Nothing but Ghosts

by Beth Kephart

  “Look who has come for a visit,” Dad says when I find him much later in his studio. The rain has stopped, but the sky’s still dark. Every studio lamp is blazing.

  “Sammy?” I say, because there’s no mistaking Sammy and his hair, which looks like one more fire burning.

  “My new first-rate assistant.”

  Dad, I want to say, are you serious? Monkey? But I hold my tongue and take a quick visual check, and this is the weird thing: Nothing’s broken. Here Sammy stands in this room of glasses, jars, solutions, and resins, and there is no apparent damage, no aftermath of Hurricane Mack, no puddling paints, no drips. I look at Dad, and I know Dad knows precisely what I’m thinking. I look at Sammy, and he stands there staring—head cocked, fists punched into his sides, as if I’m the one intruding.

  “Sammy’s mom is attending to some business,” Dad explains, making the arrangement sound official. “Baby-sitter canceled, and I said I could use the help.”

  “You were the next best thing?”

  “I am the best thing. Don’t you forget it.”

  “Lucky for Sammy,” I say.

  “Lucky for me,” Dad says. “Look at how far we got. The canvas is almost back on its stretcher.” Dad steps aside, and he isn’t lying. The painting’s beside him, all in one piece, with a spanking, brand-new liner.

  “I helped,” Sammy says now, flopping his head to the opposite shoulder.

  “I see,” I said.

  “It was super easy.”

  “I bet.”

  “I have superhero powers.” Now Sammy squats and grunts and points and hops and then he stands up straight. “I’m speedier than Spider-Man,” he says. “Than Human Torch, even.” He squats and groans and points again. His jeans are so loose that it looks as if he’ll run right out of them. His T is two sizes too small. The red lights on his yellow sneakers flash.

  “What’s that you’ve got there?” I point to the little movable table beside him, and its jars and paints and brushes.

  “I’m making my own picture,” he says. “See?” He lifts a sheet of construction paper from the center of his table, and his colors start to drip down the page. Everything is either yellow or orange, and there are lots of jagged edges.

  “Stars?” I guess.

  “Rocket ships,” he says, thrusting out his bottom lip, then forgetting his disappointment in the next half second as he plops down on a little wheeled stool to finish his creation.

  “I think he’s got talent,” Dad says. “Don’t you, Katie?”

  “Uh, right. Sure.”

  “You remember when you used to paint out here?” Dad continues. “You were always painting flowers.” I get a sudden flash of another me, sitting right near Dad, painting like Sammy. I remember Dad stringing a clothesline and pinning my paintings and calling to Mom, “Come and see Katie’s show.” Whatever Mom was doing, she would stop to praise me, always pick out a favorite. The favorites got hung on the refrigerator door, with the banana magnets. “How did the research go today?” Dad asks me.

  “Okay, I guess. Nothing special. Tell you later.” Because who knows what Sammy might report back to his mother, and how can you keep a mystery a mystery if the whole neighborhood is in on it?

  “I was thinking pizza for dinner,” Dad says.

  “Pizza?” I say. “Really? The master chef wants pizza?”

  “Pepperoni, pepperoni, pepperoni,” Sammy says, supposing, I suppose, that someone asked him. He holds his wooden-handled paintbrush up, as if he could paint the air, and stomps his feet so that his sneakers send up flares.

  “I’m not eating pepperoni,” I say.

  “We’ll do half and half,” Dad says.

  “Whatever,” I say, turning for the door.

  “Katie,” he calls after me, “would you mind calling for delivery?”

  Later Dad asks if I can walk the kid home, and what am I going to say: “No, I’m busy?” I moisten a wad of paper towels and wash Sammy’s face. Then I pick him up all screaming and kicking and carry him to the sink and stick both his fists beneath the spigot. “Water’s too hot,” he complains, and I cool it down a bit. Then I dry him off and turn him around, and Dad says, “You’re looking spick-and-span.”

  “Superheroes don’t wash up.” Sammy pouts.

  “They do after pepperoni pizza,” Dad tells him. Sammy looks at Dad like Dad might just be onto something. He stomps his flashing shoes toward the kitchen table and gives Dad a friendly upper-arm flick.

  “I’m coming back tomorrow,” Sammy announces.

  “Are you now?” Dad says.

  “Yeah, ’cause you need me,” Sammy says.

