Nothing but Ghosts

by Beth Kephart

  It’s pretty out here. The moon is less than it was last night, and there are thin shreddy clouds floating around in front of stars, leaving blanks in the constellations. The airwaves are busy with crickets and cicadas, and Sammy Mack, bless his monkey heart, is oddly, fabulously quiet. I keep standing here grubby, watching Dad across the drive, until finally I make my way toward him. “Hey” I say, as I open the door. “Disturbing the genius at work?”

  “It’s the strangest thing, Katie,” he says, not moving his nose one inch from the canvas.

  “What is?”

  “Just…I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like what I think is going to be here when I start removing all the dirt.”

  “You said it was a metropolis.”

  “Yes. But nothing of this earth.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m thinking that what we have here is someone’s idea of heaven. I’m thinking it’s a glimpse of the eternal.”

  “Well,” I say.

  We both stand there not talking, just studying the painting, and I honest to goodness don’t know how he can make any guess about it. The thing looks cloudy black to me; it seems ruined.

  “I spent the day taking photographs of it,” he says.

  I nod.

  “Tomorrow I’m going to remove the stretcher. It needs a new lining before I can start cleaning. The original canvas is like sandpaper.”

  “Sounds difficult,” I say.

  “Goes with the territory,” he answers. “I’ll wrap it up, lay it down on Mylar, start to peel—it just takes time.”

  “If you need any help…”

  “That’s okay. You’ve got your own work to do.”

  “I could help you at night,” I offer.

  “Thanks, honey,” he says. “But you work too hard as it is already, and now you’ve taken on research.”

  “Tomorrow I won’t be as late, Dad. I promise.”

  “Let’s meet halfway on this,” he says, “I’ll push dinner back to seven, if I can count on you being on time.”

  “Deal,” I tell him.

  “All right, then,” he says. “Now will you please go take a shower? That T-shirt is starting to reek and that cap doesn’t do you one single ounce of justice.”

  “You’re no peach yourself,” I say. I leave him laughing.

  The house is incredibly dark when I step back inside. I find the switch that lights the staircase and wind past the gallery of photographs—my grandmother, her mother, their border collies, the midnight-colored horse with the diamond of white stuck right in the middle of its forehead. There’s a picture hanging here of my mom in a girly Easter dress, and that’s my favorite photo, because Mom is already wild and not at all what rich girls were meant to be. She wears soft gloves but holds her shoes, and her feet are bare. She’s laughing at something you can’t see, and her hair falls in big, loose curls, tossed by the breeze. When I was younger, I used to carry this photograph all around the house with me. “Tell me a story,” I’d say to Mom, and Dad would say, “Oh, don’t get her started,” though he didn’t mean it, because he loved her stories. He’d stop whatever he was doing just to be there as she told them.

  I hit another switch at the top of the stairs, and that lights the hall, which really looks more like the wing of some big, old inn, where they park room-service carts outside doors. The hardwood floors are scratched from my roller skating days. The wallpaper is from medieval times, or something pretty close. When Mom was alive and I was younger, our hide-and-seek went on for hours. She always won because she knew the places I hadn’t yet discovered.

  In Barcelona, she couldn’t sleep. By day, we would walk from the old city to the new city all the way to this place they call Sagrada Família, which is a church that looks like a painted sand castle that they’ve been building for years but cannot finish, don’t ask me why; even the tour guide couldn’t explain it. We would stand in lines and we would walk through the church, around the construction, up into the towers, over and down, and then we’d walk all the way back to our hotel to rest, stopping at theaters or shops as we walked. She wanted to be by the sea at dusk—by the boats that bobbed on the back of the Mediterranean, and at midnight she wanted tapas, she wanted dancing, she wanted, but I only get it now, life. In the morning she’d be out of the room before Dad and I had awakened, just taking a walk, she would say, or buying oranges on the Rambla, or hunting down some pastries for our breakfast.

