The Ghost in the House

by Sara O'Leary

  I pull my hair forward so I can see the ends. The light shines through so that each strand sort of glows and even the split ends are beautiful, like some strange insect universe seen through a microscope. My mouth is dry, and I think of getting up to get something to drink. I picture myself standing up and walking to the kitchen and opening the fridge. There is orange juice in there, and a jug of filtered water that will be beautifully cold and clear. I can’t think of anything better. But I remain where I am. I have this funny feeling that I am suspended in this moment in the same way that the specks of dust are suspended in the air. If I move, everything may suddenly change. I look out the window at the green world there and can’t imagine being anywhere but here.

  I seem to have fallen asleep on the carpet. I can feel the bristles of the woollen nap digging into my cheek and know I will have a mark there that will take all day to fade. I will go to class looking like someone who has been struck or had an accident. I will look like someone that something has happened to. Go to class? Do I have to go to class today? For a moment I have a strong feeling of déjà vu, but I shake it off. I need to have a shower and clear my head if I am going to finish writing the essay I was meant to be writing last night. The essay about…the one on the sources of…It’s so strange. I can’t remember at all.

  I pick up the dishes I left sitting on the table last night and carry them out to the sink. My mother would be scandalized that I went to bed without doing my dishes. Of course, there are many things I do that would scandalize her. At least some of them I do because they would scandalize her.

  I think about the boy I stood up. I’d never intended to go. He was sweet and funny, but you could look at him now and realize that in twenty years he would still be exactly the same. Playing his guitar in little cafés. Working some joe job to pay the rent. Always making romantic little picnics to be eaten in bed or on a beach somewhere because he never had the price of a restaurant meal. Not the kind of boy it made any sense at all to fall in love with. Not with his golden curls or his warm laugh or the way he looked at you, or any of it.

  I am tiring of living in the present tense. I am thinking about the future—about making plans and meeting someone and making a life. I am thinking of a house as a home and trying to picture myself there. I wake up in my narrow little bed and immediately feel something is wrong. Am I late? Was I supposed to be somewhere?

  I sit up and look around. There are clothes strewn around the room and stacks of books tottering on every flat surface. I am wearing a t-shirt that has the name of my high school on it. I had to buy it for gym class but now for some reason, I have started liking it in equal proportion to how much I hated it then. I try to work out what this says about me. Is this nostalgia? Surely I’m too young. I’m only—

  A voice in my head tells me that this is not real. This is not my life. I’ve been here for days and days now. I’ve had meals and watched movies and talked on the phone for hours and hours. I used to do that. I know that I am not really twenty. That I don’t belong here. But it is tempting to stay. To just start again. To be twenty and then twenty-one and then twenty-two and so on. Then to meet Alec again for the first time. To be young. To be alive. I died. I don’t belong here. This is not real.

  Yesterday’s half-consumed cup of morning coffee is still on the bedside table. I experimentally sip at it. I can swallow. I can taste. Somehow I am back in this body. Alive. The coffee is cold and bitter and possibly more delicious than I could ever imagine. For the past number of days, I have been living and simply taking everything for granted. I truly am young again. Now I want it all. I want to eat and bathe and have torrid, sweaty sex. I want to eat a fig. I’m overcome with a sick feeling of longing mixed with self-pity. I feel my skin begin to prickle like at the beginning of a fever. I lie down and close my eyes and let the tears run down into my ears. I luxuriate in feeling sorry for myself.

  Oh lord, that was frightening. I look around to be sure I am here. That I am me. Me now. Dead me instead of past me. That was like being caught in some very comfortable web. I could have stayed forever. Could I have stayed forever?

  I tell myself to stay in the present but instead I give in to the temptation to relive nights out with friends and nights in with Alec. I visit days from early in our relationship all muddled in with days from when we knew each other better than any other person on the planet. There are days I visit more than once. I return again and again to a night we slept on quilts laid on the conservatory floor, listening to the rain against the glass. I go dancing with him in late-night Montreal clubs and walk home with him in Montreal dawns.

  I go back and spend time with everyone I’ve ever loved: my parents, my sister, Gran. I seem to be able to go anywhere—revisit any moment from the life I lived. I go canoeing with my father. I listen to him read to me from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I go picking blackberries with my mother. A long, slow afternoon where we barely speak to each other and yet are never more than an arm’s length apart. I seem to be able to stay for longer and longer inside a memory, but I am sluggish when I return.

  I can go anywhere that I have already been. I can have that time back again. But then, after spending a languid afternoon sometime at the end of the twentieth century drinking whisky macs in a posh hotel room with Alec, I try to walk through a wall and instead of reappearing in the cellar as I expect to, I suddenly am nowhere.

  It is cold and dark wherever this is, and I have to resist the temptation to scream because it would frighten me even more to hear my voice in this non-place.

  I put my hands out in front of me and try to move forward to see if there is a wall or door or anything at all, but there is just the feeling of dark as absence and I have to pull my hands up to my face quickly to be certain they are still there.

  I close my eyes and wish I were dead.

  Then I open them again and I am in the study and the light from the window dappling the gleaming oak surface of Alec’s desk is almost enough to make me weep because it is so real.

