Nothing but Ghosts

by Beth Kephart

  “As I recall, you were doing all the talking.”

  He leans down, and I do, too, squinting to read the paper in the sun. It’s one huge feature on John Butler Everlast. His obituary, plus the gossip, plus a list of every person who came to show respects.

  “Jesus, Danny.”

  “Says that he died in 1973, cause of death pneumonia,” Danny continues. “Says his memorial service was one for the books. Says a thousand people came, but do you see Miss Martine’s name anywhere in that list? You see her in any of the pictures?”

  I scan the whole page. I stop and read it slow. Danny is right.

  “Where was she, then?” he asks me. “How do you explain it?”

  “I don’t know.” I shake my head, plant my elbows on my knees, hold up my head with my fists. “They had a fight? She was pissed off? She was out of the country? She was sick?” Danny starts folding the newsprint back into its crackling squares. He leans forward, touches my cheek.

  “We have another clue,” he says, smiling his extremely white smile.

  “Another ticket to nowhere.”

  “We just need more clues. Power in numbers.” When he stands, I stand beside him. When he walks, I walk, too, and now I’m thinking how nice it is not to walk alone, not to stand apart, not to face the big questions on my own.

  “You ever hear the story about King Clovis?” I ask as we veer closer to the stream.

  “Honors history, Mr. Larson. Guy stranded at a river. Flowers show him the way. Fleurs-de-lis, right? Rescue and escape? Why do you ask?”

  “It’s just that Miss Martine carried fleurs-de-lis at her debutante ball, and fleurs-de-lis are yellow flag irises, and yellow flag irises grow in swamps.” I leave the Everlast painting out of this for now; we’re nearly back at the site, and there wouldn’t be time to explain. “Why would the daughter of one of the richest men on the whole Main Line carry irises, if she could have orchids, or roses? What did the fleurs-de-lis mean?”

  “That she liked yellow irises?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe that she was looking for an out.”

  “Out of what?”

  “Out of this.” I sweep my hands toward the garden estate, and Danny shakes his head.

  “Who’d want out of this?” he asks. “Look around,” he says. “Look up. It’s really kind of perfect.”

  “You’re a funny guy,” I say.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because most guys wouldn’t have noticed.”

  “Katie, listen. The woman lives in a house on a hill alone, and she’s lived there all her life. That doesn’t sound like escape to me. That sounds like a choice.”

  “I guess,” I say, though I’m not convinced, but now there’s no more time to debate it. We’ve made our way back to where it all begins—to the mud, and our shovels and axes.

  Chapter Eighteen

  All afternoon, digging and sweating, I’m thinking about Danny. About Danny, about the clues, about Barcelona, about a daughter who doesn’t show up at a father’s funeral. About varnish and color and disappeared color. About rescue and escape and Miss Martine, who maybe, if she strained hard enough, could see the dig from where she is, inside her house. Her dig. The sun pushes itself between the trees, insists on its own heat, and it feels like we’re working inside a pot of stew. There’s dirt and sticks and bug shells at my feet, and beneath Danny’s cap my hair is ruinous. By the time the shift is done, we’re all too tired to do much more than head for home.

  In the kitchen there’s the in-the-oven-smell of pot roast, but everything is strangely quiet. I finally find my father on the living-room couch, no TV on. He seems asleep, but his eyes are open—staring at the ceiling, no glasses on. I used to find him like this every day for weeks after my mother died, until finally he began to work again, began to cook, like someone far away and maybe high above us was forcing him back to life.

  “You okay?” I ask him.

  He says quietly, “Hey, Katie.”

  I tromp over to the couch, sit at one end, near his toes, untie my heavy, old, grunge-ugly work boots, which I will, I promise myself, dump in the trash once this garden gig is over. “What’s happening, Dad?”

  “It’s that painting,” he says.

  I wait for him to tell me more, to roll his eyeballs back down from the ceiling. It’s way too hot in the house, thanks to that pot roast. I feel drips of sweat running down my neck, down my tee. I get up to shove open a window. “If you wanted to paint regret,” Dad asks at last, “what symbol would you use?”