  One afternoon I was up in the room reading my summer book for A.P. English when Mom pushed through the door. “You have to see this,” she said, and she led me by the hand down the hall to the elevator and out onto the streets, then toward the square, where these musicians who had gathered before some government hall were banging and playing and calling. They had burned-bottom pots in their hands, big wooden ladles, teakettles, and also real instruments like brass trombones, harmonicas, accordions, and flutes. It was all just noise, not song, and some people were shouting over it, and I asked my mother what was going on, and she said, “I don’t know, and I’m not sure it matters.” She had so much light in her eyes, and what I kept thinking was, So this is Barcelona. So this is my mother loving Europe.

  The sun was hot, but she stayed pale.

  The days were long, but she wanted them longer.

  There were mimes in Barcelona, I remember. They’d paint their faces white and their mouths grossly huge, then stand in the sun and stare at the crowds and not ever break their silence. “Imagine not speaking like that, for hours and hours,” Mom would say. The thought of it making her shudder, but I didn’t understand why.

  “Mom?” I call out, because I hate the silence of this house. “Mom?” Her door is shut and I lean hard against it, and then I walk a couple of doors farther and deliver myself to the shower.

  Chapter Ten

  The next day I get to Miss Martine’s early, but this time I don’t let on that I am here. I stand back instead, watch from the other side of the stream, and wait for Old Olson to show up in his minicart, to rumble on in from the other side. He does after a while, after some of the early-bird bugs have started buzzing—parks his machine under the umbrella of a tree, climbs out, and walks (and I knew he’d do this) directly to the hole, which we pickaxed and shoveled out yesterday until we hit a smooth minus two feet all around. Reny says we might as well be shoveling dry concrete, and yesterday Owen, red and real hot, tossed the axe to one side and pounded the pit with his fists. “You’re looking ridiculous,” Danny leaned in and told him, but it was Ida who snapped him back to his senses. “You’ve got a girl watching, young man,” she said. “And I do not believe you are making an impression.” Owen looked up and Danny offered a hand. Then Owen climbed out on his own. He swiped the dirt from his knees, picked up the axe, and we finished the day without much talking, except for saying, over and over again, that it was much too hot. Through it all Old Olson kept his station by the tree—looking on but not pitching in, which is your choice, I guess, when you’re the boss.

  Now Old Olson squats down and balances himself with one hand. With the free one he starts digging around, raking his fingers through the crumbles of dirt, same kind of action as yesterday’s, until I went and scared him. Whatever he wants he hasn’t yet found, and now he’s raking with the other hand, but again he comes up empty, and he stands, removes his hat, scratches hard at his bright white snow-colored hair. Tall as he is, with his white hair shining, I suddenly wonder why he works at an estate at all, why he keeps himself hidden beneath a hat. Mom would have said that he has a quality to him. Something stand-outish, when he’s not in disguise.

  Hearing something, I turn, take my eyes off Old Olson, see Ida and Reny cresting over the top of the hill. She moves like a wall with legs, swings her right side forward and then her left side forward, while Reny is more like a flamingo. The widest parts of his legs are his knees, which pluck up and down like someone’s yanking at knee-maneuvering
strings. Ida has to take four steps to keep up with Reny’s two. They’ve seen me. There’s no sneaking out of view.

  “Hey.” I wave to them, and me calling out makes Old Olson turn. “Morning, Old Olson.” I wave to him, too.

  “Early again?” he calls out, across the watercress stream.

  “Just got here.”

  “Well,” he says, giving me a long look with his little eyes, “we might as well get started.” He puts his hat back on, and I stone-to-stone it across the stream, toss my backpack, walk to the cart, pick up a flat-faced, steel-handled shovel. I whack it down at the hole, and soil scatters. I whack it down again and collect the loosened dirt with the blade of the shovel.

  “Girl’s got the knack,” Reny says, and Ida gives him the shut-up eyeball.

