The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle (46 page)

W
HAT IS A GHOST
? Danner says it’s not always the way people think. A ghost doesn’t have to be someone dead, rattling chains, stuck between two worlds. A ghost is a spirit and everyone has a spirit, living or dead. Animals, plants, people.

They’re bumping along in Emma’s dad’s Blazer. Her dad is always saying this stretch of road is the worst and wondering where the hell his tax dollars go.

“Potholes the size of Rhode Island,” he says.

He’s watching Emma in the rearview mirror, his eyes all worried and strange, which is the way he looked at her each time she coughed when she had pneumonia last year.

“Imagine,” Danner tells Emma, as she sits beside her on the crumb-covered, juice-stained backseat, “that the world is like those layers of clear pages in encyclopedias and biology books: put them all together, and you get a whole image, like a frog or a person. But making that up is layer after layer: sheets with heart and lungs, the nerves, the muscles, the skeleton, the skin. This is what the world is like. Do you understand?”

“No,” Emma admits. She doesn’t get it at all. If Mel were here, Mel might get it.

Danner looks out the window at the world going by: a barn with a broken back; a woman watering the pansies around her mailbox; the Heigh-Ho Cabins, which promise satellite TV and have a glowing red
VACANCY
sign. Danner’s wearing an old faded green college sweatshirt of Emma’s dad’s.
SEXTON
, it says, in big white letters.

Emma’s never been to Sexton College, even though it’s less than an hour away from their house. She knows it’s where her parents met. Where they studied art
A Long Time Ago.
Sometimes, Emma says, “I’m going to go to Sexton when I grow up,” and her parents talk in their irritated-but-trying-to-sound-calm voices, and tell her there are plenty of schools out there and we’ll just have to wait and see, and besides, Sexton might not even be around by then.

Emma’s dad turns down the radio, which is fine by Emma. She doesn’t get baseball at all. B-O-R-I-N-G. Emma shifts in her seat, puts her hand on the worn green sleeve of Danner’s shirt and asks the question again.

“How did you die?”

Danner turns back toward her, shakes her head. “Who says I did die? Who says I’m not some future version of you, or the daughter you’ll have one day, peeking in from the transparency all the way on the bottom?”

“You’re not me,” Emma says. Her head is starting to hurt. She wishes they’d hurry up and get home.

“Your parents think so. They think you invented me,” Danner tells her.

Is it Emma’s imagination, or has Danner’s face changed a little now? She looks a lot more like Emma. A grown-up-girl version of Emma wearing a Sexton College sweatshirt. Emma closes her eyes tight. She doesn’t like it when Danner plays these games.

“But I didn’t.”

“Are you sure?” Danner asks.

“Yes,” Emma answers. “You’re real.” To prove her point she reaches out and touches the sleeve of the sweatshirt again.

“So you can’t invent something real, imagine it to life?” Danner pinches the thin skin on the top of Emma’s hand.

“Ow!” Emma cries, pulling her hand away. “Whose side are you on anyway?” Emma asks, annoyed.

Danner laughs. It’s that quiet, cat-sneeze-sounding laugh.

“Yours,” she says, smiling a sly smile. Her face is her own again. “I’m always on yours.”

T
ESS HAS WORKED LATE
into the night to finish the grotto. Coleman lanterns hiss around her. Her fingers have holes burned in them from the cement. At some point or other she always takes off the thick, clumsy rubber gloves, needing to feel the sculpture take shape against her skin, forgetting, in the moment, the acid-burn pain that contact will bring.

The grotto is the latest addition to her ferrocement sculpture garden.
The Island of Doctor Moreau
is Henry’s name for it—he jokes, but the truth is, great artwork or not, she knows he finds the whole thing unsettling.

Emma, on the other hand, has always loved the garden. She’s spent hours, whole summer days, playing out here, imagining it to be its own country, a land she’s named Freesia. She even made up a little song, a sort of national anthem:

Everyone’s free in Freesia

The lions, the dodos and me

We wear what we like, we go swimming at night

Everyone’s free in Freesia!

