The Ghost Notebooks

by Ben Dolnick

  . . .

  Hannah’s old bedroom had, at some point since her death, become a memorial. The bed in which Hannah and I had slept on the rare occasions when we’d stayed with the Rampes’—in which we’d had quiet sex and wrestled over the fan remote and stayed up watching Inspector Morse on her laptop—was now covered in the stuffed animals Hannah had collected when she was eight. There were framed photos of her on every surface, from every phase of her life—grinning in a strappy black dress at a work event; bravely bearing braces against a pastel-blue background; in a bikini on a beach with Megan. Terri would spend hours in there each day weeping over old yearbooks, sorting through T-shirts. Bruce would sometimes wander in and spin slowly in a baffled circle, like a little boy lost in Tokyo.

  At first I couldn’t bear going in there—among the many things that had become poison to me, photos of her were possibly the worst—but after I’d been at the Rampes’ for a week or so I gave in. There turned out to be a not-unpleasant enfolding-ness about it. I still didn’t look directly at the pictures of her, but I wandered around picking things up, quietly marveling. This was where she’d slept every night for the first eighteen years of her life. This was where she’d talked on the phone to boyfriends with forehead acne. Every single thing—the blue plaid blanket with “FRIENDS SEMINARY” sewed into it; the black plastic alarm clock with the wires poking out; the tower of empty CD cases—had had some significance to her, had seemed worth saving. It was, I eventually realized, like being in a historic house museum.

  And then I did force myself to look at the pictures: not the recent ones, not the ones in which she looked like the Hannah I’d been engaged to, but the old ones—six-year-old Hannah standing at a sink in her grandparents’ house in Connecticut, helping to wash a bowl full of lettuce; eleven-year-old Hannah at camp, working on a stick-and-feather dreamcatcher.

  This is what I was doing—sitting on Hannah’s bed, sipping a glass of Bruce’s Scotch, flipping through an album of photos of fifth-grade Hannah in an apple orchard—when Megan walked in and closed the door. It was eleven thirty on a Tuesday night.

  “Can I talk to you for a second?”

  “Okay.”

  She squinted at me. We hadn’t been alone in a room together the whole time we’d been in the apartment.

  “When are you going to stop bullshitting everyone?”

  For a second my brain was startled into flashbulb blankness. So this was the old, bad Megan. It was as if she’d been acting in a play and we were now backstage. Her eyes and her voice made me think she’d been drinking. I asked her what she was talking about.

  “I talked to Hannah’s doctor this afternoon.”

  I just looked at her.

  “Dr. Blythe. He said he talked to her a few times before she died. He said he’d been worried about her.”

  “Okay,” I said. My heart had started to kick.

  “And I talked to Hannah a couple of days before she died. You didn’t know that, did you? Something was off. I could tell. What was wrong with her? Tell me.”

  “What did you talk to her about?”

  She waved her hand, like someone clearing away a cobweb. “We talked about bullshit—my job, Thanksgiving, the wedding. She was holding back, though. She was gonna tell me something.”

  “What do you think she was going to tell you?”

  Megan hesitated, looked away, seemed to forget I was in the room. Then she asked, in a drunken approximation of a whisper, “Did she kill herself?”

  It was the first time I’d heard anyone say the words out loud. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “I’m right, though, aren’t I? Dr. Blythe wouldn’t say it, but I will. I thought about it as soon as I heard she was dead, but then I told myself she couldn’t have, Nick would have to know. But then I thought, maybe you do know. So just tell me, okay? I won’t say anything to my parents. Did she kill herself?”

  “You need to go to sleep.”

  “So you haven’t thought about it for one second?”

  I lied as automatically as a child. “Correct,” I said.

  Megan fixed her eyes on me. “If my parents weren’t already a fucking wreck, I would press you on this, okay? I know you’re not telling us something.”

  And she left me alone with my empty glass and my photo album.

