Nothing but Ghosts

by Beth Kephart

  “I’ve been taking too many A.P.s, I guess.” I smile.

  He laughs. “Yeah. You’re such a loser.” He keeps looking at me.

  “You’re going away,” I say. “To BU, in two weeks.”

  “I guess I am.”

  “That totally sucks.”

  “I guess it does.”

  “I hate good-byes.” I feel like I’m going to cry, and how stupid is that?

  “Two weeks is fourteen days,” Danny says, pulling me even closer toward him.

  “Yeah, but it still sucks.”

  He takes his arm from across my shoulder. He reaches for my hands instead, and his hands are big, his thumbs are worked and rough, his hands feel right on my hands. When he bends, I stand tall and we meet in one sweet kiss. Danny Santopolo has kissed plenty of times, I can tell. He makes this one kiss last forever, until it’s me who falls back down to my real height.

  “Cool moon,” he says finally, looking out on the stream, his arm settled back now on my shoulders.

  “Yeah.” My finch heart beats. I can’t say more.

  He places my hand in his hand, pulls it up to his lips. “You want to see the trunk for yourself?”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The lights are still on when I steer my bike right past Sammy Mack’s drive onto my own. Dad’s got the studio blazing, lit up like a fire. Two pairs of glasses sit on the slope of his nose. It’s close to eleven, and he doesn’t look up when I tap on the door, doesn’t turn when I say hello. I feel like I’ve been gone for years—my head somewhere that my body’s not.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Hey, kiddo.” He doesn’t turn. “You have a good ride?”

  “Uh-huh.” I straighten my bangs with my fingertips, take a swallow of air to help calm my heart. Danny’s out there somewhere walking home, and there’s a trunk buried deep at Miss Martine’s—a trunk, I saw for myself. Danny put his hand on my hand, helped me trace its outline in the dark. “I asked Old Olson what it was,” Danny told me. “He wouldn’t admit it was there.”

  “You ready for news?” Dad asks now, his question bringing me back.

  “Sure,” I say. “I’m ready.”

  “You’re not seeming all that excited.”

  “Long bike ride,” I say. “Sorry.” I cross over toward him, weave between all the lights, stand by the stool where he sits before the Everlast canvas. He’s got his kit of pigments at his feet, a coffee can of brushes on the black ledge of a nearby easel. Dad would make the perfect mad scientist in any casting call. “Seriously,” I say. “What’s up?”

  “In the John Butler Everlast version of regret, we have ourselves a blackened city, and we have ourselves a garden,” Dad says, sweeping his arms around in front of the canvas in his weird way of pointing things out. He looks at me, and I give him a nod. “This,” he says, “you have already seen for yourself.”

  “That is a fact. I have.”

  “And in that garden there is light. Bright greens, bright yellows, bright pinks. This, too, you’ve already noted.” He sounds like a magician about to pull a cloth from a cage of doves.

  “Got it.”

  “But what else do you suppose we discover in that garden?”

  A trunk? I want to say, but I wouldn’t even know how to start to tell that story. “Don’t know.”

  He takes the first pair of glasses off his nose and pushes them down on my own. Everything in the room looks ten times bigger. I feel a little seasick. “A shell,” I say finally, because I see it now—hardly there but certainly there. A turtle shell hung on the base of a wide tree, just below where the first branch twists out and upward. “The shell I told you about.”

  “The guy sure had a vision,” Dad says.

  “Yeah,” I say, and I feel my heart going at it again. I’m thinking about Owen’s prize, thinking about Danny’s kiss, thinking about the bridge, the trunk, the dark, Miss Martine and her one-light house, Old Olson all silent and denying. The storm and the day of the storm.

  “Would have loved to have been in on one of Everlast’s board meetings,” Dad goes on. “They must have been unique.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I took a little trip today.”

  “You did?”

  “Is my life so boring that a little trip is so exciting?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Just down the road, to Quality Chemicals,” he continues. “They let me into their archives.”

  “That’s cool.”

  “You want the long and the short of it?”

  “Sure.”