  “Regret?” I’m too confused, tired, hot to fake an answer.

  “Things that you wished you could do over. How would you paint that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s a theoretical question, Katie. It’s not like I’m going to hold you to the answer.”

  “Regret could be a bird flying away,” I say, thinking out loud, playing this game for his sake, because for all I know he’s been lying here for hours, waiting to ask. “Or it could be the shell you leave on the beach, or maybe the last leaf on a tree.”

  “Would you paint a perfect city and give the whole thing a brown-black sky?” Dad asks.

  “Is this a trick question?”

  “Would you paint all the windows in the city black, except for one light in a single room?”

  “I thought you said this painting was Everlast’s idea of the eternal.”

  “I thought the darkness was dirt, but it’s not.”

  “So this city of Everlast’s is dark?”

  “Dark, except for the garden.”

  “There’s a garden?”

  “Pink, yellow, green, orange, ochre, violet, Tuscan red.”

  “You can see that much already, Dad? You’ve already done that much work?”

  “I’m starting to see through,” he corrects me. “There’s a difference.”

  “Well, is the garden the garden? The one at Miss Martine’s?”

  “I’m thinking it might be.”

  “Does it have a stream?

  “Yes, a finger of a stream.”

  “Is Miss Martine herself in the painting?”

  “No, or at least I can’t see her yet.”

  I take all this in. I try to fit the parts together. I understand, a little more, why Dad’s been lying here staring.

  “Dad,” I ask now, keeping my voice still and cool as I can make it, “is there, like, a turtle in the painting?”

  “A turtle?”

  “A turtle. You know, with a shell?”

  “There are many things I still can’t quite make out,” he says after a spell of not moving, not breathing, just lying there thinking, like he does. “One of those things could be a turtle. Why do you ask?”

  “At the garden today—at the dig? Owen found a carapace. It was cool and everything, you know—just the shell itself was cool—but then when I was holding it, I found the thing had this mark in the back. An indentation. Had to be put there.”

  He smiles.

  “I’m serious, Dad.”

  He sits there rubbing his chin, working out something, but I am not even going to guess what. There’s never a point to rushing genius.

  “Dad,” I ask after some time goes by. “What kind of daughter doesn’t go to her own father’s funeral?”

  Abruptly he turns toward me, and the reverie is gone. He gives me a scary, intense stare. “That’s an odd question,” he says. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because that’s what happened with Miss Martine. Everlast died, the town came to pay respects, but not Miss Martine. It’s in the record, at the library,” I add. I leave out the part about Danny.

  “Strange,” Dad says, and now his face changes again, his eyes go unfocused, and I realize that he still hasn’t chosen a pair of glasses to put on. A thousand thoughts go through his mind—I can see the flutter.

  He sits there blinking at them and doesn’t tell me one.

  “Do you know when the painting was finished?” I ask
.

  “From what I can make out so far, 1960.”

  “Miss Martine hasn’t been seen since 1954.”

  “You have the month and day?”

  “Reny said something about September 10, the day of a massive storm.”

  “Well there’s your answer, Katie D’Amore. Recluses don’t go out, even to the funerals of their fathers.” He plants his feet on the floor, fishes up some eyeglasses from the chains around his neck, puts on a pair, gives me a long, funny look, then winks. “Nineteen fifty-four,” he repeats now, then says nothing else.

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “You should be learning everything you can about that one particular day, Katie. Seems like there’s something in it.”

  “Could be,” I say, though of course he’s right.

  “I think I’m killing the pot roast,” he says, pushing himself off the couch. “Better go and take a look.”

  “Hey,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Thanks.”

  I can tell that he wants to move on to something new, that whatever he was feeling when I first came home is still floating here, above us. “Where’s Sammy?” I change the subject.

  “His mother came and got him, some time around four.”

  “Is he still your first-rate assistant?” I follow Dad to the kitchen, which is smoking by now. It feels like he’s far away, and what I want, right now, is to reel him back. “Did he like your breakfast?”

