Nocturne

Daniel and Marian fought a lot, though their fights were difficult to carry out because they lived with an elderly woman, a widow, Frau Wirth. They knew that they were lucky to live affordably in their new city. It was Swiss, one of the banking centers of Europe, and housing was limited, and very expensive. They’d found the old woman through a friend of a friend from someone at Marian’s new workplace, which was, of course, a bank. Frau Wirth wore dark clothing and leather shoes with soft soles that looked like vanilla cake. You could barely hear her movements about the house. She could walk the length of the hall almost in silence. And though she seemed very old, the skin on her face loose, creased, and wrinkled, she was physically hardy, took daily walks, went to mid-day concerts, and played Chopin and Debussy on the baby grand piano in the sitting room. Her playing was beautiful and full of emotion.

Of course, she would never play earlier than nine in the morning or past seven at night. And she always asked them first if it would disturb them. Not disturbing others was, Daniel and Marian were coming to learn, very important in Switzerland. In Frau Wirth’s apartment building, for instance, laundry and vacuuming could not be done past eight at night and never on Sundays. There were regulations, too, for when and where one put out the garbage and recycling.

But it wasn’t merely worry about disturbing Frau Wirth that made them determined to hide their fighting. It was the fact that she had an idea about who they were, an idea that she guarded and liked and that seemed to guarantee her happiness.

They became aware of this a few weeks after moving in, when Frau Wirth walked them over to the narrow chest of drawers that sat in the hall just opposite the entryway door and that had an air of quiet unapproachability. A white cloth—the sort a priest might wear on his shoulders—was draped over the top of it and seemed to illuminate the family photographs that were out on display, most of which were black and white and yellow with age. One depicted Frau Wirth in her wedding dress next to her now dead husband. She was young—no doubt younger than Daniel and Marian were now—and a little too square-jawed to be pretty. She showed them her parents’ and husband’s parents’ wedding photos, the images so faded that one had to squint to see the young couples in their fine clothing. Then she gestured at the only color photograph on display: her daughter, wearing a thick winter coat, smiling, and squinting as a high wind blew her hair out behind her. She seemed to be on the top of a mountain.

It was insensitive and stupid of Daniel to ask Frau Wirth if her daughter was married and had a family of her own now. The light left the old woman’s eyes and a kind of strain entered her face as she explained that her daughter had passed. It was a tragedy. It happened only a few years ago. She loved the mountains—to look down on the world, to take and feel that risk. An avalanche buried her and now she was gone.

I’m so sorry, Marian said, taking the old woman’s hand.

But Frau Wirth smiled then and opened the top drawer, showing them an assortment of velveteen sachets, fastened by golden twine, one of which she prised open and emptied into her palm, where Daniel and Marian saw a transparent plastic baggy holding four or five stained teeth. They’re my father’s, she said, from when he was a child. In the next sachet was yet another plastic baggy containing a blond lock of her mother’s hair. Another kept the pebbles and dust of what remained of her late husband’s ashes. Each of the baggies was labeled—Poppi, Mutti, Liebling. The old woman’s eyes glistened as she showed them these treasures, and seeing them turned Daniel’s stomach, though there was also a tender and desperate miserliness in the old woman’s collection.

When she’d finished sharing with them, she closed the drawer again, turned, took Marian’s hand, and smiled. And Daniel could feel the relief and hope rush out of Frau Wirth as if she were touching him, too.

And so, of course, they could do nothing less than be—or appear to be—a happy couple for the old woman. They couldn’t glare or shout at each other, which was particularly hard when Marian confronted Daniel on a rainy Saturday afternoon, admitting that she had read his journal that morning, while he’d been sleeping. It was out on his desk as usual and she opened it. Now I know what you really feel about me, she said, what you really think of me. That was my journal, he said. You had no right. You don’t like sex with me, she said. You think it’s boring. You don’t care that all the men who are my bosses at the bank drink too much wine at lunch, go home early, and leave me with all the work and never give me any credit for doing it. You don’t give a damn about that. You’re irritated when I come home and whine—that was the word you used—whine about it. That journal was not yours to read, Daniel whispered fiercely.

But they both stopped when they heard the door of the kitchen open and close. They donned their raincoats and found a large beech tree in the park next to the apartment to stand beneath and shout at each other as the rain fell and dripped through the leaves. You think that I take too long to have an orgasm, she said, that it’s all work and labor for you. That was my journal. Those were my thoughts. And you don’t like it when I pee in the bathroom while you’re at the sink brushing your teeth. It grosses you out and you wish so much that I wouldn’t do it in front of you because you don’t want to see me on the toilet or to hear the sound I make. And you think I’m materialistic, that I only want a Mercedes sedan and expensive clothes. My journal, he said yet again, though he felt that he was losing in this exchange as she threw back at him everything he’d written against her so that finally he countered by saying, I wrote good things, too. Lots of them. I wrote about how you’re my best friend, how there’s so much that I can only say to you and no one else. I wrote that I trust you and would do anything for you. That I love to hold you at night in bed. Blah, blah, blah, she said, shaking her head, her hair matted, water streaking down her face. You think that I’m a moody hag and rise and crest and fall like a wave, like the tides in the stupid ocean when the phases of the moon pull and push on it. Give me—give everyone—a break! What bullshit, Marian said. What utter self-help-book crap. I don’t even remember what the title of that book was—the one your mother gave us. But you agreed with me at the time that it wasn’t helpful at all, that it was toxic, sexist bullshit. Now I know that you believe in it. If you really think I’m a water woman and you’re a caveman, that you’re from Mars and that I’m from Venus, you should just retreat into your rock hole and lick your balls all alone on your red planet because you’re a poor, lonely creature who can only commune with himself.

Daniel didn’t know what to say next and it didn’t matter because he had so clearly lost. She had won and he had lost. And now they walked back into Frau Wirth’s quiet apartment, where Marian retreated into the small bathroom and took a long, angry shower. He hid his journal deep beneath the left lower corner of the mattress and then looked out the window at the gray rain and wondered why he’d left it out on his desk in the first place. Perhaps he’d trusted her not to look inside or perhaps he’d secretly wanted her to read every word and believe it, even though some of it was fantasy, half-true at best—ideas he jotted down simply to amuse himself and to construct a person—not quite him—who could be rude, insensitive, thoughtless, who could even be an asshole and enjoy it. He hardly knew anymore what he’d written in those pages, though he did care that Marian’s bosses were unfair to her and he often liked focusing on her pleasure in bed. But if what she’d read had hurt her, she deserved it—every bruise and blow that she got from her cruel trespass into his mind.

After that argument, there was a period of shyness and hesitance between them as if they were, over the next week or so, strangers to each other. They were overly polite, always saying please and thank you. They refrained from love making and even touching in their small bed, though this was finally impossible and at times they would wake during the night and have to quickly move away from the other’s sleepy embrace. And while it was obvious that Daniel had hid his journal, which no longer sat on his desk, Marian said nothing about it.

Frau Wirth, it seemed to Daniel, sensed that something was off between them. When they ran into her in the kitchen on Friday evening, she smiled and asked, Your week—did it go well?

Yes, Marian said.

You both seem tired. I’d like to make you dinner tonight. Could I do that?

Marian and Daniel set the table while Frau Wirth began to prepare the meal. She took slabs of pale meat from a package of butcher paper, bathing them in a bowl of egg yolk, then turning them one way and another in a plate of flour and breadcrumbs before putting the filets in a cast iron pan of melted butter, where the meat sizzled gently while she saw to the vegetables sautéing in another pan and the small dumplings boiling in a pot of water on the back burner.

So many tasks at once seemed too much for her, given her age and the bend in her back. But she managed it without straining or working too hard. When she dropped a wooden spoon, Daniel hurried to pick it up. She smiled, thanked him, and then added in High German, which Daniel and Marian understood better than they did the local dialect, This meal was my husband’s favorite.

If it was his favorite, he said, I’m sure we’ll like it, too.

She paused for a moment, looking down at the counter and shaking her head. There was a stillness in her that struck Daniel then and he wondered if she were suffering a spasm of pain or discomfort. Today, she said, would be our sixtieth anniversary. Herr Wirth was a romantic. I know he would have brought a wonderful gift and, of course, I would cook his very favorite meal and play the piano for him.

She looked up and smiled at Daniel and Marian then and Daniel felt the odd urge to look over his shoulder, where the old woman’s eyes had settled with some warm emotion on something or even someone, though of course there were only the three of them in the small kitchen.

