Ghost Writers: Us Haunting Them, Contemporary Michigan Literature (Made in Michigan Writer Series) [1 ed.] 0814334741, 9780814334744

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Ghost writers

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Made in Michigan Writers Series General Editors Michael Delp, Interlochen Center for the Arts M. L. Liebler, Wayne State University Advisory Editors Melba Joyce Boyd Wayne State University Stuart Dybek Western Michigan University Kathleen Glynn Jerry Herron Wayne State University Laura Kasischke University of Michigan Frank Rashid Marygrove College Doug Stanton Author of In Harm’s Way A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu

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Ghost

Writers

co n t e m p o r a r y m i c h i g a n l i t e r a t u r e e d i t e d b y K e i t h Ta y l o r & L aura K as i schke w a y n e s tat e u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s i d e t r o i t

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© 2011 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ghost writers : us haunting them : contemporary Michigan literature / edited by Keith Taylor and Laura Kasischke. p. cm. — (Made in Michigan writers series) ISBN 978-0-8143-3474-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8143-3594-9 (e-book) 1. Ghost stories, American—Michigan. 2. Ghosts—Michigan—Fiction. 3. Supernatural—Fiction. 4. Haunted places—Michigan. I. Taylor, Keith, 1952– II. Kasischke, Laura, 1961– III. Title: Us haunting them. IV. Title: Contemporary Michigan literature. PS648.G48G49 2011 813’.08733089774—dc22 2011002994

Typeset by Maya Rhodes Composed in Dante MT, Archive Atlantique, and Avant Que

contents Preface: Grim Reader vii Laura Kasischke | Ghost Anecdote 1 Steve Amick | Not Even Lions and Tigers 9 Elizabeth Kostova | Thin Air 39 James Hynes | Backseat Driver 47 Nicholas Delbanco | Pier Road 81 Laura Hulthen Thomas | Bones on Bois Blanc 87 Anne-Marie Oomen | Bitchathane 127 Kelly Fordon | Estate Sale 141 Lolita Hernandez | Making Bakes 153 Eileen Pollack | The Devil in Cross Village 165 Keith Taylor | The Man at the Edge 187 Elizabeth Schmuhl | Belief 199 Contributors 209

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grim reader, did you ever see a ghost? no; but you’ve heard—i understand—be dumb! and don’t regret the time you may have lost, for you have got that pleasure still to come.

Byron, Don Juan

preface: g rim reader When the editors first started talking about ghost stories several years ago, we talked for a quite a while before we asked each other if we actually believed there were such things as ghosts. Even when we finally popped that question, we equivocated. Sure, we’d both heard pretty convincing stories about something strange that happened, once, to someone who seemed sane—someone not known to be a liar or prone to hallucinations—under circumstances that lent some credibility to the strangeness, the possibility that what had happened was not easily dismissed as a prank, the shifting light, the physics of wind in the hallway of an old house. We didn’t try to explain those stories, although we admit that we saw them more as windows into the minds of the people who reported them than as descriptions of reality. We recognized a need to tell the story and our own desire to listen to it. Then we realized something else. Many of the ghost stories we knew—either the ones told around campfires or those collected in volumes, whether intended for a popular audience or for an audience that considered itself literary—were centered on a particular place. A house, often an old house with

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a long family history. A park or a field. A particular town. The ghosts either inhabited these places or were desperately trying to get back to them. And we lived in Michigan, so many of our ghostly references were entirely local. We knew of a house on the west side of Ann Arbor that seemed to carry a horrible history and, possibly, the ghosts of dead children. We shared a former student who, while professing not to believe in such things, is heir to a house above an orchard outside Benton Harbor where some of her relatives see things. We’d heard stories of apparitions on Belle Isle in Detroit, in the towns of Niles, Alpena, Cross Village, or Trout Lake. The ghosts in Michigan, perhaps like ghosts everywhere, seem to stay close to home. While editor Keith Taylor was discussing this phenomenon with his eighteen-year-old daughter Faith, a young woman who has grown up through troubled economic times in her home state, she said, “Well, good for the ghosts! At least they still call it home.” Some of those homebound ghosts seem to be benign, even protective. Others might be tied to places that frighten the teller of the story, or the created characters who must confront those places. Others appear when the living are going through significant changes in their lives or are overcome with anxieties. Others appear for no reason, when they are not needed and when they are certainly not wanted. We thought we might be able to find some new stories out there in our state, so we asked some of our best writers— some very well known and others just at the beginnings of their careers—if they knew or imagined something ghostly they might want to write about. We came up with the dozen stories here, some of them eerie, others funny or bittersweet, some even a bit troubling in their picture of things happening here now. Some of the stories are true tales written by non-be-

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lievers, pieces their authors call essays, although we have tried to keep from labeling them. Others are clearly fiction, and are meant to be a bit frightening. There are a couple where we aren’t quite sure of the author’s intentions—true or not? We will let the readers figure out which ones are which. The dictionaries tell us that ghost can refer to anything of which there is only a hint, a suggestion, a vestige, a trace—the ghost of a smile . . . the ghost of a chance . . . the ghost pain felt in the limb after its amputation . . . But the Germanic geist is a cognate of the word guest. Probably the tradition of the death’s-head at the table grows out of that connection, as well as the superstition that the wrath of a ghost will be directed toward the one who refuses to welcome it. It appears that when or if we are visited, the ghosts will either be in the places they knew when they were alive, or else the ghost is a wanderer, a lost traveler, a soul sidetracked or snagged, desperate to get home. Sometimes—and it seems as if we are blessed, perhaps more than most, with ghostly presences—that home is here, on a couple of peninsulas surrounded by enormous amounts of fresh water. Our home is still theirs. The Editors

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laura kasischke ghost anecdote

When I was sixteen, I saw two girls, my age, slip through a fence in my backyard. When I say slip, I mean that they did not walk through the fence, or climb over it. There was no gate or hole in the fence. It was chain link, the fence, and separated our yard from the Ratterinks’, and these girls walked across the backyard and slipped through it as if it didn’t exist. When I called out, “Hey!” they turned to look at me, and then at each other, and then they disappeared. I stood up. I’m sure I said, just under my breath, “Shit.” They were pretty girls. Teenage girls. The smaller of the two had been wearing one of my old dresses. I’d tried that dress on

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myself one afternoon a few months before, and, realizing that it was too small, tossed it into the box my mother was planning to take to Goodwill. Because my mother never made it with that box to Goodwill, I had no idea what happened to that dress. Maybe this girl had found it in the garage? The other girl was prettier than the smaller one. She had black hair down to her waist, and she was wearing tiny cutoffs and a halter top. I was fairly certain that if I thought about it long enough, I could remember where I might have seen that one before. The pool? The mall? Kids for Christ? Yes, Kids for Christ. I hurried into the house after I stood, swore, and they vanished. The reason I was sitting in the backyard in the middle of the night was that I was smoking dope. Even with my father fast asleep, and even with the way he slept like a man in a coma those days, I couldn’t very well smoke marijuana in the house. He’d have had no idea what I was doing. He’d have been alarmed, smelling that, if he’d woken up to that smell. He might have thought I was burning my dresses, or fruit, or old love letters soaked in my mother’s perfume. But this was some very good weed, which, after the funeral, my cousin Chris had rolled into twenty slender joints for me and put in a beautiful old-fashioned cigarette tin that said Tobacciana on the lid. I was being conservative with it. Chris lived in New Jersey with my aunt and uncle, and had only come back to the Midwest for the funeral, so I knew I wouldn’t see him again any time soon, and he would not, obviously, be sending me any

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refills in the mail, so I allowed myself only one joint per week, parceled into a puff or two Monday, Wednesday, Friday. This was Friday. I had to make it last, I kept telling myself. I was definitely not the type of girl to get on a bus and head downtown in search of a dealer, and these days I could only stand to open my eyes after dark when I was high. Luckily, it was summer, so it stayed light late, but what would happen—? I tried not to think about that. In the past, I’d only gotten high with friends, smoking whatever they had, but I hadn’t had any friends since the fight. The only “friend” to come by in all that time was Mary Bacon, our resident teenage ambulance chaser. The first time, she’d brought flowers and a card so sentimental I couldn’t get past the second line, the one about how loved ones live on in the memories of . . . The second time, she brought a loaf of bread her mother had baked. My father and I devoured that within about an hour. That time, she was actually on her way to her volunteer job, wearing her candy stripes and a little thing like a stiff wing in her hair. I doubted she was going to come over a third time with some drugs. The girl I’d had to fight was a senior. A big fat bitch with glasses. I broke the glasses; she gave me a nosebleed. Even in the sobering span of time that had passed—two months to be exact—and everything that had happened since, I still didn’t see what it was that I’d done that was so bad that they’d all scattered from my life, and so fast. I still believed, until a few

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weeks afterward, that when the obituary ran they’d start stopping by and calling. But let’s not even get into that, and all those sad facts. They didn’t. No one did. One or two moms, sure. But I could tell, even with them, they’d heard: “She’s a psycho now. She tried to kill this perfectly nice fat girl.” It was surprising how solid that girl was, and the sound she made, the shocking inflexibility of her skull when my fist made contact with it. I didn’t know that the glasses had been shattered until much later. I heard her crying. I do remember that. And Tony’s expression of surprise and distaste. It was as if he’d been waiting the whole six months of our being together to show me that face. Can I just say a couple of things in my own defense? First. Well— Oh, forget it. There’s no defense. The only thing that girl did was elbow me accidentally in the restroom line. But what I’d started telling you about were the girls. The ghost girls. The one in my dress. And the other one. That one I swore I might have seen with a tambourine during that last meeting of Kids for Christ, which had been my older sister Bethany’s idea. She’d gone off a few years before

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to a Christian college and come back looking like a cleaner, happier, stupider version of herself. “You’ll need something solid to cling to in hard times,” she’d said. I know you’re probably asking yourself why I listened, since I wasn’t, it seemed, the kind of girl who would be easily talked into Kids for Christ or anything else. But I suspected, really, that Bethany was right. Maybe not about Christ, but about the hard times, about solidity. Then, I made the mistake of hesitating at the door, and the next thing I knew I was in her car, listening to Amy Grant, driving off to someone’s cookie-cutter house on the other side of town. “Oh, hel-lo!” the mother of that night’s host-Kid for Christ said when she opened the door. My sister—the one who used to slap mannequins in department stores and then laugh so hard she’d wet her pants—embraced this woman, and then turned and offered me to the woman, whose smile froze, eyes widened, before she gave me a gentle pat on the back. There were some Bible verses, and a lot more hugging, the smell of cookies getting overcooked on an aluminum pan, and then the music. And that dark-haired girl staring blankly into the distance as she tapped a tambourine with the meat of her palm, and then against her hip. Bethany went back to college and only breezed in for our mother’s funeral before shipping off with her fellow missionaries to an island somewhere in the Pacific—that vast steel wrinkle where I knew the island that would want my sister’s advice would be perfectly at home.

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I overheard her telling the cousin who’d given me the cigarette case of joints that she’d had a personal encounter with Jesus, and that she wasn’t going to grieve for our mother because it would be insulting to Jesus. “Wow,” our cousin Chris had said. They both looked up at me when they saw I was hovering, eavesdropping. My cousin smiled. (Stoned?) My sister scowled. I never went back to Kids for Christ, although my sister must have given them my phone number because some girl called the following Monday night to see if I needed a ride to the next meeting. When I said no, that I couldn’t go, the conversation ended with “Jesus loves you, you know.” “Thanks,” I said. I had to hang up the phone, finally. I could tell she would be willing to hang on to her end of the line for a hundred years just listening to me breathe. Well, I had the fight a few nights after Kids for Christ night. Blah, blah, blah. My mother died. Just before she did, she asked me to please help her put on her strand of pearls. Of course, she was delirious. I should have told her she was already wearing them. She would have believed me. But, stupid me, I fished around in her hospital bag until I found them. They were there, along with her underpants and her Bible, because she’d been wearing them when she’d been admitted for the last time. I don’t know why she was wearing the pearls then, or why she wanted to wear them when she died, but I reached around her neck to try to clasp them behind her, and something happened when I did, and the string broke, and the pearls scattered all over the linoleum, bouncing and snapping around like a hailstorm or the roll of a hundred tiny

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dice—and while I was down on my knees trying to pick them up, my mother died. A rattling, a gasp, my father and a nurse ran into the room. They looked at her, and then at me. I was holding up a handful of pearls, trying insanely to smile. Would you hate me if I told you what I did with the pearls? Well: I held on for a long time, but after they wheeled my mother out of the room, and my father signed all the papers and made the arrangements, I let them slide off the ends of my fingers in an iridescent trickle into a trashcan. They were body temperature by then. They clattered into the empty can. It was like letting go of a beautiful handful of cancer. I never saw any of those Kids for Christ again, except for the one with the dark hair who slipped with the one wearing my old dress through the backyard that night. They looked at me, and then at each other, having clearly seen me for what I was before deciding not to turn back, before simply passing through the fence. Then, they vanished. They saw me, and I saw them that night—that very dark night in the earliest and worst part of my life. They were ghosts, and girls. I’m quite certain of that. But why should you believe it? I was young, I was grieving, I was stoned out of my mind, I believed in nothing, it was the middle of the night in my backyard, and I was alone— You would never have believed such a story. Just as I would not

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have believed you if you’d told me that one day we would be married, live together in a little house, have a child. Just as I would not have believed you if you’d told me that, one day, those ghost girls would seem more real to me than the girl at the picnic table, the one who was me: “Hey!” she called out, weakly, even sweetly, full of longing, thinking she was calling out to those girls, when, in truth, she was calling out to the future, calling out to you. Obviously, that night, you were somewhere else entirely— maybe kissing a stranger, or falling off a balcony, or watching television with a child—and someday you would have an anecdote of your own to tell about that. Your anecdote would be full of meandering, and contradiction, and passionate sighs, and I would listen—not without interest or sympathy, but never fully believing it, either, or understanding it, lying in bed beside you, listening to the breeze in the trees outside, our child asleep in the next room, and your past a dark, intangible drifting between there and here. I would be beside you, listening to the story of that time— if you managed to survive it, to tell me about it, and if I lived to hear it. I would be trying and failing to imagine it, maybe even many times, before I told you my own story again—this one and the next one, and so on and so on, back and forth, back and forth, until the first light. “Hey!” She was calling out to you, who didn’t even know her then, who would not have recognized her, who dwelt on the opposite side of a chain-link fence like the one between the past and the future, between life and death, between the teller and the listener, and our house and the Ratterinks’.

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s t eve a m i c k not even lions and tigers

Harry Bennett put two and two together, and what he came up with he was none too crazy about. Sure, it made perfect sense that his hunting lodge now had a full-blown infestation of haints. Hindsight and all, it stood to reason, and he had to kick himself a little for not catching on sooner that this might be the deal. Those monkeys they’d rubbed out right there on the property, he probably should have taken care of a little farther away from the main building. Or at least worn some kind of a hex, maybe a potion. There were plenty of boys in the Ford Service Department who knew a thing or two about a thing or two in that line, having come up from the hills and hollers of Kentucky, Tennessee, Chattanooga—all those southern-type states where they still had witches operating, not like where he was raised, a college

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town with science and reason and all the very latest forwardthinking beliefs and theories. Yeah, those southern bumpkins working for him likely could have come up with something, hoodoo-wise, to ward off spirits beforehand, if they’d thought of it at the time. But no one had raised the issue. No one had said one word and now the joint was lousy with haints. He couldn’t quite put a face or a name to any of these unworldly troublemakers, but that one Jew organizer he and a couple of the servicemen drowned in the moat had to be one of these same ghostly characters up to no good now, raising a ruckus when he was off his guard, either trying to sleep or give it good to some broad. It was a shame, is what it was, that he’d blown a minor fortune outfitting this place so he could rest here in safety, not having to worry so much about all the Commies and finks out to get him. Besides buying a chunk of Clare County so large it would be hard not to spot interlopers coming a long way off, plus laying in enough Springfields, Tommys, and other firepower to mow them down at their leisure, he also had an army-surplus cannon, the moat of course, and an explosives charge rigged to go off under the drawbridge if an enemy tried to cross. The tunnels hadn’t been cheap either—or the battleship steel-plated doors, the concrete “log” walls and the secret passageways and exits, and the getaway Trimotor seaplane on the other side of his own private lake, and the Ford sedan he kept there, too, gassed up and constantly running, ready for escape. It was shit-assed expensive, sure, but he’d thought it would mean he could rest easy. He could come out to Lost Lake, the place they were calling the Lodge, and let down his guard. Breathe in the fresh air, recuperate. Sleep in, waste a few deer or rabbits, get sauced, pork this one or the other—

