The Last to See Me

by M Dressler

  “It will do that.” He looks at the wall behind Ellen, into the mirror, but I can tell he’s only seeing himself. Not me. And now I know what I need to do next.

  “My weapon only makes things plainer. Armor doesn’t make anything easy, I’d say.”

  “Maybe we should talk about something else.” She pulls her hands back toward her.

  “Agreed. Something you’re comfortable with. Tell me about Benito real estate. This hotel. It’s quite a showplace.”

  They order and talk and in a moment the waiter comes and sets their salads down and grinds pepper to ash for them. So elegant everything is now. Lettuces curled like lace. The table covered in white cloths. No more chickens in the yard. And the lamps all electric.

  “It goes back to timber days, this hotel,” Ellen is telling Pratt. “The bustle and boom and the rowdy days.”

  “It’s hard to picture it,” Pratt says between bites. “As quaint and tidy as everything is now, and quiet.”

  “You mean normally.”

  “It almost seems too quiet for a go-getter like you.”

  “No. It’s peaceful. I like that. People come here to get some rest. Like the constable said. They come to get away. Did you text Mr. Dane?” She points to his device.

  “I did, and he’s of the opinion the damages should be charged to the Lambry estate but he’s willing to discuss it. I don’t think he fully understands what’s happened yet. All he kept insisting was that he wasn’t responsible for any pre-existing circumstances. Don’t worry. I’ll make him understand. Eat. You’re not eating.”

  “I guess I’m not that hungry.” She stares at her plate, then away, at the other tables.

  “Don’t feel guilty. You can’t. Your business is to sell houses, not shoulder them.”

  “You’re right about one thing.” She still looks around the crowded room. Her back to me, to my eyes, to my interest in every move she makes. “I am a go-getter. I admit that. I want to do well, here.”

  “Then what, I’ll ask again, are you doing buried in this out-of-the-way corner?”

  She turns to Pratt again and pushes her salad around on her plate with her fork. “I’m not buried.”

  “Then you must have been somewhere pretty deep before.”

  “I was.”

  “Prison?”

  She laughs. A deep, good laugh. Like Franny’s. “No! No, not that, not exactly.”

  “What, then?”

  “If you want to know the honest truth, I’ve—I’ve started over, in Benito. Or actually, I’ve just gotten started. After a not so good start. I actually don’t like to talk about this much, but—I lost someone. No one who became a ghost, no. My father. And then I had to take care of my mother, who was sick all the time. She didn’t have much of a life. So neither did I. When she passed away, I moved out. Until then, everything was just—in limbo. Waiting to get out of the house and study and get some kind of life. So what seems like being buried, to you, feels like fireworks to me. I’m ambitious because I finally get to be ambitious. And I don’t want to mess anything up.” She looks straight at him. “So now you know my sad little story. What about you? How did you get to be who you are? Did you wake up one day and decide you were going to … give people peace?”

  “I didn’t decide. I had no choice. I was born for this.”

  Pratt lifts two fingers. The waiter comes and pours more wine. Someone drops a knife, and Pratt turns and raises his eyebrows at a noisy table where some drunken tourists are hooting and clapping.

  “Do you remember,” he says, turning back to Ellen, “when you were small, maybe after your father died, maybe before, being afraid of things hiding under your bed?”

  “Constantly.”

  “Even though no one had ever suggested to you that you should be afraid of such things? And yet you were.”

  That’s true. I was afraid of such things, too, when I was living, even though I was never told I should be. Not by my father. I just knew. Even though nothing had ever come up out of the dark place and touched me. I knew, too.

  “Somehow you knew,” Pratt says to Ellen, “without anyone telling you, that the space under your bed wasn’t empty.”

  “Yes. That’s true.”

