Nothing but Ghosts

by Beth Kephart

  But there was nobody like Mom, either, and if she were here, she’d tell me something about how red is always chasing yellow. I’ll never have another new Mom story. I only have the old ones to keep, which is why I have stayed so quiet since she passed, why I’ve been keeping to myself, because if I talk, if I say too much about Mom, I’m thinking that the parts I still have will escape, like bubbles.

  I wonder again what she’d have made of Miss Martine and the gazebo mystery—of Old Olson asking us to dig to a trunk he hoped we’d never see. His was a stupid plan, but he went ahead with it, and that could mean only one thing: He was desperate to get to the trunk, willing to take some risks. Something has happened after all these years to give that trunk new meaning, and even though you could say that it’s none of my business, it’s come to matter to me. It’s a problem I have a shot at solving, a question I have to answer.

  I slip the photo of Miss Martine out of my bathrobe pocket. In the morning glow of my parents’ room, I stare at it and let it stare straight back at me. There’s more to see by the light of day than there was last night on the stoop—loose, long curls in Miss Martine’s hair, a pin clipped to the edge of her shirt collar that looks something like a turtle—yes, a turtle—and there, in the crook of her arm, a single long-stemmed flower: fleur-de-lis. There’s the bark of a big, old tree in the background, and a little bit of sky to the side, just enough to get a feeling for some sun. But there’s something, too, in the way that Miss Martine looks so hard at me, something in her flinty eyes that I’m starting to think is familiar.

  Really, truly, freaky familiar.

  I close my eyes. Try to dream my way toward a knowing, try to conjure Mom and her wisdom. The kaleidoscopic colors pulse, hash, jumble—it’s practically a noise they make. The sun pushes in from beyond—whisked heat. I imagine Miss Martine in her house alone, imprisoned by the darkness that descended on her garden, by the years that passed without her really living them. Vanished. Vanquished? Escape or rescue? A turtle’s shell, those fleurs-de-lis—all varnish, no color, no light. Something got stolen in the midst of paradise. A father took a stance and lived with sorrow. A daughter withered. My mother died too soon inside the exuberance of color. Miss Martine has lived a life set apart, for too long.

  I feel a tear begin to leak down my cheek. I am, all of a sudden, immensely tired. I long to stop walking around with all these questions.

  In the absolute silence of this room, time goes on without me. Runs through me and past. When I open my eyes again, it’s to the sound of frisk and clatter, to that finch, outside my mother’s window, tapping its beak on the glass.

  “You again.” I sigh. “You’re kind of amazing. For a bird.” Lying in my mother’s bed, not moving, I watch the thing flit and flutter, bang, bop, plunge, return, punch its ballet into the glass. The finch looks past its beak, through the window, through the streams of color. It plays its game a dozen times until reluctantly, slowly, I lift myself off the bed, plant my feet on the floor, step toward the window and the sill of colored bottles. I arrive, and the finch disappears, and all I have before me now is sky and gravel and, to the left, below, my mother’s garden. The yellow, white, and red of the big fat dahlias. The effusive zinnias. The catmint and the mounds of hellebores that survived the winter and bloomed in spring and sit there making their plans for next season. Everything that could have bloomed without Mom’s help has, miraculously, bloomed, even things that aren’t supposed to survive the frost. Even the weeds that have wedged into all the empty spaces can’t contradict my mother’s beauty, or her idea of beauty, or the need for beauty to live on. “I’m not going far,” she said.

  Throwing the window latch, I push my weight against the glass, and though it takes an extra urging, it finally gives. Fitting my fingers inside the contraptions of the screen window, I free that, too. Nothing separates me now from the world outside, and I lean out as far as I can into summer—look forward, look down, upon Mom’s garden. I stand here making promises to myself—a daughter’s promises: to live my life with my eyes wide open. To honor exuberance, and color.

