Paper Ghosts

by Julia Heaberlin

  He smiled at me with white, perfect teeth. His physique had bullied an inexpensive pilled blue suit into hanging like Armani. Rachel always said she wouldn’t marry anyone without good teeth or a six-pack. My dad teased her that she’d never get married. I’m sure he regretted that.

  It felt like my sister was approving her investigator, too.

  It wasn’t just his looks. He’d stuck out a handshake that felt genuine and firm. “I’m DeAndre, but you can call me Andy if you don’t tell my mother.” I didn’t care how many times he’d used that line—it made my parents smile. Instead of stashing us in a refrigerated interview room, he had arranged three desk chairs neatly around his cubicle.

  He talked directly to me instead of at my parents, even when they were the ones asking the questions. I later learned this is a technique that neurologists use when their patients have dementia, to make them feel worth something. I’m listening to you, not them, even though you are out of your mind.

  He scribbled notes. He told me he was officially adding Carl Feldman to my sister’s suspect pool. That came with a warning not to hope too much for quick answers. Carl had vanished not long after being acquitted in the Nicole Lakinski trial. No one knew where he was.

  Andy politely wrote down the name of Carl’s book so he could see the photograph of the twins for himself. The whole time, his computer was open to a picture of my sister. It was the only way he was insensitive. My parents and I couldn’t bear to look at it. At that time, we were all parked somewhere on the ladder of grief. My father was locked in at anger, which produced calves carved from treadmill running and a lawn scraped bald by ruthless mowing. My mother hunkered down at depression with an endless, golden glass of “iced tea” that smelled like varnish.

  I was still foundering on guilt. For instance, I knew Rachel would blame me for the fact that the picture she hated most represented her on every FBI computer and missing persons poster.

  Andy didn’t know that his picture of reference, this senior class portrait, had produced a screaming match between my mother and sister. It was the one time my mother put her foot down on my sister’s love affair with blue hair dye and nose rings.

  So, for the first time in her life, my sister was documented as ordinary and cookie-cutter as everyone else, an immortalized Texas girl in jeans, boots, and a crisp white shirt.

  The weathered red barn she’d leaned against would forever loom like a blood-spattered premonition. My mother limited her to one necklace and her favorite turquoise ring, the one that is tight on my finger right now, turning it a little pink. Her hair had been dyed dirty blond, back to its estimated natural color.

  The second appointment my dad had made was with my art teacher, Alegra-with-one-l. In the way that one page turns another, my father struck up an affair with her two months later while my mother drank from her icy glass. But I didn’t know that then, and I thought my teacher was nice to murmur sympathy and spend an hour with us thumbing through Carl Feldman’s book.

  She’d sworn she was going to burn it in her gas fireplace that night even though it was 70 degrees outside. As the pictures bled into one another and my mother murmured these photos are sick, I was surprised that something inside me had protested. Even as a teenager scared out of my mind, I knew there was something important about Carl’s work.

  While my parents finished up with the teacher, I’d slid the book into my backpack. Everyone watched me do it. No one said a word. I was realizing that none of them really believed that the photograph from under the staircase and the one printed in Carl’s book were the same.

  It was grief intruding on imagination. Maybe the photograph in my closet never even existed. Right then I decided not to tell them about the weird feeling I got when I looked into Carl Feldman’s charismatic face on paper.

  My mother suggested therapy. After ten forced sessions of that, I’d shut up about Carl, about the twins. If I could point back to a moment in time, this would be the one where I began to act more like my sister, to tell a few necessary lies and begin to enjoy it.

  I felt fractured, like the light that fell through the amber glass in my mother’s hand and splintered on the wall. I thought that when I had daughters, I would be more interested in their secrets.

  I ripped everything off my closet wall. Carl became Suspect No. 1. I tried desperately to find a trace of him using the limited resources of a seventeen-year-old girl.

