Ghost Songs

by Regina McBride

  Though the passenger seat is empty, I sit in the back.

  “Where did she die?” I ask as he pulls out onto Cerrillos Road.

  “At work—when everyone was gone.” He pauses. “Like your father.” Our eyes meet in the rearview mirror. In those three words, like your father, I feel him trying to reach out to me.

  I hear myself ask the question, “Did she use a gun?”

  His eyes find mine again in the mirror. “Yes.”

  I look away and watch the headlights streaking past. My tears are steady and quiet. This is not the shock my father’s death was.

  •

  Jerry keeps a shoe box full of his favorite rocks on the floor near his bed. And there are rocks on his dresser and lining a little shelf above it. He shows me pieces of mica and flint, and pebbles he says were shaped by water, and a dry wafery rock that crumbles too easily. When talking about rocks, he has about him an air of almost breathless excitement. “This one,” he says, holding a chunk of something that looks like porous cement, “is from a meteor.”

  I take the rock from him and examine it.

  He leans forward and in a half whisper, says, “Meteors fall to earth.”

  Mom smiles when she comes in and sees us looking at the rocks. She has said before that Jerry has a calling, that he’ll be a geologist, someone who studies rocks.

  •

  Jerry and I walk on the mesa with our heads down. The dry ground is riddled with stickers, stubs of cactus, piñon brush. Small grasshoppers fly out and hit my bare calves. And the occasional stinkbug runs out from under a weed. Sometimes I find broken glass, clear or bright green, or my favorite, very deep cobalt blue. I prefer the glass to the rocks, but I don’t tell Jerry this, just that I like the glass, and he tells me to go ahead and put pieces of it into the bag.

  “Look, Reg,” Jerry says and holds up the metal cartridge of a bullet. “A gun was fired near here.”

  “Throw it away!” I say, but he won’t. He rubs the dust off it with his shirt and places it not in the bag with everything else we found but in his pocket.

  •

  As Mr. Murphy turns onto our street, I ask if Tracy, Sheila, and Jerry all know. He says that they do. All the lights are on when we pull up to the house, all the windows and doors open.

  I get out of the car and stand there a few moments before closing the car door. It is summer’s end and the nighttime is alive. Crickets sing so loudly and with so much energy the air vibrates. Stars crowd the darkness above the poplar trees. They shake and send out wavy shimmers of light.

  Tracy appears in the window of the lit kitchen. Sheila steps out of the screen door, a silhouette, her head raised, one arm gesturing in my direction.

  •

  I do not ask if Mom left a note, and no one mentions one.

  Uncle Jack explains it will be a closed-casket wake.

  Sheila starts to cry. “I want to see her.”

  •

  “I need a new dress,” I say.

  “Well,” Aunt Pat says, and her upper lip twitches, “what did you wear to your father’s funeral? Won’t that do?”

  “No,” I say, “it won’t do.”

  •

  With the bedroom door locked, I put on the new white lace dress, look at myself in the mirror, and remember my First Holy Communion, how, in my veil and white dress, I told my mother I was her bride, and how, at my confirmation, I took her name, Barbara.

  I sit in the room in my dress and say, “Mom,” to the air. Repeatedly I summon her. But nothing. Maybe she is gone. Maybe she has left no ghost, no trace. And I cannot feel my father, either. Nothing. No one. Only silence.

  •

  Three of the four roommates living with me on Manhattan Avenue move out, leaving only me and David, a boy I knew in high school. We don’t have much furniture, just some ratty old pieces from the Salvation Army, and mattresses on the floor of each room. Tracy moves in with us. She and her friend Theresa have stopped getting along.

  We don’t keep regular hours. In the middle of the night, most of the lights are on. David has a good job as a waiter at the Bull Ring, an expensive steakhouse, and has bought a stereo. At all hours Jeff Beck’s Blow by Blow plays at high volume, or Traffic’s John Barleycorn Must Die, or Bare Trees by Fleetwood Mac.

  I’ve been working on a monologue from Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw and stride aggressively through the rooms crying out, “We ride to Orleans! We ride in the name of God and under the orders of holy saints Catherine and Margaret.”

