The Ghost Notebooks

by Ben Dolnick

  By two forty-five I’d started to think that I might have been on the wrong floor, or that the picture I’d found on Google Images had been of a different Albert Blythe, and so maybe the bald man was Hannah’s doctor after all. But then a fancily dressed woman walked out of the door right in front of me, the only door that hadn’t already opened—I knew the woman wasn’t the doctor, because she was dabbing at her eyes—and there, standing right behind her, tightly smiling in farewell, was Dr. Blythe.

  It’s always weird, seeing someone in person after having only seen them in a photograph. He wore a striped gray suit, and he looked a few years older than he had in the picture, baggier in the face and neck. My heart speed and vomit potential increased on parallel tracks. Dr. Blythe glanced toward me with an expression that said, You aren’t waiting for me, I hope? I shook my head minimally. He reminded me of late-career Jimmy Stewart, a kindly small-town judge. He had thin lips and combed silver hair and round glasses. Hannah’s most trusted repository for distress. He stepped past me into the mystery room and I, with my ears booming, fixed my eyes on the magazine in my lap.

  Some part of me, I realized, had expected instant recognition—not that he’d know my particular identity, but that he’d know I was there on business related to Hannah’s death; that he’d have spent the past couple of weeks consumed by the question of what had happened to her, ever ready to be interrogated. This had been craziness on my part, I realized now. He was a professional. And part of what his profession entailed was occasional disasters befalling his patients; crisis was the water in which he swam. The calls he’d gotten from Megan and Bruce probably hadn’t even been the strangest interactions of his week. There was no way he’d be shamed or shocked into telling me details that he hadn’t told them. He hadn’t stepped out of his office and seen Hannah Rampe’s grief-sick fiancé; he’d seen a damp, unshaven stranger who looked and smelled like he’d spent the past twenty-four hours on a Greyhound bus. He was probably in that little room calling the doorman to see why I’d been let up.

  So I did finally have a plan, I realized. If I was going to get anything of value from Dr. Blythe, I was going to have to steal it.

  There were, at that point, two other people with me in the waiting room—a skeletal teenage girl reading a Game of Thrones paperback so thick it was almost cubic, and a fortysomething woman with curly hair and glasses who I took to be the skeleton’s mother. Probably the mom had caught the daughter throwing up. Or maybe she’d caught her with an older guy. Anyway they seemed too preoccupied by their own suffering to interfere with mine. It was now almost three o’clock.

  For most of the time that I’d been sitting there I’d been reading, or pretending to read, an article in a year-old issue of National Geographic about Pygmies in Brazil. What I was going to do now, I decided, was close the magazine, stand up, and, while Dr. Blythe was busy enjoying his cup of tea, calmly try the door to his office. If it was locked—or if another doctor walked out and saw me breaking protocol—I’d say something sheepish about this being my first appointment. All the other doors in the suite were still closed. I could hear what I was fairly sure was Dr. Blythe’s soft voice through the door behind me, a friendly murmur. I’ll do it in three seconds, I told myself. Two seconds. Pygmies subsist almost entirely on bushmeat. Now.

  The door to Dr. Blythe’s office wasn’t locked, and neither was the inner one—two doors, just a couple of feet apart from each other. I twisted the bolts on both of them behind me. I was too single-minded, too adrenalized, once I was inside the office, to reflect on the fact that this was where Hannah had spent who knows how many hours pouring out her secrets. I was making a steady, urgent, just-going-about-my-business hum. The room smelled strongly of sandalwood. I pulled open a drawer in the large mahogany desk—pens and paper clips. A half-dead spider plant stood in the far corner; a box of tissues sat on a glossy black side table. I sifted through a pile of journals and envelopes on the edge of the desk; nothing, nothing. But there—between the desk and the wall, at knee height, was a gray metal filing cabinet. Yes. The drawers were locked, but after a couple of minutes of prying and wiggling with one of the paper clips—shades of high school gym lockers—I managed to spring the top one open, and then the bottom.

