Nothing but Ghosts (12 page)

I
find him staking dahlias against his own little caretaker’s house. His hat off and his shirtsleeves rolled, most of his face in the shadows. He seems younger to me than he has before—less hard edged and maybe more lonesome—and I’m near enough to the stream to hear the water running through, its movement over rocks, so that it isn’t so silent right here where he works.

I shouldn’t be here, I know, by myself, near dark.
If he knew, my dad would not be pleased; Danny either. Danny would say I’ve gone too far, that some risks should not be taken. But I am here to see this thing through, and I don’t feel frightened.

I wait until he sees me. I stand here leaning against an old birch tree, watching him work, watching the gold eyes of a rabbit glow from beneath a holly bush, eyeing all the stuff that’s grown up between his house and the estate—the hedges, the trellis, the passion-flowers laced through the trellis. The dahlias have peaked and their faces are heavy—big, rust-colored accordion-fold faces that are too heavy for their stems. He props each bloom back up by force of a meshy metal cage. He steps back to look at the whole, and then he turns, and that’s when he sees me. His back goes straight as a rod; his shoulders hunch.

“Katie,” he says. That’s all. He pulls the gloves off his hands—the right one, the left—and drops them. He fits a pair of garden shears into the pocket of his
pants. “Forget something?” He just stands there, daring me to explain myself. That gold-eyed rabbit comes flying out from beneath the bush. Scuttles in the air between us, then past me, is gone into the woods.

“I found something,” I tell him, for it seems the best way to start.

“You found what?” He clips his words, uses as few as possible.

“I mean, in the library. In a box. Inside a book.
Great Expectations
.”

He levels me with a long stare. “You always did strike me as the bookish type,” he says. He puts a hand around his chin, which he scratches slowly, as if there’s no real itch. It gets so quiet between the two of us that all I can hear is the stream beyond, the buzz of a bug, a stick breaking somewhere in the woods. Squirrels, I think. Or that rabbit.

“It’s a photograph,” I tell him. “A picture I think you should have.”

He drops his hand. His brow goes crinkly. He doesn’t move or say a word, just stares at me with those flinty eyes. I step toward him, reach into my bag, and retrieve the image. I balance it on my palm, stretch my hand toward him. He still won’t move. He watches my face first, and then my hand, studies my eyes again, finally leans forward. Leans and lifts the photo from my hand and balances it on his own palm. I want him to say something, one thing, but he does not.

“May 1954,” I tell him, because night has started to come on in a hurry and maybe it’s too dark now for him to read the tiny blue words. “The Devon Horse Show. Your mom. She won the blue ribbon.”

He looks from the photograph to me, and back down to the photo, and from a branch somewhere high above, a blackbird screams. I hear the scramble of the rabbit beneath bushes close to the stream, the running around of squirrels, another bird. “Where did you find
this?” he finally demands.

I tell him again. “Inside a book. Inside a box. At the library.”

He turns and stands that way—his back to me, his body in the shadows, his shoulders shifting down, his head bending toward the photo. “It just seemed like you should have it,” I tell him, because he won’t talk and somebody has to. “There are these boxes,” I start again. “Seven of them at the library, and I’ve been sorting through them. I’ve been trying to understand.”

“Understand what?”

“This place. Miss Martine. The dig. Things that disappear. People.”

“Seems more like spying.”

“The boxes are anyone’s to sort through. Local Lore. They just arrived one day—stacked outside near the book-return slot when Ms. McDermott got to work. They needed cataloging, and I volunteered. I mean, I’d started working for Miss Martine, and then there was
that turtle shell, you know, the one that Owen found, and it had that indentation inside, and then my dad, at home, has been working on a painting—he restores paintings, that’s what he does—and it’s an Everlast painting, as it turns out, and I don’t know: I wanted to understand.”

It’s a long speech, and it gets his attention. He turns and faces me, and his eyes are brisk and bright though his face is muted by shadows, and he doesn’t look mad, doesn’t even seem confused. More like he seems relieved. “Miranda Everlast Thomas.” That’s what he says.