At the table, the old woman was careful to tell them how they were to eat what she’d prepared. The schnitzel would need a dash of salt and they were not to forget to squeeze the wedge of lemon over it. They followed her instructions and then began to eat. The schnitzel was light, very hot from the pan, lemony and buttery. You like it? she asked.

Yawohl, they said. Das schmeckt aber gut.

They talked then about Marian’s work—her bosses were still leaving the bank early and not giving her credit for finishing their projects. That certainly wasn’t fair, Frau Wirth agreed. Swiss men, she said knowingly and shook her head. You should ask for a promotion as soon as possible. I’m sure they won’t want to lose you. She wanted to know then how Daniel’s search for more teaching hours was coming and he told a small lie, feeling a frisson of guilt when he said that he was looking at several language schools—in fact, he enjoyed his mornings reading and jotting down ideas in his journal—and didn’t want more hours and hadn’t looked for any. But he couldn’t admit as much because Marian was hoping he’d take on more hours so that she, in turn, could quit her job and look for something else.

I’m sure you’ll find all the work you want, the old woman said. Herr Wirth was a tailor, she added. And the clothes he made—mostly business suits—were very fine and commanded a good price. But he was also at times a seamstress. She laughed to herself and seemed to be entertaining a warm thought. That wasn’t perhaps very manly work. People talked about him, though none of what they said was true. What silly ideas we sometimes have. He was an artist and very good at what he did. He loved it and it was also lucrative. The wedding gowns he made were beautiful. She shook her head now. The young Swiss don’t really believe in marriage anymore. And they don’t like children because they are loud and badly behaved. And that’s true. But they are many other things, too. And now the villages are nearly empty because there are no children there and no one wants to stay in a place without children. I understand why young people feel this way. We’re living in a different time. There are so many—too many—of us. And we’re eating up the world. But there can never be too many happy people—too many good people. I believe that. Don’t you?

We do, Marian and Daniel said almost at the same time.

And I would like the villages to fill up again, she said. Herr Wirth and I grew up in the same village. We met there and our daughter was born there. We would have stayed, too, if the young people hadn’t left and if the older people hadn’t talked nonsense about us. It’s true that life can be a little backwards in certain places. Herr Wirth couldn’t finally find enough customers to keep his business going. So we came here.

After the meal, Frau Wirth told them that she was growing tired and wanted to play a little piano before it got too late. My music won’t disturb you? she asked. Oh, no, they said. We love it. She helped them clear the table and then left them to do the cleaning and washing up. They stood side by side at the sink, both of them thinking of Herr Wirth, dead for many years now, making his suits and wedding gowns. He was an artist, the old woman had said. And now they began to hear her music, so gentle and soft that they could barely make out the somber tones from the kitchen. From time to time, as they worked, their arms and hands touched and Daniel experienced a tension and excitement at their closeness. Once, when he handed her some cutlery that he’d just rinsed, Marian brushed his shoulder and smiled at him. He even thought that she was on the verge of kissing him quickly. But he was glad that she didn’t because closeness and touch felt suddenly dangerous. They needed to stay apart for as long as they could and for as long as it took to render the kitchen spotless and return everything to order. But twenty minutes later, when they’d cleaned and put everything away and when there was nothing else to do, they noticed the old woman’s playing growing more assertive, louder, and more forcefully beautiful.

What is that? Daniel asked.

That’s a Nocturne, Marian said. It’s Chopin. She put a hand just above her breast now. How can she be so old and frail and churchy and still play like that?

Daniel laughed and said, She has secrets.

They looked at each other and Daniel saw the shyness in her eyes that had been there ever since their fight. She was different, changed, and perhaps he was, too. He even felt remorse. I shouldn’t have written those things about you, he said. They weren’t even true—not really. And I also haven’t been looking that hard for more work. I’ll start doing that on Monday.

She nodded, her eyes becoming all at once hard before they softened again and she said, It’s my fault. It was your journal. They were your private thoughts. I invaded your space. It was wrong of me. I know you’re hiding it from me now and I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t trust me either, if I were you. And I didn’t mean what I said about you going into your cave and doing that. Maybe you’re right about me being a wave, rising and being emotional and then crashing.

No, he said, that’s bullshit. It’s awful and reductive and silly. He took both her hands in his then and said, Almost nothing I wrote was true, especially the thing about you peeing in the bathroom while I brushed my teeth. That doesn’t annoy me or gross me out. I made it up. I don’t know why. Maybe it just made me feel powerful or something. But I like the sound you make—your tinkling. It’s funny and it makes me feel closer to you. It makes me feel that I know some part of you that’s private and that most people don’t know and that I do.

Marian laughed and squeezed his hand tightly and said, That’s sort of ridiculous.

I don’t care, Daniel said. It’s how I feel. And, in fact, he did feel this way now, though he’d also felt at times a little invaded by Marian’s casual peeing in front of him, by how comfortable she was sitting on the toilet while he spit and rinsed the toothpaste from his mouth.

Frau Wirth’s piano music was coming from the sitting room more forcefully now. It was quiet and gentle and loud and powerful all at once. There was, it seemed, more emotion in her music tonight—on the sixtieth anniversary of her marriage. Perhaps she imagined that Herr Wirth was present, dressed in one of his own fine suits and leaning over the piano or even sitting next to her as she played.

Did you sort of feel like, Daniel said then, that her dead husband was here, in the kitchen, while we were eating the schnitzel?

Maybe, she said. And they both laughed nervously at this idea.

What was Herr Wirth thinking, Daniel asked, as he looked at us with his wife?

Marian took a moment before adding, That we, you and me, were beautiful.

Daniel nodded, though he didn’t think that was all there was to it. I wonder if he was imagining the gown he’d make for you.

I want to go into that room, Marian said.

What room? Daniel asked.

The one just across from the kitchen. It’s always closed and has all the family photographs of Frau Wirth and her husband and their dead daughter on the walls.

You’ve already been in it, Daniel said, haven’t you?

Marian shook her head, but then said, I’m terrible, aren’t I? Only one time, when she was at her church choir rehearsal and you were out teaching. I always want to know what’s inside people. I want to know their secrets.

Do you think she keeps the door closed on purpose? Daniel asked.

Marian smiled and said, Did you keep your journal out on your desk on purpose?

As they talked, the music seemed to touch them with a gentle deliberateness that allowed them to surrender to it. It was a spring night, the light outside blue, with evening coming on. The birds in the park across the street were making a gorgeous racket, as if in response to the old woman’s music, which rose and fell in swells and took them, Daniel and Marian, into the hall, where Marian opened the door and they entered. A tender swath of red sun lit the room and fell over the wide closet doors, which Marian opened now, revealing the funerial sweep of men’s clothing—blazers and creased trousers, stiff and regimented, the color of midnight that expressed obligation and also, as Marian knew, a shirking of duty onto someone else—the secretary who couldn’t leave until 5:30 and who never drank wine at lunch.

Marian knew exactly where the gowns were, thrusting her thin arms up to the elbows into the black wall of fabric and spreading it open, revealing the long, sweeping shapes that were so brilliant that they couldn’t possibly be real. Some were suspended from hangers and others were closed up in gray protectors. Reaching into the closet and embracing them, she pulled several gowns out, a wake of trains and skirts and flounces dragging over the floor before she let them fall onto the sofa against the wall and then opened one of the protective sleeves, the smell of mothballs and something like candy invading the room as Marian pulled away layers of tissue paper to reveal the dove white silk of a skirt. After being closed up for so long in the dark, the gown seemed to give off its own light, which spread a little into the room.

Do you think she would mind if I put it on? Marian asked. Then she looked over her shoulder and said, Do you think he would mind?

Just after she posed this question, the music, once again seeming very purposeful, changed tempo and brightened into a kind of folk dance, the grief that had been at its center only a moment ago now a distant memory. Marian stood, reached behind her, undid a few buttons at the top of her smock, and let it fall to the floor. She was thin, with a little padding of flesh at her belly that Daniel had always loved to kiss first and before their touching became urgent and bent on pleasure. Help me, she said.

Daniel lifted the white gown, which seemed to spread in his hands and unfurl so quickly that he almost dropped it before Marian put her arms into the sleeves and the dress, all at once, took on its intended shape around her. Daniel thought that if a stem of bone—dried in the sun to a white sheath—could be a flower in blossom it would be this dress with Marian in it. He approached her from behind, her small butt just peeking out of the gorgeously rough seams that had been left loosely sewn for later sizing. It didn’t matter. The dress fit her perfectly. Can you zip me up? she asked.

He did and she turned around now and faced him. Am I beautiful?

He laughed but then said, Do you think Herr Wirth was gay?