  When that went nowhere, I decided to eliminate other possibilities. I hunted down the two previous owners of our house. The first owners were a dead end, literally—a couple who died right after each other in their seventies, twenty years before we moved in.

  The second owner was Mrs. Zito, the widow of an Italian immigrant, who sold us the house with all her carefully placed instructions. She had settled in a nursing home forty-five minutes away. I traced her son first. His name, Nixon, had been penciled at the top of a height chart on the frame of our kitchen door.

  I was the one who painted over it because my mother said the kitchen smelled like a lasagna factory. I felt bad about getting rid of his name and the tiny specks of tomato sauce, like I was erasing somebody’s history. I had brushed Nixon’s name with only the slightest of coats so I could still see it if I looked hard enough.

  How many Nixon Zitos could there be?

  One, it turned out.

  32

  Carl had abruptly left me on the balcony. I sat in his chair for a long while, watching Houston go to sleep and the stars wake up.

  Peaceful, if I didn’t still picture it drowning.

  When I walked back into the suite, Carl was not interested in me laying out snapshots from my Tupperware container like a game of memory solitaire, or sticking out his tongue to show me he’d swallowed his meds, or discussing the metaphysical abilities of my sister.

  So once again, Carl is on one side of a door, and I am in bed on the other. I’m propped up with Carl’s well-thumbed book of photographs, something of a nightly ritual since I was eighteen, as if it holds all the answers. I hear the faint hee-haw sounds of Family Feud, a marathon that may go on all night. He knows nothing about our little detour tomorrow. I’ve told him to be dressed and ready to go at 8, and he didn’t ask why.

  The stack of four pillows I’m leaning against is so dangerously plush that I wonder how many geese had to die for them. The Door Jammer is firmly lodged in place, an ugly artifact in a room trying so very hard to soothe me.

  A little while ago, I’d removed Barfly’s bandage as instructed on the sheet from the vet clinic and popped a pill down his throat. The closet door is cracked about six inches, enough that I can hear his sleep sighs and piggy snorts. It took ten minutes of watching his stitches rise and fall to assure myself he was dreaming and not sucking in a last breath.

  One of my father’s extra-large white T-shirts is falling loose around me, hitting me mid-thigh. It is thin and worn and soft from the sweat of all of his labor and worry—the one possession I asked for specifically when he died of a heart attack after mowing the lawn in August heat during my junior year of college.

  I used to be revolted by the idea of people wearing a dead person’s clothes or rolling in bedsheets like a dog for a whiff of someone they love. I didn’t understand why my grandfather’s dark suits and golf shirts were still neatly hung in his closet for fifteen years after he was buried.

  My grandmother stored her tank of an Electrolux behind his dress pants, so whenever she asked me to go get the vacuum, my heart would pound. It was like opening the door to a tiny haunted house with Old Spice air freshener. Rachel said it was like getting a vacuum out of a coffin. She never minded like I did, though.

  I understood later. Later, I’d sit in the dark of our closet and let Rachel’s dresses tickle my head. I’d breathe in dust and her perfume like sweet cigarettes.

  I’d remember just how sweet she could be. Every day
I had chicken pox, she waited outside our house for the ice-cream truck so she could buy me a rainbow Popsicle. She spent a whole summer coaching me for middle school volleyball tryouts. She started a rumor about a boy who’d started one about me.

  I flip a page in Carl’s book and then another. It seems like I’ve spent most of the last six years of my life with people on paper. The spine is loose and cooperative at this point.

  I stop at Lady in the Rain and wonder again if she is Carl’s wet ghost. A victim who won’t let him go. It’s such an evocative, surreal photograph. In the artist’s note, he calls his elegant subject “Cinderella.”

  I want to flatten myself and enter the photograph, feel the slap of the rain, yell at her to stop, ask if she is dead or alive. Is her face beautiful or ordinary? Is she running home or for her life?

  I turn two more pages. I’m back in my childhood closet, parting the clothes. The twins. The Marys, as Carl calls them.