  “John Butler Everlast took a leave of absence at the very height of his success. Left the company in the hands of his chief financial officer, which wasn’t, as it turned out, a good thing for Quality.”

  “When was that?”

  “The leave? Well, funny thing. September 1954, it started. He stayed away a full year afterward.”

  “Do the records say why he left?” I press.

  “Family matter is what the records say.”

  “No kidding,” I say.

  “Right. Like we didn’t have that much already figured for ourselves.”

  “So put it all together, and what do you get?” I ask, taking off his pair of magnifiers and passing them back, stumbling around in my own head to fit every clue together.

  “Don’t have the full skinny on this one yet, Miss D’Amore. I restore art. This painting needs a bona fide detective.”

  “I guess,” I say, looking back over the canvas again—the blackened city, the lit-up garden. Miss Martine has to be somewhere in the painting. I just don’t know where, and maybe it’s hard to know why it matters, except: A woman has gone missing for fifty-three whole years. That’s more than three of my lifetimes. And if I know where she is, maybe it will be easier to find my mother, or some way of living, of moving forward though she’s gone.

  Dad catches his whole chin in his big hand and shakes his head. “Did you enjoy your bike ride?” he asks.

  “Didn’t you already ask me that?”

  “Perhaps, but I’m forgetting what you said.”

  “I said I did, and thank you very much.”

  “The D’Amores don’t do sarcasm,” he says, and I laugh.

  “Going to bed, Dad,” I say, kissing him on the head, weaving back through the lights toward the dark.

  “Hey, Katie,” he says when I reach the door.

  “Yeah?”

  “I almost forgot. A Ms. McDermott showed up here earlier. Left a package for you by the front-door step.”

  “Ms. McDermott?” I ask, turning back to see if he’s messing with me.

  “Would I lie,” he says, “about that?”

  “Ms. McDermott, the fabulous librarian?”

  “Well, she was pretty fabulous,” Dad admits. “And she did mention something about research.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The moon is gigantic—a big white throb in a blue-black sky. Ms. McDermott’s package is propped up against the door, with just my name on it—KATIE—and her initials: A.M. There’s hardly any weight to it, feels like it could have been blown away by a fraction of a wind, but it’s just so still tonight. I sit on the stoop wishing Danny were still near, his arm around me, his laugh, because when I open whatever Ms. McDermott has dropped off, I’m going to need another kiss.

  The envelope isn’t sealed, and something flimsy falls right out into my lap—a photograph, size of my hand. It’s a slick black-and-white on one side. A handwritten note on the other, blue ink. Miss Martine Everlast. May 1954, the note says. Miss Martine, the same year that she vanished.

  I turn the photo faceup and lift it higher, toward the moon. She isn’t glamour here, not the star of some ball, not wearing diamonds in her hair, which falls long and dark, past the bottom edge of the photograph. Her blouse is hardly a blouse, more like a shirt, something a man might have worn, with a stiff, starched collar, and now I need better light to see her. But I also need to sit right here and
think, while Dad works his painting across the drive, and Sammy trampolines his way to bed across the street, and Jessie and Ellen are out being best friends, and Danny is or isn’t home quite yet. History is never absolute truth, Ms. McDermott said, and I don’t feel in danger of drawing wrong conclusions here, but I don’t even have a single guess at how all this adds up. I have these clues and no theory, and when I stare at the moon, it’s only one unblinking eye, staring straight back. Add a recluse to a garden to a very odd Old Olson. Add a hole, a turtle, a trunk, a painting about regret, a day in a year—I’d rather do calculus. It’s as silent out here as it is inside all the rooms of the house, which are so pitch-dark and so ridiculously big. I’m tired, too tired to stay here on the step with my thoughts swimming in circles.

  “Night, Dad,” I say, but not loud enough for him to hear me.