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live a normal life. But now, all that was for nothing, on account of the haints had wormed their way in. The first one he heard, Harry didn’t say a peep, thinking maybe he’d cooked it up in his head. No reason coming off like a nutcase on account of the wind or maybe a chipmunk in the rafters. It was kind of like a rustle and kind of like a murmur. And maybe kind of like neither. He hadn’t really been paying attention. He’d been looking over this color brochure from a gator farm down in the Everglades, considering getting one shipped up there and how that would work once the Michigan winter rolled around and also how he could have done a much better job designing this brochure—anyone could; for one, the colors were all wrong for the Sunshine State—and he thought he’d heard a distant train whistle too, low and moanful . . . But it could have been shit-all, really. The second one caught him unawares while playing a little table tennis on the side porch with one of the younger servicemen named Mert (which, as near as he could tell, wasn’t short for anything). The score was 10-all and just as he was about to serve, Harry felt a cold breeze up his neck that, swear to christ, felt like fingers, and he flinched, as anyone would, and flubbed it, and when he asked for a do-over, he said, “Didn’t you feel that?” “Feel what?” Mert said. On second thought, he decided, maybe it was just a draft. Even though a draft doesn’t normally have fingernails or smell like puke, most times. He took the loss. The third one said his name: “Harry Bennett.” Outright, like a broad whispering in his ear. Only the whisper was just his name, not the usual sort of whisper from a broad, like what

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it would cost him to take her home or what she was prepared to do with his tackle or the go-ahead to stick it somewhere unusual. It was just his name, unadorned. And when he opened his eyes and turned, he saw there was no broad lying next to him on the bed. There had been, but she was in the head. He was sure of it. He could hear her splashing around, giving herself a quick whorebath in the sink. This was just a whole lot of nothing lying next to him, whispering in his ear, and this third one said it again—“Oh, Harry Bennett . . .”—this time sounding openly disappointed in him. Frankly, it also sounded a little like his dear old ma, though that was craziness, on account of what business would his ma have lying on the other side of the wet spot from him on a Hollywood mattress while he was bare-assed naked? No business whatsoever. Scrambling out of bed, he scooped up his drawers and marched out to the dining hall, tugging them on and shouting to the fellas bunking in the other wing. This was no longer going to be a secret. “We got haints,” he announced. “Spooks. Banshees.” “You talking about ghosts?” said one of the old boys, named Lew, which was short for Lewellyn. “Phantoms?” “The same. I’m hearing them everywhere. The place is crawling with the invisible little bastards.” No one rolled their eyes exactly or laughed out loud. But that didn’t tell him anything, really. He knew they’d keep such razzing to themselves. He called the shots in Ford Service and they weren’t about to give him the business, even if they privately thought he was bughouse. “I need this fixed,” he said. “Lickety-split.” There was some question as to whether haints could inhabit

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concrete. (The logs of the Lodge weren’t logs at all but big, man-made, bullet-stopping mothers. They were made up to look like logs by that talented Eyetie he took off the line on account of he just looked like he’d be handy with masonry— which he was, even throwing in authentic-looking knots here and there with a twist of his trowel.) He knew the men were debating this point as they snapped to it, going about the business of figuring out how to make the place haint-free. They didn’t say it right to his face, and they sure didn’t make the mistake of rolling their eyes, but he did hear the word cee-ment tossed around as they discussed how best to handle it. If they’d raised the objection to his face, he would have told them what about Olde England, Scotland, all those places with spookedup castles? All those places, no matter how good they were at keeping out the Frenchies or the Hun or whatever was coming at them, they couldn’t keep out the haints. And sure, granted, those castles weren’t made out of Ford’s finest, straight from the slag at the Rouge, but rock was rock, more or less, wasn’t it? So the choice of building materials didn’t enter into it. Besides the issue of cement and whether or not it was haint-proof, the men he’d put on it were kicking around the merits of getting in a scientist of some sort, maybe find an egghead at the U of M who could capture them using television rays or radar or some such Buck Rogers hoohaw, versus going the other route—finding a man of the cloth to come in and run them out with holy water or prayer or by waving the Bible around. With some other crowd—maybe with the Grosse Pointers, the Edsel-types—he’d probably stick his nose back in and push the university route, on account of his own stepdaddy, Bob Winslow, had been an early member of the Engineering faculty. But these monkeys wouldn’t be impressed with

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that. Besides, the truth of it was, old Bob had basically been a foundry supervisor, a glorified blacksmith, and they’d brought him onto campus, black slouch hat and stogie and all, straight out of his shop down by the Ann Arbor Railroad track, and slapped that academic moniker on him to dress him up, but basically he was there to help run what was then a little pissant shed of an outbuilding, to teach the kids a trade. Besides, he’d only been Harry’s stepdaddy for a few years before kicking, he was so old, at which time Harry found himself shipped off to an uncle’s farm in Saginaw. And then he rejoined his ma in Detroit. So it wasn’t like he’d exactly been raised on faculty tea parties and Christmas caroling at the dean’s house. Hell, his own real daddy had died in a tavern scuffle. With this crowd here, that part of the family tree probably commanded more authority than this iffy connection to former university faculty. He could hear the fellas out there, on the side porch, weighing the yeas and nays of each idea, and he tried to think of the last time he’d even gotten within spitting distance of a man of the cloth. Probably, it would have to be that Bible-banging socalled reverend who was stirring things up on the line, working at the Rouge . . . What was his name again? Reverend Bradford. Yeah. And the guy had been a line monkey just like the rest of them, so how much of a bona fide preacher could he have been? And not a very connected one either because none of his bawling and begging to his “Heavenly Father” there at the end managed to save his sorry ass one iota. Though now, given this infestation problem, Harry sort of wished they’d postponed icing that bird. Even a questionable clergyman might have had a notion or two about what to do on the spirit front . . .

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It was settled, then. Until they worked out this haint jazz out at the Lodge, he would stay the hell out of Clare County entirely and move his operations over to his Ann Arbor place, the Castle. The land agent who sold him the property back in ’29 insisted it was still really Ann Arbor, though it was generally thought of as Geddesburg and did teeter right on the edge of Ypsilanti—which was handy now that he had the Willow Run operations to oversee, too, just down the road. But what he liked the most was the high view and the quick access to the river. He’d been born a few hundred feet from the Huron River, farther upstream, on Wall Street. There’d been a time when that part of town, with all its street names hat-tipping to the biggest city in the world—Broadway, Canal, Maiden Lane, his own ironically poor Wall Street—was hoping to be the real downtown, the center of things in Ann Arbor. But it hadn’t worked that way, as most things don’t, and those that thought it would had backed the wrong horse. (There was a lot of that going around, he supposed. A lifetime of chances for throwing your hat in one ring or the other.) Losing out to the higher ground around campus, the area became known as Lower Town. In a lot of ways, this was a fair piece from that little shack where he’d wailed to life back in ’92, stuffed in there with his brother Haze and Ma and his true daddy, two years shy of getting himself clobbered to death. For one thing, he owned more land than they had on that narrow lot back on Wall Street. Christ, the Castle sat on 154 acres—more than three thousand times the land of all of Lower Town. And the house itself was as distant from the old neighborhood as the moon. He’d done

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it up like an ornate fun house—half upper-crust manor, half lavish bordello, half dungeon. Besides the secret passageways and hidden rooms, all the staircases had switchbacks, where you could turn on a dime and go one way or the other—your choice. Plenty of ways to shake an intruder, if the need arose. Granted, he hadn’t designed it to keep out haints, but if this fishy business with the voices turned out to be coming from something regular, something that could bleed—if it was soreheads seeking payback of some sort, trying to pull the wool over his eyes, make him look like a punk, scared of some cheap Houdini séance sleight of hand—he would be more than prepared for them there at the Castle. This house, though not quite the armory that the Lodge was—no moat, no doors booby-trapped with dynamite, since the women and kiddies stayed there—at least looked like a fortress, looming like a real, honest-to-christ castle over the banks of the Huron River. In fact, he had a tunnel that ran from the basement down to the boathouse, just like some English lord might—if any English lord ever had a 120-horsepower, seventeen-foot Chris Craft Deluxe Runabout. The tunnel branched, giving him options. Besides getting to the river, you could sneak through a sliding cabinet into the hidden Roman bath (or out of it and away, when he had to whisk out a broad he’d snuck in for a little action). One branch led to a spiral staircase—a tight squeeze up to the watchtower. But if you went the other way, down at the end, if you took the wrong turn, you’d be sorry. Down that way were the dens where he kept the big cats— the tiger and the lion that would, if there were in fact living, breathing agitators behind this, trying to make him look like a monkey, more than adequately settle their hash.

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His first night back from Lost Lake, he took to the tower roof to survey his domain and sweep the security spotlights around the grounds. He had a modest little gun nest up there, the surplus ack-ack artfully tucked in among the parapets. He was watching some movement in the bushes, just beyond the boathouse. It was probably nothing. Or just the cats. Usually, they stayed caged in their dens. But they did need to roam some or they got stir-crazy, and sometimes, when it seemed safe, the handlers let them out. There had been a hobo jungle growing nearby, adjacent to the property, and once they started letting the lion and tiger take the air, the camp had pretty much folded up and moved on down the tracks. He’d missed the cats, out at the Lodge. Jungle animals you could see at least, not like them voices. It was easier to clear your mind up here, and he was starting to wonder if maybe voices didn’t mean jack. Voices couldn’t do anything, really. Haint-wise, it could be worse. It wasn’t like he was seeing bedsheet-type haints, floating through walls and rattling chains in his face and chasing him through a graveyard, like when the kiddies did their trick-or-treating. Yeah, voices probably couldn’t touch him. Especially a hundred and fifty miles away. They were meeting down in the pub in the basement, the space he preferred to use when he had to conduct Ford business at home. It was not only private down there, but an easy place for men to relax and smoke cigars and say what they needed to say, on account of he’d made up the place like a real English pub, leathery and ye olde, with a billiard room and a full bar and kitchen, and it was usually, as it was now, drinks all around.

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They were there to present a sort of report on the monkey business out at the Lodge. It was Lew and another serviceman named Red (whose hair wasn’t even vaguely red, but his last name was Brown or Black or something and so the others considered it humorous, calling him Red). The third guy wasn’t in Ford Service, but had acted as foreman on some of the crucial work on the Castle. He had an engineering background and had been privy to some of the more confidential parts of the layout of this house—the parts they’d blacked out of the blueprints for most of the workers on the site; the switchbacks and hidden spiral staircases and secret passageways. So they figured they could trust him with this issue of de-hainting the Lodge. The fourth guy was new— some egghead “consultant” the foreman found. He’d been let go from the Michigan State Normal College in Ypsi under circumstances Lew felt would keep the guy manageable—he’d had him checked out and thought they could at least trust him enough to offer up some theories. Maybe not let him poke around at the Lodge and ask a lot of specifics, but maybe just offer them some “fer instances”; start them down the right track. His name was something sneeze-like, an unpronounceable tangle, so they were just calling him “Professor,” (all except Red, who slipped in a couple “Patches” here and there on account of his suit coat had suede patches at the elbows). The boys had thoroughly tossed the Lodge looking for hidden speakers and wires and come up with jack shit, and now they were on to the next step. “This is one route and nothing’s guaranteed here,” the foreman explained, “because it’s all based on a real unscientific premise. But—” “But if we entertain the supposition,” Patches continued,

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“that there may be entities out there, the first approach is to ask ourselves where did they come from? For argument’s sake, let’s assume that, at one time or another, a person or persons, for various reasons, might’ve . . . disappeared out there . . .” “Beats me,” said Red. “How a thing like that would come about, I mean.” “It’s a stumper, all right,” chimed in Lew. “One for Charlie Chan, you ask me.” Harry thought he caught the foreman fella wincing, just for a sec there; just a quick, weary intake of air, and then he became absorbed in his notes. The guy was a hard worker, just trying to make some money here, but he wasn’t with them. Not really. Neither was Professor Patches over there, and Harry needed to remember that and stay on his toes. Harry stood to pull himself another draft. “My money’s on them Potawatomis. Maybe we built that thing over some Indian happy hunting ground or some such thing.” In the bar mirror, he caught Lew’s eyebrow shoot up, crooked as a crowbar, but he ignored it. “Ancient burial mounds. I got no earthly idea, frankly. All I know is it’s giving me the heebie-jeebies and we need to give them the boot.” Turning to face the bunch of them, he lowered his voice, though there was no way anyone upstairs could hear. “So I’m not cooped up in my goddamn house.” Their consultant coughed. “One route we might consider is some . . . discreet excavation. Limited, of course.” “And we drag the lake,” said the foreman. “Very low key. At night.” So this was a disposal issue? What were they saying—that they shouldn’t have put the place to use? It was right there in the title of the thing: Lost Lake. What was it anyway—crying

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out to be, at least—if not a remote place where certain individuals might get themselves permanently lost? And the lake was called that long before he laid eyes on the property. Seriously, who knew what those Potawatomis were up to, back when? Redskins had no reporters or union officials breathing down their necks, poking their noses in. They could’ve massacred a whole wagonload of beet farmers and fur trappers out there, years ago, and no one would be the wiser. This wasn’t all on him. No way. Not to mention a few stray rats the Purples and other pals in the rackets may have dragged out there to rid themselves of. Them haints didn’t have any reason to be bugging him of course—he hadn’t had a hand in those, other than saying, “Sure. Why not? I got room. I got a whole lake. Knock yourself out.” But them, they weren’t his lookout. If there were haints from that business, they needed to get their ghosty selves on into Detroit and heckle the likes of Abe Bernstein, Leo Cellura, Pete Licavoli—those guys—if they had a beef. It seemed unfair that a haint would be so disorganized—especially those that had called themselves organizers, for Pete’s sake. A haint ought to know who the hell he was trying to haint and not just fire off the spookfest willy-nilly, like some sort of ghostical scattergun . . . At least not drag his name into it. The Professor looked sweaty. How could a guy sweat down here? The temperature was perfect. “I’m not trying to point fingers, gentlemen. Let me be clear on that. I’m just suggesting that someone—someone who is in a position to do such a thing and do it discreetly—should perhaps sit down and try to draw a connection between the emanation of . . . let’s call them ‘otherworld energies’ and certain real world, physical

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locations at the site. Does everyone follow? I need not know the particulars, in this regard—nor do I wish to have them elaborated upon—but I believe this is the first step you need to take.” The meeting ended abruptly when he thought he heard someone, maybe the gardener outside, calling to him. And why’s the gardener using my first name? Not very professional . . . But no one else said they heard it. It was the haints. They were here now. At the Castle. To his ma, he admitted what was happening; that he was hearing haints. He went out to the little house in back to tell her. The pool house and the pool itself and the miniature play village he’d had built for the girls all shimmered white in the bright sun, and so, when he knocked and let himself in, his eyes all bedazzled and confused, it was dark and hard to focus there in her little front sitting room. He remained standing, addressing her silhouette in her favorite wingback chair. There wasn’t a lot to tell, because he wanted to keep it simple, but something made him want to tell her this much: for no reason he could feature, there seemed to be mysterious voices cropping up at his place out in Clare County and—possibly—he’d maybe just heard one here now, in the house. That was all he knew. Her take on it was this: “Oh, dear.” He didn’t like the tone of that. It sounded like more than just concern—shades of disapproval thrown in to boot, so he said, “You know this road out here, Ma? Geddes? My deed says this whole section here was once part of the Potawatomi Trail. And up at the Lodge, there were Indians running loose all around up there at one time, too, so . . .”

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“Oh, dear, dear, dear . . .” This time she added tongue clucks, but other than that, it sounded like all she was going to say on the matter and he knew not to push it. He’d had the little house built just for her, though there was a point there, back in ’27, before they even moved onto the estate, where he could imagine she might not feel comfortable coming to live with them. On top of being the year they had to shut down the plant and retool for the Model A—a long drawnout sweat that he frankly wouldn’t ever want to go through again (and for Harry’s part, a bigger deal than the other, the hoopla the press wanted to focus on), it was also the year all hob broke loose over Mr. Ford’s paper, the Dearborn Independent, and all what they called “anti-semantic” stuff, all that jazz Cameron and Liebold put out about the “Zions” scheming to take over the world’s banks—a lot of it pretty rough but some of it just silly, like claims that jazz records were Jew-sponsored “moron music,” designed to smooth their way to the top—all of which was frankly pointless shit-stirring, but Mr. Ford had once told him, “Harry, don’t ever try to outguess me,” and so who was he to try? Christ, even trying to cipher out what “outguess” meant, exactly, was beyond him. But it was egg on all their faces. Mr. Ford paid out a million in damages and, after all that, sort of shrugged it off, and when he told Harry he was going to pay, and what did he think about that, Harry got in a little gag about how “I know about lions, Mr. Ford—nothing about Zions,” and that should have been it, but his ma said something, as if the whole business had been any of his doing. She said that wasn’t how she raised him, reminding him how she and old Bob Winslow used to drag him to the Church of All Creeds, which, despite calling itself a church, actually

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had Jews as members, too. She said it was just wrong, spreading that stuff. He explained how it wasn’t his paper, it was Mr. Ford’s, and how he had to work for somebody, didn’t he, and if the man sometimes got a little foamy-headed, how was that his lookout? The Mrs. wasn’t buying it. The day after his meeting about the Lodge, first thing in the morning, he finally filled Esther in. “I’ll tell you what this is,” she said. “Either this is another one of your sorry ideas of a practical joke and I’m supposed to come all unglued with concern, or this is fatigue, pure and simple.” Fatigue, he explained, was for weaklings. This here, this was haints, no question. When he pictured fatigue, he pictured shell shocks—gigglers in straitjackets and defeated-looking wrecks in canebacked wheelchairs being pushed around a shady lawn. Buckles and bedpans. “You just can’t unwind,” she said. “You got that place out there to unwind and you’re just incapable of doing it. After a while, something’s got to give.” Give? Of his three wives, she’d been the only one to get him, usually—follow his thinking, respect his moods and his privacy and his dedication to his work, his Mr. Ford—so he really couldn’t feature why she was giving him the business about this, trying to make him feel like he was screwy. He’d heard what he’d heard! The voice that spoke his name here in the Castle hadn’t been any quieter or any more mush-mouthed than the voices back at Lost Lake. And it wasn’t the gardener. So what was she trying to pull with this?

