by Sonya Taaffe
Evelyn was blowing his nose one last time, fussily as an actor and his shoulders still drawn with real pain; she thought nonsensically of the feel of his hair under her hand, how fine it had looked, windblown, and knew she could not move to touch him, then or ever. “All right,” Delia said, and again, as if she were the one with her head bowed, “all right.” The last moment she could turn away, run as fast and as far as a ghost out of the world; she swung her leg over the chair, tightened her hands among coins and Kleenex in her pockets and felt no comfort in them, no talismans. Evelyn watched her unsmiling, waiting. “We’re going to Providence.”
**
“Hounds of Love” was playing on WBRU as Delia pulled into the driveway where she had once backed into a washing machine— the Futureheads with their half-yodeled vocals and bouncy guitars, not Kate Bush and the invocation of M.R. James, but the engine still died on I’ve always been a coward and she could not tell whether the non-look Evelyn gave her as he stretched his legs like anyone corporeal enough for a slight cramp was a deadpan or only his usual guarded disinterest, which might have been terror all along. All night, he had huddled in his armchair as if within a charmed circle while Delia paced and turned pages in her croupier’s slope of light, swallowing the tiredness she could not afford to yield to like a Charon’s coin of blood; he offered his bed with such fine-tipped courtesy that she slept on the couch, shrugged under her jacket and Evelyn’s old unraveling sweater with its smell of doused fires, and woke in the heron-colored dawn to find him watching her, wondering what he had not done while she dreamed of steam condensing down the sides of a claw-footed tub and the archaeologist who appeared sometimes around the setting of Orion, her breast stitched across with the trackmarks of bullets, one hand still clenched on some blunt and broken nub of stone Delia could never quite see. There were ghosts drawn to her that kept their distance, shy as cats, prowling until they trusted her: some never had. Evelyn on the far side of the driveway, holding the oar like an umbrella with his Baedeker under his arm, was looking up at their destination as skeptically as though he had heard his cue. Delicately, so that she could not miss the quotation marks around the word, he said, “Have we come home?”
The last time she had stood on the narrow strip of asphalt between the four-bay house on Ann Street and the newer, taller Victorian with its curlicued eaves, the driveway had lumped underfoot with old frost heaves and frecklings of tarpaper like leaf-mold, shed from the gambrel roof with every storm or strong wind; the house itself had faded from the sunflower yellow of her childhood to tiger-stripes of sallow parchment, as dull as the tooth-colored trim. A tangle of wires that looked more than anything like an eviscerated birdcage coiled rustily behind a wood-sided station wagon, a child’s incongruous red plastic sled leaned up between the recycling bins. She had slipped the lock on the basement door and come out with a slow cold knotted in her back that took days to fade. Sometime in the years since then, someone who was not her father had resealed the driveway, reshingled the roof and painted the quarter-sawn clapboards fresh dove-grey and the trim white as frosting, though the windows looked the same century-flawed glass within their neat slats of shutters. She had pressed her fingers against those cold lights in winter, imagining she could feel time seeping as slowly under her touch as melting ice.
“As much as we’re going to.” She knew she sounded distracted, rounding the house with Evelyn a few reluctant steps behind. The only things crunching under her boots were green and white tree-blossom, small flowers and twigs from blustery New England. “My mother had the place on the market even before the divorce went through. It’s old enough, she could have gotten it registered as a historic house or something, but I don’t think anyone really cared by then. It was cheap-ass student digs for a while, then the new owner flipped it; I didn’t really keep track. I don’t know who lives in either unit now….” Down the concrete steps to the basement, the door presented a similarly neatened face, but she recognized its hardware, the little give in the latch when she pulled on it, feeling the bolt in the frame. The knob was verdigris-rimmed under her hand, old brass under tree-ring layers of paint. In genuine surprise, she said, “They never changed this lock.”
“Breaking and entering.” Evelyn sniffed slightly, pushing up his glasses; he sounded unconvincingly disapproving, a parody of the strait-laced traveling companion. Still shaky and silent as he locked up his own house in the bright, head-bending sun, he had tried to clean himself up at the rest stop in Westwood, emerging from the men’s room with his hair wet-flattened and his cheekbones flushed from scouring with paper towels, hands tight in the pockets of his windbreaker as he walked past Delia to the car. At least he had put on shoes before leaving, black sneakers pulled on over socks he found while Delia tried not to hover around the front door and the boat bumped at the bottom of the steps, its sides reflecting little wind-frisked lines of sun. He was easiest when she thought of him as a character, long-sufferingly familiar enough to snipe at—suit yourself, you cut-rate Charon—walk through walls if you want to, but I need doors! She could not afford it; not even if he were alive.
“It’s worked for me so far,” she said mildly, and showed him the door swinging open, the darkness and the laundry-scented dust beyond.
