Before and Afterlives (28 page)

When she arrived at school the next day, everyone was waiting with sad eyes and invitations to parties or sleepovers. They b
elieved she’d been through hell and, though many of them had never been haunted, enough had and now they were talking, sharing secrets, surrounding Sylvie with their stories of grief and torment. She’d understand, they thought. She knew the horror.

But Sylvie hadn’t been horrified. She had loved seeing her mother walk around the same rooms she’d walked in when she’d been living. It was almost as if she wasn’t dead. True, she could no longer touch her mother, but she could see and hear her, and sometimes she thought she could smell her pe
rfume
,
Eternit
y
, but she realized that was just a lingering memory after she started to see other ghosts. Ghosts don’t have a scent, she now knows. Not unless you can remember what they smelled like when they were living.

So it had only been Sylvie that saw her mother at first. Her f
ather didn’t tell the reporter that. And then one day he had come home from working at the cabinet factory early, a stomach ache, and found his beautiful daughter in her bedroom of their slanted, narrow house, talking to his dead wife.

Sylvie had kept it secret until that day, which was also the day she realized others could see her mother if she didn’t take pr
ecautions: arrange for times when she and Anna could sit and chat like nothing had ever happened. When her father saw, though, he told everyone, and everyone had patted his back and consoled him while disbelieving. For months afterwards he complained to friends and relatives that his wife was haunting him and his daughter, and for months friends and relatives made sympathetic faces, nodded politely, placing a hand on his forearm or putting an arm around his shoulders as they walked through the park, saying things like, “My mother thought my father was haunting her for a while after he died. Don’t worry. It’s just a phase.”

He had been outraged by their belief that he was just anot
her ordinary mourner. He had seen his wife standing right in front of him, talking to his daughter. It was no intimation, no product of his imagination. He could see her, speak to her, when Sylvie was in the room. But his friends and family would only bat their lashes while they pondered polite responses, trying to consider how to help him through his grief
.
How must Sylvie be handling this
,
they wondered
,
if this is how Richard grieves?

And then, as he said in the article, he found his father’s old P
olaroid camera and took a picture of Anna. He’d prove what he saw. He hadn’t realized that, when he snapped her picture, she would disappear. He received his proof in the photo that she had been there, but when he looked at it, she was still as stone and no longer talking. Sylvie had cried and cried, curled her fists into balls and beat his chest until he grabbed her wrists and stopped her. “You killed her!” Sylvie screamed.

“No, Sylvie,” her father said, “the cancer did that.”

Later, her father gave her the picture to keep, after having passed it around to friends and family to prove his sanity.

It wasn’t until he gave the picture to Sylvie, after he was through with it, that Anna spoke again. “We can’t let him know about me this time,” said Anna. And Sylvie, who had been crying, nodded and said, “I’m sorry, Mom. I’ll be car
eful this time. I won’t let him know you’re still with us.”

In the newspaper interview, her father had done something that Sylvie’s mother said was noble. He had lied about how it was Sylvie who made his wife visible. He didn’t admit that he’d never been able to see her without Sylvie nearby. He said nothing about the camera. He had told the reporter he’d bought the usual ghost hunting equipment for the job: infra-red temperature gauges, negative ion detectors, Geiger cou
nters, electromagnetic field sensors. He owned a few of those things now, for props. He had protected Sylvie.

“Dislike what your father’s done,” Anna told Sylvie, “but don’t hate him. His intentions were good.”

Now Sylvie is popular. Previously she’d been just another poor white girl who hadn’t learned how to fight, avoiding everyone, head down, watching her feet pull her through the hallways of Western Reserve Middle School. When she gets off the bus now, there is always someone waiting to walk and talk with her in the hallways.

“Did your father catch any ghosts this weekend?” Ariel H
yland asks during lunch on Monday. Ariel is probably the darkest-skinned black girl in Warren Western Reserve Middle School. For years she and Sylvie have shared a bus seat, talked in a minimal way about each others families, but other than that, the girls barely know each other.