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“Maybe you should go talk to someone, Har. Like, you know, a doctor.” What he told her was maybe she should go talk to someone, too—a shut-up expert. This was her old medical background flaring up. He wasn’t about to go to a headshrinker on account of they were all Hebes, according to Mr. Ford—who should know, on account of him being the brainiest man he ever met. It was Mr. Ford who got the lowdown on reincarnation—figured out that everything must come back again on account of chickens, how they learned somehow to smarten up and gangway at the first sight of an auto, how it meant they must have got themselves knocked on their ass in a previous life. Smart, that man. A real thinker. It was him again—Mr. Ford—who figured out, the first day they looked at this property together, he should cover over an unused sluiceway and bingo, you got yourself an escape hatch, heading right down to the river. “Even if you don’t need a doctor, you could at least be still for once and try to relax. For just an hour. No telephone calls, no meetings. What would that hurt?” Of the three wives, she was the practical one: she knew when to ease off and not come at him head-on. She got it. The last Mrs. Bennett, Margaret, didn’t understand him to the point she snatched up his youngest, Harriet, and lammed it out of there. It was morning, so he never would’ve thought of it himself: “Wouldn’t a bath be nice?” she said. A bath was her standard solution for most everything, which meant everything was just jake. Copacetic, as the spooks said. He was just going to take a bath. Nothing screwy about that. In the head in his secret room behind the fireplace, he had a

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beautiful tub he’d designed with black tile, art deco as all hell, but in the middle of the day like this, if he tried to hide out in that one and find some peace, he knew he could count on still being able to hear his family out there and the servants running the carpet sweeper and the dog yapping and jangling, everybody coming and going, and he knew the commotion would keep him on edge. True, he had a little porthole built in so he could keep an eye out for interlopers while taking a soak and, granted, anyone barging in would have to know exactly how to open the hidden panel by the hearth, but he decided instead to take his soak down in the Roman bath in the basement. There, it was well fortified and secluded, both, and he could do it up right like the ancients did, like an emperor in his own goddamn grotto, the waterline clear up to his chin. Adjusting the massive, dedicated water heater, stoking it up to nearly scalding—that was really living. Sometimes, when he was in there, letting his body bob and float, he thought about how few baths he probably got those years on the farm, at his uncle’s. Had to be only in the dozens. And then later, when his ma ran the boarding house in Detroit, you had to really get in line for the tub. He never would’ve pictured he’d have a thing like this. The place could fill with steam to where it started to look like the coke ovens at the Rouge, and he was feeling drowsy now, lost in the fog of it. A person could faint in this heat. Not him, of course, but a lesser man . . . He thought he heard something. It wasn’t his name. Not this time. It was more of an oooooooh. It was probably wind coming through the tunnels. Or a distant grumble from one of the big cats. He hadn’t rassled with them in some time and he really ought to, on account of they could unlearn that he was on their side—the fella providing

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the T-bones. It was important to keep that up. He got a whiff of that smell again—the faint smell of puke—just like he had out at the Lodge. But here, it could be drifting in from the lion. The tiger kept clean, generally, but that lion had some breath on him. Or maybe it was more an ooooooppp . . . He listened closer now, holding his breath, not stirring the water. It came again, more distinctly than before: “Sou-oopp! Sou-oopp!” Standing straight up in the water, he marched up the little steps, out of the bath, grabbed his robe, and headed out. Haints or no haints—-flesh and blood or spirit-bound—no one was turning up the boil on Harry Herbert Bennett, thank you very much. He would not be ingredients. Not today. He took off in the Deluxe Convertible Coupe, knowing his wife never used that one anyway. She hated the color: “The man finally offers five alternatives to black and you pick the one that looks like dried blood!” She got big laughs repeating it but she was nuts on that score. The color was all class, the red-brown of it, the way it wasn’t quite one or the other. He gunned it up to forty, still on the winding hill of Geddes, then told himself to ease up: Try not to kill anything today. On his way out to the garages, trying to get the hell out of there, he’d paused for just a sec to look at the coops. They kept chickens there, in the back, descendants of the Wyandottes he’d raised at his uncle’s. He watched them for a moment, bobbing and strutting like the spooks along St. Antoine in Paradise Valley, dressed up fine on a Friday night, and he thought again about Mr. Ford’s idea about reincarnation. It was a mouthful of a word just to mean you maybe got a second chance, but something that important probably deserved a toughie for a

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label, something that wasn’t too easy to sling around. Just for the sake of supposing, given some of the things his ma had said to him about his life, just say she had a point—was there a chance he’d get another shot at it in the next life? He’d be the last one to say his ma was wrong, so maybe she had a point, maybe he’d smirched up his life just a bit; maybe he’d entangled himself in something that no longer sat so right, sucked in by a thing that looked real good at first but was now starting to peel loose of the wall. Few people ever argued with her. But the chances were even greater Mr. Ford was right—nobody ever argued with him. In fact, it had been Harry’s job since 1916 to make sure they didn’t. Not that he’d necessarily overstepped the boundaries of good and evil—he wasn’t ready to hang his head in shame just because so many of these newsies and sob sisters and pinkos and longhaired professor types thought he should. All these Rooseviks screaming how he should crawl under some rock or eat his gun or otherwise in some way just drop dead. No sir. Not by a long shot. He never stuck his foot in no one’s ass who didn’t have it coming. All the beatings he ever handed out were begged for. But if his ma wasn’t entirely happy, well, that was maybe a different story. It came to him now, out in the rush of fresh air, that it was that song. That was what they were singing that day at Gate 3, that “Soup Song” they got up to the tune of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean”—all that crybaby boo-hooing about sleeping in a flophouse and wanting something to eat other than soup. That rat agitator Maurice Sugar had worked it up and all three thousand of those monkeys were belting it out, in between charging the gate and throwing shit-all through at the boys. For a famished bunch, they sure seemed to mean busi-

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ness. You’d have thought they’d be more fatigued, all this singing about soup and being hungry, but they were still coming. When the tear gas didn’t keep those mugs back, the boys had to step it up. That was back in ’32, the so-called “Hunger March” dustup, and he’d caught it a little from his ma on that. He was stuck out at the Rouge for several days dealing with it, but when he got back to the Castle, his ma didn’t come up to the main house to greet him. Finally, after a couple hours, he went out to check in on her in the little house out back and she had that look. She didn’t mention anything at first, but she had the paper laid out on her music table in the sitting room, screaming headlines and all, like Exhibit A. Like it was his fault, though how could it be—five thousand bums show up at the Rouge, shouting for jobs, pushing on the gates, raising hob? What part could he possibly have had in causing that mess? And they’d done everything they could to calm it down, keep it from getting out of hand. Told them to disperse, fired only tear gas at first. He’d even had them bring in a fire truck and hose them down. What kind of nitwits keep coming, doused in ice water one week into March? In Michigan, that’s still the dead of winter. It was only when the mob started chucking chunks of frozen mud through the gates that they opened fire on them. So it wasn’t like anyone was happy about this. Half a dozen died in that fracas, but only five dozen were injured. With those kind of things, what worked best for management was a high number of injured, so as to spread the word around on the street to lay the hell off, and that stays in the memory of the average guy, and you want maybe zero corpses, ideally, so that it dies out in the papers and the politi-

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cians and muckety-mucks lose interest in it. What worked best in the rabble-rousers’ favor in these things was an outcome the other way round, like that one they got for themselves there— a solid handful killed, to grab at the sob sisters in the press, and hardly enough simple little warning bruises and scrapes to effectively spread the word around to knock it off. He didn’t say that to her, though. What he said was he was in his office for most of it. It wasn’t much of a response, granted, but he liked to remind her he had an actual office. And her eyesight was poor enough she might miss the big welt on his forehead. Esther, who at that point wasn’t his wife yet but was a nurse in the Administration Building, had patched him up. His ma said, “I’m glad that you’re doing so well and making a living, son, but I really didn’t imagine this is what you’d be doing with your life, when you were such a happy, gentle baby. And so artistic, with your paint boxes and all.” “Yes, ma’am . . .” was all he could say, but what he wanted to say was, What the hell was I supposed to do, Ma? When he’d met Mr. Ford on the street back in ’16, when he’d been introduced to him as a resourceful, scrappy guy, what was he supposed to do? Stick with the navy, spend half his life in the brig? Return to the boxing game, keep losing fight after fight? What options did she imagine he had back then? “I think I need to get away for a while,” she said faintly. “Florida or some place where I can see the sun.” “Sure, Ma,” he said. “Sure thing.” Seriously, though, was he to steam off to Europe for a fullpaid art scholarship at the Louvre? Accept a cushy diplomatic post from one of his old school chums? Lounge around the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club, marry one of the J. L. Hudson girls? Honest to christ, was he supposed to turn down his one shot, a

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chance to be the go-to guy, to be in charge of nearly everything for none other than America’s greatest industrialist? No, she could never understand, but when luck gives you a chance meeting with Mr. Ford, you make hay. When a man like that asks you, right out of the gate, “Can you shoot?” you say, “Yessir, you betcha, sir, just point out the target, sir.” He remembered getting a real kick out of papier-mâché— the gloopy manufacturing of it—and mushing clay around, sculpting stuff. But he also once liked playing with a barrel hoop and jacks and mud pies and all that other kid stuff. He had studied art at the Detroit Fine Arts Academy, true. And even later, when he was fully growed—done his stint in the Navy, boxed, told Mr. Ford that business about how sure thing, yes sir, he could shoot, no problem, and then hustled himself to a shooting gallery and spent a weekend there till his aim matched his mouth—even after all that, it was actually the art department where he’d started at the company, for a few months at least, before Mr. Ford either remembered what he’d hired him for or stopped horsing around and playing games with him and got him started doing the work he’d been doing ever since, the ever-shifting work with no fixed label to it other than it was always the work that no one else wanted to tackle. Yeah, he’d taken some classes as a kid and his daddy had been a decent housepainter—big deal. So he had some artsycraftsy side to him, granted. He could muck around a little with it there at the Castle, as he’d done—designing the big arched wooden doors, the marble accents, all the plaster doodads up in the vaulted ceiling, overseeing all that stuff himself from sketch to finish. But other than that, he’d made his choice. He’d stepped one way a long time ago and it was too late to go back. —

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Two hours later, still standing in the Michigan Central Station, staring at the arrivals board as the big room buzzed around him, he had to face it: his ma was not getting off the train from Florida. Maybe he had the day wrong. That wasn’t like him, a slipup like that, and he couldn’t imagine the soup he’d be in if he’d pulled a boner like that with Mr. Ford, meeting the wrong train. Them haints must’ve been getting to him, was all he could figure. And now he had to go back there. Brother. He hated to leave the station. So nice being around actual living folks who weren’t haints, jostling and laughing and calling out to one another. Regular friendly interaction. So many of the fellas in uniform, too—which he liked to see. It was a sign that they knew how to be a man, how to button their lip, stop grousing and fall in line, be some benefit to society. And the building itself, he could look at that thing for hours, if he had the time. Boy, there was something to have had a hand in, all right. He tried to picture what it would have been like to be involved in a big beautiful project like that. Of course, it would be a bear to make it secure, properly fortified, if that was his lookout. But if his own small part of the thing had only been, say, drawing up plans for the windows or some of the tile arrangements in the head, that would have been one nifty job, yes sir. That would’ve been something to be proud of and stay proud of. Especially when his ma finally pulled in from Florida, being able to arrive in this palace of transportation and brag, “My Harry dreamed up that frieze there and them shoe shine racks over there. Ain’t they something?” That would be it. But she wasn’t there. On the way home, he went by way of the Rouge. He felt

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at home there, in his element—calm, if he didn’t have to look at the stupid overpass. That harmless-looking little pedestrian bridge that, back in ’37, caused them all so much grief as the site of the so-called “Battle.” The thing with an overpass, the way it works, you got stairs on one side and stairs on the other. You can go one way or you can go the other—your choice. Those troublemakers had a choice—they could have turned around and hightailed it before things heated up. They chose to stay put and have their asses handed to them. “The Battle of the Passover, more like,” one of the fellas cracked, on account of all the Jews behind it. That was a hot one, all right, so he passed it along to Mr. Ford when they had a sit-down about the incident, not letting on that he hadn’t cooked up the wheeze himself. Might as well let the boss think he’d come up with it on his own. But Mr. Ford wasn’t smiling that time. He had too much at stake. Now, pulling onto Miller Road, he thought he might just camp out in his basement office for a few days, sleep on the couch. ’Course, if he got lonely, needed some company . . . no dice. He’d never sneak a broad into his office. Not there. But holing up there was still on the table, anyway, as the Administration Building loomed closer. It was a nice enough day, just like the one in ’37 when those bastards finally got their wish, and he could almost picture that son of a bitch now, slumped like a dislodged scarecrow sliding loose of his pole. And then he was picturing it. There was Reuther. Walter Reuther with his goddamn bloody shirttails hanging out, staring back at him from up on the overpass. Today. Right now. And that big dummy Dick Frankensteen, too—that big Yid or maybe Kraut Frankenstein/steen monster, flailing and help-

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less with his jacket yanked over his head like a haywire bonnet, just like the boys were still socking away, giving it to him but good in the breadbasket, right in the kidneys, breaking his ribs, knocking the stuffing out of him. It was like a playground scuffle, what they did, pulling his suit coat up over his head like that. That’s all it was. Sandlot high jinks. OK, maybe with some head kicks thrown in and a toss down a flight or two of stairs, pile-driving his head into the concrete and like that, but still. The idea was the same. More or less harmless. So why was he seeing these guys up there like they were dead and buried, spooking him up like pure A-1 haints? Harry hit the brakes. A car swerved around him, a ’39 Merc. They couldn’t be haints. On account of Reuther and Frankensteen were still kicking. Living grand, in fact, high on the hog, now that they got their precious union, their grubby little two-dollar raise. They’d roughed them up, sure, but roughing up wasn’t rubbing out. How could a guy haint you if you never hardly touched him? Those guys. Crying to the press, showing off their bloody dress shirts like they were some sort of battle flags . . . rotten Commie fink bastards. Not only getting him chewed out by Mr. Ford for mishandling it, but chewed out by his ma too, who had seen it in Time and actually said she was “surprised” at his behavior. He tried to tell her they’d started it, that they’d been trespassing on company property, making a big show, wanting to be seen walking the grounds, to let the monkeys inside know they were out there, ready to stir up trouble, and probably to hand out pamphlets. But his ma said that Time said that wasn’t true. Time said the Ford men and the Dearborn deputies started it, and that they’d also knocked around some “ladies.” He choked back a laugh at this. You don’t hang around with

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Jew agitators and smoke in public and wear a beret like some sort of godless bed warmer for Uncle Joe Stalin and meanwhile also pull off “lady,” but that’s not what she meant. She meant they’d grabbed a couple of the gals and knocked them around. He denied it till he was blue in the face, but his ma knew better, and by the time he’d left her sitting room, she’d upgraded her “surprised” at him to being “very disappointed” in him. She’d never quite put it like that before. She was tired and old. And easily confused. What the blazes did she know about labor-management negotiations? Still, it stung, having your own dear old ma take the side of Time magazine. It could kind of eat away at a fella, a thing like that. Didn’t she understand that however he set out, whatever the plan had once been, things had sort of slipped away from him? A person can sometimes get a big break—like meeting Mr. Ford right after a big street fight, for example—and they’re offered a thing and they just go with it, thinking, Why not? We’ll see, and before they know it, it’s their life and they’ve maybe kind of lost their way. Cars behind him were honking now and he saw Reuther was pointing at him, dripping all over the stairs. “You just damned yourself, Harry Bennett,” he shrieked through bloody teeth. “You just damned yourself good!” He kept going, flooring it. No way was he sleeping out here tonight. He could read the concern on Esther’s face when he got back to the Castle and explained that he’d driven all the way into Detroit, but his ma hadn’t arrived on the train. She sat straight down—flump!—fanny to couch in half a second without even taking aim.