  “What you knew”—he pauses and drinks—“what you guessed, was that the empty space, alone, was enough to make the thing possible. In some way, without ever talking to a scientist about it, or a cleaner, you knew, in your child’s heart, that space is never empty. That space is, in fact, the most creative thing in creation—because it can be filled by anything. But now you’re grown up, and that sensitivity to space is gone from you.” He stares into the mirror behind Ellen, at me, though he doesn’t know it. “As it is from most of us. It disappears when you get older. You lose the feeling for it.

  “But I can tell you that the reason you felt something was hiding under your bed, all those years ago, is precisely because it was. It just knew better than to show itself to you.”

  Or maybe, Philip Pratt, it had a deeper heart than you can imagine.

  “Children frighten so easily. And then they scream and give the ghost away. From the beginning—as a child—I never screamed. I peeked and tried to draw it out. Something has always told me that the easiest way to get rid of a thing that scares you is to bring it close. Then, once you see what it is, you can figure out how to crush it.”

  I go on listening as my anger starts to rise. Crush it, he says. That’s the only thing he can imagine doing to something that makes you feel the dark underneath.

  “But you have to bring it into close range, first. When I did, when I was very young, I saw that it wasn’t a real thing. It wasn’t a human being. It was a shell. The mold of something that once held a human being. But a mold that can only hold so much, bear so much, before it breaks. All my life, I’ve wanted to smash the unbearable. There’s a mirror behind you, Ellen, for example, but please don’t turn around and look. Hold very still.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m looking at neither your reflection nor mine.”

  Because now I’ve let my anger shimmer loose. Because I have no choice. Because I’m real. I’m no mold. I’m more than you say I am, hunter. Much more.

  Ellen stops breathing.

  “This hotel had quite a few ghosts in the past, I imagine?” Pratt asks quickly.

  “But they were all cleaned out years ago.”

  “Then they should have gotten rid of the mirrors, too.”

  “They wanted … period detail.”

  “Bad idea.”

  “What does it look like?”

  “Vague. Clever. Concealing itself with the bright lights all around.”

  “What should we do? Should we sound an alarm?”

  “No. I believe that’s what it wants. It wants to scare us. It wants to alarm everyone here. That’s what most manifestations are after. The urge is to terrorize. Stay where you are. Let’s just see where things are taking us.”

  I can move very, very slowly, when I choose to. Even when I’m letting myself feel all my pain, all my anger, I can move so slowly that when I slip out of the mirror and flatten against the glowing wallpaper, like this, Pratt loses me. I’m as thin and stretched as paper itself, burning in the light. I can rise slowly up, along the wall, climbing to the ceiling, till the room filled with tourists is spread out below me, every table, with no idea of what is hanging over them. I flow on my back, along the ceiling, toward the edge of the room, where the largest of the mirrors hangs. Pratt is standing up now, worried, wondering where exactly I’ve gone. And now, if only he will do what I want him to do, if only he’ll notice—Yes, yes! He’s coming closer to the grand mirror now, where it stands like an open door behind the brace of tourists who’ve had too much to drink. I glide inside it, and one of the drunken men, laughing and leaning into another’s shoulders, thinks surely he must be imagining the shape—

  “What …?”

  From the mirror, I reach a white arm out toward him, detach
ed.

  “Wait, wa—what is—”

  Who’s to say, when you look into a mirror, who’s the ghost and who is real? Why do the living believe, when they see themselves reflected, that they’re the solid ones? What if you are nothing, just the mold of a human being, and the truth, the real thing, is me—the bright shadow on the other side?

  The man, and everyone at his table, screams.

  I’m what they need to see. I’m a dead woman, her face eaten away. I’m a dead, old woman, wearing a floating, billowing Chinese robe, with yellow dragons stitched across it, breathing fire, and along with my dead, reaching arms and my floating gown a white fog comes pouring from the mirror, my white hair following after it, and the smoke, a choking smoke, begins to fill the room, rising around me.

  Hold fast. Hold fast, until Pratt’s seen what I’ve made.

