by Sara O'Leary
“It’s like I’m walking around with an arrow in my heart, Fay. I don’t always feel it but it’s always there. And something—some little unguarded movement—can make the pain just as sharp and brutal as it was that first day.”
He looks at me to see if I understand. I do. I think I do.
“It’s time to stop this,” I say. “You can’t sleep here tonight, my love. This isn’t where you belong.”
I pick up his mohair blanket and put it inside the cupboard, pushing the door firmly closed. Without saying anything more he stands and blindly stumbles out of the room. I hear his footfall on the stairs and then a door opening at the top.
Morning. I know now that it is time for me to go for good. Time for me to let Alec go.
But still, I can’t leave without saying goodbye to Dee. I find her down in the cellar pushing things into a backpack.
“I have to go,” she says.
“So do I,” I say. “Are you going to be okay?”
She looks up at me, her gaze briefly more direct than it has been before. “Mom said that I am more important to her than anything. Do you think that’s true?”
The one thing that everyone always wants to hear from the person they love.
“Of course it is,” I say.
I follow her to the front door. Watch as she pulls on a pair of leopard-printed sneakers.
She is a totally different person—the goth girl, the cutter has been left behind. She is cycling through personas and waiting to choose one. This too will pass.
“I’m leaving for good this time.”
“Yeah,” she says.
I move to stand in front of her. She looks out the window. She is deliberately avoiding looking at me.
“Alec is a good man—” I begin, then stop and begin again: “Your mother has been through a lot. She deserves to be happy. You all do.”
“I’ve got to go out now,” she says brusquely. She glances up and for the first time I see Janet in her face.
“Of course,” I say. “Goodbye.”
She’s fine. If she’s not then she will be. She has Alec. She has her mother. And then she goes, just like that. I’m glad that she doesn’t need me. I’m glad she has what she needs.
I look out the window and see her stalking down the street. Her pale hair electric on her head. My not-ghost girl. I’d half hoped to see someone out there waiting for her, but she is alone. The only good thing about being thirteen is that unlike being dead, it doesn’t last.
I find Alec in his study. He is looking out the window and when I say his name he turns to me and smiles and the look he gives me is everything I didn’t know I needed.
“I just said goodbye to Dee. It’s like she’s turning into a different person,” I say.
“They do that,” he says. “At this age. She’s figuring out who she is. Who she wants to be.”
The children we never had feel near to me. Not in the room with us but not so far away either.
“Alec,” I say. “I’m frightened.”
“What are you afraid of?” he asks.
“Everything,” I say. “I’m afraid of being forgotten,” I say before I even know I am going to say it.
“That’s not going to happen,” he says.
Replaced is not forgotten, I tell myself. Replaced is you leaving such a void behind you in the world that if it is not filled in some way then everything—absolutely everything—will fall into it. I look at him and know this to be true.
I am weary. I don’t recall ever being this weary. I sit down on the floor and then go right ahead and lie down, stretching myself out on the beautiful carpet.
Alec looks at me there for a moment and then lies down beside me. We are parallel lines that never touch. So much has changed in the time that I’ve been away. So much has changed since I’ve been back. All I wanted is what I have right here in this room.
“Do you think things happen for a reason?” I ask.
“Oh,” says Alec. “That’s the big question, isn’t it?”
“That’s not an answer,” I say.
“I do believe,” he says. “I do believe it now…”
“Why now?”
“Because you died. That’s a thing that happened. I don’t know why it happened—haven’t the faintest idea—but if I believe, as I did for a long time, that it was random, then I’ll go mad. I would do anything to live in a world where it hadn’t happened, but that world is gone, lost to me. I have to live in this one.”
“I feel like I am slipping away,” I say.
“I know,” he says.
“I suppose it was all borrowed time, wasn’t it? Being here with you. This wasn’t supposed to happen and somehow it did. I should be grateful.”
“It was never going to be enough,” he says.
I am thinking about Swedenborg. About the book Alec was reading on the day we met. About his face as he looked up at me for the first time. “It was, though. It was enough.”
And then we just lie side by side and are quiet for the longest time.
“I’m going to have to go soon,” I say finally.
