Nothing but Ghosts

by Beth Kephart

  The kitchen window goes from dusk to black. We finish, I clear the plates away, I scour and soap and wipe the counters down. “Good night, honey,” Dad says, and he pushes back and walks away, goes down the long hall with the old things, and turns on the TV. It is three hours at least before Letterman. The kitchen is good and clean. I go out the back door and sit on the stoop, take a very good look at the moon. It has been hanging close all summer long. Tonight it is wide, and full with its craters and jags, and there is this halo that swirls around and keeps on going.

  The moon throbs. There’s only cricket song and nervous birds and Sammy Mack in the house across the street, screaming bloody murder at whoever is giving him a bath. Later I’ll see him through the window, jumping from bed to bed in his room. Sammy needs a trampoline. And he needs a whole truckload of patience besides.

  Do you ever wonder what a soul is made of? If it’s moon dust or moonlight? “Mom?” I say, as if she can hear me. “Mom, you there? Anywhere?”

  Chapter Four

  The next day the finch is at it again, earlier this time, even louder. I prop myself up on both elbows and shake the bangs out of my face. The thing is bright as a canary with a hooded face, a lovely little devil, as my mother would have said. “You win,” I tell it, but now it’s hammering again, stopping only to cock its head before it revs back up. My room is a minty green except the window wall, which my mother painted white when I was born, and the windows are the old-fashioned kind with real, splintered-up mullions. Attacking one single, specific pane, the finch goes at it. Always the same pane, always the same exact spot, as if it is on its own excavation.

  Beyond the finch is the top of the old maple tree. Beyond the tree is the sky and the sun. It’s still the cranberry-ginger part of dawn. Not even Dad’s coffee is on. What if the glass breaks and the bird flies in? What if the whole upstairs shatters and crumbles? I imagine the finch making a nest inside my lamp shade—dropping its feathers into my shoes, over my bedspread, over my pillow, over me. I imagine everything giving way to the finch. Suddenly I’m thinking about Miss Martine, who makes her desires known through good Old Olson. “Miss Martine has requested a lavender border,” he’ll report. “Miss Martine wants the narcissi deadheaded.” “Miss Martine wants the black-eyed Susans thinned and a branch of Korean dogwood for the centerpiece of her table.”

  Once I looked her up in the local public library. She was as stunning as Ida sometimes says—the only-child heiress on every bachelor’s arm who never did get married. She was born April 8, 1938, which makes her sixty-nine years old, and it has been fifty-three years since she’s last been seen in town, last thrown a party on her lawn, or been seen with any guy—rich or old or ugly. She’s had her own kind of vanishing, and when I ask Ida why, or even Reny, they say the story goes that she stopped her socializing after a whopper of a storm blew straight through town. “Storm like a bowling ball,” Reny says. “Tore the roof off a bunch of houses. Set a barn on fire. Ripped a train right off its tracks. Things died. People got frightened. That’s what they say anyway, because I wasn’t here; I was miles from here, doing my growing in the Blue Hills.” Old Olson has known Miss Martine all his adult life. That is why, the rumor goes, he is trusted with her wishes.

  Dad is up now; I can hear the coffee huffing. I tell the finch to go and knock itself out. I grab my stuff and go down the hall to the shower, past the door that my father keeps shut. My mother’s things are in there—her clothes, her jewelry, her boxes of shoes, her collection of tinted glass bottles. She had lined up the bottles on every inch of windowsill, so that the room would never repeat itself—would be the color of whatever bottles the sun struck, whatever ways the reflections mixed on the walls and on the ceiling. “It’s like being inside a giant kaleidoscope,” she said. And the thought of that made her happy.

  In the end, after the doctors said that there was nothing they could do, after my father had begged for a better answer, after I hated every living thing for living past my mother, the kaleidoscope was all my mother did—she watched the room change as the sun moved toward and then beyond her. There’d be spots of lilac and tangerine and moss green on the ceiling up above. There’d be shades of ruby in the creases of her pillow.

  “You’re so beautiful, Claire,” my dad would tell her. But mostly he would sit there, saying nothing. The chair where he sat is still there, empty. The colors collide, but no one’s watching.