Because he made dresses like this?

Frau Wirth was right, Daniel said. They’re not just dresses—they’re art. And he thought then that Herr Wirth might have been gay, a queen in a wedding gown, or gone both ways or even been a woman in a man’s body. And if he’d been any or all of these things, there had probably been times of sadness in this house and between this man and woman. Herr Wirth had had no choice but to marry his closest friend, who must have known at some point that he wasn’t what he appeared to be. But perhaps she wasn’t what she appeared to be either. And perhaps they loved each other nonetheless. And he was certain that they had both loved their daughter very much and that it was a good thing that Herr Wirth had died before the girl because a person can only take so much heartbreak.

Listen to the song, Marian said. They paused then and focused on the energy and lightness—it was ethereal and full of an easy joy—that came down the hall and into the room like a breeze that threatened to become in an instant a gale-force wind. I can feel the music, she said, smiling. It has hands and thin, quick fingers. She laughed and jolted suddenly, as if being tickled. Frau Wirth is doing this on purpose, isn’t she? Marian said as she watched Daniel begin to undress, starting with his shoes, then his shirt, and jeans. A pile of dark men’s clothing had fallen to the floor when Marian had pulled the gowns from the closet and Daniel began to put these on, starting with the right pant leg, though the last time he’d worn a suit had been at his own wedding more than two years ago. Of course, the clothes fit him perfectly. When he fastened the top button of his shirt, tied his bowtie (he’d never worn one but somehow knew how to manage it and pull the knot taut), and hiked the blazer over his arms and shoulders, he felt all at once like a cad, a bad man, a real fucker, who would do anything he had to do to make his way in the world and promise everything to his wife then break his oath with whomever, man or woman or whatever else, he wanted most. He’d do it and get caught and lie and almost certainly do it again. Daniel already felt guilty about this and promised himself to work against these impulses as Marian grasped his hand and pulled him into her.

The dance they performed then was new to them, though each move was in their legs and arms and torsos. It made them laugh and kiss deeply before releasing each other again and striding across the room, separate for the moment but locking eyes.

Now the music became serious again, full of late season grief and loss and a sense that time was passing and that nothing would be the same after this. Daniel had insulted Marian in his journal and she had trespassed on all his secrets. But how Marian was able to find Daniel’s cock and release it from the impenetrable black crotch of the trousers, he didn’t know. She plunged down and took him into her mouth and he searched through the white mounds of fabric until he found her and did for her what she was doing for him. He made her come and she pulled so hard on him that it hurt and he cried out. The clothing was strong and held to them tightly, not tearing or sliding or coming loose, which made the fact that she could lead him between her legs and that, a moment later, he was inside her, miraculous. The old woman hammered out gorgeous, deep-throated chords now in a music that bent towards the blues and jazz and rock and stride and Ragtime, all without somehow leaving behind Chopin’s Nocturne so that it was clear that Frau Wirth was also an artist who knew what she was doing, driving them on, Marian grasping at Daniel, pushing him into her again and again until they were almost there, until the villages would be full once more, alive and teaming and noisy. And then they were done and the music softened, became a lull in which their bodies grew slack and soft. A tender swatch of notes, a light melody, drew Marian’s hand to his cheek and let it rest there. Whether it was her or him or both of them at the same time who said, Oh, my darling, my love, he didn’t know.

The blue darkness came in through the windows and draped itself over the room, which shifted and moved slowly in the shadows. The music lay over the floor now, reclining lazily beside the couch where Marian and Daniel held each other. It stroked them and ran its hands through their hair before, like an impatient mother, it jolted upright and made them do the same, made them clean up their mess—such a mess; they were always making messes; and it was late, too late for them to be up—then led them down the hall and into their bed because tomorrow was another day, a big day, and they needed to be ready for it. It pulled the covers over them, seeming to retreat, to back quietly out of their room, while they embraced, closed their eyes, and drifted off just as the old woman lifted her hands from the keys and placed them palm down in her lap.

~ ~ ~

When they woke the next morning in a pool of sunlight, they smiled and kissed. Marian’s breath was gloriously foul and Daniel knew that his was, too. But the differences between them had been repaired, though when they sat up in bed and looked out the window at the late morning light, Daniel felt with an unsettling reassurance the presence of something—a sliver beneath the skin, a small wound that would grow better but never quite heal.

By the time they entered the kitchen, it was almost noon and Frau Wirth sat at the table writing notes. She was dressed all in brown and was almost done eating her usual Saturday lunch—a blood sausage with apple sauce. She loved the sweet with the savory, often eating pork and small bits of meat with jams, compotes, and stewed fruit. She was smiling and her eyes glowed. I’m afraid, she said, that I broke the house rules and played too loudly and too late last night. I found letters of complaint from our dear neighbors this morning. There was a humorous and knowing tone in her voice that Daniel had never heard before. She shrugged and sighed. That’s why I’m writing apologies to everyone today.

But you played so beautifully, Daniel said.

I didn’t bother you? she asked, her tone all innocence.

Not at all, they said.

She’d been about to bend over the table and continue writing when she looked up at Daniel and Marian and said, My goodness—look at you two! You’re glowing. I would even say that you’re….

What? Marian said.

Oh, Frau Wirth said. And she dabbed a bit of food from her lips with a cloth napkin and seemed to blush a little. I don’t know.

But she did know. Daniel and Marian were sure of it

# # #

John Fulton has published three books of fiction: Retribution, which won the Southern Review Fiction Prize, More Than Enough, which was a Barnes and Noble’s Discover Great New Writers selection, and The Animal Girl, which was long listed for the Story Prize. His fiction has been awarded the Pushcart Prize and been published in Zoetrope, Oxford American, and The Southern Review. New stories are forthcoming or have recently appeared in The Sun, Fiction, Ploughshares, and The Missouri Review, and his third story collection The Flounder will appear in the spring of 2023. He teaches fiction writing at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Undiscovered Country

The kitchen of my childhood home. Its buttery-yellow wall-phone, dial grubby, cord stretched limp from use. Our cluttered white Formica countertop and ugly linoleum floor, rust-orange bubbles intermingled with brown. An AM/FM Westinghouse table radio with a worn black leather carrying handle. Three of us in that kitchen. My mother pacing like a caged animal, flinching whenever the phone rings. Her long fingers, nails slicked cherry red, twisting the dial of the staticky radio back and forth to get the latest updates on the bridge collapse.

How much I am misremembering I do not know. I was ten and my sister a few weeks shy of fourteen, and all this happened in Ohio thirty-six years ago. Maybe the phone was avocado like our refrigerator, and maybe the radio was not a Westinghouse, maybe that was the fan and TV and every other appliance in our house. What I do recall with certainty is my mother’s face the next morning. Somehow it haunts me, that face contorted by her violent protests, by her tears when two police officers arrived just after sunrise with the news that divers had found my father’s baby-blue Buick.

My mother has been missing for twelve hours, and I’m not entirely sure, but it seems as though I’m experiencing some strange variant of déjà vu.

She called this morning to tell me she was lost, that she felt as if she were sloshing around in a sea of cars. Her voice sounded faraway and her watery metaphor odd, until, after hours of pacing my bedroom floor, my memory reeled back to the night my father died. Her call dropped before I could ask for a landmark, and she never answered my dozens of calls and texts.

It is nearly one o’clock in the morning when a deputy sheriff phones to inform me they have located my mother, or at least her cellphone, in a nearby motel. Their IT expert tracked its ping from one cellphone tower to the next.

“Lots of pinging,” Deputy Todd says. “Your mother likes to be on the move.”

“You’ve got that right,” I agree, with a tinge of humor. I am so relieved and grateful that I want to connect with the deputy, make him laugh. But I stop short of telling him how my mother asked me last year to teach her how to use a dating app for seniors. And insisted that I filter out men older than sixty-five. Susanna is seventy-six and has been married four times.

On my way to meet Deputy Todd, I call my sister to update her. “Do you think she’s with anyone in the motel room?” Sheila asks, before she begins humming Oh, Susanna.

I hang up. Sheila sometimes makes light of our mother’s descent into old age. It’s her way of deflecting what is hard to witness. Never mind that she lives in San Francisco and has missed most of Susanna’s slide into her twilight years. 

My mother answers the deputy’s brisk knock on her motel door right away. She looks disoriented, her blue eyes muddy with dullness. It takes her a few seconds too long to recognize me, but then she quickly puts on a mask of haughty delight, drawing on her skills as an actress. She worked for a few years in stock theatre before she married my father. Or maybe it was college theatre. My mother is never entirely clear when it comes to her own history. And even less so these days.

