He hadn’t even finished his shave. When I came into the bathroom, I saw there was still hair stubbling the right side of his face. And after I called the doctor, I don’t know what got into me, but I sat there and finished for him. I sat on the ground and pulled his head into my lap and finished so he could have his last good shave. He liked a good shave.
I hadn’t expected to miss him. I’d expected only relief. And I was relieved, more than I could say or express—sometimes I’d find myself laughing, and I had to be very careful at the funeral and in front of neighbors to seem sad, when sometimes all I wanted to do was sing. At night I walked the house in the dark and touched all the things that belonged to me: the sofa he would never sit on again, the chairs he would never knock over, all the dishes he would never throw.
But sometimes I woke from the middle of a dream and found myself reaching for him or rolling over toward the place his warmth should have been. The house was so quiet, so still, I listened unconsciously for the sound of his footsteps, the door slamming, the roar of his voice or his laughter from the living room. For months I expected him to call out to me to bring him a beer, hurry up already, where’s dinner. For months I threw burned bacon into the trash thinking of Ed, thinking of how foul a mood he would be in, before remembering that he wasn’t coming down to breakfast. I had carried the weight of him for so long that without it I felt dizzy. I guess it’s the same way trees grow around the very vines that are killing them, so they’re strangled and sustained all at once. After a long time, even pain can be a comfort.
I didn’t really, deep down, believe he was dead. At least, I didn’t believe he was gone forever. I was constantly waiting for him to come back, and dreading it, too, and even the dread was like grief.
Ed liked to smoke his pipe in the bathroom. He’d grown up in rural Virginia and shared an outhouse with five brothers; I think the bathroom might have been his favorite room in the house. Sometimes he’d flush two, three times in a row. He liked the sound of it, he said. And even in deep winter he’d crack open a window and sit there with his pants around his ankles, puffing on his pipe, so over time the wallpaper went yellow with it.
Two months after he died, I woke up in the middle of the night and I knew: he’d come back. I could smell his pipe. The smoke was seeping into the bedroom, clinging to the weave of the sheets. And I knew I had only to push open the bathroom door and I’d see him, his pale thighs and knees like doorknobs, his nightshirt wrinkled and the wispy tufts of his hair sticking straight up, like the feathers of a baby bird. Go back to bed, Alice, he’d say. Can’t you leave a man in peace for even five minutes?
But there was nothing: nothing but the toilet, and the bath, and the old yellow wallpaper, and the window, closed. And it was then, in that moment, that I really understood that I was alone and I would be alone.
I sat that night on the toilet seat. I leaned my forehead against the wallpaper. The smell of his pipe was so strong, I could nearly taste it. I stayed there until morning.
TRENTON
Trenton was nearly out of time.
Seeing the ghost, and learning about the woman whose brains had gone splat in the den, had made Trenton temporarily reconsider his plan to die. For a few short days he’d felt that he had a purpose; there was a mystery for him, layered underneath the visible world, like a gift nestled inside folds and folds of tissue paper. He’d felt that everything was connected: coming back to Coral River, meeting Katie, and the ghost. Or ghosts. Whoever they were.
Katie had been . . . what? A friend? A kind-of friend? He didn’t know.
Now Katie was gone. Vanished. The day after the fire, while Caroline, Minna, and Amy were at the doctor, making sure Amy wouldn’t be asthmatic or psychologically scarred for life, or whatever Minna was worried about, Trenton had once again walked the mile and a half to Katie’s house, as he had for the party, and found all the doors locked, the house dark, the driveway empty—as if no one had ever lived there at all. He had rung the doorbell anyway and pounded on the door so loudly that a group of birds had startled up from the field and gone cawing together into the sky, like a shadow breaking apart and re-forming.
It occurred to him he hadn’t even gotten her number, though she had gotten his at her party. Write your number on my arm, she’d said, uncapping a blue marker with her teeth and pulling up her sleeve. He’d been so happy he nearly got his own number wrong.
But no matter how much he stared at his phone and willed it to ring—or locked it up in a drawer and told himself he didn’t care either way—his phone stayed quiet. Maybe, he thought, Katie had never even existed; she could have been a figment of his imagination.
Except that Amy remembered her. He’d had to swear Amy to secrecy, so she wouldn’t tell. Katie couldn’t get in trouble; she told him so herself.
Minna and his mom were treating him like he was a psych case, like he might go on a shooting rampage if they said the wrong thing. Minna thought there was something wrong with his brain—he’d heard her say so to their mom. She thought he’d started the fire, maybe even deliberately. He wasn’t allowed to be alone with Amy anymore. She hadn’t said so explicitly, but any time he went to check on Amy or play a game, Minna suddenly materialized, eyes sharp and worried, and whisked Amy away for a meal or a nap or a walk.
Maybe he had started the fire. Maybe it was all his fault. Maybe he was really, truly crazy.
His father’s memorial service was tomorrow. The ghosts didn’t leave him alone, even for a second, anymore.
“I wish they wouldn’t fight so much.” She was sitting in the bathtub, or maybe not sitting. It was hard to tell, since she didn’t have a clear silhouette. She was just a shadow on the tiles, shifting in the sun. “My mom and my stepdad were always fighting. Then he left. My real dad left, too, before I was born. I never even knew him.” Then: “I wish they’d just stop.”
She talked to him this way, in sudden bursts, half nonsensical, about people he didn’t know and places he had never seen, brief and jumbled outpourings of old memories and whispered complaints. He still had trouble figuring out how old she was. Sometimes she seemed as old as he was and sometimes just a kid. She had told him she was sixteen; based on what he knew about girls of that age, which admittedly wasn’t much, he guessed that she was younger.
She hadn’t told him her name, either. Sometimes she claimed to be the missing girl, Vivian. But when he had called her by that name, she had suddenly burst into tears—breaking apart in waves, like a pattern of broken sunlight across a wall—and sobbed that no one knew who she really was, no one would ever know her again, she was dead and she would be forgotten. It made Trenton want to die and strangle her and hold her all at once.