  Chapter Five

  The dust has settled, but now there are bugs—a little blue-black cloud of them that, no matter what, won’t swat away. I’ve tried my hand, I’ve tried my shovel, I have even tossed a rock, and Ida says, “Did you think that gardens were somehow bug-free?” and Owen says, “I don’t think they’re biting.” Old Olson says that bugs are why we kids are paid more than the minimum wage, and shrugs and walks away.

  They’re too small to be mosquitoes, and they’re definitely not flies, and even if they don’t bite I hate the buzz-saw sound of them. After a while, Danny sighs and says, “Girl,” then he reaches into his backpack and hauls out a Boston U cap. “Keep it,” he says, plunking it onto my head. “I’ve got an extra at home.” He pulls the bill down to my nose. He makes a little fan wave in front of my face, smiles his glossy white smile. Maybe it helps some, but I pretend it helps a lot and skulk back over to my edge of the hole. Everyone’s been given a different side to dig. Reny’s stuck with the part that has the fattest roots.

  Yesterday evening Old Olson chalked the site, and this morning I picked out a shovel from his old golf cart and started wedging in. Where the wall had been, the earth was still moist; there were snail shells and grub backs and a knot of string and all the bacteria and fungi that I knew from school had to be there, but that I couldn’t see. I could go maybe four inches in, and then the earth got different—hard and stubborn, like it was protecting something, and now every shovelful is a gigantic effort, and it hurts. I am the Girl, and I am the youngest, but no way am I the only one who is having a tough time, because even Danny’s face is showing strain as he grips the shovel harder and puts more weight against the blade. The earth, four inches in, doesn’t want to budge, at least not across the stream at Miss Martine’s, and now Reny is complaining—swiping the sweat off his high brow and saying, “A gazebo? Really, Old Olson? Is this your idea of a joke?” Ida has big wet marks all over her white T-shirt. Owen has stopped for a bottle of Gatorade. I get a flash of my dad back home in the cool of his garage. I’d give anything to be there, giving him grief.

  “Pickaxe would come in handy,” Old Olson says after a while.

  “Didn’t fit in your cart?” Reny asks him.

  “Left it up at the top of the hill, against the back side of the main house. Was using it yesterday for a project.”

  “A knock-the-door-down project?” Ida asks Old Olson, and I don’t know, I genuinely don’t, why he puts up with her in the first place.

  “I’ll get it,” I volunteer, before anyone else can.

  “Get what?” Owen asks, because I guess he’s been orbiting outer space somewhere with his Gatorade.

  “The pickaxe.”

  “I can get it after lunch,” says Old Olson.

  “No, really,” I say. “It isn’t any problem,” because truly it isn’t, it’s a blessing—I can go around and over and back down and come back to a hole that’s more deeply dug. I can even outrun the bugs, or try. And at the end of it all, I’ll have been helpful.

  “Go on, then,” Old Olson says. “Quick as you can.”

  “See Girl run,” Owen says. I tug at Danny’s cap, and I’m off.

  I go the long way around because the slope’s less steep, and because there’s more shade that way. Walking Miss Martine’s estate is like traveling around from country to country. She’s got beds of red flowers, only red. She’s got groves of apple trees, and apples only. She’s got a pretty pebble garden that Yvonne weeds every morning, and everything that isn’t pebbles is either orange or pink. You can move from one countr
y to the other, though some countries are divided by stone walls like the stone wall we just moved; Reny claims that walls like these kept the herds of Ayrshire cows from straying.

  High on the hill Amy’s thick, dark hair tumbles out of her straw hat as she bends in next to Peter, who snips away at the bottom branches of some tree. Yvonne is higher still, alone, taking care of the gladioli and the dahlias. On the opposite side of the hilltop is Miss Martine’s house—the same stone as the Ayrshire walls, a million tiny windows, a wide, three-sided porch, a big gray door that is the color of the massive slated roof. Where there are no shutters, there are curtains, and the curtains are always closed. There are pots of sweet Williams on the wooden railing of the porch. If you were just driving by, you wouldn’t guess that anything was strange.

