“Bridget, honey. Just calling you back. I’m sorry we didn’t connect earlier. Listen. Don’t worry if your house has a ghost in it. And don’t worry if you think you’re crazy. I want to tell you a story.
“You and I went through some hard times when you were a little girl—I mean a really little girl, right after your dad left.
“And you know”—this sounds almost sung, after the briefest of pauses during which Kathleen seems to have taken a sip of her coffee—“I’ve always had my faith. It goes without saying that I wish I’d done a better job raising you to believe in something. I don’t mean to tell you what to do, you’re a grown woman. But I’ll tell you, it’s been a great comfort to me in dark times.
“Anyway. This was one of those times. I never knew what to make of it, exactly. But I think it might have been one of those times when God was reaching out to me and even if I didn’t understand what it meant, something was really there.
“You were a little thing. You were . . . I think maybe two. Almost two.” Bridget understands, without Kathleen needing to say so, that whatever she’s talking about must have happened in the year after Carrie-Ann died, her mother’s zero year. She hears her mother take another sip of coffee and then begin to talk faster, as if the caffeine has given her a jolt, or the remembrance has.
“I was in the kitchen, reading my Bible. I did that a lot at night in those days after putting you to bed. The apartment we lived in was always so loud. It was a tiny place, I don’t know if you remember it. I was glad when we were out of there, it always had a bad—vibe, I guess.” Kathleen laughs unhappily. Bridget’s heart aches at the sound. “So I was reading my verses and feeling, you know, pretty low. I was working two jobs at that time, there was a neighbor lady who would watch you overnight, and I used to just sit at that kitchen table in the hour before my night shift and read my verses and just dream of sleep—oh, you can’t imagine how tired I was. Can you believe it, I worked from ten to three every night, then I came home and slept for four hours and got you up and off to day care and then worked from eight till four, then I picked you up and played with you in the afternoon and gave you dinner and a bath and put you to bed, and then I sometimes took a little nap—although, jeesh, when I did that it was like I was even more tired, so I didn’t always. This was one of those nights when I didn’t sleep, but I wanted to so badly. I sometimes thought, thinking about it later, that I must have been asleep and dreamed the whole thing. But then, when I’m true with myself, I know it was real. It wasn’t a dream.
“Anyway, what happened was, I turned the page of the Bible and suddenly there was this verse that just seemed to sing up at me. ‘As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you.’ I don’t remember what chapter it was, but I remember it was like those words were blazing up at me, telling me to read them over and over.
“I sat back in my chair then and sort of, I don’t know, lifted my hand to my face, to rub my eyes, and I felt, I swear I felt someone standing behind me. In my kitchen, in my home. With my baby girl sleeping in the next room. I was so scared. I knew there was someone there—I could feel, well, it was like I could feel something breathing over me. And then—and I know this sounds crazy, a little bit—but I felt something touch me. Just real light, you know. But something put a hand on my forehead and just pressed real gentle, like when you were sick and I would put a cool washcloth on your forehead and you’d be soothed that way.
“You would think I would have screamed or jumped or something, but you know, I decided to just let it happen. Just let it in. Maybe I was so tired I couldn’t have fought anyone off anyway.” Kathleen laughs. “I would’ve just given up. But it felt so good, and not frightening at all, that I just let it, whatever it was, just hold my head like that, and I felt so light, almost like I didn’t have to think or work or feel anymore. I was so grateful. Just for a minute, to be at peace that way.
“I don’t know how long I sat that way. But when it was gone I felt better. I went to work and if you can believe it, the very next morning at the bank was when I got my first promotion. That’s the craziest part about it, almost! I’ll never forget it. But it meant more money, so I could cut back on my nighttime job, and sleep more, and we finally moved out of that unlucky old apartment later that year. I finally began to feel like we were going to move on, to better things. After that night.”
Bridget’s tears, streaming down her cheeks, are making the slick glass face of the phone slippery. She reaches for a tissue from the box on the nightstand and misses a little bit of what her mother says next.