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He gave out his theory on the situation: that Ma was still sore over the rumpus at the overpass. “Harry.” Esther was shaking her head. “Sweetheart. Imogene passed in ’36. She never lived to see that overpass unpleasantness.” In a flash, he was over there and he slapped her. After a pause, like she’d taken a moment to swallow something, she was right back, calm as a preacher. “Your mother is dead, Harry. Do you need to lie down?” “Do not nurse me here!” He found he was jabbing a finger at her, pointing at her just the way he thought he’d seen Reuther pointing at him earlier. “That is bull. What you’re saying there, that is the bunk. On account of she got very heated with me over that. She did. Said she was . . . disappointed in me.” “Over the overpass business? That was in ’37, dear.” “No, no! You’re not hearing me! You’re not listening! We had words over the Time photos, all that crap they said about us beating up women! She told me, ‘Oh dear.’ She wanted some time alone. But she’s coming back! On the train from Florida!” The parlor was very quiet. He didn’t hear any haints at the moment. Even Esther was quiet when she spoke again. “She went away after the Hunger March riots, Harry. You told me. I wasn’t here for that. That was during the reign of dear old wife number two, but I know when the Hunger March was, believe me: March 1932. Yours wasn’t the only skull I bandaged that day.” He could either stand there arguing this with her and probably have to smack her in the mouth again, or he could get the hell out of there. The sun had long since set while he’d been yakking with the

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Mrs., but the moon was out, big and bright as a searchlight. He couldn’t recall if the cats were loose tonight. There was supposed to be a schedule. Out back, the grass was wet and long and he strode to her little house and rapped on her door. It was dark inside and there was no answer. He let himself in, whispering that it was just him, Ma, just Harry. He couldn’t get the lights to work but could make out, in the moonlight shafting in, chairs draped in sheets and what looked like the old patio set. They were storing stuff in there now? Since when? It looked like there was part of a hammock stand and a stepladder and a croquet set . . . He could picture breaking someone’s hands with a big wooden mallet once, the bones cracking like a lobster dinner, the blood spraying back on him, ruining his bow tie. He couldn’t remember the face, but the hands he could see now better than the face of his own mother. He couldn’t remember if it had been a croquet mallet or what. But this here—this was all wrong. He needed to lam it. Right now. No time for cars and conversations. He could smell the river, that upchuck algae smell, and heard its lapping and the shush, upstream, of the Dixboro dam. He heard movement in the grass. And a single cluck: those reincarnated chickens. Had to be. It was possible, he supposed, that there weren’t any haints. Least not the kind that floated up like a vapor, gases rising from an unmarked grave, that came after you from the land beyond for payback. But either way, he had to get to the boat and get the jesus out of there. Stumbling down the hillside, he slipped in the wet grass and just went with it, not fighting it, taking the rest of the steep grade on the seat of his pants, like a lucky kid with a sled. Down in the boathouse, they kept the runabout barely

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moored, the way he preferred it, so he could cast off in a flash like this. Hopping in, he was right at the wheel, jamming on the push-start. Nothing. There had never been nothing. This was a Chris Craft, for christ’s sake. Top of the line. Still working the starter, he stretched out one leg over the side, using it to push off along the length of the dock and inch the thing out of the boathouse, at least, and set it adrift. He was out, free, but still just bobbing in the shallows, caught up against the riverbank. OK, the electric starter was broken. That was all. Some short that had been overlooked by his boys. It didn’t mean they were out to get him, in cahoots, paid off to sabotage him, set him up. It was just a scientific crap-up—moisture, electricity, maybe mechanical wear and tear . . . It wasn’t haints with wire clippers. Scrambling for the engine cover, for some rope, he was going to have to try pull-starting it off the flywheel. Over on the banks, the big cats were coming down to investigate. He yanked and yanked and slipped and gashed his hand and yanked and yanked some more. The boat sloshed and rocked beneath him, the days of his sea legs long past. Breathless, his arm about to give out, he took a quick breather, stretching his back against the strain, glancing up at the moon and over at the cats, still coming on, now about halfway down the hill, stepping slow on those great paddleshaped paws. He wished there wasn’t a moon tonight. Big bare bulb of a moon, looking down at him like that. Big know-it-all moon.

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e l i z a b e t h k o s t ov a thin air

If the boys’ activity camp hadn’t been cancelled for that day, I wouldn’t have taken them to Greenfield Village, but it was. It’s not a fancy operation, that camp; Parks & Rec runs it out of a community-center basement. Melanie found it by looking for something cheaper than last year’s YMCA Sports & Fun Week. The idea was to give me a little time off the daily grind. I told her I didn’t need that, but she knew I did and signed them up anyway. On Thursday, the fourth of my five precious days to myself, a water main broke and flooded the communitycenter basement. Melanie had already left for work when they called us. Jonny said it served the camp right for being in a basement. Robert cried and said the flood had probably washed away a

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mural they had painted the day before. I said quickly that we would go to Greenfield Village and ride the merry-go-round, even though I knew it would cost as much as a week at camp. We hadn’t been there in a long time, but that was what came into my head, and I promised it to them before I thought about the expense. Which is unlike me, in all fairness to myself. We drove into Dearborn by way of the interstate. I parked in the big lot and we bought tickets and got our hands stamped, which Robert didn’t like—he said it hurt—and went in through the turnstile. It was already too hot to be doing this, at ten in the morning. I put my hat on and made the boys put on theirs, to protect them from sunstroke and skin cancer. When you’re with children, there are so many things to protect them from. In fact, I hadn’t been to Greenfield Village in several years. I used to go as a kid, with my school, and then Mel and I took the boys once or twice when they were really little. I had nice memories of that, nothing shocking or sad or supernatural, until this day off from camp; in fact, we have a couple of photos of the boys in a horse-drawn wagon, Jonny on my lap and Robert still in a little sling across Melanie’s front. Those pictures actually hang in our front hall, and when we had to move to the apartment, I rehung them by the front door. Amazing how much older five years can make you, I always think when I notice myself in those photos. Today the boys looked tall and stringy and independent, running ahead of me across the railroad tracks and climbing up the fence at the horse barn. They were the ones who had changed most, of course, not us. I bought a bunch of tickets that would let us ride the antique cars, the wagons, the omnibus, and whatever else we could get on besides the merry-goround, enough to kill two hours until we could have hot dogs and ice cream and see the indoor museum and then go home.

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By two it would be too hot to stay outside, unless I wanted to give us all heatstroke, even with the hats. The smell coming out of the front of the horse barn was kind of pleasant, and I was thinking we could stay there a while longer when one of those classic Village Model Ts pulled up next to us. It was black, polished to a blinding shine, and the driver was dressed up to look like the right period, an old man with slicked-back white hair, not much of it left, and a black jacket and tie that didn’t look modern but didn’t look shabby, either. He stopped the car with a flourish, pulling some brake and adjusting the wheel expertly, waved, and opened the door for us. I whistled for the boys. “Don’t we need to give you some tickets?” I asked the driver. “Oh, don’t worry about that,” he said. He smiled—yellow teeth and blue eyes. He had that kind of face that holds together well in old age. He picked up a cap from the seat next to him and pulled it firmly on. “Your little ones will enjoy a spin and I’m about to go off duty anyway. In fact, it’s my last day here. Keep your tickets for something else.” I liked the sound of that—they hadn’t been cheap, the little passes for rides, so I hadn’t bought that many. “Thanks,” I said. “Sure thing.” He ran a hand back over his neat hair. He wasn’t sweating, like I was; he must be used to working in the heat, I thought, constantly driving around. I got the boys into the backseat and the door shut behind them and they bounced a little on the scratchy upholstery. I sat in the front seat with the old man. “Probably doesn’t feel like your family car, does it?” The driver started up an engine that didn’t exactly purr and carefully let off the brake. “It doesn’t sound like it, either,” Jonny told him. He half turned to the backseat. “No, son, it doesn’t—you’re

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right about that. But you’ll get used to it. I’m going to drive you the loop of the main square and then some, so you can get a good tour before I go off duty. Off duty forever, hallelujah.” I liked the old guy for helping us out, especially on a morning that had not been my lucky one, so far. I said, “So this is your last day on the job? Are you retiring?” “Yes, thank goodness. I’ve been working since I was fourteen. Not here, of course, but in general. Working hard, every day since then. Can you believe that? How old are you two?” He turned again to look at the boys, but only part way, responsibly, just moving his head a little so he didn’t take his eyes off the road. We were lumbering past the farmhouse where the Wright brothers grew up—I thought that was it, but I didn’t want to interrupt to ask him for information. “I’m eight,” Jonny said, as politely as I could have wished, “and my brother is five.” “I’ve got great-grandchildren your age,” the man said with a laugh. “Time I retired, don’t you think?” We all agreed. “How long have you worked here?” I asked. “Oh, this is just my last-minute job,” the man said. “I worked on the assembly line for the first thirty years or so. I was a manager after that, when they needed people during the war. Then I went back on the line, when all the real managers came home. Ford, Chevy, lots of places, all right here. I must’ve worked a hundred years. In fact, I met Mr. Ford, early on, when I was about half a grasshopper’s age. How about that, boys?” He smiled at me and shifted gears. I couldn’t quite get this chronology straight—did he mean World War II?—but I felt too tired to try, somehow, and I didn’t want to seem to ask how old he was. It was pleasant just being out of the sun and feeling the engine jerk us gently along, and I settled down in my seat.

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As long as the boys didn’t start fighting. I’d promised Mel to feed them often. But it seemed as if I should say something, so I asked, with some real interest, “Henry Ford?” “Oh, yes, the man himself. He built Michigan into what it is today. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. Even with all these problems we’re having.” The driver slowed for a crowd crossing the street in hats and sunglasses and I noticed suddenly that most of the Model Ts pulled up to a pickup point for the tourists to get into them one by one. This guy must have taken pity on us, stopping near the entrance instead. It occurred to me that we could rest in the car for as long as he wanted to drive, then do the merry-go-round for as long as the boys stayed excited about it. “What was Henry Ford like?” I asked. “Nice man, not bad, just a normal guy like you and me. Except much richer.” He laughed. “I knew all of them—Ford, Thomas Edison—you know they were big friends—Edison was an odd bird, a genius. Orville Wright—I didn’t know Wilbur so well. I knew everybody—I got around. I even knew George Washington Carver. Amazing man. And Andrew Jackson.” He gave a big smile, maybe at his own joke, and waved toward the village square, where we were turning in sight of the hodgepodge churches and cabins and a hot, dry expanse of grass. I played along for the sake of the boys. “Yeah, there’s a lot of history here, isn’t there? But I bet you’re going to miss this place. I hope they’re giving you a big party, after so many years.” “Well, we all have to retire sometime.” He didn’t look upset. “I just try not to think what it’ll be like at home, nothing to do but watch television. But when you’re a hundred and twenty, they don’t have to keep you on.” He turned and winked at me.

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The boys didn’t seem to be listening, to my disappointment, but I could tell them about this character later, what he’d actually said. “How about you? What’s your line of work?” I told him, briefly. “But I got laid off last month. I’m looking for something else, but it’s tough. Fortunately, my wife has a pretty good job. At least for now.” “Sorry to hear about that. Don’t you worry. I’ve been laid off more times than I can count on my fingers and toes. But they’ll hire you back. They always take us back sooner or later. As long as there are cars, there’ll be work in this town.” “I hope so,” I said. Now I was glad the boys weren’t listening. Jonny was trying to make Robert play Rock Paper Scissors with him. I thought about asking the driver to get their attention and tell us all about the slave quarters and the early farmhouses instead, but he’d started talking about something else. “There’s Edison’s laboratory. You been here before?” “Oh, yes,” I said. “I’ve always liked that building. Amazing it was moved here.” “Yes, indeed. From New Jersey, of course.” He braked skillfully for a crowd of children crossing at the wrong point. “We hardly got that done before Ford was on us to move something else—I don’t remember what. All the guys were fit to be tied, everybody moaning and groaning. Ford stood them all beers and macaroons—why macaroons, we asked, but that’s what it was, I remember plainly well—and he gave everyone a nickel or two raise. We did whatever he wanted, you know. He was something else. When you find your new job, I hope you get a real boss, the real thing.” “I’d kind of like to be the boss myself, someday,” I said, to lighten things up a little. “Sure—wouldn’t we all.” But he did grin at me. We’d started

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back around the long loop and everyone sat mostly quiet in the heat until we reached the other side of the square and he was pulling up near the stables again. I noticed that he was dropping us almost where he’d picked us up, not at the stand ahead where the Model Ts usually let off their passengers. “Thanks very much,” I said as he slowed, and I turned and pointed at the boys to make them say the same thing. They stirred lethargically and Jonny poked Robert with his elbow. “I said it,” Robert told him. “Didn’t I, Dad?” The old man tipped his cap to them. “Climb out carefully, young fellows. By the way, here’s a job lead for you. Call this guy, if you like. I know he’s looking for someone smart, front office. Don’t know if you like this kind of office work, but it’s worth a try. I won’t be needing it myself, praise the Lord.” “Thank you,” I said, taking the card between my thumb and forefinger. He sat smiling at me. His blue eyes were remarkably clear and bright, and his lined skin had a fresh, pleasant look to it. He hooked a thumb in the armhole of his oldfashioned vest, and I saw the band of a red suspender underneath. “You bet,” he said. He made sure I had shut my door tightly after me. “Take care of yourselves, now.” And he drove purposefully off, not turning around again. I looked at the card he’d given me. It was ivory, a little tattered, with squat capital letters for all the words. It read, dominick’s dairy, since 1896. As I watched, the words faded away under the sunlight. Like that, in a matter of seconds, disappeared. I looked quickly after the Model T, but it was gone. Gone, or had it merely merged into the line of rumbling black cars on the artificial Village streets? The man had vanished, too, like my prospects, but not like the last of my hopes. Mel would be home for dinner at six, and I was learning to make

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the kind of meatballs she liked and had always made for the rest of us when she wasn’t so busy. Robert leaned against me, sweaty, smelling like the old horsehair seats, like mothballs. I put an arm around him. It takes only one person to be nice— kind—but two to be good to each other.

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One sunny afternoon in April, not long after her release from the hospital, Susanna looked out the front window of her apartment and saw someone sitting behind the wheel of her car. She had been tidying up the living room, putting books away, straightening three-month-old New Yorkers on the coffee table. She had only glanced out the window as she stooped to snatch the television remote off the sill—how had it gotten there?— and return it to the top of the TV. Bent at the waist, her nose inches from the glass, she caught her breath at the sight of a figure—she couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman—sitting with its hands on the wheel and its face turned away from her toward the passenger seat. Then she stood up straight, clutching the remote in both hands as though she might aim it at the

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car and make the figure vanish with a press of her thumb. Oh great, she thought, you need this right now like you need . . . what? Like you need what? The parking lot was long and narrow, an oblong of cracked and stained old asphalt that emptied onto Trowbridge Road. Her little blue Chevy Prizm was parked at a right angle to the strip of matted brown lawn between the lot and the boardedup restaurant next door, and next to the Prizm was the only other car in the lot in the middle of a weekday afternoon, a red Dodge that never moved from its spot. From the grass between their front bumpers rose a youngish maple, its shadow printed on the asphalt, sharp near the trunk, blurred at the tips of its branches. The upper reaches of the tree itself were fuzzed with new buds of translucent green, while from the lowest limbs, just over the two cars, a few brown leaves still flapped like skeletal hands in the mild spring breeze. Crazed with crooked shadows, the Dodge’s sheen was dulled with a settled layer of grime and plastered here and there with dead leaves. From her own car a brilliant coin of sun glared in the rear window, making spots in Susanna’s eyes. She shifted her gaze back to the driver’s side window, hopeful that the figure she’d just seen was only the reflection of a tree limb in the glass. But then the figure twisted in its seat, turning its back to her to face the passenger side more squarely. She gasped and stepped back, squeezing the remote tightly in both hands. Then she drew a deep breath and said, “Right,” and she wheeled away from the window and stamped across the carpet. She flung open her apartment door, thumped in her bare heels down the cold concrete steps, and strode out onto the rough asphalt. This is stupid, she was thinking, even as grit pricked her bare soles. It was cold, and all she had on were a pair of exercise tights and a sweatshirt, and when was

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the last time she walked barefoot on pavement? When she was what, fourteen? Go back upstairs, she thought, lock yourself in, call the cops, but she was also thinking, no, this is what got you into trouble, this is the pattern. “Get mad at who you’re mad at,” Dr. Ghose had said, in his quiet, condescending singsong. “Direct your anger out, not in.” So, the remote clutched to her chest, she marched right up to the side of her car, stooped to the driver’s side window, and lifted her other hand to rap smartly on the glass. But the driver’s seat was empty. Susanna stooped a little lower to peer through both windows on this side. There was no one in the car. She stood up straight and let her hands drop to her sides. She was uncertain if her skin was tightening and her toes going numb because she was afraid, or just because she was cold. Then the remote control slipped from her hand and clattered against the asphalt, and she snatched it up and dashed back across the parking lot and up the stairs, muttering, “Idiot” with each jarring impact of her heels. Nice going, Nancy Drew, she thought as she scuffed the grit off her soles onto the doormat and slipped back into the warmth of her apartment. She was shaking, and she was pretty sure it wasn’t just from the cold, so she put the remote on the coffee table and sat cross-legged on the couch and closed her eyes and tried to find her center. But it didn’t help. Now I’m seeing things, she thought in the dark behind her eyelids. This’ll wow Dr. Ghose. Susanna had not driven her car since before her suicide attempt. When she added up the time—a week in intensive care while her wrists healed (three days of that in restraints, in a Nembutal fog), plus another six weeks or so in the psych facil-

