Stranger Things Happen

by Kelly Link

  Louise shrugs. “Good night,” she says to Louise.

  “Well,” Louise says, “good night.” She picks up Anna, who has fallen asleep on the couch. Anna was not impressed with the ghost. He wasn’t a dog and he wasn’t green.

  “Good night,” the cellist says, and the door slams shut behind Louise and Anna.

  Louise inhales. He’s not married, it isn’t that smell. But it reminds her of something.

  “What’s your name?” she says, but before he can answer her, she puts her earplugs back in again. They fuck in the closet and then in the bathtub and then he lies down on the bedroom floor and Louise sits on top of him. To exorcise the ghost, she thinks. Hotter in a chilly sprout. The cellist’s mouth moves when he comes. It looks like he’s saying, “Louise, Louise,” but she gives him the benefit of the doubt. He might be saying her name.

  She nods encouragingly. “That’s right,” she says. “Louise.”

  The cellist falls asleep on the floor. Louise throws a blanket over him. She watches him breathe. It’s been a while since she’s watched a man sleep. She takes a shower and she does the dishes. She puts the chairs in the living room away. She gets an envelope and she picks up a handful of the ghost’s hair. She puts it in the envelope and she sweeps the rest away. She takes her earplugs out but she doesn’t throw them away.

  In the morning, the cellist makes her pancakes. He sits down at the table and she stands up. She walks over and sniffs his neck. She recognizes that smell now. He smells like Louise. Burnt sugar and orange juice and talcum powder. She realizes that she’s made a horrible mistake.

  Louise is furious. Louise didn’t know Louise knew how to be angry. Louise hangs up when Louise calls. Louise drives over to Louise’s house and no one comes to the door. But Louise can see Anna looking out the window.

  Louise writes a letter to Louise. “I’m so sorry,” she writes. “I should have known. Why didn’t you tell me? He doesn’t love me. He was just drunk. Maybe he got confused. Please, please forgive me. You don’t have to forgive me immediately. Tell me what I should do.”

  At the bottom she writes, “P.S. I’m not pregnant.”

  Three weeks later, Louise is walking a group of symphony patrons across the stage. They’ve all just eaten lunch. They drank wine. She is pointing out architectural details, rows of expensive spotlights. She is standing with her back to the theater. She is talking, she points up, she takes a step back into air. She falls off the stage.

  A man – a lawyer – calls Louise at work. At first she thinks it must be her mother who has fallen. The lawyer explains. Louise is the one who is dead. She broke her neck.

  While Louise is busy understanding this, the lawyer, Mr. Bostick, says something else. Louise is Anna’s guardian now.

  “Wait, wait,” Louise says. “What do you mean? Louise is in the hospital? I have to take care of Anna for a while?”

  No, Mr. Bostick says. Louise is dead.

  “In the event of her death, Louise wanted you to adopt her daughter Anna Geary. I had assumed that my client Louise Geary had discussed this with you. She has no living family. Louise told me that you were her family.”

  “But I slept with her cellist,” Louise said. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t realize which number he was. I didn’t know his name. I still don’t. Louise is so angry with me.”

  But Louise isn’t angry with Louise anymore. Or maybe now she will always be angry with Louise.

  Louise picks Anna up at school. Anna is sitting on a chair in the school office. She doesn’t look up when Louise opens the door. Louise goes and stands in front of her. She looks down at Anna and thinks, this is all that’s left of Louise. This is all I’ve got now. A little girl who only likes things that are green, who used to be a dog. “Come on, Anna,” Louise says. “You’re going to come live with me.”

  Louise and Anna live together for a week. Louise avoids her married lover at work. She doesn’t know how to explain things. First a ghost and now a little girl. That’s the end of the motel rooms.

  Louise and Anna go to Louise’s funeral and throw dirt at Louise’s coffin. Anna throws her dirt hard, like she’s aiming for something. Louise holds on to her handful too tightly. When she lets go, there’s dirt under her fingernails. She sticks a finger in her mouth.

