The Last to See Me

by M Dressler

  I like riding in cars. I ride with her around the edge of the cove. It’s a twisting gray ribbon, Benito’s sea-road, threading above the cliffs and beside the great red trunks of the trees.

  We cross the river that feeds its heart into the cove. I can see the deeper color where the captains used to anchor their doghole schooners, called that because they could turn tail in a narrow circle and survive the shoals. Where the docks once stood, there’s nothing now but stumps of blackened wood jutting up from the sand, like trees that haven’t given up hope of the sun.

  From here, the far side of the bay, Benito’s painted houses and curio shops appear small and sparkling, like lumps of sugar. My home, my home. It’s a sweet place. And I mean to keep it that way. It’s sweeter, too, knowing that Pratt had no luck today and has gone off to rest his empty hands, as other hunters have before him, on the bar at the Main Street Hotel. Alone. Alone. And why shouldn’t he be?

  Ellen guides her wheel and turns away from the cove and into the woods. Such deep shade here, and bracken, away from the road. The air turns thick and misty. We pass the small cabins and trailers filled with those who work in the village but sleep among these planted pines. The strong, virgin woods are long gone.

  It’s nice to go off with Ellen, like this. It’s brought back to me how I miss old Alice’s company. She was quiet, too, when she drove. And also didn’t know I was beside her, helping her, as much as I could. Slow down, now, watch out for that limb. Like Ellen, she listened to me without knowing, which always gave me a warm feeling—as getting a Lambry to do your bidding would make anyone in Benito feel. In fairness, I did try to make her happy in return. I’d nudge her gaze toward a perfect white shell lying on the beach. Or help her catch one of her jars of wet brushes before it shattered on the floor. I kept young and then old Alice company while she painted in the fog and wind, while she called out, lonely, to the lowing seals, creatures she always believed were answering her because she didn’t know they’re really tough, territory-minded things, and bark not in friendship but in warning. How nice it was, at the end of a day, for us to tramp back together, Alice and me, through the sand and wind up the headland, toward the house, side by side. For fifty years, just the two of us—at least until Manoel came along.

  Ellen’s gone deeper into the piney lanes, passing the old huts where the opium-smokers used to live. She brings her little car to a stop in front of a house sitting alone. It’s shaped like the letter A, its roof sliding all the way down to touch the ground. A painted FOR RENT sign still leans against its moss-covered flank.

  She gets out, taking her satchel with her but leaving behind her keys, in the way of someone who thinks no harm can come to her in an out-of-the-way place like this. Careful, I whisper. Careful. She reaches back in to get them. A good thing, too, because even a ghost can’t always know when an intruder might be nearby.

  I follow Ellen up the steps to her door. She smiles, glad it seems with what she’s accomplished today. She hums to herself as she goes in. How sweet. The living wear their hearts on their sleeves when they think no one is looking. Though sometimes they try to hide what they’re up to, even from themselves—I’ve seen it with Manoel. But even then, it doesn’t take much to see right through them, any more than it does to peer through a pair of boardinghouse curtains. I warned Alice about her handyman. Well, if you’re going to keep him around, then at least let him be useful. Tell him to build something. Keep him busy. Tell him you want to see the water and the sky all the way around. Tell him to leave the little balcony upstairs above the dome, floating, floating.

  At the very end, when Alice and Manoel had their terrible argument, and she’d fallen to the floor of her bedroom, I’d been there, too, to tell her what to feel. I’d heard her thoughts and her question, and told her that it was all right. It’s only where others have gone before you. She’d lain very still, her eyes wide open and finally seeing me, as they all do at the end, and I’d gone to close the curtains so the sun wouldn’t make her cry, and moved the pillow that had fallen to the floor. To make her more comfortable.

  A piece of fear twisted her mouth when I stroked her gray hair. What are you going to do to me? I heard her think.

  Yet all we can ever really do for each other, as my Da used to say, is what we hope will be the best.