“Excuse me?” He has said the name softly. I step closer.

“My mother’s cousin,” he says. “She died a couple months ago. Her son’s been cleaning out her house, readying it for a sale. Or so I’ve heard. We’re not personally in touch, and from what I understand, he was rather estranged from his mom.”

I shake my head, bewildered.

“She was my mother’s best friend, too,” he explains, “besides being her cousin. My mother trusted her, from what I understand. Let her in on some secrets. Miranda Everlast Thomas. Her boxes. Her lore.” He shakes his head, as if some big piece in a puzzle he’s been mulling has been settled into place. He forgets that I am here, seems to.

“So you really are Miss Martine’s son,” I say.

He smiles vaguely. “It seems you had established that.”

“I mean, I was only guessing: from the photographs, the newspaper stories. The storm. Local Lore. Guessing from that.”

He looks at me for a long time, then looks again at the photograph in his hand, which I’m sure he can hardly see by now, not where he’s standing, not at this time of day. The stream sings its song and there’s a rustling in the woods. Some lightning bugs have begun to
put their lamps into the night. “This is the only formal portrait ever taken of my mother and father together,” he says now. “I’ve been looking for it for a long time.” He takes another long look at whatever part of the photo he can still see, then slips it in his pocket.

“The second gazebo?” I ask.

He nods. “I needed help,” he says, “to move this earth around. It’s old earth. It falls hard on itself.”

“We were digging for this all along? A photograph?”

He nods again, shrugs. “My mother passed away last year,” he says. “I wanted this back.”

“Gone?” I step back, feel a shudder rip its way up my spine, think of Ida poking Reny, all the things folks keep to themselves.

“She died, Katie. Her time had come.”

“Died?” I turn and look up at her house—through the trees, toward the mansion, where just that single light is on. I think about my mother’s flowers blooming in the pachysandra patch for a ghost of a woman, an
idea. I think of rescue. “But I thought…” I turn back around to look at Old Olson, but the shadows really are falling fast, and I can’t read his eyes anymore. I wait for him to explain, to fit the pieces together, but he turns now, straightens a dahlia that has fallen lightly against its mesh cage. His gloves remain on the ground, where he tossed them. He keeps his back to me.

“Old Olson?” I say, finally.

“Listen, Katie,” he says. He turns back around, crosses his arms, looks up at the sky, starts speaking. “It’s just the way it is, okay? Just the way it was.” This, I realize, is a story he hasn’t often told. An entire history, long buried. “She had never been well, my mother,” he starts again. “After she lost my father, and I was born. My first memories are of her being far away, of me, running down that hill”—he gestures—“tossing pebbles in the stream, hunting for fish, finding an owl. My mother near, but distant. They sent me to school after a while—her mother and her father, I mean. I’d come home for the summers, for Christmas, but mostly
I grew up in other places. Grew up loving this place, most of all. Grew up missing her.”

“So you came back?”

“At one point, her father died, her mother was gone, and what was I going to do, really? Who could care for this place? She wasn’t even forty, but she was frail. I was through with college. So yes, Katie. I came home. I stayed. She loved it here, despite everything, and when she wanted to leave, I took her. She wore scarves, big sunglasses, hats. No one was much looking for her anymore. Nobody noticed.” His words are quiet. He doesn’t move. A slight breeze moves through my hair. “Cancer,” he says.

Cancer. A word we both understand.

“I thought she was still here,” I say. “Up there.” I point to the house, to the light on the hill. “I thought…”

“You thought what I wanted anyone who wondered to think. What everyone needed to think, if I was to stay here and still honor my mother’s secret.
It was easier to let people imagine her alive. Easier to pass as her gardener than a son. We had lawyers who helped.” He smiles. “The privilege of money.”

Way above Old Olson’s head, the first pale star has come out. Something quick and small moves through the air above—a couple of bats, maybe—and the dry, hot air of the day is starting to feel perforated with something sweeter. There are a million images in my head, a thousand questions.