  All the cellists are there. They look amputated without their cellos, smaller, childlike. Anna, in her funereal green, looks older than they do. She holds Louise’s hand grudgingly. Louise has promised that Anna can have a dog. No more motels for sure. She’ll have to buy a bigger house, Louise thinks, with a yard. She’ll sell her house and Louise’s house and put the money in trust for Anna. She did this for her mother – this is what you have to do for family.

  While the minister is still speaking, number eight lies down on the ground beside the grave. The cellists on either side each take an arm and pull him back up again. Louise sees that his nose is running. He doesn’t look at her, and he doesn’t wipe his nose, either. When the two cellists walk him away, there’s grave dirt on the seat of his pants.

  Patrick is there. His eyes are red. He waves his fingers at Anna, but he stays where he is. Loss is contagious – he’s keeping a safe distance.

  The woman cellist, number five, comes up to Louise after the funeral. She embraces Louise, Anna. She tells them that a special memorial concert has been arranged. Funds will be raised. One of the smaller concert halls will be named the Louise Geary Memorial Hall. Louise agrees that Louise would have been pleased. She and Anna leave before the other cellists can tell them how sorry they are, how much they will miss Louise.

  In the evening Louise calls her mother and tells her that Louise is dead.

  “Oh sweetie,” her mother says. “I’m so sorry. She was such a pretty girl. I always liked to hear her laugh.”

  “She was angry with me,” Louise says. “Her daughter Anna is staying with me now.”

  “What about Anna’s father?” her mother says. “Did you get rid of that ghost? I’m not sure it’s a good idea having a ghost in the same house as a small girl.”

  “The ghost is gone,” Louise says.

  There is a click on the line. “Someone’s listening in,” her mother says. “Don’t say anything – they might be recording us. Call me back from a different phone.”

  Anna has come into the room. She stands behind Louise. She says, “I want to go live with my father.” “It’s time to go to sleep,” Louise says. She wants to take off her funeral clothes and go to bed. “We can talk about this in the morning.”

  Anna brushes her teeth and puts on her green pajamas. She does not want Louise to read to her. She does not want a glass of water. Louise says, “When I was a dog…”

  Anna says, “You were never a dog -” and pulls the blanket, which is not green, up over her head and will not say anything else.

  Mr. Bostick knows who Anna’s father is. “He doesn’t know about Anna,” he tells Louise. “His name is George Candle and he lives in Oregon. He’s married and has two kids. He has his own company – something to do with organic produce, I think, or maybe it was construction.”

  “I think it would be better for Anna if she were to live with a real parent,” Louise says. “Easier. Someone who knows something about kids. I’m not cut out for this.”

  Mr. Bostick agrees to contact Anna’s father. “He may not even admit he knew Louise,” he says. “He may not be okay about this.”

  “Tell him she’s a fantastic kid,” Louise says. “Tell him she looks just like Louise.”

  In the end George Candle comes and collects Anna. Louise arranges his airline tickets and his hotel room. She books two return tickets out to Portland for Anna and her father and makes sure Anna has a window seat. “You’ll like Oregon,” she tells Anna. “It’s green.”

  “You think you’re smarter than me,” Anna says. “You think you know all about me. When I was a dog, I was ten times smarter than you. I knew who my friends were because of how they smelled. I know things you don
’t.”

  But she doesn’t say what they are. Louise doesn’t ask.

  George Candle cries when he meets his daughter. He’s almost as hairy as the ghost. Louise can smell his marriage. She wonders what Anna smells.

  “I loved your mother very much,” George Candle says to Anna. “She was a very special person. She had a beautiful soul.”

  They go to see Louise’s gravestone. The grass on her grave is greener than the other grass. You can see where it’s been tipped in, like a bookplate. Louise briefly fantasizes her own funeral, her own gravestone, her own married lover standing beside her gravestone. She knows he would go straight home after the funeral to take a shower. If he went to the funeral.

  The house without Anna is emptier than Louise is used to. Louise didn’t expect to miss Anna. Now she has no best friend, no ghost, no adopted former dog. Her lover is home with his wife, sulking, and now George Candle is flying home to his wife. What will she think of Anna? Maybe Anna will miss Louise just a little.

  That night Louise dreams of Louise endlessly falling off the stage. She falls and falls and falls. As Louise falls she slowly comes apart. Little bits of her fly away. She is made up of ladybugs.