  But the house smells ancient like the earth, damp like the day after a storm. There is silence; nothing moves; there are no cats sleeping in the shady parts and no dogs getting snippy. Miss Martine’s is quiet as the stones down in the stream, quiet as the robin’s nest that Danny found the other day, which had been lived in, then abandoned.

  I don’t dare knock, and I don’t dare stand there staring. I hurry around to the back, to where the porch finally stops, and the pickaxe is there in a thin ray of sunlight, leaning against the house just as Old Olson had promised. I reach for it, and it is wood handled, heavy. I bend a little in the knees, and as I pull it up toward me, I stagger back, stepping—I don’t mean to—into a bed of pachysandra. I hear the snap of green things at my feet, the crunch of leaves that had more living in them, and suddenly I am certain I’ve been seen. I look up, and nothing moves. Only in the far right corner window of the second story does a white curtain dance in the breeze. Behind that curtain a shadow moves. Or nothing moves: I can’t be certain.

  “Sorry,” I say, not nearly loud enough, about the pachysandra. “Didn’t mean to.” Cradling the pickaxe, I step out of the patch and away. I take cautious, even-if-she’s-watching-I-won’t-look-nervous steps. I turn the corner of the house and start to run. When I reach the crest of the hill, I’m sprinting—wondering if Miss Martine ever saw me in the first place, if she’s up there right now watching, standing in a new window, following me with her eyes. I try to get a picture of her in my head, fix her—old and stooped, or tiny and light, her hair in a braid in a coil around her head, or her hair cropped close and neat. Who is she? I wonder. What has time done to her? But every time I’ve asked Ida to describe her, she won’t; every time I’ve asked Reny, he grunts. I only have, in my head, an image of Miss Martine young, old-newspaper young—small boned, fit, dark haired, alluring, but not what my mom would have called delicate. Mom was always making distinctions like that. Find the fine line, she would say, and understand all that it separates. The fine line at Miss Martine’s is between the living and the dead or dying, between all that is growing and all that has stopped behind the walls of the heiress’s house. I am glad for Danny’s cap and the shadow that it lays across my face. I am glad for the hill that falls down hard and fast.

  “Long time coming,” Ida says when she sees me making the leap across the stream, which isn’t, by the way, an easy thing to do with a pickaxe in your arms. From the looks of things they haven’t gotten too far; the hole is much like it was.

  “We thought you’d absconded,” Reny says, pulling a long finger down one of the lines in his face.

  “Hey,” I say. “I’ve traveled miles.”

  “Give me that thing,” Danny says, and I hand it over, gladly. He fits his hands around it like he’s testing out a baseball bat. He digs his feet in and takes one impressive swing. The earth beneath the blade breaks up. There’s a minicloud of dust. “Not bad,” he says, and now Owen wants to take a turn, and there’s another blast of dust. “This’ll work,” he says to nobody, and the two of them go at it now, two brothers with an axe. There are buckets in the back of Old Olson’s cart. I get enough for the rest of us, so that we can haul the first layer of dirt away.

  “Keep it up,” Old Olson says when he’s satisfied that we’ve got ourselves a system.

  “Looking forward to the champagne,” says Reny.

  Chapter Six

  Dad’s got himself a new painting. It arrived today in a U-Haul truck, courtesy of some local museum that itself got the painting courtesy of some anonymous donor. He says that it came all mummy wrapped, not as tall as me, but more than twice as wide as I am tall. It’s so messed up, he says, that you can only see dark shadows of things—figments, he calls them, that suggest a world.

  “What kind of a world?” I ask, waiting for him to finish his lemoned asparagus, which he eats with his fingers as if each stalk were a carrot stick.

  “A metropolis,” he says, raising his eyebrows and wiping his hand across his apron lap before reaching for a roll.

  “Which metropolis?”

  He’s sprinkled capers on the veal, like olive-colored salt pills.

