Aerogrammes (19 page)

I thought maybe I’d soak in the bathtub for a while, like
the loofah commercial, minus the loofah. I wanted something cleansing and cool and quiet. I wanted to come up with a way to tell my dad that I was leaving.

I poked around in the potpourri basket over the toilet and found a bottle of lavender bubble bath solution, probably my mom’s. Two capfuls turned the tub into a bed of sudsy white. The room filled with a dense, floral smell, steam mossing over the mirrors.

As the water ran, I remembered the bed we’d shared as boys, how Amit would be snoring while I confessed my attraction to Cleo from
The Catillac Cats
. I remembered riding on a plane to India when I was seven, and how Amit made me sit in the middle seat, next to a guy who kept ordering whiskey sours until he sauced all over me and my in-flight blanket. I remembered the nightmares after my mom died, how Amit would shake me gently by the shoulder, and sometimes, briefly, leave his hand there.

By the time I turned the faucet off, Amit was calling me, hoarsely.

I ran, almost tripped down the stairs. The television was off, but I found him staring at the blank, gray screen.

“I wet the bed,” he said.

I stood there, waiting for something to happen.

“I wet the bed, Neel.” His voice was low and stunned. “I thought I could hold it. I fell asleep, but I guess the beer …” He bent his head to his chest, his face crumpling. He began to cry without a sound.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Hold on.”

I ran back to the upstairs bathroom and found a beach towel in the closet. When I returned with the towel, Amit was defeated, yielding. He let me peel away the blanket, his bathrobe, and his T-shirt, his damp scrubs and boxers. The smell
stung. His knees were bonier than I remembered, a pale sheen to his calves. I threw a towel over him.

“Ready?” I slid my arms under him and gathered him up with a small groan. His skin was clammy, his legs impossibly heavy.

Pitching forward, I staggered up the stairs. In the hallway, we passed by Amit’s old room, which gave off the neat, staid air of a museum exhibit. He swiveled his head around, hungrily absorbing all that he had missed for the past two months.

Finally, we reached the bathroom. Surprisingly, Amit didn’t make fun of the bubble bath. He only said, “I know that smell.”

Just when my arms seemed on the verge of giving out, I squatted, easing him into the water, towel and all. He held on to the sides of the tub, and I bunched two hand towels behind him so he wouldn’t slip down. I caught sight of the surgical scar on his back, raised and pinkish, like a shiny, segmented worm.

“Is it too cold?” I asked, catching my breath.

“No.” Amit lowered his head and closed his eyes. “It’s nice.”

He sighed. As his features loosened, I saw him forgetting his tears, our trek up here. “Thanks. You can go. Go do whatever you were doing.”

I hovered over my brother. If I couldn’t leave him then, I knew I never would.

I caught sight of my cloudy reflection in the mirror—a shadowy, motionless shape—and something landed heavily within me. Leaning against the tile, I listened to the gentle slosh of the water. I closed my eyes, and in an instant, we were at the pool again, Amit standing on the high dive, peering down, stiff with terror. The moment we locked eyes, his fear became my own.

That year, thousands entered the lottery for only a handful of husbands. Of that handful, very few could remember what had happened after they had departed. One husband could recall only a smell: the stogie-scented leather of his father’s Lincoln. Another had been stranded in an endless bed of his ex-wife’s daffodils, and whenever he yanked a flower, two more plants unfurled in its place. Was it heaven through which they had passed, or some flavorless form of limbo? There was no one to ask, and gradually the question lost its novelty, eclipsed by the more pressing question of who among the living would land a ghost husband.

After Gina was notified over the phone that she had made it to Round Two, she filled out an online application whose seven personal essays and thirty short answers seemed a test of resolve more than anything else. She also taped the requisite Bio Video, doing the sorts of things that would set her apart from other grieving widows, like somersaulting on her backyard
trampoline and baking a Kahlúa Bundt cake dusted with confectioners’ sugar.

In a more serious segment, Gina placed the camera on the kitchen counter and laid out the basics of her life. Her husband had died in a bicycling accident last year. She was a stylist at Swift Clips, but without Jeremy’s salary, she was having trouble meeting her mortgage payments. The bank guy had pitied her for a limited time and cut down her payments, but now, with the imminent rockslide of back taxes and late fees, her house,
their
house, would soon slip through her fingers.