“I’ve always loved men in uniforms,” Susanna says, reaching to brush dandruff from the deputy’s shoulders, “but I suggest you invest in a good shampoo.”

Deputy Todd blushes and steps back. I snatch my mother’s hand, steer her into the motel room. “Susanna, are you okay?” I ask. “We were so worried.”

My once glamourous mother looks disheveled and as shriveled as a raisin. Her decline happened at warp speed, only in the past year or two, and I haven’t yet adjusted to the new, or more accurately, the very old Susanna.

“Can’t a woman have an adventure?” she asks, all bravado for Deputy Todd. This is probably a routine call for the deputy. My mother lives in Laguna Woods, a gated community of more than fifteen thousand seniors. How many times a day does his department get calls for seniors gone astray, adrift in forgetfulness?

“What’s the code?” I ask him. He gives me a puzzled look. “The code for a missing elderly person?” Back in the Pliocene Age, before newspapers went the way of dinosaurs and I began grant writing, I worked as a police reporter. I’ve forgotten the code, if I ever knew it.

“It’s 10-65, the same as for every missing person, ma’am. But for seniors around here we sometimes say lost wood. If we have to step it up a notch, we send out a Silver Code, aka Silver Alert, like an Amber Alert.”

“Why is this nice policeman here, Melanie?”

Deputy Todd, who cannot be more than twenty-five-years old, grins at me. As he leaves, he playfully steps on only the carroty swirls of the carpeting, his walkie talkie streaming static and chatter like our old radio.

My mother’s black leather bag, a vintage Frye backpack from her hipster days and now far too heavy for her, lies on the floor near the desk, its contents spilled like coins from a slot machine. I chuck everything back in and ask, “Where are your car keys?”

“I don’t know,” she says with a shrug.

“Well how did you get here?”

She shuffles to the edge of the bed, sits, and juts out her chin like a petulant adolescent. “I gave the taxi driver my address,” she says. “But when we got there, it wasn’t my condo. It wasn’t even my neighborhood. We drove … I finally had him drop me off here.”

My mother dips her head in embarrassment. There is a pink bald spot at the crown of her scruffy white poodle frizz. Hair has always been a focal point for our family; we never fail to comment on a new cut or highlights. So when Susanna proclaimed she was over the hassle of coloring and styling, it was a huge red flag.

And it’s not that I ignored it, but her fading and frizzled hair, in such close proximity to her fading and frazzled brain, terrifies me. We usually tiptoe around the subject of age, of our own impermanence, but on my birthday last month, she quoted from her favorite Shakespeare—Hamlet’s line about the undiscovered country from which no traveler returns. Then with melodramatic flourish, she warned me, “Remember, it’s later than you think.”

“Why didn’t you call me when you got here?”

She looks at me with defiance. “I would have figured it out sooner or later.”

“Okay, fair enough. Where is your car?”

“Oh, Melanie, that’s the problem. Somewhere in a shopping center parking lot. I should have traded it in for a siren red or vivid blue. Everyone in Southern California has a white car.”

“You’re sleeping at my house tonight.”

“For in that sleep of death what dreams may come ... when we have shuffled off ... well, I’ve forgotten the rest. Whatever, it’s all stardust. Like us. I read somewhere that humans are made of stardust because our atoms are the same as those in the galaxies. Isn’t that sublime? From stardust to stardust sounds much lovelier than from dust to dust, don’t you think?”

When I nod in agreement, she tells me she wants to go home to her condo because Harry will be waiting there with cocktails. Harry, Susanna’s last husband, died six years ago.

She gives me such a dreamy smile that I decide not to burst her bubble. My mother is not stupid—she has a master’s degree in Renaissance literature—but she’s always had a detached, airy demeanor, as if she were on stage, gliding through her lines on Valium. It doesn’t help that she whisper-speaks with a baby doll voice like Marilyn Monroe’s. Also, she belongs to the medical marijuana club in Laguna Woods, and I can never tell whether she is buzzed or not.

Still perched on the edge of the bed, Susanna presses a fisted hand to her ear. “You’re right,” she says into her fist. “Melanie has so little joie de vivre.”

I have never seen my mother pretend to be on the phone. Her remark annoys me, but I’m more alarmed and curious about the imaginary conversion. I drag a chair from the desk, so close our knees touch. She whispers with her free hand cupped over her mouth, and I cannot not make out another word.   

Up this close, I realize the eyeliner she had tatted on years ago has bleached to a turquoise rim around her eyes. The mole on the corner of her lower lip is darker than ever, like a piece of chocolate she’s neglected to wipe off. Her breath smacks of peanut butter.

“Susanna, what’s up?”

“I know this looks strange, but this is important. I need to take this phone call. Can you wait out in the hallway for me?”

“Harry can wait.”

“It’s not Harry. It’s your father.”

“Oh, Susanna.” My voice catches in my throat.

My father, Thomas O’Malley, plunged to his death on an autumn night on his way home from work at the Westinghouse Electric Corporation in Toledo, Ohio, where he sold industrial motors. Eleven others perished with him in the Maumee River. Three of the dead were never found, including my father. My mother rented a splendid silver casket, and spent the money she’d saved by not buying it on a large, intricately chiseled headstone for my father’s grave. His funeral Mass was mobbed, his wake a rowdy affair at the Irish-American Club where my sister got black-out drunk, although I’m not entirely sure about this last bit. I might be remembering the wake of my cousin David, hit by a car in grade school.

After the bridge collapse, I would daydream of my father twisting free underwater. Swimming the icy river currents to shore, dazed and bereft of memory like some character in a daytime soap opera. I was sure that someday he would swim back to us. For years afterward, I would see him on the street, just turning a corner out of my view or swallowed up by a crowd.

“Yes, Thomas,” my mother says, uncovering her mouth. “Yes, dear. No, it’s not raining. It was a beautiful day today. You would love California.”

“Where is he?” I ask, playing along. “What does he want?”

My mother breaks into laughter, her laughter rising like a child on a swing, soaring, pumping skyward. Then just as abruptly, she stops, becomes all serious. “Oh darling, we were young. And what a run I had after you.”

“Susanna?”

“Now look what you’ve done. He’s gone. Gone again.” My mother drops her hand, the one fisted into an imaginary phone, and glares at me. Then she pulls a bag of peanut butter cookies from under the folded blanket at the foot of the bed and nibbles on one.

“Let’s go,” I say with measured calm, trying to entice her like I might a nervous dog.

Once we were the same height, but now I tower over her. With a puzzled look, she scans the room and then says, “I think I missed a date tonight with Herb Meyers.”

~ ~ ~

“I’m not doing this by myself,” I tell Sheila. I’ve put Susanna to bed in my guest room, made myself a cup of tea, called my sister despite the time. It’s three o’clock in the morning.

Susanna’s decline has accelerated, I inform her, and she needs round-the-clock care. Despite her grogginess, Sheila pounces. Too expensive.

“As if you can’t help out.”

“I’m not an ATM,” my sister says, all huffy. Her husband is a successful realtor in San Francisco, where a one-bedroom condo can sell for a million, and Sheila makes decent money as an X-ray technician. “Oh hell, I’ll book a flight for Friday. What about Ronnie?”

“What about him?” 

Our half-brother, son of husband Number Two, is an asshole. Our mother argues that he suffers from a surplus of intelligence and cannot relate to normal (read inferior) people like Sheila and me. He blinks conspicuously and often, rarely smiles, and has zero charm and zero friends. For years, Susanna claimed he was an immigration attorney working to help the disenfranchised in Brownsville, Texas. Poking around on the internet one day, Sheila discovered he was a 1-800-dog-bites-and-accident attorney. When confronted, our mother simply said, “Don’t be so judgmental.”

“Should we call him?” Sheila asks, yawning.

“In a few days. Why bother now?”

“Bother with what?” my mother asks as she baby-steps into my kitchen, overly cautious since she slipped and broke her wrist last year. I tell Sheila I’ll call her in the morning.  

Susanna sits at my kitchen table. She looks fragile, her shoulders rounded, her chest concave. Fleetingly, I wonder if breast implants deflate with age. She is wearing a pair of my flannel pajamas, several sizes too big, with the legs rolled up, and this seems to me a karmic reminder of the circular nature of life. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I played dress-up with her first wedding gown.

“Susanna, I thought you were asleep.”

“You know I can’t sleep at night.”