  Whatever I may have thought about Dr. Blythe, I couldn’t accuse him of sloppiness. In each drawer there were dozens of manila files, all hanging neatly with his patients’ names and treatment dates handwritten on white labels in his careful script. Anders, Deborah, 1/15/98–4/21/03. Clustig, Anthony, 7/20/97–9/6/98. Inside the files were bills and insurance forms and handwritten notes on yellow lined paper.

  Hannah’s file was in the bottom drawer, toward the back. Rampe, Hannah, 6/17/05–. He hadn’t gotten around to filling out the end date.

  I’d just lifted her file out of the drawer when I heard someone trying the outer door. Either that or I’d bumped into something. Then the knocking started—tentative at first, almost embarrassed, but harder with each passing second. “Who’s in there?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Let me in there this second!”

  I still didn’t answer. My heart was ticking, quickly but quietly. I glanced out the window, saw that there was no fire escape, realized that it would have been insane to use it anyway. My nausea had disappeared. I knew what I needed to do; I just needed to sort out the choreography. I tucked Hannah’s file into the front of my pants, pulled my shirt over it, took a deep breath, and opened the inner door. Now I could hear Dr. Blythe much more clearly, just a foot away from me, right on the other side of the outer door. “If you don’t let me in right now I’m going to—”

  But I never learned what he was going to do. Instead, in one motion, I unlocked the door and burst through it like a rushing linebacker. Dr. Blythe fell backward into the table with the magazines, then slid down onto the floor. His glasses were off. His hair was mussed.

  For a second he crawled around on all fours, like a boxer struggling to find the ropes, and I just stood there frozen. The curly-haired woman was on her feet, trying to help Dr. Blythe up, while the daughter sat staring at me wide-eyed. “For God’s sake, Caitlyn, call 911,” the mother said.

  But by then I’d been reanimated. I was out the door, down the stairs, and back in my car, before she could even have explained the emergency.

  [Edmund Wright’s journal]

  Nov. 10

  …Though Sarah insists, with increasing fervor & despair, that I grow gaunt & sallow, never have I made such leaps in comprehension as I have in these recent weeks; damn the body & its continued pleas for tending.

  The first break came quite by accident; on the evening of William’s eighth visit, I happened not to set down the pencil I had in hand as he approached. Thus did I wake, after the customary vision, to find that while living out William’s death in mind, I had also set down a page-long account of it on paper. Thus began my training as a scribe for the spirits.

  And this was not even my most momentous turn—for last Monday evening I sensed, sitting in my study, that behind me milled not just William but a whole company of beings, & sure enough, when the time came for my inhabitation, it was not William’s spirit I recognized & it was not William’s death into which I was immersed. Our home, I realized, may be host to a veritable multitude. Crouching in near every household object, I now believe, hide spirits like snakes in the crevices of a stone wall, each one awaiting a suitable vessel into which they might, for the time being, slip & through which they might find expression. Having been carved into just such a ready vessel by William’s visitations, I now find myself deluged, nightly, by more spirits than I can here record. There was, four nights past, the sorry fellow who met his end in the thresher at the mill; the following night came the woodland creature (for the spiritual world seems to be no more exclusively the domain of man than does the biological world) who came to grief in the jaws of a coyote. Thus do I, proud researcher & man of letters, find my calling as acting secretary for an invisible
& insubstantial assembly.

  I report without boastfulness that during these fruitful weeks my capacity for sustaining periods of inhabitation has grown prodigiously. The visitations now last an hour or more; the accounts that I wake to find filling my notebook contain evermore detail, evermore clarity.

  Thus must I guard against complacency & stay ever mindful of the staggering volume of questions still to be explored, viz., Are spirits unhappy, reliving their deaths day & night? Do they long to escape from their peculiar state? Do they desire more from living beings than temporary fleshly homes, & if so, what is their desiderata?

  …

  [Poughkeepsie Journal, January 5, 1958]

  DUTCHESS COUNTY WOMAN GOES MISSING FROM HIBERNIA HOME

  Friends and Family Pray for Her Safety

  Hibernia, January 5, 1958—Dutchess County Sheriff Richard Thornhill asked the public for assistance on Sunday in locating Hibernia resident Janet Kemp, missing since New Year’s Day. Mrs. Kemp, a 40-year-old homemaker and mother of three, was reported missing by her husband, George Kemp, on the evening of the 1st and has not been seen since.