Gina had to rewind and re-record the segment several times because she couldn’t leak a single tear. Never when she needed it. At one point she got up, diced an onion, and when her eyes were properly bleary, she taped the winning take.

Three months later, the matchmaker came to Gina’s house for what was termed the Final Round. Gina had expected a sage old woman with bad teeth and a soothing smile. The matchmaker’s name was Barb Spindel. She wore her hair in a tight black bob and hugged her clipboard to her chest, as if to prevent anything from mussing her pin-striped blazer. She inspected a cracked photo frame, toed the rough shag carpet. She tilted her head at the coffee table, which was just a door resting on cinder blocks.

“Jeremy found it on the side of a street,” Gina said with too much enthusiasm, tugging on the hem of her skirt. “Just laying on the grass. It was a real bitch, lugging it home.”

Gina stopped. Barb was staring at her, eyebrows raised in anticipation of a point.

“I’m sorry,” Gina said. “I’m nervous. I’ve read about ghost husbands, but I’ve never actually met one in person.”

“That’s what you think,” Barb said. She lowered herself into a papasan chair, which creaked from her weight. With a blackberry fingernail, she tapped the bamboo frame.

“Can I ask a weird question?” Gina said.

“Please.”

“Am I correct in assuming that none of these guys was ever a murderer? Because I don’t think I’d connect very well with a murderer.” From her pocket, Gina removed a folded piece of paper from which she read out other unsavories: suicides, addicts, wackjobs, felons. “Basically, I’m looking for someone without a whole lot of baggage.”

“Gina, they all come with baggage. Lucky for you, this guy also comes with a very attractive dowry.”

Barb told her about Hank Tolliver, born in 1935, expired in 1990. In life, Hank had been an orthopedic surgeon who died from a pulmonary embolism at age fifty-five. He had no children and one ex-wife: Helen.

Gina recognized his name from the Tolliver House, a country mansion of alabaster brick and gray shingle, with a tower that shot straight into the sky. As a little girl, when Gina’s school bus passed the Tolliver House, she would press her nose against the window and imagine herself trapped in its fairy-tale tower, tall enough to skewer a cloud. “Hank has no heirs,” Barb said in cajoling tones. “And he was smart enough to hire people to manage the house for ten years, in case he was to return. So if you two hit it off, the Tolliver House goes to you. If not …” Barb shrugged. “It goes to his second cousin Gardner, at the end of that ten-year period.”

Gina stared at Hank’s photo for a long time, trying to imagine herself beside such a beautiful man, in such a beautiful house. His hair was lush and combed back, his forehead broad, a faint raking of wrinkles at the corner of each eye. (“He looks sad,” said Gina. “Oh, that’s just his face,” said Barb.) Gina sensed a kinship in his handsome, wounded gloom.

According to the terms of the contract, Hank would come home most evenings, like a normal husband, but the days
would be hers alone. He would never expect her to have dinner waiting; ghosts did not eat. He would never want her to plump up with his child and set her life aside; ghosts did not engage in intercourse. Theirs would be an open marriage. “So you can tend to your carnal needs whenever necessary,” Barb assured her. Gina gave a nervous laugh; Barb did not.

“Good. Great. Only …” Gina hesitated. “What if it doesn’t work out?”

Barb paused to administer a disapproving look. “Financially, divorce is an unwise decision. Both parties lose everything.” She explained how Gina would forfeit all the assets she had gained through the marriage, how Gina’s ex would have to depart the world all over again. “Thus far, I’ve had an excellent track record, so I prefer to work with people who share my outlook on the bonds of marriage.”

Gina nodded in solemn agreement.

Prior to their first date, Gina found on her doorstep a bowl of blushing peonies, with a note that said:
Looking forward! HT
. Somehow he had learned of her affection for peonies. As the days went by, her living room brimmed with a lush, leafy smell.

On a cloudless Saturday, she met Hank at the Tolliver House. When he opened the door, she stuttered her hello; he was so handsome. “Gina,” he said, stepping aside to let her in, smiling as if he’d known her forever.

