Ghost Songs

by Regina McBride

  •

  Kim has called me into her office again.

  “You said that your mother changed the last three or four years she was alive.”

  I nod.

  “Did something happen that you can remember, something that caused the change?”

  It occurs to me that Nanny’s death had something to do with it, but I cannot speak. The thought of mentioning Nanny makes me numb and tired.

  I shrug and shake my head.

  •

  At night, when I can’t sleep, I drive to the southern end of town where the main road becomes the Albuquerque highway and turn into the desert neighborhood where we lived, our house occupied now by another family, other children’s bicycles on the lawn. I park across the street and watch unfamiliar figures passing back and forth behind the lit kitchen window. Do they know, I wonder, that they live in a house full of ghosts? Do they feel us there?

  •

  Some nights, after rehearsals, I don’t go back to Manhattan Avenue. Tom lures me to his dorm room, where we make love on his narrow bed until we’re exhausted.

  •

  The summer before I go into sixth grade, Dad develops an allergy to the sun, big red blotches forming all over his face. He has to wear a cowboy hat whenever he goes outside, and suddenly the sun seems larger and closer than I remember it being the summer before.

  Dad buys Jerry a matching brown cowboy hat.

  Jerry hesitates. “I don’t have that allergy to the sun, Dad,” he says.

  Dad peers at him, then turns the hat over in his hands, looking at it. He extends it toward Jerry again. “Try it,” he encourages.

  Jerry puts it on and Dad says it looks good but Jerry seems embarrassed.

  Dad colors slightly and smiles. “I can take it back to the store,” he says. But he never does. The brown hat, too small for Dad, sits on the shelf in the living room.

  •

  One weekend I see Dad and Jerry outside, surveying some cracks in the concrete pathway near the lawn. Jerry is wearing the brown cowboy hat, and my father is wearing his. They stand out there in the sun with their hands on their hips.

  •

  All of us kids are in the car with Mom as she drives on Paseo de Peralta in northwestern Santa Fe. She stops at a gas station and when she turns the key in the ignition, she looks over her shoulder at me in the backseat where I sit between my sisters, and says, “That’s the soldiers’ cemetery, where I want to be buried. Remember that, will you?” She points across Rosario Boulevard at a green hill lined with square white headstones. Then she laughs slightly.

  “You’re not going to die,” I say.

  “Everyone dies,” she answers. “And when I do, I want a soldier’s burial.”

  My heart thumps and when none of my siblings speak, I say, “Well, you’re not a soldier!”

  “That’s what you think!” she says, with a roll of the eyes and a bitter ring in her voice.

  •

  Usually Mom gets home from her new job before the red light coming in Nanny’s window gets very dark and turns purple, and when she doesn’t, it is unbearable. I think of the soldiers’ graveyard, and worry that she may have driven there instead of coming home. If she doesn’t come home, I don’t know what I will do. Sometimes I lie on Nanny’s bed, imagining a little ribbon of blood at my mouth. I’m suffering, I think. That makes me closer to God. If after the purple light has given itself over to darkness she still isn’t home, I will start to cry and run into the kitchen and hug Nanny, closing my eyes and searching her embrace for the part of her that is also my mother.

  •

  In a magazine famous for its photographs, I turn the page to a big black-and-white picture of alleys and burned-out buildings. Someone has written God is dead in dark letters on the wall. The world is wide and undiscovered. I worry there are black-and-white places where God has died.

  •

  Susie gets heavy after being spayed. When Mom tells her what a good girl she is she gets excited and does what we call her karate jump, one little hop in the air before landing on her four short legs. If Mom says it again, she blows out once fast through her nose, then gallops up the hall, nails clicking on the tiles, comes back, then sits down and pants.

  “Good girl! Good girl!” we squeal at her and she jumps again, races up the hall and back, a flurry of jingling license tags and clicking toenails.

