Spirit (22 page)

‘She was standing in my father's bedroom. I don't know how she got there. I just looked up and there she was. She talked to me. I could hear her, as clearly as I can hear you. She said she was going to protect me. Then she collapsed. Well, not really collapsed, but folded up,
shrivelled
up, and disappeared. Right in front of my eyes, I swear it.'

Lenny eyed her for a long time, and then he said, ‘You ever hear of reefers?'

‘Of course I've heard of reefers. But I've certainly never smoked one, if that's what you're trying to suggest.'

‘Okay, I'm sorry. I'm finding this hard to get to grips with, that's all. Tell me all about this girl.'

‘There's nothing much to tell. She appeared, and talked to me, and then she tried to touch father. That's when I got angry, and I tried to grab her arms, but she folded up right in front of me, while I was holding her wrists. In the end, all I was left with was a flower, made out of frost, which melted.'

Lenny was staring at her as if she had just said something in a foreign language. ‘You were left with a flower, made of frost?'

Elizabeth, embarrassed, slammed down the album. ‘You saw those pictures for yourself. She appears, and then she vanishes, no warning, nothing! I saw her again on Oak Street, after I came around to your house! She was standing on the oak stump, as real as anything except that she didn't have a face. Hair, but no face, as if-1 don't know, as if her whole head was made of glass.'

‘No face, nothing at all?'

‘Nothing. I was scared to death.'

‘And that was today?'

‘When do you think? That was this afternoon, when I was walking home from seeing you. I saw her, Lenny, she was real.
Solid enough to touch! But she kind of blew away, like sheets of paper, like pages torn out of a book.'

‘She was real enough to touch and yet she blew away?'

Elizabeth was infuriated. ‘You don't believe me, do you? You think that I've lost my mind, like my mother! You think it's a trick, or a joke, or some kind legpull! Well, if that's what you think it is, Lenny, look into my eyes, because I'm crying for my sisters and I'm crying for my parents and most of all I'm crying for me, and if this is a legpull it isn't a very funny one, is it?'

Lenny quickly seized her hands and said, ‘Whoa, come on, Lizzie, don't get so steamed up! I'm sorry, I believe what you're telling me. I really do. Come on, I saw it for myself, I saw the photographs, except that was I sure that I must have been dreaming, or having some kind of an optical illusion. I mean that doesn't happen, right? People appearing in photographs and then they're gone. That doesn't happen.'

Elizabeth picked up the album and held it tight against her breasts. ‘This time, it
has
happened. This time, it's real.'

Lenny swallowed. Then, almost reverently, he said, ‘I've seen men dying. I've seen the shadow of death pass over their faces. I've seen men talking and laughing when they were shot to pieces and should of been dead, and I've seen men sitting on the ground dead without a single mark on them, as if they just decided to stop being alive. But I never saw anything like this before, and I don't know what to think of it, so what I'm doing is, I'm trying as hard as I can to believe that it isn't true, and that I was tired, and my brain was just kidding me along, or maybe you were.'

‘It's real,' said Elizabeth. Then, much more quietly, but no less emphatically. ‘It's real.'

‘Then what do we do? Laugh it off? Call for a priest, or what? What the hell do you do when something like this happens?'

‘I suppose we have to try to work out what it means.'

Lenny frowned, and raked back his hair with his fingers. ‘You really think it means something?'

‘It must do. I think it's Peggy. In fact, I'm sure of it.'

‘Peggy? Your little kid sister? The one who drowned?'

Elizabeth nodded. ‘I know it doesn't look much like her, but it
feels
so much like her. I don't know how, and I don't know why, but she won't go away. It's almost as if she's looking after us, because she made us so unhappy when she died.'

Lenny took out a pack of Luckies, and offered one to Elizabeth. On some of those Pacific islands, you know, they believe that you can go into this hypnotic trance, and talk to your dead relatives. These witch-doctor types even advertise their services on billboards. Come on in and chew the fat with your dead Uncle Frank, or whoever.'

He lit her cigarette, and then his own, and blew out smoke. ‘That's in the Solomons, though – Choiseul and Bougainville. You don't expect to talk to your dead relatives in Sherman, Connecticut.'