  “Night, Mom.” But never loud enough, and now as I sit on this stoop another time comes tumbling back, another place—Cascais—which is where we traveled to after we’d traveled through Barcelona, Mom saying, “Our vacation can’t be finished yet,” Mom making the calls to delay our flight home and to get us to this town in Portugal. “It’s only a few more days, Jimmy,” she told my dad. “And we’re so close, and besides, when will we get to Europe again?” Our clothes were end-of-trip dirty, and I was missing Ellen and Jessie, but Dad said, “If you want to see Cascais, we will. But after that, Claire, we really will have to get ourselves home.”

  “Summer’s supposed to be sweet in Portugal,” Mom said, kissing Dad hard on the lips and hugging me.

  But when we got there, the weather was wild. It was like a mist had been tossed off from the distant hills of Sintra—a rolling mist, which grew more dense and more insistent once it reached the streets of Cascais, and which carried inside it a big, chilled wind. By dusk on the first day we were all wishing for the sweaters we didn’t have, and by evening Dad and I didn’t want to leave the hotel. “Room service,” Dad practically pleaded. “It’ll be fun.”

  But Mom had seen a restaurant with a terrace sitting up above the town, and she had set her heart on it. “I want to watch the sea,” she said, “at night.” And so that’s where we went—to the terrace above the town, ordering pizzas with strange things on them and sitting on our napkins so the wind wouldn’t steal them away. We could hardly hear each other talk because of the wind, and the truth is, Mom didn’t seem like she was up for that much talking, so we sat. Across the way we could see the lip of the Atlantic, the fishing boats, the tourists being blown about. On the terrace, the wind kicked at our ankles and flapped the tablecloth against our knees, and toward the end of our meal the open umbrella beside ours snapped right off its metal stand and pirouetted into our table, tossing the knives and the forks and the pizza plates down, spilling a bottle of wine.

  “I’m thinking we’ll have dessert to go,” Dad said. “We can watch the sea from the hotel.” But Mom was turned toward the harbor, where a crowd had begun to gather, and she wasn’t going back to the hotel.

  “There’s going to be a parade,” she told us.

  “In this weather?” Dad said.

  “Look,” she said. “How beautifully strange.”

  I watched then, and Dad did, as the crowd by the harbor swelled and some sort of music began, music we could hear from where we sat because of the direction of the wind. “A parade,” Mom said again, and after Dad paid, neither one of us asked or protested, we just followed Mom out of the terrace and down the hill—Dad putting his arm around Mom to keep her warm and to protect her from the toddlers, children, grownups, tourists—all of us heading to the shore. I walked behind them. I walked beside them. I walked backward when the wind blew hard, and when I turned around, the parade was right there; it took us in.

  The parade was all these little kids. It was girls fighting the wind in their big, strange hats and flaring dresses—green, I remember, white and red. It was boys in suspendered pants and their own strange hats, who pushed wooden wheelbarrows before them. The weird thing about the wheelbarrows was how they were laced with rods of light—orange, rose, and green light rods that were bent to look like flowers—and how at the same one moment the boys lifted their wheelbarrows to the sky, like signs. That’s when the girls began to skip and spin, and then it was like standing inside a merry-go-round, like whirling with the merry-go-round. All that color and light was going up and down to the strangest sort of music, while the wind blew in from the sea.

  I lost Dad that night, but not for long. I lost Mom until the parade moved on, wound itself away from the harbor and up into the crooked streets. I turned and saw her standing on the edge of things—too thin, I realize now, and frail, the wind caught up in her hair. She’d kept her secret the whole trip long. She stood in that strange, chilled mist, alone, alive, but knowing what would come. History is never absolute truth. It isn’t just the thing that was. It’s the thing that could have been.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  I wake with the photograph here beside me, on my pillow—the finch doing kamikaze against my bedroom window. It does its hammering thing and its flying away thing, and this time I know where it’s going. This time I remember Sammy Mack’s finger, pointing straight to my parents’ bedroom window.

  “All right,” I say. “I’m coming.” Placing my feet onto the floor, pulling my bathrobe on, slipping the photo of Miss Martine into the bathrobe pocket. It’s early, before dawn. I hear the TV mumble-blaring downstairs. Dad must have come in late, turned it on, fallen asleep to its noise, and he can’t hear me now, won’t hear me standing outside his own bedroom door. In this house, you can break the locks just by applying the right pressure—by holding the knob up, pulling the door toward the hall, then pressing the knob back down. The locks in this house don’t mean a thing. They’re just signs: DO NOT ENTER HERE.