  Anna comes and sits on Louise’s bed. She is a lot furrier than she was when she lived with Louise. “You’re not a dog,” Louise says.

  Anna grins her possum teeth at Louise. She’s holding a piece of okra. “The supernatural world has certain characteristics,” Anna says. “You can recognize it by its color, which is green, and by its texture, which is hirsute. Those are its outside qualities. Inside the supernatural world things get sticky but you never get inside things, Louise. Did you know that George Candle is a werewolf? Look out for hairy men, Louise. Or do I mean married men? The other aspects of the green world include music and smell.”

  Anna pulls her pants down and squats. She pees on the bed, a long acrid stream that makes Louise’s eyes water.

  Louise wakes up sobbing. “Louise,” Louise whispers. “Please come and lie on my floor. Please come haunt me. I’ll play Patsy Cline for you and comb your hair. Please don’t go away.”

  She keeps a vigil for three nights. She plays Patsy Cline. She sits by the phone because maybe Louise could call. Louise has never not called, not for so long. If Louise doesn’t forgive her, then she can come and be an angry ghost. She can make dishes break or make blood come out of the faucets. She can give Louise bad dreams. Louise will be grateful for broken things and blood and bad dreams. All of Louise’s clothes are up on their hangers, hung right-side out. Louise puts little dishes of flowers out, plates with candles and candy. She calls her mother to ask how to make a ghost appear but her mother refuses to tell her. The line may be tapped. Louise will have to come down, she says, and she’ll explain in person.

  Louise wears the same dress she wore to the funeral. She sits up in the balcony. There are enormous pictures of Louise up on the stage. Influential people go up on the stage and tell funny stories about Louise. Members of the orchestra speak about Louise. Her charm, her beauty, her love of music. Louise looks through her opera glasses at the cellists. There is the young one, number eight, who caused all the trouble. There is the bearded cellist who caught the ghost. She stares through her glasses at his cello. Her ghost runs up and down the neck of his cello, frisky. It coils around the strings, hangs upside-down from a peg.

  She examines number five’s face for a long time. Why you, Louise thinks. If she wanted to sleep with a woman, why did she sleep with you? Did you tell her funny jokes? Did you go shopping together for clothes? When you saw her naked, did you see that she was bowlegged? Did you think that she was beautiful?

  The cellist next to number five is holding his cello very carefully. He runs his fingers down the strings as if they were tangled and he were combing them. Louise stares through her opera glasses. There is something in his cello. Something small and bleached is looking back at her through the strings. Louise looks at Louise and then she slips back through the f hole, like a fish.

  They are in the woods. The fire is low. It’s night. All the little girls are in their sleeping bags. They’ve brushed their teeth and spit, they’ve washed their faces with water from the kettle, they’ve zipped up the zippers of their sleeping bags.

  A counselor named Charlie is saying, “I am the ghost with the one black eye, I am the ghost with the one black eye.”

  Charlie holds her flashlight under her chin. Her eyes are two black holes in her face. Her mouth yawns open, the light shining through her teeth. Her shadow eats up the trunk of the tree she sits under.

  During the daytime Charlie teaches horseback riding. She isn’t much older than Louise or Louise. She’s pretty and she lets them ride the horses bareback sometimes. But that’s daytime Charlie. Nighttime Charlie is the one sitting next to the fire. Nighttime Charlie is the one who tells stories.

  “Are you afraid?” Louise says.

  “No,” Louise says.

  They hold hands. They don’t look at each other. They keep their eyes on Charlie. Louise says, “Are you afraid?”

  “No,” Louise says. “Not as long as you’re here.”

  THE GIRL DETECTIVE

  The girl detective looked at her reflection in the mirror. This was a different girl. This was a girl who would chew gum. - DORA KNEZ, in conversation

  The girl detective’s mother is missing.

  The girl detective’s mother has been missing for a long time.

  The underworld.

  Think of the underworld as the back of your closet, behind all those racks of clothes that you don’t wear anymore. Things are always getting pushed back there and forgotten about. The underworld is full of things that you’ve forgotten about. Some of them, if only you could remember, you might want to take them back. Trips to the underworld are always very nostalgic. It’s darker in there. The seasons don’t match. Mostly people end up there by accident, or else because in the end there was nowhere else to go. Only heroes and girl detectives go to the underworld on purpose.