  “Ate three and a half pancakes.”

  “That all?”

  “Almost ran me out of syrup.”

  “He’s crazy, you know.”

  “He’s just a kid, Katie.”

  “You’re like his second father, Dad.”

  Dad gives me another one of his looks, gets a little red around the ears. “Nothing of the sort,” he says. “Just an old mad scientist with a funky day job.” He pulls the tumblers out of the cabinet. I go and get the lemonade. I set the table for the two of us. There’s just one rose in the vase tonight.

  Later the steam that has been rising all day long has made a sticky clump in the green bowl of my room. Nothing sweet blows through the window. No breeze bumps up the stairs. “Nineteen fifty-four,” I repeat, whirling the year around in my head. I think of all the research to do, the codes to break, the hours between now and tomorrow, between knowing and not knowing, between me and me seeing Danny.

  I try to cool myself down by thinking of Niagara Falls and the Pacific Ocean, of buckets of ice and frosted soda, of the day Jessie and Ellen and I climbed over the fence of the Henrys’ house down the street and swam late at night in their pool; they never noticed, they were gone, living for the summer in their Aruba getaway. Jessie did a mean Henrys imitation. Ellen climbed back over the fence the very next day and left them a pot of thank-you flowers.

  I never liked the Henrys, but that night I loved their pool, and now I’m thinking of that park with the pools in Barcelona, which was past the Gothic quarter, up near the arch and the bocce pits, where some guy with a hat took my dad aside and said something about the thievery of the Moors. “That can’t be right,” my mother said, but Dad stood by his translation, Dad said he knew what he’d been told but that didn’t mean that he believed it, and then we were still walking, or maybe we had turned and were headed back, but suddenly there we were in this park of a million water fountains and a million kids running and splashing in their underwear. There was this bald guy wearing bright feathers for hair. There was this other guy with a pink scarf who was making music with a horn so long that it hit the ground and turned up and kept rising.

  Deeper in on the path that wound up and down by all those millions of pools was a gazebo, maybe the size of Miss Martine’s, but higher off the ground, and right there was dancing. It was like the dancers used their feet to dust the floor, like their only words were the words of the song that played from the boom box some kid had brought along. I watched them for a long time.

  I was watching the dancers when my parents drifted away. I turned and didn’t see them and walked under some trees, and up a pile of steps, and through this sculpture where dragons carved of stone sat spraying water high, and then I went down the stones, and under some flowered trees and over past some cats. I finally found them down where a wedding was going on, or had already happened, my mother sitting on a bench, my dad beside her, both of them watching this bride and her groom at the edge of a pond where the water was so still I could have sworn it was a mirror. I saw my mom pull a flower straight out of a tree. I saw her stand, take the flower to the bride, and bow her head. I saw her go back to the bench and sit down with my dad and ask him, “Would you marry me again, Jimmy? Would you?”

  “In a heartbeat,” he said, “and you know it.”

  “I wouldn’t take any of it back,” Mom said, and maybe I don’t know how you put regret inside a painting, maybe I can’t figure out Miss Martine, maybe I can’t really save my dad from sadness, but maybe so much time goes by that you start to understand how beauty and sadness can both live in one place. My eyes are heavy and the air is still hot. I may already be dreaming.

  Chapter Ninteen

  Sammy sits on top of two fat phone books, and now he points his fork straight down like a pole and jiggles the French toast around until a piece breaks off. He swishes it through a pool of syrup.

  “You’re way early, aren’t you, Sammy?” I ask, looking at Dad.

  “My dad brought me.”

  “Your dad brought you?”

  “Yeah. He was going to the airport.” Sammy’s got a Phillies shirt on and a pair of red shorts. His light-up sneaks are kicking at the air above the floor.

  “How’s my daughter detective?” Finally Dad says something, holding a plate toward me that has just one piece of French toast. “There’s plenty more,” he says, “if you want it.”

  “This is enough.” I sigh, taking my place between Sammy and Dad, pushing my hair back from my face.