Sylvie nods. Tells Ariel about the Boardman mansion. The girls and boys that line up on the benches of her table lean in to listen closer. They are always waiting to hear about another ghost, a
nother capture. Sylvie’s father is famous. He’s been the lead story fo
r
Ghost Hunter Monthl
y
. He’s been invited to Pittsburgh to rid a hotel of a spirit that’s stalked the place for four decades. What he’s waiting for is a call from Hollywood, asking him to do a show. Sylvie tells the other students enough to satisfy their curiosity. But it’s never enough. Even after she finishes telling them about Mrs. Boardman, how she had offered Sylvie tea when she came upon her in the attic, how nice she had seemed about being found, even after it is clear Sylvie will tell no more and changes the subject to the Ghost Walk that’s coming up next weekend and would anyone like to go, they eye her greedily. They have no interest in community theater actors who just pretend to be dead. Only real ghosts matter.

Having made plans to attend the Ghost Walk on Saturday night with Ariel and a few of the other lunch table crowd, Sylvie starts to worry. For months she’s tried to pretend her new fame will disappear, that at some point she can go back to being nobody. She doesn’t know how to tell who really wants to be her friend and who wants to hang around her because of her father’s escapades. She likes knowing where she stands. There are girls who leave letters in her locker now, telling her about their own ghosts. There are boys who come up to her at her lunch table and offer her trinkets of misplaced affection: photographs of glowing lights in their back yards they’ve taken, DVDs o
f
Ghostbuster
s
o
r
Caspe
r
, once a silver charm bracelet with tiny, ghostly faces dangling from it. Before, when her mother was still alive but sick and losing her hair and refusing to take money from her family for a better doctor, for better treatment—and even before that, when Anna refused to take money for a college education from her father the art historian, because he’d offered it like she was just another charity organization after marrying Richard, and she would rather live and die working at Wal-Mart, as her mother once said—Sylvie had had few friends. Ariel Hyland hadn’t been what she considers a real friend. Ariel had talked to Sylvie, but had never befriended her in a way that made Sylvie fee
l
know
n
, the way a true friend knows you, the way Sylvie’s mother knows her. But still, out everyone at Western Reserve Middle School, Ariel is the closest thing she has. She’ll stick close to Ariel at the night of the Ghost Walk, she decides.

“That’s a good idea,” Anna says when Sylvie confides in her. Sylvie tries not to burden her mother with her own pro
blems, but sometimes she can’t help herself. She tries to be big, to be strong, but sometimes she just wants her mother. “It’s good that you have friends, Sylvie,” says Anna. “You can’t hide from the world forever.”

“It isn’t hiding,” says Sylvie.

“What is it then?” Anna asks from the front page of the photo album. In the background Sylvie’s dresser is pressed up against the wall of her bedroom in their old falling-down house, her old mattress thrown down on box springs that have been thrown down on the scratched up hardwood floor. It’s where Richard took her picture with the Polaroid months ago. Haunting Sylvie’s bedroom, as usual.

“It’s refusing,” Sylvie says. “I’m not hiding from the world.  I’m refusing it.”

“But why, honey?” her mother asks. It’s times like this that Sylvie finds herself annoyed with Anna, like most girls at school act annoyed with their mothers. Whenever Sylvie admits that she doesn’t love the world or life as much as her mother loved it, Anna begins to nag like any mother. “There’s so much out there for you, Sylvie,” says Anna. “Don’t refuse the world. Embrace it.”

“Mom,” Sylvie says, “whatever’s out there isn’t you. I love you, but can we drop it?”

The church where Sylvie and Ariel meet the others from their lunch table is on a corner of courthouse square, all lit up on this October evening, leaves tumbling end over end across lawns, scraping across the sidewalks like the severed hands of zombies. Sylvie has always been a fan of Halloween—her favorite movie i
s
The Nightmare Before Christma
s
, her favorite candy are those little sugary pumpkins, her favorite colors: purple, orange and black—and now it all seems a little ironic to her as she stands in the front room of the First Presbyterian Church sipping cocoa with Ariel and five of their cafeteria friends whose parents have dropped them off or sent them on their bikes with enough money to buy a ticket to the realm of the dead for the evening, making them promise to be back by ten o’clock.