“—back to work, honey. You know, every minute of work I put in, even in those dark days, was sweeter because I knew I was trying to make a good life for you. So even though I felt like I was doing nothing but hours and hours, just putting in hours and hours, I had your sweet little face in my mind the whole time. Just thinking, that’s my girl, I’ll do whatever it takes for her. And it felt like when I was missing the strength to keep that whole machine going, for you, something came to visit me to tell me to keep it up. That I was doing the right thing, and it was going to be all right.
“So that’s why I’ll always say I believe in ghosts. I’ll talk to you later, honey. Try not to worry. I love you.”
* * *
In her sleep, in the darkness before awakening, she senses the air coming alive even before she hears the door to the bedroom open, the movement of air in the room, bringing with it the tang of death and earth, the two inescapables, the matched pair. She hears the footsteps, quick now and approaching.
She is afraid to open her eyes.
“Please, please don’t,” she whispers.
The footsteps stop short, but she feels the presence at her bedside. There is someone there.
“If she were here, she could see you, I think,” Bridget murmurs.
There is a shuffling sound, a strong exhalation. Bridget emerges from sleep into the realization that it’s Mark, not the ghost. But the scent—she opens her eyes.
He’s there, looking off toward the window and not at her, moving toward the closet while unbuttoning his shirt. He’s left the bedroom door slightly ajar. And the ghost is there, too: She can see her, flickering out in the hallway. Looking in with one bright dead eye. She’s still hunting.
Bridget sits up quickly.
Mark pulls off his undershirt and glances back at her over his bare shoulder, on his way to the other side of the room. In that one look, Bridget can see all she needs to know. That he’s angry. That what she said to him has had its time to sink in, and what he remembers isn’t that she apologized or told him she loved him, but that she was unloving, unyielding, unfair—and that she had the gall to be surprised that he notices the simplest, stupidest things about Julie. That she caught him off guard and attacked. He’s exhausted, he’s had a terrible, long day at work, and whatever wounded or ashamed part of him she might have stepped on this afternoon has decided to rise like a gravestone and make its coldest stand. This is married life, Bridget supposes. You start the day intending to be a good person, a good partner, but there are usually significant detours before bedtime.
He reaches into his back pocket, pulls out his wallet, and takes a thick sheaf of twenties out. He tosses it onto the foot of the bed, where her feet are tucked under the covers. He steps out of his pants, and his belt jingles to the floor. In his boxers, he makes for the door, to take a shower and change before he heads back to the office.
“I don’t make little comments,” he says, and it would be ridiculous if he weren’t so angry. And if he hadn’t just left a spiteful little pile of money at the foot of their bed.
Bridget hears the bathroom door close out in the hallway and knows there will be no more sleep for her that night. Soon Mark will go back to the office. Soon she will be alone again with the ghost.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Rebecca could hardly stay in bed for the entire harvest season, ho
wever much Frau and the Doctor and perhaps even John might have wished it. Whether or not she could walk without feeling like her insides were falling out, there was simply too much to do.
And besides, by October Dusana had made a few remarks too many about how tired-out Frau was (“she not a young woman, after all”), how exhausted John and the men were, how no little boy so healthy should be spending so much time indoors, even at his tender age, how, really, her color seemed to be coming back. How every other homestead in the county but theirs was full to the rafters with people helping to pull in the grain, neighbors and relations and even children, all sitting down to the table at dinner with clean hands but otherwise bodily coated in sweat and sweet smells from the fields, oh, the prodigious amount of baking and cooking it took to keep that many friends in full stomachs during the busy weeks. “To me, that is a harvest season, although I know you and Mr. Hirschfelder do things different. Ah, but me, what fun!”
“There’s plenty I can do sitting down,” Rebecca snapped at her father one afternoon during a follow-up call, and that was the end of her time in bed. Never would he argue with her, as Frau had often said of her parents. Rebecca was beginning to realize just how much the Doctor and John had in common in that regard.