  It’s a little after that when Danny and Owen show up and take their places—Danny moving quicker than Owen down the hill, and apologizing for both of them. “If I had a car,” Danny grumbles, “this being late would never happen.” Owen gives him a look like “Yeah, speak for yourself,” and Old Olson keeps his arms knotted as he leans against a tree. Butterflies do their gliding thing and scatter. The bugs buzz. Reny starts to whistle “She’ll Be Comin’ ’Round the Mountain,” and Ida hums like she forgets that there are others of us here. You don’t talk much when you work like this. You don’t let Danny see that you’re watching him, or Old Olson know that you’re suspicious. And you don’t ask Ida and Reny the questions you’ve got about Miss Martine at the top of the hill.

  At break, I join Danny and Owen on the other side of the stream, where they’ve spread out their stuff beneath the trees. I yank my napkin from the backpack, pull out yogurt, a ripe peach, a Ziploc bag of smashed-up crackers. I blow some air into the sticky mess of my long bangs, which have gotten stuck beneath Danny’s cap. The Santopolos both have hoagies, the stuffed-full, foot-long kind, and no one says anything until we’re mostly through with our lunch, when Danny squeezes his fist into his khakis pocket.

  “Dude,” Owen says, when Danny uncurls his fingers. Owen has four inches at least of his hoagie left, and a golden glow of mustard on his lip. Putting down the hoagie, he smears his mouth with his fist, which leaves a trace of dirt beneath his nose. I’d give him grief, except that I’m too busy staring at the thing on Danny’s palm. “What is that?” I ask, because it’s half a hand long and half a finger skinny and also pale and knobbed and Swiss cheesy but hard. It seems snapped at one end; it’s a fraction.

  “Can’t say that I know for sure,” Danny says. Owen sweeps it right off Danny’s hand and lifts it up toward the light. “But you ask me to guess, and I’d guess bone.”

  “Where’d you get it?” Owen asks.

  “Where do you think? In the hole.”

  “Are there any more where that came from?”

  “Do you think I know?”

  “Well, you picked up this one without saying a thing. Who knows what else you saw and stole.”

  “You’re crazy,” Danny says. “I’m no thief.”

  I take the bone out of Owen’s hand and glance past the guys to across the stream, where Ida and Reny are sitting—Ida with her legs kicked out, Reny with his chin resting on the table of his knees. Old Olson is nearby on his walkie-talkie. The three of them for sure aren’t watching the three of us; we’re just the summer help, while they’re the real caretakers. I twirl the bone between my fingers. I touch the broken end. “Probably a cat,” I say. “Or a raccoon. Don’t you think?”

  “Why not a horse,” Owen says, “or a cow?”

  “Owen,” Danny says, “it’s not that big.”

  “Big things have little bones too, you know.”

  “Biology is not your specialty.”

  “Whatever it is,” I say, “it’s got to be old, sitting underground for all these years.”

  “I could use it for my culminating project,” Owen says.

  “Dude,” Danny says, “you haven’t started that one yet?”

  “I still have most of this month.”

  “You’ve had three years for your culminating project. And no, you’re not using my bone for your project.”

  “You’re selfish, man.”

  “More like you’re lazy.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Guys,” I say, “chill out. Can’t you? There are probably more where this came from.”

  “Ashes to ashes,” Danny says, taking the bone back, burying it deep in his pocket, pulling his T-shirt up over his killer abs to wipe the sweat off his face. Owen picks up the rest of his hoagie and takes a whopper-sized bite. I spot a ladybug on a long blade of grass and give her a ride on my finger, and she takes her time. She goes up to my knuckle and zigzags back down, as if she has all day long to choose a direction, to live in this green garden with tree stumps, crumbles of seeds, bones—a cat, I’m sure it was a cat, maybe a tabby or a calico that belonged to someone who also, maybe on a bright day when things were blooming and ladybugs were swarming, disappeared. Vanished. Things disappear and vanish. That’s the fact. Before you’re ready for them to go, they go, and after that all you can do is keep the idea of them bright inside yourself. I place my finger alongside a blade of grass. The bright red dot climbs off.

  “Hey,” Owen says.

  I look up. “What?”

  “You think Miss Martine is really up there, in the house?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Why do you ask?”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know. The bone. I thought…”

  “That bone belonged to a cat, Owen. Seriously.”

