her back, shifted her shoulders and walked off in a different direction. She met Iz in the clinic on Dedalou Street where people went to sell their blood, neither of them really that broke but who could pass up cash for something that could be replaced so easily. They started talking and just kept on, blew half their payment on a meal in a real restaurant, an arbour stretched over them covered with vines, with tiny, flickering lights.

Iz said she’d been working
as an au pair in Basel, with the sweetest children, who cried when she left. She hitched south with a boy named Michel who could always make her laugh, taught her the French words for body parts and emotions, miming fear and sorrow and joy. He was gone when she came back from the market in Thessaloníki, a wilting flower on her rolled-out sleeping bag and a note that said,
Sorry but I must to leve
, and she said she felt so foolish, not realizing it was the same old story.

Making her slow way
down to Athens, Iz kept thinking she’d see him, that they’d meet in each town she passed through because he was on his way back to her, wearing his exaggerated expression of regret. When that didn’t happen she found herself remembering the chewing sounds he made when he ate and the ugly nylon shirt he often wore, the one that made him look like someone else. Although mostly she still thought of the way his hair fell softly back, after he’d shaken it out of his eyes. The way his jeans and wide leather belt sat on his bony hips. Halfway through the second bottle of Demestica
they decided, Clare and Iz, to take the first boat out in the morning, and when they met at the ticket office they felt like sisters or long-lost friends, easy together, but with so much to catch up on.

Iz and Clare
didn’t look anything alike but there were so many coincidences, and they made up a story and talked as if they really believed it. A feud or a curse long ago and a family divided, splitting off to the east and the west. They both carried things in their right pockets as charms, Iz a tiny teacup and Clare an old, flattened nickel, and the same names popped up going back in their families and really, how likely was that? But Robert said that names went with different times after all, like styles of clothing, ways of thinking, and it meant nothing. There were stories about fires in Jen’s family too, and in Carly’s, and did that mean they were all related? Jackson said he had a twin brother, but they’d been separated at birth and adopted in different states; he hadn’t mentioned it before because it made him sad.

Douglas said anyway
it was just a distraction, trying to make connections that way—we should all be trying to move forward, instead of wandering around in the past. But Carly was certain that they’d lived before, maybe in the same family or at least the same town. Or maybe they were really the same person, what about that, arrived here from completely different times. She was never bothered when people laughed, just said, in her calm, breathy voice, that if a man could actually walk on the moon surely anything was possible.

She finds the tiny library just past the cenotaph, at the end of the short main street. Finds the atlas she wants to check, and then a history of the town that she carries over to the only long table. She’s not much interested in the pioneer section, though she knows she should be. Their hard journeys and all that hewing, that chopping. All the clearing they had to do before they could begin to build something modest and new. But after the sketches of the first shack and the first tavern there are early photographs of buildings she’s walked past. Two churches and the courthouse and the boarded-up station, some of the grand houses on the bluff. There’s a picture of that retirement home when it was first built as a hotel—a
completely modern
hotel, according to the caption. Empty doorways and windows and several workmen posing for the camera, holding up paintbrushes and hammers. Behind them one has turned his back and perhaps he’s actually working, bent over a little, his suspenders a dark X against his shirt.

The book is surprisingly thick and she skips most of the text. Turns past newspaper headlines about shipwrecks and wars, all the pictures of soldiers as they march away, and then back home again. There are other parades, and sports teams and church picnics, a circus tent. Clearly Bonnie was right about the winters; there are snowbanks that reach the tops of hydro poles, and the lake is a tumble of ice. The last pages are filled with all the town councils, looking much the same until the seventies arrive. Sudden long wedges of sideburns and wide patterned ties, silly moustaches; she knows she’s probably walked past some of them too.

There are two girls at the other end of the table, maybe doing their homework, their heads bent and their smooth hair glowing in the sleepy light. The sound of their laptop keys reminds her
of something, and she tries to work out just what it is. Thinks of long fingernails, impatient on a Formica table, strips of plastic in a doorway, clattering in a sudden breeze. Neither is quite right and then she wonders why she makes it complicated, why she tries to connect that noise to something that’s already known. She thinks of other sounds that you recognize without even realizing, the ping of a microwave, or the beep when a truck backs up, the grating whir before a CD starts to play.
The past is another country
—is that how it goes? She thinks about how every sound in the world was once new, a train whistle slicing through the night or the tick of a clock, the crackle of the very first fire. What it would have been like for those shapes huddled around it, feeling suddenly safer, and warm.

She knows she could turn that into a good essay topic, something to do with new sounds, with learning and associations.
The past is another country: discuss
. But of course she doesn’t do that anymore. The right choice to hand in her keys, to roll the poster of Lorenz and his rubber boots, and sweep up the paint chips it had pulled from the wall. The last time she stood in a lecture hall she kept losing her place, distracted by the same sound of tapping, and by things she was keeping at bay. It didn’t matter; except for those few in the front, she knew no one was listening, and she thought of tossing her neat notes in the air, thought of sending them all away.

She’s certain that she didn’t really do that. She hopes not; it wouldn’t have been fair. Not their fault that they stay the same age while she just gets older; not their fault that they don’t yet know all that they don’t know. And she thinks of another time she walked a long beach, holding a small child by the hand. She remembers the silvery light, the pause they walked through between rain showers and how quiet it was, only the
sound of the waves as they washed up, leaving their wet loops on the sand. “We can’t go far,” she said, or something like that, and just then the child pointed and said, “Look!” A duck up ahead, followed by the skittering, matchstick legs of the ducklings that trailed along after. As they watched, the duck took to the water, struggling to get over the breakers but then swimming calmly while the ducklings tried so hard to follow. Bowled over and tossed back on the shore in a wet tumble, again and again, and she couldn’t hear it, over the water, but she imagined their peeping and wailing. Thought, Yes, it’s difficult for her. But look how impossible for them.

Iz had a grandmother
who lived with them when she was growing up, one who rocked in a chair and told stories. She said she knew that made her sound like one type of grandmother but it wasn’t like that, and all of her stories were terrifying. Filled with ghosts and demons and punishments, and people singled out for tests and torment that they didn’t deserve, but couldn’t escape. She said she still had nightmares about the horse that lunged out of the water and snatched up children, left their parents weeping on the pebbled shore.

Once her grandmother told Iz
that she might be a changeling baby, because of her strange ears that stuck out, and when she went crying to her mother she said it was only teasing, such a big fuss she was making over nothing. Iz still had faint scars from the operation to pin those ears flat; she said she’d become obsessed and her parents thought it would make her life easier and for a while it did, and she felt transformed. Her brothers found other things to tease her about, but nothing they came
up with bothered her as much, and they got on better anyway as they all got older, united against their youngest sister who was a tattletale with big blue eyes and screamed the place down if she didn’t get her way. Such a noisy house she grew up in, filled with tantrums and the sound of her brothers’ heavy feet as they thundered through.