  “None that I’ve ever seen.” He slaps half a stick of butter on his warmed-up bread, which is something he and Mom would have fought about, except that they hardly ever fought. “At least I’ll die happy,” he’d say if she wrinkled her nose, but he’ll never say that again, because happiness, we know this absolutely now, is not what dying is about.

  “So this is it now? This painting? Your next big thing?”

  “Biggest canvas I’ve ever worked on.” He smiles. “A veritable mystery. It arrived at the museum wrapped in shower curtains. Polka-dotted shower curtains that had a crust of mildew.”

  “Weird,” I say.

  “Which reminds me,” he says. “How is our Miss Martine?”

  “Same as always.”

  “Another figment, wouldn’t you agree?”

  I nod and shrug at the same time. “I was up around her house today.”

  “Did you knock?”

  “No way. You kidding?”

  “I knocked once.”

  “You did?”

  “Your mom sent me out with a basket of fruit. She’d heard it was Miss Martine’s birthday.”

  “When was this?” I ask, and I’m about to say, And why did you never tell me?

  “Your mother was pregnant with you at the time. She’d been talking to somebody who knew somebody who knew about Miss Martine’s big day. She said that if nobody else was going to throw the heiress a party, she at least could send her some fruit.”

  “Except that she sent you.”

  “She did. That’s true. Because she was pregnant and I insisted.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Nothing happened. No one opened the door.”

  “Not even Old Olson?”

  “Not even.”

  “That’s strange.”

  “Figments,” he says. “I’m telling you.” He puts the last of the butter on his little shelf of roll, then wipes the leftover juices from his plate. He chews away and swallows down, then unties his apron. “I should go on one of those reality TV cooking shows,” he says.

  “Right.”

  “I should,” he says. “I would be famous.”

  “I thought you already were.”

  “There’s famous, and then there’s famous. I’m thinking of going for the second kind.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got a painting to restore first.”

  “I’ve got a painting,” he says, “to resolve.” He looks at me, and I see the dark beneath his eyes.

  “I’m on cleanup duty,” I say.

  “I’ll trade you cleanup duty for a call you make to Ellen or to Jessie. I’ll give you the car. I’ll lift the curfew.”

  “Hey, but no thanks,” I say.

  “You sure, Katie?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “You’re a good kid, you know. You don’t have to be a perfect one. I’m okay here, on my own.”

  “Will you get out of here?” I tell him, reaching to collect his plate. “You’ll miss your show.” He looks at me with his sad eyes and drinks down the rest of his lemonade. />
  The weird thing about cricket song is how the sound never stops but there’s still space between the beats. On the front stoop I sit and think about this, try to picture the crickets in the grass, the way Mom once explained them to me. She said that crickets think in terms of trills and pulses, that they use their abdomens and their wings to sing, and that cricket singing is a big male thing; the females can’t get a note in. “These guy crickets just sit around all day waiting for their chance to sing,” she said, and I remember that she was brushing my hair, that we were sitting out on the stoop together, both of us in our summer pajamas; I might have been six, maybe seven. On the warmest nights, Mom said, crickets chirp the fastest, and tonight being warm, the songs are high and rapid, the songs are swelling everywhere and from all directions.

  Through the door I hear the sound of the TV, the gusts of buggy laughter that have a rhythm all their own. Across the street I hear Mrs. Mack going after Sammy, begging him to climb down from the flat part of their roof. She uses logic and kindness before she starts promising treats, and then she gets into her desperations, her bleating, as Dad likes to say, and Sammy knows it, Sammy’s king, and now Mrs. Mack is going to have to wait for her kid to get bored with her defeat. It’d be better for us all if Sammy’s dad were home more.

  Then again, Sammy isn’t all bad, because he’s dropped some gifts our way, not that he would know it, or understand the irony. It was because of Sammy that Mom said that we’d all had enough. That we had to get away last summer and not just for some weekend at the shore. I was lying on my bed with a book when she poked her face through my door. “Babe,” she said, “I’ve had an idea. Let’s go find your father.” Her green eyes were full of light, the way they got when she was feeling certain. Her auburn hair was knotted back. Mom always wore skirts, even on nothing days. She had on a pair of rhinestone flip-flops.