Grandghost

by Nancy Springer

  Plaintively, this person asked when Cassie would be back. Wednesday, as planned, Cassie told her, trying to sound reassuring. Secretly, however, she had her doubts.

  To assuage her guilt, after hanging up she did some ordering for the business on her smart phone via the internet. Then she checked her email, browsed Facebook, got bored and put the iPhone away. Sighing, she got up to look out the window at the backyard thriving with bushes, vines and weeds that Mom no doubt cherished as wildflowers. This area was beautiful in a tropical way, but daytimes seemed always too hot to go for a walk. Wondering why she felt bored and restless, Cassie realized she was anxious for her mom to get back from seeing her pet skeleton.

  Maurie would have a brain seizure if she heard about that expedition.

  Or about the collarbone Mom had been stashing.

  Or the way it had somehow ended up in the bathtub.

  ‘If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck, around here it’s a platypus,’ Cassie muttered. ‘And Maurie doesn’t like platypi.’

  Without conscious decision, Cassie ambled out to the studio and stood looking at certain crude paintings done as a senile sort of trick by Mom, according to Maurie, but according to Mom, by … something else.

  Cassie considered that she had never actually seen a platypus. Nor had she ever actually seen a ghost. So why believe in platypi if she didn’t believe in ghosts?

  Still, she felt pretty damn uncomfortable thinking that something spiritous had been at work in Mom’s studio. But whoever or whatever had drawn the recent pictures, she felt sure it wasn’t her mother. The thing about Mom’s artwork, remarkable for a picture book illustrator, is that she never used the aww-poor-wittle-baby tricks. No neotene heads, no oversized eyes. Her people and animals were appealing because of their grit and sturdiness. So was Mom herself. If Mom spontaneously sketched a tree, it would be a gnarly old oak with character. If Maurie sketched a tree – Cassie had never seen her sister draw, but she imagined Maurie would draw very straight, symmetrical, orderly trees. As for herself, she didn’t feel like sketching a tree or anything else right now. The pictures she was studying made her feel queasy in her mind.

  The stick-figure children had big eyes – huge eyes – with detailed eyelashes, the sort of eyes drawn by someone very needy indeed. The child lying on the bed was not sleeping but wide awake, with the same beseeching eyes. And all of the pictures sprawled out of control, the bed disproportionately large, the mother so overpowering that her arms and hands had to be distorted in order to fit on the paper. Her eyes were just slashing lines. All of the pictures were done with harsh, angular, brutal lines, not the kind Mom would use at all. The flames leaping out of the white box didn’t curl; they looked jagged, like a lot of red-hot daggers …

  Too hot. Dangerous. Could burn.

  Something in Cassie’s mind either clicked together or snapped apart, and intuitively she knew.

  She knew what the white box was supposed to be.

  Her insight terrified her.

  But at the same time she wanted to cry.

  NINE

  Waiting in Atlanta for her connection back to Ithaca, instead of phoning her husband – no problem; he wasn’t expecting her for another two days – Maurie phoned her Aunt Gayle, her father’s sister. Still shocked and shaken by her curtailed visit with her mother, Maurie needed to talk with someone more sympathetic and, face it, more female than a husband. Even more than she needed a ride home to her work-in-progress Victorian house in Ithaca, Maurie needed to vent.

  Aunt Gayle was a fashionable woman who occasionally invited Maurie to come on down to New Jersey and join her on a jaunt to Manhattan for lunch at a very nice restaurant and some shopping in the most exclusive stores to purchase (Aunt Gayle) or pretend to contemplate purchasing (Maurie) designer shoes and purses. This was not something Aunt Gayle did with Cassie and had certainly never done with Mom. Maurie had noticed at her father’s funeral, not for the first time, that her mother and her aunt, while perfectly civil to each other, weren’t exactly a mutual admiration society. In full-on brat mode, eager to tattle on her mother, Maurie knew exactly whom to call.

  ‘Hello?’ fluted an exquisitely cultured feminine voice.

  ‘Aunt Gayle, you’re not going to believe what she’s done now.’

  ‘Maurie, dear! Is this Beverly we’re talking about?’

  ‘Of course it’s my mother. She found a skeleton.’