  Back in the guest room I didn’t sleep that night: the rash of unwelcome thoughts had become my entire skin. I tried, uselessly, to remind myself of all the ways in which Megan was insane—the YouTube documentary she’d made me and Hannah watch about how the Denver airport was actually an internment camp; her belief that half of the world’s problems were due to a vitamin B12 deficiency. But it didn’t matter. Every thought I’d ever had about Hannah’s death returned to me now in a meticulous how-could-you-ever-have-doubted-it? edit. Her breakdown when we were putting up Halloween decorations. The full medicine bottle. The farewell sex. I shook so hard, lying there with the sheets wrapped around me, that I could hear the bed frame rattling against the wall.

  But morning always comes, no matter what sort of night you’ve had; this is an underappreciated fact. I splashed my face at the sink in the little guest room bathroom and brushed my tongue and told myself: Bruce and Terri know that Hannah’s death was an accident, and that’s all that matters. Get through today, give nothing to Megan, and let everyone, including yourself, get on with their heartbroken lives. I walked out into the rest of the apartment with my throbbing head held high.

  I’ve tried to understand now why it was so unthinkable to me to just tell the Rampes the truth—why couldn’t I just have said that I had a terrible suspicion that Hannah might have killed herself, and that this was at least as excruciating a possibility to me as it was to them? Why did I have to compound my troubles by acting like a criminal? The only answer I can come up with—the only answer that isn’t implausibly self-flattering—is that I felt like a criminal: the fiancé is never entirely innocent. If Hannah had killed herself, then I had destroyed the Rampes’ lives—not to mention my life—with an obliviousness that deserved jail or worse.

  Anyway, as soon as I walked into the kitchen, I could feel that my plans for the day were beside the point. It was close to nine thirty. Bruce was on the phone, standing at the island with a pen and note pad; Terri was at her desk in the corner, gazing at the computer. Neither of them looked up when I walked in, or gave any indication that they were aware of me at all, so I must have seen something in their faces, felt a kind of tightness in the air.

  I didn’t notice that Megan had walked into the kitchen until she spoke from right behind me. “I changed my mind. I had them call Dr. Blythe this morning,” she said. “You can tell them why you think we’re full of bullshit.”

  Now Bruce and Terri were facing me—Bruce had set down the phone and he was polishing his glasses, which was for some reason as terrifying as if he’d been sharpening a hunting knife.

  “Is there something you haven’t told us?” Terri asked. She sounded desperate.

  “No,” I said.

  Bruce looked up. “Dr. Blythe wouldn’t tell us much, but he said this morning that Hannah hadn’t refilled her medicine since September. Did you know that?”

  “She was taking something else,” I said.

  “Not according to Dr. Blythe, she wasn’t.” His voice was deadly calm.

  “She was going to see him when we came for Thanksgiving,” I said.

  “He didn’t know that. He said they’d only had a few phone appointments.”

  Bruce was moving forward as he spoke, so when he asked me if I was absolutely sure there was nothing I wanted to tell him, he was standing close enough that I could smell the coffee on his breath. I sputtered out, “I thought she was okay.”

  The rest of the conversation—Bruce advancing, me retreating, Terri and Megan orbiting like referees—couldn’t have lasted for more than ten minutes, but it felt eternal, outside of time.

  Bruce: “The moment you kne
w she wasn’t taking her medicine, that’s when you should have called us. The second you understood that something might have been the matter.”

  Me: “I didn’t think something was the matter. I didn’t know.”

  Terri: “But if you even had to think about it, why didn’t you say something to us? Why didn’t you tell us you were worried?”

  Me: “I wasn’t worried. I thought she was okay.”

  Bruce: “What did I say to you before you moved away? What did I tell you, standing right here in the kitchen?”

  Terri: “Just tell us if she was all right or if there was something going on with her. Just tell us that.”

  Me: “She was having a hard time. It was a stressful couple of months.”

  Terri (now sobbing): “Then why didn’t you tell us?! Our baby may have killed herself! Killed herself! Can you imagine the pain she must have been in? And you were right there and you could have called someone, you could have called us, but you did nothing, you just came here and you—”

  Megan: “You fucking sat there while everybody said What a terrible accident, and you just sat there and you—”

  Bruce: “You let us down. We trusted you with the thing we value most in the world and you destroyed it. You destroyed us.”