  There are three kinds of food.

  One is the food that your mother makes for you. One is the kind of food that you eat in restaurants. One is the kind of food that you eat in dreams. There’s one other kind of food, but you can only get that in the underworld, and it’s not really food. It’s more like dancing.

  The girl detective eats dreams.

  The girl detective won’t eat her dinner. Her father, the housekeeper – they’ve tried everything they can think of. Her father takes her out to eat – Chinese restaurants, once even a truckstop two states away for chicken-fried steak. The girl detective used to love chicken-fried steak. Her father has gained ten pounds, but the girl detective will only have a glass of water, not even a slice of lemon. I saw them once at that new restaurant downtown, and the girl detective was folding her napkin while her father ate. I went over to their table after they’d left. She’d folded her napkin into a swan. I put it into my pocket, along with her dinner roll and a packet of sugar. I thought these things might be clues.

  The housekeeper cooks all the food that the girl detective used to love. Green beans, macaroni and cheese, parsnips, stewed pears – the girl detective used to eat all her vegetables. The girl detective used to love vegetables. She always cleaned her plate. If only her mother were still here, the housekeeper will say, and sigh. The girl detective’s father sighs. Aren’t you the littlest bit hungry? they ask her. Wouldn’t you like a bite to eat? But the girl detective still goes to bed hungry.

  There is some debate about whether the girl detective needs to eat food at all. Is it possible that she is eating in secret? Is she anorexic? Bulimic? Is she protesting something? What could we cook that would tempt her?

  I am doing my best to answer these very questions. I am detecting the girl detective. I sit in a tree across the street from her window, and this is what I see. The girl detective goes to bed hungry, but she eats our dreams while we are asleep. She has eaten my dreams. She has eaten yo
ur dreams, one after the other, as if they were grapes or oysters. The girl detective is getting fat on other people’s dreams.

  The case of the tap-dancing bankrobbers.

  Just a few days ago, I saw this on the news. You remember, that bank downtown. Maybe you were in line for a teller, waiting to make a deposit. Perhaps you saw them come in. They had long, long legs, and they were wearing sequins. Feathers. Not much else. They wore tiny black dominos, hair pinned up in tall loopy curls, and their mouths were wide and red. Their eyes glittered.

  You were being interviewed on the news. “We all thought that someone in the bank must be having a birthday,” you said. “They had on these skimpy outfits. There was music playing.”

  They spun. They pranced. They kicked. They were carrying purses, and they took tiny black guns out of their purses. Sit down on the floor, one of them told you. You sat on the floor. Sitting on the floor, it was possible to look up their short, flounced skirts. You could see their underwear. It was satin, and embroidered with the days of the week. There were twelve bank robbers: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then Mayday, Payday, Yesterday, Someday, and Birthday. The one who had spoken to you was Birthday. She seemed to be the leader. She went over to a teller, and pointed the little gun at him. They spoke earnestly. They went away, through a door over to the side. All the other bank robbers went with them, except for Wednesday and Thursday, who were keeping an eye on you. They shuffled a little on the marble floor as they waited. They did a couple of pliЋs. They kept their guns pointed at the security guard, who had been asleep on a chair by the door. He stayed asleep.

  In about a minute, the other bank robbers came back through the door again, with the teller. They looked satisfied. The teller looked confused, and he went and sat on the floor next to you. The bank robbers left. Witnesses say they got in a red van with something written in gold on the side and drove away. The driver was an older woman. She looked stern.

  Police are on the lookout for this woman, for this van. When they arrived, what did they find inside the vault? Nothing was missing. In fact, things appeared to have been left behind. Several tons of mismatched socks, several hundred pairs of prescription glasses, retainers, a ball python six feet long, curled decoratively around the bronze vault dial. Also a woman claiming to be Amelia Earhart. When police questioned this woman, she claimed to remember very little. She remembers a place, police suspect that she was held hostage there by the bank robbers. It was dark, she said, and people were dancing. The food was pretty good. Police have the woman in protective custody, where she has reportedly received serious proposals from lonely men and major publishing houses.