You Have Never Been Here

by Mary Rickert

  “What were you going to say?”

  “I don’t know if I should.”

  “No, go ahead.”

  “It was your daughter.”

  “What was my daughter?”

  “She was wearing me out. I know she wasn’t meaning to, but it’s like she was haunting me ever since she, I mean, she wouldn’t leave me alone.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Steffie.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess people change when they’re, you know, dead.”

  I nod.

  “Anyway, it stopped once I talked to you. I guess she just wanted to make sure you got the message.”

  I remember that time as being almost joyful. What a relief it was to think of our separation as temporary, that she would return to me as she had been before she left, carrying flowers, her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright with happiness.

  I got the phone call on a Tuesday afternoon. I remember this so clearly because I marked it with a big, black X on the calendar, and also, that day, though it was already April, there was another storm, so sudden that six motorists were killed in a four-car pileup, one of them a teenage boy. But that was later, after Maggie’s parents left.

  Maggie’s mother calls in the morning, introduces herself, and says that she and her husband want to talk to me, could they stop by for a visit.

  How can I refuse them? They are Maggie’s parents and I’m sure concerned and curious about this adult she is spending so much time with. Nancy, Maggie’s mother, sounds nice enough on the phone. When they arrive an hour later, I think I could like her and, to my surprise, the reverend too.

  She has a wide, pleasant face, lightly freckled, red hair the color of certain autumn leaves, and hazel eyes that measure me with a cool but kind mother-to-mother look. She wears a long, dark wool skirt, boots, and a red sweater.

  Her husband has a firm handshake and kind brown eyes. His hair is dark and curly, a little long about the ears. He has a neatly trimmed beard and mustache. I am immediately disturbed and surprised to find myself somewhat attracted to him. He wears blue jeans and a green sweater that looks homemade and often worn.

  They sit side by side on the couch. I sit in the rocker. A pot of tea cools on the table between us, three cups and saucers on the tray beside it. “Would you like some tea?”

  Nancy glances at her husband and he nods. “Thank you,” he says, “allow me.” He reaches over and pours tea for the three of us. I find this simple gesture comforting. How long it has been since anyone has done anything for me.

  “I have to thank you,” I say. “You’ve been so kind about allowing Maggie to visit and her company has been much appreciated.”

  They nod in unison. Then both begin to speak. With a nod from his wife, the reverend continues.

  “I feel I owe you an apology. I should have visited you much sooner and then, perhaps, none of this would have happened.” He laughs one of those rueful laughs I was always reading about. “What I mean to say is, I should have offered you my services when you were suffering but I thought that you probably had more spiritual assistance than you knew what to do with.” He looks at me hopefully.

  But I cannot offer him that redemption. Oddly, there had been no one. Oh, many letters offering prayers, and accusations, and a couple Bibles mailed to the house, but no one stood and held my hand, so to speak, spiritually. There was something distasteful about my involvement in Steffie’s horrible death; no one wanted any part of it.

  He looks into his teacup and sighs.

  “We’re sorry,” Nancy says in a clear, steady voice. “We’ve been involved with our own problems and because of that it seems we haven’t always made the right choices. It’s affected our judgment.”

  “Please, don’t worry about it. You’re kind to come now.”

  The reverend sets his cup on the table. “We’re here about Maggie.”

  “She’s a lovely girl.”

  Nancy sets her cup and saucer on the table, licks her lips. I smile at the gesture, so reminiscent of her daughter. “We thought, well, we want you to understand, we hope you understand, that we thought you, being an artist, and Maggie, being so creative. . . .”

  The reverend continues. “We prayed and pondered, and thought maybe you two would be good for each other.”

  “We made the choice to let her be with you for both your sakes.”

  “Certainly we had no idea.”

  “Oh, no idea at all.”

  Suddenly I feel so cold. I sit in the rocking chair and look at the two of them with their earnest faces. I want them to leave. I don’t understand yet what they’ve come to say, but I know I don’t want to hear it.

