Ghosts of Harvard

by Francesca Serritella

  Cady reached out and brushed her fingers against the thirty-some knobs that lined the keyboards.

  “Those are the stops. Like the expression “pulling out all the stops”? It literally means to engage all the pipes at once, full blast. It’ll blow your hair back.”

  “I knew you played the piano, but this? You have to be a serious musician to play this. I thought you were all physics all the time, like Eric.”

  “Music and physics have always gone hand in hand. Eric didn’t share your supernatural ear?”

  Supernatural. Cady knew he meant her perfect pitch, but she blushed with embarrassment anyway. “You clearly never sang karaoke with Eric.”

  “Never had the chance.” They were both quiet for a moment, silenced by the finality of it. “This is a Fisk organ, Charles Fisk was a Harvard grad and accomplished physicist, he worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II before devoting himself to organ construction.”

  “From the nuclear bomb to church organs—atonement?”

  “I don’t know if there’s atonement to be had for that,” he said with a grimace.

  “Is it like the piano?”

  “Not quite. A piano is a forgiving instrument; it’s easy to control the volume, all the notes linger and glide over one another, and the sustain pedal can mask any mistakes. An organ is the opposite. When your finger hits a key, even if it only grazes it, wind is released into the pipe at full blast. And as soon as you lift your finger, the wind stops. The pipes speak at a fixed volume—”

  “The pipes ‘speak’?”

  “That’s the term, funny, isn’t it? Anyway, they ‘speak’ at fixed volumes, depending on the size. So no sins are forgiven.”

  Cady’s eyes scanned the enormous instrument with its four keyboards and countless stops on either side. “Sounds impossible.”

  “I like the challenge.” The side of Nikos’s face crinkled with a smile. “The piano is like a high school girl; pliable, sensitive, easy to please.” Nikos ran his hands over the keys in a light caress. “But an organ is the sort of woman who’s out of your league, maybe a little older, aloof. On the surface, she’s an ice queen, but if you touch her in the right ways”—he paused and walked his fingertips across the keys—“she’ll make you feel like a god.”

  Cady elbowed him with a laugh. “So, do you have to sit here in the dark, or is that just your mood lighting of choice?”

  “They ask us not to turn on the house lights at this hour. I won’t lie, it’s a bit spooky. See here?” Nikos reached up to adjust a mirror poised above the music ledge. “You’re supposed to look in this to watch the choir conductor. But these rehearsal nights, when I’m all alone and the wind is howling, I find myself compulsively checking the mirror. Like I expect a ghost, or perhaps a wayward freshman girl, to be lurking behind me.”

  Nikos laughed but Cady didn’t. Her thoughts returned to the voice. “Do you believe in ghosts?”

  “Please, I’m a man of science.”

  I don’t know.

  Had her thoughts summoned Whit? Hearing the voice with Nikos beside her made her panicky again. She wanted to turn it off.

  I want to believe, don’t you? That the ones we’ve lost aren’t really gone.

  “Do you?” Nikos asked.

  She shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “Is that why you came here?” Nikos’s voice was gentle, but the question cut her to the quick.

  Cady couldn’t bring herself to answer, her heart rate quickening. He thinks I’m sick, she thought to herself.

  No, I don’t.

  “Play something for me.”

  “Okay, what do you want to hear?” Nikos asked.

  “Anything,” Cady answered.

  Do you think it’s sick I want to enlist when my father died in the Great War?

  “How about … Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor?”

  Way I look at it, when someone’s taken from you too soon, there’s a finite number of things you can share with that person, so you want to share them all.

  Cady hadn’t responded, so Nikos added, “You’ll know it when you hear it.”

  The first notes poured from the organ at such a high, reedy pitch, it tickled the eardrum. Then the lower chords erupted, vibrating through the organ bench and up her spine. Nikos’s hands moved quickly and expertly across the manuals, and she recognized the piece immediately, a Halloween classic.

  Music, Navy, these are my chances to having something in common with my father beyond blood, so how can I resist that pull?

  The music’s quickening tempo and menace only magnified her anxiety, but Nikos’s playing was a distraction from Whit, and she didn’t want him to stop.