  Terri: “How did this happen? Please, please, tell me, how did this happen?”

  By this point the three of them had literally backed me into a corner, in front of the coat closet, and I was all but shielding my face.

  “I don’t know how it happened,” I said. “I don’t know.” And this, I realized, scrabbling backward along the wall, nearly knocking over a side table, was—unlike almost everything else I’d said recently—entirely true.

  . . .

  No one had to tell me that I wasn’t welcome at the Rampes’ anymore. That morning I went back into the guest room, stuffed my things into my duffel bag, and, with no goodbye and no sense of where I might be headed, walked out into the middle of a cold gray rain on Broadway.

  You can’t understand, until you’ve lost someone, what a horrendous assault New York City is capable of committing on a person’s senses. Sleeplessness must have been part of it. Also I hadn’t really been out on the street, for any extended period, since Hannah’s death—and before that, I hadn’t been back to the city since August. It was freezing now, wet and grim and Thanksgiving-decorated. But that didn’t mean the streets weren’t teeming with activity. Tourists lined up outside the CBS building for a glimpse of someone in a camel’s-hair coat and heavy makeup. A small Indian woman next to a Starbucks truck was offering samples of a chocolate drink in elf-sized paper cups. A hellish proliferation of women Hannah’s age, all obnoxiously alive, walked past me in every direction, hoods tightened around their faces, yoga mats strapped to their backs. Every single advertising poster and scaffolding bar and store window seemed to say: No one ever dies and nothing ever ends and no one has ever suffered anything worse than a cracked iPhone screen.

  I walked into Central Park near Columbus Circle, and, suddenly woozy, settled in with my bag on a clammy wooden bench near the pond. On the bench a few to my left there was a heap of black garbage bags that might or might not have concealed a person. My right sock was soaked from a puddle. So this, I thought, is how homelessness begins, not with a momentous decision but with a gradual surrendering; a rest becomes a nap becomes a night. It only occurred to me as I was arranging my duffel bag into a pillow that there was in fact one place in the city I could go—one place, that is, where I could go without risking hypothermia or institutionalization. Hannah’s and my old car was still sitting in the Rampes’ garage.

  I gathered my things and walked quickly back out of the park. It’s amazing how eager you can be for the comforts of a fifteen-year-old Volvo. The car key, a cracked black rubber square, was, I realized, the only key on my keychain that worked for any door I still had even the remotest interest in entering. Why hadn’t it occurred to me weeks ago? I’d never need to call on the Rampes or some half-forgotten friend again; I would begin my life as a grief-powered nomad.

  The garage attendant blinked at me indifferently from his stool. I found the car between a stone pillar and a white Lexus SUV. The doors were still splashed with dried mud that must have come from upstate, maybe the hike off the Taconic we’d taken in September. The car was cold enough, inside, that I could, sitting in the driver’s seat, see my breath in front of my face. Hannah’s tissues and lemon cough drops and sunglasses were still piled in the broken center console. A flyer from the Wright House’s Spooky Halloween Festival was still tucked into the passenger’s-side door. For the hundredth time since she’d died I was struck by the sloppiness of death, by the world’s refusal to let you forget absolutely anything.

  I pulled out of the garage—that the car started at all was a minor miracle—and for what must have been an hour I drove slowly around Manhattan with the balky heat turned up full blast. A sleepy-voiced woman on NPR was talking about the craft of memoir. Be sure to include lots of sensory details—that was the important thing, apparently. Also, don’t forget to give your family fair warning. I switched to a half-clear bluegrass station. Periodically, as I drove, I felt water running from the corners of my eyes, but I didn’t know if these were tears of feeling or tears of body-system malfunction. Driving in New York City is only unbearable, I realized, because you’re usually trying to get somewhere. I drove down the Henry Hudson, wove for a while through Midtown, following the lights, then came back up along Sixth Avenue. I honked at a biker, experimentally, zoomed around a waiting cab. I was on a long Upper West Side block, passing an empty stretch of sidewalk, when it occurred to me—I felt an instant and horrifying sort of relief—that there was nothing keeping me from plowing directly into the stone side of one of these buildings. Would that be enough to kill me? Forty or fifty miles per hour, head on into a wall? My parents, my friends, the Rampes, a stranger watching NY1—would any of them really be surprised? A thirty-year-old man, whose fiancée recently drowned in a small town near Rhinebeck, was killed in a one-car accident on Tuesday afternoon. The lemon squares from Hannah’s reception would get to serve double duty.