“How did you know the portrait existed in the first place?” I ask him.

“At the very end she spoke of it. Said she’d had it hidden. I thought she meant that it had been locked in that trunk. I guess she meant that she had given it to Miranda. They’d had a falling-out after I was born. They weren’t on speaking terms, long as I knew my mother.”

“Then Miranda passed on.”

“Then her son cleaned out her house.”

“Then the boxes just looked like Local Lore,” I say. “Like nobody special’s story.”

“I guess that’s right.” He touches the outline of the photo in his pocket. He settles his hip and bends his knee, like a man leaning up against a fence.

“What
is
in the trunk?” I ask.

“Everything she would have left with,” he says, not bothering to make the mystery a mystery anymore, “had she had the freedom to leave.”

“Where was she going?”

“To Virginia, with my father.” He leaves it at that for a moment, lets the story hang, then continues. “They were planning to elope the night he died, and so she’d packed her trunk. There was a storm. She didn’t care. She hired a taxi to take her to the train, but the taxi couldn’t get far—rain everywhere, floods, splinters of trees on the ground, and the taxi stalled. My father boarded the train without her. Her father went to find her. Three days later, she learned my father was dead. When her father understood that she was carrying me, that she had planned to escape with a
horseman, to elope, he buried her trunk in the ground. He didn’t want a soul to find it, didn’t want a trace of it anywhere. She was sixteen. Four months later I was born, and she didn’t leave this place after that. It was said she’d gone to Europe. A lot of things, really, were said.”

I nod, tip my chin to the sky, wipe a tear from my cheek. More stars have begun to appear and brighten.
Hello, Mom,
I think.
Hello, Miss Martine.
“So what is next?” I ask. “For you?”

“I’m leaving, Katie. Hurts too much to see the old place empty. Have lost my strength for it.”

“And Ida and Reny, and Yvonne and Peter…?”

“They’ll stay with the new folks, if they want. Go off, if they want. They’ll be able to choose; it’ll be part of the terms.”

I bite my lip. “That’s nice of you,” I say.

“They’re family, Katie. That’s what you do.”

I nod again, and through the descending darkness I
see him smile. “I want to show you something, Katie,” he says. He begins walking and I follow—down the path, under the trellis, toward the bridge where Danny and I stood in the dark and kissed. Seems like a long time ago. I stay three steps behind him, fitting my boots into his boot prints. Just short of the stream he stops and pulls back the branches of a big tree, and because it’s all so shadowy out here right now, he takes my hand and lifts it up, against the bark, where I find the hard head of a nail.

“Turtle shell,” he says.

I shake my head, don’t understand.

“They’d rendezvous here by the tree,” he says. “My mother and my father. The shell was their sign.”

“So they hung it there? On a nail on a tree?”

“A story my mother loved to tell,” he says. And then, out of nowhere, he laughs. An owl hoots back as if to answer, and now Old Olson laughs again.

D
ad’s at work in the kitchen when I get home. “Good day at Miss Martine’s?” he calls out, and I just say, “Hey.” I don’t know where I can start, and every inch of me is aching. Later tonight, I’ll tell Dad the whole story, and after that I’ll call Danny, and after that I’ll sleep. The only thing I want right now is a long and steaming shower.

“Katie?” he says when I’m half up the stairs.

“Yeah?”

“Might as well get something decent on.”

“What?”

“A dress or something. I don’t know. I’m preparing one of my all-time specials.”

“Dad,” I say, “why don’t we just have eggs, or toast? We could have cereal.”

“No way,” he says. “Not a single chance. I think I’m onto something.”

I turn, and I’m sure the surprise is in my face. Coincidence, or a joke of his? Just his way of being Jimmy? “Onto something in the kitchen, or onto something with the painting?”

“Now what would be the fun of me telling you when you’re all sourpussed like that?”

If I argued, or begged, my body would hurt even more. I give him an “okay” shrug and continue heading up the stairs and to my room and then down the hall, passing the room where the things that were my mother’s were and, at least for now, still are. I turn
the shower water to extra hot. I lose myself inside the steam.