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ity—she realized she hadn’t been behind the wheel for nearly two months. Tracy, her friend from work, came over three or four times a week and took Susanna out somewhere, to dinner, to a movie, to Meridian Mall, or even just for a drive out to Mason and back. After a couple of weeks of this, Susanna said one night, “Let’s take my car,” but Tracy only agreed if she could drive. Susanna sat uncomfortably in her own passenger seat, clasping her wrists in her lap to hide the scars. Check your mirrors, she wanted to say. Don’t ride the brakes. Use the damn turn signal. Not to mention that Tracy had shorter legs than Susanna, which meant that when Dr. Ghose finally gave Susanna permission to drive again, she’d have to move the seat back and readjust all the mirrors. “It’s weird,” she said, “being a passenger in your own car.” “I don’t mind driving.” Tracy hunched over the wheel like an old woman, even though she was younger than Susanna. “Anyway, you can’t just let it sit there, Suse. The battery’ll drain, the tires’ll go flat. If you don’t use the car, it’ll . . .” “Die?” Susanna took a mildly malicious pleasure in watching Tracy go speechless and turn bright red. She felt bad, so she touched Tracy’s arm, then pulled her hand away. “It’s alright, Tracy.” She clutched her wrists again. “But please don’t call me ‘Suse.’” During the first week back in her apartment, Susanna had noticed the red car parked next to hers. It was a ten-year-old Dodge Shadow with Illinois plates whose tags had expired a year ago. The tacky grime on the trunk and hood was pocked with the dried impact of raindrops, and the dusty windshield was printed with the paw prints of cats, or possibly raccoons. The car’s roof was printed with the stains of dead leaves. The side windows were nearly opaque with dirt made sticky by

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tree sap, and when Susanna finally got curious enough to cup her eyes and peer through them, she saw only empty seats and four items on the gray carpet of the foot wells: a pebbled plastic glass on its side on the front passenger’s carpet; a crumpled white sweatshirt with an unreadable logo behind the passenger seat; and, behind the driver’s seat, a tiny souvenir football from the Chicago Bears and a quarter. Crumbling drifts of last autumn’s leaves had washed up against the Dodge’s softening tires. More leaves had piled up over the vent under the windshield wipers. The car had begun to irritate her, since it always sat in the same place and never moved. It seemed to have been there all winter, before she’d gone into the hospital, but she wasn’t sure she remembered seeing it before. Of course, there was a lot of stuff she wasn’t sure she remembered from last fall, but now that she was home all day, for the time being, with little to do but read, watch TV, and stare out the window, it seemed to her that in the year she had lived in this building, she had never seen the car in another spot, never seen the car in motion, never seen anyone get into or out of the car. She wasn’t exactly sure the car had been there since she moved in, but she couldn’t remember a time when it wasn’t. She started asking her neighbors about it, when she ran into them at the mailbox or on the stairs. This required some plucking up of her nerve. Even before the hospital, she’d been the odd woman out in the building. Most of her neighbors were students at Michigan State, which meant she was at least twenty-five years older than most of them, and at least fifteen years older than the Chinese grad student who lived just below her. Most of the kids in her building were renting their first apartment, while she was living in the only place she could afford after her house was foreclosed. Every one of

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them seemed to radiate youthful vigor and heedless optimism like a wood stove, and it was very, very hard not to think that she was meeting them as they were coming up the slope of life, while she was going down. The few she’d spoken to before she tried to kill herself probably remembered her only as a woman who reminded them of their moms, or even, oh God, their grandmothers. And if they hadn’t noticed her before, the red lights of the ambulance flashing in their windows and the police cruiser spitting staticky voices into a frigid January night had no doubt made an ineradicable first impression. Now they all knew who she was, whether she liked it or not. Still, she didn’t cut herself or anybody else any slack in these recent encounters, but stood her ground and met each neighbor’s eyes with her hand at her throat. Each diffident boy she approached turned instantly and self-consciously solicitous, as if afraid that she might try to kill herself again right there in front of him, and the girls were energetic and cheerful, pitching their voices high as if Susanna was elderly and deaf as well as suicidal. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she’d say, “but do you know whose car that is under the tree?” And the boy or girl would gratefully turn away from her, wheeling his or her whole body to gaze across the parking lot. “The Chevy?” “No, that’s my car. I mean the one next to it.” “The teal one? That’s mine . . .” “No, the one right under the tree. The red car.” She’d force a smile and edge into her neighbor’s field of vision. “Illinois plates? Tires going flat?” Her neighbor’s gaze would seem to blur, then he or she would blink at her and say, “I don’t know,” or “I never really noticed it.” Or, “Why don’t you ask Allan?”

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Allan was her landlord, a bluff, energetic, sixty-something guy with the bandy legs and orangutan stoop of an old shortstop; he chugged along with knees bent and shoulders rolled forward as if he expected a grounder at any moment. He had a red face and a red bald spot enclosed by a monkish tonsure of white hair. This spring he was wearing a nylon windbreaker in dark Spartan green and scuffed running shoes and a shapeless pair of khakis cinched up under his potbelly. He talked too loud and took up too much space, and he was as skittish as a cat. Not long after Susanna came home from the hospital, he showed up one day, feigning solicitude—“Just checkin’ in, hon,” he said, as hearty as Ernie Harwell—and broadly hinted that she might be happier somewhere else, that perhaps the apartment held too painful a memory for her. Susanna was flustered to be interrupted in the middle of the DVD she was watching from her sofa—A Streetcar Named Desire—but she managed, not entirely deliberately, to balance helplessness with calculation—not unlike Blanche DuBois, in fact—wrapping herself in her comforter and wringing her hands in a way that displayed the still-red scars on her wrists (“Cut with the vein next time,” suggested one of her psych ward comrades, “not across.”). On the one hand, she managed to convey that her therapist—“Dr. Ghose?”—said that moving was one of the most stressful things you could do, while on the other, she made it clear that her current employer, the Michigan Department of Transportation, was very generous with paid medical leave and that she’d have no problem meeting her financial responsibilities. She widened her eyes at Allan, knowing that to him, if not to the children who were her neighbors, she was an attractive younger woman. “You’re still the prettiest girl I know,” was the last thing her ex had ever said to her, before he took off to Texas and stuck her with their metastasizing mortgage.

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“If I had to move right now,” she said to Allan, Blanche-ing it a bit, the woman herself paused in mid-flutter on the screen across the room, “I don’t know what I’d do.” Allan started backing toward the door immediately, holding up his big-knuckled hands and saying, “Whoa, missy, that’s not what I meant.” After he was gone, and she unpaused Vivien Leigh, she felt a little guilty at how pleased she was with herself. So that now, when she saw him stumping across the parking lot and hurried out in her slippers to ask him about the abandoned car, he was as eager to please as a nine-year-old. Even so, he blinked across the lot the same way her neighbors had, as if he didn’t even see the Dodge. “It’s not Brittney’s?” “No, I asked her,” Susanna said, not certain which of her neighbors was Brittney. “Well then, I sure don’t know,” he boomed. “I’ll check it out for you, though.” But after a week she hadn’t heard back from him. Either he didn’t bother to check, or he’d forgotten, or he found out that it belonged to someone in the building and had forgotten to tell her. She thought about calling the police or even the Illinois authorities and reading them the license number, but she never did that, either. I’ve already called enough attention to myself, she decided, for one year. She decided not to mention the abandoned car, or the phantom in her own car, to her therapist. Dr. Ghose was a native of India, which perhaps accounted for what she took to be his barely disguised disdain at the trivial problems of Americans. As he watched her with a heavy-lidded gaze that reminded her of an unusually bored and pitiless Salman Rushdie, she could practically hear him say in his posh, post-colonial drawl, “Lost

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your job, your husband, and your house, you say? Try growing up in a village in Gujarat!” All he had to offer her were the same positive-thinking bromides that Tracy volunteered until Susanna asked her to stop: Put it behind you. Don’t internalize your rage. Find something else to occupy your mind. Pull your socks up, you silly bitch. Yet still he asked her to come twice a week, and she didn’t think it was only because of whatever pittance he was getting from Blue Cross/Blue Shield. She decided that, despite his disdain, he must have settled on her as his chief informant for a research project about the inner life of the North American woman of a certain age, in return for which he regularly renewed her prescriptions for powerful antidepressants. After surprisingly little inner struggle, this arrangement began to seem like a fair exchange to Susanna. In the first session after she saw the figure in her car, he spent the entire fifty minutes asking a series of mostly irrelevant (to her) questions about her childlessness. “You have never had the desire to have children? You have never regretted not having children? Do the children of your peers evoke any response in you?” The real answers to these questions were simply, “No,” “Not once,” and “Not really,” but Susanna, happy to provide satisfaction in exchange for Paxil, vamped a bit for Dr. Ghose, even going so far as to invent a fictional child of a fictional friend who, one afternoon, had accidentally called Susanna “Mommy,” causing a fictional maternal pang in Susanna. “And you did not probe this feeling any further? It did not cause you to reconsider your choice?” “I’m forty-nine,” Susanna said, reflexively shaving a few years off her age even as she offered the doctor an artfully constructed mask of middle-age rue.

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“Interesting,” said Dr. Ghose, rubbing his temple with his long middle finger. Only at the end of the session, when he moved behind his desk to renew her prescription, did he rather absently ask if she was having any adverse reactions to the pills. “Dry mouth?” he said. “Insomnia? Upset tummy?” “Hallucinations,” Susanna said before she could stop herself. She was already sitting on the edge of her seat, with her bag perched on her knees. Tracy was waiting to take her home. Dr. Ghose’s head jerked up, his pen stilled suddenly over the prescription pad. His eyes widened. “I’m joking.” She pressed her lips together as if she were repressing a smile. “Not very funny, Susanna.” The pen continued across the pad. Dr. Ghose looked up again as he tore off the top sheet. “Of course, you would tell me if you were having hallucinations.” “Of course I would,” said Susanna. And that, Susanna resolved, was the end of it: she had driven a stake through the heart of the figure in the car, turning it into a joke. She didn’t think about it again until one morning a few days after seeing Dr. Ghose, when she was hoisting the venetian blinds in her living room window. Her mind was still numbed with sleep—she hadn’t had her coffee yet—but the sight of someone sitting once again in the driver’s seat of her car jolted her wide awake. She stood in the window in her nightgown, chilled all over, her hand raised, the cord cutting into her palm. The rattle of the blinds faded and the living room emptied of sound all at once, enclosing her in an airless silence. “There you are,” murmured Susanna, hanging onto the

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cord as if she might fall over. Now there were two figures in the car. Her apartment building was only two stories, and even in her second-story window, she was not very far off the ground. She was looking through her Prizm from a shallow angle, with a better view of the passenger seat, and there, turning to face the person in the driver’s seat, was another shadowy figure. Through the morning glare in her living room window and the long, bony shadow of the tree, Susanna could not make out any features of this new figure; all she could tell was that it had lifted its arm toward the driver. And the driver had turned slightly to face the passenger, without taking its hands from the steering wheel. Susanna let go of the cord and the blinds crashed down, the vanes clattering against the glass. She drew a deep breath and pressed her hand to her mouth. Then she pried a gap in the vanes with her fingers and peered into the sunlight again. At the far end of the parking lot, morning traffic crawled toward campus along Trowbridge Road, making the scene seem perfectly ordinary. But the figures were still there in her car, both of them; now the driver had taken its hands off the wheel, holding them palm outward between the seats, as if saying to the passenger, hold it right there, pal. “Damn,” said Susanna. “Damn it all.” She stalked into her bedroom and sat on her unmade bed and stubbed her feet into her running shoes and tied them tight. Then she started out, stopped, and went back to snatch her key ring off the dresser. Her car keys weren’t on it—Tracy had those—but she had her apartment key and a couple of work keys and the key to the house she’d lost in Okemos. The metal frame of the stairwell thrummed as she trotted down the concrete steps, and as she marched out into the early chill of the day, she worked the blades of the keys between her fin-

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gers the way they taught her in rape defense class, ready to gouge a piece out of some son of a bitch if she had to. The low morning sun glared through the bare branches of the tree as she reached her car, and she hooked the fingers of one hand under the cold door latch and cocked the other, bristling with keys, over her shoulder. But the door was still locked, and by jerking the handle Susanna only yanked herself up against the car. She staggered back, her fist full of keys still poised, and bent slowly to look in the window. The car was empty. She swung her gaze from the dash to the backseat, leaning to one side and then the other to peer around the headrests. No one was in the car; she could practically smell the chill, undisturbed dank of the Prizm’s interior. She turned suddenly, grinding grit into the asphalt under her shoe. She wasn’t alone—the rush hour traffic was backed up at the light where Trowbridge met Harrison Road—but she felt like she was the only person in sight. She looked back up at the blank blinds in her living room window and felt a sudden chill. What if the vanes were pried apart by fingers and she saw a pair of eyes peering down at her? But the blinds hung perfectly still, and the chill pierced her skin, reminding her that she was standing out in front of two lanes of commuters in her nightgown. She ran her hand through her uncombed hair, feeling itchy, like she always did before she showered. She glanced across her Prizm to the abandoned Dodge, narrowing her eyes to try to penetrate the grime on the window. Why can’t you be haunted? she thought. But all she saw in the window was her own slightly crazy reflection, so she groaned and started back across the parking lot in her nightgown and running shoes. Just outside the stairwell, a fat orange tabby sprawled on its side on top of a neighbor’s pickup truck, its

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chin pressed into the folds around its neck, its eyes half closed, watching Susanna insolently. “What are you looking at?” she snapped, and the cat skidded down the windshield and disappeared around the corner of the building. After work that afternoon, Tracy came over to take Susanna to dinner. They watched the first half of Hardball first—even though Susanna couldn’t stand Chris Matthews—to give the rush hour traffic a chance to thin out. Tracy sat all the way back in Susanna’s Ikea chair, her toes just brushing the carpet, and she stared out the window more than she watched the screen. Susanna silently debated mentioning to Tracy the figures she’d seen in her car, and decided against it. At seventhirty, while Chris Matthews kept barking interruptions at some poor woman, Tracy scooped her keys into her palm and stood and said, “It won’t be too bad now. Let’s take your car. I’ll drive.” They got right on the freeway at the end of Trowbridge and headed for the west side of Lansing. Tracy never took Susanna east, toward Okemos, probably for fear that mere proximity to her foreclosed home would drive her to slit her wrists again over supper. Halfway to the restaurant—Bob Evans again—Susanna said, “Tracy, have you been sitting in my car?” “I’m sitting in your car right now.” Susanna rolled her eyes. “I know that, thank you. I mean . . . have you ever come over and sat in my car?” “Why would I do that?” “I don’t know.” Bad idea, Susanna thought. “Forget it.” “Did you see someone sitting in your car?” Tracy took her eyes off the road to glance at Susanna.

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“No. It was just a reflection or something.” “Suse, did you see someone sitting in your car? Did you call the police?” “Tracy, forget it. It was just a shadow or something. It was dark.” For God’s sake, don’t tell her it was broad daylight. “Susanna!” “Forget it. Will you watch the road, please?” As a way to divert Tracy’s attention from the topic, Susanna suggested they go someplace other than Bob Evans, and despite some passive-aggressive grumbling from Tracy—“Will they have anything I like?”—they ended up at a Lebanese place Susanna knew of out on West Saginaw. The change of routine threw Tracy, and as she ventured warily into the brave new world of kafta kabobs and falafel, all she talked about during the meal was the strange food in front of her. “What’s this?” she asked, poking her fork into the hummus. Susanna was relieved, because as grateful as she tried to be for Tracy’s help, Susanna had never worked up the nerve to tell Tracy how uninterested she was in gossip about work. Emboldened by the little bit of control she’d wrested back, Susanna decided to try something else on the freeway back to her apartment. “Dr. Ghose and I have been talking about getting my car keys back,” she said. It was a lie, and it wouldn’t be hard for Tracy to check. “The one you have,” Susanna went on, before Tracy could speak, “is that a copy, or is it my actual key?” Tracy pointedly watched the road. “He hasn’t said anything to me.” The arrangement was, Susanna had waived doctorpatient confidentiality on this one topic, and Dr. Ghose would let Tracy know when Susanna could have her key back. “Well, we haven’t decided anything yet. It’s that at some point I’ll need it back.”