Hank toured her through every room. She opened the mottled burl doors of an antique Austrian armoire and leaned into the sweet stale smell. She cooled her palms against the marbled Jacuzzi across from a dressing table, where fruit-scented bath balls sat in a basket like a clutch of colored eggs.

“You don’t have to show me everything,” she said. “If it bores you.”

“Bored?” He stroked the faded brass hinges on the bedroom
door, each hinge engraved with a delicate fleur-de-lis. “I don’t think I can get bored, not this time around. Everything feels new.”

Gina found it hard not to stare at him. In a matter of minutes, he had capsized all her movie-fed notions of ghosts—the tattered clothes, the corroding flesh, the tortured soul. He looked polished, debonair, in loose slacks belted high around the waist, a polo shirt, and wingtip shoes that made no sound.

Finally he took her up the winding staircase of the alabaster tower. One great round window opened onto a park, where golf carts went whizzing across the green dips and swells, around the weeping willows, shivering their tresses. Hank had put on a Patsy Cline record, and Patsy’s longing voice seemed to push faintly through the floor:
Oh, the wayward wind is a restless wind / A restless wind that yearns to wander …

“Barb said you were married once,” he said.

“I was. His name was Jeremy.” She rushed through the rest. “He was riding his bicycle. There was a car. He wasn’t wearing a helmet.”

Grimacing, Hank removed a handkerchief from his pocket. For an alarming moment, Gina thought he was going to weep. Instead, he sneezed.

“Sorry,” he said, after honking into his handkerchief. “About your husband.”

She appreciated his insensitivity, how he didn’t follow up with an oozy apology. Death was just another detail.

“Jeremy used handkerchiefs, too,” she said, so quietly that Hank seemed not to have heard. He was looking down at the sidewalk, where a woman was tugging at her Labrador’s leash. The dog was whimpering and wagging its tail. The woman flung a suspicious look up at Hank before scooping the dog into her arms and hurrying away.

Hank emptied a sigh at the glass. “People,” he muttered.

“Do you know Jeremy? That was my husband’s name. Jeremy.”

Gina was about to add that Jeremy’s eyes were blue at certain times and gray at others, but Hank said gently, “It doesn’t work that way.”

Gina nodded at her shoes, feeling stupid.

Gina’s parents refused to travel up from Florida for the wedding. “You want to marry a ghost, then marry a ghost,” her mother said over the phone. “Call me when you find your head.”

“Mom, did you even read the article I sent you?”

Her mother gave an unconvincing grunt.

It was the same article that had first piqued Gina’s interest in ghost marriage, and she’d even highlighted certain lines for her mother’s edification: “In nineteenth-century China, it was perfectly acceptable for a young woman to marry a dead man, an arrangement called a ‘ghost marriage,’ which enabled families to consolidate their wealth and power and allowed enterprising young women to pursue their ambitions without the interference of a living husband or children.” According to the article, the practice of ghost marriage was being revived in several parts of the United States. The statistics for the success of ghost marriages were quite high, and most women polled described themselves as “very satisfied” with their unions.

She sent the same article to her sister, Ami, who had manufactured an excuse so as not to attend the wedding. Apparently, she had volunteered long ago to chaperone her daughter’s third-grade field trip to Shakertown, and she just couldn’t leave the teachers hanging.

Gina supposed that Ami had a right to be annoyed. Ami’s wedding had been carefully designed by their mother, and not one decision—from the choice of groom to the choice of boutonniere—had been settled without the opinions of Gina and her mother, followed by a nod from her father.

“Yeah, I read the article,” said Ami, when Gina called. “But it’s not like all these ghost marriages work out. What about that crazy woman with the diaries?”

“Mary,” Gina said quietly. “Mary” was the sole counterexample, a woman who had fallen in love with her ghost husband “Mike.”
If only I could get closer to him
, she had confided in her diary. She became obsessed with the idea of touching him, and it seemed to her that if humans could touch humans, then surely ghosts could touch ghosts. She shot herself in a Kroger parking lot.

“See?” Ami said. “They don’t all have happy endings.”

“But there’s never a happy ending,” Gina said.

Ami ignored the remark. “I don’t know, Gina. I still think you could’ve held out a little longer. You never even tried Soulmates.com. Even I did Soulmates.com.”

And on and on they went in circles of accusation and defense, like strands of hair swirling a drain, like sisters.