  •

  Tracy has strep throat and lies on a striped mattress. She eats nothing. All she can get down is tea. She went to a health clinic and got a shot of penicillin, but it doesn’t seem to help.

  •

  I keep forgetting that Tracy’s sick, and then I pass through her room and look down at her, surprised. For two weeks now she has lain there wearing the same purple T-shirt and jean shorts.

  •

  I can see myself and most of the other girls reflected in the big mirror at the front of the dance studio. All of them wear tight black tops and long skirts, while I wear a white turtleneck and a pair of black tights. I am the only girl without a skirt, and everyone but me has an identical pair of shoes, noticeably different from mine. I am also the only girl in the class with short hair. While we wait for the class to begin, the girls, all frigid-faced, stare at my reflection. I am much plumper than any of them. As the teacher turns to face the mirror, she breathes out harshly through her nose. I wonder if that snort is meant for me. Without saying a word, she begins to move, and taking my cue from the others, I imitate everything she does.

  Calling one girl to the front, she speaks a flurry of Spanish words to her, then steps back and claps time as the girl, rib cage distended, head high and back, holds one skinny arm in the air, trilling her castanets to a light gallop. One foot stomps again and again as she turns. I struggle to follow the girl’s lead. The teacher squeezes my upper arm as she places it in the proper position. Tears shoot into my eyes.

  After the class, the teacher approaches my mother, who has been standing in the back of the studio with a group of other mothers, watching the class. She asks why I don’t have the proper clothes or shoes for Flamenco. My mother apologizes, says she didn’t know.

  Driving home, my mother is quiet, her stare is wide as if it is taking in more than the road ahead.

  “I don’t want to go back,” I say.

  “No,” she says distractedly. “Don’t worry.”

  •

  In the summer before fourth grade, I am in one of my first plays, cast in the role of Heidi. When I don’t want to leave theater class after rehearsal one day, Dad laughs and tells Mom that they have a prima donna on their hands.

  Dad tells me it is time to go and I respond with something he often says: “I’ll be with you in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

  •

  I like to go to Saint Francis Cathedral downtown when no one’s there and just sit and think, watching the lit votives cast moving shadows in their alcoves. It occurs to me that I should light a candle for Tracy.

  Why is it so hard for me to remember that she is sick? Why am I not attending to her, trying to take care of her?

  I am afraid to be a mother. It’s too dangerous to be a mother. I think of the lady in the financial aid office; I’ve spoken to her several times on the phone and met her in person when I delivered my paperwork. She knew Mom and is very kind and encouraging to me. I wish I could call her and ask her to take care of Tracy.

  •

  I knock over a knickknack, a little plaster cherub head on a small blue porcelain stand. It shatters on the floor near my feet, but the face, intact, flies across the room, separate from the rest of the head, and lands under the couch. I sweep everything up but the face. Later I look under the couch, and the face lies there peering up in the darkness.

  •

  “Reg, will you make me some tea?” Tracy asks from the mattress.

&n
bsp; I stand in the kitchen holding a cup under the faucet. I stare as the water runs over the edge of the cup. I can’t remember why I’m here.

  “Reg,” Tracy says from the other room.

  I pour the water in the pot. There are no tea bags.

  She says it’s okay.

  I bring her a cup of boiling water.

  •

  “Your mother’s suicide was a response to your father’s,” Kim says.

  I nod.

  “But why did your father kill himself?”

  I want to try. I want to be able to give her answers.

  Kim asks me to remember him. I think of him balancing the checkbook, the afternoon light falling across the kitchen table where he sits, the shadows of my mother’s poplar trees moving on the curtain and the wall.

  “Did money have a hand in things?”

  I nod. “My father was supposed to get this very important job back in New York, where I was born. He was so sure he was getting it that we moved into this big house we couldn’t afford.”

  “But he didn’t get it?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “We moved to New Mexico because he found a job here where he was supposed to be able to advance. But he had no luck. When I was ten or eleven, he had to take a second job at night as a bartender.”