Elizabeth said, ‘I'm worried about her. I'm worried that she's trapped in some sort of terrible betwixt-and-between – you know, not quite living and not quite dead. Souls are supposed to let go, aren't they. They're not supposed to haunt you. I read somewhere that ghosts are the souls of people who can't let go, people who can't quite die, because they've left something unfinished here on earth.'

Lenny sat back. ‘What did your sister leave unfinished?'

‘Her life, of course.'

‘But nothing specific?'

‘Not that I can think of.'

Elizabeth turned to him. The firelight was dancing in his eyes, and he looked as sensitive and handsome as she remembered him, from all those years back, when he was all packed up to join the army. ‘You believe me, don't you?' she said.

‘Sure I believe you. Why would you make up something like that? Besides, I saw the photograph album.'

‘Shall we look at it again?' asked Elizabeth.

‘Unh-hunh,' said Lenny, quickly shaking his head. He laid his hand on top of the album cover so that she wouldn't open it. ‘I don't think we need to, do you? Either she's there, or she's not there. If she's there we'll go crazy; if she's not there, we'll start to doubt what we really saw – what we
know
we saw.'

He paused, and smoked, and then he said, ‘One day on Guadalcanal I was sitting outside my tent eating my midday meal when one of my best buddies came and sat down next to me. I swear this is true. Ray Thompson, his name was, tall sad guy from St Louis, Missouri.

‘I didn't look at him too closely. On Guadalcanal there were so many flies that you concentrated one hundred per cent on what you were eating. We all developed this kind of flick-bite way of eating, twitching our spoons to shake the flies off, and then quickly swallowing it before they could settle again. That was a stinking place, Guadalcanal, let me tell you. There were spiders as big as your fist and wasps as long as your finger, and tree-leeches, and centipedes that left a rash when they walked over your skin. Most of us caught malaria or dengue, and we all had dysentery.'

‘I don't know how you could bear it.'

‘I'll tell you how we could bear it, we didn't have the choice. You want some more wine?'

She passed over her glass. ‘You were telling me about your friend.'

‘That's right. Ray and me sat together and talked about home and girls and this and that. I noticed that Ray wasn't eating but I guessed that he'd eaten already, because General Vandegrift was always complaining that we were too damned thin. Mind you, who wouldn't be, with malaria and dysentery? For no reason at all, Ray says, “When you get back, tell Carole
that I've left the money under the driver's seat.” I turned around to ask him what he meant, and he was gone. I didn't know where he went. I was pretty sick by then, I could have been hallucinating. But I never saw Ray again; and about two days later somebody told me that he was dead. Not only that, they'd found him in a clump of kunai grass a quarter of a mile away from the camp, about an hour before he came to talk to me. An hour
before
. He talked to me, I swear it, but he was dead.'

‘Then it does happen,' said Elizabeth, feeling awed.

‘I think so. Something lives after you. I don't know what, or for how long, or why. But I believe it does. I still see men who died on Guadalcanal. I see them driving in automobiles. I see them in supermarkets. No man leaves his loved ones, and the life that he worked so hard for, just because he's dead.'

‘What about the money?'

‘The money under the car seat? I don't know. I wrote to his wife and told her but she never wrote back. Kind of an unsatisfactory ending, huh?'

At first, Elizabeth found Lenny's talk about his dead friend to be convincing and sympathetic. But after he had finished another glass of wine, and started to tell her that everybody lives after death, and that all of his Marine buddies could still be found, if only he knew where to look for them, she began to think that there was something wrong with him, something irrational. She knew for sure that she had seen Peggy, but how could Lenny believe that all of his dead friends were still walking around. Over 1300 Americans had died on Guadalcanal. Surely they hadn't all returned home, dead, to pick up their lives where they left off?

‘If somebody wants something bad enough,' Lenny declared. ‘Then, death alone isn't enough to stop him having it, believe me.'

 

 

Elizabeth went down to the cellar and brought up another bottle of wine.