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Tracy worked her jaw as if trying out phrases. “I’m happy to drive you anywhere, Suse.” Don’t call me that. “What if I need to go somewhere?” “Where? You’re not planning to come back to work yet, are you?” “For crying out loud, Tracy, to the market. To the, to the video store.” “Don’t you have Netflix?” “For God’s sake, Tracy.” “I can take you anywhere you want to go. I can bring you anything you need.” “What if there’s an emergency? What if the dam breaks?” “The dam? What dam?” “I don’t know. It’s a figure of speech.” “I don’t know what dam you’re talking about.” “Tracy, it’s my car.” “Of course it is.” There was another long pause as Tracy worked her jaw again. “I just want you to be careful.” “Why wouldn’t I be careful?” “What about that woman in Grand Ledge?” “What woman?” “You know, the carjacking thing.” “What carjacking thing?” “Maybe you don’t know about it.” Tracy gave her a selfconsciously mournful look. “It happened while you were in the hospital.” Susanna threw up her hands. “This woman in Grand Ledge was abducted?” Tracy said. “In broad daylight? Well, she was from Chicago, actually, but he took her right out of the Meijer’s parking lot.” “He? Who’s he?” “The carjacker? You really didn’t see this? They had a sur-

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veillance video of some guy getting into her car.” “What happened?” “They never found her. Or her car.” “What about the guy?” “They never found him, either. He was too far away from the camera to identify.” Tracy dropped her voice theatrically. “They’re pretty sure she’s . . .” “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Susanna. “I don’t need to hear it.” Now they were gliding off the freeway onto Trowbridge Road and slowing for the turn into her parking lot. “I still want my key back,” she said, sounding childishly sullen even to herself. Then, as Tracy started to pull into the usual parking space next to the Dodge, Susanna said sharply, “Hold it.” Tracy braked, and they both lurched forward against their seatbelts. “Did I hit something?” Tracy squeezed the wheel with both hands. “No. Just don’t park under the tree.” She pointed across the lot, to an empty spot right under her living room window. “Park there.” “Why? Don’t you always park under the tree?” “Tracy, please. Just do it.” “Are you sure?” “Tracy!” “Alright.” Tracy cringed and swung into the spot and turned off the car. As she reached between the seats for her purse in the backseat, Susanna snatched the keys out of the ignition and got out of the car. “Susanna!” Tracy leaned across the seat and looked out the passenger door at Susanna, then she opened her own door and struggled out, watching Susanna wide-eyed across the roof of the car. “I’m calling Dr. Ghose!” “Tell him I said hi.” Susanna grimaced at the pressure on

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her fingernail as she pried apart Tracy’s ring to remove her key. When she had it, she tossed the ring of keys across the car. Tracy flinched and missed them, then stooped to pick them up off the asphalt. “Susanna, please,” she said as she stood up again. Susanna slipped the ring into her purse, and she tried to stare Tracy down over the roof of the car, even though all she could see was Tracy’s silhouette against the headlights of cars on Trowbridge Road. Finally Tracy said, “Just promise me you won’t go anywhere after dark.” Susanna sighed silently in relief and hoped that Tracy hadn’t noticed. “I thought you said the woman was taken in broad daylight.” “Just promise me,” said Tracy. Before she went to bed that night, Susanna turned out all the lights in her apartment and opened the living room blinds. The restaurant next door had been closed since before Susanna moved in, but the shopping center beyond it still had a few active businesses, and its empty parking lot was lit by a sickly yellowish glare from the sodium lights. The light shone through the new leaves on the maple and gleamed in the hoods of the cars in the parking lot of her building, even the abandoned Dodge, but none of it seemed to reach across the parking lot to her Chevy. Her own car was full of shadows, but she could still make out the empty seats, the top of the dashboard, the empty cup holder that she never used. She left the blinds open and went to bed. She was wakened in the middle of the night by a crashing thunderstorm. A particularly bright flash made her open her eyes, and a hollow rumble that shook the whole building made her sit up in bed. The green numbers of the clock on the

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dresser said 3:20. She flung back the covers and jumped up, wide-awake now, and she pried open her bedroom blinds. No rain was falling yet, but the maple tree was thrashing in a powerful wind. She went into the living room and edged up to the side of the window, clutching her elbows. The dark mass of limbs twisted and groaned against the glare of the lights next door. Then a brilliant flash bleached the parking lot, and for an instant every flailing leaf of the tree was etched in brilliant black and white. The thunder an instant later came up through Susanna’s bare feet, rattling the glass and making her jump. As the lightning faded, she peered straight down into the windshield of the Prizm. Her car was full of light, but it wasn’t lightning, or the dome light. All around the car was darkness and wind, but inside, the car was full of daylight slanting at a steep angle, picking out the dust on the dashboard, throwing a bright crescent into each of the cup holders. Two figures sat in the car, the driver and the passenger. The line of the roof along the top of the windshield cut them off at their collarbones, so Susanna could not see their faces, but both figures were moving. The passenger gesticulated at the figure in the driver’s seat, and the driver lifted her hands off the wheel and seemed to be pounding her temples. The passenger flung himself back in his seat and pressed his palms against the dashboard. As he did, a white arm reached between the seats, out of the backseat, and Susanna gasped. A third figure! she thought, unable to catch her breath. Then lightning flashed again, and the windshield was blanked out, the empty seats illuminated in the bleaching glare. Susanna threw her hand up over her eyes and recoiled from the window, but as the light died and thunder rattled the glass, she peeked between her fingers to see the windshield full of daylight again. The passenger was flailing in his seat,

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his hands still propped against the dash. The driver crossed her arms over her chest, clawing at her elbows. “Oh, God,” moaned Susanna, and she stumbled through the dark to her bedroom and plunged her hand into her purse, feeling for her car key. To her astonishment, her fingers closed around it right away, and as another flash lit up her bedroom, even through the blinds, she saw herself in the mirror, whiteskinned and wild-eyed, clutching the key in her fist. “I’m scarier than you are!” she almost shouted, and she ground her heel into the carpet and marched to her apartment door, twisting open the deadbolt and yanking on the knob. The cold wind blowing up the stairwell pressed against her as she started barefoot down the stairs. In the parking lot no rain was falling, but the wind blew her hair over her eyes and into her mouth and pressed her nightgown between her legs. Another flash blinded her momentarily, but in the dying light she pushed back her hair with one hand and slipped the key into the lock on the first try, hauling the door open against the wind and sliding behind the steering wheel. She yanked the door shut with a definitive thunk, and she sat panting behind the wheel with the key thrust like a blade between her thumb and forefinger. The wind battered the car, and she heard the oceanic rush of the tree behind her. She looked at the empty passenger seat next to her, listening to the hoarse gasp of her own breath in the upholstered silence of car. She twisted around and looked into the backseat, at the limp seatbelts snaking across the seat. “OK,” she said, and she thrust the key into the ignition and started the car. She hesitated for a moment with her hand on the gearshift, then adjusted her mirrors, right, left, and center, from Tracy’s settings; she reached between her knees and slid the seat all the way back. Then, as fat raindrops began to slap

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against the windshield, she made a Y in the parking lot, reversing out of the spot under her window and pulling in again under the lashing tree, next to the grimy old Dodge. The pouring rain glazed the windows, blurring the view. She sat for a moment, watching the drops pucker the blur, then glanced once more at the passenger seat and into the backseat. No one was there. Then she shut off the engine, yanked up the parking brake, and opened the door. The wind nearly wrenched it out of her hands, and she was drenched immediately as she got out of the car, her nightgown plastered to her skin. As the rain sizzled against the asphalt and the roof of the car, she locked the door and lifted the latch to make sure it was locked, then lifted the latch again, just to be certain. Then she splashed across the parking lot and up the stairway, the wind pushing her from behind. Inside, she pushed the door shut against the wind, then stood pinching the soaking flannel away from her belly, dripping water on the carpet. She pressed her wet hair back from her forehead with both hands. The living room window blazed with light again, the floor rumbled. She went to the window and lowered the blinds without looking into the parking lot, the cord cutting into her palms. The blinds were still rattling as she stormed off to bed. In the morning she hauled up the blinds again as soon as she got up. The sky was a scrubbed, windless blue. Morning sunlight slanted through the trees; fresh green leaves and a few leafy twigs lay among the glassy patches of water on the parking lot. Her car sat under the tree, in shadow. There was no one in it. Beside it, the Dodge seemed to be as grimy as ever, despite the storm. Tracy called her at eight-thirty, right after she got to work, no doubt. “My lord, did that storm wake you up last night?”

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“What storm?” Susanna said. “You didn’t hear it?” Tracy said. “I can’t believe you didn’t hear it.” “Slept like a baby. Like a log. Like a dead donkey.” Tracy sort of laughed. She never could tell whether Susanna was being funny or not. Then, out of the blue, she said, “Hon, you didn’t take your car out after I dropped you off last night, did you?” “No,” said Susanna. “Really?” “Oh wait, I did some street racing on Michigan Avenue. I kicked some frat boy’s ass.” “You’re not ready yet, Suse. I worry about you.” “Tracy, knock it off. I didn’t go anywhere.” There was a long pause, and Susanna could hear Tracy breathing. She could hear other voices in the office. “The car wasn’t parked this morning where we left it,” Tracy said. This wasn’t a surprise to Susanna. She knew Tracy checked up on her; once or twice she’d even seen her Subaru creeping slowly by on Trowbridge Road. Even so, it made her angry. “Jesus Christ, Tracy! I moved it last night, during the storm, OK? Is that all right with you?” “I thought you said you slept through the storm.” Susanna sighed. “I’m going to have to tell Dr. Ghose.” “Tell him whatever you want! It’s my fucking car!” “And I’m coming by to drive you to see him this afternoon.” “Did you hear what I said? I can drive myself.” “I’ll be there at two fifteen.” Susanna groaned. She was exhausted. “Whatever,” she said.

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— “You seem more nervous than usual,” said Dr. Ghose. As she sat with her legs crossed in his expensive but vulgar leather chair—Dr. Ghose had Hugh Hefner’s sense of decor— Susanna was suddenly aware that the toe of her shoe was jiggling in the air, so she stopped it. This, of course, only made her more self-conscious, so to cover it, she said, “I’m bored.” Dr. Ghose arched his eyebrow. “Am I boring you?” “Wait a minute,” Susanna said. “What’s that mean, ‘more nervous than usual?’” “Am I boring you?” “I’ve had a bad couple of nights.” “Bad. You mean . . .” “Bad. I couldn’t sleep.” Dr. Ghose massaged his temple with the tip of his middle finger. Now he looked bored. “That could be a side effect of the Paxil.” “How about bad dreams?” “What is it, then? Are you having insomnia or are you having bad dreams?” “I can’t have both? I’m a complicated woman, Doc. I have a rich interior life.” “Are you jousting with me, Susanna?” Her leg was beginning to ache with the tension of holding it still, so to hell with it, she thought, and started jiggling her toe again. “I took my car keys back from Tracy,” she said. “I know.” Susanna sighed. “Of course you do.” “I don’t like the way you took them back. It shows misdirected hostility.” Susanna shrugged.

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“But it also indicates a yearning to take control again,” said Dr. Ghose, “to be in charge of your own life.” “Either that,” said Susanna, “or I’m just tired of seeing other people behind the wheel of my car.” Dr. Ghose frowned. Oops, she thought. “How’s that working out?” said Dr. Ghose. Susanna sighed, to cover her relief that he hadn’t picked up on what she’d just said. She gave him a grin and waggled her thumb toward the door, indicating Tracy in the waiting room on the other side, perched on the edge of her chair, sullen and triumphant. When Susanna had come down the stairs into her parking lot at two, Tracy was already parked next to her Prizm, watching Susanna come as she lowered her window. Before Tracy could speak, Susanna had handed her the keys. “Sancho Panza’s waiting for me,” she said now. But after the session, in the tense walk across the doctor’s parking lot to the car, Tracy silently handed Susanna her car key. “You sure?” said Susanna. Tracy looked heartbroken, and Susanna caught her trying not to glance back at the window of Dr. Ghose’s office. “You drive,” Tracy said. “You’re ready.” The following day, Susanna was unable to settle on anything all morning. She sat in her bathrobe, scowling at The View until she switched it off in a rage. “Do they really think we’re that stupid?” she yelled at the set. She picked up a book and then flung it down after only ten minutes in the Ikea chair. She vacuumed the living room carpet and quit when she came to the bedroom. She washed the plates in the sink, but not the silverware. She made herself a tuna sandwich for lunch and ate half of it.

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Whatever she was doing—fuming at the TV, assaulting the carpet with the vacuum, banging her dishes in the sink—every few minutes she stopped and went to the window. Each time she saw no one in her car, and each time she got a little more frustrated, until she was groaning aloud as she turned away. At last she flopped on the couch and stared out the window. From the couch, all she could see was the top of the tree against the broad, blue sky. Ordinarily, it was a lovely, restful sight, the only really nice thing about her crummy apartment, and for the first few weeks after she got out of the hospital, Susanna had done little but lie and watch the way the light limned the bare branches. But now, as she lay tensely on the couch, the tree pleased her less and less, and after a few minutes it began to seem less peaceful and more brooding and watchful. Here and there she saw faces in the new leaves, patterns of light and shadow that formed open jaws and deep-set dark eyes and aggressive cheekbones. One whole section of the tree, a lower quadrant, seemed fleetingly, as the light took it, to form the face of a giant, open-mouthed clown, all in green, lunging at her through the window. She groaned again and mashed the heels of her hands into her eyes. Then she jumped up and dropped the blinds, and she paced up and down the living room. “Oh brother,” she said to herself. “Oh brother.” At last she went into the bedroom and changed into a sleeveless dress. She tried on three pairs of shoes before she settled on her sandals, and she stood at the sink in the bathroom and scrubbed her face. She brushed her hair and tied it back. She went back into the bedroom and stuffed her wallet and her keys and her sunglasses into her purse. She went back into the bathroom and put on some lipstick. She went out to the living room window and hoisted the blinds. In the leafy afternoon shadow under the tree, she saw

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three figures in the car, all in motion. The driver waving her palms in the air, the passenger reaching between his knees, and the third figure, a gray silhouette in the rear window, lunging forward, between the seats. “Ah!” breathed Susanna. She must have been tight, because she felt her shoulders relax and all her joints loosen. She turned away from the window and left the apartment, slapping down the stairs in her sandals, slapping across the cracks and stains in the parking lot. She knew the dress was too summery—the air still held a hint of winter, goose-pimpling her upper arms—but to hell with it, she was going to dress for the day she wanted, not the day she had. She unlocked the Prizm and opened the door, but before she got in, she paused to look across the top of the car at her reflection in the dark, grimy window of the Dodge. “I want you gone by time I get back,” she told the car. “I’m tired of looking at you.” Then she slid into the warmth of her own car, behind the wheel. She put the key in the ignition and started the car; she punched the heat and cranked up the blowers, feeling the musty air turn warm against her scrubbed cheeks. She looked once around the empty car, back and front, then tilted the rearview mirror to look at herself. “Where shall we go?” she said. Following the path of least resistance, at first she drove automatically up the long, grassy trench of the freeway through downtown, pleasantly numbed by the deadening rhythm of her tires thumping over the joints in the road. She got off impulsively at Waverly Road and ended up at the Meijer’s on West Saginaw. The lot was half empty, but she parked a long way away from the store anyway, and told herself she was enjoying the walk in the brisk air. There had been surprisingly

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little traffic, she’d hit all the lights just right, nobody cut her off. I’m driving again, she thought, feeling light as a ballerina as she stepped into the glare of the supermarket. She came out twenty minutes later with a lot of food she didn’t really need, a family pack of chicken parts, ten clinking bottles of lemon-flavored Perrier, the first tin of kippered herring she’d bought in fifteen years. She felt light-headed, almost tipsy, and noted it with the diffident clarity of a drunk. It’s because I’m on my own, she told herself, I’m out and about on my own for the first time in weeks and weeks and weeks. As if from a distance, she watched herself maneuver the squeaking shopping cart all the way across the half-empty lot in the brittle springtime sunlight, hauling it to a stop next to the passenger side of the car. She unlocked the front door and reached in to unlock the rear door. Lifting the straining plastic bags two at a time into the backseat, she thought, I’m fine, I’m in control. I can turn the world on with my smile. She manhandled the cart toward the nearest cart corral and gave it a little shove, thinking gaily, go find your friends. She tipped her sunglasses onto her nose and strode, sandals slapping, back to her car. Her arms were cold, but so what? I’m all by myself, I’m moving under my own steam. She unlocked the driver’s door, watching her bug-eyed reflection in the window. She slid behind the wheel and, as she slammed the door after her, the passenger door opened and a scruffy young man slid into the seat and pointed a handgun at her, keeping it low, down around his waist. She didn’t see his face at all, or what he was wearing, only the silvery pistol with its oily sheen and the cavernous black hole of its muzzle. “Start the car,” said the man. She couldn’t think of a thing to say to him. She could scarcely

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breathe, at first. Once they left the parking lot, he told her to get on the freeway, and she managed to say, “Which way?” They were approaching a wide green sign that showed left for Lansing, right for Grand Rapids. “Right,” he said. “North.” She glanced at him as she pulled onto the ramp, and he nudged her in the ribs with the gun. “Watch the road,” he said. “Don’t look at me.” All she’d seen was a gaunt young man with wide cheekbones and a blunt nose; she could smell him sweating. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him punch the heat and turn the blower on high. She merged into the northbound traffic ahead of a semi and gunned the accelerator to keep ahead of it, and the man nudged her again with the gun. “Not too fast,” he said. The heat was blowing right in her face. She realized she was still wearing her purse over her shoulder and she lifted it off. “What are you doing?” The man’s voice went up in pitch. “Take it.” She dropped it in his lap. “There’s two hundred dollars in cash.” Actually, there wasn’t, and she wished she’d said five hundred. “There’s credit cards. I haven’t seen you yet.” “Shut up.” She heard him push the purse to the floor. She reached over her shoulder and yanked on the seatbelt. “What are you doing now?” His voice shot up in pitch again. “I’m putting on my seatbelt,” she said. “If you don’t like it, shoot me.” “Goddammit, don’t drive so fast.” Susanna glanced at the speedometer; the needle hovered at eighty. She tried to take a deep breath, but her diaphragm was too tight. She eased back on the accelerator, but the needle