  Inside, Ellen is turning on all her lights. She shivers a little, rubbing her hands together. There are just four little rooms in this pointed house. Downstairs is the kitchen and living room with bright new things placed against the dark walls and floor: a vase here, a comfortable chair there. On the fireplace mantel she’s put a single photograph of a man holding a baby up in his arms. Otherwise, there are no pictures, nothing private at all. A bookshelf full of business books. A door to a small bathroom. Upstairs, a loft with a neatly made bed. Above the bed, the roof is pointed and pitched, like the hull of a ship turned upside down. Everything is tidy. No dirt on the braided rug. Even the empty dish on the floor beside the back door is shining and clean. For her cat, that must be.

  I like seeing how Ellen lives and where she sleeps. I wonder what it must be like to live here with her. To be the secret pet who depends on her for comfort and company.

  She opens the back door and calls through the screen for her kitten. But no answer comes, no rustle from between the trees. She sighs and pushes the screen door out and together we walk through the light turning gray and cold, to a neglected garden. A plant cage has tumbled, and crumpled leaves litter the ground. She tramps over the earth in her good business shoes and turns this way and that, calling for Kittums, Kittums, and only turns back, sighing again, when she hears the sound of the phone she’s left near the door.

  What a ghostly thing it is, a telephone, that with only a sound it can make the living jump. So amazed we all were, as children, when the first line in the village was strung and went, of course, straight to the Lambrys’ post—the Lambrys always the first in line to get anything new and exciting. We stood hushed outside the iron gate that kept us from their garden, and strained to hear the telephone bell ring. Now my hearing stretches so far I don’t need to be near Ellen and can linger in the woods and trail my skirt through the leaves.

  “Philip.”

  “Calling to thank you again for all your help today.”

  “No, thank you. I hope I helped. Especially since I don’t have much background in—what you do.”

  “It’s not something they spend much time on in real estate classes?”

  “A little. Not much.”

  I can hear a soft tapping sound. Pratt touching at something.

  “I’ve been going over a few details here, Ellen. The Lambrys have always been very orderly about their estates and their money. Alice’s will, for example”—I hear more tapping—“is very specific and directed the house to be sold to the highest bidder and the proceeds disbursed to her relations. So that would seem to argue against a dead Lambry being angry at the sale of her property and—”

  “—taking it out on the Danes?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, can’t ghosts change their minds?”

  “They don’t have minds to change. Their desires are fixed at death, like compasses. Also, I went ahead and checked on any deaths in the house.”

  “I was going to do that for you. I thought you said, ‘patience.’”

  A fine piece of silence on the other end. I come a little closer to Ellen.

  “I just didn’t want to overwhelm you with chores, right off the bat. Luckily, your public records people here are wonderfully cooperative. What I’m seeing here”—more taps and clicks—“is comfort and peace. Lambrys who lived to ripe old ages and died in their beds with their affairs in good order. Which, again, argues against any upset about wills and inheritances.”

  “I guess I didn’t know ghosts could be so touchy about money.”

  “I stopped counting, a while back, how many of my cases were about who took Aunt Imelda’s pearls.” I hear him laugh and take
a drink of something and the clatter of silverware against china.

  “Are you having dinner?”

  “I am. You?”

  “Just out looking for my cat.”

  “No luck?”

  “She gets into all sorts of places when she’s feeling sketchy. It’s all right.”

  “I do have one new request for you, Ellen. Can you get me a list of all the currently empty or abandoned buildings, properties, and structures in the village?”

  “I can—but there won’t be many. Space is at such a premium here. There’s not even much that’s for rent or sale. We’re just too small a market.”

  “Do your best. And another question: are the Lambry heirs likely to come up from San Francisco anytime soon?”

  “I don’t think they’re even planning on coming at all. Like I told you—they don’t want anything to do with the bother of all this. I think they just want the money in their hands and to be done with the last bit of Lambry property. In the village, I mean. Apart from—from the graves.”

  “You sound a little tired over there.”

  “I am. I feel worn down.”

  “Take a shower. You’ll feel better. Get the dirt and dust of the dead off of you. I should have told you. It sticks to you. Deadness. It weighs.”