—hiding in the dark, hiding in the street—
In the moments it took her vision to fade in from tree-blocked noon to cobweb-soaked panes and the light switch on the far side of the basement, she was already tallying the changes: two new models of washer-dryer, the filing cabinets gone, some dry-stalked, seed-nodding plant split up through a missing square in the cement like a vase of Japanese lanterns, a pair of sawhorses and cans of stain and varnish where her father had once polished his ’65 Yamaha while she watched from the basement stairs, drinking cranberry juice from a jam-jar glass. Something that looked a great deal like a giant plush chameleon, squashed with rolls of toilet paper into the topmost shelf over the sink. A laundry hamper the solid blue of Play-Doh, half full of clothes someone had evidently removed from the dryer to make room for their own wash. She did not know if she was hoping it had been moved, thrown out, lost to gentrification; she stepped around a sun-warped white table and chairs, flyspecked lawn furniture no one in her family had ever owned, and felt her pulse jerk in her throat so quickly she could not tell if it was relief or something less painful. Wedged against the cinderblocks behind the boiler, its greenish upholstery even more of a mildew nest than the last time she had tried not to breathe near it, after all these years was still the couch she had slept afternoons on, tucked her feet into the cushions for reading, watched television at an angle with her head resting on a padded arm, even tried once to make out with a girl from Federal Hill, both of them so twitchy at every creak and shift of house-beams that might have been Delia’s mother coming home that they fled eventually to Hope Street and held hands under the table, drinking too much coffee, like rebels in the French New Wave.
Clearly and curiously, from the farther end of the couch, her sister said, “Dee?”
She heard Evelyn’s tight intake of breath behind her; she did not have time for his surprise or his pretense, as if a dead man could be startled into needing air. She knew what he was seeing, pulling itself upright on the damp-spotted cushions with an adolescent’s mixture of impulsive grace and awkward growing bones: herself at nearly fourteen, a doppelgänger more than half a lifetime gone and fading like a Polaroid. She had never worn those heavy-pocketed cargo pants, that T-shirt with its cracking red-and-white silkscreen BEWARE OF GOD; even in her thrash years, never styled her hair so shock-black, stripped of any brass or blue highlight and jagged out like an angry marker scrawl. Evelyn had never seen them standing together, would not know that Delia had always been the taller by an intermittent inch, not once the thinner of the two. He would not need a yearbook to turn from one to the other and recognize the same backswept brows, the same dark, freckled skin with its grain of acne or faint scars, a softer curve of Delia’s mouth in the face of t
he girl gazing back at them from under the water pipes.
From elbow to heel of her small, hard-callused hands, her wrists were raked with silver like the back-shine of a mirror, corpse-candles ribboning her bloodless flesh.
—and of what was following me.
Delia let out her breath, as consciously as she had taken one that tasted of salt breeze and warming sun, green things pushing up and rotting and swayed by the tide. Her voice only stuck a little. She had been less frightened then. “Hey, Ari.”
“You’re starting to look like Mom. That’s fucked up.” The ghost of Aurelia Tabor rested her arm across one knee, slit wrist dangling carelessly open. It had taken Delia years to get used to her conversation, the familiar voice winding up through the nights when Delia could not sleep: not only that she spoke, but that she remembered. She tilted her chin like a command, too cool to look curious. “Who’s the tourist?”
“His name’s Evelyn.” Saying the words, even meaning them, they felt absurdly naïve. “He’s here to help.”
She knew Ari’s face would harden at that: a mistrustful teenager, nearly twenty years dead and still cynical. “Oh, really? Is that why he looks so fucking scared?”
“You would, too, if you were standing in this basement.”
“Like you would know.”
Stupid, if she had expected her sister’s contempt not to focus her way; it was there in her voice, immediate and vicious. “You ran from here. You ran from me,” and Delia had known ghosts that fought her with everything from paralyzing despair to collapsing ceilings, but never another that got so instantly and hotly beneath her skin, scratching off scars from the inside. Nothing she could do right, nothing she could help. No one she could ever make herself over into without that crack running through her, that broken place ghosts could whisper through, or just guilt. Even braced for it, she felt it swamp her like a foundering wave, drowning by exhaustion; she made herself not cringe, not look away, grinding out, “Jesus, Ari, you have no idea—”
From behind her shoulder, Evelyn laughed once, sharp as piano wire.
“Two of you. Oh, God help me. I should have known.”
He sounded almost merry, his unplaceable accent coming and going between the words. When Delia risked a glance away from her sister, he was smiling without any humor at all, wave-worn oar and travel guide in his hands like a saint of sea voyages—not exactly the world’s greatest reality check, but she had known him for a day and a half, not since before she could read, and the house that had once been hers scared him only as much as everything else. Silent as if they had shocked her, Ari’s ghost was staring at both of them, fingers tracing her cut-frilled wrist as if reading herself comfort in Braille, younger than Delia had ever thought she looked when it was the two of them against Nathan Bishop and the world.
“I’m here now, all right?” she said with a gentleness she did not feel, toward either of them at that moment, or herself. “I made a promise. I don’t intend to break it. That’s what I’m doing here. I think you have to trust me if this is going to work.”
Not quite under his breath, Evelyn muttered, “I don’t think so,” and she did not waste time on hushing him. Ari, digging nails into her own skin now as if she could stick the long-severed flesh back together, twist and seal herself like clay or just tear the mistake out, was barely audible even so.
“It hurts, Dee. It really fucking hurts.”