The garden began, eight years ago, with the sculpture of Henry and Tess themselves, stuck in the middle of a long-abandoned, overgrown flower garden just between the house and Tess’s painting studio. She created a form with rebar and chicken wire, then covered it with layers of carefully sculpted cement.

Tess named that first piece
The Wedding Dance.
It’s a life-size sculpture of the two of them dancing, his arm around her waist, her right hand clasped tightly in his left. From the waist down, they have the bodies of lions, tufted tails held gracefully. Their human faces seem frightened, a little horrified even, like they’ve just glanced down for this first time and discovered what’s happened to them. They understand there’s no going back. They’re stuck this way forever.

“Why lions?” Henry asked. “Lions are supposed to represent strength, right? Power? So why do we look so scared?”

“Lions are killers, Henry.”

His face went pale. He never asked about the sculpture again.

After
The Wedding Dance
came the dodos, a parade of them, each wearing a sign around its neck telling its name. There’s Faith, Hope, and Charity. Honor, Wisdom, and Obedience. Flightless birds, all long extinct. Some people don’t get the joke. Others, like Henry, call it too obvious, but Tess finds it amusing, which is good enough for her.

The next project was a cement-and-stone goldfish pond with a fountain in the center in the form of a spitting frog.

Met-a-morph-o-sis, babycakes.

Along the east and west side of the small pond, Tess built curved benches shaped like a mermaid and merman, the concrete rough and inlaid with stones and shells. Landlocked, they eye each other across the water with serious faces, cross eyebrows, as goldfish jump and the frog spits on and on.

Beyond the pond, a pair of five-foot-tall owls loom, facing each other in menacing poses: wings open, claws reaching as if a
fight is about to begin.
Who?
they seem to ask out loud, the unanswered existential question that feathers will be torn over, beaks broken.
Who? Who? Who?

Here and there, a scattering of flowers Henry’s mother planted years ago: foxglove, bee balm, jack-in-the-pulpit squatting in the shade of the owls, clematis clambering across the merman bench. Tess has been thinning, moving, nursing the garden to life. She brings home new perennials from the farmers’ market, planting them here and there; she has no plan.

Then, last week, at the north edge of the garden, which is bordered by trees leading into the woods, Tess dug up a patch of hostas and started the grotto. She constructed an arch made from stone and cement, embedded with a mosaic of broken glass, beer bottle caps, and assorted things from the junk drawer: springs, dials, washers, cog wheels from an old bicycle—a tribute to the broken and neglected, to things taken apart and never reassembled. And now, in the center of the grotto, in the niche, behind the row of votives in glass jars, sits a photo of Suz encased in a clear plastic box, protected from the elements. Our Lady of Compassionate Dismantling.

The picture was taken just weeks before she died. Suz sits on a chair outside the barn, whittling a piece of wood that would become part of an antler. Henry had caught her by surprise with his camera. In the picture, Suz is looking up, startled almost, raggedy blond hair falling into her eyes, which are amber flecked with gold. Her face is a question mark, a
who goes there
?

It is Tess’s favorite picture of Suz because the camera captured this sense of vulnerability. Of being both startled and startling. It is the one thing Tess saved from that summer.

Tess has been in a frenzy to get the grotto done—spending every free moment on it for a week now, mixing cement by flashlight in the dented wheelbarrow. Soaking her aching wrists in a mixing bowl full of ice water before bed so she won’t be too sore to work out with the heavy bag in the morning.

“What’s the hurry?” Henry has asked, but how can she explain the fierce necessity she feels? The burning need to work faster, to have it done. And today, now that she’s heard about Spencer’s death, the postcard he was found with, she’s more driven than ever.

Tess does not believe in signs. Or curses. Above all, she does not believe in ghosts.

But she has no explanation for the vermilion-paint incident that precipitated the building of the grotto.