  “We continue to hope that Mrs. Kemp will be reunited with her family,” said Sheriff Thornhill. “In the meantime we’re asking anyone with any information to please step forward.” Sheriff Thornhill acknowledged that the weekend’s snow has made his department’s search all the more challenging.

  Mrs. Kemp is known as a valued community member and the proud mother of three children, ages 10, 6, and 5, all enrolled at Cold Spring Elementary. Her husband is one of Hibernia’s two family physicians, with a specialty in obstetric care. The Kemp family has been described by neighbors as unusually kind and generous. Their support was instrumental in the construction of the new Town Hall on Cold Spring Road.

  On the day of Mrs. Kemp’s disappearance, the Kemps visited a neighbor, and they were seen returning home no later than 4 o’clock in the afternoon. The neighbor whom they visited, Alfred Creswell, described the Kemps’ behavior that day as being entirely ordinary. “Only thing I can remember is that George kept wanting to know whether I thought the snow would hold off,” said Creswell.

  The Kemp home, located at 23 Culver Road, is one of Hibernia’s oldest, dating back to the years before the American Revolution. The house and its environs were thoroughly searched by Sheriff Thornhill and his officers immediately after Mrs. Kemp’s disappearance. On Thursday afternoon a neighbor drew the police’s attention to a shovel left standing in the woods beside the house, but upon questioning Mr. Kemp explained that the shovel belonged to his eldest daughter, who had used it to bury a doll. No further evidence was discovered.

  Mrs. Kemp’s disappearance and the subsequent investigation have created a palpable sense of unease in the ordinarily tranquil Hibernia. “We are heartsick when we think what could have happened to Jan,” said one neighbor, who asked not to be identified. “Especially with this cold. We want so much to believe this will all end happily.”

  Among those who have not given up hope is Mr. Kemp, who stood alongside Sheriff Thornhill on Tuesday and seconded the sheriff’s call to the public for information. “We miss Jan terribly,” Mr. Kemp said, “and we will not rest until she is back home with her family.” Asked by a reporter if he felt unsafe, living in the house from which his wife disappeared, Mr. Kemp answered succinctly. “I do not,” he said.

  3

  There’s a short list of things that, in the interest of harmony and sanity, all couples should be forbidden to do: walking in on the other in the bathroom; thinking in any real detail about the other’s prior sex life; sharing more than the shallowest of one’s insights regarding the other’s parents. To this list of terrible ideas I’d now like to add: reading the other’s psychiatric notes.

  Before I could make that particular mistake, though, I needed to get away. I drove from Dr. Blythe’s office—an orange-enveloped parking ticket flapping on my windshield—up Columbus, past the red stone church that Hannah and I had once had a fight in front of, past the scaffolding-covered building that Terri called the scourge of the Upper West Side. There’s a feeling, a hot, pulsating busyness, that goes with having done something you know is going to get you in trouble—it goes back to elementary school, the terror of a teacher’s footsteps; or it may go back even further than that, savannah sins. Anyway, I had it, I was dizzy with it. Every part of me that wasn’t directly involved in the act of driving was shaking. I was doing the vehicular equivalent of the fake-casual walking people do when they’re trying not to look suspicious. I stopped at every light that seemed even to be thinking about turning yellow; I used my turn signal with greater precision and patience than I had since my driver’s test. Hannah’s file lay in the empty passenger’s seat next to me, and I reached over and covered it with my jacket as if it were a bundle of dynamite.

  My initial plan was to circle around for a bit and then to drive to the Rampes’, where I’d put the car back in the garage and present Bruce and Terri with Dr. Blythe’s notes, thereby demonstrating that I was in exactly the same position that they were—hiding nothing, desperate to know the truth. But of course the police—if the curly-haired woman or her daughter had really called them—would already have found out whose file it was that had been taken. So the Rampes’ apartment, of all the places in the city, was probably the one where it made the least sense for me to go right then.