‘Were you really that struck on me?' Lenny asked her, as he poured it out.

Elizabeth laughed. ‘You were the love of my life.'

‘Maybe I should have paid more attention to you.'

‘You were going to war. You were a man. Why should you have paid any attention to a gawky thirteen-year-old girl?'

He sat back and lit another cigarette. ‘You weren't gawky. You were cute. I always remember you as cute.'

‘I
felt
gawky.'

‘Well, you've certainly changed now. I hardly recognized you when I met you at the station.'

‘Thank you,' she said, and found herself blushing. She still found it difficult to accept compliments without colouring up.

‘Can I ask you something personal?' said Lenny. ‘Do you have a steady beau?'

‘I have plenty of men friends, if that's what you mean.'

‘No, no, I'm talking about somebody steady. The kind of guy who takes you home to meet his parents, and who starts discussing children, and where you're going to send them to college.'

She smiled at him and shook her head. ‘No, nobody like that. Not now, anyway. After Haldeman Jones, I dated a writer called Kenwood Priest for a while, and Kenwood kept talking about buying a house in the Finger Lakes region and living the life of a recluse, just the lakes and the trees and the whippoorwills, but that wasn't for me. I spent my whole
childhood in Sherman. I want traffic, and people, and police sirens.'

‘Kenwood Priest, what did he write?'

‘Oh, some thin, sensitive book called
The Lost Young Men
. I'll always remember the last line. “For there is no going forward for us, and no going back, and we must stand on the shoreline of our growing-up, with the seagulls keening overhead, until the surf comes in and overwhelms us at last.” '

‘Hmm,' said Lenny, swallowing wine. ‘Sounds kind of mushy to me.'

They paused in silence for a moment, with the fire crackling and the wind blowing hollow in the chimney, and then they both looked at each other and burst out laughing. It was probably the wine, or tiredness, or the extreme strangeness of what had appeared in the photo album. But they laughed until the tears ran down their cheeks.

‘Oh God, stop,' begged Elizabeth. ‘My sides hurt.'

But Lenny went on hooting and gasping and clutching himself, until Elizabeth seized hold of his wrists and shook him and said, ‘Stop it, Lenny!
Stop it
! You're giving me a stomach ache!'

He stopped laughing and looked up at her. She let go of his wrists, but he lifted his hand and touched her hair, soft and fine and shiny in the firelight.

He didn't say a word, but he lifted his face and kissed her, first on the cheek, then on the lips. Their tongues touched, and spoke in silence more words than either of them had said since they had first met each other again. Both of them kept their eyes open, and looked deep and unfocused into each other's eyes, their lashes still wet and sparkling from laughing.

They kissed, and kissed again. Lenny held Elizabeth tight in his arms, his fingers running slowly down her back. Even through his jacket she could feel how lean and wiry he was. All those months in the Pacific had taken the flesh off him, and he
had never put it back on again, even after five years of civilian life. He stroked her hair, he stroked her shoulders. His hand slid around the side of her sweater and cupped her breast.

She pulled away. ‘Please – I don't think I'm ready for that yet.'

Lenny smiled, and shrugged. ‘That's okay by me. Just following my natural urges.'

‘You don't mind?'

He leaned forward and kissed her again. Of course I don't mind. It's quite enough excitement for one evening, finding out that the girl I always used to like has grown up into the most attractive woman I ever met.'

Elizabeth blushed again. ‘Flatterer.'

‘That's not flattery.' He touched her cheek with his fingertips. ‘You really are one of the most beautiful women I ever saw.'

‘Only one of them?'

He grinned, and gave her one more kiss. ‘Listen,' he said, ‘I have to be going. I'm taking mom to Hartford tomorrow, and I want to make an early start.'

‘It's been good to see you,' said Elizabeth, squeezing his hand.

‘How about dinner Saturday night? You'll still be here?'

‘I'd love it.'

She found Lenny's coat and he shrugged it on. He stood in the draughty hallway holding her close, holding her right inside his coat, like warm wings wrapped around her. Until she stood so close to him she hadn't realized how tall he was. He smelled of tobacco and musky cologne.