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Authors: Joan Lowery Nixon

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BOOK: The Ghosts of Now
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Sleep is an eraser. It’s like one of those magic tablets I had when I was a kid, with the black stuff under a heavy sheet of plastic. I could write on the plastic and the words would show, then zip! Pull it up and everything I’d written had disappeared. It was only later, when I’d look closely at the black part, that I could see the imprint of the words still imbedded there.

In the morning I come out of a dream where I’m with Meredith. The black stuff with the deeply cut words shows up, and I remember.

I swing my feet over the edge of the bed. I want to go to the hospital right away to see Jeremy. I have a plan.

Mom and Dad are still asleep, so I dress as quietly as I can and—remembering my promise to Dad—leave a note against the salt shaker on the kitchen table as I swallow a slice of bread and a small glass of milk.

In just a few minutes I’m at the hospital, walking into Jeremy’s room. Another woman sits by his bed.
Same gray hair, same encouraging smile, even the same knitting—only pink, instead of yellow.

I introduce myself, and she says, “He rested well all night.” She glances around the room. “I’ll get another chair.”

“I’ll be right here,” I say, “if you want to go to the ladies’ room or get something to eat or go outside for a smoke.”

That was the magic button. “Well,” she says, “as long as someone’s with him. That’s what your father wants.”

She leaves, and I hitch the chair a little closer to the bed. Again I take Jeremy’s hand and stroke the back of it. For a few moments we sit there silently.

Finally I say, “I couldn’t wait to get here to talk to you, Jeremy, and now I don’t know what to talk about!”

Naturally he doesn’t answer. I knew he wouldn’t, even though I waited as if he would. “I mean I’ve read about some people who’ve talked to people in their families who were unconscious, and sometimes it’s helped to bring them back. I’m going to do that with you, but I honestly don’t know what you’re interested in. You’re my brother, and I don’t know anything about you. Should I talk to you about your friends? I guess I don’t know any of your friends, except Boyd. You play tennis, and I don’t know anything about the school tennis team. And none of us knows where you were Friday night.”

His hand moves slightly in mine, and I lean forward, holding my breath. “Jeremy? Can you hear me?”

But Jeremy sleeps.

“Listen, Jeremy,” I try again. “I wouldn’t like it if anyone went through the stuff in my room—especially my brother. So I hope you’re not going to get mad at me or anything, but I’m going to check out the things in your desk. Please don’t mind too much, Jeremy.”

I stroke his hand again. “All this time I thought of you as only somebody living in the same house, and I never thought about what you needed or thought of or wanted. Does that make any sense?”

“It does to me.”

The voice comes from right behind me, and I jump straight out of the chair. “Mom! You scared me!”

There are tears in her eyes, and she says, “Angie, I didn’t mean to listen in. But you were so wrapped up in what you were saying to Jeremy that I couldn’t interrupt you.”

“It’s okay.” I pull the chair toward her. “Come on. Sit down.”

“No, that’s your chair.”

“Mom, sit down. I’ll get another chair.”

I walk into the empty room across the hall, wishing that this place didn’t smell so strongly of pine-scented cleanser. Pines should be woods and glens and damp places with rotted bark and curling ferns—not hospital floors. It’s a terrible way to cheat. I pick up a chair and carry it back, placing it on the other side of Jeremy’s bed.

Neither of us says anything for a while. The room is quiet enough for me to hear the tiny rhythmic drips of the I.V. feeding Jeremy’s arm. Mom’s perfume
floats over to me, adding a comforting softness to the room.

I want Mom to understand what I’m doing, so I tell her. “I believe that Jeremy can hear us. I think if we talk to him we can reach through and pull him back.”

“Do you?” She’s hopeful as she glances back at Jeremy. “What should we say to him, Angie? Should we tell him how much we love him?”

She looks as lost as I feel, so I reach across the bed and put a hand on her shoulder. “Why don’t you tell him about the tennis matches on national TV?”

She blinks at me. “I don’t even know who’s playing.”

“Well,” I say, “I know a couple of them, but I have no idea about the scores.”

Mom starts getting fidgety. She squirms in her chair and brushes invisible crumbs off the blanket and throws little side glances at Jeremy as though she’s not sure she’s ever seen him before. When she looks at her watch the second time I say, “It’s too early for a drink.”