  I tell myself that I shouldn’t go memory surfing again. That it is dangerous. That I could end up in the dark woods. But like a wilful teenager, I refuse to listen. I want to be back to when we were together. When we are happy. I go back to the old days once more because despite the danger, I can’t stop myself from revisiting the wonderful time when Alec and I were new.

  The windows are all open and the apartment is sweltering. I can hear the children from next door playing in the yard. A ball thumps repeatedly against a wall and I feel like my heart is slowing down to match the regular sound of rubber thwacking against brick.

  There is no sign of Alec. I’m lying in our bed wearing one of his undershirts and a pair of his boxers. Anything more than that sticks to my skin and makes me feel like screaming. Vancouver is never hot like this. I’m sorry I ever left.

  Last night was bad. I got mad at Alec for talking to a woman at the party and stormed off. I thought he’d follow me and he didn’t and now it’s morning and he’s still not here.

  I think it was her height and her red hair and the shape of her hands that unnerved me. I shouldn’t have told him she looked like a witch. It was certainly true, and the sort of thing Alec would have laughed at if we’d been getting along—but we weren’t getting along, and he said I was being immature. And he was right.

  Is he going to leave me? Is he going to run away with the witch who can talk about all those great Russian novels when I can’t even say Dostoevsky out loud for fear of getting it wrong?

  This tiny room is making me feel crazy. Alec says to think of it like an Elizabethan box bed. Box room, box bed, boxed in. It’s fine when we are in here together. I do like this apartment. The stained-glass windows in the living room are the nicest bit. I always think that if you were outside looking in then it would seem perfect. Where is he?

  He’s never stayed away all night before. What if he never comes back? What if something
has happened to him?

  And then I am back. Here. Now. I can feel all the agony of that day but I’d forgotten all about it years ago. It was nothing. Alec came home. We made up. But thinking about how bereft I felt in that moment leaves me almost grateful to be the one who has died. I don’t want to go back there.

  I remain hidden. Watch the three of them playing family. He is sad and broken and she doesn’t know why, but she knows that he needs her care. When they sit together in the evenings she puts her hand on the back of his neck and I imagine how it must feel. The coolness of her skin. The steadying feel of that constant gentle pressure. Her loving touch.

  I shouldn’t have ever had to see him with someone else, but I have.

  For now, I stay in the shadows. No one sees me. No one knows I am here.

  One evening I see him take her hand in his and press his lips into the centre of her palm. She moans and then laughs.

  When they go up the stairs I don’t follow, and I don’t allow my mind to follow, either.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I AM WAITING for Alec in the study and when he opens the door, before he can see me or not see me, I speak.

  “Hello, my life,” I say.

  I see him draw back in shock and then gather himself. “Where have you been?” he asks. I am looking into his eyes. Trying to gauge if he is happy to see me.

  “I’ve been spending time in the past,” I say without knowing I’m going to. I sit down beside him.

  “Remembering things, you mean?”

  “No, not remembering exactly. It’s more intense. Like I’m really there.”

  He looks at me. Smiles. Frowns. “Time travel?” he asks.

  “Kind of. I’m not sure it’s good,” I say, carefully. “I mean it is good. It’s great. But also, every time I go into the past it’s like less of me comes back.”

  “Can you choose where you go?”

  “Not completely. Sometimes. Maybe. Where would you go?”

  “Oh…” he says. He stares at his hands. “I don’t think I would want to go anywhere. Not unless I could stay.”

  This surprises me.

  “Not our first night in the house?” I ask. “Or the day we met? I can tell you what everyone else in the room was wearing. I can tell you what it said on the beer mat. What the specials of the day written on the chalkboard were. I can tell you what song was playing. I can see everything. Like it’s still right there. Like we are still right there.”

  He stands, turns away from me, goes over and looks out the window. “I don’t care about any of that. I know we were there. It happened. It was a long time ago.”

  “But I feel it. I feel everything. I’m there. I’m right there.”

  “I don’t think you should do it anymore,” he says. “What if you go into the past and can’t get back?”

  “Then I would be back there, living our lives all over again. At least I would be with you.” I go to stand beside him.

  He shudders.

  “I won’t do it again,” I say quickly. “I won’t go back anymore. I promise. I just want to be here with you.”

  I look at him and then he looks at me and it is exactly the same thrill as the first time he looked at me.

  I am thinking that if Janet and Dee were to leave for good, Alec and I could go back to living here on our own. And it might get easier. This is what is in my mind as I take the little Chanel spritzer out from my old satchel hidden under Dee’s bed. The perfume had been a birthday gift from my mother. It was what I remembered her wearing on special occasions when I was small, and I liked the idea of wearing it myself when I put on something nice and wore my hair up in a twist. Only I actually hardly ever used it because it made me sneeze.

  I steel myself to go into the bedroom. I open what was my closet and am rewarded with the sight of all of Janet’s black garments hung neatly in a row.

  There isn’t a lot of scent left in the bottle, but I think there’s enough to send a message. Janet needs to know this is still my house.