  Another part of what they all say, another lie they tell about us. But no, it isn’t the dead that stick and soil. It’s only the dust of the past that weighs and dirties, and the grime of the hunt itself. It’s not me. I’m not dirt.

  Stay calm now, Emma.

  “You could have told me that sooner. Creepy as it is.”

  “Clean up and rest and have a good evening. And I’ll see you tomorrow. And thanks for arranging the handyman.”

  “I’ll call and make sure he’ll be there in the morning. I have another appointment but I’ll try to be there with you both as soon as I can.”

  “Excellent. Good night then.”

  The light’s fading fast. And Ellen, inside the house, is pulling off her jacket and blouse and going into the bathroom.

  Dirt. Dirt. Dirty. Why that word? Why, when all we’re trying to do is survive? You just watch, the village gossips used to say about me, now her father’s dead and she’s in the boardinghouse, she’ll fall into dirty ways with that pretty face of hers. She will, she’ll get herself into trouble, turn herself into a slatternly thing, slopping around with mill hands and who knows what. When all I ever wanted was to take a long hot bath, too, after a day of cleaning and cooking and filling the plates of men who stank, handing me their laundry, their drawers stained with ash and pitch, in those days when the smoke from the mills hung over the village, clinging to your neck, to everyone and everything, rolling in billows through the doors. I sweated, so of course I stank at the end of a day—just like the loggers who came from ferreting out the trees with sticks of dynamite, sweating and grinding them downriver toward the mills and the men who took what had been living and whole and turned it into one dead thing only, and that the same thing over and over again. The same plank of wood, the one grand lush thing turned into a thousand dead, dull things. That’s how the living think of us. That we’re all the same.

  But I wasn’t any thing. My black hair was long and shining. My back was sturdy, my hands and nails clean and clipped. My face, shaped like a heart, mirrored my father’s chin, with his cleft in it.

  I run away from Ellen, leaving her to her bath, and wind through the dead rows of the forest, dragging dirt with the edge of my skirt. The earth might touch me, but it doesn’t stain me. I spy the skeleton of an old, cracked greenhouse, tucked in its shadowy dell, a place once used by the sellers of smoking pipes and forgetfulness in these woods. Now its door hangs from one loose hinge. I go inside, rest in its room of empty clay pots. But only for an instant. I don’t, won’t linger in such places. I can’t. Nothing lasts, nothing can live in a hollow place. Only loneliness. And it’s loneliness that makes a soul easier to snuff out.

  Like that poor boy in the mine.

  And yet this is where Pratt thinks he’ll find me—like any other ghost, hiding in a ruin, in an empty building, in a deserted hut, along a wall of mirrors, in a buried shaft. I look around at the abandoned shell of the greenhouse. But what—for I do have a mind, Mr. Pratt—what if a hunter could be tricked into thinking he’d found the very thing he thought he was looking for, in the very place where he thought he might find it?

  What then?

  For it’s sure, my Da used to say to me, that there’s nothing simpler than to give a man what he wants.

  So. Give it.

  7

  I walk in darkness under the sparkling drops of the chandelier.

  I pass like foam over the deep Turkish carpets and glide along the smooth paneling, my sleeve brushing it.

  I pass in front of the fine mirrors and the carefully framed watercolors.

  It’s night again. And this is my place, now. My home. Lambry House.

  I always dreamed I’d live in a fine house, someday. When I was young, not yet nineteen, I’d walk back from Evergreen Hill with a basket on my arm, after tending to the graves of my family, and I’d glance up and see the elegant globes of light in the Lambry parlors. I’d think: how wonderful it must be to live in such brightness. I’d stop in front of the closed garden gate, its metal glistening with dew, and study how grandly the white pillars held the porch roof up, like a kind of throne, with fine copper gutters trimmed all around it, and I’d wonder what it must be like to be someone whose rainwater passed through money.

