Carpe Glitter

by Cat Rambo

  When someone loves you like that, deeply and unconditionally, it’s very hard not to love them back. My grandmother may have coerced me into the college of her choosing, but we’d both known the truth: while she’d done plenty to use me to hurt my mother in the long and complicated game they’d been playing all their lives, keeping me hostage was a strategy that would have worked for either side. My mother had not used it, but I wasn’t sure if that was through unawareness or some moral scruple. I’d never understood all the currents of emotion that ran between them.

  I paused in front of the oak double doors. They weren’t original to the house—she’d brought them back from somewhere in Bavaria. Carved with willow trees and Rhine maidens, each boasted a handle made of a brass swan. I laid my fingers on a swan’s neck and tried the handle: locked. I sighed and began testing keys from the vast loop of unmarked ones I’d found in the kitchen. After ten minutes of trial and error, the lock clicked and I swung the door open.

  I found the light switch and flipped it back and forth, but the bulb was burned out. You couldn’t see the room for all the boxes, blocking most of the light from the windows. A narrow passageway led between the stacks of cardboard cartons—some old liquor boxes, others labeled theatrical supplies.

  The one at eye level to my right read: White Feathers: 1 Gross. Ghostly tendrils still clung to the tape along one edge.

  I pushed my way forward through the cardboard corridor, so narrow that my shoulders brushed it on either side. It went straight for a few steps then branched, one side toward the window and (I presumed) the bed area, the other snaking toward her sitting room.

  I opted for the latter.

  At the threshold between the two rooms, near a rack of cocktail dresses, I sought another light switch, but it was just as fruitless. The air smelled of dust and perfume and the ancient fabric that I kept brushing against, as though it were reaching out for me as I passed.

  The next room was even darker, the windows completely blocked by long curtains. I was using my cell phone as a flashlight by now, holding it out between my fingertips. It startled me when it rang.

  I glanced at the screen. My mother.

  I answered, standing there in the dusty darkness that smelled like Grandmother. “Yes?”

  “I need you to pick me up at the airport at 1:15,” my mother said.

  “Today?”

  “Of course today! I’m about to get on the plane. I’m flying on United, flight 323. Do you need me to repeat all that so you can write it down?”

  “Why are you coming?”

  “So I can help you.”

  Suspicion seized me. “Where are you staying?”

  A pause, as though my question was in some foreign language that required translation before it could be processed. “With you. Aren’t you staying there at the house?”

  I imagined my mother “helping” me. It made my throat tight. All my life I’d watched the two of them do battle. Now my mother had come to crow over a victory that consisted of simply having outlived the other. Or, worse, like the others—the agents, Eterno—she wanted something here but would not tell me what.

  I steeled myself and said, “No, you can’t do that. I’ll find you a hotel.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Why on earth can’t I stay there?”

  My mind cast about for excuses. There must be some reason.

  “It’s a legal thing,” I said. “The will dictated that I had to sort the place by myself. No help.”

  Which was only semi-true, but my mother had never been particularly detail-oriented, so I hoped she’d buy this.

  She did, although she liked it not at all. “You can pick me up in the morning and I can help, at least,” she said. “I know where a lot of her things came from originally and can help you sort out what’s valuable and what’s not.”

  I’d bought myself a reprieve, so I didn’t fuss. My mother loved Vegas and could easily be distracted by promises of going to see a music (never magic) show, or dinner at a club. She loved to gamble—for a long time I’d thought the falling out between them was over one of my mother’s gambling debts, but neither had indicated that this was true. It was the sort of thing, I knew, that my grandmother would have loved to reproach my mother with.

  I put the phone away and stood in the darkness, listening. But the only sounds were the long slow creaks of the house, the scrape of the wind against the roof, the distant roar of the air conditioning unit trying to keep the downstairs cool.

  I stepped forward into the darkened room. Something glimmered on the other side.

  ***

  Perhaps I should have known that she’d leave me whatever it was that she thought most important there in the parlor, where she’d spent so many hours practicing sleight of hand or playing the tall harp that sat beside her fainting couch. It was evident that she’d passed a great deal of her recent time here. A jumble of metal puzzles punctuated the coffee table’s surface, along with several years’ worth of entertainment trade magazines. Even retired, she’d believed in keeping up with competition in the field.

  She’d placed it on the little rosewood and ebony table that used to hold a foot-tall statue of the goddess Athena. A quart-sized mason jar, but its glass glowed with an oily, green-tinged white light. Not as though something inside the jar was glowing, but as though the glass itself was glowing, shining into and trebling itself to almost a lamp-like brilliance. The shadows it cast wobbled over the room’s interior, unexpectedly free of carton stacks.

  I went to the table’s edge and faced the jar. It was sealed. A label on the side was written in my grandmother’s careful penmanship.

  “Susan Day’s ghost, 2/22/63,” it said. Propped against the jar’s base, an index card with words in the same handwriting: “She’ll help you.”

  I touched the side of the jar. Despite its almost radioactive shine, it was cold as the moon—so cold I was worried that my skin might freeze to it.