  Somewhere down the road, I think, Miss Martine is standing—above a dream, above a garden, above a story. She’s standing there alone, except for Old Olson, who is alone in his own kind of way. I think about the two of them now, walled off in that place. The two of them overseeing the seasons but never going far beyond their gates. All of a sudden, something falls into place. The portrait. Those eyes. A connection. Because Miss Martine’s eyes are Old Olson’s eyes. There can be no two ways about it.

  “Jesus,” I say, and pull my head back through the window, to this side of my mother’s room, where now the before is mixed up with the after, where suddenly Miss Martine isn’t just some old recluse; she is somebody’s mother. I notice a fluttering near a tree beyond. The gold breast of the bright finch, winging off.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  I don’t even bother with a shower. I pull on yesterday’s clothes, stuff my hair into Danny’s BU cap, tie on my shoes, and hurry down the wide stairs past the photographs and the restored portraits, straight into the kitchen.

  “Howdy, stranger,” Dad says when he turns around and I’m there. “Old Olson give you another paid day off?”

  “Dad,” I say, “I’m kind of late. I’m sorry.” I start throwing lunch things into my backpack, pick up a banana for the road, stuff a couple extra-big plastic bags into the backpack, hoist the backpack. I head into the mudroom for a silver trowel and tuck that in with the rest of my stuff.

  “You say hello to our guest?” Dad asks. He looks startled, maybe, by my hurry. Like he doesn’t know what questions to ask.

  “Hey, Sammy,” I say, “what’s up?” The kid has on his Spider-Man suit with the rubber mask flipped up. Two doughnuts sit on his plate beside a log of sausage that’s got a stripe of burn down its long side. He is looking like he lives here, and right now, for Dad’s sake, I’m glad he does.

  “Jimmy and I are busy,” Sammy informs me, nodding furiously and hoisting the sausage with his fingers.

  “Is that a fact?” I zipper my backpack, stoop down to tie the laces of my muddy work boots, stand, and walk toward the door.

  “You’re not thinking about leaving here without some breakfast?” Dad asks me. “Are you?”

  “Got to, Dad.” I kiss his forehead. “But I’ll be back, I promise. I have something to tell you, but first there’s something to do.”

  “Our mystery?”

  I nod. “Home by seven.”

  “See that?” I hear him say as I step one foot out the door. “Another superhero, Sammy. This neighborhood is chock-full.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  At Miss Martine’s I walk my bike across the macadam and toward the shelter of the shed, then head back to the top of the hill and look out—see Yvonne near the top of the hill staking dahlias and Peter down by the ferns. Way on the other side from me, Amy looks like she’s thinking of climbing into a tree; Owen’s beside her, big green buckets in his hands. I don’t see Danny, don’t see Old Olson either, but where the hill stops altogether and the angle flattens and starts easing toward the stream, I see Ida and Reny, knee-deep in prairie-drop seed. Beyond them the caution tape is still on yellow fire, but there’s no hole—just a lumpy recession where the hole used to be.

  I don’t turn toward the stream. I turn, instead, toward the house, the windows of which are lit up on one side by sun. Nothing stirs, and I head off in the house’s direction, my backpack heavy, my work boots sinking into the earth of the hill. When I get to the front of the house I weave around, toward the back, alongside the porch, near the patch of pachysandra that I crunched what seems like forever ago. There are broken brown leaves that no one’s replaced. There’s a chance to make a small thing right.

  Above me, the curtains in that same one room move, touched by the breeze. Nothing else. The only late-summer yellow in Mom’s garden is the thread-leaved coreopsis, which isn’t fleur-de-lis by any stretch, but
it’s a flag of blooming something, and now I pull them, these clumps of my mother’s flowers, from the plastic bags into which I planted them this morning—six clumps drawn up while Dad and Sammy had breakfast. There are earthworms from this morning’s dig in a squirm among the roots. There is the sweet deep chocolate of earth, mud worked into my fingernails. I dig out the crushed pachysandra. I edge in the yellow. The shadows change, and the day’s heat rises. My mother’s flowers stretch toward the sun.

  I run into Ida and Reny on my way back down the hill. “You’re getting yourself a late habit, aren’t you, Girl?” says Ida when she sees me.