  “It’d be more interesting,” he says, “if it hadn’t.”

  “Dream on,” I tell him.

  “Hey. It’s a dig. Give it some credit.” He smiles ridiculously, and I’ve got to give him props. Better to hope for something interesting with this work than to assume that it’s as flat-out muscle-busting, mind-gnawing tedious as it is.

  “Break’s over,” I say, glancing back toward Ida and Reny, who have pulled each other to their feet and are stomping about in their boots, rubbing their legs, to get the circulation going. Owen looks now, too, and laughs.

  “We could use better partners in crime,” he says.

  “What we could use,” Danny says, “is some rain.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Past the drive, the road falls down so fast it feels like bungee jumping. A scrap of air gets caught between me and my backpack, tilts me back for half a second, and then is whooshed away, and I’m flying forward, both hands wrapped around the handlebars and the bangs beneath my cap blowing wild across my face. There are big puffs of shade on one side and yellow heat on the other, as if the clouds and the sun have all sunk straight into the ground. The cool side of the street is Miss Martine’s side, until the fence that separates her from The Willows, which is the park with the goose pond where everybody goes in winter to make out or ice-skate.

  Right about here is where I turn left onto a long, flat, straight road that is all shade on both sides at this time of day, except for where they’re putting in a ring of new houses. This is my favorite road of all the roads I ever travel on, and it was Mom’s favorite, too, which I know because she’d drive here and park and say floaty things like “Red really is the best color for a barn” and “What do you suppose they hide in silos?” Corn still grows along parts of this road, and the best houses are the old ones, real and solid and not trying for awards.

  I slow down and take it in until the next crossroad, and here I hang a left. This road has houses at its start, then a house made into a bank, then the original post office, then a gravel parking lot, next to which is the library. The library has wide columns out in front and thirteen stairs you have to climb to get all the way up. The glass doors are plastered over with a zillion book club signs. You swing them open into a whopping AC blast. I get a real quick case of the chills, then my goose bumps settle down.

  “Well, if it isn’t Miss Katie D’Amore,” Ms. McDermott says.

  Too out o
f breath to speak, I finger my bangs back into place, adjust my backpack.

  “Your room awaits you,” she says. She unlatches the little half door at the circulation desk and starts making for the stairs, and I follow behind, thinking of just how fabulous she looks in her yellow tank top and white linen pants and spike-heeled hot-pink shoes. I don’t even know how she can walk in those things, but she’s a runway-quality walker. She must have studied fashion when she was majoring in books, must have modeled on the side; I’d bet on that.

  At the bottom of the stairs we turn left, where the small rooms look like the interrogation rooms you see on TV detective shows. Ms. McDermott slips a key into the first door lock, snaps on the light, and there they are: the seven boxes of Local Lore. I have a fresh pad of paper in my backpack, a bunch of rubber banded number twos.

  “You need anything,” she says, “you ask me. I’m here till five today.”

  All I can say is “Thank you.”

  When she’s gone, I take my seat at the long wood table and drag the nearest box into place. I pop the lid and now stand again, so that I can get a good look inside. It’s like paper soup—photos and clippings, notes, an almanac, an odd-shaped leather binder. I reach for the binder first, which seems most promising. I lay it down, open it up to photographs—square and black-and-white, with jagged edges, a couple still stuck in their original places on the thick black paper, most of them detached.

  With white pencil somebody has written words below where the photos are all meant to be. Winter 1948. Honeysuckle season. Pooch takes a carriage ride. Croquet on the lawn. Lazy Sunday. The photos are so small, blurred, and faded that I have to scrunch my eyes to bring them into focus, and even scrunched up my eyes are confused. It’s hard to make out how what is now was what was then, because the roads are thin and the cars are funky and there are tons more trees and fewer fences. I sift looking for something familiar, and that’s when I find the two entrance posts at Miss Martine’s. They’re squat and stone, just like they are in present time, but in the photo they’re gobbed all around with flowers. At the very edge of the picture is the nose of a collie, but nowhere anywhere is Miss Martine. Not as a baby, not as a little girl.