  A servant would move into the light. Mrs. Broyle, the housekeeper, or the girl who served the meals, who was Irish, like me. Sometimes, I saw the Chinaman who took the ashes out. Sometimes, the lace curtains in the Red Parlor would be pulled back, and I could see deep inside, into the dining room, where the men lounged in their smoking jackets and the Lambry girls, in gowns as pale as honey, stood by the mirrors and seemed to chatter with their own faces.

  One more look—all I’d allow myself—and then I made my feet walk on. A Finnis might long for fine linen and silver, but gawking at it did no more good than asking for a plate of full moon when only the new one was being served. I hurried back to Mrs. Strype’s boardinghouse so I wouldn’t lose the roof over my own head. I had no time to think about gowns like honey or hair ribbons streaming down straight, ironed hair. Girls like me and Frances wore our curls pinned up tight and our shirtsleeves rolled up to keep them clear of the steam off the washtubs.

  In that summer, 1914, when I wasn’t yet nineteen, a boy, Tommy Allston, came one day from the Lambry House to Mrs. Strype’s to ask for a girl to come and do some extra work that needed tending to. The girl who was asked for that day was me.

  There was nothing surprising about this. Those of us who worked in the village, women and men both, could be called up to one of the big houses at any time, to help with the glazing of a window or to re-shingle a water tank or to carry the heavy rugs into the backyard so they could be beaten with a mallet. Sometimes, if the Lambrys had a shipful of guests, the laundry alone overmatched the staff, especially all the shirts and collars that needed turning out and starching and pressing, to say nothing of the coats that needed buttons and brushing, and the gowns that needed their torn hems fixed, and the men’s cuffs that needed extra scrubbing—for the Lambry sons, Quint and Albert, were known to dress as fancily as their sisters. I’d seen that up close.

  A girl like me wouldn’t usually get close to the Lambry children except during some hubbub holiday where the whole village rubbed elbows—like the Fourth of July, when we crowded together on the cliffs to see the fireworks splash in the cove. Quint Lambry had stood near me at the edge, trying to get as close as he could, like me, to the boom and the cannons. When we both let out a whoop at one loud, bright burst, he turned to me like a gull surprised to see another flying at the same height. Another time, I’d caught him eyeing me as I swept off the porch at Mrs. Strype’s—though when he saw I’d spotted him, he’d dropped
his head in a short, funny nod, like something inside him had snapped and broken. Everyone in the village knew the Lambry children had been told not to act too proudly as they walked down the street or looked in at a shop window. Mrs. Strype had snorted through her flat nose at me, And why do they teach them that? Because there’s no good fortune in being rich if people think so poorly of you they want to kill you in your bed.

  Still, I was surprised to be called to the Lambry House on that Monday, which was washing-day at all the boardinghouses, not a day that girls like me were usually called away. My shirtwaist stuck to me, damp as a sail, and I looked a mess when Tommy peered over the fence. He grinned and whistled.

  “Stop your flirting, Tommy Allston,” I jeered back at him. “Go back to the telegraph office and get your messages.”

  “You’re wanted at the Lambrys. Right now.”

  “Why?”

  “Dunno. Find out yourself.” He let go of the fence and put his cap back on, whistling.

  I stepped away from the tub and took off my apron and wrung it out and flopped it on the clothes line. Promptness was expected and paid well. I called up to Mrs. Strype that I was needed by the Lambrys. Mrs. Strype was a fussy, sour woman. She stuck her head out of one of the second-story bedrooms and called, “Have a Chinaman gardener and a steamship that brings them silk on a Sunday, but they don’t think to ask if I can spare you. Lovely.”

  “I’m going,” I said, glad to be away from her moods. I passed through the boardinghouse hall and tucked my hair in at the spotty mirror and then strolled out onto Albion Street, where I kept my head down and my arms folded across my wet chest, the best way to keep out of trouble with the sailors. Before I turned toward the Lambry House I looked up the hill at Evergreen and kissed my hands in honor of my family there. It’s a pity, Da used to say, that the best piece of land most men will ever own will be the one they get to enjoy the least.

  At Lambry House, I opened the gate and closed it behind me. Mrs. Broyle was already standing on the wide porch, in front of the frosted, scrolled doors, her hands folded over her apron.