  There’s a dull thud in my stomach. It always hurts to look at them now. I could never ferret out their last names or track them to a missing persons’ list. I could only wonder.

  I flick to the next picture, an empty old swing, with its rusted chains and slats splintered like rotting teeth, an abandoned object Carl’s camera has brought back to imaginative life. On this swing, minds wandered, girls kissed boys, babies rocked, people talked low, sweat dried, fevers cooled.

  The river of life. Where did the twins fit into it? Rachel? Me?

  Carl’s pictures never stop talking, they just don’t say what I need to hear.

  The explosion of sound from the next room is so loud that my hand involuntarily slings the book into the wall. I watch the spine crack, the book split cleanly in two as if hit by an ax. And then silence.

  I’m already across the room, aware of a chill through the threadbare T-shirt, my trembling legs, Barfly’s high whine from the closet. I’m wondering if somebody’s face got kicked in—Steve Harvey’s on the TV, Walt’s chubby one in the mirror. Worse—if Carl kissed the flame of his lighter to something he shouldn’t have.

  Barfly is still whimpering.

  I don’t want to go out there. Neither do I want my only option to be jumping off an eleven-story balcony with a dog in my arms. My sister loved the exhilaration of heights. I always stayed on the ground, staring up.

  No smoke is filtering under the inch gap between the bottom of the door and the carpet. I bend over to smell only the potpourri of fiber, dirt, a flowery carpet deodorizer.

  When I press my ear to the door, I hear Carl. He’s reciting. Counting. Sliding gravelly objects across a hard surface, one at a time.

  “Everything will be OK,” I assure Barfly. I dig a pair of shorts out of my suitcase and slide them on before I crack the door.

  Carl has dumped the bag of rocks he collected onto the shiny maple dining table.

  He’s counting his gold.

  “You came out of your fortress,” Carl says congenially. His head is down, focused on his task. The rocks have scratched thin, jagged lines on the table. They join the faint ghostly rings of champagne bottles. “Thirty-two,” Carls says. “Thirty-three. Thirty-four.”

  The Tupperware container of snapshots that he’d refused to consider an hour earlier is on the floor in the middle of the room, empty. Victims and their families, people I’d collected and obsessed over for years, are a tornado of debris across the carpet, the brocade couches and high-backed chairs.

  One photo has been propped up against the lamp on the end table behind him. I think how pretty she is. How the barn is another pop of red accent in the room. How the toasted glow falls through the lampshade fringe in a way that makes her seem more alive, light arranged by someone who knows how.

  “Your sister,” Carl says.

  “And how do you know that?” My breath is skipping, uneven.

  “Thirty-eight,” he says. “Thirty-nine.” His finger draws another rock across the table, a ragged claw down my spine.

  I clear my throat.

  “Fifty,” he says. “Fifty-two.”

  “How do you know that’s my sister?”

  “How do you think? She looks like you.” He points to my finger. “And you are wearing her ring.”

  TITLE: THE MARYS

  From Time Travel: The Photographs of Carl Louis Feldman

  East Texas, 1992

  Gelatin silver print

  Photographer’s note—I stumbled across these twin girls the day of my uncle’s funeral in East Texas. He was a potato farmer all his life until skin cancer got him. The mortician left the dirt stains under his fingernails. He said he could bleach them but my aunt said no, that’s who he was. After we put him in the ground, we went back to their cabin for the usual gorging on grief and Southern food. At some point, I escaped with my camera and went out for a shoot in the woods. I snuck up on these little fairies about a quarter of a mile in. I don’t know where they came from or why they were trekking in the mud in their Holy Communion dresses. I photographed them for twenty minutes before they saw me. Who are you? one of them yelled. You scared us.

  I’m Carl, I told her.

  I’m Mary, she replied.

  I’m Mary, too, said the other, with a grin.

  33

  “OK, young man, let’s get started. What is today’s date?”

  “July something,” Carl replies cooperatively.