  •

  Tracy and Sheila both move in with the families of friends and I pick them up one Saturday. After the family’s estate was settled, each of us kids received just under $4,000, and as soon as I came back to Santa Fe, I used more than half of mine to buy a used turquoise Mustang. When I start to drive, the song “Maybellene” by Chuck Berry comes on and we decide, unanimously, Maybellene is the perfect name for the car. I drive up previously unexplored streets off Siringo Road, avoiding the old house, though we are close. I wait for one of them to suggest driving past it, but to my relief neither does. It is something I do alone. To do it with them would be too hard.

  “Mom’s friend lives on this street,” Sheila says in a tone so casual, it is as if Mom is still alive. I find myself wondering if it’s true. I sense in Sheila’s voice that she just has an urge or a need to mention Mom. That it almost doesn’t matter what she’s saying. I hope that she won’t do it again.

  “Mom took me to that friend’s house once,” she adds, and I meet her eyes in the rearview mirror, then look away.

  •

  Mom shows me an old pewter-and-gray photograph, a slightly heavyset man in a suit, with white hair and thick white eyebrows, holding his hat with both hands near his chest.

  “My uncle Michael,” Mom says, keeping her eyes fixed on him, a soft, flushed smile on her face. She has talked about Uncle Michael before, her father’s brother. They immigrated to America together as young men. He was always particularly kind to her. She was his favorite.

  “What a nice man he was,” she says. “I miss Uncle Michael.”

  •

  The south side of town, where Cerrillos Road becomes the Albuquerque highway, is still undeveloped, hardly any stores, just vast stretches of mesa for miles. A small adobe building sits isolated far back off a dirt roadway. Its sign is almost as big as the building and reads The Rock Shop in big dark letters, uneven and jagged, as if they themselves were formed of rocks.

  It’s Saturday and while Mom plants squash and pumpkins in the back garden, Dad drives us kids here. It’s a form of heaven for Jerry. I gravitate to a huge gray stone cut open to reveal a cave of jagged purple crystals, but Jerry keeps tearing me away from it to see different fossils: flat sandstone with imprints of small fish; gray stone with images of veined leaves and more sculpted, round, beetle-like creatures with delineated rib cages, some of them as large in diameter as a baseball, but flatter.

  “Trilobites!” Dad says when Jerry shows him. Jerry repeats the word twice in quick succession.

  I breathe in his enthusiasm and it catches in my lungs. “Trilobites,” I say, exhaling the word.

  •

  The whole family is in the car.

  “What did the duck say when he bought lipstick?” Jerry asks us.

  “What? What?” we demand.

  “Put it on my bill.”

  •

  “An actress,” Kim says to me, “needs to have access to her own history. When you work on a play, you have to look at the dramatic arc. You break it down into manageable parts, into beats. See how every event leads to the next.”

  I nod as if I understand. But it is as though each death were an explosion that erased the connections between things. In my mind a fizzing whiteness hovers, particles refusing to settle.

  Kim says I might begin by asking myself what my mother had wanted, and what my father had wanted. Why had they wanted these things? What were the obstacles that kept them from accomplishing their objectives?

  •

  I am in my dorm room when my father calls. “Why don’t you come by the Tap Room
tonight and say hello,” he says.

  “I’ll try.”

  “I’ll look for you.”

  “Okay.”

  Silence.

  “Your mother called you very late one night and no one answered.”

  “Oh, sometimes I study late with friends.”

  Silence.

  “I better go,” I say.

  •

  Early the next morning, Jerry and Tracy knock on my dorm room door.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  They come in and sit down, Jerry on the bed, Tracy on a chair. I close the door and look at them.

  “Dad’s dead,” Jerry says plainly.

  “No. No. No.” I scream, flail my arms, and start to cry. “How?”

  “Car accident,” Jerry answers in a monotone.

  I scream and yell and pace. I am unsure what to do with myself. I look again at them, waiting to hear that it isn’t true.

  Jerry says, “It wasn’t a car accident.”

  •

  Only once do I look in the book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. I read the phrase: The cut worm forgives the plow. I slap the book shut.

