The Ghost in the House

by Sara O'Leary

  When Alec was first offered the job at the Sun, I wasn’t sure I was ready to leave the life we had built in Montreal. I was afraid to jinx what we had. But when Mira told me this house was for sale, it felt serendipitous—like it was time to come home.

  Alec is sitting on the couch, reading a book and eating a bowl of pistachios. I’ve never seen him eat pistachios. Maybe I assumed things about him for so long that they became as good as true. Like not eating pistachios. Like not being attracted to blondes. I sit down beside him, and he shudders. I inch away.

  I wonder if this is now as close as I will ever get to him.

  Why can he not see me when Dee can? If it had to be anyone, it should have been him.

  Janet comes in and sits between us on the couch. I can get a good look at her now. She is pretty rather than beautiful. Her features are slightly too regular. Her hair is a pale blonde with streaks of paler blonde. It looks expensive.

  She looks nothing like me, and I’m surprised to find that this hurts.

  I move nearer to her to see if I can make her shiver, and she does. But then she snuggles into Alec’s side and gives—honest to God—a contented sigh. He looks at her in a way that was only ever for me.

  I’m back at the piano, although not actually on it this time. I do love this piano. It’s a beautiful thing. A Steinway baby grand. Mahogany. I take pleasure in looking at it. I was always going to take lessons but never did. Alec bought me songbooks and I learned to pick out a song or two in a way that would have been admirable if I’d been in grade school but was somewhat underwhelming given I was a grown woman. You have to be patient, he would tell me.

  But I couldn’t.

  I’m listening for the front door to open, signalling Alec’s return from work, but instead I hear Dee roaming from room to room and calling my name. This must mean she’s the only one in the house.

  “Fay,” she calls in her thin voice. “Fay, come out and play!” She laughs.

  She comes around the corner and sees me sitting at the piano.

  “There you are,” she says.

  “I was waiting for you to get home,” I lie.

  She sits down beside me on the piano bench. Hammers a key with one finger. “Why do you think you can see me when Alec can’t?” I ask, resisting the urge to slap her hand away. My poor piano.

  “How should I know?” she says.

  I get up, stand at the front window and look out at the street. Think of my child self looking in.

  Dee and Alec are sitting in the kitchen, eating cinnamon buns. He buys them from the place up the road called Grounds for Coffee. I always thought it was a funny name.

  “Don’t tell your mother I’m ruining your supper,” Alec says.

  “I will,” she says.

  Dee is smiling. She looks like a different child when she is smiling. It’s Alec bringing this out in her. He’s always had a light he could shine on people. A sort of heightened attentiveness. He would have been a good parent. I’m sad to realize that he’s always had this in him. I wonder if the same could have been true of me.

  Dee looks up and sees me and her expression changes. She has been caught being happy in spite of herself. She pushes her plate away from her. Alec looks at her with concern.

  “I was thinking maybe we could all watch something together later,” he says. “You, your mother, me.”

  “Do you like ghost stories?” Dee asks him.

  “Films, you mean?” asks Alec.

  I think about a long-ago evening spent curled up in bed, watching that old black-and-white comedy with the crazy medium. What was her name?

  “No, I mean do you like real-life ghost stories,” she says. I step forward so as better to see Alec’s face. “Do you believe people can come back from the dead?” she asks.

  “Revenants?” asks Alec.

  “No, ghosts. Do you believe in ghosts?”

  She looks at Alec. He looks down into his coffee cup as though he might find the answer there.

  “What if it can happen? What if the dead can come back?”

  Alec is silent.

  “Well, what if they could? Would you want her to? Your first wife?”

  This makes me reel. First wife.

  “Dee,” he says gently.

  “What?” She crosses her arms in front of her. Waits.

  “I’m married to your mother now. We’re very happy.”

  He looks closely at her, trying to gauge her reaction. Probably trying to understand where this whole line of questioning has come from.

  She looks up at me, raising her eyebrows. “But what if your real wife came back?” I feel a surge of fondness when she says this. I nod approvingly.

  “Dee,” says Alec. He reaches out and takes her hands in his so that she is forced to look him in the eye. “I am not going anywhere.”

  I’m in the attic. The madwoman in the attic. I sit down on the bed and look around me. I guess this must be a guest room now. This was the most cluttered room in the house and now there’s just a bed and an enormous dresser, and one of those cheval mirrors with a blanket thrown over it. The furniture all looks brand new and a bit hotel-ish.

  I’ve been thinking about those Kübler-Ross stages of dying: anger, denial, bargaining, depression…I’m trying to work out where I am so I can tell how far I have to go. I think I’m stuck on anger. Anger that my life has been cut short. All the things I’d been waiting for have been stolen from me. I won’t grow old with Alec. We’ll never have a child. But there were five, though, in that film All That Jazz. Five stages and I can only remember four. Anger, denial, bargaining, depression…I search my memory but I just can’t remember the fifth.