  The reverend looks at me with those beautiful eyes and shakes his head. “We’re sorry.”

  Nancy leans forward and reaches as though to pat me on the knee but the reach is short and she brushes air instead. “It’s not her fault. It’s just the way she is. We only hope you can find it in your heart to forgive her.”

  The reverend nods. “We know what we’re asking here, a woman like you, who has so much to forgive already.”

  My hands are shaking when I set my teacup down. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The reverend just looks at me with sorrowful eyes. Nancy nods, bites her lower lip, and says, “We know what she’s been telling you,” she says. “We found her diary.”

  I open my mouth. She raises her hand. “I know, I would have thought the same thing. It’s horrible to read your child’s diary, but I did, and I don’t regret it.” She glances at her husband, who does not return the look. “How else can a mother know? They’re so secretive at this age. And I was right. After all, look what she’s been doing.”

  I look from her to the reverend. “We know, we can guess how tempting it’s been for you to believe her,” he says.

  “She’s ill, really ill.”

  “We knew this even before—”

  “I read her diary.”

  “But we never thought she—”

  “How could we? We hope you understand, she’s mentally ill. She didn’t mean to cause you pain.”

  The cold moves through me. Why are they here with their petty family squabbles? So she read her daughter’s diary, while I, imperfect mother, never even looked for Steffie’s, or had any idea what her e-mail address was. Why are they here apologizing for their living daughter? Why do I care? “I’m not sure I—”

  “There’s also a scrapbook. If I would have known, if we would have known—”

  “A scrapbook?”

  The reverend clears his throat. “She was obsessed with your daughter’s death. I try to understand it, but God help me, I don’t. She saved every article—”

  “Every picture.”

  I imagine Maggie cutting up newspapers, gluing the stories into a red scrapbook, the kind I had as a girl. “It’s all right,” I say, though I’m not sure that it is. “A lot of people were fascinated by it.” I imagine myself on an iceberg, drifting into the deep, cold blue.

  The reverend opens his mouth but Nancy speaks, like a shout from the unwanted shore. “You don’t understand. We know what she’s been telling you, about your daughter coming back, and of course, we hope you realize it’s all made up.”

  There. The words spoken. I close my eyes. The ice in my blood crashes like glass. The reverend’s voice whispers from the distance. “We’re sorry. It must have been tempting to believe her—”

  “She called me. I spoke to her.”

  He shakes his head. “It was Maggie.”

  “A mother knows her daughter’s voice.”

  “But you were so upset, right? And she never said much, did she? And in your state—”

  “Nancy,” the reverend says gently.

  The room is filled with sad silence. I can’t look at either of them. How stupid I have been, how unbearably stupid. I see the reverend’s legs, and then his wife’s, unbending.

  The world is ending, I think, all darkness and ice, like the poem.
>
  “We should leave,” says the reverend.

  I watch the legs cross the room. Listen to the closet door, the rattle of hangers. Whispering. “We’re sorry,” says Nancy. Footsteps in the kitchen. Door opened. “Snow!” Closed.

  All darkness and despair. The greatest loneliness. A shattering. Ice. Who knows how long until at last I throw the cups across the room, the teapot, still full. Brown tea bleeds down the wall. I scream and weep into darkness. Now I know what waits at world’s end. Rage is what fills the emptiness. Rage, and it is cold.

  How we suffer, we humans. Pain and joy but always pain again. How do we do this? Why? Some small part of me still waits for spring. Just to be sure. I know it is absurd, but the rational knowing does not change the irrational hope.

  I figured Maggie’s parents had told her that they talked to me. I couldn’t imagine she would want to face my wrath, though she couldn’t know that I didn’t even have the energy for anger anymore. Instead I felt a tired sorrow, a weariness with life. She did come, in the midst of a downpour, knocking on my door after school, wearing a yellow slicker. I finally opened the door just a crack and peered out at her, drenched like a stray dog, her hair hanging dark in her face, her lashes beaded with water.