She could feel those angular shoulders within the circle of her arms, if her sister’s ghost would let herself be held; it would hurt like iron in a fairy tale and Delia would bear it, but it would change nothing. She said instead, with very little hope that she sounded less weary than she felt, “Come on over, boatman,” and when she saw how suddenly still Evelyn went, not quite refusing, “You’ll be all right if you stick close to me.”
“I very much doubt that.” But he was already crossing to meet her, laying the Baedeker down on the CD-stacked hutch of a pinewood desk she had never written at; already holding out the oar as if he trusted her with it, and she took it from him as if she felt the same.
**
In dream after dream, Delia had sent her sister on with her blood, with her shadow, with her singing, with her life, with beckoning ghosts of grandparents or best-loved musicians, with nothing more than a kiss that burned like dry ice. In none of them had she imagined a dead man for an audience, the oar with its entangling skeins of past. Out of Evelyn’s hands, it still felt as plain as it looked—a museum piece no one should take to sea, no warmer or colder than her sweating hands or the basement’s musty air—but the longer she held the dune-grey wood, the more images she felt come absently to mind, blooming around her thoughts like dreams on the edge of sleep: pomegranate groves, white manes tossing, dark water bubbling around pale rocks, a field of poppies bending so slowly under the wind, she could have believed them underwater, crepe-red petals all turning to show their seed-centers like a heart parting under a knife. Ghosts hummed and flickered where she could not see them, static on a channel she could not tune. Just once, she looked across at Evelyn, eyes closed, hugging himself with his arms as if he were the one around whom the air had sunk to breath-stealing abyssal cold, and he was a boy with straight-winged brows and a sweet broad mouth, bleeding around the edges like lens flare. Her sister wavered like a photograph under a tap, never drained to silver and never swirled away. She stopped singing when she realized it was dark beyond the basement windows: she could not tell if it meant night. No one had come down to retrieve their laundry or investigate the noise. At one point she had thought to wonder if they were even still in a basement anymore, but she did not think it mattered; they were all still there, all three of them: even magic had not worked.
She left the oar on the desk while she stretched, both hands in the aching small of her back. There was a curdled smell in her nostrils, like rotting windfalls or a surfeit of May blossom; she kept feeling she should see something on fire, but there was only Ari slumped over her arm of the couch like a shipwreck survivor clinging to her last spar, her face hidden in mold-whitened twill and the dead light of her arms. Evelyn had sagged down against the wall, all lanky angles when he folded up: head fallen back, mouth open, like an exhausted runner. Down among the dead, the wide-eyed and the legless…. Delia shook the song out of her head: Ari had never been alive to hear it. Her voice was sandy with strain. “Evelyn. Why?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know why you think I know.” She could not tell if he was stonewalling her or merely as near the end of his rope as he looked; nothing in the toneless voice told her. “You asked for it. I gave it to you. There’s an end to our agreement.”
“It kept your ghosts off. Does it only work for you?”
“I wish it did.” Now he looked at her, not straight on; not smiling. The bruises on his face were greening slightly, healing faster than the scratches on her hands. “You can give it back to me now.”
A slow beat that was not surprise went through her, soundless as space. Her sister’s shoulders lifted and dropped very slightly, without raising her head. Delia whispered, “You godforsaken coward.”
His mouth cracked a little; none of them had the strength to shout. “Whatever you think of me, don’t imagine it can hurt more than anything else you’ve done. If I’m a cut-rate Charon, you’re not much of an Orpheus. What do you even want from her? From this place? I know what you want from me, that’s been plain enough, but I don’t think you’ve a very clear idea of the rest. Leave her alone, for God’s pity, let her go. Let me go,” and she could hear the next sentence as coolly as a nightmare, the voice of her anger that sounded like spiteful Ari, despising her for even having thought to try, Go back to your dead who want you. Rustling around her like a wind of broken leaves, half-remembered deaths banging against her moth-light, all but the one she wanted. Interrupting it, she heard her own voice slapping back from the glare-lit cement as flatly as a blow: too harsh for her scoured throat and she had stopped noticing.
“Go, then—I really don’t care anymore. You wanted to come along on this road trip, I didn’t stop you, but you are not helping and you are not going to make me lie to her, do you understand?” As if Ari were the child between them, their sotto voce and her silence the fiction that if nobody yelled, nothing they said could wake her; she knew those nights, years of them, and still her voice scratched on, cutting at Evelyn with everything she had known not to say: as if there were only one way to speak in this house and everything she had ever said in it wrong. “Go back north, if you don’t want to be here. Go back to your marshes. Watch the sun come up. Do whatever dead hermits do, read your classics and pretend you never died. At least you can.”
Very tightly, the dead man said, “You know it doesn’t work that way.”
“How does it work, then? How does it actually work? You walk out that door and go to hell, and I’m supposed to feel sorry enough to stop you? Save you?”
“Jesus God!” His voice snapped upward so breathlessly, it would have been laughter if she had not seen his face. One hand made a helpless, half-finished gesture; abandoned it like words. “Save me? Is that what you think you can do? What are you playing at? Queen of the ghosts—Hekate watching the ways, earth-shaking all-important Ari Tabor—”