Last Tuesday, Tess had been in her studio, a small barn that sits at the eastern edge of the sculpture garden, between it and the house. Behind the barn lay the quarter mile or so of thick woods that act as a barrier between their yard and the road. Tess had been working on a painting (one she doubts she’ll ever finish now) of a bunch of sweet peas in a rusted watering can. She was squeezing a dab of vermilion paint from the nearly new tube to the piece of thick glass she uses as a palette when she had the now familiar sensation of being watched. But it was stronger this time, and soon accompanied by a noise. A crashing in the bushes outside.

Tess dropped the tube of paint and hurried outside to investigate. She jogged a ways into the woods in the direction she’d thought the sound had come from.

“Hello?” she yelled. There was definitely someone out there, running through the woods.

“This is posted land!” she called out. “We prosecute trespassers!”

She continued zigzagging through the trees, unable to hear any footsteps but her own.

“I own a gun!” she threatened, though the only weapon in the house was Emma’s water pistol.

She stopped every few steps, held her breath, listened. She heard a car going by on the road. A hermit thrush. Her own heartbeat in her ears, loud as club music, a rhythmic throbbing she
felt from her hair to her toenails, but nothing she would dance to. It was dusk. The shadows played tricks in the woods. She returned to the studio unnerved, and went back to her painting.

Only she couldn’t.

The tube of paint she’d been using, Winsor & Newton vermilion hue, was missing. When she’d heard the noise in the woods, she’d dropped the tube onto the top of the little rolling cart she stored her paints in. She’d left it right next to the thick glass palette.

Now, impossibly, it was gone. She pushed the cart away, got down on her hands and knees, searching the floor, but it wasn’t there.

All that afternoon and evening she told herself she must have had it in her hand when she ran into the woods, must have lost it there without somehow realizing. She even went back, trying to retrace her steps, searching the forest floor, but there was no tube of paint.

The next day, she returned to her studio after lunch to find the tube of vermilion paint set next to her easel, crumpled and almost empty.

“What the fuck?” she mumbled, reaching for the paint, her hand trembling a little.

Emma was outside, playing in the garden. Tess could hear her talking to someone—Danner? the cement owls?—and saying, “Ready the army! Freesia’s been invaded!”

So it had. Tess resisted the urge to open the door to her studio, scream for her daughter to come quickly, run inside, where it was safe.

But clearly the studio was not safe. Maybe there was nowhere to hide from whoever, whatever, was stalking them.

“It’s your imagination,” Tess tried to tell herself. Paranoia, the destroyer.

But what about the paint, Tess?

It was then, at that moment, as Tess held the nearly spent tube of vermilion hue in her hand while her daughter fought imagined enemies with a stick sword outside, the idea of the grotto came to her, a vision of perfect clarity, a solution.

And she thought…what? That maybe the feeling of being watched might go away? That no other tricks might be played on her—no noises in the woods, no missing tubes of paint? That by this one simple act, she could protect her daughter?

If she named the ghost, built an altar for her, faced her in this way that bordered on worship, then, maybe then, she’d be left alone?

It was crazy. Superstitious. Maybe even a little dangerous. Hadn’t they promised to never again speak of Suz or that summer? Made a pact that their very lives depended on them keeping? And yet here she was now, a week later, placing a photo of Suz front and center in the niche of the altar. Flaunting the one piece of evidence she’d kept.

How could she ever explain this to Henry? She was supposed to be the skeptical one, the levelheaded adult who always laughed at the idea of ghosts and curses and bogeymen.

“It’s just art,” she told him when he wandered over after getting back from the grocery store and let out an audible gasp at the sight of the photo of Suz. Surely, she thought, he’d remember what it was like, being guided by the muse, feeling like you had nothing much to do with it.

“The photo has to go,” he told her. “Evidence,” he said.

“It’s a snapshot, Henry. Putting up a photo doesn’t make me guilty of a damn thing but being sentimental.”

“So that’s what this is about?” Henry asked. “Being sentimental?”

Tess shook her head. “I shouldn’t have to explain my art. Not to you.”

She’d been furious. Furious with herself for not being able to explain the true reason for the grotto, furious with Henry for being such an asshole about it even though she knew he was just trying to protect her, to keep their family safe.

Ironic. That’s just what she’s trying to do too.