  “He worked hard,” she says.

  I nod, but can’t say more. The air in Kim’s office is too full of my father: smells of metal, worn leather, car exhaust.

  •

  Mom says I can have the small, flat blue bottle shaped like a moon that’s in the drawer with her slips and nylons. “Your father gave me that perfume around the time he asked me to marry him.”

  There is only a little perfume left at the bottom, a concentrated tincture. I recoil at the dizzying fumes, like dead flowers mixed with bourbon.

  “It doesn’t smell nice anymore, sweetie.”

  Words are written on the blue, moon-shaped bottle, silvery words I can barely see: Je Reviens.

  “It’s French,” Mom says. “It means ‘I Shall Return to You.’”

  Sometimes I see my father on a Sunday, or very early on school mornings, but he works so much, it feels like he doesn’t live here anymore.

  Je reviens, I imagine him saying. I shall return to you.

  •

  I am on my way to watch cartoons in the den when I see Dad sitting alone in the living room reading the newspaper. I go in, take a book from one of the shelves, and sit beside him on the couch. I’ve picked a book of Irish place names.

  There is something almost comical-sounding about many of the names. If I were reading them to someone who wasn’t Irish, I’d be embarrassed.

  “Listen, Dad,” I say. “Some of these names of places are funny: Abbeyfeale, Ballymoney, Clonmacnoise, Doonooney.”

  When I make a face, a shadow I can’t quite read crosses his forehead. He nods softly with his mouth closed, then looks back at the paper. My heart pounds as if I have just made fun of Dad himself. I want to make it up to him.

  “There is a river named Bride that runs through Waterford. And there is a place called Bantry Bay. And Kinsale. I really like those names. And Kinvara!”

  He looks up again from the paper. “I’ll tell you a funny one,” he says. “Skibbereen.”

  We both laugh.

  “It’s a beautiful word, though,” he says, “in its own wild way.”

  I find another funny one: “Castlepook!” I say and we laugh. I turn the page. “Killinaboy!” I cry out and we laugh more.

  “So wild!” I exclaim, shaking my head slowly and smiling as I turn the pages. “All so wild and beautiful!”

  •

  Except for our hushed first-grade class entering in single file, the cathedral is empty. The dark, cold air echoes. At every turn, we are confronted by another life-sized statue. The deeper we go into the church, the worse the statues seem to be suffering—dripping blood, in various states of torture. Many of their faces look upward toward heaven, but there is one, Saint Anthony of Padua, who gazes straight down into my face. He holds the Christ child in one arm, and offers a loaf to a kneeling beggar with the other hand. His tender brown eyes see me. Reggie, he says.

  Saint Anthony of Padua is a gentle presence, giving a loaf to the beggar. He does not have to get nailed to a cross.

  •

  Sister Maria del Rey has said that we should come to her with any Communion questions. I go at lunchtime. When she sees how much I am shaking, she looks concerned.

  “Sister, can I receive Saint Anthony instead of Jesus Christ?” I ask.

  Her eyes open wide and her mouth drops. She sends me back outside onto the playground for recess.

  That afternoon in class Sister teaches us the song “I’m a Soldier in Christ’s Army.” I sing as loud as I can and try to catch her eye. I sense that she hears me and knows I want her attention, but she refuses to look at me.

  Maybe I cannot marry Saint Anthony. Maybe I can only marry Jesus. But worse than the tortured heart Jesus wears for all to see is the fact that his suffering is meant to repeat all the time. It seems as if it is over when he is resurrected, but it isn’t. It is all going to happen again.

  •

  I tell Kim that in the months my mother lived after my father’s suicide, she often could not hear us when we spoke to her. She stared, her pupils small as pinpoints, as if something bright hung on the air before her.

  “There is a story there,” Kim says. “If you trace out how this came to happen, the ghosts will probably stop.”

  But I have not been able to see any order. The connective tissue between memories has been destroyed in the blasts. I worry that without cause and effect there is no story. I fail to connect the dots. Eventually, Kim stops asking me to try.

