BASEMENT
Fiona is not ready for the basement, not just yet.
– Fiona saves the basement for later and walks through the dining room, the living room, and then into the den. Go to here DEN
– Fiona goes into the kitchen. Go to here KITCHEN
– The idea of going into the basement is enough to make her abandon the tour and leave the house. Go to here LEAVING THE HOUSE
DEN
Sam is never delicate closing the French doors and their little rectangular windows rattle and quiver in their frames. Fiona rearranges the books in the built-in, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves; first alphabetical by author, then by title, then by color-scheme. Dad shuts the lights off in the rest of the house, leaving only the den well-lit; he hides, and dares his children to come out and find him, and he laughs as they scream with a mix of mock and real terror. Dad and Mom put Sam and Fiona in the den by themselves and shut the French doors (controlled, and careful) because they are having a private talk. Mom sits on the couch and watches the evening news with a cup of tea and invites Fiona and Sam to watch with her so that they will know what’s going on in the world. Sam and Fiona lay on the floor, on their stomachs, blanket over their heads, watching a scary movie. Sam stands in front of the TV and stiff-arms Fiona away, physically blocking her from changing the channel. Mom lets Fiona take a puff of her cigarette and Fiona’s lungs are on fire and she coughs, cries, and nearly throws up, and Mom rubs her back and says remember this so you’ll never do it again. Sam says there was a girl named Olivia who liked to climb the bookcases in the walls and wouldn’t stop climbing the shelves even after her parents begged her not to, and in an effort to stop her, they filled the bookcases with the heaviest leather-bound books with the largest spines that could squeeze into the shelves. Olivia was determined to still climb the shelves and touch the ceiling like she’d always done, and she almost made it to the top again, but her feet slipped, or maybe it was she couldn’t get a good handhold anymore, and she fell and broke her neck. Sam says you can see Olivia high up, close to the ceiling, clinging to the shelves, and if you get too close Olivia throws books at you, the heaviest ones, the ones that can do the most damage. Of all the ghosts, Olivia scares Fiona the most, but she wants to read the books that Olivia throws at her.
– Fiona goes back to the entranceway and to the front stairs. Go to here THE STAIRS
– Fiona goes into the kitchen. Go to here KITCHEN
– The first floor is enough. Fiona doesn’t think she can continue and leaves the house. Go to here LEAVING THE HOUSE
THE STAIRS
Sam ties his green army men to pieces of kite string and dangles them from the banister on the second floor and Fiona is on the first floor, pretending to be a tiger that swipes at the army men, and if foolishly dropped low enough, she eats the men in one gulp. Fiona counts the stairs and makes a rhyme. Dad falls down the stairs (after being dared by Sam that he can’t hop down on only one foot) and punches through the plaster on the first landing with his shoulder; Dad brushes himself off, shakes his head, and points at the hole and says don’t tell Mom. Mom walks up the stairs by herself for the last time (Fiona knows there’s a last time for everything), moving slowly and breathing heavy, and she looks back at Fiona who trails behind, pretending not to watch, and Mom rests on the first landing and says there’s a kitty cat that seems to be following her, and she says that cat is still with her when she pauses on the second landing. Sam says there was a boy named Timothy who always climbed up the stairs on the outside of the railings, his toes clinging to the edges of treads as though he was at the edges of great cliffs. Climbing over the banister on the second floor was the hardest part, and one morning he fell, bouncing off the railings and he landed head-first in the entranceway below, and he didn’t get up and brush himself off. Sam says that Timothy tries to trip you when you are not careful on the stairs. Of all the ghosts, Timothy scares Fiona the most, but she still walks on the stairs without holding onto the railings.
– Fiona walks up the stairs without holding the railing (and actually smiles to herself), and then goes into her bedroom. Go to here FIONA’S BEDROOM
– The stairs make Fiona incredibly, inexplicably sad and Fiona doesn’t think she can continue and leaves the house. Go to here LEAVING THE HOUSE
FIONA’S BEDROOM
She spies out the window, which overlooks the front door, and being that their house is on top of a hill, it overlooks the rest of the town, and she picks a spot that is almost as far as she can see and wonders what the people there are doing and thinking. Dad reads her The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher using a British accent; it’s the only storybook for which he uses the accent. Mom takes the cold facecloth off of Fiona’s forehead, thermometer from her mouth, and says scoot over, I’ll be sick with you, okay? That night Dad isn’t allowed in her room and he knocks quietly and he says that he’s sorry if he scared her in the basement and he’s sorry about dinner and he’s making it right now and please open the door and come out, and he sounds watery, and she’s not mad or scared (she is hungry) but tells him to go away. Sam is not allowed in her room but he comes in anyway and gets away with it and he smiles that smile she hates. She misses that smile terribly now for as much of a pain in the ass as he was as a child, he was a loyal, thoughtful, sensitive, if not melancholy, man. Sam says that there is the ghost of a girl named Wanda in her closet and no one knows what happened to her or how she got there because she’s always been there. Of all of the ghosts, Wanda scares Fiona the most because try as she might, she’s never been able to talk to her.