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stayed at eighty. Through the windshield she saw the trees on either side of the freeway gliding by. She watched the semi slip behind her. The engine of her little car was straining. I’m not here, she thought. This isn’t happening to me. I’m watching this on television. “I mean it.” The man pushed the gun hard into her side. “Slow down.” The AC button popped in of its own accord, and with surprising speed the blowers started pouring cool air into Susanna’s face. The man cursed and released the button, and it popped in again. The interior of the car was turning arctic, even colder than the air outside had been. “Stop that,” he said. “How are you doing that?” “I’m not doing anything.” Cracked and patched pavement flashed under the hood of the car. At the last second Susanna swerved left out of the middle lane in front of another car, to avoid rear-ending a pickup truck. Squealing brakes and the blare of a horn dopplered away behind her. The grass of the median was streaking by just beyond her window. She took her foot completely off the gas and laid it gingerly on the brake pedal. She scarcely dared to take her eyes off the road, but she dropped them for an instant to the speedometer. Ninety, it said. “I’ll do you a favor.” The young man’s voice climbed to a whine. “Pull over and let me out.” They were coming up hard on a minivan in the left lane. The Prizm’s engine was roaring. Susanna pushed down on the brake pedal and nothing happened. She tried to swerve into the middle lane, but the wheel wouldn’t budge. The car jammed right up behind the minivan, inches away from its rear bumper, and the van swerved into the middle lane, horn blaring. The Chevy thundered past, its engine screaming, and Su-

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sanna heard horn after horn squalling behind her. She glanced in the rearview mirror to see what chaos she was leaving in her wake, and saw instead a woman with a white face sitting in her backseat. “I’m putting down the gun.” The young man’s voice was trembling. “Look. Here it goes.” The pistol went clunk between his feet. “Stop the car.” The speedometer needle trembled past a hundred miles per hour. Susanna felt as if she were floating in her seat, watching something happening far, far below. She didn’t even know her car could go this fast. She almost felt like laughing. A sign flashed by ordering them to merge right, the lane was ending, and the wheel lurched under Susanna’s grip; the car plunged across two lanes and back again as horns howled in its wake. Susanna stomped on the brake and nothing happened. The center line strobed under the car. The cars and trucks on the other side of the median were as tiny and immobile as Matchbox toys, just sitting there. In the northbound lanes, cars dived onto the verge, and elephantine semis shuddered in the Chevy’s slipstream. “I’m begging you, ma’am.” The man was yanking desperately at his shoulder belt, trying to jam the metal hook into the slot. “You’ll kill us both!” The car shuddered, the wind battered the windshield. They had somehow rounded a curve without flying off the road and were streaking west now, past blurred grass and newly leafed trees. A bubble rose painfully up Susanna’s windpipe, and she took her hands off the wheel. “You crazy bitch!” shouted the man. “What are you doing?” He lunged for the wheel and was jerked back into his seat as if someone had grabbed him by the collar. Susanna squeezed her eyes shut and pounded her temples

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with her fists and screamed as loud as she could. She whirled on the carjacker and was pulled up short by her seatbelt. The young man, wild-eyed and shining with sweat, threw up his hands defensively. She spread her fingers wide in front of his face. “Idiot!” she shouted. “It’s not me driving!” “What the fuck are you talking about?” he cried from behind his hands. He was shuddering all over. “Then who’s driving?” “It’s her,” Susanna said, and she dug her fingers into his jaw and twisted his face toward the white-faced woman in the backseat. The man screamed and struck Susanna’s hands away; he hauled the shoulder belt across his chest and jammed the hook into the slot. The steering wheel twisted on its own in front of Susanna, and the car thundered across the shoulder at ninety miles an hour, bounded through the fence beside the road, and charged across a grassy field toward a tall maple in full leaf. Susanna and the carjacker were bounced painfully against the ceiling and the doors, held down only by their shoulder belts. Suddenly the bouncing stopped, and the car was sailing clear off the ground, straight for the tree. The carjacker stiffened in his seat, his eyes rolling white; he ground his palms into the dash, bracing himself. “I’m sorry!” he shrieked. The trunk of the tree was impossibly close, every cranny and whorl of its bark etched in brilliant sunlight. A white arm reached between the seats and popped the button on the carjacker’s seatbelt. All the air was sucked out of Susanna as the hood of the car buckled against the tree and the airbag bloomed in her face, and at the last instant she thought she felt a pair of arms, freezing and electric, slide around her from behind and clasp her to her seat.

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— After Susanna was out of intensive care, Dr. Ghose admitted her into the psych facility again. He doubled the dosage of her antidepressants, and Susanna floated in a deadening, pinkish haze. She knew she had visitors, but she could never remember in what order they visited her. She remembered Tracy sitting by her bed, weeping and squeezing Susanna’s hand in both of hers. “I blame myself, Suse,” she said. “I never should have let you have the key.” “What key?” Susanna remembered saying. She also remembered Dr. Ghose sitting in the corner of the room, just beyond her toes. “The police believe the carjacker grabbed the wheel,” he said. “But I know better, Susanna.” He massaged his temple with his middle finger. “And so we start again from the beginning.” She remembered a long, staccato session with a woman from the Michigan State Police. “Your passenger didn’t make it, ma’am. You know him?” “No.” “You ever see him before?” “No.” “We found a gun in the wreckage. That yours?” “No.” “He threaten you with it?” “Yes.” “He make you drive that fast?” “No.” “You do it to scare him?” “No.” “He drive that car into the tree, or did you?” “Wasn’t me.” “I don’t understand, ma’am,” said the officer.

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“Join the club,” said Susanna. Then, another session, maybe earlier, maybe later, with a different officer. “He mention anybody else to you?” “No.” “Woman from Grand Ledge, maybe?” “No.” “He didn’t say anything about her?” “No.” “Where she might be?” “No.” “Did he mention what he might have done with her car?” “No.” Then, impulsively, Susanna said, “What kind of car did she drive?” “Why do you ask?” said the officer. “No reason.” The officer consulted his notebook and said, “Ninety-six Dodge Shadow, fire-engine red. Illinois plates. That ring any bells?” Susanna shook her head. “Why’d you ask?” he said. “No reason.” At last, after four more weeks of listening to idiots whine in group, and hours of pointless conversation with Dr. Ghose— “You can fool the police, Susanna, but you can’t fool me”— Susanna let Tracy ferry her home and help her up the stairs. Tracy would gratefully have spent all afternoon with Susanna, but finally Susanna ushered her out and promised to call every day. When Tracy was gone, she sat on the couch and stared out the window at the tree floating in the breeze, and after an hour of that, she pushed herself up and hopped without her crutches to the window. She propped herself against it, her

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fingers splayed against the glass. The abandoned car was gone; a green pickup truck was parked in the shady spot under the tree. When she called Allan to ask him about the Dodge, he said he didn’t remember it. And when she asked her neighbors about the car, at the mailbox or on the stairs, no one remembered there ever being a car like that in the parking lot at all.

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nicholas delbanco p i e r r oa d

Some years ago my wife and I bought a home in western Michigan, just north of the Indiana border. The building was, as real-estate agents say, a fixer-upper, in sore need of TLC. Bulldozers hovered nearby. It would have been simple enough to raze the thing and start anew—but we restored the old farmhouse, had it stripped and repaired and sanded and painted and, after a year’s worth of work, took possession. It’s mostly a place to escape to; we go there when we can. Eight hundred feet from Lake Michigan’s shore, the house stands beneath towering maple and ash trees, with a patchy, sloping lawn. This is, in fact, the oldest structure in the self-consciously historical hamlet of Lakeside. It’s known as Centennial Farm. A plaque in a flowerbed proclaims: michigan centennial

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commission: owned by the same family for more than one hundred years. They kept close quarters, clearly, but the roof sufficed. Windows and porches had been added; the outhouse was dismantled and the barn improved. Running water was available, so were heat and light. In a little local pamphlet called “Centennial History of Lakeside,” I found a photo of the place—recognizable as ours—built by James Abdon Wilkinson in the late 1850s. I was born in England and lived much of my life in New England. The 1850s still seem recent as a construction date to celebrate, and I remember being unimpressed. It takes five hundred years in England before a house seems ancient or can lay proper claim to ghosts; in New England it requires two centuries at least. But those who settled near Lake Michigan arrived much later than did those who settled Maine or Massachusetts, and members of the Wilkinson clan had indeed founded the town. Old John Wilkinson, James’s father, was the original trader and farmer in the region, and the place was first known as Wilkinson City; he planted fruit trees and established a trading lodge by the lake, with cleared land and cottages for the workers there. A small museum adjoins the post office, with photographs and artifacts and a 519-page journal recording the transactions of everyday life in 1857–58. Here are some prevailing prices: flour cost 3 cents a pound, beef 6 cents a pound, salt a penny a pound, sugar 14 cents a pound, butter 26 cents a pound, suet 4 cents a pound, 1 peck beans at 12 cents a pound, coffee 14 cents a pound, eggs 13 cents for a dozen, codfish 7 cents a pound. Tea was expensive at 70 cents a pound, but a pint of brandy was 40 cents and a bottle of cordial 15 cents. These last two items, bought in December, suggest Christmas baking projects, and if one fell ill or overindulged there were medicines

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for sale such as castor oil, laudanum, salts, quinine, paregoric, alum, camphor, and the all-inclusive “pain reliever pills.” The women made their own clothing, it seems, and a good deal of the men’s. They bought “delain, blue cotton, shirting, satinett, lining, factory blue flannel, calico, denim, sheeps gray, linsey Woolsey, diaper, cottonade, crash, linen, drilling, muslin, ticking, gingham, velvet, ribbon, sheeting, cambric, cashmere, pants stuff, jaconet, tweed, tablecloth, more antique, bared mull.” Some of the service payments have been recorded as follows: “keeping team in barn, 12 days for $7.01, 250 pounds of hay for a dollar, digging well, $2.50, 12 rods of ditch for $4.50.” The shingling of a house cost $15.00, though the shingles themselves amounted to $45.50. Things were cheaper then. Mr. Wilkinson, however, sympathized with those who paid their workers nothing at all, and whose labor force was black. His family came from Virginia, and had he had his druthers those cottages behind the lodge would have quartered slaves. When his side lost the Civil War, and he headed south again— how far, one wonders, ahead of the prospect of tar and feathers?—the good citizens of Wilkinson City remarked to each other, “We need a new name.” Looking at the nearby shore, they said, “Let’s call ourselves ‘Lakeside,’” and Lakeside it’s been ever since. The house had an ill-pointed chimney without a chimney cap; we built no fires that first year. Relining brick is costly, and it was a project deferred. The weather turned. Returning in November after several weeks away, and turning the key in the front-door lock, I heard a noise—then saw something scuttling back and forth across the living room. At my approach the figure—figures—disappeared. Then they raced back into view. They were, it developed, baby raccoons, four of them,

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who’d nested on the heat-shelf in the fireplace and had been awakened and disturbed by our arrival. Their mother, thankfully, was not around, and there was no damage; these creatures were not large enough to wreak the havoc of which adult raccoons are capable, and for which they’re famous. My wife shrieked and withdrew. I shooed them into a side room, then barricaded its doorway and opened a door to the west-facing porch, through which they could escape. Shaken a little, but mostly relieved that we’d arrived in time to set them free before they wrecked the house in winter-long captivity, we unpacked and made a meal and went to bed. That night my dreams were fitful. I thought I heard plaster falling; I thought I heard the patter, still, of raccoon feet. The floor was a sounding board: dumdiddydum. Upstairs, awake, I thought of all the years this space had been inhabited and uninhabited and who lived in it when. There’s a photograph in the “Centennial History” of men in top hats and women in billowing skirts. At the feet of the children sleep dogs. Everything is black or white: the canes, the hands that hold them, the shoes, the bonnets, the chairs. Long after James’s death, his wife, Mary Annis Wilkinson, remained on the property, cared for by their children, and she recorded in her diary in 1914, “Plaster fell in the dining room. Oh, the poor old house. I did so want it to last while I live and it seems to be going so fast, but perhaps it will last as long as I do.” The wind was high, with spurts of rain; the great maple by our bedroom window creaked and groaned. In the predawn dark I went downstairs to shut the door to the west porch and, in a container of pillows and throw rugs, found the baby raccoons fast asleep. They had burrowed under blankets and were breathing audibly, in unison. This time I carried them outside

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and, upending the basket of pillows and blankets, dumped them in the grass. End of story. They hopped clumsily away, squeaking, chittering, and either survived or failed to; there are grown raccoons now everywhere who threaten our birdseed containers and garbage pails. But as I lay back down again beside my sleeping wife, I saw the line of volunteers, those young men of the region donning uniforms and streaming south to die. Others lived. These men from Wilkinson—William and Amos Fisher, Anson George, Aaron Clark, Isaac Kitchell, J. Wildrick, S. Smith, A. E. Taylor, William Dingman, and William Perham—are listed in The Acorn as returning veterans. Earlier, on April 16, 1861, when the governor issued a proclamation calling for volunteers in the “War of Rebellion,” James Abdon Wilkinson hired a proxy soldier to go in his place; he did not want to fight against his southern friends. I knew this; I knew the names of the postmaster and his village patrons; I could tally up the cost of household goods. For personal, laundry, heating, and lighting uses there were the following expenditures: “washpan 25 cents, chamber, 50 cents, 2 oz. indigo, 25 cents, washboard, 37 cents, mop stick 18 cents, parlor stove $10.00, cook stove $29.00, 13 lb. stovepipe $1.30, 12” flatirons $1.20, lamp chimney 15 cents, paper of stove black, 12 cents, 1 lb. candles 25 cents, 1 ball wicking 6 cents, 1 candle mold 40 cents, milk strainer 75 cents, pewter mug 10 cents, bed cord 31 cents, 1 pair blankets $3.50, 1 set spoons 31 cents, 1 set plates 44 cents.” Five rolls of wallpaper cost fifty cents and twentynine pounds of paint $2.03, but a paintbrush cost $1.00. What are we haunted by, and why? Each time I enter now, I half-expect a skittering of raccoon feet, a startled, startling face of white and black above the snout. The blue throw rug

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they chewed has holes all through the fabric; I have retained that too. John Wilkinson was thin and upright and severe and white-haired in the photograph they took of him, standing by our door. Many of his children and his children’s children stayed in the area. He did establish the road by the lake, the trading post and post office; he never did contrive to furnish his cabins with slaves. But the past will not be buried by a name change or renovation and a fresh coat of paint. Wild creatures scrabble on his floorboards still and will, when we are gone, reclaim the field.

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laura hulthen thomas bones on bois blanc

The trip to Bois Blanc Island to bury Mom’s ashes at Lighthouse Point was supposed to be a quick, clean weekend dash, but when Quinn let his end of the pole slip again and the hard metal rapped Cass on the crown of her head before collapsing the top-heavy ten-man tent, Cass felt the cinders of her marriage, too, scattering fast in the brisk sweep of wind funneling through the Straits of Mackinac. They’d been at the tent for over an hour, bickering their muddled way through a tangle of poles and ropes and the powerful bursts of Lake Huron wind that made a mess of it all. Every time Cass used her back as a jack against the center pole to drive in a stake, Quinn would lose hold of the opposite

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end and the tent would cave. The two-man tent they’d used before the kids were born would have sufficed. But Quinn had insisted on making this a family vacation, not merely a duty to the ashes, and that meant borrowing the old tent from his dad. Bois Blanc would be their last trip for a while. Six months ago, Quinn had lost his job writing for the local paper. The Ford dealership had just let Cass go. They certainly couldn’t splurge on a new nylon model, so now they had this relic to wrestle, and it looked like rain, too, Cass thought, squinting at the beach where John and Nell were running along the water’s edge. Swollen silver clouds tumbled over Mackinac Island a mile or so away across the Straits. A dense mist drizzled the Grand Hotel’s deep green roof. Cass studied the heap at her feet, looked up at Quinn. He was surveying the tent with slumped shoulders. She scowled at the dejected pucker of skin nesting between his eyes, the expression that signaled he was about to give up on the task at hand and leave it all to her. “Why don’t we try another site back in the trees?” she asked. “If we move, we’ll be downwind of the Porta-John and you’ll complain about that all weekend.” His typical jab at her. Cass sighed. She scanned for the kids. John was wading in the water, but Nell was running toward them, gossamer curls unwinding from her pigtails. That golden hair, the family anomaly. Cass’s own was dishwater brown, Quinn’s the neutral color of dust. Cass’s mother had always insisted she’d been a towhead herself, but Cass had never been able to trust any story Mom concocted, and she’d never seen the photos to prove that Mom’s hair had ever varied from the bottle-black bob she’d worn her whole life.