  He’s standing, running, close enough now. I sink into the white smoke pooling under the tables and around the waiter’s feet, down into that inch of space close to the ground, that narrow space the living are told to cling to if fire fills a room, that gasping space where you’re supposed to drop and try to breathe, because it’s the very last space where life can hold on, just an inch above the coffin of the earth. As I glide along the floor I hear the living screaming above me, pitiful, drowning in smoke, trying to escape but finding no door because all they see is fear and blindness and all they feel is a white robe tangling their heels.

  By the time the medics arrive to help, I’m folded and resting in the velvet of the curtains. Pratt is helpless, telling everyone there was no fire, only smoke, listening to everyone wailing all at once.

  It was a woman! She wore a Japanese-looking costume!

  She had a face!

  She had no face.

  It was bone.

  There was a laughing!

  I saw hair.

  Something floating. Before the smoke, the fog.

  She tried to touch me.

  She brushed against me. It was like she was tearing the skin from the back of my legs.

  Everything was gone.

  The poor, poor tourists. Still weeping into their hands and screaming. But in a different way, now. They threaten to sue the hotel, the whole village of Benito. They grow angry because it feels better than being afraid. Because when you’re angry, you know that you’re still alive.

  “Was it Alice?” Ellen whispers to Pratt.

  “It appears that way.”

  Pratt turns to the white-faced waiters. “There’s nothing more to be done here. There was no fire. Calm these people down and get them back to their rooms. And have all charges sent to me. I’ll see they’re taken care of.” To Ellen, he says, “It’s time to get you out of here.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “My job. Just go to the hospital.”

  “I can’t. It’s too much.” She seems frozen.

  “Then go home. Right now. Get your coat. I’ll walk you to your car.”

  I pass through the hotel doors with them. Pratt ushers Ellen to her car and watches until her glowing taillights grow smaller and smaller beside the rim of the cove. But I stay near; I cling to the veil of the streetlight in a mist. He doesn’t move for a long time, looking after her. Our shared Ellen. Then he goes back inside, passes the restaurant, goes upstairs.

  In his room on the second floor, he paces. I see him through the parted curtain. His is the finest suite, with dark velvet curtains, overlooking Main Street and the cliff’s edge and the swinging, lighted buoys. He won’t look, for some reason, in the direction I want him to look, in the direction my smoke, my mist, has blown and now lingers—over the beach and Alice’s hideaway. He keeps his head down and braids his fingers across the back of his neck, stretching, tense.

  The waves crash and hiss below. The mist rises and throws itself at him, at his lighted window.

  The guests are leaving the hotel with their bags, crying.

  And neither you nor I, I think, are going to stop what’s been started. Are we, Mr. Pratt? Neither one of us can stop being what we’ve become. Stopping, what would it do? It would wipe from the mirror everything we know we are.

  I won’t stop. I won’t be crushed by you.

  And you won’t stop. I’m counting on it.

  He comes to the parted curtains at last. In the deepening darkness, I glide away, leaving another trail for him to see. I loosen my white skin and let it shimmer and float behind me like a shawl, dancing, playing in the air. He can’t mistake it: Alice’s robe again, her Chinese dragons slithering in one direction, down to the surf.

  Follow me. Follow me.

  On the beach, as I float down, the waves toss and change, turning themselves over and over. I set my white feet to the sand and walk toward the corrugated metal hut Alice had Manoel build against the shadow of the cliff. The place she came to when she wanted to be in the wind and storm and fog, but not get caught by them. When she wanted, with her brush, to be the one doing the catching. I look behind me at the glistening path on the shore I’ve left for him—but Philip Pratt still hasn’t come down.

  He’s stubborn. I give him that. It takes will not to do as you’re told.

  Or maybe he’s just not as brave as I was when I went walking under the moon with Quint. Maybe he’s a coward, hiding behind his silver cuff. He says he was born to his life. But no one is born to his life. You only die with it, then wait to see what happens next.