– Fiona will go to all of the second-floor rooms in their proper order, waiting until she’s ready to go to her parents’ bedroom. Go to here SAM’S BEDROOM
– The second floor is indeed too much. Fiona doesn’t think she can continue and leaves the house. Go to here LEAVING THE HOUSE
SAM’S BEDROOM
Fiona sits outside Sam’s room and the door is shut and Sam and his friends are inside talking about the Boston Red Sox and the Wynne sisters that live two streets over. Fiona finds magazines filled with pictures of naked women under his bed. Dad is inside Sam’s room yelling at (and maybe even hitting) Sam because Sam hit Fiona because Fiona took some of his green army men and threw them down in the sewer because Sam wouldn’t play with her. Sam lets Fiona sleep on the floor in a sleeping bag (she always asked to do this) because they watched a scary movie and she can’t sleep but isn’t scared and tries to stay awake long enough to notice how different it is sleeping in Sam’s room. Mom hides under Sam’s piled bed sheets and blankets and they trick Dad into going into Sam’s room and she jumps out and scares him so badly he falls down on the floor and holds his chest. Sam tells Fiona to come into his room and she’s worried he’s going to sneak attack, give her a dead arm or something, and instead he’s crying and says that they aren’t going to live in this house anymore. Sam says that there aren’t any ghosts in his room and tells her to stop asking about it so Fiona makes one up. She says that there’s a boy who got crushed underneath all of his dirty clothes that piled up to the ceiling and no one ever found the boy and Sam never takes his dirty clothes downstairs because he’s afraid of the boy. Of all the ghosts, this one scares Fiona the most because she forgot to name him.
– Fiona goes into the bathroom. Go to here BATHROOM
– The second floor is indeed too much. Fiona doesn’t think she can continue and leaves the house. Go to here LEAVING THE HOUSE
BATHROOM
Dad leaves the bathroom door open when he shaves his face and he says there goes my nose and oops no more lips and I guess I don’t need a chin. The shaving foam is so white and puffy when Fiona puts it on her face, and she greedily inhales its minty, menthol smell. Sam is in the bathroom for a long, long time with what he says are his comic books. Mom is strong and she doesn’t cry anywhere else in the house, certainly never in front of Fiona or Sam, but she cries when she’s by herself and taking a bath and the water is running; the
sound of a bath being run never fails to make Fiona think about Mom. Everyone else is in her parents’ bedroom and to her great, never-ending shame, Fiona is in the bathroom with the door shut, sitting on the floor, the tile hard and cold on her backside, the bath running, the drain unstopped so the tub won’t fill, and she cries, and Dad knocks gently on the door and asks if she’s okay and asks her to come back, but she stays in the bathroom for hours and until after it’s over. Sam says that there was a boy named Charlie who loved to take baths and stayed in them so long that his toes and feet and hands and everything got so wrinkly that his whole body shriveled and shrank and he eventually slipped right down the drain. Sam says that if you stay in the bath too long Charlie will suck you into the drain with him. Of all the ghosts, Fiona finds Charlie the least scary, but she talks to him in the drain.
– Fiona goes into the hallway and stands in front of her parents’ bedroom. Go to here PARENTS’ BEDROOM DOOR
– Fiona stays in the bathroom, like she did those many years ago. Go to here BATHROOM
– Fiona doesn’t think she can continue and leaves the house. Go to here LEAVING THE HOUSE
PARENTS’ BEDROOM DOOR
The door is closed. It’s the only door in her haunted house that is closed. Even the door to the basement in the kitchen is open. The door is closed. It’s a Saturday afternoon and the door is closed and locked, and Fiona knocks and Mom says please give them a few minutes of privacy and giggles from deep down somewhere in her room, and Fiona knocks again and then Dad is yelling at her to get lost. The door is closed because it’s almost Christmas and she doesn’t believe in Santa anymore but hasn’t said anything, and she knows she can’t go in there because their presents are wrapped and stacked along one bedroom wall. The door is closed and Mom’s smallest voice is telling her that she can come in, but Fiona doesn’t want to. Fiona places a hand on the wood and her hand is a ghost of her younger hands. She wonders what is on the other side, what has changed, what has remained the same. Change is always on the other side of a door. Open a door. Close a door. Walk in. Walk out. Repeat. It’s a loop, or a wheel. Of all the ghosts, the ones in her parents’ bedroom scare her the most because maybe nothing ever changes and even though she’s an adult (and likes to think of herself at this age as beyond-adult because its connotations are so much more dignified and well-earned than the title elderly) she’s afraid she’ll make the same decisions all over again.