  But I’m going in because the finch says to, because I miss my mother, because I need her, because maybe just being around the things that she loved will bring me some kind of answers. After a while, the lock breaks free. Gently I tap against the door, and it opens, and then it opens more. Everything but Mom is here. Everything, the way she lived it.

  I close the door behind me, fast, so that not one bit of Claire D’Amore escapes. I jiggle the knob. I stand and take her in: Her favorite perfume, her straw hats. The photographs that always hung still hanging, all smoky with dust, and if I opened her closet and her bureau drawers, I’d find the things she loved to wear and the things she bought but never wore, dresses with their tags still on.

  Along the windowsills are the tinted bottles, and beyond the windows is the glow of sun, the colors of early day. Mom and Dad slept in a queen-sized bed, with three pillows on Dad’s side and one on Mom’s, until Mom got sick and Dad propped her up with all four, except for the end, when Mom said, “I need to sleep, Jimmy,” and Dad helped her lie flat. Mom’s side was the window side. She liked the windows open, even in winter, piling the blankets high on freezing nights and saying to Dad, when he begged her to shut them, “But it’s so exhilarating, Jimmy. It’s just like camping.” I’d hear them laughing from down the hall. No one in our house watched Letterman when my mother was alive.

  The sun continues to rise. Outside, the sky grows more yellow-blue, and inside, the shadows are smoking away, and all I want is to be with my mother, to hear her explain to me why it was that she had to go, how it makes sense, or is even in the neighborhood of fair, how she kept her dying such a secret. Why a secret? I’m taking all these A.P. courses, but none of them have explained vanishing. None of them say how it is that a talk-of-the-town woman disappears after a storm, or how a mother who opens her arms to your best friends, to everything, can slip away to a place that you can’t find. Was her living so well in Barcelona a lie, or was it her gift to Dad and to me? Was Cascais ecstasy, or a warning?

  The last thing my father did before he shut this door for good was put everything back to the way it was before Mom got cancer. Every shoe in the shoe bag. Every drawer on
its runner. Every dress on its hanger. Every hat on its hook. He piled the pillows back the way they’d been and swept the floor, and now the dusty floorboards creak and snap beneath my footsteps. I sit on my mother’s side of the bed. I lie down the way she once did. I fit my head into where her head used to fit inside her pillow. I would give all I ever learned or thought I knew to hear her say my name. “Ask me anything, Mom,” I say. “I’ll even tell you about Danny.” I close my eyes to hear her or to dream her back, but ghosts, I’ve figured out this much, don’t work that way. What I see in my mind is the last time my mother saw me—her face nothing but eyes by then, her hands so thin and so pale.

  “You make me proud, Katie,” she said.

  I said, “I do?”

  “Everything about you, love.”

  “Mom?” I said. “Mom, don’t leave me?”

  “I’m not going far,” she said. “You’ll find me.” Then she closed her eyes, and she didn’t open them again, except once, when Dad was back sitting in his chair, and the room was full and ripe with color.

  Dad locked their room to keep her in. I’ve broken back in to find her.

  When I open my eyes, parts of the sun have found parts of the bottles, and fuzzy sprays of rose, peach, violet, and lemon have been tossed against the far wall. My mother used to call this kind of color suggested color, and as I lie watching, I remember her lying here saying, “It’s a brand-new show every day.” For her that was the best part, how the color show was never the same, just like the best part of Dad, she thought, was that he was always doing something goofy, though she preferred to say “surprising.” “He has reinvented the male species,” she’d tell me when we were folding the warm towels in the laundry room, or spooning the last of the brownie batter into a tray, or weeding out her garden, or stringing lights around the branches of her last Christmas tree, which we put up early every November, because she loved Christmas best of all. “There’s nobody like Jimmy D’Amore.”