  With no more future, the past is all you have.

  The cascading notes crashed over Cady, and she was desperate to submerge her consciousness and drown out Whit’s voice, but it wasn’t enough. Like the rattle of a bathtub chain beneath a thunderous faucet, the voice was only louder underwater.

  So you make their past your present, it’s almost like they’re with you.

  “Can you play it louder?”

  Nikos obliged, pulling out two more stops.

  Cady nodded.

  Nikos hesitated. “We’re not supposed to pull out all the stops at night—”

  You want to know about keeping the past alive, you ask a Southern boy.

  “Please—” she cried.

  Ghosts don’t haunt the living.

  “Louder!”

  We haunt them.

  The organ roared. Cady flinched at its earsplitting volume as if she’d been struck. The subterranean rumblings of the bass chords twisted in her gut and drummed in her chest, the wind from the pipes blew on her cheeks, the tempo like adrenaline coursed through her veins. Any emotion, any thought in her brain was wiped out, her skull scraped clean. But the obliteration was a relief; the visceral discomfort soothed her. She had the easy, frightening sensation of surrender.

  And she didn’t hear the voice anymore.

  Cady returned to her dorm room punch-drunk, desperate to lie down and quell the ringing in her ears. The suite was dark and quiet, everyone seemingly had gone to bed. Emotionally and physically exhausted, Cady collapsed onto her bottom bunk.

  Squish.

  She sat up and twisted around to see a piece of chocolate cake smashed onto a paper plate, and now, her bedspread. She reached to her back, and her fingers found the sticky icing clinging to her sweater. A Post-it Note lay on her pillow, written in precise purple handwriting:

  I saved you a piece.

  20

  Cady had felt sick to her stomach with guilt all morning, a situation not helped by her father’s aggressive driving, as they were running late to Grampa and Vivi’s vow renewal. She’d slept badly the night before, berating herself for blowing Andrea’s birthday. Just as Cady had instructed her, Andrea had indeed texted her that she and Marko were coming to the room, but Cady had been so preoccupied with Matt’s new information about Eric, Mika, and the voices that she had completely missed it. She could only imagine how humiliated Andrea had been when she walked into a dark dorm room with no surprise waiting for her, and in front of her crush no less. Worse still, Cady had had to leave that morning to catch her flight to Philadelphia before Andrea woke up, so she hadn’t been able to apologize in person. Not that she knew what she would say—how could she sincerely apologize without making herself sound crazy? “I’m sorry, I got distracted by the voices in my head.” “I’m sorry, I might have schizophrenia, but I’m pretty sure it’s ghosts.” She’d spent most of the flight trying to compose a text, and after a dozen drafts in her Notes app, Cady managed to send only:

  Andrea, I am so, so sorry.

  She checked her phone again in the backseat. Andrea still hadn’t replied.

  Self-loathing sloshed in Cady’s gut as her fa
ther changed lanes.

  Cady opened the other note she had written in her iPhone on the plane, a secret inventory of all the facts she had gleaned about each of the voices, who they were, and whence they came:

  Whit—full name James Whitaker Goodwin, Jr., from Georgia, calls WWI “The Great War,” so pre-1940.

  Father died in the war, Whit too little to remember him. So Whit born sometime between 1910 and 1914.

  Currently a junior, so he’s about twenty years old. Current year for him between 1930 and 1934.

  Robert—expert in literature, science, mentioned recent Nobel prize 1922, prob mid 1920s

  Bilhah—slave during Pres Holyoke’s time (1737–1769), her current year is ?? Can’t read, son is mute, afraid they will sell him!? Needs my help.

  Cady looked out the car window and mulled over her theory. Professor Prokop might not approve, but Cady had incorporated what she’d said about hidden dimensions—in which time and space could be warped and folded over, leaving traces in our world—into her interpretation of the voices, but in layman’s terms, they were ghosts. People from different times poking through the same space. They spoke to her as if their time was the present, and they seemed to experience her in their world in whatever way made sense for their period. They didn’t know they were dead, because in their own dimensions, they weren’t yet. Could she help them? Could they help her? Bilhah already had, that night with Teddy. Cady wondered how they died, or would die. Was she supposed to help them avoid that fate? Was it some sort of test?