An older woman comes over to ask if they’re all part of a group or willing to mix with other travelers along the River Styx this night. Everyone laughs or smiles; she’s obviously excited to call the Mahoning River the River Styx and to use grammatical constructions like “this night” to her heart’s co
ntent. No one answers her immediately, so Sylvie speaks up. “We’re going together if possible.”

“All righty,” says the old woman, who smells exactly like the church smells, Sylvie notices, a little musty and a little like Avon perfume. “Then go ahead and wait outside on the front steps. Your guide for the evening will meet you shor
tly.”

Ariel says she’s getting a refill of cocoa—“The damn ticket for this cost so much,” she says, “might as well get my mo
ney’s worth.”—and everyone agrees. Their Styrofoam cups steaming with cocoa again, they wander out to the steps, which are wide and steep and face the tree-lined road of mansions their guide will take them down. They wait, sipping, discussing the potential the Ghost Walk has for being incredibly cheesy. “Too bad your dad’s not here, Sylvie,” a boy named Aaron says. “I bet he could tell better stories.”

“Ghosts are ghosts,” says Sylvie, shrugging.

The clatter of hooves on pavement distracts them. A horse-drawn hearse lit up with lanterns on each of its corners is coming down the street. The driver is headless, they see, when he pulls the hearse to a stop. Ariel asks how he manages to drive the horse if his head is really stuck down in his shirt. “Probably see-through,” says Aaron.

“Or maybe there are little holes they cut in the shirt,” says a
nother boy, Patrick.

“Or maybe,” says Sylvie, “he’s dead but able to see without a head.” No one says anything at first. They all look at Sylvie as if she could be the anti-Christ. Sylvie laughs. Then they all laugh.  She’s surprised them by being funny. Now she seems a little more like them. She’s not just the ghost hunter’s bea
utiful daughter.

The headless horseman turns to them and waves his gloved hand to follow. He tells the two horses to walk along, and A
riel says, “I heard his voice down in the middle of his shirt. He’s got a head in there all right.”

They follow the headless horseman’s hearse, and at the street corner they find a woman wearing a black cloak. The headless horseman turns the horses down the street to come back around to the church and lead another group to this same spot. The woman in the cloak tells them that she’s their guide now. She’s tall and willowy with red hair curling out from her hood. She smiles, looking at each of them for a moment. “Everyone ready?” she asks. Everyone nods. “Well then, let me warn you before we begin our journey, there are some pretty scary ghosts out tonight, so stay together.” The boys laugh, the girls smile. The woman wearing the cloak rolls her eyes at them and grins. Then she turns and they begin follo
wing her down the tree and mansion-lined sidewalk.

Sylvie has already been in several of these mansions, has already found several ghosts in them for the families that own them. The families that still live in the historic district of Warren are some of her father’s best customers. They’re gone for the evening, so the Ghost Walk can be held without the living pas
sing by windows to go to the bathroom or sitting down at the table to eat dinner while townspeople gather outside. Sylvie has heard some of the stories already. The mad doctor who built his mansion with a pit in the basement and a trap door on the front porch. One pull of a switch and you fell into his dungeon where he’d perform experiments on you and you’d never be heard from again. The wife whose husband beat her, so she ran away to live in a nearby cemetery because her husband feared the dead and wouldn’t go there to get her. The lawyer who hung himself from his porch because he’d killed a man who came to collect a debt. The actors’ faces are powdered white. Moonlight glows on their cheeks and foreheads. But their cloaks and old fashioned dresses and suits don’t seem nearly old enough to look authentic. It’s better than real ghosts, thinks Sylvie. Better than watching them disappear when her father takes their pictures.