Instead of Three Wishes (4 page)

After that, John saw her almost every day. Always in the same place, the alcove formed by crossing roof supports. Always she was reading. John couldn't make out what book. He no longer ate his lunch there, but he found excuses to send the crane by in the early afternoon. Rolling silently on the rails that crisscrossed the roof, he could watch for her from a safe distance. Once he saw her rising up through the catwalk as if she were climbing invisible stairs, holding a book open in front of her while she climbed. As much as he saw her, she never seemed to see him.

John thought, as he drifted along the roof, of the
foreman's advice. Be polite. Maybe they'll be polite back. John had read more books since he started work at G-P than he had in his entire life. Reading the books was a luxury he would never grow tired of, but it would be nice to have someone to talk to, someone else who liked to read. When he had screwed up his courage, he walked over during a lunch break.

“Uh, hello.”

The girl looked up in surprise. She put the book she was reading down beside her and it disappeared. John stood silent, tongue-tied by terror or shyness.

The girl continued to look up at him. “Did you want something?”

John swallowed and stammered, “Well, no. It's just that I've seen you here reading and I thought I'd, well, that it would, I mean, I just wanted to say hello. To be polite.”

“That is very, very polite of you. Shall we introduce ourselves?”

“My name is John.”

“My name is Edwina. It's nice to meet you, John.” She smiled at him, and John felt the terror, or the shyness, whichever it was, break into pieces and disappear as if it had fallen through the catwalk at his feet. When she asked if there was something in particular he might like to talk about, now that they were introduced, John had an answer ready.

“What are you reading?”

 

It was a book by a man named John Muir. John had never heard of him, but Edwina said they were very interesting essays on nature. John was just promising to look them up in the library when the buzzer sounded, calling him back to work. Edwina told him to stop in and see her again the next day.

John looked for her during his next shift but didn't see her. It was the day after that that she was sitting in her usual place looking like a statue as well as a ghost. She moved only to flip the pages in her book.

She looked up and smiled when John said hello.

“I'm sorry I wasn't here yesterday after all. I was busy all day chasing dust balls with a mop. I've been here for hours today, though. Have you been busy or have you been ignoring me to teach me a lesson?”

“Neither,” said John, “I've only seen you here for the last few minutes. I radioed down that I was going on break and came right over. You weren't here before.”

“Strictly speaking,” she said, “I'm not here now. At least I am in my here, but not your here.”

“Exactly where are you,” John collected up enough nerve to ask, “if you are not here?”

“Where is here, you mean?” she asked. “Here in deadland, in ghostdom, in limbo?”

“Is it, uh, heaven?” John asked, thinking back to his rudimentary instruction in religion.

“If it is,” said the girl with a laugh, “it's every
thing it should be, but severely underpopulated. There's just us: Mother and Uncle Tim, and Todd and Eunice, and Richie and Alex and Angela and me. I never thought of heaven as being quite this exclusive. Is it your idea of heaven?”

“I don't know enough about it to say,” said John, referring to his scant information on heaven, but the girl, Edwina, took him to mean her home.

“Sit down,” she said, “and I'll tell you about it. You're the first nice ghost to come along in years and years.”

 

Edwina described the house she lived in with her mother and uncle, her sister and sister's husband, her brother, Richie, and her cousins, Alex and Angela. The house she lived in was exactly the same as it had been just before the demolition team arrived. The days passed and the seasons changed, but year after year the house was exactly the same.

“And we have the mythical never-empty wallet of food as well,” Edwina explained. “As often as we take a cup of flour from its canister, a fresh cup takes its place. We have as much of everything now as we had when we started being dead.”

John choked on his lunch. Edwina continued, “But we never have anything new, of course. Mother shopped very carefully, right up to the last, but even back then there were things you couldn't get easily. Chocolate, for instance. We've gone years and years without a taste of chocolate. I think the boys might
have forgotten what it tastes like, but I still dream about it.”

“Nothing ever changes? Not at all?”

“Oh, some things. Little things,” said Edwina. “Mother has a stack of flower bulbs in the shed, and every year she plants them in a different pattern. We move the furniture around from time to time, but it always gets moved back eventually. Once there was a man who read poetry aloud, and I wrote it down. But that's the only new thing to come into our world since we died.

“And we never get any older. Richie and Alex will always be ten. My sister and Todd will always be newlyweds. Angela will always be two. And I will always be the only one with no one my own age to talk to.”

“You have me to talk to,” pointed out John.

Edwina smiled. “You aren't afraid to talk to a ghost?”

“Not at all.” John realized the truth as he said it.

“Then I'll meet you here every day and you can tell me about all the books you have in your world that I don't have in mine. Do you read poetry?”

 

The room that Edwina saw when she sat and read was an attic. It was at the top of the house, which had stood on the top of a hill, and this was the only part of the house that reached as high as the roof of the factory. If he concentrated very hard, John found he could see the old chaise lounge that Edwina sat on,
and in the mist he could see the room around her, the bare floorboards, and the curtains covering the window behind her. He saw them most clearly when Edwina read to him.

Edwina made a point of reading for a few minutes in the early afternoon when John took his breaks. He told her that John Muir's books weren't in the library. They'd been banned for many years because of their subversive content. Edwina didn't think they were subversive at all, and she read one of them aloud during John's breaks, to prove it. It took a week, partly because John interrupted over and over again to ask questions about the trees and animals that Muir described.