  I’m standing in the doorway, deciding where to sit. The pub is half empty. I came on a whim, with an hour to kill before my meeting at the gallery on the other side of the street. My eye is drawn to a man on the far side of the room sitting at a table by himself. He’s older than me, I think, and he’s handsome. There’s something distinguished about him, but also a little rugged. His dark curly hair looks like it’s trying to escape his head. His beard is dark, reddish, and full. He’s reading an old, cloth-bound book. I can see the gold lettering on the cover. The Gist of Swedenborg. He has a half-empty pint of Guinness in front of him, the foam clinging to the sides of the glass.

  He looks up and catches my eye. He smiles, and I smile back. Is there a word for something like déjà vu, but for a person? A person you don’t know but feel you know or must have known. I feel this pressing need to wrap his curls around my fingers. It’s a kind of pleasant ache.

  There is something about this moment, the way it thrums with energy. I try to look away from him and find that I can’t. He mouths the word hello. Inclines his head toward the seat across the table from him. I do have an hour to kill, and nothing to lose. I sit at his table, directly across from him. His eyes are clear and hazel. A starburst of gold encircles his pupils.

  And then I am here. In the present. And I remember. Not “dying.” It wasn’t the five stages of dying, it was the five stages of grief. I may have reached bargaining. I just want one more day.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  DO ALL GHOSTS get trapped in the houses where they last lived? Have I been here all this time, or was I somewhere else? I suppose home is where I would come, given the choice. But what happens if your house is demolished? Is Vancouver now populated by homeless ghosts?

  My father would be younger than me now. How strange. I was thirteen when he died; he was thirty-five. Is he still in our old house? Did I miss out on seeing him all those years?

  My father was a playwright and my mother an actress. This was the official version. My mother had stopped acting when she got pregnant with Vicki, and my father was a sometime landscaper, housepainter and handyman, a jack of all trades and master of none. My mother was certain that my father was going to hav
e some great breakthrough, that all their debts would be paid off and everything would be fine.

  Instead, he died, and my mother seemed to go to bed for about a year. And after that, she went through the motions, cleaning houses, providing for Vicki and me however she could. And then, a few years later, caring for her sick mother. It was only after she retired, living in the smallest apartment in the world, filling her time with books and walks, that I realized she was finally happy.

  I never thought of her as being brave for living through that death. At the time it felt like something that was happening only to me, my father dead, my mother gone. I resented her. I never thought about her being with him, about her seeing him go. Not until the time I accidentally midwifed a death.

  It was the holiday Monday at the start of September. Labour Day. I wasn’t supposed to be working. I’d given my cell number to a few of my favourite clients—even though Mira had warned me not to—and Marjorie had called to ask me to tea.

  We’d been hired initially by Marjorie’s nephew. He’d been in the process of moving her into an apartment, and he’d wanted us to clear all the extra stuff out of her house. Anything that could be of value, he’d asked us to set aside so it could be appraised. Marjorie knew what was valuable, but she refused to say. The only items she wanted to hold on to were those that had belonged to her son. He died when he was nineteen and she’d never gotten over it. It seemed so sad to me that this boy had lived and died and she was the only one left to remember him. She gave me a photo of him on a motorcycle and I put it in my wallet and kept it there after she was gone. Like I’d inherited the duty of remembering from her.

  We were in Marjorie’s new, tiny apartment having tea when she died. I’d brought over a Sara Lee pound cake because she had recently told me how much she’d been craving one. I almost hadn’t gone to pick it up for her, thinking I’d leave it for next time, but she’d sounded so low on the phone. I went into the kitchen to slice it, and when I got back to the living room Marjorie was slouched in her chair, her chin resting on her chest.

  I crouched beside her and slipped my hand into hers. It was cold. Then, suddenly, it gripped mine.

  “Marjorie?” I said. “I’m here.” Her eyes were glazed and unseeing. Her grip relaxed.

  And she was gone. I felt her go. Felt that I was alone.

  All I want is to be with Alec.

  “I want us to be together,” he says. I can feel his breath tickling the little hairs at the back of my neck just before he kisses me there.

  “We are together,” I say. The two of us have spent all the nights and most of the days of this past week in this single room, keeping out the winter chill by doing things furtively underneath the quilt his grandmother made even though we do not feel the least bit furtive about what we are doing. Last night I woke in the dark and we were holding hands like little children. Like we’d been lost in the woods and then found each other.

  Alec has finally gone out for supplies and I have been waiting for his return.

  “You know what I mean,” he says. I can smell the coffee he has brought home for me and beneath that the sharp bite of the cold outside air and the smell of cigarettes on his clothes. He presses the length of himself up against me through the quilt I am wrapped in. I can smell his own smell underneath all the others he has brought in with him. I sip my too-sweet coffee.

  We have been talking about marriage. About children and the future. I’ve been telling him I’m not ready and he’s been telling me that he is ready enough for the both of us.

  “Just say yes,” he says. “Say yes to everything.”