After emerging from the hot bedroom upstairs and rejoining the world where her work was welcome, Rebecca carried her little boy around the farmhouse and the yard in a cotton sling between her shoulder and her hip, and when he couldn’t be there, he was in a crib with wheels that John built for him. Frau went back home to her room at the Doctor’s house.
Those final days of autumn, every man and woman on the place worked from darkness to darkness to get the farm through the late season, John and the men wagoning the harvest to the grain elevator and the railhead in town, all the while simultaneously plowing for the winter crops, and Dusana and Rebecca gathering and preserving the late vegetables from the garden plot while undertaking the strenuous annual effort of ridding the house of a summer’s worth of dust.
It would be far from true to say that the work invigorated her—in fact Rebecca found herself dreamily focused on sleep, thinking about it throughout the day, weighing pieces of sleep in her mind, tasting it like a broth, imagining with longing the sweet, swift decline into sleep, like a fall off a ladder. Matty woke twice every night to nurse, once at midnight or so and once at four, maddeningly close to Rebecca’s usual waking time at five A.M. Between feeding sessions she slept so hard that she often awoke disoriented, unsure where she lived, who she was, or why she was alone with an infant.
But at least now she knew the difference between a dreaming life and a waking life: Whatever else one could say about it, a farm in late harvest left no one feeling listless and purposeless and about to be consumed by her own bedsheets. While getting back to work on the farm with John and the hired help didn’t energize her, it did strengthen her. Because it was more obvious to her than ever what she was truly working for—she thought she would have needed to be a stupid woman indeed not to see it, when she carried it with her day in and day out and it woke her up in the night. The point of all this effort was not to outpace John’s mother or hide from her own mistakes but to help build a life for herself, for her boy, for her family. The point wasn’t whether she was good at it. The point was doing it, with every bit of will she possessed.
Rebecca and Dusana struggled at first with caring for the baby after Frau went back home; the farm’s demands were an unyielding machine that didn’t—couldn’t—stop its ratcheting gears for a hungry infant. Matty was an insistent squaller when he wanted to feed, and despite Dusana’s repeated, embarrassed, and finally short-tempered tutorials, Rebecca had a difficult time learning how to nurse the baby while he was in his sling. “But that what the sling is for!” Dusana exclaimed in exasperation, her imperfect English breaking apart. “It’s no reason for carry him all day if you sit down to feed him!” Of course, Dusana was right—it would have been the better way. But Matty was as little and floppy as a hot water bottle, and Rebecca couldn’t balance him correctly. He would lose the breast and be inconsolable, and the milk springing forth would ruin her dress. More laundry. It seemed unfair. The nursing hurt less by now, but she was still a novice, and she finally acknowledged that she simply couldn’t feed the baby while standing up—Dusana’s older sisters and their superior mothering abilities notwithstanding.
But she made of it a wiry little math problem to solve, and she made good use of the time whenever she found herself dropping into a chair, or even cross-legged on the floor, with Matthew in her lap, whether in the cellar or outside the linen closet or on the porch or in the kitchen garden. She learned to arrange the baby in the sling across her lap so that she could keep her hands free, and she sewed larger pockets into her aprons and kept her spectacles and some mending work there. She spent many a pleasant half hour that way, sitting in the warm, sun-baked grass under a denuded peach tree with a happy baby at her breast and her sewing kit spread out around her, her fingers working at something, her eyeglasses on her nose, her back aching as it almost always did. If she talked to Matty while he nursed, she found that she could keep him awake long enough to nurse each breast to empty. So she would mutter stories to him like the ones Frau used to tell her as a girl, only the hapless heroine was herself and not Florencia. John found her in such a state one afternoon, midstory.
“Once upon a time your mama was trying to pluck a chicken. Nobody had told her how to do it, and she didn’t want to ask.” (All this, so far, was true.) “She was looking forward to a nice hot chicken for supper. So she pulled and pulled and plucked and plucked, but it seemed to her that no sooner did she get a feather pulled than another one grew in its place. She began to think she must be doing it wrong. She said to the chicken, ‘How do I pluck you, silly old thing?’ Wasn’t that a funny thing to do, to ask the chicken? But your mama is a funny one. And do you know what? The chicken said, um . . .” Rebecca paused here to bite off the loose end of a thread with her teeth.