By the time I make it back downstairs, I realize something’s actually up. The living room is half as messy, for one thing, and the kitchen is basically scrubbed. Cooked in, but scrubbed. The extra leaf has been fitted into the table and a linen tablecloth thrown on, and on one end is the bud vase and on the other is a water pitcher stuffed full with black-eyed Susans. Dad’s got one of Mom’s aprons on, but he’s also wearing a regular shirt with the sleeves rolled up an equal distance on his arms.

“Dad,” I ask, “what’s going on?”

“Well, don’t you look lovely?” He tips his head in my direction when he turns to see me. “Your mother loved you in that dress, I remember.”

“She bought it for me,” I tell him. I spin, and the yellow skirt kicks out a circle.

“You look like a pinwheel.”

I glance past him toward the sink, the counters, the top of the oven. He’s grilled asparagus and sprinkled it with cheese. He’s tossed blueberries and raspberries in with a salad. He’s filled an oval plate with crackers and cheese. “You look like you’ve been cheffing all day,” I tell him.

“Wait,” he says, “until you see what I’ve got in the oven.”

“What’s going on?”

“We’re having a party.”

“We are?”

“Yes, and if you would be so kind as to set the table? Six settings, Katie, with the linen napkins.”

I don’t budge. “Dad. Seriously. What’s going on?” I can’t see how he’s got a surprise when I’m the one who has solved the mystery, stumbled onto all the answers.

“We’re having a party, like I said.”

“Any particular reason?” I’m still standing, not
moving an inch. Dad lets out the longest, most theatrical sigh. He starts collecting the plates, the forks, the knives, the napkins, and presenting these.

“End-of-summer celebration.”

I open my hands, take on the stack of table things, still don’t budge. “It’s not the end of summer, Dad.”

“Oh, Katie,” he says, “do you always have to be so right? Just go with this for a while.”

“Six places, Dad?” I start laying things out.

“Well, will you look?” he says. “Here comes our first guest already.”

I follow Dad’s gaze, out the kitchen window, see Sammy Mack and Mrs. Mack, walking up like two civilized people. The kid’s dressed just like a normal person—a pair of khakis, a dark blue tee, his light-up sneakers. He’s holding his mother’s hand. They knock, then let themselves in. Sammy breaks free from his mother’s hold and runs toward my dad, giving him a friendly smack against the thigh.

“Awfully nice of you, Jimmy,” Mrs. Mack says to my dad, then, to Sammy, “Your very best behavior now—remember what we talked about.” Sammy pumps his head in his best imitation of agreeing.

“Thank you for bringing him over,” Dad says. “We’ll get him safely home later on.” Mrs. Mack smiles at my dad, gives a stern look to her son. She waves at me like I’m a second thought, like she didn’t actually see me until now.

“You remember my daughter, Katie,” Dad says.

“Of course,” she says, waving hello and good-bye.

“What’s for dinner, Jimmy?” Sammy asks.

“Chicken,” Dad says. “And spaghetti squash. It tastes just like spaghetti.”

“Does it taste like pizza?”

“We could pretend.”

Sammy sets off on a triumphal march, all around the kitchen, pumping his little fists, nodding his head, making his shoes light up like fireworks.

“Is it Sammy’s birthday?” I ask my father.

“Not that I know of. Is it, Sammy?”

Humming to himself now, Sammy is off in his own world. I finish setting the table—forks on linen napkins, plates in their places, water glasses, knives. When I turn, I find Dad’s next guest has slipped in so quietly that I hadn’t even heard her. I’m too flabbergasted to say hello. Have you ever seen one of those cool Gap models in the pages of
Vanity Fair
? That’s who she looks like—all funky but sweet, with the coolest, tallest pair of cranberry-colored shoes. “Ms. McDermott,” I say, feeling my face turn red hot. “Dad didn’t tell me you were coming—”

“She’s tough to surprise,” Dad interrupts. “I do my best.” Even Sammy’s stopped to give the librarian the once-all-over.