  ‘No!’ Aunt Gayle sounded scandalized already. Maurie felt sure that if Aunt Gayle ever found a skeleton, human or otherwise, even that of a child, she would quickly and decently cover it up again.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Maurie relished dishing the details, facts first, then the bizarre happenings and suggestions that made her frightened and furious – although she acknowledged the fury, not the fright. ‘Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous? She really seems to expect me to believe there’s a freaking ghost.’

  ‘Honestly!’ Aunt Gayle commiserated awhile longer, then asked, ‘And what does her next-door neighbor think? That very religious person you told me about once?’

  ‘Um, Wilma Lou?’ Maurie could never help showing off her good memory. ‘Wilma Lou Ledbetter?’

  ‘Is that her name?’

  ‘Yes, I believe so. I’m not sure how much she’s heard about any of this.’

  I drove home from the morgue with my mind churning like a washing machine. A boy. My sweet little girl was an angry boy dressed as a girl, and, being a thoroughgoing feminist, I felt infuriated that a dress should be perceived as a shame, not a compliment. Yet, as a reluctant realist, I knew the child had been cruelly shamed. And this alarmed me, the cruelty, and it made me wonder, with a queasy feeling, how he had died.

  I walked into the house to find my daughter Cassie looking all too much the way I felt. Rather than relaxing with a book, she was on her feet studying the prints that covered my front-room walls, kind of a visual history of my career: The Duck That Ate Dirty Socks, Petunia Wanted a Pony, Cats of a Clowder and so on.

  I set down my portfolio. ‘What’s the matter, Cassie?’

  ‘Who says something’s the matter? Can’t I look at your art?’ Cassie gave what seemed like a genuine if ghostly smile. ‘You know, Mom, your muscular trees show tremendous emotional vitality.’

  ‘Do I hear graphology speaking?’

  ‘Yes. And there’s conscientiousness in your details, showing that you never trivialize anyone, especially not children. Unlike most adults, you are constantly aware that children are people. You have been a lifelong advocate for children.’

  ‘Heavens.’ I found myself abruptly sitting down. ‘Stop it, Cassie, before you make me cry.’ Honestly, she had brought moisture to my eyes. ‘Did something happen while I was gone?’

  She sighed, sat down on the sofa next to me and said, ‘First, tell me about your visit with the coroner.’

  ‘It was about as jolly as you’d expect, given the skeletal nature of our business. Cassie, you’re being evasive.’ I turned to give her a steady look. ‘What’s going on?’

  With another sigh, she said, ‘You know the brown snaky thing the big woman is holding in the child’s … the picture, the one on the easel?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I think it’s a belt. And there’s more.’ She looked at me, and I had never seen her eyes so bleak.

  I felt my mouth grow dry. ‘What?’

  Instead of answering at first, she stood up, took me by the hand as if she were the mother and I were the child, and gently tugged. She led me into the studio, to the big picture on the easel. I felt my heart squeeze; yes, the brown thing in the angry woman’s hand was definitely a belt.

  Cassie crouched and collected in her hands the many X-ed-out pictures of a child sleeping under a cloud dripping rain. Very quietly, she said, ‘I think these mean she wet the bed.’ She stood up, clutching the papers in unhappy hands. ‘And I think she was punished. You know that expression people use for being in trouble – �
�I’m in hot water.” Wasn’t that once literally a way some abusive people disciplined their children?’

  Both of us focused on the picture of a white box shooting jagged orange flames. ‘Oh, my gosh,’ I murmured, for the first time seeing the white box as the bathtub, but I didn’t need to say it; we both knew.

  ‘That’s why she put the collarbone there,’ Cassie said.

  I felt a strange, transforming anger take a smoldering hold on me. They had mistreated him. Beaten him. Abused him so badly he had died. My spirit grandson.

  Cassie must have seen something in my face. ‘Mom?’

  ‘I think my tree of tremendous emotional vitality has just turned to charcoal and stoked a furnace.’ I stood up and got moving, smoking hot with wrath and intent on action. Never before in my life had I felt such a vigilante anger. I slammed all over my house searching alien, masculine utility crannies – in the bathroom, the laundry room, the garage.

