ALICE
How do ghosts see?
We didn’t always; it had to be relearned.
Dying is a matter of being reborn. In the beginning there was darkness and confusion. We learned gropingly. We felt our way into this new body, the way that infants do. Images began to emerge. The light began to creep in.
Now I see better than I did when I was alive. I never liked to wear my glasses, and by the time I was thirty, I couldn’t see from one side of the parlor to the other without squinting.
Now everything is perfectly clear. We do more than see. We detect the smallest vibrations, minuscule shifts in the currents, minor disturbances, molecules shifting. We are invisible fingers: we play endlessly over the surface of things.
Only memory remains slippery and elusive. Memories won’t keep faith with you. They’ll go sliding away into the ravenous void of nonbeing.
Memories must be staked to the back of something, swaddled in objects, wrapped around table legs.
Trenton is so motionless in the armchair, if it weren’t for the way he occasionally reaches up to finger a pimple on his face, he might be dead. Amy sits at his feet with an enormous, leather-bound book on her lap. I recognize it as The Raven Heliotrope.
Minna was the one who found it, discovering the typewritten pages loosely stacked and stashed in an old crawlspace. She read it so many times she could recite whole passages from memory. When she was ten, she went crazy trying to figure out the writer’s identity—the manuscript was anonymous—and Richard Walker, in one of his spells of good humor, had it bound, and even called in literary experts and a Harvard professor, who judged from the language and imagery that the book might date from the mid-nineteenth century.
This was endlessly amusing to me. I know for a fact that The Raven Heliotrope was completed between 1944 and 1947. I wrote it.
“Mommy!” Amy cries out suddenly, excitedly. “I’m at the part with the bamboo forest. Do you want me to read it to you?”
Amy’s mention of the bamboo forest sends a small thrill through me. That was one of the passages I was proudest of: Penelope and the Innocents get attacked by a vicious band of Nihilis and are only saved by the sudden appearance of magical bamboo, which grows up around them, impaling the Nihilis army.
“Sure, honey.” Minna dabs her forehead with the inside of her forearm.
Amy moves her finger across the picture of Penelope riding a horse. “Then Penelope went riding away . . . and there were Nihilis and they were ugly and they liked blood.”
“You’re a terrible writer,” Sandra says neutrally. Believe it or not, I had actually managed to forget her existence for an hour, the way you do a shadow’s.
“She’s not reading,” I snap. “She’s making it up.”
“Bamboo,” Sandra says. “Bamboo! You might have at least used rosebushes. Thorns that punctured the eyes, and all that.”
I don’t bother responding. It was Thomas who told me about bamboo—that it grows so quickly, and with such strength, it can go straight through a human body. We talked about how terrible the natural world could be.
Of course the bamboo is only doing what it must. Everything obeys its own inner laws. Everything is greedy, and moving toward a version of light.
“Penelope made a wish and then a forest grew up . . . ” Amy says, after putting her finger, arbitrarily, in the center of the page. She trails off. She’s butchering it. The forest doesn’t grow because Penelope wished it. The forest grows out of the blood of the Innocents.
Minna scoots past the desk and pulls apart the curtains. She must be looking out at the driveway. I no longer know what the driveway looks like. Sandra told me it was paved. But I can still picture the hills—at this time of year, the poplars and the cottonwoods should be blossoming, and the daffodils will be pushing up, and the air will smell sweet as the sap begins to run: a painful smell, which brings back memories of other springs and other cycles, a continuity that exists beyond and apart from us.
“Who is it?” Amy pushes the book off her lap. “Is it Nana? Is she back?”
“It’s not Nana,” Minna says, frowning. “I don’t know who it is.” She sighs. “Stay here with Uncle Trenton, okay, sweetie? Trenton, can you watch her? Don’t touch anything, Amybear.”
Minna goes out into the front hall: a dim place that always smells like old shoes. No one uses the front entrance except for delivery people and the various groups that go door-to-door, petitioning for a clean water act or advocating for Mr. So-and-So for governor.
The man on the front porch is wearing a too-big suit and holding a briefcase that looks like a theatrical prop. He seems vaguely familiar. After he introduces himself as Dennis Carey, Richard Walker’s lawyer, I realize I must have seen him before.
“Well, I guess you better come in,” Minna says, and opens the door wider to admit him.
For a moment I’m swept away by a wedge of light that cuts into us, penetrates the layers of air and dust that have accumulated in the hall. Then Minna closes the door.
“You could have told us you were coming,” she says, sticking her hands in her back pockets so he can’t avoid looking at her breasts.
“Here comes trouble,” Sandra says, obviously pleased. She loves a good spectator sport.
His eyes tick down and careen back up to her face. “I called,” Dennis says, shifting his briefcase to his left hand. “I spoke to Caroline . . . ?”
Minna laughs. “No wonder I wasn’t expecting you,” she says. “Caroline isn’t here.”
“Not here?” Dennis tugs at his collar. He’s probably in his forties and not completely unattractive, although he has too much stomach and too little hair.
I feel a brief flash of fear. Minna is like a spider, huge and hungry.
“My mom tends to be forgetful,” Minna says, and pushes past Dennis, shouldering too close, so her body brushes against his. “You want something to drink?”
Dennis transforms his nervous cough into a laugh. “Better not,” he says. He’s uncomfortable, as he should be, without knowing why. “I’m still on the clock. I made the appointment with Caroline . . . ”
Minna waves a hand. “Appointments have never stopped my mother from drinking. What do you say? Whiskey? Wine? Vodka? We’re absolutely drowning in vodka . . . ”
“I shouldn’t,” Dennis says, but I can feel him beginning to relent.
“You might as well relax.” Minna takes another step toward him. “Who knows how long we’ll be waiting for the others . . . ” She steps forward again, so they are standing less than a foot apart.
All the threads are pulled tight in that instant. Even I am swept along. The air vibrates like a plucked violin string.
Then Amy bursts out of the study.
“Nana’s back, Mommy!” She barrels down the hall, half sliding on bunched-up socks.
Just like that, the threads are cut. Dennis and Minna instinctively step away from each other.
“Honey, be careful!” Minna reaches out and catches Amy by the shoulders, forcing her to slow down.
“Who are you?” Amy says, looking up at Dennis.
“Don’t be rude, Amy,” Minna says.