  •

  The window of my old bedroom is open and morning breezes come in through the screen, the curtains shifting. A gust of April wind rushes through the leaves of the trees, a sound I always took comfort from as a child, pretending it was the ocean crashing at a shoreline. The trees my mother planted have always been steadfast outside my window, waving in wind or standing unmoving on still, hot days. At night, they made the soft brushing sounds that led me into sleep.

  I hear my sisters’ voices down the hall, their words a blur but their intonations clear: quiet questions that have no answers asked to the air. I hear Mom’s voice. And it is calm.

  Another breeze rushes and agitates the trees. I press my face against the screen, watching them as they lean in my direction. I sense in their ache to tell me something both a plea and an accusation.

  I walk down the hall. Dust motes float, glimmering in a shaft of morning sun coming in the front window. My sisters are on the couch with Mom, their laps and legs lit in sunlight, the rest of them sitting back in shadow.

  Tracy, who is fifteen, wears one of my cast-off shirts, her auburn hair grown out in thick waves, wild over her shoulders and down her back.

  And Sheila, at thirteen, looks eleven at the most, slender with a freckled, upturned nose. Both their faces are red and streaked with tears.

  Jerry sits in a chair in a dim corner, gazing past me. His hair looks unwashed, a stubble of bright beard on his chin. He is in his freshman year at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, a seven-hour drive south, but came home for spring break yesterday. Since earlier this morning when he and Tracy picked me up from the dorm, he hasn’t said a word.

  I stand in the middle of the room trying not to cry. “Mom,” I say.

  She seems to really look at me. She gets up, squinting as she passes through the shaft of sunlight, stirring the dust motes to a soft frenzy. She embraces me. Maybe what my father did broke a spell in her, awakened her, brought her back from somewhere she’d gone. I feel a sensation, a relief I’d always felt in her arms when I was small; the possibility of disappearing into her.

  “Don’t leave, Reggie,” she says.

  “I won’t, I won’t,” I cry.

  I hold harder to her, afraid she’ll let go. On the coffee table, I see a yellow pad, things scribbled on it in pencil, some of the words scratched out: Block’s Mortuary and the phone number. Military Cemetery on Rosario Boulevard. Private First Class Vincent William McBride, served Korea 1952–1954. Near the yellow pad are deep burns where cigarettes have been lit and forgotten. In the ashtray is a cigarette left to burn down all the way, a long tunnel of ash.

  My mother’s face feels cool and childlike as it rests against my neck.

  •

  Mom stands with her arms crossed, watching Nanny sleep in the green chair. “This time,” she says to my father quietly, “I think she’s going to die.”

  A little later when Mom is in the kitchen, I go in and put my arms around her. I have caught her at a good moment and she seems grateful to be approached. She puts down a spoon she is stirring something with and gives herself over to the embrace, pressing a kiss to my temple.

  I want to tell her that I wish I could have taken care of her when she fit in one hand. I want to tell her that instead of having Nanny for a mother, I wish she’d had me.

  •

  Tracy tells me, “Dad left a note.”

  “What does it say?” I ask.

  “It says that he loves his kids and something like, ‘Barbara knows why I’m doing this.’”

  •

  I sit on the floor of my old bedroom, listening to my mother on the phone in her room making funeral arrangements. My father has done something irreparable. There is a new trajectory in place. Every cell and every particle around me knows how things will end. Every bright dust mote rushing through the sunlight and disappearing in shadow rings with inevitability. The house, the furniture, the trees, my brother and my sisters, even my mother—we all know, but it is not possible to accept this and keep going.

  •

  I am cast in another play at the college. I am Shelly, the spaced-out hippie girl in Moonchildren. Standing downstage, I hold a plastic bottle of bubble stuff, a delicate pink wand poised before my lips.

  “Bubbles are divine!” I announce in a high-pitched voice, then blow. A flood of bright bubbles flashing prismatic colors in the spotlight floats out into the dark over the laughing audience.