  “Go home, Maggie.”

  “Please. You have to talk to me.”

  She is crying and snot drips from her nose toward her mouth. She wipes it with the back of her hand, sniffing loudly.

  I simply do not know what to say. I close the door.

  “You were the only one who ever believed me!” she shouts.

  Later, when I look out the window, she is gone, as if I imagined her, made her up out of all my pain.

  I decide to sell the house though I don’t do anything about it. I sleep day and night. One day I realize I haven’t seen the cat for a long while. I walk around whistling and calling her name but she doesn’t appear. I sit at the kitchen table and stare out the window until gradually I realize I’m looking at spring. Green grass, leaves, tulip and daffodil blooms thrust through the wreck of the garden. Spring. I open windows and doors. Birds twitter in branches. Squirrels scurry across the lawn. Almost a year since we lost her. Gone. My little darling.

  Then I see someone, is it, no, in the garden, picking daffodils, her long, dark hair tied with a weedy-looking thing, wearing the dress she had on last year, tattered and torn, my daughter, my ghost.

  “Stephanie!” I call.

  She turns and looks at me. Yes. It is her face but changed, with a sharpness to it I had not foreseen. She smiles, raises her arm and sweeps the sky with flowers and I am running down the steps and she is running through the garden calling, “Mom, Mom, Mom!” I think when I touch her she will disappear but she doesn’t, though she flinches and squirms from the hug. “You can’t hold me so close anymore,” she says.

  So I hold her gently, like the fragile thing she is, and I’m weeping and she’s laughing and somehow, with nimble fingers, she braids the bouquet into a crown, which she sets on my head. She covers my face with kisses, so soft I’m sure I’m imagining all of it but I don’t care anyway. I never want to wake up or snap out of it. I want to be with her always. “Steffie, Steffie, Steffie, I’ve missed you so much.”

  She has bags under her eyes and her skin is pale and cold. She stares at me, unsmiling, then reaches up, takes the crown from my head and places it on her own. “You’ve changed a lot.” She turns and looks at the yard. “Everything has.”

  “It’s been a hard year,” I say to her narrow back and bony elbows. She looks like such a little orphan, so motherless standing there in that dirty dress. I’ll make her something new, something pretty. She turns and looks at me with an expression like none I’d ever seen on her in her lifetime, a hate-filled face, angry and sharp. “Steff, honey, what is it?”

  “Don’t. Tell. Me. How hard. This year. Has been.”

  “Oh sweetie.” I reach for her but she pulls back.

  “I told you. Don’t touch me.”

  “At all?”

  “I’m the queen,” she says. “Don’t touch me unless I touch you first.”

  I don’t argue or disagree. The queen, my daughter, even in death maintains that imagination I so highly prize. When I ask her if she is hungry she says, “I only ate one thing the whole time I was gone.” I feel this surge of anger. What kind of place is this death? She doesn’t want to come inside while I make the sandwiches and I’m afraid she’ll be gone when I come out with the tray, but she isn’t. We have a picnic under the apple tree, which is in white bloom and buzzing with flies, then she falls asleep on the blanket beside me and, to my surprise, I fall asleep too.

  I wake, cold and shivering, already mourning the passing dream. I reach to wrap the picnic blanket around me and my hand touches her. Real. Here. My daughter, sleeping.

  “I told you not to touch me.”

  “I’m sorry. Honey, are you cold?”

  She rolls over and looks up at me. “You do realize I’m dead?”

  “Yes.”

  She sets the wilted crown back on her head and surveys the yard. “You really let everything go to shit around here, didn’t you?”

  “Stephanie!”

  “What?”

  Really, what? How to be the mother of a dead girl? We sit on the blanket and stare at each other. What she is thinking, I don’t know. I’m surprised, in the midst of this momentous happiness, to feel a sadness, a certain grief for the girl I knew who, I guess, was lost somewhere at the border of death. Then she sighs, a great old sigh.