  “Well, we’ll have to ask your mother.”

  I give Dad the are-you-kidding-me? stare, but Dad won’t catch my eye. He runs his fingers through his lion’s mane and slouches back against his chair. “See you, Sammy,” Dad says. “Thanks for stopping by.”

  In the dark I reach for Sammy’s hand. Without a fuss he gives it up. Wraps his fingers around my one finger so tight that I swear he’s popped my knuckle. The clouds have all gone off somewhere, and the night is clear, and the crickets are going crazy, and there’s hoo-hooing that could be an owl, could be a pair of mourning doves. Sammy’s shoes light our way down the drive, until right near the end, where the big bulb in the old lamppost throws out a shine, and right there, in that shine, are the four glass eyes of a mother deer and her spotted fawn. They’re just standing there watching us watching them, and I never would have guessed that Sammy Mack could ever be so quiet. It’s like we all four have been caught in a photograph, like someone’s sent a message. And it would go on like this all night except for the car in the road, hanging the curve. The headlights throw the deer from their pose. They escape on their skinny legs.

  “Rudolph,” Sammy says, when they’re gone and we’re crossing the road.

  “You think so?”

  “Yup, I know so.” He nods so vigorously that I worry he’s going to snap a muscle, and now that we’ve reached his own driveway, he lets my battered finger go and heads off at a sprint for some old birches. “You wanna see what I can do?” he calls to me. I don’t have so much as a chance to answer before he hurls himself up into the wishbone part of a tree and scrambles up its thickest branches.

  “Impressive,” I tell him, jogging now to where he is. “But more impressive for superheroes is the way they get back down.”

  “Easy,” he tells me, and before I can stop him, he stands up tall on the branch he was sitting on and puts his arms out like wings. “To infinity and beyond!” he yells, and steps out into the night and falls through the air to the ground. He rolls around, a sidewise somersault. I rush toward him, swoop in.

  “Flying is my specialty,” Sammy says, all out of breath.

  “Is that a fact?” He looks okay. He talks okay. He’s standing up. He’s walking. He takes off for his front door, and the door slams hard behind him, and suddenly I remember Sammy when he wasn’t more than a single armful, when all he could do was lie in his carriage and wait to be lifted up toward the world. Mom and I would see them in town—Mrs. Mack and her bald baby boy. We’d be standing in line for a free chunk of fresh-baked bread at Basket or a whole sea bass at Hook and Sinker when we’d hear the boy fussing behind us, and wherever we were, whatever we had to do, however many bags we had in hand, Mom would walk straight back to where the Macks stood and offer to hold Sammy for a while.

  “Can’t keep him happy,” Mrs. Mack would sigh as Mom unbuckled the stroller straps and lifted Sammy to her shoulder.

  “Sometimes they just need a change of view,” Mom would tell her.

  There’d be gray shadows in the papery skin beneath Mrs. Mack’s hard blue eyes, lengths of hair gone loose from a clip. “He hardly sleeps,” Mrs. Mack would go on. “I wonder—sometimes I think—that I’m doing something wrong.”

  “This boy’s just got a lot of living to do,” Mom would assure her. “He’s not planning on wasting a second,” and as if to prove
that Mom was right, Sammy would quiet down and look around, start pointing, gurgle noises.

  “I guess,” Mrs. Mack would say, and then, always, I don’t know why: “Was Katie ever like that?”

  “Katie was her own person,” Mom would say, shifting Sammy in her arms, giving him more to point toward. “All of them are.” And you know how you know a person’s highest compliment? Well, this was Mom’s. She wanted me always to be just who I am. She wanted me never to pretend.

  I stand a little longer under the cover of dark in Sammy’s front yard, to be sure that the door doesn’t fly open again. The kid seems safe for the night, safe for tonight, at least. I turn for home—myself, alone.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Two more days of rain, and on the third, Dad gets himself into a breakfast frenzy. On burner one, the pancakes; on burner two, the fried eggs; in all four slots of the toaster, toast; and on the table a bright purple dahlia. “What are you doing?” I ask him, and he says, “I was feeling inspired.”

  “Inspired?” I say. “Maybe more like hungry? You planning on chowing down all that yourself?”

  “I was counting on your companionship,” he says. “My pancakes have never been better.”

  “Dad,” I groan, grabbing my lunch, sealing it into Ziplocs.