It’s true, my mother is a nocturnal creature. After my father died, she began staying up all night, going to bed around five in the morning, getting up around two o’clock. This inverted circadian rhythm has caused any number of problems in her social life and marriages, and she hasn’t worked much since my father’s death, cushioned by the marriages and divorce settlements. Our grandmother helped raise Sheila and me, and later Ronnie. Susanna was more like an aunt who dropped in occasionally to check on us.

I hook her arm in mine and guide her to my guest room, where I offer her a melatonin or sleeping pill. She shakes her head and orders me to fetch her makeup kit in her Frye bag. She unsnaps it, retrieves a dose pen labeled Calm.

“I thought you—”

“Oh, don’t be a prude, Melanie. It’s the only thing that helps me sleep. The strain is called dick-a-something.”

My mother takes two hits and stares intently at me. “Get some highlights,” she says, “you’re too old for such dark hair.”

~ ~ ~

Two days after my mother wandered off, I pick up Sheila at the airport. My mother’s best friend, Anne Marie, is babysitting her. In my car, Sheila punches on my air conditioner then hugs me. “It’s so damn hot down here. I don’t know how you deal with it.”

“You’re having a hot flash,” I say, pulling away from the curb.

“You’re projecting,” she counters, rolling up the sleeves of her shirt. One of her tattoos peeks out. Sheila has five, spackled across her shoulders and triceps. Tiny angels. Some sitting on stars and moons, other with bows and arrows, all captioned with the names of her miscarried babies. She is the mother of two teenage girls, adopted from China, but she does not want anyone to forget her lost children.

“Tell me you’ve finally gotten on one of those dating sites Susanna was asking you about,” Sheila says. “I worry about you.”

Neither Sheila nor Susanna understand that I’ve all but given up on finding a partner. I raised my son Jack as a single mother, navigating a few serious relationships that didn’t last. I’ve dated plenty, but no one has ever quite measured up to my father, crystallized in my memory as the father I adored as a child. And I’m well aware of the implications of admitting this. I have had plenty of therapy.

“I’ve been on a few coffee dates,” I lie. “Nothing to write home about. Jack got an internship a few weeks ago with a tech start-up in Santa Monica. It’s all good, really.”

I turn my car out of the airport onto the boulevard where jacaranda trees in the median blaze a line of abundant purple, while Sheila studies me as if searching an X-ray for a fracture. But instead of interrogating me further she asks, “How’s Susanna?”

“We’re bringing her back in for testing this afternoon. She’s still acting funny, still talking to Harry and Dad.”

“Funny how she never wanted to talk about Dad after he died, and now she’s talking to him.” Sheila scratches her leg and flushes red.

“Another hot flash?”

She ignores me. “Do you remember the hole Dad had on the inside of his right thigh?” The narrow cavity, about three inches long and an inch deep, was the vestige of a bone disease my father suffered as a child, an illness that put him in a hospital and wheelchair for months.

“We haven’t talked about Dad in ages, and you’re bringing up a hole in his leg? Which was on the outside of his left thigh by the way.”

“Inside, above his right knee,” she says with older-sister authority. 

“You’re maddening.”

I’ve always believed that memories are subjective, reconstructed, elusive. So, it shouldn’t annoy me how irreconcilable our childhood memories often are. Once, Sheila recalled three hideous puppies our dachshund Gertie supposedly birthed after mating with a German shepherd. I have no recollection of them. Other times, we cannot agree on the name of our old dance school teacher. Or whether the two cheerleaders who got pregnant in high school were sisters or cousins. But memories of our father, those we usually agree on, and they are coated in a hagiographic shimmer.

When we arrive at our mother’s place in Laguna Woods, we find her and Ann Marie playing gin rummy and drinking ice tea. The stench of funeral lilies permeates air. “Ann Marie brought the stinky flowers and made tea,” my mother says. “She spiked hers with rum, but I’m clean. I know I have those tests today.”

My mother stands from the card table to hug Sheila, and Ann Marie whispers to me that my mother is fabricating again. Ann Marie is a day drinker, but I nod agreeably.

“Susanna, we need to get you a haircut and color job,” Sheila says, eyeing our mother with both hands on Susanna’s shoulders.

“Your hair looks lovely, dear. How are my China dolls?”

“Susanna, how often have I asked you not to call—”

“I’m sorry. It’s a term of endearment, but I know it’s not PC. How are Julia and Emily?”

“Emma, it’s Emma. They’re fine. They’re both—”

“Ann Marie, thanks for visiting,” my mother says, turning her back on Sheila. My sister frowns at me, as if my mother’s abrupt dismissal of her girls is my fault. Sheila calls Jack “Susanna’s pet.” And I cannot disagree; our mother prefers men.

 As soon as Ann Marie leaves, Susanna heads toward her front door. “I want to show you my art installation,” she says. “I got the idea when Ruth dragged me to the Orange County Museum of Contemporary Art. You wouldn’t believe what passes for art these days.”

“Susanna,” I say, “we don’t have time.”

But my mother is already walking down her breezeway toward the stairs leading from her second-floor condo to the lawn. Once there, we follow her to a stately magnolia tree in full bloom. Dangling from its branches are a dozen or so purses, ringing the lower portion of the tree like a double string of lights. I recognize the purple leather drawstring bag, a Christmas gift from Susanna that Sheila rejected. A bag with a studded turquoise handle purchased during a Southwest trip. Two red patent leather handbags trotted out for the holidays. The rest are everyday brown and black, but they still pop among the vanilla flowers.

“Did you get on a stepstool to do this?” I ask. “You could have fallen again.”

“No dear. A neighbor helped me. I call it Tree of Memory.”

“It’s beautiful.” I can picture it in a contemporary art museum.

“When I pass away, I want you two and Ronnie to take it down. Open the purses before you toss them. I’ve left my remembrances in them.” She licks her forefinger and wipes a smudge of dirt off one of the red patent leather handbags.

“Oh please, you’ve got years ahead of you,” Sheila says with exaggerated cheerfulness.

“We need to get going to the neurologist appointment,” I say, checking the time on my iPhone. My mother shoots me a spiteful look. A shadow passes over her face. She seems to transform before us, like a little kid coming down from a sugar high, suddenly tired and irritable.

I take her arm, but she pulls away. “You’ll have to give me a few minutes to get ready, and your father dropped off some fish. I left them wrapped in newspaper on the kitchen counter.”

Upstairs, she points to the bundled newspaper and orders us to put it in the freezer while she freshens her makeup. Sheila picks it up. Inside are a tattered pair of slippers.

~ ~ ~

The neurologist sends my mother to the hospital for a series of tests, and after Sheila and I get her admitted and settled, we drive back to her condo to pack her an overnight bag. As we descend the hill of the wide boulevard, the late afternoon sun is setting over the ocean horizon like a forest fire ablaze with orange and yellow and wisps of black. It is one of those sublime sunsets that lifts your spirits, takes your breath away, and makes you think maybe, just maybe, there is an afterlife.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Sheila asks.

“It’s a gorgeous sunset, isn’t it?”

“Yes, nirvana,” Sheila says, “but I’m thinking about the tree. I can’t wait to check it out.”

“I don’t know, we should respect her wishes,” I say, even though I’ve had the same thought. It is tempting, like the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Evil. But also forbidding, because we all know how that turned out.

“Oh, for Christ sake, Melanie. She probably won’t even remember she asked us to wait.”

Sheila twirls a strand of her hair, gives me a disarming smile.

“She asked us to wait,” I protest again, half-heartedly.

Of course, as soon as we park the car, we sprint to the magnolia tree. Sheila grabs the purple bag, and I pull down one of the red patent leathers. We act as if we are drawing from a lottery, and Sheila, as usual, goes first, dramatically untying the loop of the drawstring bag and swirling her hand around its interior. She pulls out a clutch of black-and-white photos from the forties or fifties. They have scalloped edges and names written on the back in my grandmother’s perfect Palmer handwriting. We do not recognize anyone.

A brown alligator purse contains the strawberry blonde ponytail sheared off Sheila’s seven-year-old head. Others reveal a tiny box of yellow baby teeth, Susanna’s birth certificate, and more photos of strangers. In the other red patent leather, I find a newspaper clipping.

“Oh, my God, Sheila.” Shock floods my veins like an icy river. “Do you have your readers on you?”

“What? Let me see!” Sheila tries to grab the clipping, but I slap away her hand.

I look at my father’s photo—in it he is slightly older than I remember him—and under it is a name I do not recognize: Timothy Ryan.

“It’s an obituary,” I stammer. “It’s Dad’s obituary.”

“So, what? Like we haven’t seen it.”