  I’m in the kitchen looking out the window and thinking about children playing in that yard. Climbing the tree. I can almost hear their shouts and laughter. Without even looking down at my hand I reach out to the window ledge and feel the circle of hard metal beneath my fingers. It takes just the tiniest of movements and I hear it hit the stainless-steel sink and then tinkle its way down the drain. Janet was a fool to leave her wedding band sitting there.

  Alec is alone in his study when I find him. He doesn’t look at me.

  I sit down in his desk chair and try to think of something to say. I can’t stand for him to be unhappy with me. “Today when I was the only person in the house I started hearing something upstairs,” I say. “Something like the sound a rocking chair makes as it goes back and forth on a wooden floor. What do you call those things on the bottom? Rails?”

  He is lying stretched out on the couch with his arm thrown across his eyes, so it is impossible to read his expression. He is wearing a beautiful green sweater and I’d like to remark on it, but it hardly seems the time. I would like to lie down next to him and throw my leg over him and rest there awhile with my head on his chest and his heart singing its old sweet song in my ear.

  “I think you call them rockers,” says Alec. His voice is small and tight.

  “Okay, rockers,” I say. “I could hear this sound. And I thought, what if it’s a ghost? Which is stupid—for a dead person to be afraid of ghosts. But I never believed in them before, and now I do. And I can’t imagine who else might be haunting this house and wasn’t sure I was up to meeting them. I mean, people must have died in this house over the years. It’s what…a century old, right?”

  He still isn’t looking at me.

  “I was scared,” I say.

  “Scared? Like you want Janet to be? The way all your stupid little stunts are meant to frighten Janet half out of her wits in her own home?”

  Her home.

  He looks at me and I wish to be anywhere but here.

  “But my things, my house, my—”

  “Things! Things! It’s a house, Fay. A thing. There are lives involved here, Fay. Real, human lives.”

  I find myself drifting from room to room. I go to the kitchen but find I am getting the urge to break things again, so drift on. In the living room I stop short. It’s dark but there is enough moonlight for me to see that my dollhouse has been placed back in its old spot. It’s turned the wrong way around, but it is there. Is this a message? And who for? I once told Alec—half joking—that rather than buying an urn he could put my ashes inside the dollhouse and then bury that. I suppose he ignored me, because the house is still here.

  I sit on the piano bench to wait. I lightly finger the keys so they make sounds that you might hear but would also doubt you were hearing. I wait. I watch the light change outside the window as dawn finally arrives. I think about the first night I found myself here on the piano. About how little I knew then.

  Finally, Janet comes down the stairs. She is dressed in one of her chic black outfits and her hair is perfectly smooth, but her face looks as though she’s had a bad night. There is a moment’s pause as she walks into the room and I see her register the dollhouse. She walks over and rests a hand on the roof as though to persuade herself it is real.

  She doesn’t scream or faint or do any of the things I might have hoped when she sees my dollhouse back in its old spot. She stands and looks at it for a moment. Turns away and then turns back as though she might possibly have dreamt it. Then she walks out of the room. I hear her on the stairs and then the sound of the bedroom door clicking shut.

  “Of course it was her. Who else would it be?” Janet gets up from the breakfast table to fetch the coffee pot. I see Alec look helplessly out the window. How can he answer that question?

  “I hate that she’s unhappy,” he says.

 
“She’s unsettled. She’s acting out. It will pass,” Janet says. She fills his cup and drops a kiss on the top of his head before sitting down.

  Alec nods. He stares out the window again and I realize that my dollhouse is out there. It must be out in the back lane by the bins. My house has been discarded.

  “She and I have been through a lot. She’s a tough little cookie.”

  “Like her mother,” says Alec.

  “Like her mother,” Janet agrees and laughs.

  “I wish she gave you more credit.”

  “She wants to believe her father is a good person. You can’t blame her for that.”

  Alec shakes his head. “We’re her family now. You and me. We’ll get her through whatever she’s going through. If she needs help then we’ll get help.”

  He reaches out and takes her hand. He is so focused on Janet, on their conversation, that he doesn’t look behind him. He doesn’t even know I am here.

  I find Dee in the cellar. She has her phone on a little tripod and is taking pictures of herself. She is wearing a pink top that looks like it was made out of recycled bath mat. She is smiling. She seems like she’s a different person and this is the other thing I’d forgotten about being thirteen. You change like the weather.

  “Was that you? The dollhouse?”

  “That’s for me to know,” she says. Then she directs the phone camera at me and snaps a series of pics. Looks critically at the phone, flipping through them.

  “Nothing to see here,” she says, showing me the photo of the empty space where I should be.

  “Was it you?” I ask.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she laughs. “Anyway, it worked. I think maybe we’re going to see Dad. To give him another chance.” She gives me a curious look. “So that’s it,” she says. “You can go now. Or stay. Your choice.”

  I stay away as long as I can bear, hoping that Alec’s annoyance with me will dissipate in my absence. When I return, I find him sitting alone in his study with a glass of wine in his hand. He is wearing a tattered old sweatshirt of mine with the Ficciones logo on the front. I’d forgotten that shirt existed. The bookstore itself is long gone.