L
AST SPRING, JUST DAYS
after Henry moved into the barn, the great white pine fell in a windstorm, missing the farmhouse by mere feet.

Henry himself, as a young boy, built a tree house between this pine and two other smaller trees. He pretended it was a pirate ship and spent hours sailing the seas, telescope pressed to his eye, yelling,
Ahoy!
and
Thar she blows!
Making countless invisible pirates, traitors one and all, walk the plank.

One hundred and twelve. Henry’s counted the rings. The white pine had lived through 112 winters and springs. It had seen drought, floods, terrible blizzards, and ice storms that must have sent its branches cracking, snapping off, unable to bear the weight. The farmhouse was built in 1906 and this tree was older than that. This tree had seen the house built; watched the passing lives move through it. Henry imagined relations of this tree who stood beside it, felled to clear the land. Lumber was milled for the house and barn. Beams were hewn by hand. And the little tree watched as people toiled in the soil. Crops were planted. Horses raised. Gardens grown. Though countless trees had died, this one survived, and thrived.

Tess, Henry, and Emma stood over the fallen tree once the storm passed.

“We could have been crushed alive,” Emma said, face twisted with worry as she glanced around the yard, eyes moving from tree to tree, wondering which was likely to come crashing down on them next.

Tess put her arm around Emma, kissed the top of her head, and said, “No, sweetie. We were safe.”

“That’s right,” Henry said. “This house is old, but sturdy. It’s built like a fortress.”

He eyed the distance from the tree to the house, the roof above Emma’s bedroom, and said a silent prayer.

“Maybe it’s a sign,” Emma said.

Henry gnawed the inside of his cheek.

Tess nodded, a smile forming. “I think so, Emma. I do. I think it means it’s time for your father to do some artwork again.”

“Artwork?” Henry asked, toeing the massive trunk with his work boot.

“A sculpture. Look at the size of this thing! Think what you could do!” She was almost giddy, and for the briefest instant, he let himself get caught up in it, imagining the possibilities. He leaned down to touch the surface of the trunk, thinking the tree might speak to him, as it had in the old days.

He hadn’t picked up his tools since college, the summer after college—the summer of the Compassionate Dismantlers, and Tess, he knew, was disappointed in him. She’d encouraged him over the years to carve something, anything. A few Christmases ago, she’d bought him a duck-decoy kit that included a block of wood, templates, basic carving tools, a set of paints, and an instruction booklet. It was a male mallard that Tess said would look perfect on the mantel.

The gift was condescending as hell—it was like giving Picasso a fucking paint-by-numbers kit from the hobby shop. Another
example of how Tess didn’t understand him at all. If she was content to make tame paintings to sell to old people who came through Vermont on bus tours, wearing socks with sandals and carrying fanny packs—more power to her. But he wasn’t going to go that route.

The kit, never built, was put on a shelf in the workshop. A
someday
project that both of them knew would end up in one of Tess’s yearly yard sales with a tag that said
Brand New! Never been opened!

In spite of their seemingly doomed marriage, her opinion of him stung. He was supposed to be a sculptor, an
artist,
not a house-painting contractor. He had this hope then, standing over the enormous downed tree that had miraculously missed the house by mere feet, that if he could somehow go back in some small way to the Henry he used to be, Tess might ask him to move back in. And maybe if he returned to the house, he could go back to his role as protector, and somehow his very presence would ward off falling trees and whatever other natural disasters were looming.

Daddy’s magic. He makes all the bad things go away.

Maybe, as Emma had suggested, it really was a sign.

So, grudgingly, he had some of the guys who worked for him at the painting company come and help him haul a fifteen-foot section of the thick trunk into the unfinished side of the barn he used as a workshop, where each night, the massive tree waited.

Henry began by debarking the tree. He tucked the blade of his ax under a free edge of bark and drew it toward himself—the bark came off in slick strips, satisfying as peeling the dead skin off a sunburn. Then he found his long abandoned woodworking tools and got started. Or at least tried to.