“The chicken said, ‘Ask the fox.’”
John, ducking underneath the branches of the peach tree behind them, was almost laughing. Rebecca could hear it in his throat, and the sound of it made her long to trace the length of that throat with her mouth. She turned her head to look up at her husband, aware that she wasn’t exactly at her prettiest, with her spectacles slipping crookedly down her sweaty nose and her hair falling out of her coronet braids, unwashed and lank looking. But she found that he was looking at her with warmth nonetheless, and it fortified her heart.
John came around the peach tree to kneel in front of them and admire his little boy, who came off the breast to stare at his father with interest. “Hello, little fellow.” With soft, sure fingers, as if he did it every day, John pulled Rebecca’s chemise over her damp breast, and then he stroked Matthew’s thick wheat-brown hair. “And how are you this afternoon, Mrs. Hirschfelder?” he asked quietly.
Everything in her was shivering as if she hadn’t been sitting in eighty-degree heat all afternoon. His touch had awakened every nerve. “Thirsty,” Rebecca managed. “I’ve been out here too long and it’s hot.”
“I’ll get you a drink,” he offered in a soft voice. He kept his eyes trained on Matthew, deliberately it seemed to her. The boy made no secret of his excitement at his father’s voice and presence, so close by.
“It’s all right, don’t bother. I’ll go in,” Rebecca said immediately, then regretted rejecting his offer. She knew it was a fault of hers that had become an ingrained habit—pushing off Dusana’s offers of help, and Frau’s, and her father’s, and of course John himself, his entire being. Her solitary ways hadn’t done much for her happiness thus far, and nothing reminded her of how lonesome she could make herself so much as her little sweet companion, her dear constant audience. “Don’t go,” she added in a gentler way. “He loves it when you hold him.” She transferred the bundle of boy into John’s arms and stretched he
r back and waggled her sore fingers while John stood with Matthew and raised him.
“So how does it end?” John asked, still looking at Matthew, who kicked his legs mightily in the sunshine over his father’s head.
“Excuse me?” Rebecca felt a bottoming-out sensation. I think it’s bound to end the way it began, my dearest. With me saying something you can’t forgive.
“What does the chicken say?” And he grinned down at her, his handsome face looking relaxed and joyful. The flash of the old John was almost too much for her to bear. Rebecca looked aside hastily into the browning grass.
“The chicken—the chicken says . . . ‘I’ll make you a deal. You can pluck me and eat me for supper if, and only if, I can have a kiss.’ And being a funny woman, Matty, your mama thought, ‘Well, it can’t be so bad, to kiss a chicken.’” John released a husky laugh. Rebecca lay back in the grass and squinted up at the two of them outlined against the bright afternoon. “So Mama said, ‘All right, chicken. That seems a fair exchange.’ And she bent toward the chicken to give it a kiss, and only then did she realize how she’d been fooled.”
Rebecca stopped. This story, the ending of which she’d heard from Frau many times before when Florencia had played the starring role, suddenly seemed like the wrong one to tell. She was seized with a moment of doubt that was like looking into a mirror and seeing a face she didn’t expect to see.
“Go on,” John said, almost smiling.
“Well . . . a chicken—a chicken has no lips.”
John laughed heartily.
“So she couldn’t kiss the chicken, and the crafty chicken came back to life and regrew all its feathers and hopped back out into the yard, and Mama was despondent and sat down at the kitchen table to wonder what on earth they’d eat for supper, because all the men were due in from the fields soon. But then she smelled a delicious scent in the air, and she looked up, and the oven was glowing merrily, and she went to the oven and opened it up, and there inside was a fat, juicy roast chicken, all brown and glistening in the pan, and ready for their supper.”
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