  “Do you have a second?” I ask her, and she snorts.

  “A second? As if we haven’t already given you more than that. Go on and ask. We’ll see.”

  “Fess up.” Reny nods. He smiles his crooked-tooth smile. He claps his gloved-up hand onto my shoulder. “We’re all ears.”

  “How long have you two been with Miss Martine?” I ask. “If you don’t mind telling, that is.”

  Ida watches a dragonfly settle, does the math in her head, gives me an odd little look. “Right about forever,” she decides.

  “Before Old Olson was Old Olson,” Reny adds. “At least.”

  “I’m thinking we showed up here in seventy-four,” Ida continues, her whole face screwed into one big estimating wrinkle. “That about right, Reny? Left the Blue Hills, came this way. Long silver train with the windows down, dumped us off at Thirtieth Street Station. We were just married. We didn’t know much of anything.”

  “Want ad,” Reny says. “We were responding. Back then Old Olson was still a kid, maybe twenty. Most educated man I ever knew of, the autodidact version. Man would go around the garden citing Shakespeare, Descartes, Pascal, Mr. T. S. Eliot himself. You ever hear of T. S. Eliot?”

  “Girl ain’t stupid,” Ida says.

  “Wasn’t implying,” Reny answers.

  “Where’d he come from?” I ask.

  “Who?”

  “Old Olson.”

  “Well, from the womb, I guess,” Ida says. “I don’t know. He was the gardener. He needed help. We didn’t ask questions.”

  “We came to work,” Reny says. “He kept to himself.”

  “And always lived in the caretaker’s house?” I ask.

  “What’s that?” Ida says quickly, crossing her wide arms across her wide chest and staring at me hard, daring me to ask one further question. I fix the cap on my head and try to look like I haven’t noticed. I study her. I study Reny. They know something, and they’re not telling.

  “Old Olson. He’s always lived here? In that house?”

  “Far back as we’ve known him,” Reny says.

  “And that’s all we know,” Ida says, poking Reny in the shoulder. Subtle she’s not.

  He turns around, takes a long look at her wrinkled face, and turns back around to me. “Yup.” He nods. “About the whole length of our story.”

  “Why are you asking, anyway?” Ida demands.

  “Just curious,” I tell her.

  “Curious doesn’t do much for a garden,” she says. “Gardens are hard work and water. Dirt, some seeds. They don’t take a single benefit from people standing around talking.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Keep your smarts to your schoolwork,” Ida says. “You’ll be better off in the end.”

  I find Danny and Old Olson on the bridge above the watercress stream. A whole flock of white butterflies has lifted off just a little down breeze, and when all those white wings reach the bridge, they split off into fractions—some going under, on the stream’s side, and some rising above, skimming Danny’s shoulders, then rising into the shadows, toward the higher branches of the trees. Old Olson turns to watch, swiping the hat from his head. Danny turns, and the two of them stand there not seeing me, not talking to each other, just letting the wings go by. Time messes with the truth. Time puts cracks in things.

  Old Olson’s seen a million pairs of wings, I’m thinking, and every scrap of moon and everything that’s died and everything that’s grown and everything that’s died again, because that’s what happens in a garden; and in gardens, secrets happen, too. The hole isn’t the hole anymore. Danny is leaving in thirteen days. I haven’t seen Jessie or Ellen all summer. Ms. McDermott found a photograph, and in the photograph I found what I am sure is at least one truth in a pair of eyes.

  But I don’t know what is hidden in that trunk, or why it matters now to Miss Martine, who disappeared some fifty years ago, but not like my mom disappeared.

  What’s in that trunk? I wonder

  And why did Old Olson never choose to leave, to live beyond the garden?

  Standing here, there’s nothing I can know for absolute, hard fact except that summer’s ending and senior year’s about to begin, and afterward I’m going to college, and Dad will be there in that too-big house, cooking his too-big meals, staying up too late in the night, leaving two chairs empty, one for me and one for Mom, one flower in the bud vase on the table. How will I know if he’ll be okay? How can I stop the things that are left from vanishing?