– Fiona opens the door. Go to here PARENTS’ BEDROOM
– Fiona returns to the bathroom. Go to here BATHROOM
– Fiona doesn’t think she can continue and leaves the house. Go to here LEAVING THE HOUSE
PARENTS’ BEDROOM
Sam and Fiona wrestle Dad on the bed with his signature move being a blanket tossed over their bodies like a net so that he can tickle them with impunity. Fiona tells Mom that Dad shouldn’t have hit Sam because she kind of deserved what he did to her for throwing his army men in the sewer. Mom stands in the room wearing only a loose-fitting bra and underwear, and she yells at her clothes, discarded and piled at the edge of the bed, saying nothing she has fits her anymore, and she says it’s all just falling off of her. It’s Christmas morning and Sam and Fiona sit in the dark and on the floor next to Mom’s side of the bed, watching the clock, waiting for 6 a.m. so that they can all go downstairs. Mom is in bed; she’s home from the hospital and she says she is not going back. Despite the oppressive heat, Fiona sleeps wedged between her parents during a thunderstorm, counting Mississippis after lightning strikes. Fiona gives Mom ice-chips because she can’t eat anything else and Mom says thank you after each chip passes between her dried, cracked lips. Dad sets up a mirror opposite the full-length mirror and takes pictures of Fiona and her reflections from different angles with his new camera (she doesn’t remember ever seeing the photos). Mom’s skin is a yellow-ish green, the color of pea soup (which Fiona hates) and her eyes, when they are open, are large and terrible and they are terrible because they are not Mom’s, they are Maisy’s eyes, and her body has shriveled up like Charlie’s and pieces of her have been taken away like she was Little Laurence and she says nothing like Maisy and Wanda say nothing, and Sam is standing in a corner of the room with his arms wrapped around himself like boa constrictors and Dad sits on the bed, rubbing Mom’s hand and asking her if she needs anything, and when a nurse and doctor arrive (she doesn’t remember their names and wants to give them ghosts’ names) Fiona does not stay in the room with her family, she runs out and goes to the bathroom and sits on the floor and runs a bath and she hasn’t forgiven herself (even though she was so young, a child; a frightened and heartbroken and confused and angry child) for not staying in the room with Mom until the end. Sam says there was a girl named Fiona that looked just like her and acted just like her, and her parents stopped caring for her one day so Fiona faded away and disappeared. Sam says that if Fiona doesn’t stop going into Mom and Dad’s room that the ghost-Fiona will take her over and she’ll disappear, fade away. Of all the ghosts, ghost-Fiona scares her the most, even though she knows Sam is just trying to scare her out of the room so that he can wrestle Dad by himself, and she thinks that there are times when that ghost-Fiona takes over her body and the real-her goes away, and sometimes she wishes for that to happen.