I squint to scan the single paragraph about a man who worked as a fishing guide for thirty years, who moonlighted as a bartender at a popular local restaurant, who left a wife and two sons. The obituary is dated six years earlier and datelined Toronto. He had lived in a small town on Lake Ontario, about five hours from our hometown.  

The clipping slides from my hand, flutters to the ground. Sheila retrieves it, reads it, and looks at me with horror.  

“Melanie, he abandoned us.” Sheila begins weeping. She had changed earlier into a sleeveless shirt, and two of her tatted angel-children shake so hard they seem to be dancing.

Tall and ginger-headed and gregarious, our father was a windstorm of activity. He always had a wrench or a fishing pole or the wheel of a speedboat in his hands. He lived for weekends when he could build something in his workshop or escape outdoors. Enchanted by his exuberance, Sheila and I would follow him like the Pied Piper, trolling for walleye in glassy lakes, sledding down dangerously steep hills, hunting through woods for arrowheads and green glass bottles. When he died, we were lost in the forest.

It does not seem possible that he deserted us, that my past is part fiction. What does it mean, I wonder, if one of the very foundations of my life, the narrative of a loving father lost tragically young, is a lie? What have I lost comparing the men I have dated, loved, and twice almost married, to a father who abandoned his wife and children?

It is dark outside now, only the lights from the parking lot illuminating the grassy area around the magnolia tree. I can barely make out Sheila’s features, but I feel the shift in her. Her shock and sorrow twisting into rage.

“This makes Ronnie a true bastard, and Susanna a bigamist. And we, we’re what, fools? He loved us. Didn’t he love us?” She looks older to me, her neck sagging, her lips quivering. I stupidly wonder if it is true that shock can cause hair to turn white. Her voice raw, she adds, “I remember them arguing a lot before he died … I mean before—”

“You never told me that.” For the second time today, our reliably parallel memories of our father have diverged, and I wonder which of us is right about the position of the tiny hollow in his leg. 

“Why would I? It didn’t mean anything until now, I guess.”

“What did they fight over?” I cannot remember my parents yelling at each other. But perhaps this is willful forgetfulness.

“You were probably asleep. It was always late at night. I don’t remember what they fought over, or if I could ever make out the words. But I would guess money. Grandma helped them out now and then.”

I’m still sitting stunned among the magnolia blossoms. When I stand, black dots swirl in my vision, and it comes rushing back, a wintry day a few months after the accident, snow falling in sheets, one of the first of the dozens of times I thought I saw my vanished father.

He was at least a block away, on a street not far from our neighborhood, a blur of red hair getting into a sedan. I yelled. I ran. The man steepled his hands over his forehead to block the snow, something my father would do, then slipped into the car and drove away. When I got home and told my mother, she yelled at me with a fury that seemed histrionic even for her, and while I don’t remember her exact words, her message was clear: you must accept the truth and the truth is your father is dead.

“She knew,” I say. “She knew he was alive not long after the accident. I’m sure of it.”

Susanna. Under her showy, protective façade, she was grieving a desertion, not a death. She was hiding a depression that forever skewed her sleeping habits, and called in her mother to provide us the solace she could not, along a with a buffer against the truth. She married and remarried looking for someone to rival, or perhaps spite, the man who left her.

“You don’t know that,” Sheila says, unable, perhaps, to accept that both our father and mother were not the people that we had always believed them to be.   

“Where did she get this obituary?” I ask, nodding at the newspaper clipping. Sheila cannot stop staring at the photograph of our father, older than we ever knew him. “Look at Ronnie. How long did she con us with the respected attorney BS? Maybe she was trying to protect us after she found out, and then never got up the courage to tell us.”

I imagine the two of us flying to Ontario for answers we might regret discovering. Answers that surely cannot provide my father absolution. I picture Susanna offering us half-truths and spin she has likely spent a lifetime creating, and now forgetting. And I realize I will never fully understand the enigma of either of my parents.

“I don’t understand,” Sheila says. “How could he have left us, never got back in touch? And he had two boys? Did he want boys all along, not us, to hunt and fish and go boating with?”

She begins to wail again, a furious and high-pitched wail, like the banshees my father used to describe to us. Spirits whose keening signaled the death of a loved one. And what I feel is something akin to another death. The father I loved is dead again, replaced by a stranger. I miss him all over again, this time with aggrieved bewilderment.

Not many stars appear in the light-polluted sky, but I pick out the brightest one, gaze at it, and conjure what I had dreamed of so many times as a child. My father swept away, lifting his head above the river’s surface, shaking the water from his ginger hair. Only this time he swims toward another life.   

# # #

Mary Taugher’s fiction has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Narrative Magazine, Santa Monica Review, Epiphany, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Coolest American Stories 2022, and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco where she is currently at work on a short story collection. She can be found on Twitter @T57Mary

All You Can Eat

Her brother’s ghost materializes with a BOO as Claire walks in the door, and she throws a shoe at his irritating shimmer.

“Fucking stop, Davis,” she says. “I hate when you do that.”

The corners of his mouth curl like cigarette smoke. “Sorry.” When they were kids, Davis filled Claire’s bed with rubber snakes, leapt out from behind the couch, changed the time on her bedside clock so she would wake in a panic. He died at twenty-five, before he could outgrow pranks, and now the hair on her arms stands up when she crowds past him in the hall, a mild electrical field he generates.

 “I don’t know why you have to haunt my apartment,” she says. “Go haunt mom and dad. Go to Chuckie’s place.”

“Come on, that’s not fair.” Davis floats behind her into the bite-sized living room. The furniture is piled so high with her belongings that she eats in front of the television on the floor, the carpet a constellation of crumbs. “You know it wasn’t Chuck’s fault. Those fentanyl dosages are not reliable.”

“Nothing’s reliable when you order it off the internet.” Claire sets her other shoe down on the blanket of mail covering a chair and inspects the wet blister on the back of each heel.

“It was an accident, Claire. You need to get over it.” Davis’ hair drifts like kelp. When he died, it needed cutting.

“You get over it. If you took some responsibility, maybe you’d move on.”

“Move on where, exactly?”

Ignore him and he will go away, the psychic she hired had advised. Her mom used to say the same thing when they were kids and he teased her until she cried.

“Claire.”

She turns on the television. An episode of Nature, birds of paradise working their complicated choreography of seduction.

“Claire. Hey, Claire. Claire.”

Her stomach hurts. “What, Davis?”

“How was your date?”

Claire’s date had been with Wallace, a cheese importer with sobriety-themed tattoos. They had gone to that tapas place where she had eaten the cheese off their charcuterie board in the optimistic spirit of lactose-tolerance.

“It was good.” She texts a thank-you with Davis reading over her shoulder. “Seriously, though, can you give me some space?”

“Why are you thanking that guy? Didn’t you just see him? And you’re home early. So.” Her brother’s ghost smells like Polo cologne and a cigarette smoked in the rain. “Couldn’t have been that good.”

“Davis. Can you just clear out for a few hours?” I’m going to kill you, was what she always said before. Get out of my room or I’m going to kill you. Give me back my phone or I will murder you.

Davis makes a face. Or she thinks he makes a face. His ghost is gauzy and she can watch television right through him. “I’ll be in the bedroom.” He lingers long enough to make sure she knows she has hurt his feelings

The bedroom. No longer her bedroom. The definite determiner makes her stomach churn. Her doctor diagnosed her chronic gastrointestinal distress as aerophagia, meaning she compulsively swallows air. When she’s nervous her abdomen swells like a threatened toad.

Claire, waistband tight, hesitates in front of the trash can with Wallace’s gouda, creakily farting. Her brother calls from the bedroom, “You sound like a door in a haunted house.”

“This is a haunted house.” When she pads into the bedroom (her bedroom, her bedroom) for her pajamas, Davis is at the window. He casts no reflection. A cricket sends out a mating call from under the bed.

“You have to do something about those crickets,” Davis says. 

“Eventually they’ll die.” She unzips her dress. Usually, if she takes off her clothes, her brother sucks his teeth and vanishes. Her bra is an old one, pilly lace with orange stains under the arms. Claire had worn it to discourage herself from impulsively bringing Wallace home. She feels she needs to let a person know she has a ghost before she brings him home, the way you let a person know if you have herpes, or a dog that bites.

Claire has tried to get rid of her brother’s ghost in the following ways: asking politely, burning sage, drawing a sigil and affixing it to the fridge, purchasing a Himalayan salt crystal lamp, and once, while drunk, reading aloud from the Bible. Davis hung around, moping.

Pretty much the only thing that works is getting naked, but she can’t spend all of her time undressed. She lives on the first floor, and she had already burnt herself trying to open boil-in-a-bag rice without a shirt on.