I guess it came out harder than I’d meant it to, because she looks hurt and says, “I wasn’t thinking of having a drink, Angie. You act as though I’m an alcoholic.”

I mumble, “I’m sorry. It’s just that you do seem to drink a lot.”

There’s a long pause, and she says, “Sometimes it helps.”

“You said that before, Mom. I don’t know what it helps.”

She looks at me with eyes so much the dark blue color of my own; yet I feel she’s talking not to me but
to herself. “Each place we go, I start over,” she says. “I join clubs and smile at strangers. I belong to study groups and study things I haven’t the vaguest interest in. Or is it ‘in which I haven’t the vaguest’? Oh, well. I go to dinner parties and luncheons given by people who’ve asked me just because my husband’s job is more important than their husbands’ jobs.”

“Listen, Mom, I didn’t mean to—”

“You complain about missing friends each time we’ve been transferred. Don’t you think it’s the same with me? I learned a long time ago to put up barriers, to never allow myself to cry over a friend I might never see again.”

I feel so weird hearing all this from my mother. I don’t know what to answer. I don’t know if she even expects an answer. Awkwardly I pat the hand she has resting on the bed and stumble to my feet. “I’d better get back to the house. I never did get my French assignment finished.”

She just gives me a vacant smile as though she’s traveled somewhere I’m not allowed and says, “I’ll stay with Jeremy a while, Angie. Your father will probably be here soon too.”

“Want me to start something for dinner?”

“We can go somewhere later. I don’t know. There must be a restaurant nearby.”

We stare at each other, and she adds, “Well, there’s always the club.”

I stoop to kiss the top of her head and pause, looking at Jeremy. I have got to reach through to him. And I’ve got to find out what happened. It’s a strange feeling, as
though if I don’t find out, Jeremy won’t ever come back. “Good-bye, Jeremy,” I murmur. “I’ll see you later.”

I think I see his arm move, just slightly. Mom doesn’t react, so maybe it’s just my imagination.

My feelings about Jeremy are so strong that when I come into the empty house I make straight for his room, stopping at the doorway because I feel like an intruder. Papers and books are mounded on his desk, and the dark red-plaid spread on his bed is pulled askew over lumps and bumps in the blanket. I step over his tennis shoes as I walk to his desk, and pick up a few papers that have slipped to the floor.

I pull out the chair that’s tucked into the kneehole in Jeremy’s desk and sit in it. I divide the books and papers into two sections: books neatly to the left, papers to the right. I glance through the papers. School assignments. A bookmark hangs from one of the books. Jeremy’s reading
Captain Horatio Hornblower
? I wonder if it’s an assignment or if it’s a story he’s really into.

I slide open the center top drawer. It’s a jumple of broken pencils, gum wrappers, even an old yo-yo. But there’s a slender book on top of the mess. It’s the size of a ledger, with a deep brown cover. I reach for it as though I’ve been told to do so, and as I open the cover I hold my breath.

Poetry by J. D. Dupree.

Jeremy writes poetry?

I turn the page gingerly, terrified at stumbling into Jeremy’s secrets.

I soon forget that I’m an intruder. The first few poems wouldn’t even be a threat to Rod McKuen; but the literary quality doesn’t matter. It’s Jeremy’s thoughts that are on these pages, and I’m discovering a brother I hadn’t known existed. He writes of loneliness, of the terrors of moving to new places. He writes of feelings I can share, and I’m ashamed that I thought those feelings were mine alone. But there’s a hopelessness in some of the poems that frightens me. I read one of them aloud, and the words hang shivering long after I’ve spoken them:

I grab at stars
,
sweeping my hand across the heavens
,
hanging onto sharp chunks of hope
that cut my palm
.
Carefully, eagerly I pry open
my fingers
and find I have captured
only slivers of darkness
.

Some of the pages in the book have been torn out. I read through a couple more poems before I come to the last one. Beyond this page lie clean, blank pages that are ready for his thoughts to come.

As I read this poem I begin to tremble. The handwriting is a hasty scrawl of black ink, and the first line has been scratched out and written over. It’s a strange poem, different from the others, but it’s here for a reason, and I feel it tugging at me:

The house is haunted
by the Ghosts of Now
whose shadows no one wants to see
,
whose screams no one wants to hear
,
until tomorrow
.