  The woman, who actually is young, has identified herself as “Dr. Amy, a neurology fellow, the doctor appetizer before you get the main course.” She’s officious, pretty, smiling like the sun, and the epitome of that patronizing-old-people thing I hate. Carl seems to be getting a kick out of the way her white lab coat is cracking open at her bare knee.

  Last night, I’d picked up the photographs littered across the hotel room. I hesitated, then left the one of my sister in place under the lamp. I stayed awake half the night in my plushy ZaZa bed in a frantic state of mind, worried about how to break the news to Carl that the first half of the day would be spent in a famous neurologist’s office, an appointment I had to lie and raise hell to confirm.

  Carl had surprised me. “I’m in,” he’d said amenably this morning. “Maybe the doc can get this arm to stop jumping around. Also, I want to order the Brioche Toad in the Hole French Toast from room service. Read here: It’s got orange vanilla soak, warm balsamic strawberry preserve, pickled rhubarb, whipped basil-mint butter, goat cheese, and sorghum molasses drizzle.”

  Carl got his fantastical breakfast, and the ZaZa shuttle gave us a free ride because the office was within its four-mile radius, and now Dr. Amy is making marks on her clipboard. She flashes her eyes back to Carl.

  “Who’s the president?”

  “An idiot.”

  Another mark.

  “You can’t count that one wrong,” Carl says.

  “You just worry about answering the questions as best you can, sir. Can you please repeat: ‘Dog, fork, leg.’ ”

  “Cat, spoon, arm.” Without a beat.

  “Spell the word world backward.”

  “K-C-U-F.”

  “Let’s try that again. World.” She says it slowly, with a blowing, sexy wh sound at the beginning. It indicates why she was able to skirt her way into one of the most experimental dementia research programs in the country.

  “U-O-Y,” Carl replies, with a wh sound on the y. He puffs out enough air that it tickles the blond strand dripping down her cheek.

  “Perfect. Now, please take this piece of paper in your hand, fold it in half, and put it on the floor.”

  Carl does exactly that.

  “Perfect.” She picks up the piece of paper and hands it back to him.

  “Now close your eyes,” she purrs.

  “If you insist, sweetheart.”

  He puckers his lips. She ignores him.

  �
�Take the pencil from my hand. Write a sentence on the piece of paper. Here, use the back of my clipboard. Sorry, I’m a little out of sync. Long day already.” She sucks in a breath of fake exhaustion. “This is a simple three-step command: Close your eyes, take the pencil, write a sentence.” I’m sure she wasn’t supposed to say simple.

  “Write anything?” Carl asks innocently.

  “Anything at all.”

  Eyes squeezed shut, he scribbles for a few seconds, then folds the paper along its creased line and hands it back.

  “Perfect,” she says. “You can open your eyes.”

  She unfolds the paper and sticks it under the clip on her board without looking at it, busily writing. When she does digest what it says, the blush spreads down her neck like a bad burn.

  “The doctor will be in shortly,” she says brusquely. Dr. Amy is done.

  “How much are you paying for this?” Carl wants to know as soon as the door clicks shut. “Did you give them one of your fake names and credit cards? What am I supposed to call you today anyway?”

  “Try harder,” I say. “This is part of the process that you agreed to back at Mrs. T’s. And I’ve told you not to use my name at all when we are with other people. It’s easier that way.”

  “I don’t remember agreeing to this. I don’t trust anyone who uses the word perfect.”

  “I get it, Carl. Move on. She’s not the doctor we’re here for.” Just the appetizer.

  “You’re here for,” he corrects. “I’m a veteran of these so-called Blessed tests, based on the Blessed dementia scale, dreamed up by some guy named Blessed. If the Virgin Mary’s got something to do with this, and if this is the best stuff they’ve got, our brains are screwed.”

  With every mile, every minute, Carl has transformed from the mute at Mrs. T’s who wore the Christmas tie and appeared unmoved by my recitation of Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road.” He’s off-and-on smart, funny, cruising on multiple levels at once.