Thumps and shrieks from next door. Her neighbor Siobhan has children who throw themselves at the wall that separates their apartment. These children own two bearded dragon lizards, which Claire knows because last week a bunch of feeder crickets got loose and made for the loose collar of a heat pipe that ran directly into her apartment. Now she has crickets.

“Those fucking kids,” Davis says. He floats overhead. She can go sit in the tub awhile and be alone, but her brother thinks it’s funny to sing from the drains, songs he knows she won’t be able to get out of her head. “Moving Out” had been lodged there all week.

“They’re not bothering me,” Claire lies.

“So where did you go, for this date?”

“The tapas place,” Claire says. A cricket’s chirp is answered by another under the bed.

“Aw, man, really? You know that was my favorite. What’d you go there for?”

“I didn’t know it was off limits.”

“I miss eating,” Davis says.

“Well, I still have to eat. I’m sorry if that’s hard for you.”

When Davis sighs, his ghost wavers. “Hey. Claire. Remember when you dated that guy who was missing a neck?”

“He had a neck.”

“NoNeckLottaFace? He had to turn his whole body to look at things.” A cricket lands on the bedside table and Davis cups his hands over it and it passes through his fingers. “You should really go talk to those assholes next door, Claire. Their kids have been screaming all day.”

Claire doesn’t want to talk to the neighbors. She wants to lay on the carpet with a hand on her belly.

“Good old NoNeckLottaFace. What happened to that guy?”

Claire shrugs. Kievan was uncomfortable when she brought him here, and she could tell he didn’t believe her when she told him her apartment was haunted, but they couldn’t go to his place because his ex-wife still lived there.

Next door, Siobhan’s television blares a show about explosions. The volume doubles.

“This is not OK,” Davis says.

“I know. You’re right,” Claire sighs over the protests of her stomach. It hates conflict.

“You’re going to have to put more clothes on than that, though.”

“I know, Davis.  I’m going to.” She zips up the dress so hard the zipper-pull breaks off.

~ ~ ~

Siobhan has a nice doormat. Cead Mille Failte, it reads, beneath the silhouette of a house wreathed in clover. Claire, feet stuffed back in her clammy shoes, scuffs the soles over the greeting.

Through the neighbor’s door: the sound of more explosions.

“Aw, come on,” Siobhan’s husband yells from inside. Claire touches the doorbell. Hesitates. Knocks instead. “You suck,” he yells at something that sucks.

“Someone’s at the door.” A child’s voice, awake well after ten o’clock on a Wednesday night. The explosions pause. Siobhan opens the door wearing an elastic headband that makes her hair stand out in a corona.

“Hey, sorry to bother you,” Claire says. She doesn’t know why she says sorry. Her stomach sends up a gurgle. “I’m wondering if you can turn the television down.”

“The kids are off from school this week,” Siobhan says, looking at Claire like Claire had come asking that she address bee-colony collapse or the war in Yemen.

“I was thinking you could, you know. Be a little quieter.”

A wail from behind the woman. “Mom, Grayson dropped all of the milk on the floor.” A chorus of sobbing from the kitchen.

“Gray, I’m coming and we can clean it up together.” When she turns back to Claire, her smile evaporates. “Do you have children?”

“No,” Claire says. She wishes she had not come over here. When she goes home, Davis will tease about her failure.

“That’s too bad. We’re always looking for neighbors with children. It’s more fun to go to the park as a big group.”

~ ~ ~

For their second date, Wallace wants to go for some kind of artisanal macaroni and cheese. Claire meets him in Union Square Park, near the dog run with its frozen-over smell of piss. “They make their own macaroni,” he says. “Gluten-free. Some kind of ancient grains. And the cheese, of course, is amazing.”

Wallace looks good, leaning up against the railing, tapping an unconscious finger to the beat of the hare krishnas beside the defunct fountain. He seems taller than last time, but she’s wearing flats tonight.

“Actually, I don’t do all that well with cheese,” Claire says. Her stomach swells. Sometimes she places a hand over it while she’s riding the subway, and other women offer her their seats. “I’m, you know. ‘Lactose intolerant.’”

“Seriously? You should have told me,” Wallace says. “I would have taken you somewhere else for dinner last time. Where do you want to go for dinner?”

The farmer’s market in Union Square stays open all winter, cranky and organic. Claire watches a man who looks a lot like Chuckie pay for bread from one of the vendors and tuck the loaf under his arm. Sometimes she still thinks about going to Chuckie’s place with a pickaxe just to break down his door and scare him. After they buried Davis, Claire tried talking to her father about a lawsuit, but he just muttered something about sleeping dogs and went back to looking at boats on the internet.

“There’s an Indian place on University that I like,” Claire says finally. “Sometimes I go there when I want to be alone before I go home.”

“I thought you said you live alone,” Wallace says, drawing her back as a cab cuts the corner they are crossing.

“No one else lives with me.” And, seeing his expression. “It’s a long story. Family stuff.”

“Ah.”

“I’m not, like, divorced and still living with my ex or anything.”

“Oh.” He digests this.“Is it your parents?”

“No. My parents kind of do their own thing.” A dandruffy snow begins to fall, and Claire points in the direction they need to go. “I haven’t seen them in over a year now.”

“Mine hate the city,” Wallace says. “They came to see me get my five-year coin, though.” Easy Does It, one of his tattoos reads, But Do It.

“My parents aren’t big on visits. Or on the phone. When my brother died, I couldn’t get my mother to pick up the phone. Eventually I had to just send her a text.” Davis past away last night, the text read, her grammar undone by finding her brother’s body, Claire still wearing the dress she had worn to go out the night before. Davis had been staying at her apartment and when he overdosed, he fell to his knees before toppling face-first to the carpet. All the blood pooled in his face, and the mortician, unable to conceal the livor mortis, recommended that the casket be kept closed. Claire pushed for Davis to be buried in slacks and the beautiful cashmere sweater he had shoplifted from someplace expensive, but her father wanted that pullover for himself, and said if the coffin was closed it didn’t matter what he wore. No one cried at the service, and she wasn’t going to if her parents didn’t. Her mother’s chin had the same stubborn jut it took on when she was driving.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” Wallace says. He holds the restaurant door open for her, and a wave of cardamom and sitar rolls out. “How long ago did he pass?”

“Two years, next month,” Claire says. “So. Yeah. A pretty long time now.” She always feels like she needs to reassure people that she is OK, that she will not try to get them to take up one of the handles of her grief. Also, she wonders if it can even properly be called grief, when she sees Davis more now than she did when he was still alive, and when she wishes so frequently that he would just be normal-dead instead of bothering-her dead.

When the food arrives, Claire will eat little of it. She wants to bring Wallace home, to have the air knocked out of her when their bodies collide. She decides not to tell him about her brother’s ghost. Let Davis be startled for once.

Claire and Wallace make out in the back of the car until the Lyft driver sighs and turns up the music and she knocks Wallace’s glasses off in her eagerness and he needs help finding them when they get to her building. She has trouble finding her key. It has to be somewhere in her bag. Davis claims he can’t leave the apartment or move things around, but she blames him anytime something goes missing.

Behind her, a blue light and red police lights, radio static.

“The cops are here,” Wallace murmurs, and she glimpses his nervousness, the person he used to be shelved in the person he currently is. He rubs his wrists like he’s checking them for handcuffs.

Claire finds her key in time to let the cops in behind her. Her next-door neighbor Siobhan is in the lobby, weepy children burrowing into her ribcage.

“It’s going to be OK,” Siobhan says to her children. The door to her apartment stands open, and Claire can see the wreckage inside. Furniture toppled, lemon squares flung at the walls. A bearded-dragon lizard with its side-mounted legs picks its clumsy way past the broken glass that was once a terrarium. “It’s going to be OK, I’m right here and everything is going to be fine.”

The sight of this tenderness is more unsettling than the vandalism. Claire wishes she could get past without her neighbor seeing her, without Wallace seeing her flex her overdeveloped not-my-problem muscles.

“You came home and it was like this?” the officer asks Siobhan.

“Yes,” Siobhan says, stroking her son’s blond head. “Everything’s all smashed up.”

“Should we do something?” Wallace asks Claire. “Maybe we should see if the kids want to come in here to wait?”

Claire no longer wants Wallace here. She is certain this is her fault, the way she knows everything is her fault, ever since she introduced Davis to that drug-peddling asshole Chuckie, ever since she began ignoring Davis’ pinprick-pupils. He had called her the night of his overdose and she hadn’t returned his call. She still has the message on her phone. She won’t listen to it but won’t delete it either.