What he did, those first few days, was spend his evenings after dinner walking in circles around the great tree, hoping for inspiration. He tried looking at it from various angles. Considered
how naked and pale it looked without its dark, rough bark. He lay down next to it, sat on top of it, ran his hands over its surface, once finding a deeply buried nail he himself had put into the tree decades earlier, when he’d built the tree house.

Emma came into the barn to see the great sculptor at work.

“It still looks like just a tree trunk, Dad,” she said, squinting at it, as if she was missing something.

“These things take time,” he told her. “You can’t rush into it. The wood guides the sculpture. The wood alone knows what it wants to become.”

“So, what—you’re waiting for the tree to start talking to you?” she asked.

He nodded. “Exactly.”

Emma shook her head. “Good luck with that,” she said, leaving the barn.

Henry would come stumbling out of his workshop at daybreak and make his way into the kitchen at the main house for coffee and breakfast with Tess and Emma; a semblance of normalcy that Henry clung to but at the same time found rather pathetic. He could pretend all he wanted, but in the end, he’d still have to go slinking off to the barn to shave, shower, and dress. And inevitably, each morning, Tess would gaze at him over her steaming mug of French roast and ask how the sculpture was going.

“Great,” he would tell her.

“So the tree started talking?” Emma asked one morning.

“Blabbing away,” he told her. “Can’t get a word in edgewise.”

“Can I come see?” she asked.

“Let’s wait awhile, huh? Until I get it roughed out. Then you and your mom can come take a look.”

“It must feel good to be working again,” Tess said, and he gave her a little mousy smile.

He was a fraud and he knew it. A poseur. He’d never been a real artist. Real artists didn’t quit.

He took to opening a bottle of wine each night in his barn. He’d tune the radio to a classic-rock station and drink merlot from a coffee mug while he pondered the tree. Great beached whale of a thing. He remembered the sculptures he’d done in college: rough forms carved from tree trunks—humans, wolves, bears, and fish—never finished enough so that you’d forget where they’d come from. He wanted the spirit of the tree to shine through.

The wood guides the sculpture.

The wood alone knows what it wants to become.

These were the things he believed in back in college, this naive notion of ethereal messages that it was up to him to pick up on, to spell out with his mallet and chisels.

“Sometimes I think we’re just conduits,” Tess told him once, years ago, when she sat in his studio space in the corner of the sculpture building at Sexton. “Like the art we make can’t possibly come from us. Do you know what I mean?”

She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, cradling a mug of coffee in both hands. A small-framed, compact girl who hardly took up any space at all, yet she’d say these things with such fierce intensity in her eyes that they came out like the words of a giant.

Henry nodded. Yes. He felt that way all the time. He was just a pair of hands—someone,
something
, else was doing the real work.

Tess wore denim overalls splattered with paint and a charcoal-colored chunky wool cardigan with heavy wooden buttons. Her brown hair was twisted back in an untidy bun, held in place with a pencil.

The painting building was next door to the sculpture building, connected by a tubelike suspended walkway. The Habitrail, they called it. Tess and Henry would often be the only two working there at night. The buildings were supposed to be locked and unoccupied after ten, but every now and then they’d share a joint or a beer with Duane, the security guard, and he’d let them stay as late as they wanted.

There was a kitchenette in the painting building, and Tess had a copper pot for making Turkish coffee. She’d fill a thermos with it, then carry the hot, thick, sweet coffee through the tube to the sculpture building, and call out, “Break time!” Sometimes, Henry was too caught up in what he was doing to stop, and Tess would sit, sipping her coffee, watching him work.

“When I watch you sculpt,” she told him, over a steaming cup, “I feel like there’s three of us in the room: you, me, and the piece. You make the wood come alive, Henry. That’s what I love about your art.”

Sometimes, she’d come right up and caress the wood, running her fingers over whatever sharply angled face he was carving: wolf, bear, old man. He had this strange sense, in those moments, that the sculpture was more real to her than he was.

T
ESS BEGAN REFERRING TO
the north side of the barn as his studio.
Going to your studio tonight, Henry?
or
How’s the light in your studio?

Even Emma started: “When can I come see you in your studio? I want to see if I can hear the tree.”