  I lift the blanket so that he can snuggle in beside me. “Why do you have so many clothes on?” I ask. And he laughs.

  What I wouldn’t give to return to that moment. To stay there.

  Dee got sent home from school today. She was caught skipping class and given a three-day suspension.

  “I need you to sign my suspension letter,” she says.

  “Doesn’t your mother need to do that?” I am stalling. I don’t know whether I can write on paper. I haven’t thought to try.

  “Yeah, but to get her to sign it I’d have to tell her what happened.”

  “You should tell her.”

  “I’m not telling her. Just sign the thing for me.”

  “I’m not signing it.”

  She glares at me.

  Janet Whyte, she writes in a fat, girlish script.

  I wince, like I’ve fallen on something sharp unexpectedly.

  “She took his name?”

  “D’uh,” says Dee. “They’re married.”

  “Did you change your name?” I ask.

  “Why would I? Nothing to do with me.”

  I kept my own name because I liked it, and used to tease Alec that “Mrs. Whyte” sounded like a character in Clue. But now it seems I left a vacancy for someone else to step into.

  Dee is folding up the letter and putting it in her binder. I see she’s doodled skulls and flowers all over the inside cover. Half in love with death like all the sweet young romantics.

  “They don’t have anything in common,” she says. “I don’t even know what they’re doing together.”

  I know what they’re doing together at least some of the time. Think about something else.

  She holds out a deck of cards to me. I shake my head.

  Dee absentmindedly scratches beneath her sleeve.

  Apparently Janet doesn’t know anything about the cutting. I can’t see how this is possible, even if the child does wear her sleeves hanging down over her hands most of the time.

  “Why do you do it?”

  “Do what?” Dee asks, looking up from her cards. She is laying out a game of solitaire.

  “That thing I’m not supposed to mention.”

  She doesn’t say anything for a long time. I wait. Red queen on black king, black nine on red ten.

  “I don’t know.” She pulls down her sleeve and pokes her thumb through a hole in the seam. “Why are you keeping on at me about it?”

  Her pointy little shoulders are constantly drawn up in a defensive stance. I wish I could put my hands on them and press down.

  I give her what I hope is a reassuring smile.

  “But why did you do it to begin with?”

  “I thought it might help,” she says.

  And after that she won’t say any more. We both watch the cards as she turns them over and slides them into place, aligning them into something like families.

  I’m in the study listening to Alec and Janet talking in the living room. They’re making plans.

  “I think you should do it,” says Janet.

  “I’m not old enough,” says Alec. “And I’m too old. I’m in-between.”

  Janet laughs throatily. “Take the money. You’re young. Young enough to take a chance.”

  I wonder if they’re offering another buy-out at the newspaper. We had talked about this. About Alec taking the money, walking away from that nine-to-five. All the equity in the house. Freedom. But we never did it. I didn’t think it was what Alec wanted.

  “It’s risky,” says Alec.

  “Not really. I’m making good money. We’d be fine. You could do what you like. Get away from that toxic atmosphere.”

  Janet has one of those raspy Lauren Bacall, you-know-how-to-whistle voices, the kind I tried to cultivate as a teenager.

  “You could write your book,” she says. “Open a bookshop. Do something for you.”

  “A bookshop?” asks Alec. He sounds bemused but not entirely resistant.

  Alec will keep on growing and changing, learning new things and going new places, and I will stay just as I am. I’ll become a memory that is tied to one part of his life. His past.

  “Do it,” says Janet. “Do it, do it.”

  And then the ta
lking stops.

  I’m lying in bed, in our bed, and thinking about how for the first time in my life I am really happy to be living in this body. Strange to think of this hidden potential lurking inside me all these years. I picture a long row of children like Matryoshka dolls diminishing in size. And then I think of myself inside the house like a doll inside a larger doll. I love this house. The life that Alec and I are going to have together—the family we will make together—is all contained in this house. Like potential energy stored up and waiting for us.

  “Fay? Where are you? Fay?”

  It’s Alec’s voice. His way of saying my name like he is savouring the shape of it in his mouth. I don’t answer right away so he will say it again. I can’t wait to tell him about the child we are going to have.

  “Fay?” Louder this time.

  “Here,” I call. “I’m here, Alec. Upstairs.”

  I can still feel how my body felt then. All that love. All the infinite possibilities.

  Dee and I are playing double solitaire. She says handling the cards will be good practice for me. I’ll do just about anything for company. Dee may not be mine but right now she’s all I have. And because she’s acting as though all of this—a girl and a ghost meeting up to play cards—is normal, now I do as well.

  “Why do you think only you can see me, Dee? Can you see other ghosts?”

  “Yes. I have psychotic powers.” She makes a face. Ha, she says. Ha-ha-ha.

  I put my cards down. “Be serious.”

  “Oh, how should I know,” says Dee. “Maybe you have to be trying to see a ghost before you can? Otherwise wouldn’t they be everywhere? All the time?”

  “Were you trying? But you didn’t know me. Do you think you brought me back?”