  Cady hadn’t really believed in ghosts before, not the type that rattled chains or made the room temperature drop. The closest she’d come to a paranormal experience was years ago, when Cady and her mother were driving by their old house and her mother decided to knock on the door. The new owners invited them in, and although the walls were new colors and Cady and Eric’s shared bedroom was now an office, she could feel her younger self there. She could hear Eric’s little-boy voice echoing around the stairwell. Her family’s past selves were captured between those walls, preserved in memory, like an insect in amber. These ghosts felt like that, and she was starting to believe in them.

  “Chilton Gables, that’s the name of the place, right?” her father asked. “I think we’re here.”

  After driving around the labyrinthine retirement village, they finally found the correct tan clapboard home, which looked nearly identical to all the others save for a few details, like garage placement or shutter color, as if all the homes were genetic relatives. However, Grampa and Vivi’s stood out thanks to Vivi’s collection of stone statuettes on the lawn: a boy and girl sitting on a bench, a pig pushing a wheelbarrow, a bunny rabbit with white balloons tied troublingly around its neck, and the Virgin Mary.

  “Looks like I’ll have to park down the street,” her father said. Cady saw the driveway was already stuffed with cars and more along the curb.

  “That, or we can just turn around and go home,” her mother said.

  He shrugged. “They’re your family.”

  “It’s Vivi’s family, I don’t know these people,” her mother muttered. Vivi had three children, a little younger than Cady’s parents, and a bunch of grandkids, but her mother was right, Cady hardly knew them beyond a refrigerator Christmas card. Blending hadn’t been a priority on either family’s side. “It’s ridiculous. A vow renewal? They’ve only been married two years.”

  “I think it’s kind of nice, since they didn’t have a real wedding,” Cady piped up from the back, overcompensating for her mood. Grampa and Vivi had eloped; they’d gotten married on a Carnival cruise ship somewhere in the Atlantic. They didn’t even tell anyone they were engaged, or maybe people don’t get engaged at their age. So it took the family by surprise, most of all Cady’s mother. It had been only eighteen months since Cady’s grandmother had passed away from a brief but brutal battle with pancreatic cancer.

  They parked a few doors down and plastered smiles on their faces before Cady pressed the doorbell. The door swung open and Vivi greeted them, beaming.

  “Hello, hello!” Vivi cried. She was swathed in a champagne chiffon dress and jacket set that matched her peachy-hued hair, and her makeup level was set to “showgirl.” “C’mon in!” The three of them shuffled slowly through the front door as Vivi hugged each of them, her many bangles jangling as she threw out her soft arms and pulled Cady into a heavily perfumed embrace. Vivi kissed her cheek and Cady could feel the creamy pink lipstick leave its mark.

  “Kare-bear!” Grampa came ambling into the entrance hall in a tan suit, arms outstretched. He looked healthy and happy, younger than his eighty-one years.

  “Hi, Dad,” her mother said, hugging him.

  He spotted Cady over her shoulder. “And my munchkin!” Grampa’s bear hug leapfrogged from his daughter to granddaughter. “Come in, come in, wait’ll you see the spread we got in here!”

  The party was more elaborate than Cady expected—a white carpet rolled out through the entrance hall and into the living area, which was missing its usual furniture and filled with three rows of white fold-up chairs and a pink-rose-covered altar. Gauzy white curtains hid the kitchen from view, but well-dressed catering staff emerged with trays of drinks and hors d’oeuvres, and the place was packed with older faces Cady had never met before. She and her father oohed and aahed while Grampa grinned so wide, Cady feared for his dentures.

  “Wow, Dad, you weren’t kidding,” Cady’s mother said, her eyes wide.

  “You know what they say, you can’t take it with you!” He laughed. “I gotta spruce up before the ceremony. Then afterwards, they’re gonna set up some tables toot-sweet, and we’ll have a nice buffet dinner. Now enjoy yourselves and eat some shrimp—they’re jumbo!”