“Soon,” he promised. “Soon.”

Henry bought more bottles of wine. He sharpened his chisels, knives, and gouges. He walked around the tree. He waited for it to speak to him. On the radio, the Rolling Stones sang about getting no satisfaction, Aerosmith told him to dream on. He poured himself cup after cup of wine and prayed Tess and Emma wouldn’t show up at the door determined to see his progress.

And then, one night, it came to him. Not inspiration exactly, but more a moment of desperation. He had to do something. Anything. So he grabbed a small hatchet and began the long process of bringing one of the ends of the log to a point, like whittling the end of a giant pencil. He worked for four days at this and then he saw it. A canoe. He was going to carve a canoe! He
smiled to think how pleased Tess and Emma would be to see him taking sculpture to this whole new, practical level. He was making something they could all climb inside and take out on the water. If the land ever flooded, they’d be safe. They’d have Henry’s canoe, their own private DeForge family ark, to save them.

He was so happy that he did a little canoe-building dance around the log, hatchet in one hand, mug in the other, sloshing wine onto the floor, staining the front of his old work khakis.

“A canoe?” Tess’s brow was furrowed, her lips pursed. The sigh that came out from between them was a low, disappointed whistle. She had, he imagined, expected a person or an animal. A face she could caress. But this was the postcollege Henry, the grownup, fatherly, business-owner Henry. The practical Henry with tiny wrinkles around his eyes.

“But what are you going to do with it?” she asked.

“See if it floats, I guess. Maybe teach Emma to row?”

Emma was dancing around the canoe. “I think it’s so cool, Dad!” she said. “Will you make paddles too?”

“Of course, sweetie.”

“But you’re afraid of the water, Henry,” Tess said.

She had him there. So much for Practical Henry.

But he continued to go through the door in his tiny kitchen and into the workshop each night, to turn on the radio, pour himself some wine, and hack away at the giant log. He used a chain saw to cut a crisscross pattern in the belly of the log, then used an ax, an adze, and chisels to chop out the little pieces, hollowing the canoe. He had been at this for over a year now, and it was finally close to being finished. The inside was hollowed, the ends and bottom shaped. He was just doing the final smoothing, taking away the rough edges.

It was a large canoe, big enough for three or four people. Some nights, when he was done working on it, he’d crawl inside and stretch out, his body perfectly cradled by the scooped sides.
More than once, he fell asleep there, only to wake up hours later and make his way stiffly to the daybed on the other side of the barn.

He’s done this again tonight. He wakes and looks at his watch. It’s nearly 1
A.M
. He goes to the window, sees Tess still working on the new grotto, a mere shadow in lantern light.

It’s unlike Tess to be this obsessed with a project, to work so many hours. But then again, there’s never been a project quite like this one, has there?

For ten years, she’s mentioned Suz maybe half a dozen times. Now, suddenly, Tess seems consumed.

Henry’s afraid that if anyone sees the grotto, like the private investigator Spencer’s father is sending, for instance, it could be viewed as evidence. People don’t build shrines for the living, do they? Surely Tess realizes this. He tried talking to her about it earlier this evening when he returned from the grocery store.

“Do you think it’s a good idea? The grotto? I mean, having the photo of Suz stuck in there like that. It’s kind of a red flag, don’t you think?”

“You don’t understand,” she told him.

“What, Tess? What is it I don’t get? Christ, it’s practically a signed confession! And what do you think Emma makes of it?”

“Emma thinks it’s a tribute to a friend. A friend who made the moose she loves so much.”

Henry shook his head. “The photo of Suz needs to go, Tess. The private investigator might show up any day now—”

“I don’t tell you how to carve your ridiculous canoe. And what do you think Emma thinks of that? What will she think when she learns the canoe is never actually going to go anywhere near the water, but just sit gathering dust in the barn?”

He turned and walked away.

Now, as he watches her out the window, he remembers her twenty-year-old self sitting cross-legged in a pile of wood chips
on the sculpture-studio floor. The sweet, earthy scent of dark coffee and cardamom a swirling aura around her.