– Fiona is determined to finish her tour and she walks downstairs, walks through the first floor, into the kitchen, ignoring Percy, and then down into the basement. Go to here BASEMENT
– Fiona is still reenacting the night her mother died in her bedroom and she goes back to the bathroom. Go to here BATHROOM
– Fiona doesn’t have to go to the basement. She leaves the house. Go to here LEAVING THE HOUSE
BASEMENT
Fiona does a lap around the basement sometimes holding her hands above her head or tight against her body so that she won’t brush up against the forgotten boxes and sawhorses and piles of wood and roof shingles, and careful to not go near Dad’s work area (off limits) with its bitey tools and slippery sawdust, but she has to go fast as Sam is counting and if she doesn’t make it back to the stairs before he counts to twenty he kills the light (at some point he’ll kill the light anyway). Fiona follows Mom to the silver, cow-sized freezer and watches her struggle to lift out a frozen block of meat. Sam places his green army men on top of the dryer and they make bets about which plastic man will stay on the longest and Fiona doesn’t care if she loses because she loves smelling the warm, soft, humid dryer exhaust. Dad has been in the basement all day and they haven’t eaten dinner and Sam is not there (she forgets where Sam is, but he’s not in the house) and Mom has been gone for exactly one year and Fiona doesn’t call out Dad’s name and instead creeps down the basement stairs as quietly as she can and the only light on in the basement is the swinging bulb in Dad’s work area, and a static-tinged radio plays Motown, and Fiona can’t see Dad or his work area from the bottom of the stairs, only the light, so she sneaks in the dark over past the washer/dryer and the freezer, and Dad sits on his stool, his back is to her, his legs splayed out, his right arm pistons up and down like he’s hammering a nail but there’s no hammering a nail sound, and he’s breathing heavy, and there are beer cans all over his table, and she says Dad, are we having dinner? even though she knows she should not say anything and just go back up the stairs and find something to eat, and he jumps up from off the chair (back still turned to her), beer cans fall and a magazine flutters to the dirty floor (and if it’s not the exact same magazine, it’s like one of the naked-girl magazines she found in Sam’s room) and so do photos of Mom, and they are black and white photos of her and she is by herself and she is young and laughing and she is on the beach, running toward the camera with her arms over her head, and Fiona has always loved those pictures of her Mom on the beach, and Dad’s shirt is untucked and hanging over his unbuckled pants and instead of getting mad or yelling he talks like Sam might talk when he’s in trouble, a little boy voice, asking what she’s doing down here, and he picks up the magazin
e and the pictures and he doesn’t turn around to face her, and then she asks what was he doing, and he slumps back into his chair and cries, and then he starts throwing the beer cans (empty and full) off of the wall, and Fiona runs out of the basement in less than twenty seconds. Sam says that the ghost of every person who ever lived in the house eventually goes to the basement and that some houses have so many ghosts in their basements that they line the walls and they’re stacked like cords of wood.
– Fiona has finally seen all of the ghosts and spent enough time with them, and she can now leave the house. Go to here LEAVING THE HOUSE
– Fiona goes back up all the stairs to stand in front of her parents’ bedroom door. Go to here PARENTS’ BEDROOM DOOR
LEAVING THE HOUSE
It’s colder now than it was when she arrived. Fiona walks to her car and won’t allow herself to stop and turn and stare at the house. Even with the visit cut short, she knows the ghosts are not trapped in the house, not bound to both the permanence and impermanence of place, as she foolishly hoped. The ghosts do not follow behind her, in a polite single-file, Pied Piper line to be catalogued, and then archived and forgotten. The ghosts are with her and will be with her, always. It is not a comfort because she will not allow it to be a comfort. How can she? As always, Fiona is too hard on herself, and she remains her very own ghost that scares her the most.
– Fiona does not forgive herself. Go to here THE FRONT DOOR
– Fiona returns to the house. Go to here THE FRONT DOOR
LEAVING THE HOUSE
It’s colder now than it was when she arrived. Fiona walks to her car and won’t allow herself to stop and turn and stare at the house. She knows the ghosts are not trapped in the house, not bound to both the permanence and impermanence of place, as she once foolishly hoped. The ghosts do not follow behind her, in a polite single-file Pied Piper line to be catalogued, and then archived and forgotten. The ghosts are with her, have always been with her, and continue to be with her, and maybe that can be a comfort, a confirmation, if she’ll just let it. Fiona was ten years old when Mom died from colon cancer. Her father died of cystic fibrosis thirty-seven years later. Dad never remarried and moved to Florida when he got sick and Fiona wrote him letters (he wrote back until he became too weak to do so) and she talked to him every other day on the phone and she spent three of her four weeks of vacation visiting him, and her lovely brother Sam cared for Dad during the last two years of his life. Poor Sam died of pneumonia after suffering a series of strokes five years ago. She doesn’t know what to do so she starts talking. She says to her father (who she knew for much longer and so much more intimately than her mother, yet somehow it feels like she didn’t know him as well, as though the glut of father-data confuses and contradicts) I’m sorry that we let every day be more awkward and formal than they should’ve been and I’m sorry I never told you that I don’t blame you for anything you did or said in grief, I never did, and I want to say, having out-lived my Marcie, that I understand. Then she says to Mom (who she only knew for ten years, less, really, in terms of her ever-shrinking timeline of memory, and of course, somehow, more) I’m sorry I didn’t stay, I wish I stayed with you, and I can stay with you now if you want me to. Fiona cries old tears, the ones drudged from the bottomless well of a child’s never-ending grief. And she cries at the horror and beauty of passed time. And she chides herself for being a sentimental old fool despite having given herself permission to be one. As always, Fiona is too hard on herself, and she remains her very own ghost that scares her the most.
Phantoms Page 23
