by Ellen Datlow
“She did that this morning,” my client said. “She does it every day.”
I started with the living room. It had been painted red, which some people believe is a cure for a haunting, though I’ve never found it to be true. I noticed a book open on the coffee table. A book of poems written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had lived less than a mile away.
Give all to love; obey your heart.
My client had been the previous occupant’s friend. After her husband walked out, my client had spent night after night comforting her dear friend, before the truth came out. It was a love letter that gave it away. Kept in his drawer. Some people don’t understand the power of the written word. It surfaces when you least expect it to. As I crossed the room I saw marks on the curtains, like the claw marks of a cat, though none was in residence. I could see the tree from this window, right in the middle of the lawn.
I took the stairs. I’d been told that the runner had been replaced, but there were the previous tenant’s wet footsteps, as if she had just come in from walking in the wet grass. The tub in the upstairs bathroom was full. My client had told me she had to drain it every morning. I went to the bedroom and stood on the threshold. It was very cold here. There was ice on the ceiling and on the walls. My grandmother once told me we are not the only ones who have regrets, whose hands shake, who weep over our mistakes. Ghosts have regrets too. They wish they’d stayed home on the morning of their death, that they hadn’t married the wrong man, that they’d left the ladder in the garage and packed a suitcase instead. They wished they’d said good-bye to love and hello to the bright, brilliant world.
It was quiet inside the bedroom. All of the dresser drawers had been pulled open. I’d been told they refused to stay closed. I had my bag with me, which I set down, then I lay upon the bed. This is the reason I can’t have clients follow me around. To get to the heart of the matter, I have to do things that can seem strange, even inappropriate. I got under the blanket. I could tell that the right side had been her side. My client said her perfume was on the pillow no matter how often the linens were changed. Through the window I could see a wedge of blue sky and the top boughs of the apple tree. That was when I started to cry. I felt overwhelmed by emotion, even though I’m usually very clearheaded. I’d seen it happen to my grandmother a few times. She’d have to sit down, and I’d bring her a drink of cold water. It would take her a while to collect herself, but she finally would.
I went downstairs and informed my client I’d have to tear up her check. I couldn’t help her.
“Then we’re selling the house,” she said. “I don’t care if we take a loss.”
She didn’t bother to see me out and there was no need to say good-bye. We hardly knew each other, after all. I went down the driveway and gazed up at the falling white petals. It was a pretty property, and sooner or later someone would buy it; they’d likely get a good price, not that it would do my ex-client any good. People who think ghosts can’t travel are mistaken. They stay close to whatever or whomever matters most, a place or a person. They can walk for miles, fit in the trunk of your car, fold themselves into a suitcase. I kept that information to myself, however. She’d find out soon enough.
The Loneliness of Not Being Haunted
Bracken MacLeod
1.
The antiques dealer had assured June that the object was an authentic railroad watch—named so because it was accurate enough for railroad time service. But that’s not why she’d wanted it. Mr. Jackson also insisted that the timepiece had been in the possession of the previous owner when he died. Not just owned by him, but beloved and held close at the moment he passed away. “It was his great-grandfather’s watch,” Mr. Jackson told her as he pushed the box across the counter, closer to her. The object had been a dying man’s connection to a personal history. Then, his children took it from his hands and sold it. Its personal worth as dead as its third generation of owner. She bought the watch and hurried home. She unwrapped it at the dinner table and began to admire its detail, turning it over, focusing on the scrollwork around the engraved backplate instead of the liver spots and wrinkles on the backs of her hands. The pocket watch was older than she was, but it existed in a slower state of entropy. The timepiece was already over a hundred years old, and, if cared for, would persist for a hundred more, where she would be “lucky” to see a century pass. It wouldn’t be long after that failed milestone that there would be nothing left of her but bones. And after another hundred years, maybe nothing at all—not even a memory.
Young people think it’s fortunate to live a long life, but June knew differently. Time is not kind to transient beings. It takes breath and weakens bone. And if you’re “lucky,” you’ll live for years with the memory of all your lost loves. Everyone you have ever loved will eventually die. And if you live a long time, their absence will never leave you, like the ghost on a wall where a painting used to hang.
She turned the watch over again and looked at the face. Black lacquer hands stood still in a chevron over a bright white face, ringed by bold numbers. In a smaller circle where the numeral 6 should have been, the second hand stood still, pointing at a hash mark between 40 and 45. She considered winding the device to see it come alive, but decided she didn’t want to observe the hands moving or even hear it tick. Its stillness was better. For it, time remained quietened at a quarter to noon. Or midnight.
And now it was hers. She clasped her hands together over it. It felt nice in her palms. Heavy and cool and solid all the way through—a corporeal thing. A thing with weight. But that was it—only weight, nothing else. At her prime, in her forties, when she felt most alive, most rapacious, and ready to kick down doors, she’d had weight. Height, too. But, that was half a lifetime ago and the years had made her light and frail. Worst of all, though, they’d left her alone.