  “Sammy’s been telling me stories,” Dad says.

  “Uh-huh.” The French toast is good.

  “Super bullet yellow bird,” Sammy says. He points his fork upright and starts spinning it around, throwing globs of buttery syrup everywhere.

  “What did you say?” I ask.

  “Brrrrrrrrrr,” Sammy says, loud as a drill. “Brrrrrrrrrrrr.” He’s stabbing his fork at every last open spot of air, his lower lip jutting out and vibrating. I stare at him, wondering what he’s seen, if the finch hammers at his window, too.

  “I think Katie gets the idea,” Dad says, touching Sammy’s hand with his own to chill the demonstration.

  “Where’s the bird, Sammy?” I ask him.

  “Outside.” He jabs his fork toward the window.

  “Where outside?”

  “Outside outside.” He points again, then sticks the fork into his mouth and chews with his mouth wide open. His teeth are the tiniest teeth I’ve ever seen, but fierce.

  “Can you show me?”

  “Katie,” Dad says, “I just got him settled in. And you’ve hardly touched your French toast.”

  “Well, after you’re done eating, Sammy. Can you?” I give Dad the I-know-what-I’m-doing look. Now he’s the exasperated one.

  “I can show you right now!” Sammy shouts, throwing his fork to his plate, jumping off his phone-book tower, and heading for the door. Dad puts his head into his hands.

  “Sorry, Dad,” I say. “We’ll be right back, I promise.” I push back my chair and hurry to catch up with Sammy, who has already slammed the door behind him. Out in the middle of the driveway he’s stomping, around and around, waiting for me to stand beside him.

  “Right there,” he says now, pointing high, not in the direction of his house, but in the direction of mine, in the direction, to be specific, of my parents’ bedroom window. I follow his hand and that’s precisely where he’s pointing, no question about it. He stomps around some more now, mission accomplished. I put both of my hands on his little mighty shoulder
s until he finally looks up at me.

  “Sammy,” I say, “tell me exactly what you mean.”

  “Super bullet yellow bird,” Sammy says. “Going brrrrrrrrrrrrr brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr at the window.”

  “That window?” I point to my parents’ room.

  “Yup.”

  “When?”

  “When I came with Dad.”

  “You mean this morning, Sammy? Early?”

  “Today!” he shouts. “Today! Today!” There’s no way on earth that this kid is lying, and suddenly I understand. The window finch is a messenger. There is something that it wants to say.

  “Man, you really are a first-rate assistant,” I tell Sammy, and he smiles ear to ear, showing off all those baby teeth, shaking his shoulders so that my hands come loose.

  “I have superhero powers,” he says.

  “I guess you do.”

  He nods ferociously. “I do.”

  “We better go inside and finish breakfast,” I say. “My dad’s going to need you fortified.”

  “Fortified?” Sammy asks, his nose wrinkled. He turns and marches backward across the drive, into the house.

  “Superhero plus,” I say.

  Chapter Twenty

  Now that it’s the sweet time of day and the sun feels good on my skin, I don’t mind just sitting here on these library steps watching the traffic go by, don’t mind the fact that I’ll be late to Miss Martine’s and the dig, that I’ll likely catch Old Olson’s flack. I don’t mind watching the clouds break and drift, and sometimes it looks like there are signals up high, and sometimes the sky is through-and-through blue, and it’s really pretty out here in the morning, by myself, alone. Beauty and sadness. Rescue and escape. There’s that line, I think, between what is and what has not happened yet.

  It’s a little past eight thirty when I see a red Miata slow and take the library parking-lot turn. A few minutes more and I hear the clack-clacking of Ms. McDermott’s tall, flare-heeled sandals. Every single one of her toenails is painted a different shade of red, all in service to her skirt, which is like a big flamenco costume—sunset colors seamed with black, a magnificent volume that coils and uncoils about her legs. Her black tank top seems to skim her skin. She pulls her sunglasses to the top of her head, changing the angles of her hair, and when she moves her arm, her big bag falls down, into the crook of her elbow.