  “Mom?” she says, in her little girl voice.

  “Yes, honey?”

  “It’s good to be back.”

  “It’s good to have you here.”

  “But I can’t stay.”

  “How long?”

  She shrugs.

  “Is it horrible there?”

  She looks at me, her face going through some imperceptible change that brings more harshness to it. “Don’t ask the dead.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to.”

  “Just stay. Don’t go back.”

  She stands up. “It doesn’t work like that.”

  “We could—”

  “No, don’t act like you know anything about it. You don’t.”

  I roll up the blanket, pick up the tray. We walk to the house together beneath the purple-tinged sky. When we get to the door she hesitates. “What’s wrong?” She looks at me with wide, frightened eyes. “Steff, what is it?” Wordlessly, she steps inside. I flick on the kitchen light. “Are you hungry?”

  She nods.

  The refrigerator is nearly empty so I rummage through cupboards and find some spaghetti and a jar of sauce. I fill a pan with water and set it on the stove.

  “Is Dad coming back?”

  “Would you like to see him?”

  She shakes her head vigorously no.

  “Steff, don’t be mad at him, he didn’t know—”

  “Well, he really fucked up.”

  I bite my lip, check the water. Where is my little girl? I turn and look at her. She is walking around the kitchen, lightly brushing her hand against the wall, a strange, unlovely creature, her hair still knotted with a weed, crowned with wilted daffodils.

  “Do you want to talk about it, what happened to you?”

  She stops, the tips of her fingers light against the wall, then continues walking around the room, humming softly.

  I take this to be a no. I make spaghetti for six and she eats all of it, my ravenous ghost child. What is this feeling? Here is my dead daughter, cold and unkind and difficult and so different from the girl she used to be that only now do I finally accept that Stephanie is gone forever, even as she sits before me, slurping spaghetti, the red sauce blooding her lips.

  The dead move in secrets, more wingless than the living, bound by some weight; the memory of life, the impossible things? Dead bones grow and hair and fingernails too. Everything grows but it
grows with death. The dead laugh and cry and plant flowers that they pick too soon. The dead do not care about keeping gardens in blossom.

  Dead daughters don’t wear socks or shoes and they won’t go into old bedrooms unless you beg and coax and then you see immediately how they were right all along. Dead daughters have little in common with the living ones. They are more like sisters than the same girl and you realize, just as you miss the daughter you’ve lost, so does the dead girl miss, really miss, the one she was.

  The dead pick up paintbrushes and suddenly their hands move like rag dolls and they splatter paint, not like Jackson Pollock, or even a kindergartner. All the paint turns brown on the paintbrush and drips across the canvas or floor or wall, until they, helpless, throw it to the ground.

  All the dead can do is wander. You walk for hours with your dead daughter pacing the yard she will not (cannot?) leave. She picks all the flowers and drops them in her step. She sleeps suddenly for hours, and then does not sleep for days. She exhausts you. The days and nights whirl. The last time you felt like this was when she was an infant.

  One day, as you sit at the kitchen table, watching her tearing flowers from the garden in the new dress you made that already hangs raglike and dirty around her, you think of Maggie Dwinder and you realize you miss her. You put your face in your hands. What have you done?

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  You would like to believe that she asks because she cares but you don’t think that’s true. Something vital in her was lost forever. Was this what happened at death or was it because of how she died? You accept you’ll never know. She refuses to talk about it, and really, what would be the point? You look at her, weedy, dirty, wearing that brittle crown. “Maggie Dwinder,” you say.

  “As good as dead.”

  “What?”

  She rolls her eyes.

  “Don’t you roll your eyes at me, young lady.”

  “Mother, you don’t know anything about it.”

  “She’s your friend, and mine. She told me you would come. She suffered for it.”