Throughout her life, she’d had lovers and friends, but age, disease, and misfortune had taken every one. Taken her lover and their daughter on the very same night that had broken her and left her bedridden for months. That had been the start of her decline. She who was once strong, withered in the wake of that loss. She who had loved, was left alone. And eventually her friends, one by one, faded away as well. Some moved, some died, others just disappeared. She’d heard on the radio that the kids call it “ghosting,” when people just gave up on you and vanished.
She had gone on a ghost tour once with a friend. Kat—short for Katherine—stood beside her in the thick, humid afternoon while the guide told them about the spirits haunting the trees at the edge of the plantation property. As he told the story, her friend gasped and stepped back, holding a hand over her mouth. The guide had smiled and said, “Sometimes, she appears to people from behind the trees.” Kat pulled her hand away from her face, mouth agape and asked, “Was she blond?” The man nodded and smiled. The crowd gathered around oohed and aahed. Some looked at her like she was a plant—someone there to sell the story, not actually a tourist. But Kat was a tourist. June felt a stab at her center. Kat didn’t even believe in ghosts. She was the one who wanted to believe; she was the one who needed them. She didn’t see anything but trees, a plantation house, and a group of people all wishing they’d seen what Kat said she had.
Later, over drinks at the rotating bar in the Hotel Monteleone, Kat rationalized her experience as a suggestibility inspired by the heat and morning cocktails, but June knew her friend was still moved. The ghost of a long-dead woman stepped up beside her, smiled and then faded away as if she’d never been there at all. That was how Kat described it, anyway. June hadn’t seen anything but Kat jump back and act shocked. Her friend wasn’t the type to fake it. She was sincere to a fault and didn’t believe in ghosts. Not until that trip, anyway.
Kat was killed in 2001.
June still had Kat’s glasses. The same pair, through which she saw the spirit in the trees, sat on the table in front of her. But at that moment she was focused on the watch.
Though her hands always felt cold, the watch grad
ually warmed between her palms until only its weight assured her it was still there. She wanted to reach into it and find the spirit of the man who’d died with it in his hands. She wanted the connection to it that he’d had and, through it, the connection to him. She wanted his hands to close around hers and hold it with her.
June sighed and spread her palms. It was just an object. Though it would move and tick if she wound it, there was nothing in it that lived. Nothing special. It was just another thing in a lonely place full of silent things.
The distant sound of someone laughing outside drifted up through her window from four flights below, and the neighbor’s footsteps above creaked and thumped as he paced from one end of his apartment to the other and back. A car horn honked and a man yelled and tires screeched abruptly as the driver jammed the gas and a bus stopped, its hydraulics hissing as it “knelt” to release riders and accept more and the city kept on all around her.
She set the watch on the small ritual table, between Kat’s glasses and a rubber ducky that had been in the bathtub with a toddler when she drowned. June lit a tall candle and placed it in the center of the star engraved in the top of the table, next to a wedding ring and a pair of dog tags, and waited. Nothing changed. Her room was a muted mélange of city noise boxing in the stillness of her apartment. After a while, she got up and set about the task of making herself dinner. The aroma of her meal soon overtook the scents of matchstick sulfur and candle wax.
She sat at the dinner table by the window and ate, looking out into the street at the people rushing to get from one place to another. Not one of them looked up at her. They only saw one another, and even then, most of them pretended not to. It was the way you survived in a city. By creating a personal illusion of isolation in a press of forced intimacy.
After dinner, she washed her dish and set it on the drying towel next to the sink. There was no point in wiping it dry and putting it away in the cupboard. She’d have breakfast on the same plate in the morning. And lunch. And then dinner again. One plate. One seat. No waiting.
She turned off the lights and headed for bed. Along the way, she blew out the candle. Nothing had been attracted to it or the watch. Not tonight. She’d try again tomorrow.
2.
The man on the other end of the line stammered as he told June that something had come into the shop she might be . . . interested in. She asked why he was calling instead of Mr. Jackson. “He usually lets me know himself when he has something new.” She glanced at her table. At the things there. The new addition was nice enough, she guessed. Though, the watch would look better in a dome on the mantle than in the middle of the star.
“This item isn’t really his style. But I think it might be yours.”
June wasn’t feeling up for a trip out of the apartment, but the man wouldn’t agree to tell her over the telephone what it was he found. He kept insisting it’d be better if she came in to the shop to see it in person. And it had to be today. Mr. Jackson wasn’t ever coy or insistent like that. When he called, he told her what he’d set aside, according to her standing request, and asked when she would be able to drop by. June tried not to leave anything waiting too long, but there was never any urgency in their transactions. Whenever she could find time to get to his shop was soon enough.
The man on the phone assured her it would be worth her time, saying this wasn’t a thing she was likely to ever find again. Not like the watch or the fountain pen or any of the other things that had made their way onto the table before being replaced by another once-loved object. This was unique, and available today only. She said she’d try to make it in before lunch. He seemed satisfied and said he looked forward to seeing her, though there was something in his voice that seemed off when he said it. Like it was a lie. Mr. Jackson was always very kind to her. Every time she visited his shop he asked how she was doing and made pleasant small talk. More importantly, he seemed to take her odd interest seriously. Not everyone did. She imagined some people talked behind her back. Called her morbid. She didn’t think Mr. Jackson did. If he did, he hid it well.