  Frost crystals furred the iron lid’s edges as well.

  “But what do I do with you?” I wondered, staring at it. I half-expected the jar to answer, but it remained mute.

  If I unscrewed the lid—which seemed like the logical thing to do, particularly given the lack of instructions—would it free the ghost?

  Was this the object that everyone was looking for? How did they know she had such a thing? And what had she used it for, if she had used it at all? I thought back on the cellophane-wrapped bars I’d found stacked in one bathroom: enough tangerine-scented soaps to cleanse the entire city, so old the soap had gone blotchy and brown.

  Had the ghost been waiting all this time to be freed? What if it were angry? I pulled my hand back.

  Research was called for.

  Grandmother’s library was literally impassable, so high and closely stacked were the cartons of books. Many were books from fans, with personal notes to her written inside the cover; others were histories of stage magic with footnotes, sometimes entire chapters, covering her life. There’d been three Gloria Aim biographies published. Only one was authorized, but you wouldn’t know that from the number of boxes of the other two she’d stashed away here.

  I brought the jar with me. To protect myself from its chill, I’d wrapped it in a small throw blanket I’d picked up from the fainting couch. Even wrapped away, its light glowed, lighting the cloth from the inside. I put it on the table near the door and began to move cartons, clearing a path to the eastern wall.

  Most stage magicians pursue the trappings of the real deal, true magic, as though it’s a mandate, some geas that comes with the job. Grandmother had been no exception, and the shelves on the eastern wall held manuscripts that had belonged to John Dee and Roger Bacon, witches’ grimoires, and parchments, old long before Las Vegas ever bloomed in the desert.

  There was no card catalog or indexing system of course. I ran my finger along the spines,
letting them bump past, until I found On Ghosts, a slim book with a blue-paper wrapper covered with spirals. It was written by some San Franciscan I remembered coming to the house once or twice when I was a child, although I didn’t remember them talking about ghosts. That seemed as good as a starting point as any. I pulled down a few more titles, stacked them on a table, and sat down to think. My mother would be in a few hours, and I needed to prepare my ground as carefully as any military campaigner.

  Some of this sounds hyperbolic, or as though my mother was some Crawfordesque vision of rage. In truth, she was a rather passive creature, but at the same time, one who saw the world through a constant lens of negativity. Everything was bad to my mother; there was always a worm at the heart of the rose, and I’d been no exception.

  She was happy enough to leave me to my own devices as a child. Most of my meals were TV dinners, indeed eaten in front of the TV, while she was out working.

  She was skewed, my mother, in a way I was incapable of seeing until I left the house and saw some other families in action. Other people didn’t call their parents by their first name. Other people celebrated things like birthdays and Christmas; my mother found them cliché. Other people had parents who came to school plays and games and parent-teacher nights.

  Just thinking about her tore me up. Being around her was a battle.

  I’d keep anything that I didn’t want her to see in my room. I had the great circle of keys, after all, and that was the only key to the room. I’d stashed the metal leg in the room, and now I took the mason jar there too, but moved by some impulse, I hid that even deeper, putting it in the very back of the towel cupboard and closing the door, extinguishing the jar’s light.

  I clicked the key in the lock.

  Hiding things from my mother as though she were an opponent or enemy; even dead, my grandmother continued their war.

  My phone rang while I was waiting in the airport parking lot for my mother, whose plane had been delayed a half hour. A start-up I’d never heard of, offering me a job.

  Flattered, I said I was available, but not until the house was sorted, at least a month off.

  I didn’t think the request remarkable in any way, but they got huffy, pushed me. An amazing salary—but only if I could start the following week.

  I tried to find out the rationale behind the hurry, but the recruiter told me nothing, just pressed harder. Finally, I forced a regretful no—the sum was very large indeed—and hung up, glad that it hadn’t happened in my mother’s presence.

  But it was odd, that pressure. Surely it would be paranoid of me to think agent Forest capable of creating a scheme to manipulate me that way.

  Wouldn’t it?

  My mother arrived in a flutter of scarves and an ensemble utterly unsuitable for the heat.

  “I’d forgotten how awful it is here,” she said, directing the attendant to put her four bags in the back of my car. “For the love of God, get me somewhere air-conditioned.”

  I asked how the flight had been, and she told me, in too much detail.

  “I’ve booked you in the Luxor,” I said. “Figured you might as well enjoy the Vegas lifestyle while you’re here.” It also put a thirty-minute drive buffer between us. Without a car, she’d end up relying on me for rides and that was enough distance that trips wouldn’t be trivial back-and-forths.

  I could see her calculating all that, but also putting it up against the lure of having gambling facilities just an elevator away. She gave me an I know what you’re doing look, but just murmured, “Okay.”

  “After I drop you there, I’ll come back in a couple of hours,” I added, “and get you for dinner. What would you like?”

  “That good Chinese place Eterno sometimes takes us to,” she said. “Have you seen him?”

  “I just ran into him at the grocery store yesterday. We had coffee.”

  “Is he well?”