  But my hands didn’t turn the wheel—instead, I drove steadily on and turned left on Central Park West—and this was, I realized, not because of any instinct toward self-preservation. It was because if I crashed, I would never find out what Hannah had told Dr. Blythe. So this—the moment of not leaping my car onto the sidewalk, not having my rib cage crushed against the steering wheel—was when I first formulated to myself the choice that would become my mantra: I could either die or I could find out why Hannah had died. Curiosity is responsible for as many saved lives as penicillin.

  I don’t know if I’d been unconsciously driving toward Dr. Blythe’s office the whole time, or if it was more that the car was now obeying its own gravitational pull. In any case I was now passing Seventy-third Street. I knew, from things Hannah had said, that his office was somewhere in the West Eighties, and luckily, psychiatrists’ addresses turn out to be no harder to find online than anyone else’s. Dr. Albert Edward Blythe was at 9 West Eighty-fifth Street, Suite 5A, less than half a mile from the Rampes’ apartment, less than three blocks from where I was. I had only the foggiest notion of what I intended to say to him—Please tell me everything; please tell me only the things that suggest she died accidentally. But I turned left on Eighty-fifth and there it was, a redbrick building with a green awning and, despite the season, air conditioners protruding from every other window. I parked with the back half of the Volvo hanging in front of a driveway and, doing a convincing impression of a man in need of psychiatric services, walked hurriedly past the doorman.

  For as long as I’d known about Dr. Blythe, I had always—though of course I’d never mentioned this to Hannah—felt a mostly senseless dislike for him. I’d been eager for her to talk to him when she’d had her pre-Halloween meltdown, of course, but that had only been desperation. Therapists of significant others are always n
odes of weird feeling, I think. They charge too much. They know too much. Even former therapists are like exes who’ve never quite been broken up with.

  The building was a shabbier cousin of the Rampes’—brass mailboxes, tile floors, stacks of Amazon packages against a wall. As soon as I stepped out of the elevator on the fifth floor, I could hear the collective roar of a dozen white noise machines. Every floor in the building must have been like this; I was inside a beehive of mental anguish. I turned the knob on the door labeled 5A.

  Dr. Blythe’s waiting room was small and carpeted and windowless, Santa Fe anonymous. There were three or four black chairs, an abstract print of what looked like a totem pole, a glass table heaped with National Geographics and New Yorkers. One man sat waiting for his appointment—a weary-looking finance type who kept crossing and uncrossing his legs, sighing theatrically. I realized two things as I sat down: that multiple doctors shared this suite, and that I was, despite not having eaten since the night before, in more-than-theoretical danger of throwing up. I took a few deep breaths and closed my eyes. My first order of business was just to learn which of these doors was Dr. Blythe’s. Whatever came next—introducing myself as Hannah’s fiancé, pretending to be a detective from Hibernia, running out the door—I could worry about afterward. It was just before two o’clock.

  One of the doctors in the suite, the first one I saw, was a bronze-haired sixty-ish woman wrapped in earth-toned scarves. She opened her door to let out a nervous-looking man with a backpack. The next doctor I saw was an athletic-looking gray-haired woman all in black; she came out to claim the finance guy. I noticed, after I’d watched some number of appointment transitions, that the doctors periodically went from their offices into a little room behind me. It wasn’t a bathroom, I decided; no flushing sound came from inside. I couldn’t see into it—the doctors all opened and closed the door as if there were a panther inside—but I thought that it had to be a shared kitchen. I pictured mugs in a cabinet next to old boxes of tea; a microwave splattered with dried dribbles of lunch. The scarf doctor came out of her office, smiled professionally, and stepped in there. Then a bald male doctor, one I hadn’t seen yet, with his foot in a hi-tech black surgical boot. But still no Dr. Blythe.