My Ghosts (9 page)

She might have tossed the paper in the kindling box and thought no more about it. She might have shown someone, shown Nan; no matter what, they’ve always been braver and better together. Instead she let the idea settle and spread, so proud of herself for recognizing the secret sign. It’s Science, of course it is, as Ben always says, that will make everything better. The next day she walked down Church Street, put her hand to the gleaming door and asked the cost, as if she was someone with every right to be there. The next step, simply, to find the three dollars, which was more than Charlie made in a week, but less than Ben did, and not an impossible sum. She thought of looking for some work she could do, but how could she explain it? And how to keep the money for herself, without saying why?

Kez tosses her head in the dark, and wonders how she didn’t even feel the weave of the new spell settling around her, the evil that she did, telling herself that the others would understand if they knew, all the while being so careful that they wouldn’t. How could she not have heard the gurgling laugh of whatever creature was watching, so delighted to see her plotting, the pathetic excuses she made to herself. Telling herself that if she made sure to eat less, no one else would really suffer for the money she took from the housekeeping
jar. “Maybe you’re losing your mind,” she told Nan, who was puzzled when she tipped it out to count. “Soon you’ll be drooling in a chair like old Peach, but don’t worry, Moon, I’ll wipe your chin for you.”

She kept the coins in a little cloth purse Clare had made when she was learning to sew, adding one or two at a time, and the sound they made when she hefted it was the music of her transformed life. She thought briefly of raiding the box under Charlie’s bed for something to pawn, telling herself that none of it was well-gotten, that he was so careless he wouldn’t even notice; a mercy that she didn’t do it, but that’s the smallest of comforts now. She thinks instead of how she felt this morning, the grand day finally arrived. She slipped out the door, wondering if this was how Ross had felt, how Nan had, walking toward a new life. Thinking already of the welcome she would receive when she came back changed. And somewhere up ahead, a vision of a hazy-faced husband, of children toddling across a gleaming floor. Money enough to spread around, so that everyone would know what a good and kind person she really was.

In the dark she presses her hands to her mouth. The long moan she’s stifled rolls through her body instead, and she doesn’t know how she’ll survive it. She’s always thought that the worst thing is for others to know; that the pinch could be borne, as long as you didn’t let on. All wrong about that too, this is far worse. She’s shamed herself, in some deep and total way. Fooled herself, caught up in a bubble of hope, as if it would float her away, when all it did was leave something too fragile between her and the malevolent world.

There’s no stopping it now, the memory of that warm and quiet room. The crackle of the fire, and the soft scratch of the pen as the doctor made her notes. She looked like the drawing in the newspaper, except for the spectacles and the hair; her eyes, seen straight on, were so gentle. Beside her desk was the magic machine and it looked, with its wires and dials, like something Ben might have rigged up when he was younger.

“So you feel generally unwell,” the doctor had said, and she asked Kez to tell her more; it would help determine the course of the treatment. “Well,” Kez had said, trying to think. She began to answer, and before she knew it her mouth got ahead of her. She heard herself saying all kinds of things about the way she felt the cold, and the sleepless nights, about having to take charge of things and the way her brothers and sisters always teased her because of it but really, how else would anything get done? And how this move, which had started out as such a good and exciting thing, had turned everything upside down. Nothing where she expected it to be, not even her thoughts. She said that the way she felt lately, the way it really felt, was like that game they played as children. When they tied a blindfold over your eyes and spun you around, and you bumped hard into walls, and that sent you bouncing into something else, stumbling over stools and rucks in the carpet, and all you could hear was everyone laughing.

After she’d blotted her eyes she said something about her ears, asked how many treatments it would take before they lay nice and flat. The doctor’s startled blink was like a mesmerist snapping his fingers; in an instant Kez was brutally awake, but with the complete knowledge of the ridiculous, shameful things she’d been saying. The doctor was speaking kindly,
saying something about other benefits, about expectations, but Kez could barely make it out; the chair rocked as she stood up and the doorknob rattled in her hand until she turned it the right way. The next thing she remembers is her pounding feet, out in the snowy street, and a voice called after her, but she didn’t stop.

Things could always be worse
; she tries to imagine that. Worse if she’d told any of them where she was going, worse if she’d said she’d come back with a big surprise. Worse if the new house was somehow next door to the Institute, instead of so many blocks away. Worse, maybe, if there wasn’t a new house, if she had to go on living between these walls that had witnessed it all. And definitely worse if she hadn’t realized her idiocy until after the treatment, when she’d already handed over her sack of coins. She’ll have to sneak them back into the jar, the same way she took them out; maybe working backwards will be something like an undoing. Maybe it would have been worse if she’d landed on her head, not her bottom, when she fell in the icy street. If she’d forgotten who she was and had to live out the rest of her life with people who were strangers to her. Or maybe that would have been better.

Her mother used to say that everything would look better in the morning. Kez opens her eyes to grey light so she must have slept, and slept deeply; Nan is gone, and she hears voices and clattering from the kitchen below. She folds up their sheet and quilt, ready to go, and heads down, wondering how she feels. Not calm exactly, more limp as a wrung-out rag. And relieved, somehow, to find she’s still here, not vanished in a puff of black smoke.

Charlie has been up early, made tea and toasted bread, all of it on the table with a little pot of the currant jam she loves; Nan says she’s been saving it for today. Charlie says, “Miss MacFarlane,” as he pulls out a chair for her, and she understands that he’s apologizing for his slam out the door.

“Thank you, kind sir,” she says as she sits down.

“I thought I’d feel sadder,” Clare says, and Nan says she thought the same. They talk about that and Kez watches them all, her brother and her sisters, their familiar faces and the familiar things they say. She thinks that she’ll find a way to make it up to them, although they’ll never know that’s what it is.