What are you saying, Jeremy? I don’t understand
.

I’m staring at the page, but it’s as though I’ve closed my eyes and have dreamed up a picture. In front of me is the haunted house that Del pointed out. It’s rotting under those twisting, unkempt vines, its windows blank eyes that shut off the ghostly world inside its walls. It’s a real house, not an allegory. Jeremy told me to stay away from that house. Why?

I close the book, replacing it in the drawer, shutting it carefully away. Now I know what my next step is. I’ve got to find those “ghosts of now” and discover what they know about my brother.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Andrews place squats alone at the end of an empty, quiet street. Maybe it’s because of the overlarge lot that surrounds it; maybe it’s because the house looks like an unkempt, yellowed old man who badly needs a barber, but I feel that the other houses on the block have cringed away from this place, tucking in their tidy porches and neat walkways and dropping filmy curtains over blank eyes.

I park in front of the house and pick my way up the cracked cement walk. The air glitters with sunlit dust that stirs from gray-coated leaves and grass and sifts back into place as I pass. A large oak near the front porch has died, its withered branches wound mummylike by a strangling vine that creeps from the tree to the dry, curling shingles on the roof of the house. One of the wooden pillars on the front porch has cracked and bent, allowing the roof to sag over the entrance way, but the dark front door stands strong and forbidding.

Someone once lived in this house and loved it, and
for a few moments I feel sad that it should be so neglected, left alone to die.

But the house is not dead.

There are small rustlings, creakings, and sounds barely loud enough to be heard as the house moves and breathes with the midday heat. I feel that it’s watching me, waiting to see what I’ll do. Or could someone be watching? Someone be listening, just as I listen?

Quickly I shake my head, trying to toss away scraps of fear, and climb the shaky steps to the front porch.

The windows are draped with some fabric that closes off the view inside. There are cracks here and there where the drapes don’t quite meet or the fabric has split, but the places are narrow and too high up for me to see through. I move from one end of the porch to the other, trying to peer inside. I shove at the front door, which grunts and holds fast. My scruffy footprints have disturbed the dust of the porch, and I feel uncomfortable, almost as though I should apologize.

Maybe around the back I’ll have better luck. The yard is full of uneven holes and mounds, with scraggly branches of untended bushes laid out like traps to catch ankles. Now and then I look up at the house, and each time I have the clammy feeling that I’m being watched. Not by one of the neighbors. I glance over my shoulder and up and down the street to make sure. No one is outside. There are no movements of curtains at neighbors’ windows. The watcher is in this house. I feel it.

It’s a big house, with rooms jutting out at the side like afterthoughts; it takes more than a few minutes to walk around to the back. The yard here is only a dried tangle, a graveyard of what was once someone’s garden. In back there is a garage that opens onto an alley. Between the side door of the garage and the back entrance of the house is a cracked, buckling cement walk. A narrow stoop of three cement steps leads up to a torn screen door that is hanging crookedly by its bottom hinge. I climb the steps, edge past the door, and find myself in a small service porch where the faded green linoleum on the floor curls away from the walls. There is something wrong about that linoleum. It should have a heavy layer of dust, as the front porch had, and it doesn’t. People have walked across this floor—and more than once.

I can hear my own heart pounding. My breathing is loud, and I wonder if the house is listening to me. Why am I so afraid?

Before I can reason with myself I grab for the doorknob, but it refuses to turn. Even the knob of a locked door would turn, wouldn’t it? Or is someone on the other side of the door, clutching the knob to keep me from turning it?

Suddenly I let go, and I see the knob jiggle before it settles into place. Yes. Someone is there. Who is it? One of those ghosts whose screams no one wants to hear?

“Angie?”

The voice hits me in the back like a sudden blow. I
shriek and whirl toward the voice, grabbing at the air, trying to find something to hang onto.

“Hey!” Del says. He’s standing below the cement steps, and he holds up both hands, palms toward me.

“I thought you heard me coming. I didn’t mean to scare you, Angie. I wouldn’t want to do that.”

BOOK: The Ghosts of Now
12.01Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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