“I’m sure they want some space,” Claire says. Her stomach heaves. “The police are here. Let’s just—I need to use the bathroom.”  She half expects Davis to be lurking behind her apartment door, but when she unlocks it there is no sign of him. Wallace surrenders his coat.

“Nice place,” he says.

“I’m sorry about the mess. I’m not really into tidying.” Claire excuses herself for the bathroom. 

“Davis,” she whispers, and her brother appears in the tub.

“Hey, Claire-Bear. Is that the guy that cheese-poisoned you?”

“Davis. Do you happen to know what happened to the neighbors?”

“Yeah.” He floats. “Of course.”

“Would you care to fucking elaborate?”

Davis shrugs. “I know a poltergeist. I called in a favor. You’re welcome,” he says, pushing slowly off the wall. “They will definitely move out now. There was a message on the wall and everything: MOVE. Spooooky!”

“But I didn’t want you to—”

“Claire?” It’s Wallace. “Is everything—are you crying?”

Davis vanishes. “No, I’m fine. One second.” Claire runs the water, hiccuping, belching. She wants the man in her living room, but she also knows she has no room for him here. They should have gone to his place, but he didn’t offer, and she was embarrassed to ask.

~ ~ ~

Claire gets a text from her mother. Cleaning out the closets. Lmk if you want any of these scrapbooks or photo albums before I toss them. Her parents are putting everything they own into storage and moving to a houseboat docked impatiently in Rhode Island, selling the home she and Davis grew up in with a brisk lack of sentimentality.

“Don’t bring those scrapbooks here,” Davis says when she tells him this. “I mean, fuck the scrapbooks. Who wants a Mother’s Day card you made in kindergarten? Do you really need to, like, stare at a fucking certificate that shows you were a good speller in junior high?”

Claire had won that spelling bee, beating Sloane Beatty with the word diaphanous. When she got home from school, Davis had asked her if she knew how to spell show-off.  Her mother told her to ignore him, and whisked the certificate off to the scrapbook. Ugh, it smells like nerd in here, Davis said. Did someone just nerd?

“I don’t want the photo albums, either,” Claire says. She has run out of space on the bookshelves, stacking her books in precarious towers. “The point is, Mom and Dad are supposed to keep our baby pictures.”

“They’re moving. Photo albums are heavy. They don’t want to carry that shit.”

“It’s pictures of you, too.”

“Mostly pictures of you, Claire-Bear. All the pictures of me have you in them. They always wanted me to pull you around in that fucking wagon so they could get a picture.”

“I remember. You pushed the wagon right over the top of that hill.”

Davis folds his legs (his diaphanous legs) into a lotus position. “There weren’t any cars coming. You’re so melodramatic.”

The doorbell rings, and Claire wonders if it’s Siobhan. She has been hearing workmen going in and out of their place, a steam-cleaner running, arguments. Guilt propels the contents of her stomach in a circular gurgle.

A second sharp blat of the doorbell. Claire puts eyeball to peephole, and it’s the man who owns her co-op apartment. She opens the door. Most people here own; she rents, a temporary inhabitant among the elderly and entrenched.

“Hi. New lease time, right?” There’s a feeling of inevitability about the annual rent increases: rent will climb and space will shrink, Brooklyn an unsustainable honeycomb, Claire unwilling to move to Queens. “Do you have a pen?”

“I didn’t bring the lease. I need to talk to you about something else.” He jams his hands into his pockets, glancing at Siobhan’s door. Somewhere behind it, a drill bores holes.  “Someone made an offer on this apartment. And I wanted to ask, if you’re into it, I’ll give you three thousand dollars, cash, if you’ll let the realtors in and surrender the keys at the end of the month.”

She’d heard about renters in this building being pressured to leave, their gas mysteriously choked off, the water in their taps ice-cold, letters from lawyers slid under their doors in the dead of night.

“That’s illegal, though,” Claire says. “Like, you can’t pressure me to move. I live here.”

“What about four thousand? If you’ll vacate by the end of the month. I’m not pressuring you, but—” He sighs. “If you’re staying, the rent is going to go up…” Calculations on his fingers. “A lot. Some capital improvements…” He tries to look around her, assessing, and she blocks his view with her body.  For all she knows, Davis is bobbing behind her. “I’m allowed to adjust to market values and be compensated for the money I put into this unit.” He always calls the apartment his unit, like it’s something that fits into his pants.

“But I live here.”

“You can stay an extra month or two. But think about it. Take the money and go find a new place.”

~ ~ ~

“Would you want to move in here?” Wallace asks when she tells him she has to find a new place to live. She is at his condo. He cares about his furniture and doesn’t like when she eats on the couch, but they’ve been spending more time here. Most of the time here, actually, and when she goes back to her own apartment, Davis has a wilted look, like a neglected plant.

She can imagine living here: she will file her dirty dishes into the dishwasher, she will make the bed like an adult person. At night, she and Wallace will draw orgasms from one another’s bodies before moving on to their books, one bedside lamp apiece. He will cook her meals scrupulously free of dairy, and the thick walls will keep sound out. When she comes home and he is away on business, she will finally be alone.

Claire puts her head on Wallace’s chest. “I would love to live with you,” she says. “But—I mean—it’s only been a couple of months. Are you sure?” An air bubble trapped in her digestive system seeks an exit.

Wallace drums his fingers nervously on her clavicle.  “I said that wrong. I’m going to be away for work. Until, like, the end of summer. I was going to Airbnb this place. But I thought maybe you would want to rent it until I come back. To give you time to figure out your next move.”

“Oh.”

“I like you a lot,” Wallace says. “I guess I’m just a person who needs a lot of space. But I’d rather have you here than a stranger, while I’m away.”

“Maybe,” Claire says. She tries to picture Davis following her here like a stray. She can not.

~ ~ ~

“Can you leave this apartment? Like, could you go to other apartments?” Claire asks her brother’s ghost.

“I don’t know. I’ve never tried.”

“Where do you go when I don’t see you here?”

“I don’t go anywhere. I just, like, turn off. Why do you have those boxes?”

She doesn’t answer. When they were kids, they would compete to see who could hold their breath the longest in the pool, staring at each other underwater, eyes burning from the chlorine. She waits now.

“Aw, seriously? You’re moving? Why? That fucking guy? With those stupid asshole tattoos? The cheesemonger? You’re running off to be with a cheesemonger?” He is so close the hair on her arms stands up. “You are fucking lactose-intolerant, Claire.”

Maybe her brother is like a vampire, and he needs to be invited to come along. After the funeral was over, Claire thought of things she wanted to tell him. There are things she wants to say now, but it’s like being underwater, the air inside her turning into stale poison. They aren’t the kind of family that will declare they love one another. They aren’t the kind of family that feels the need to all gather in one place, or to say proper goodbyes. They drift.

Her apartment sprouts echoes as she packs it into boxes. The boxes will go into storage; Wallace already has towels and dishes. She has two drawers at his place and a closet she shares with a vacuum cleaner. He is on the phone with his office in Barcelona, and she tries to follow the conversation but she does not speak Spanish.

“Why?” Davis asks as she packs the last of the boxes. “Why are you doing this to me? Why can’t you just stay here?”

Her mother texts. Claire hasn’t told her that she is moving. There doesn’t seem to be a point.

Last call! Do you want these photo albums?

I don’t want them, Claire texts back. Go ahead and throw them out.

She looks at her own ghostly reflection in the screen.  There’s her brother’s final voicemail, the one from the night he died. It’s probably him asking if she knows how to keep a moron in suspense, before hanging up.

She thinks about deleting it, but she doesn’t, the same vague way she leaves her apartment door open a crack when the movers Wallace hired carry out the last of her belongings. She sets her key on the counter.

“Maybe you can still visit,” Claire says, but her voice reverberates in uninterrupted space. Davis does not appear. Her stomach cramps, and she wonders uneasily if aerophagics ever swallow their ghosts by accident. 

She unlocks her phone once more to call a car. There is plenty of room for a ghost’s voicemail on her phone. She can go on imagining any message she likes, so long as she doesn’t listen to it. It will sit there, quietly, undigested, and make her think of family.

# # #

Treena Thibodeau’s work has appeared in Barrelhouse, Pithead Chapel, Olit, Atticus Review, The Rumpus, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and has received support from the Vermont Studio Center, the Tin House Summer Conference, and the Gulkistan Center in Iceland. She directs the virtual reading series TGI (www.TGIcast.com) and holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. You can find her on Twitter @TreenaThibs