  There’s a tree casting out big skirts of shade. I go to rest my back against it.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  There’s one more box of Local Lore, and that’s where I’m headed—to the library. It’s cool as a cave down here, and with the lights off it could be any time of day. I didn’t see Ms. McDermott when I pushed through the front door, didn’t pass her on the steps coming down, haven’t seen a soul in this basement. It’s me and me only, with box number seven. I jiggle the lid loose and all the old smells rise up—the yesterday smells, the trapped scrapbook smells, the smell of tarnish. Down there in the mix I find a sweet velvet box. The pink diamond, I think, eager and nervous, but the velvet box is empty.

  Beneath the box lies a folded scarf, and beneath the scarf a crusted jar of ink, and there are envelopes here, never addressed and never sent, a Montblanc pen. A leather change purse is a strange aquamarine color, but there is nothing to it, nothing inside. There’s a map and an old train schedule, and way at the bottom of the box a little brown book with boxy gold letters stamped across the front: Great Expectations. The book’s cover is soft as an old Bible’s, and the pages inside are onion-skin, rough and translucent at the same time. I flip to the middle before I thumb to the start, where the margins of Dickens’s novel are blued with the most immaculate handwriting, miniature cursive that I have to squint to read, and sometimes between the pages there are ribbons, newsprint scraps, squashed rosebuds, little dabs of painted color, tinted flower sketches, and now: another photograph, square with worn edges.

  It’s a fuzzy image—incredible fade—and on the very bottom someone has written a date in blue ink: May 20, 1954. The image itself is of a girl on horse-back—Miss Martine, I’m sure of it, for those are her eyes looking out from under that cap; that is her hair streaming down; that is a clump of iris in the crook of her arm. Down on the ground is a man, maybe mid-twenties, stroking the nose of the horse and looking into the face of Miss Martine. I flip the photo to the back, and in the same blue ink is a line that reads Olson and me, Large Junior Hunter Blue Ribbon Win, Dixon Oval, Devon Horse Show.

  Olson and me. My heart leaps up into my throat and flips and twists like it’s trying to wing free, and now I turn the photo faceup again and study the man on the ground, the man with Miss Martine, whose chiseled-out jaw is the same jaw I’ve seen in the garden. It’s the shoulders that aren’t the same, the build of the body, the equestrian frame. You can always tell two people in love. This is Miss Martine, and her lover. This is Miss Martine, and her fleurs-de-lis. Her way out. Her escape. It is late May 1954. She is still alive in the world.

  I thrust the lid back on the box, keep the photo with me. I hurry from the room and up the steps, and out onto the main floor of the library, where Ms. McDermott is at the Xerox machine, copying pages from some huge encyclopedia. Her turquoise blouse has its own stitched belt. She wears an immaculate
white skirt, a pair of silver sandals, purple toenail polish.

  “Hey,” I say, and she turns, and I say “Hey” again, and she says, “What’s up?” and I tell her I’ve found something, a photo, another date, a name. “Do you still have that microfilm handy?” I ask her. “Main Line Now, 1954?”

  “Easily found,” she says.

  “Do you have a minute to help me?”

  “Of course.” And she leaves the encyclopedia right where it is, facedown on the copier glass. She disappears, returns with the cassette box in one hand, and now I’m hurrying beside her to the reader. “What are we looking for?” she asks me.

  “May twentieth,” I say. “The Devon Horse Show. Large Junior Hunter Division. A guy named Olson.”

  “First name or last name?”

  “Don’t know that.”

  “What do you know?”

  “This,” I say, producing the photo.

  “Oh my goodness,” she says, taking it in for a long time. And then she sighs, and I know that whatever sadness she feels is not just about the girl and her horseman. It’s about love and what can happen to it, about what she too has lost.

  It feels like a long time passes before I release the film from its reader and return it to Ms. McDermott, who sits at the circulation desk and watches me approach—her eyebrows up, her eyes full of questions. “Well?” she asks, and I say, “His name was Olson. A first name, not a last name. His last name was Long.”