  “Even brainiacs need sustenance,” he says. “Probably even more than your average joe.”

  “Right,” I say, and I pull out a chair. “But only one, okay?”

  “Some OJ with that?”

  “Sure, some OJ. Okay.”

  “And an egg? Just one? Just the littlest one?”

  “All right, Dad. Okay. Just one egg.”

  “You wouldn’t be in the mood for toast, by any chance?”

  “No, Dad. No toast. Not today.”

  “Now,” he says, choosing a tumbler from the cupboard, and looking only a little sad about my saying no to toast, “tell me about Friday. You never did say much.”

  “Friday? You mean the library?” There’s such a pour-down of kitchen sun that I have trouble, for a sec, dialing the details back—the rain, the Local Lore, Danny’s surprise hello. “Yeah, well,” I say, after Dad puts the filled-to-the-brim tumbler down at my place, “Friday was interesting. Friday was newspapers. All the circa stuff.” I decide not to mention Danny, because if I mention Danny, Dad will start back in on Jessie and Ellen—asking me, for the millionth time, when Jessie is coming over to talk her blue streak, when Ellen is going to arrive and trip up the stairs and say “Sorry,” as if the stairs need apologizing to, when we all are going out together, when we are coming back from the mall together, stupid things in our glossy bags, like boas or triple-sized sunglasses.

  “Any leads?”

  “She had the lead in a Shakespeare play at Baldwin,” I say, and Dad says, “Ha-ha.”

  “No,” I continue. “Seriously. Plus, she was Miss Independence Day in the Fourth of July parade. In 1946 there was a sledding party at her house. Her mother’s victory garden won a prize in 1942. Best tomatoes. Best asparagus. Lima beans the size of a baby’s fingernail.”

  “Nothing much, in other words,” Dad says. He’s sat down now, has sliced his butter onto his pancake, poured himself a lake of syrup, downed half of his OJ. He nods in the direction of my plate, the old get-started-you-disappoint-me-how-little-you-eat nod. I know it well.

  “Nothing too useful, anyway.” I break a first bite of pancake with the side of my fork. It’s not gooey like the last time he threw batter into a pan. He’s definitely improving.

  “I see. Any manifestations of John Butler Everlast?”

  “Manifestations?”

  “You know, in the newspapers. Did his name come up?”

  “Some,” I say, trying to remember the things that Danny reported. “Mergers and growth at Quality Chemicals. Businessman of the Year from the Chamber of Commerce. Prize border collie. Library donor.”

  “Nothing about his paintings?”

  “No. Nothing like that.”

  “Any sponsorship of any art galleries or wings of art museums?”

  “Not yet, anyway.”

  “Any personal bests in local art shows?”

  “Dad,” I moan, “don’t you think I’d have said so?”

  “You’re keeping an eye out, though?”

  “Of course.” I nod self-assuredly, so that he doesn’t ask again.

  “You like the pancake?” he asks.

  “Perfect, Dad.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You know,” he says, “this farmer’s-market syrup. It makes all the difference.”

  I look at the watch on my wrist and the clock behind Dad, which never come close to agreement. I stand, collect my dishes. “Gonna be late, Dad.”

  “All right.”

  Leaning back in his chair, he makes a sad little face at my half-eaten pancake and the yolk that I have left on my plate. There is still a pile of pancakes on his plate, and I get that guilty feeling right in my gut for leaving him alone to eat like this, nothing to talk to except the dahlia. I stop and lean down, give his forehead a kiss. “How about you, Dad?” I ask him. “Making headway?”

  “Funny thing about that painting,” he says.

  “What’s that?”

  “The varnish,” he says. “Subtle, but it’s there: a pattern of Iris pseudacorus.”

  “You mean like fleurs-de-lis?” I say.

  “The very same.”

  “Well that’s odd,” I say.

  “Yes, I thought so, too. To pattern a painting with flowers, like he did, but to eliminate their color. To make them varnish only. It made me wonder.”

  “Dad?” I say as my pulse quickens.

  “What is it?”

  “The thing is—in the write up of Miss Martine’s debutante ball? The reporter said that she was carrying fleurs-de-lis.”

  “Is that right?”

  “And didn’t Mom use to tell a story about King Clovis and his army and a river and these flowers that stood out in the river like a guide? Those flowers that saved him being the very same fleurs-de-lis.”