“Hello again,” he says.

Again?

“Dad?” I start, but now there’s another knocking
at the door, and I give Dad my are-you-crazy? look.

“Our final guest,” Dad says.

I set off through the kitchen, practically skid into the door. When I yank it open, Danny’s staring at me, a purple dahlia in his hand. “Are you kidding me?” I ask. I don’t step aside to let him through. I just keep staring at him.

“Would I do that?”

“What?” I already forgot my question.

“Kid you?”

“What are you doing here?” I ask, and he’s still outside and I’m still inside, and I have a million things to tell him, more than a million, and again there’s this problem—I don’t know where to start—and finally I remember to make some room.

“I was invited.” He steps toward me. He stands there, slipping the purple dahlia into my hand.

“By my dad?” It’s a perfect dahlia. I know precisely where he got it.

“By Ms. McDermott, actually. Who received the invitation by way of your dad and decided to include me. Cool house, by the way. Way big. Like a mini Miss Martine mansion.”

“I’m so confused.”

“Is this the famous Danny Santopolo?” It’s my dad now, come out from the kitchen, wiping his hands dry on my mother’s flowered apron. All of a sudden I realize something: My father got his hair cut. He hardly looks mad scientist tonight.

“Good to meet you, Dr. D’Amore.”

“Hope you like spaghetti squash.”

“Never had it.”

“You’ve got to have spaghetti squash before you go to college,” Dad tells him, clapping a hand on Danny’s shoulder and leading him into the kitchen, leaving me to walk behind the two of them. “One of life’s most pressing rules.”

“Good to know,” Danny says. He waves to me from
behind his back. I catch his fingers briefly in mine. Looking past the two of them, I can see Sammy still on his march and Ms. McDermott slicing the bread as if she’s always worked in our kitchen. The chicken’s out of the oven. The meal is practically served. Dad stands at Mom’s place so that no one will sit there. I choose the chair next to Danny. We’re seated.

“Will you do us the honor?” Dad asks Sammy, who has plopped down next to him.

“Blessings on our blossoms,” Sammy shouts.

“Amen,” Dad says.

“Amen,” we echo.

“There’s enough of everything for everyone,” Dad says, scooping things onto people’s plates, passing dishes.

“You’re quite the cook,” Ms. McDermott tells him, and looking around the table now, I see that what she says is true. Dad has become a master chef. He’d win top prize on any reality TV cooking show.

“I’ve decided that cooking is just another way of painting,” Dad says, and I think;
Oh, Mom, I hope that you heard that. I hope you can see us all here right now, that you’re sitting with us, at this table.
I feel Danny’s hand reaching for mine. I squeeze his fingers tight.

“My dad don’t ever cook,” Sammy announces, and Danny laughs, and now Sammy shouts, “Pizza time,” digging into the squash. Dad asks for the bread, then he asks for the butter. Ms. McDermott takes another helping of salad. Danny says, “Wait till I tell Owen,” and I say, “Don’t,” and Sammy says, “Who’s Owen?” By now Dad is getting around to his point, is clearing his throat, saying, “We have all been at work on the mysterious case of Miss Martine. Today, I understand, there’s been a breakthrough.”

I stare at Dad, completely baffled. I stare at Sammy, who has started to fidget. I look at Danny, remember this morning, him talking on the bridge with Old Olson, him going off into the thick of the trees. Danny,
I think—maybe Danny beat me to knowing, but now I realize, looking around the table again, that the person I should be watching is Ms. McDermott. There’s a blush of high red in her cheeks, an expression on her face that I have never seen before. “I just happened to mention to your dad,” she says, “that I bumped into you in the library today. That you’d had yourself a breakthrough.”

“You told him that?”

“I did.”

“But when?”

“When he called me to verify something about the painting.”

“Which I’d shared with Ms. McDermott the night she came to drop off the photo of Miss Martine,” Dad adds now. “The painting, I mean. I’d given her a tour.”

“There’s a painting?” Danny asks.