  ‘Mom,’ Cassie asked with caution after a while, ‘what are you looking for?’

  ‘The goddamn water heater! Why the hell hasn’t it been turned down before now?’

  Because nobody could find it; that was why. Cassie started hunting along with me. ‘Basement?’

  ‘There is no basement.’

  ‘Attic?’

  ‘Who ever heard of putting a water heater in the attic?’

  ‘We’ve looked everywhere else.’

  So we started to look for a way to get to the attic, and eventually found a trap door in the top of the tool closet. Then we had to pull out dusty boxes and a huge old vacuum cleaner I never used. Grumbling about how people ought to have stepstools, Cassie climbed on to a chair and hoisted herself into the attic. I handed her a flashlight.

  ‘Ductwork, wiring, insulation,’ she reported in an echoing voice from overhead. ‘Nameless detritus. Nothing that even remotely resembles a water heater.’ She climbed back down and dusted herself off, sneezing. I shoved all the junk back in and closed the door on it. Then my daughter and I stood staring at each other.

  ‘A phantom water heater now?’ complained Cassie, as round-eyed as I’d ever seen her.

  Through clenched teeth, I said, ‘Certainly not. It must be somewhere.’

  ‘Turn on the hot water.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘The hot water in the bathtub, Mom. Turn it on and let it run.’

  Aha. I always knew my daughters were smart. With the hot water flowing, we tiptoed from room to room listening for the sound of borborygmus somewhere within the bowels of my house. In the kitchen, Cassie alerted like a bird dog. Then I heard it too: a murmur so muted that I wouldn’t have noticed it if I had been, say, washing dishes a few feet away. It was a kind of purring sound, like a big cat hiding somewhere. But I still couldn’t tell where the damn frustrating thing was. I confess that, expressing this to my daughter, I used several naughty words.

  ‘Chill, Mom.’ Cassie put her palms flat on a countertop.

  ‘Laying on of hands? We’ll be dowsing for it next.’

  ‘Not a bad idea. Bring a wire coat-hanger.’ But as she spoke, she moved along the kitchen counter, and just about the time I realized she was feeling for warmth and/or vibrations, she yelled, ‘Score!’ She punched the air. ‘Here it is.’

  The confounded thing was tucked into the corner of the kitchen underneath the countertop. And completely concealed, as I discovered after I snatched the flashlight off the top of the refrigerator, then peered into the kitchen cupboards on each side of it.

  ‘No expletive entry panel,’ I reported to Cassie as she came back from shutting off the scalding water in the bathtub.

  ‘No wonder it’s still so damn hot. It’s impregnable.’

  ‘Bring me a hammer, would you, sweetie?’

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

  ‘I am over-my-dead-body serious.’ I started yanking pots and pans out of the way.

  Cassie somehow found two hammers, dear daughter that she was, and down on our hands and knees, our butt ends pressed together at a right angle competing for space, we battered and clawed at the wooden partitions. They came down eventually, but behind them we found insulation.

  ‘Wait,’ Cassie said, ‘don’t just yank it all out,’ and she palpated the fluff on her side as if searching a breast for a tumor. Once I got the idea, I did the same on my side, and felt something like a steel nipple.

  ‘Got it,’ I said. She sat back on her heels as I bared the water heater control, studied it with flashlight in hand, then adjusted it down from 145 degrees to 120.

  Standing, I felt shaky with relief, which was nonsensical; I had not saved anyone’s life. It was way too late for that. But I hoped that somewhere close at hand, somehow, the spirit of a little boy was at least slightly comforted.

  After lunch, I marched into the front room and started to take down off the back wall all the artwork I had taped up there.

  ‘I’m not even going to ask,’ said Cassie, watching.

  This required no answer. I removed The Duck That Ate Dirty Socks, Frog Eyes Dog Eyes, A Cow Named Checkerboard (Holstein with square spots) and more – the entire visual history of my life’s work. When I had cleared the beige wall – such a boring color, the reason I had covered it with illos from my picture books in the first place – I took my portfolio and carefully removed the child’s portrait. Taping just the very edges, I positioned and flattened it on the center of the wall.