  Her mother lifted a glass of champagne off a passing silver tray.

  Cady and her parents made small talk with a few of the guests, but mostly they stood around, an awkward triad. The octogenarians around them were in livelier spirits than they were, and it was a relief when Vivi came back with some of her immediate family. Her father got busy talking sports with Vivi’s sons-in-law, leaving Cady and her mother to fall prey to Vivi.

  “You remember my grandson, Jackson.” Vivi threw her arm around the beanstalk of a boy, easily six feet tall but thin enough that he shook when his grandmother patted him on the back. “He just made the varsity basketball team at school.”

  “That’s awesome,” Cady said, only half-recognizing him.

  “Thanks.” Jackson shrugged, his blue eyes peeked through his floppy bangs for a whole second before looking back at the floor. Then he murmured something to Vivi that Cady couldn’t hear.

  “Okay, sweetie, in the kitchen,” Vivi answered him—her voice had only one volume setting. She looked lovingly after him as he ambled away before turning back to Cady. “Isn’t he handsome?”

  “And so tall!” Cady’s mother said. “When did that happen?”

  Vivi’s glow faded. “You haven’t seen him since his confirmation. That was over two years ago, he’s sprouted. He just turned sixteen.”

  Cady remembered Jackson’s confirmation reception with a wave of embarrassment—the whole thing having taken place at the home of Jackson’s mother, Linda:

  “Did someone let the dog out?” Linda had asked, fear thinning her voice. Shadow, their black lab mix, had a bad habit of chasing cars; the family must have mentioned keeping him in ten times when everyone had first arrived. When the room quieted in reply to her question, there was no question; there was barking coming from outside. And, Cady noticed, Eric was missing.

  The front door was found hanging open, the winter air chilling the cozy party. Jackson ran out the door and onto the lawn, his dress suit billowing on his teenage stick-figure frame. Cady remembered Jackson calling the dog’s name, his panic and hormones cracking his voice, then the sound of screeching tires and the dog’s yowl.

 
Thankfully, Shadow had yelped out of fear, the car had missed by the slimmest margin, and they eventually got the dog safely back in the house, but the ordeal made Jackson cry. The poor kid was so humiliated that he’d cried on the day he was supposed to become a man that he hid in his bedroom for the rest of the reception, only to be dragged out when it was time for cake.

  It seemed that only Cady’s family remained concerned for Eric. He had walked out without his coat and without a word to anyone. Grampa and Cady’s father and mother went to look for him; Cady’s role was to stay behind and make nice, but the drama was the story of the party. For the rest of the reception, there was a murmuring speculation about why a young man would just walk out like that. Cady overheard someone suggesting Eric was a drug addict. Meanwhile, Vivi was annoyed at having attention diverted from her grandson. It took Cady’s family more than an hour before they found Eric casually eating at a roadside Burger King over a mile away.

  So Cady could understand why Jackson wasn’t eager to catch up with her. She looked at her mother to see if she recalled the incident, but her mother was occupied with a member of the catering staff, swapping out her old champagne for a new one. “Which way is the bathroom again?” Cady asked.

  Vivi pointed her in the right direction, and Cady excused herself.

  She walked to the bathroom, preoccupied. She shared some of her mother’s dislike of Vivi. Vivi was hard to accept, not because she wasn’t nice, but because she was so different from Cady’s late grandmother. Her grandmother had dressed simply and aged gracefully, and she was wonderfully mysterious. She had had the mind of a scientist. She’d made her small greenhouse into a laboratory, and Cady wouldn’t be surprised if she had taught Eric how to grow those blue hydrangeas for Jenny. When they were younger, Grandma would orchestrate little secrets to entertain Eric and Cady. She pressed flowers into their children’s books and said that fairies left them. On Easter she’d set up an egg hunt that was rather difficult but for her clues—Easter bunny “tracks” left in baking flour, dropped carrots unearthed from her own garden. To Cady and Eric, Grandma was the good witch, moody but full of surprises. Cady got the sense from her own mother that Grandma was different growing up, that her darker moods didn’t always pass so easily, but it’s simpler to be a grandmother than a mother.