“Holy Cow,” said Edwina when he asked her to describe a squirrel, “how can you not know what a squirrel looks like? Haven't you seen any animals at all? Next you'll tell me that there aren't any pigeons, and I won't believe you because I don't believe anything but nuclear war would get rid of pigeons.”

“Pigeons?”

“They're a kind of bird.”

“We have birds. Big black and gray things that leave white streaks on the statues.”

“Those are pigeons,” said Edwina, a little relieved to find something familiar left in the world.

“But we don't call them pigeons.”

“What do you call them, then?”

“Just birds, there's only one kind.”

So Edwina did her best to describe all the different
birds that she saw around her every day. There were sparrows and finches and doves. There were two different kinds of woodpeckers and a couple of titmice. There might be an owl living out in the woods. They thought they heard one from time to time, but they'd never seen it. Once she'd mentioned the woods, she had to describe those, too. They surrounded the house on all sides. Some parts were overgrown with brambles, and other parts, where the oldest trees grew, had a thick carpet of leaves on the ground and nothing else but the trunks of oaks and maples and the occasional evergreen. Edwina brought samples of different leaves to show John. Once she pulled the curtain away from the window and read him a poem about a man in a forest, and John strained his eyes to see the green trees outside, but he couldn't. All he saw was sunlight.

 

In return, John found books in the library that she had heard of but never read. She asked for poetry by a woman named Emily Dickinson, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. He read the poetry aloud and she copied it down. They both enjoyed the Dickinson, but didn't think much of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

“She has such a lovely name, though, doesn't she?” said Edwina.

 

“Have there been other people that you could see?” John asked one day.

“Other ghosts, you mean?” Edwina persisted in
thinking of the people of John's world as ghosts. “After all, I feel solid to me,” she had pointed out. “You're the ones who are all misty.”

Yes, there were other ghosts. Edwina saw them from time to time as they floated through her attic room. John was not the only one who favored the alcove formed by crossing I beams as a lunch spot. Occasionally ghosts did appear in other places.

“But remember, the rest of the house is below the roof of your factory but above the floor. Mother sees ghosts in the cellar whenever she goes down. And out in the meadow they appear three times a day, right on schedule. Hundreds of them sitting on benches and eating invisible food.”

“Did any of them talk to you?”

“There was a man who talked to me quite a lot. He read me poetry, but he wouldn't read me any of Edna St. Vincent Millay. He said it wasn't worth the effort of carrying it up the ladder. I think he was right.”

John was surprised by faint stirrings of jealousy. “What did he read instead?”

“I still have it all,” said Edwina. “Wait while I get it.” She rummaged through shadowy furniture, her arms disappearing to the elbow sometimes, and returned with a rumpled pile of papers. She read aloud poets and titles and snatches of poetry. Alexander Pope, John Keats, “The Eve of St. Agnes,” Anne Bradstreet…

John asked what had happened to the provider
of the poetry. Edwina told him that the man had been promoted after a few years to work on a different crane.

“He came back to visit several times, but then he said he was getting too busy, and I didn't see him again. I missed him when he was gone, or maybe I just missed his poetry. It was nice to have something new in the world, but I think it bothered him that he was growing older and I wasn't. He must have decided to spend his time with people in his own world.”

John went down to the library the next day. He ignored the poetry section but selected carefully from a shelf of old detective novels.

They were highly successful. He read aloud from them over the next several weeks. Edwina's only complaint was that these were books that should be read while gorging on little chocolates filled with caramel, or maybe slightly sticky candy bars.

“Too bad,” she said, “we haven't any chocolate at all. Not even to cook with.”

 

“It's too bad mysteries are so much harder to copy down than poetry. I will miss them when you're gone.”

“When I'm gone?” John hadn't thought about leaving, about being promoted or even transferred to another factory. He felt suddenly wretched and wished for the first time that he lived in a world like
Edwina's where nothing ever changed.

“Edwina, how did you get the way you are? Did your mother really poison you?”

“Well. It was more than poison. I think she knew even during the trial that things wouldn't work out. She started collecting all kinds of food, and she did peculiar things. She poured flour and salt along the walls of the estate, and she painted every tree with paste. There was a terrific amount of work that had to be done. And she worried about Angela. She had a cold, and Mother said she couldn't guess which would be worse, to be a two-year-old with a cold forever or to live with a two-year-old with a cold forever. So she did everything she could to delay until Angela was better.”

“Did you know?”

“You mean, during the last bit? No. We just ate dinner together and went to bed. Everyone else slept through it but me. I woke up with a terrible headache and wobbled around until I fell out the window.”

“You what?”

“Fell out the window. That one over there.” She gestured to the curtain behind her. “I broke my back. My spine is all wobbly now, but it doesn't hurt.”

“Will you really never change?”

“Never, never, never. You will get older and go away and forget all about me, and I will still be here. Lonely, with no one my own age to talk to and no
chocolates.” She pulled a sad face, and John laughed, even as he realized that he couldn't stand to grow older and be promoted and leave the high crane and Edwina forever.

“I will bring you chocolates,” he said.

 

Edwina talked to her mother. Her mother climbed the stairs to Edwina's attic and talked to John for a long time. Just the two of them. Then John began collecting library books. He overcharged his card and anyone else's card he could borrow. He hid the books in secret places along the catwalk. He used his entire salary buying chocolates and obscure spices. And one day, during his lunch break, he drank his coffee laced with cyanide and lay down on the catwalk and listened to Edwina reading aloud a poem written in Greece more than two thousand years before John was born. It was really just the remaining pieces of a longer work, but Edwina had arranged the fragments to her liking and read them as if they were all part of a single poem.