“Not yet,” says Alec.
“You look…” I pause, and try to smile. “You look tired.” I was going to say old. He does look old. And he will get older still.
“You have to understand,” he says slowly. “While you were alive, I only ever wanted to be married to you.”
“Okay,” I say. And then, more kindly: “I know.”
“When you died—when I lost you—it was like I was handed this heavy stone. And I had to carry it everywhere I went. And the stone doesn’t diminish over time. It never gets lighter. It just gets to feel normal to be carrying it with you everywhere you go.”
“I had the easy job, didn’t I?” I say.
And then neither of us says anything for a long time.
Finally, I say to him: “I’m reaching out and taking you by the hand.”
At first it is as dark as it has ever been. And then slowly the outlines of the objects in the room appear, like a developing photograph.
As the image begins to come clear, I see that the room is blindingly white. I am lying on a metal bed with rails on the sides. There are tubes running into me and out of me. I can see my chest rise and fall. I wonder if I am dreaming.
I hear some mechanical sound from the distant nearby. A machine. “Don’t go,” Alec says. “Don’t leave me yet.” His voice comes to me disembodied, although I am the one leaving my body behind.
I let myself fall back into my body. My body and yet not my body. Strangely different. I hold my firstborn in my arms and nuzzle his downy baby head. His tiny fist unfurls against my breast and as he suckles his eyes never leave mine. I feel bonded to him, as I never have to another human being. Everywhere his skin touches mine it is like I could almost reabsorb him, and we could be one again. The tug of him on my breast runs straight through the core of me to my womb and I feel anchored and solid and powerful. This is bliss.
And then it is over.
I open my eyes and see that everything is back to the way I left it on my last day. I lie down on top of the silk duvet on my beautiful bed. Alec’s and my bed. The word home pops into my head. I close my eyes.
I can hear a beeping or alarm. A horn blaring? Insistent.
When I open my eyes again, I am lying on the floor with Alec’s coat beneath me and several sweaters spread over me. I run my hands over their textures and think, oh, this is the first day. The bright light is spilling through the uncurtained windows. Time stands still and the house travels through it.
The sound outside is the truck with all of our things that have followed us across the country, and in a moment I will wake properly. I will go down the stairs and open the door and let them in and Alec and I will begin our life together here.
And then I remember.
I must go.
Alec is standing in the entranceway looking out at the street through the pane of glass in the front door. And although I can’t see his face, I know that he is weeping. I know it from the set of his shoulders and the tremor that runs through the back of his dear, sweet neck.
I raise my hand but stop short of touching him. He turns and I see how this is stealing the breath from him.
I turn the deadbolt for the last time and pull open the door. Outside there is nothing but light. Is white the absence of colour or all colours at once? Funny how I can’t remember.
The noise I was hearing stops abruptly. The silence is immaculate.
Alec holds on to the doorframe as though he is in danger of falling. I want to speak to him but can’t. It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing to say that I haven’t already told him.
I look into his face one last time to be sure, and then I step through the open door.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
If I thanked everyone who has helped me along the way the pages would outnumber those of my story.
My family and friends have been my support throughout the writing of this book, and I can never express how grateful I am for that and for so much else.
My mother, June McDonald, taught me to read, to write, and to love. There would be no book without her.
My husband, Daniel O’Leary, has seen me through years of stumbling along in the dark following my ghost and his love and constancy is what sustained me.
My children were a dream that came true for me and I am so grateful that they are in the world.
Jackie Kaiser of Westwood Creative has been the best of agents and the truest of friends to both me and this book.
Martha Kanya-Forstner is a dream of an editor, one who saw this story for what it could be.
SARA O’LEARY is a writer of fiction for both adults and children. She is the author of a collection of short stories, Comfort Me With Apples; a series of postcard stories, Wish You Were Here; and a number of critically acclaimed picture books, including This Is Sadie, which was adapted for the stage by the New York City Children’s Theater.
The Ghost in the House is set in Adobe Caslon, a digitized typeface based on the original 1734 designs of William Caslon. Caslon is generally regarded as the first British typefounder of consequence and his fonts are considered, then as now, to be among the world’s most “user-friendly” text faces.