They’ve barely finished packing up their dishes when they hear the cart, the man Charlie knows, with two strong boys to help him. Everything begins to move quickly; their boots thunder up and down the stairs, in and out, and they shout to each other and joke, and one sings a loud song about a maid on the shore. Two trips it will take, they decide; somehow there’s always more than you think. Clare and Charlie go along on the first one, to open the door and to be there if Ben and Edith come in on an earlier train. Kez and Nan sit on two chairs in the kitchen, the table already gone, sharing the last of the tea in the old cracked mug that they’ll pitch out the back door when they’re done. “Here we go, then,” Nan says, and Kez says, “Here we go,” and they sit there, not touching, but it feels like they are, until the men return.

When everything else is loaded Kez persuades Nan to ride with the cart, while she does the final look around. It’s a milder day, and she says she may even walk down. If Nan feels like it, when she’s seen everything unloaded into its proper place, maybe she can walk up, and they’ll meet halfway. “Why not?”
Nan says, and as the cart rolls away she calls, “Take care of yourself,” as if they’ll be apart for years.

It’s so quiet then; it can’t be possible, but Kez thinks this might be the first time, in all her years, that she’s been alone in the house. Empty, it seems a small and shabby place. The bare floors, though swept and washed, are stained and gouged, the walls all crooked and cracked. The ill-fitting doors to the bedrooms creak when she pushes them open, and she thinks of the fairies and their jewelled gowns, that fade to nothing in the light of day.

In their parents’ room, with the big dresser gone, she sees the bare wall where the paper ran out that day they worked together to finish it, as a surprise for their mother. Their father had them sign their names with a thick pencil and there they all are, even Ross, even Clare, though Kez thought they’d done this before she came to them. The new people will no doubt cover their signatures with paint and paper, but that doesn’t matter; she’ll always know they’re there.

When she climbs to the attic, she sees that they’ve left mounds of grit in the corners. The broom is gone, and she thinks briefly of scooping it up in her bare hands, but that would be silly. She feels suddenly like a soldier, come back from a hundred-years war. Like the fiddler who walked out of the fairy mound, and found that everyone he knew was long gone, long dust. The traces they’ve left here are all dirt and damage, and the new family will add its own. As will the one after them, and after that, damage on damage, as long as the house keeps standing. “Oh
fiddle
,” she says aloud, and feels better for it.

She comes out through the door for the last time, and the boy is sitting on the front steps, a few houses down. Looking sideways at her, with his cheek resting on his drawn-up knees. It’s probably been longer than she thinks, and she’ll have to walk quickly to meet Nan. But she stands still for a moment and there’s a sound of things melting, the icicle children all dripping in the afternoon sun. “You’ll come with me?” she says to the boy, and he seems to say that he will.

January

In the long afternoons my daughter wants stories, but she’s too old, she says, for the one about the foolish brothers. For the one about the changeling child, or the maiden in the tower, letting down her long, long hair. The winter sun sets early, staining the cold sky, and her face fades against the pillow as the room grows darker.

It should be a simple thing, telling the real stories she wants to hear. I start to talk and the words come, and carry me along until I find myself on the edge of something I must back away from, skip around. I can tell her about the clearing in the forest, about the cabin and the sound of birds in the clear air. I can tell her about the wood shavings curled in my father’s beard, but not that I saw him blaze like a lightning-struck tree. Flames
from his fingertips, from the top of his head. I can tell her my brothers’ names and their mischief but not the way they were found, burned into each other’s arms.

We have moved Edie’s bed downstairs by the parlour window, although it’s a quiet street and there’s not much to see. Children dawdling on their way to school and later the bustling women, baskets hooked over their arms. Sometimes a scruffy black dog, skittering along with his nose close to the ground. It’s a well-built house and the sounds that reach us are faint, the whisper of a buggy’s wheels or runners, the jingle of harness. When the flames leapt, our old horse kicked down the loose-hinged door my father kept meaning to fix; he ran into the night, sparks flicking from his long, wild tail.

Angus is certain that Edie’s getting better and I’m not saying he’s wrong. Only that I can’t think in those long stages of convalescence or decline. I see him through the window, coming home at the end of the day, know the pause before he turns the handle of the door. The first words we say to each other—was it a bad day, or a better one? How much sleep, fever or not, and what was I able to tempt her to eat. So much like the way we used to greet each other when she was newly born and every detail a marvel.

Before he goes in to her, Angus pumps water to wash his hands, splashes his face and runs his wet hands through his hair. “Well, well,” he says, in a voice full of cheer, and he usually has something in his pocket, a bit of hard candy or a smooth black stone, a page from a book he found lying beneath a bench at the station. Things like the small gifts he brought home years ago, and though she’s just turned fourteen Edie receives them
with that much delight, rubs the smooth stone between her fingers, or reads the mysterious page out loud. When she’s strong enough he props her pillows higher, and she dips her own spoon into the broth. We eat our meal with her, Angus and I at the little table he moves from its place by the wall. Sometimes our knees touch beneath it, the closest we are these days.

Edie still loves to hear about the big telegraph office in the city, about the way her father and I first met. Angus raises his eyebrows when I tell her what a dandy he was, and how full of himself, like the other bonus men, their fingers a blur as they tapped the key. “Oh now,” he says, when I tell her how the girls used to jostle to be the one who carried the message slips to his desk. Again and again she wants to hear about our secret language, about the time he carried Aunt Nan’s shopping basket as the three of us strolled between the butcher and the grocer. His long fingers tapping on the handle:
Meet me tonight. Meet me tonight
.