June collected her things, put on a sun hat, and blew out the candle before stepping into the hall. She could hear her neighbors behind their apartment doors—televisions and children and yapping dogs. But no one peeked out when she pulled her door shut. It clicked too quietly for any of them to hear over their own lives, and when she turned her key, the dead bolt slid into place with a soft scraping like a far away librarian with a finger to her lips. “Shh,” it said to her.
Outside, the morning was hot and humid and June could tell it was only going to get worse. The air had that thick feel like slight smothering. She immediately wanted to go back inside, ride the elevator up home, and spend the rest of the day next to her window air conditioner, listening to records and reading. She’d light a candle. But she wanted to see what it was the man who worked for Mr. Jackson had found.
She took a step away from her building. And then another, until she was at the entrance to the subway, and she’d gone far enough that she might as well keep going.
• • •
The bell above the door tinkled as June pushed through. Mr. Jackson’s employee—she recognized his face, but couldn’t remember his name—looked up from the counter and, instead of smiling like his boss usually did when she walked in, waved her toward the far end of the counter. He lifted the barrier and stepped out from behind it gesturing with a pale hand toward the back of the store. There, he opened the storeroom door and held it, waiting for June to go ahead of him. She hesitated for a moment before stepping through. She’d never been invited into the back and she didn’t know this man. Sure, she’d seen him before, but had never actually spoken to him. And he’d never even nodded at her, let alone spoke. Suddenly, they were doing business. In the back room. There’s nothing to worry about, she assured herself and walked through the doorway.
The storeroom was small and packed tight. There were antique radios and swords and books and even a stuffed owl up on a high shelf looking down at her as if she were a mouse. She marveled at the noisy clutter of objects, ordinary and otherwise, that Mr. Jackson deemed unfit for the front of his shop. She wondered why he’d buy something he didn’t intend to put out. Maybe he had a second shop somewhere else. Maybe he had his own interests, and this was his collection.
The man closed the door, propping it slightly ajar with a cast iron Boston terrier doorstop and walked around to the other side of a round table in the center of the room. “It’s . . . well, it’s not an antique,” he said. “It’s not . . . But then I remembered your particular . . . interest, and I, well, let me show you.”
He turned around and slid a gray, rectangular box out from behind a group of objects concealing it. It was about the size of a toy bed for a baby doll—longer than it was wide or tall. He shoved aside a pile of papers and bric-a-brac cluttered on the table and set the box down. She felt more than a tinge of disappointment at the sight of it; it was plastic and cheap looking. And this was why she dealt directly with Mr. Jackson. She’d suffered the sidewalk heat and the stifling subway humidity for something that came in a beige plastic box. The trip back to her apartment would be doubly exhausting, for the frustration of going home empty-handed. She decided then that she would call back later to have a discussion with Mr. Jackson. She didn’t appreciate being taken advantage of. There were other places to get what she wanted.
“I don’t understand the need for all this cloak and dagger. That doesn’t look like anything I’d be interested in. I’m sorry, but you’ve wasted my time.”
“Trust me.” He opened the lid and removed another, smaller container from inside, the size of the doll that would sleep in that bed. He set the second box in front of the first. This one was wooden with a pair of brass inlay laurels arcing out from the center of the hinged lid. On the front were two tiny matching handles, though there was no drawer or front hinge on the box that she could see. Her breath seemed harder to draw for a second. She wasn’t cer
tain why. The object he removed wasn’t that striking. Still, it took her breath away for a second. A feeling about it. Like something had come with it that she couldn’t see.
The man pushed it toward her with a finger, immediately pulling his hand back after an inch or so. He stepped away from the table rubbing his hands on his pants and nodded, inviting her to step forward and inspect it.
“What is it?” she asked.
“The seller called it a ‘burial cradle.’ ”
“A what?”
“A burial cradle. It’s a casket . . . for a miscarriage,” he whispered. In her day, no one ever said “miscarriage” with volume. It was always whispered along with the words, “affair” and “barren.” He wasn’t from her day, though. This man was young. A third her age at most. Still, he whispered it. Miscarriage. Too terrible to say aloud.
Her forehead wrinkled and she frowned. She opened her mouth, and hesitated a moment, wanting to address him by name. “As morbid as my request might seem to you, I’m not interested in objects that haven’t been—”
He grimaced. “Before you make up your mind, open it.”
That breathless feeling returned. She took a tentative step forward and reached for the box to inspect it more closely. When she lifted it, she felt the contents shift away from her. She gripped it tighter, afraid of dropping it, though the impulse to throw it was almost as strong as the urge to hold it close. “What’s inside?” she asked, fearful of the answer. He didn’t say. He nodded. She opened the box.
Inside was a satiny pink pouch tied with a black ribbon. She reached in with a finger and touched it. Whatever was in the pouch was smooth and hard and curved. Like a cylinder. A bottle, she realized. It was in a jar. She went to untie the bow, but the man coughed loudly and shook his head.
“Are you telling me there’s a—”
He held up a finger before she could say “baby.” He said, “We’re not supposed to have this, you understand. It’s . . . illegal for us to sell something like this.”