  •

  After the play, I push through the small crowd backstage to get to Tracy and Sheila, who are waving energetically and calling out to me. When I reach them I throw my arms around them.

  “You were so funny!” Tracy says.

  “I loved it!” Sheila says.

  I introduce them around to everyone in the show. “These are my sisters!” I say.

  Everyone smiles at them. Some of the other actors hug them. It is a celebration.

  “These are my sisters!” I say again and again.

  •

  Between classes, I go to the café in the student union building. I buy a cherry milkshake and join a table of theater students, the loudest group there, everyone speaking in foreign accents or quoting lines from plays.

  A senior who has been working on Hamlet’s monologue comes in and walks toward our group carrying a tattered copy of the play. Euphoric to be part of this clan, I stand up, put one hand on my heart, and with sincere regard in my voice, say, “Here comes the beauteous majesty of Denmark!”

  •

  Kim has grown impatient with me. The comedies I’m cast in in the department have nothing to do with her. In those I am free, uninhibited. I have fun. But in acting class, Kim wants more from me. She wants me to get in touch with my “rage.”

  “How did they . . . ?”

  “Guns,” I say and loosely wave my finger in the direction of my head, then avert my eyes.

  After an extended moment of silence, she looks through a stack of plays on her desk, finds one, and suggests that for class, I work on a scene from The Chalk Garden.

  “You need something emotional. You have a lot to express. This girl, Laurel,” she says to me about the character in the play, “is like a bomb, ready to go off.”

  I take the play, wondering if when Kim looks at me she sees a bomb ready to go off. I sit in the grass in front of the theater and read, frustrated that the girl she wants me to portray is only fifteen. I am almost nineteen. I want to be a young woman onstage, not a child. The character is a furious girl who steals and trespasses; a child with pyromaniac tendencies.

  •

  My mother and father are in the kitchen. I go in their room and look in the envelope of photographs from New York and take one out of the two of them, much younger, sitting together in an elegant restaurant with daylight coming through the windows. The forks and glasses on t
he table glow. My father sits on the right and my mother on the left, each delicately smiling, their hands intertwined on the table. On the wrist of her other hand, my mother wears what looks like a flower, but her hand and the flower are smudged together into a blur of molecules, something deformed-looking and mostly invisible.

  The image sends a shock through me. If I show this to my father, he might explain that the camera made a mistake of some kind. But even that will not get rid of this sense of powerlessness the picture has filled me with. Something is revealed here. My mother’s edges sometimes dissolve. Sometimes she is not solid, but more like a storm of air.

  I take the picture and hide it under the nightstand in my room.

  Dad is outside, looking under the hood of his car. Mom sits at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, writing a grocery list on a yellow pad. I stand in the doorway and look at her hands—they are solid. I want to touch them, to make sure they feel warm at the palms and slightly cool on top. But she would see my face and want to know what’s wrong.

  •

  For months after Dad kills himself, my sisters manage, by concentrating every night at the window, to bring our mother home from work.

  Then, on the very last night of September, the white Rambler station wagon does not return.

  •

  My roommate, Wendy, says I got a phone call. Someone, a friend of my parents’, is coming to get me.

  “Why?” I demand.

  Wendy is reluctant to say.

  “Tell me,” I insist. “It’s my mother, isn’t it?”

  •

  We are watching Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street. Tracy and I sit shoulder to shoulder leaning against each other on the couch, while Sheila sits by Jerry on the floor in front of the television. The movie is about halfway over, and it is beginning to get dark outside, when Mom comes in from the kitchen and sits on the couch next to Tracy. She looks tired.

  Sheila comes up off the floor and climbs onto Mom’s lap and strokes her face. Submitting to the pleasure of it, Mom sighs deeply and closes her eyes. I move near her and kiss her cheek.

  •

  I gasp when I open the door. The large silhouette of my father looms in the shadow of the doorway. He takes an awkward step forward and becomes Mr. Murphy, my father’s boss from the Tap Room, whose voice falters and hesitates: “I’ll drive you . . . home.”