  Cassie broke the silence. ‘You should mat it and frame it, Mom. Or I could have it done, for the cafe.’

  I smiled my thanks at her, not yet ready to say how much I had taken her offer to heart. Hope of a fresh new success in the art world glistened like a dewy imago deep in the chrysalis of my mind, yet to take wing. First things first. Caring for the nameless child in the portrait took top priority.

  ‘Right now I just need to duplicate it.’ I went for the camera; some of us still use cameras instead of mutated cell phones or tablets, although I will admit I had succumbed to digital photography.

  Cassie asked, ‘Duplicate it why?’

  ‘You’ll see.’ I took half-a-dozen photos of the portrait in hopes of getting one that was nicely in focus, confound my shaky old hands, and then I took the memory chip from the camera and headed for my craft storage-cum-office space, where I booted up the computer. After selecting the likeliest photo of the portrait, I fiddled with it and ran a few copies on the printer before I got what I wanted: the child’s face sized for typewriter paper, in black and white rather than in color. I studied it and became satisfied; the tonalities contrasted enough so that it ‘read’ well. I carried it out to the kitchen, where I found Cassie snacking on Fritos. ‘Hey, kiddo, do you want to come to the newspaper office with me?’

  I loved her quizzical smile, and her drawl as she said, ‘Hey, Mommo, what the heck else would I want to do?’ Only after we were in the car and headed down the road past cotton fields and trailer parks did she ask, ‘Newspaper office?’

  ‘I hope I’m in time to get this into the Wednesday edition.’

  ‘Wednesday?’

  ‘The local rag only comes out once a week.’

  ‘Oh.’ She nodded wisely, as if all was now clear to her, which I knew darn well it was not. But I didn’t explain; I was too busy composing my ad in my mind.

  The Skink County Observer’s office was jammed into one of Cooter Spring’s rickety little plank houses, this one even more brightly painted than most: apricot with banana yellow trim. Under the shade of huge live oak trees with branches furred green by vines, we walked up the front porch and inside to find two desks, both unoccupied. This was not unusual for Cooter Spring. There were a few mismatched chairs facing the desks. Cassie and I each sat in one.

  About five minutes later, a young woman wearing a tank top, shorts and flip-flops walked in and said, ‘Hey, how y’all doing?’

  ‘Fine, thank you,’ I said. ‘Do you work here?’

  She sat behind a desk by way of answer. ‘I was on my brea
k.’

  ‘Can I still get an ad in this week’s paper?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I want a quarter page.’ I handed her the photocopy.

  Her eyebrows, which seemed kind of stenciled on to her face, hovered like dragonfly wings. ‘Just this?’

  I tried not to let my face show how stupid she sounded. ‘No, of course I need to write something to go with it. Do you have a form?’

  She did – one of those printed sheets divided into spaces to force people to print in neat letters easily counted. I filled it out simply: If you recognize this child from the 1950s, please call—

  Watching over my shoulder as I filled in my phone number, Cassie whispered, ‘Mom, are you sure this is a good idea?’

  ‘No, but I’m doing it anyway.’

  ‘Who is she?’ asked the airhead who worked for the newspaper, staring at the photocopied face.

  ‘If we knew,’ said Cassie in a far more reasonable tone than I could have managed, ‘we wouldn’t be placing the ad.’

  ‘But is this an old photograph or what?’

  ‘Or what.’ I handed her the completed advertisement. ‘How much do I owe you?’

  It was not inexpensive; I hadn’t expected a quarter page to be cheap. But I was able to pay in cash.

  ‘Hey,’ called the space cadet as Cassie and I were on our way to the door, ‘I need your name and phone number.’

  I paused to look over my shoulder. ‘Why?’

  ‘So I can call and ask if you want to renew the ad.’

  ‘I’ll call you.’ I didn’t point out that she already had my phone number.

  ‘Oh.’ She looked blank. ‘OK, I guess.’

  Waving dismissively, I walked out with Cassie right beside me. My daughter waited to speak until we were in the car and had the engine running and the air conditioning blowing at gale force. Then she put a hand out to stop me before I drove away, and she looked at me with frank concern. ‘Mom, what’s the big idea?’