  The night my father died, I hid, crying, under the bed in the empty space with the frightening thing that I had always known lived there. It had a voice, the creature who lived under my bed, though I didn’t ask whose it was and I kept my fingers away from its hot breath. In Ireland, my Da had told me, they have a name for certain spirits: the far darrig. They can act for good or ill. If you meet one, respect it. Listen to it.

  Be still, the voice hissed beside me. Be still, be calm, be brave, be patient, or trust me, even worse will come.

  I am patient. I wait by the door of Alice’s hut, though no one comes down to the beach in moonlight. No man who has the same heart, the same will, I had. Have. While the waves go on crashing on their chins, and the moon rolls its punctured wheel high in the sky.

  12

  You’re going to be lonely out at the Point.” Frances tucks my damp curls back into my cap. “That’s what you’re thinking. That you’re going to be all alone.”

  “You don’t always know what I’m thinking, Franny.”

  “I know enough to know when a girl’s not as sure of herself as she’s acting.”

  We were alone. Her beau had gone back to his camp upriver, and we were scrubbing the pine floors of the mercantile on a Sunday. It was her job, but I wanted to help. We didn’t have much time left together, now. I squatted down next to her in my wet skirt.

  We were silent for a time, and then I said, “I’ll be no more lonely there than I’ve been here in town.”

  “Maybe that was true before you had Quint in your pocket. But what about now?”

  “He’s not in my pocket, don’t say so.”

  “He was mooning at Mrs. Strype’s window enough that his mama caught wind of it.”

  “We’ve only walked together. Twice. Since the dance.”

  The second time had been on Albion Street, when he’d come up behind me while I was looking into a shop window, dreaming of buying a valise, a real suitcase. I’d turned away and seen him, and we’d walked toward the Chinamen’s temple and kissed under its lanterns and set all the gossips’ tongues to real wagging.

  And he’d made his vow again. I will come see you. I will.

  “Leave now and you won’t get a chance to walk with him again.” Franny wiped the bridge of her nose. “Although I suppose that’s his mama’s idea. But is it going to work?”

  “Well, I just couldn’t say.”

  She sat up and swatted me and laughed. “So that’s what you’re up to. Has he made any promises?”

  “Only that we’d see each other again. And be ho
nest with each other. And modern. He says he wants to do things in a more modern way.”

  “Does that mean he’s hot to have you?”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. At times, Quint Lambry didn’t seem to me like a boy who was hot enough to shoot a wild panther in cold blood. At others times he was so warm, taking my hand and talking about the future as though it were the sun, and every step we took brought us closer to living on it.

  I took the dirty brush out of Franny’s hands.

  “He’s serious, Franny.”

  “And now you’re going to miss him. You’ll be lonely. Seven dollars a week or not.”

  “No, I won’t, because you’re going to come and see me.”

  “I don’t see how.” She sat back on her heels. “I don’t get free afternoons. You’d have a better chance walking all six miles back to my boardinghouse. Except I won’t be there because I’m going to be married soon and live in a cottage all my own on the Russian River. Don’t think you’re the only one with big plans!”

  I put my head down and scrubbed. I didn’t like to think, all at once, about Franny being gone. Or to admit to her all the dreams I had of going. That I wanted a life, too. In modern style. I didn’t want to admit to her how lonely the village had become for me, in the years since my Da’s accident. How I was afraid I would grow old before my time and become one more Finnis plunked down into one more poor grave. That I wanted so much more.

  “I don’t know that I even want to come back to town,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because Quint’s going to come and see me at the Point.”

  She pushed her sleeves higher on her freckled arms. “Sure. Like a buck out of the woods he’ll come. You better watch out or you’ll end up with a fawn! Nothing modern about that. I just wish Jimmy would marry me sooner. It’s the best thing to settle down as soon as you can with someone you know you can trust and be a good father to your little ones.”

  That was Franny. Always thinking about babies. A baby, she’d told me once, was the only thing she truly wanted out of this world. A baby who would lie on her chest and coo and curl its little fists at her. But she never wondered whether a baby could kill—as I had killed my own mother.