  •

  After Moonchildren, I’m cast in a big production of The Music Man. I play Zaneeta Shinn, the mayor’s daughter. In a purple silk-and-taffeta dress, I twirl as I dance then run downstage and cry out, “Ye gods!”

  •

  When Tracy feels better enough to get up again, she is twenty pounds thinner. She is mad at me and won’t live with me anymore, even though David has moved out and we could have the entire big place to ourselves. She finds a tiny one-room apartment behind Bicycle World on Cerrillos Road, around the corner from Manhattan Avenue, and gets an after-school job at the Oil and Gas accounting division on Alameda.

  •

  On a fall day our family drives to a place called Eagle Nest, northeast of Santa Fe, and stops at the edge of a wild expanse of meadow. While Sheila joins Jerry to search a stretch of dry road for arrowheads, Tracy and I pretend to ride horses in the high grass, galloping far, then pulling on imaginary reins, rearing back and neighing, before setting off again at a canter. We are each both horse and rider.

  •

  It is still daylight. I drive south on Cerrillos and turn the corner to go past our old house.

  The trees are gone.

  I feel sick, a taste of iron surging up into my mouth. The site where each tree stood is ruptured, scarred.

  I press the gas and drive past, but circle back and park. I want to jump from the car, run to the door, and scream at the people now living there, but my hand hovers at the door handle. The anger turns into something heavy that sinks down my spine.

  The uprooted ground is parched, already turning back into desert.

  •

  Sheila calls me. Kathy’s parents fight all the time. The night before, they locked her in her room. She heard bottles breaking in the hall. I tell her to get her things, that I’m coming to pick her up.

  Mid-High, where she goes to ninth grade, is only a few blocks’ walk from Manhattan Avenue. We call Uncle Bob and tell him why Sheila left Kathy’s, and that she’ll be living with me now.

  I am determined I will be better to Sheila than I was to Tracy. I just cashed my social security check, so we go to the Saint Vincent DePaul Society and she picks out a nice bedspread for the mattress. I get a table an
d chairs for the main room, where we can eat and do homework. I take her to Vip’s Big Boy for hamburgers.

  My high school friend Kerry, who has gone to college in the Midwest, has left her cat, Layla, and a begonia plant for me to care for. Sheila attaches herself to Layla, and sleeps with her at night.

  •

  Shelia is home from school, but Layla is not here.

  “She’ll come home,” I reassure her.

  She walks back and forth in front of the house and along the side, calling again and again, “Layla!”

  I go around the neighborhood with her and ask people if they’ve seen a cat, but no one has.

  •

  I forget to pay the bill and the electricity is turned off. It’s dark, so we use candles and Sheila has to do her homework by the light of a flashlight.

  Layla has not come home. “You hardly ever fed her,” Sheila says.

  “I did!” I insist, giving her a pleading look.

  “Not enough. And you shouldn’t have let her out. You were supposed to take care of her.”

  That night when I am in bed, she comes in and says, “I’m cold. Can I sleep with you?”

  I let her come in with me. As she tries to get comfortable, she tells me she’s hungry. There’s not much in the house to eat. She pushes against me, kicks and whimpers. In the middle of the night it sounds as if she’s crying, but when I touch her I can feel that she is deep asleep.

  •

  I have a long rehearsal and get home late. Sheila comes in carrying the flashlight and asks if she can sleep with me again, but I tell her I want to sleep alone.

  I get up and give her a coat to wear and cover her up in her bed. We stand the flashlight up on the floor to be her night-light.

  I try to think of things to make it up to her. Maybe I will buy some ice cream, but I remember that there is no electricity, so the refrigerator isn’t working. I can’t go and pay the electricity bill until I get my social security check, so another week and a half will have to go by in the dark.

  •

  There is a party at the governor’s mansion thrown in honor of the theater’s patron, Greer Garson. I drink glasses of champagne and pile a little plate high with prawns and smoked salmon canapés. When I’ve had enough, I fill my cloth purse with food for Sheila, more salmon and shrimp, pineapple wrapped in bacon, and chunks of cheese, avoiding the mysterious gray pâtés.