  “That was one version of that story,” Dad says, nodding slowly, rubbing the skin beneath one eye. “Very interesting, Katie. Increasingly so.”

  “Maybe, but I still don’t know what it means.”

  “Well, that Miss Martine loved yellow irises, for one thing.”

  “Maybe still does.”

  “Ever see them over at the estate?”

  “Not really,” I say. “Not that I remember.”

  “Take a good look around,” he tells me. “Report back. Flower heads would be gone by now, but there should be evidence of stalks.”

  “I will,” I say. “Absolutely.”

  “You’re a fine investigator, Miss Katie,” he tells me now. “Don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “Bet this is going to be a breakthrough day,” I say.

  “For you or for me?” His face lightens.

  “For the D’Amores,” I say. “The both of us.”

  “Maybe so,” he says.

  “I’ll get the dishes later if you just leave them in the sink.” I grab my stuff and head out the door, find my bike, adjust my backpack, set off down the drive. I’m halfway there when I see Sammy Mack down by the mailbox, kicking up some gravel.

  “Hey,” I call to him, skidding my bike to a stop. “Sammy! What’s up?”

  “Nothing,” he says.

  “Nothing? Did you cross the street all by yourself?”

  He nods one big I’m-a-hero nod, like yes is the right answer to this question. He has yesterday’s jeans on and an even worse T-shirt, and the laces of his hero shoes are flipped out in all directions. I am thinking that his mother doesn’t even know that he’s gone. I’m thinking she’s over there dreaming.

  “That’s dangerous, Sammy. You shouldn’t.”

  “Jimmy needs me,” he says, and it takes me a minute to realize that he’s talking about my dad.

&
nbsp; “Jimmy does?”

  “Yup.” He pumps his chin up and down again.

  “Well, that’s fine, Sammy, if that’s what you think. But you shouldn’t cross the road alone, okay? And you should always tell your mother where you’re going.” I start to climb down from my bike to tighten his sloppy laces, but he takes off like a demon down the drive, toward the house and studio.

  “You can’t make me go home,” he yells out. “You can’t, you can’t, you can’t.”

  “Sammy!” I call to him. “Sammy, come here. Let’s fix your laces.” But by now Dad has heard the commotion, and he’s stepped into the drive.

  “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Mack,” I hear him say.

  “First-rate assistant,” Sammy says.

  “You like pancakes?”

  “You got syrup?”

  “Yes, my man. I just happen to be rich in syrup.”

  “I like you, Jimmy.”

  “And I like you back, Mr. Mack.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Flying down the hill past the twisty trees and the stone posts and the black gates and the gardens, scanning for the bottom parts of irises because now I just can’t help myself, I suddenly remember the day before Barcelona, when Jessie and Ellen showed up early and told my mother that they’d come to kidnap me. Mom was out in the garden with her nightgown on, which was more like a slip, which made me think, whenever she wore it, that if she hadn’t grown up with so many horses, she’d have grown up a ballerina. Her arms were long and really thin and pale, and her bracelets were always flinging off and bouncing straight across the floor—too loose for her super-tiny wrists. The diamond she wore on her left hand slid around and around beneath her knuckle, so that most of the time it looked like she wore a simple golden band. She went barefooted in the house and in the garden, too, and she always watered before the sun was too high, holding the hose close to the roots of things, plucking out weeds, picking out a table bud, and never, ever worrying about her hair, which was always lopsided when she climbed out of bed. My mom loved yellow flowers, too. She liked the surprise, each year, that burst from bulbs.

  When Jessie and Ellen biked up, she said, “Girls,” and hugged them both, like they were her other two daughters, which you could kind of say they were, because they’d been my friends since kindergarten, since bus rides and since Brownies, since the camping trip where it rained for three days and we all—my dad, my mom, my friends—sat in a tent telling each other stupid stories. “Girls.” I was downstairs in the kitchen, and I saw them out there, my two best friends with their wind-mussed hair and my mom with her nightgown and garden hose. They talked a lot before my mom showed them in, and then we all sat around having breakfast, and this was all forever and ever ago, when my dad still slept upstairs and had his pancakes waiting for him, his toast in the toaster, his Claire in her own chair, and he’d come down late, with his floppy hair, and say, “Morning,” putting on a pair of glasses to see what he could see.