  “Same as always. Larger than life. He asked if I’d ever wondered if he was my grandfather.”

  She snorted. “Of course he’s not.”

  The assuredness of her words surprised me. “Then you do know who my grandfather—your father—was? I thought Grandmother never told you.”

  “I’ve met my father.” She was smiling faintly as she looked out the front window.

  “Is he still alive?”

  Silence.

  “Why don’t I get to know?” I said. “You do, for chrissake.”

  “It’s complicated.” She was still smiling. She loved being the one to hold all the cards. My grandmother’s death had shifted our dynamic.

  Once again, I wondered if I might replace Grandmother as the opponent mother centered her life around. Better to avoid that.

  I reached over to touch her hand. “I’m sorry. You don’t need to tell me. I wanted to say how much I appreciated your coming.” Placate her now, ask her again later, and see if I could catch her at the right unguarded moment.

  She said, “What have you found so far?”

  “A lot of junk. Things don’t seem to have appreciated in value the way you’d think. And the climate of the house turns out to be bad for paper. Everything’s falling apart.”

  “Susan Day had some valuable old things,” my mother said. We had entered the Strip now. Even washed out in the daylight, it looked vibrant, charged with electricity and money. My mother’s distant gaze drifted over the hordes of sweating tourists.

  “Some very valuable old things,” she repeated. “Antiques. Military memorabilia from her time as a spy.”

  I thought of the swastika emblazoned hand. “What sort of military memorabilia?”

  Her head snapped around. “Why? What have you found?”

  Her reaction made me wary. I backpedaled. “Nothing other than newspapers,” I lied. “Perhaps I’ve been looking in the wrong places. I’m still only a few rooms in.”

  She relaxed. “Well, now that I’m here to help it’ll go faster,” she said. “After dinner, maybe we’ll take a look.”

  I called Eterno to see if he wanted to go with us, but he’d already made plans.

  “You’re capable of dealing with your mother on your own, kiddo,” he told me.

  I winced. Was I really that obvious?

  “I want to talk to you,” I said.

  “What about?”

  “Ghosts.”

  “Huh?” he said. The lack of hesitation made me think it wasn’t Susan Day’s ghost he was after, after all.

  No, it must be the mechanical limbs that everyone was looking for.

  Over dinner, I pushed alcohol on my mother, telling her she should have a few glasses of wine in order to unwind and adjust to the time change.

  “Well,” she said, “all right” and let herself be talked into an after-dinner liqueur as well. I figured she’d be sleepy and a little buzzed on the way back, that she wouldn’t object when I dropped her at the hotel.

  But only a few blocks from the restaurant, she said, “We aren’t going to the house?”

  “It’s late,” I said. “You must be tired.”

  “Is it going to be like this the whole visit?”

  I stonewalled. “What do you mean?”

  “She’s dead, Persephone. You don’t need to protect her from me anymore.”

  I sighed. “What do you want, mother?”

  “For you to be happy. When have I wanted anything else?”

  “Plenty of times.”

  She fell into offended silence. She wanted me to overflow with apology, to kowtow to her, but I was digging in my heels this time. I was too old for anyone but myself to rule my life.

  Even though I was here sorting through houses at a dead woman’s whim. But I thrust that thought away.

  We drove back to the hotel in icy silence.

  “I’ve got errands in the morning,” I said. “I’ll come by a
t lunchtime.

  “We’ll see,” she said, snipping off the words, but she relented and leaned over to hug me, a long fierce pressure that meant all the affection she could never say out loud.

  When I got back to the house, I realized I’d lost my keys somewhere in the course of the evening. It was my little key ring, the one to the outside doors. I kept the vast key ring that controlled all the inner doors to the house up in my room. I called a locksmith, but he couldn’t come for a few hours. So I made the most of it and called Eterno, who didn’t mind letting me come over with two coffees and a sack of doughnuts.

  ***

  I said, “She left me a ghost.”

  His eyebrows rose, startled. “A ghost.”

  “Susan Day’s ghost, to be precise.”

  He rubbed the side of a finger against his chin. His kitchen was small but immaculate. It looked rarely eaten in, and when I’d tried to find milk for my coffee, the fridge only yielded old takeout cartons and a glass pitcher of water.

  “She was there at the deathbed, I know,” he mused. “But I always thought she was there to protect Day’s ghost from being taken, not to take it herself. Damn, that’s cold.”

  “What would she have taken it for?” I asked.

  “Hmm. Let me think of how to put it.” He pinched his forehead. “Some people take them to talk to. But most, well, they’re a source of power. Think about if you were building a house. You’d need things to power systems, like a furnace for a heating system or a breaker box for the electricity? A ghost can act like one of those. It’s why most magicians try to get them. You put them inside other things.”

  I gazed at him.

  He looked back. “What?”

  I gestured helplessly. “I expected there to be more denial, more telling me I was being paranoid or crazy.”

  He shook his head then leaned forward to touch my hand in reassurance. “Most magicians know better than deny the Hidden World’s existence, once someone’s stumbled across it. Or have been brought to it, in your case.”