  Yes, I practice-murmured, turning left on Ninety-sixth, I am the late Hannah Rampe’s fiancé, but no, I have no idea who stole her file or decked her psychiatrist. Maybe it was a crazy person who read about her in the news. Maybe it was her sister. What were the chances that this would put off even the dimmest of cops? I drove past Amsterdam, did my best to ignore a dog walker in a purple poncho who I was fairly sure was pointing at my license plate. Maybe it would be better if I just fessed up and claimed to have been temporarily insane? Was it really so untrue? A road worker in a neon vest flapped his flag and bared his teeth at me. I was now merging onto the Henry Hudson, and as I eased up to the toll booths, I had the thought—this actually formed itself in the sweaty elevator that was my mind—that I needed to remember to ask Hannah if she’d refilled the EZ Pass.

  I ended up pulling over to read the notes, finally, at a sandwich place in a strip mall somewhere off the Saw Mill, deep in a suburban-feeling section of the Bronx. I’d been driving by then for thirty or maybe forty minutes. Sustained panic is, above all, exhausting—my hands were numb from gripping the wheel; my legs were cramped and tense; my head seemed to have been stuffed with fiberglass batting. There was a parking lot behind the strip mall, a grim little row of rear entrances. The suspect was apprehended in an empty deli between a tanning salon and a physical therapist’s office…

  “Welcome to Gino’s! What can I get you?” The girl behind the counter was in her early twenties, pink streaks in her hair, valiantly cheerful. A copy of The Five Love Languages was splayed next to the register.

  “Just some coffee.”

  “Anything else for you today?”

  “Just the coffee.”

  Opening Hannah’s folder ended up requiring a greater act of will than breaking into Dr. Blythe’s office had. Until that moment, gulping bitter coffee with the manila folder on the table in front of me, I’d managed to keep my thoughts away from the question of what I might actually find in the notes. My hands were shaking. My chest was heaving. The girl behind the counter looked over, seeming to sense that I was in some sort of extremis, and I gave her a look meant to convey that everything was fine, or in any case that mine was a not-fine-ness that I could deal with myself. I think I was half-hoping that the folder would turn out to have nothing in it but Xeroxed bills and prescription records.

  No such luck. The first page of notes—there were maybe thirty or forty pages total—was from Hannah’s first appointment with Dr. Blythe, her consultation, in June of 2005, in the middle of her postcollege breakdown. Dr. Blythe’s handwriting was small and precise and forward leaning, li
ke some futuristic font.

  6/17

  Healthy, charismatic, attractive. No trouble meeting eyes. Describes situation (“why I’m here, I guess”) w/ slight embarrassment, distance.

  Says sleep probs (6–9 months), trouble both falling asleep & staying asleep. Loss of app. Loss of interest in friends, ord activities (works @ law office, used to enjoy, now dreads). Sudden eps of extreme fear, heart racing, sensation of imm disaster, esp at night. Very bad past 1–2 mos (6–7 disturbed nights/week). Lived w/ roommate, fem friend from coll (Oberlin), now back w/ parents (Upper WS), w/ whom she’s close

  To have someone you love die is to be under the recurrent impression that until right that moment, you haven’t actually appreciated the enormity of what’s happened; that the real suffering can only begin now. This, sitting quaking at a wobbly metal table somewhere in the Bronx, was one of those moments. The sky was now dark enough that I could see myself in the restaurant’s windows. My knees were literally knocking. And here in my hands was Hannah, twenty-three-year-old Hannah, alive and scared and seeking help.

  6/24

  Dad, Bruce, v controlling, formid, mid-50’s (surgeon)—H has great respect, slight fear; Mom, Terri, once in PR, 58, nervous (hist of dysthy, poss meds (Welb?), poss postp—> H’s birth)—H feels protective, symp. Both p’s place major value/pressure on education, accomp, etc.

  Sis, Megan, 2 yrs older, bl sheep, hard teen years—> adulthood, subs abuse (alc, mar), H feels guilt/concern/excess respons, “the good daughter”