“I was planning to tell you,” I say.

“And a photograph?”

“It’s just that’s all come together only now.” I feel my cheeks go hot.

“But you were going to tell me?” Danny asks.

“I was. I can tell you now.”

“What’s going on?” Sammy shouts, impatiently, a funny look on his superhero face.

“I found a portrait,” I say. “In box number seven. A portrait that tells the whole story. Or sort of most of it. The rest I got from Old Olson.”

Ms. McDermott gives me a beautiful smile. My dad settles back into his chair. “Go on.” I feel Danny’s hand beneath the table, his fingers cool and gentle, forgiving, and now I learn forward and draw a deep breath, put the story in its place.

“Turns out that Miss Martine had a cousin,” I begin. “But she was more than a cousin, really, I guess. More like Miss Martine’s best friend. And some of the things that mattered most to Miss Martine were
entrusted, for safekeeping, to the cousin.”

“But what’s the story?” Sammy shouts. He has crisscross marks on his forehead from paying so much attention.

“The story, Sammy, happened in September, right about this time of year, fifty-something years ago, which is thirteen of your lifetimes.”

Sammy looks at me and smiles. Danny squeezes my hand. I continue. “In that night in that year, a big storm blew in from Florida, then rammed itself up the East Coast, then stayed. Streams got to be rivers, and rivers overflowed, and boats floated off and parked beside houses and the roofs of houses blew down, and a train that Miss Martine had been planning to take got thrown right off its tracks.”

“You can’t throw a train off its tracks,” Sammy says.

“We use the word
derailed
, Sammy.” I look from Sammy to Dad and back again. Then I look at Ms.
McDermott. Her eyes are full behind her glasses, eager, I realize, for the story.

“So where was she going?” Danny asks. “When the storm got in her way?”

“She was going to marry a man she loved. She was eloping.”

“Who?” Dad asks.

“A horseman,” I say. “By the name of Olson Long.” I turn to Danny. “He was her trainer. Their love was a secret.”

“Okay,” he says. “Keep going.”

“When they decided to elope, she packed her trunk, she snuck away, but the storm had set in,” I continue. And now all of a sudden, as I am telling this story, I am right there with Miss Martine, right there in that night, in that storm, with a trunk packed full of everything a society queen would need to live with the man she loved, the father of her child. And the rains come down and they won’t stop coming, and the winds
blow and they won’t stop blowing, and somewhere in the city, the man boards a train, and somewhere in the suburbs a taxi stalls, and sometime later that night that train will jump its tracks. It was John Butler Everlast who hurried out into the storm to find his daughter. Just him driving the washed-over roads, not his chauffeur. Just him beside the swollen river, desperate to save his daughter, first, and then, in his own way, to protect her. He took her home and buried her trunk full of things, and then he kept the secret of her baby. He brought her home, and that is where she stayed. Brokenhearted. Broken. Her son tending to her world.

Ms. McDermott shakes her head; the whole table’s quiet. Even Sammy, down there, is quiet. “She never escaped,” I say, “and she never really lived either. Her heart was broken. She was so young.”

“So that’s the story,” Danny says after a moment of silence. “The way Old Olson tells it.”

“And then there’s the story,” Dad says, “as Everlast
tells it. In his painting. He had to paint it right onto a canvas. His own disappointment, his deep regrets. Amazing, Katie. Amazing. The story. The way you found it.”

“I just don’t get why she had to vanish altogether,” I say, thinking of Miss Martine in that house on the hill. “Why she had to lock herself away from the world. Why she didn’t just step back into life, after a while.”

“There’s no way of knowing, Katie,” Ms. McDermott says.

The before and the after,
I think. The color of caution.

“The brutal politics of regret,” Dad says.

“The politics of shame,” Ms. McDermott says, shaking her head.

But I still can’t see it. I still can’t understand that kind of disappearance, one that you choose for yourself, like you’re dead, but you’re actually not, like
you’re a ghost, but you’re still flesh and bones, like you want to live but cannot. Gone until the past got dug back up again.