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“Go get your brother, doll. It’s going to rain,” Cass said as Nell ran up, flushed and grinning. “It won’t rain, Momma. Daddy, let’s play Money Fish.” Nell was like Mom, Cass thought in exasperation. That same prescient certainty. “Sweetheart, Mackinac’s getting drenched. Look over there.” Nell turned her gaze toward the neat line of pastel shops and whitewashed Victorian homes gone gray in the rain. “It won’t come this way. Come on, Daddy.” “All right, sweetie.” Cass glared at him. He knew how much she hated Money Fish. “The tent? It’ll be dark in a couple of hours. And, it is going to pour.” “You heard Nellie. Not gonna rain.” Quinn smiled as Nell slipped her hand into his. “Come on, Daddy.” And just like that she whisked Quinn away. Cass watched them join John at the water’s edge and then examined the pesky center pole. The damn thing was supposed to slide into a canvas sleeve before being looped. Now why hadn’t Quinn seen that? Cass grabbed the ax, propped up the pole, drove a stake. Much easier without Quinn. Lately it seemed that everything was easier without him. When she’d staked all the corners and anchored the center pole front and back, she hiked over to the car to retrieve her jacket from the front seat. They were down to one car, Cass’s red Mustang they’d stopped making payments on months ago. Quinn had parked it in a stand of firs to protect the paint from blowing sand, but already gentle drifts spackled the tire rims. Their four bikes perched flimsily on a rooftop Yakima rack Quinn had lashed with straps and bungee cords that

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had drawn looks from the locals on the ferry from Cheboygan. Damn downstaters jury-rigging wimpy touring bikes to a sports car. Up here you had to drive a mud-spattered F-250 or an Expedition not to attract sneers of suspicion, the same muscle cars she’d made—and lost—a quick fortune peddling. When Quinn had driven the Mustang onto the dock at the ferry landing, the island’s sheriff, a stocky sand-tanned guy with a shotgun mounted to the cab of his F-350, had tailed them down the dirt road to Hawk’s Landing, the local general store, where they’d stopped for marshmallows and chocolate bars, a gallon of milk, a bag of ice. At the cash register, leaning territorially against a display case of coffee mugs and cheap treasure chests stamped with a hawk winging to a dock, the sheriff had asked what their plans were for the weekend. Cass had shushed Nell while Quinn told him they were camping on the North Shore. The sheriff had looked skeptical. He had inspected the trunk for banned ash tree firewood and probably, given Quinn’s out-of-work-chic shoulder-length hair, pot. But at least she’d kept Nell from spilling the truth about Mom’s memorial. Cass didn’t have a permit to scatter her, and besides that, the lighthouse was private, not state, property. To give Mom the rest she wanted, they’d have to trespass. She pulled on her jacket and jogged down to the shore, where Quinn was leaning on the sloping edge of a boulder. Pools of black water dotted the beach. Patches of tall lake grass stippled the shore with splashes of beach daisies and pitcher thistles. The waves lapped gently at a thin line of pebbles and muck. Any sand Cass saw was yards up from the water. More marsh than beach, she thought. John and Nell waded up, quarters glinting between their knuckles. The sun groped through a blanket of clouds, and the breeze off the lake didn’t feel saturated anymore. Nell had

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called it again. The gray line of rain was cruising north, toward the Upper Peninsula’s shoreline threading the horizon. Quinn held out his hands for the kids to pour the coins into his palm. “Great catch!” he called. Nell and John beamed. “Again, Daddy,” John shouted. At twelve, he was a quiet, dignified boy, with none of Nell’s flash. He was too solemn, Cass often thought. Too uptight. Too hesitant at play, as if he distrusted fun. But, annoyingly, he loved Money Fish. Quinn pitched the coins at the water, where they scattered like pebbles, dimpling the cupped peaks of waves. “Go fish!” The kids squealed and plunged in. Cass folded her arms. “I really don’t like the message this sends.” “There is no message, Cass. It’s a game.” “Nothing is just a game when it comes to kids.” “OK. Sometimes the message is just to have fun. Lighten up.” “What is this teaching them about money? Especially now that we don’t have any?” “That it’s shiny underwater.” Quinn glanced at her, his pucker up again. Cass shrugged and settled next to him on the rock. Another stale, unwinnable argument, the same exchange they always had when they spent the day at Silver Lake down home. Even their fights were recycled. She watched John dive underwater to fish a coin from the rusty muck that swirled around his ankles. Gentle waves slapped Nell’s bare feet as she scoured the waterline for money. “I loved playing this with Dad,” Quinn said as Nell found a coin, held it up for Cass to admire. “You’re still playing it with him.” “It’s a loan, Cass.” Quinn’s low voice blended with the lapping of the waves. “Do you want to lose the house, too?” “If you hadn’t spent the last few months blogging and hang-

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ing out on Facebook instead of looking for a job, we might not have to take his money.” “I’m exploring a meta-career.” “That’s not funny.” “I’m not joking.” “To pay for the meta-house and the meta-car?” Quinn turned to her, too close. They hadn’t made love in months, only kissed limply in front of the kids. She wasn’t used to his mild gaze anymore, the gold line ringing his pale brown irises, the same breathtaking flash of yellow as Nell’s hair. “You’re one to talk about avoidance.” “That’s different.” “Oh, right. The haunting.” Cass flushed and looked away. “Reaching out a cold hand from the grave you won’t give her,” Quinn continued. “Cut it out.” “Spooky shit.” He whistled. “Jesus. OK. I get it.” The truth was, Cass was terrified of Mom’s bones and Quinn knew it. Mom had been haunting her relentlessly for months. If she wasn’t due to turn the Mustang over to Ford Credit on Monday in a voluntary repossession deal, Cass might have kept that corrugated box of lumpy ashes locked in the trunk forever. Mom had always insisted Cass scatter her ashes at the Bois Blanc lighthouse, where as a teen she’d once seen a ghost. Cass wasn’t going to bury her so far away just on account of a childhood ghost and she’d told Mom so. Mom had smiled. That prescient certainty. You’ll do it, she said. But Cass was determined. That lighthouse ghost had run their lives; she wasn’t about to let it run Mom’s death. Although Mom had never returned to Bois Blanc after her sight-

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ing, she had made her living out of seeing others’ ghosts. She contacted spooks and read the palms of lonely old ladies whose visions no one believed in but Mom, and she made Cass help in her routine deceptions. At séances she taught Cass to gaze unblinkingly into the eyes of the client, twitch a pinky, slacken her mouth at a tense moment. Subtlety convinces, Mom always said. The client doesn’t have to believe to see. What they’ll see is you. But isn’t it lying, Mom? she’d asked once after watching a frail old woman weep over a manufactured contact with a long-dead sister. They deserve to believe, Mom had told her. Cass had performed perfectly, but like the disillusioned child of a missionary zealot, she came to scorn her mother’s obsessions. She disavowed spirits. The only belief she’d maintained from childhood was the subtlety of salesmanship. What sold ghosts also sold cars. She was the dealership’s top seller two years running. But for all her years as a spiritualist, Mom never foresaw her own fate; dying young-old, all of a sudden, from the flu. Soaring fever. Drowned lungs. Dead before old age had a proper shot at her. And her final words. Creepy and vexing, uttered after her death, for God’s sake. Cass was running a fever herself when the hospital staff pronounced Mom dead and removed the respirator. Five minutes later, when a nurse was preparing to cover the body and Cass was standing beside the bed holding Mom’s limp hand, racked with rising illness and a nauseating sensation of relief, Mom had jerked upright from the pillow, arms jack-hammering hideously, eyes glittering. She lurched forward, flopped down hard onto the tile floor. Gather at the marker. It took two nurses and Cass to wrestle Mom back onto the

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bed, and the room filled at once with the pandemonium of medics rushing to save the life they’d mistakenly abandoned. But she’d been dead all along. Electrical impulses in her limbs, a postmortem St. Vitus’s dance, unusually violent, a doctor told Cass. Of course no one else in the room had heard her last words. Only Cass. As Mom intended. Gather at the marker. The tag line to Mom’s Lighthouse Point ghost story. Cass was so unnerved by her mother’s final horrifying performance that she resolved again to bury her anywhere but Bois Blanc. After the memorial service, packed to the rafters with Mom’s grieving clients, Cass had arranged for a plot in town, only to be stricken with violent vomiting spells until she’d cancelled the deal. A week later she’d driven to Mom’s favorite picnic place, a wood nettle patch by the river that flowed through town. But once in the glade, Cass had tripped in a groundhog’s hole, twisting her ankle badly. Mom’s box of ashes flew from her hands into the wood nettle patch. The lid popped off and out Mom tumbled. Cass was horrified to see not flakes of ash rain gently into the bushes but chunks of gray bone hit the dirt and roll around the glade. With her ankle swelling alarmingly, Cass gathered the bones, placed them carefully with the lumpy half-pulverized bits that hadn’t spilled, and limped right out again, clutching the box. She hastily pitched the box into the Mustang’s trunk, and there Mom had remained. She thought she’d wait until Mom’s soul settled, but then gas prices leaped, Cass’s sales tanked, and she and Quinn had plummeted from weathering his lack of a job to losing her job, his car, and now the Mustang. One way or another, Mom was determined to get to Lighthouse Point. Quinn’s only response to Mom’s haunting had been, “You can blame your mom for a loopy childhood, not global eco-

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nomic collapse.” Such was the precarious state of their relationship; he’d poked fun at her ever since. “You’re as superstitious as she was,” Quinn said. “You just can’t admit it.” “Mom wasn’t really superstitious. Except for the lighthouse ghost, all the rest was just business to her.” “Good business, too. Maybe now that your SUV market has gone to the devil where it belongs you should take up the family trade.” Nell and John ran up, fists brimming with money. Quinn gathered their coins, cast them into the water again, and the kids sped off, feet flying in the muck. Cass’s irritation bubbled. Quinn had always disapproved of her job whether she was making money or not. She raised her gaze to the water, shimmering like nickel plate under the recovered sun. John surfaced from a deep dip, shoulders glistening, pearls of water gliding from his hair. Nell must have gone down with him. “John,” she called. “Don’t let Nell stay under too long.” “She’s not out here,” John said. “She was up on shore.” Cass scanned the beach for the daisy-gold hair that always stood out on the playground, in a crowd, wherever Cass had to hone in quickly on her daughter. But the beach was empty. “Where’s your sister?” she demanded, an automatic scolding, even as she noticed John’s eyes widen fearfully at the silent stretch of sand. “Where’d she go?” Quinn murmured. “There’s nowhere to go,” Cass said. The thicket of birch and juniper that marked the boundary of the state forest began a hundred yards past the marsh of lake grass. The long spit of the peninsula beyond arced lazily into the lake. Lighthouse Point. A weird conviction seized her, that Nell was hiking through the woods to the lighthouse without them, but that

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was ridiculous. She’d only been out of sight a moment. “There she is.” Quinn was pointing to the grass, and there was the bobbing head, the boisterous grin, the flash of bare feet as she ran toward them, waving a treasure she’d found. Cass wiped at her eyes, trembling. “Look what I found!” Nell met them by the rock. Cass caught her by the shoulders. “You shouldn’t run off without telling us, Nell.” Nell was clutching a bone. Bleached smooth, the size of Nell’s shin. “Gather,” Nell said, looking up at Cass. “What did you say?” Cass stammered. She felt the blood drain from her face. “Gather,” Nell repeated. “At the marker.” Cass’s gaze flew to the Mustang; to the trunk, securely latched. Her scalp prickled. “Where did you hear that?” She squeezed Nell’s shoulders, harder than she meant to. But Nell just grinned up at her, witchy-sunny, just like Mom. “The bone,” Nell replied cheerfully. “Can’t you hear it?” “Looking at it rationally, it’s just a deer’s bone,” Quinn insisted yet again as Cass poured her third glass of wine by the campfire that evening. John and Nell were fetching marshmallows and chocolate bars from the sacks of Hawk’s Landing groceries. “It’s human.” “How on earth would you know what a human bone looks like?” “You know what Mom is now?” Cass drained her Dixie cup of Chianti in one swallow. “Not ash. Bones in big pieces. Haven’t you seen her?”

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“Why would I want to look at your mother’s remains?” “She’s up to something.” “Come on, Cass. You didn’t believe in any of that when she was alive.” “You don’t know her.” “I knew her well enough.” Quinn leaned over to her as Nell and John dumped armfuls of treats by the fire and struck out for the woods behind the tent to gather roasting sticks. “Look, I hunted deer for years with Dad. I’ve skinned deer, I’ve dressed deer, I know what deer bones look like. There must be a ton of bones scattered around. Here, I’ll get rid of it before she comes back.” Nell had nestled the bone on her jacket under the Coleman lantern Quinn hung from a fir tree. Quinn reached for the bone. “Leave it.” “Not if it’s going to freak you out.” “It’s going to freak me out no matter what you do with it.” Quinn shrugged and instead grabbed his green jug of gin out of the Igloo Playmate cooler he’d stashed near the fire. Nell and John ran up, waving long sticks. Quinn whittled a point for each of them to spear marshmallows and they settled into roasting and building messy triple-decker s’mores. Cass devoured a few, drank wine steadily. Quinn joked around, even coaxed John to wrestle around in the pine needles. Nell seemed to forget about the bone’s comfort when the lantern burned out and they had only the firelight and a fierce band of white stars for light. After the snacks and tussling, Quinn plopped down close to Cass, and the kids piled into their laps. Cass felt Quinn’s bare arm, and the kids’ legs pressing hers, and if she closed her eyes she couldn’t tell skin from skin for the electrical pulse that coursed through them all. Family skin,

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Quinn used to call it when the kids were babies. Families in love share the same skin. But Quinn spoiled their fun with spooky nonsense when a gull landed unexpectedly on a pine log just outside the ring of firelight, and he said, “Did you know that seagulls hold the souls of the dead so they can come back to help the living?” “Neat,” John breathed. Nell simply nodded, as if it was fact, well known. “Daddy’s just telling stories.” Cass pushed Nell from her lap and scooted forward to stoke the coals. “Anyway, it’s sailors’ souls.” “Tell us a ghost story,” John said. Cass glanced warningly at Quinn. Quinn ignored her. “You know the one about Tom Quick?” “I know it.” Nell bounced on her knees. “His daddy swore to scalp a hundred Indians before he died ’cause Indians scalped his daddy but he got his death-sick with only ninety-nine skulls on the shelf. He told Tom Quick with his dying words that he better get that one more skull, and because Tom Quick was a drunk and a chicken and a disbeliever he wouldn’t go kill that last Indian and fulfill his daddy’s dying wish and his daddy haunted him so bad Tom Quick disappeared in the woods and it was his very own skull the townsfolk found on his daddy’s skull shelf when they went looking for him.” “Nell!” Cass choked on her wine. “Cool,” John exclaimed. “Where on earth did you hear that story?” Cass demanded. “Grandma. She always told neat stories.” “Spooky ones,” John confirmed. “She told me one, too.” “She told me all her stories,” Nell said. “She told me in private,” John said. “You were too little. Grandma said so.”

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“She never did!” “That’s enough, Nell. Grandma should never have told you any scary stories.” Cass turned to John. “I thought you didn’t like ghost stories.” “I like this one. Can I tell it?” “Let’s hear it,” Quinn said, stretching out on his side. Amused, of course. If he wasn’t explaining ghosts away he was making fun of them. Cass scowled. He grinned back. “It’s about the lighthouse,” John announced. “Where we’re going to bury Grandma.” “Oh, no,” Cass said. “We’re not going to tell that story.” “But I want to tell,” John protested. “Absolutely not.” “Cass,” Quinn said. “Don’t you think we ought to hear what Grandma told John?” Cass studied her son. A rare flash of fun lit his face. The only time he ever looked so happy was when he played Money Fish. “OK, honey. What did Grandma tell you about the lighthouse?” “Gather at the marker,” John replied in a spooky hush. The seagull ruffled its wings noisily, right on cue. “Daddy will always be there.” Nell sat up straight. “That’s what the bone says.” Cass coughed and glared at Quinn. “That’s what the lighthouse keeper used to say to his little girl,” John told Nell. “If there was ever any danger and they got separated, the little girl was supposed to meet him at a big stone marker behind the lighthouse. So one night there was a storm so strong it blew lake water into the lighthouse. The little girl called for her dad up the tower stairs but her dad didn’t answer. She was scared, so she went out back to the marker.” He paused. Nell’s eyes rounded. “But the marker was gone.”

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Just like Mom would tell it, Cass thought. Same silence, same deadpan delivery. Her steady John, bewitched. “So the little girl ran back into the house and up the tower steps, thinking her dad just had to be at the light, but just then a huge rush of water cracked the walls, and the whole tower came crashing down. “Her daddy had gone to the shed to get oil for the lights. When he saw the tower collapse, he raced to the house to look for his girl, but the house was empty. He ran to the marker and found the marker was gone. He searched the wreck all night long, and for days and days after, but he never found his little girl’s body.” “That’s why there are all these bones to gather,” Nell said matter-of-factly. “But where was her mommy?” “Dead. Moms are always dead in these stories.” Cass shuddered. “That’s enough, you two. Time for bed.” “But it’s early!” “It’s after eleven, and we’re biking out to the lighthouse first thing.” The kids stood up. They never argued for long. How had Cass ended up with such old-young kids, she who had bickered endlessly with her mother? She would have argued her way into another half hour of campfire time at their age, yet here they were, shuffling off to their sleeping bags obediently. Tom Quick, the Lighthouse Ghost. They’d be up all night with that nonsense. Gather at the marker. She thought of Mom telling John that horrible tale out of Cass’s earshot, and she felt a flash of anger. Had she told John the whole story? Her heart still tumbled at those words. Mom used to scare her silly with that story. As a kid, Mom had spent her summers

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on Bois Blanc trading ghost stories with other summertime kids. They used to hang out at a granite monument plopped incongruously in the middle of the woods, smoke pot, play spin the pinecone, make up stories about how the granite marker that was supposed to mark the edge of the lighthouse property ended up deep in the forest, far away from the lighthouse. A boy Mom liked—not a summer boy, but a boy who lived on the island year round—told the story of the lighthouse keeper’s daughter, but his story continued past the girl’s death. The dad finally found the marker and guessed it had been moved as a prank by some island boys, abandoned in the woods because it was too heavy to drag further. Grief-stricken, he stashed all his worldly possessions in his little girl’s favorite toy, a treasure chest he’d carved for her. He buried the chest at the marker and placed the key in the lighthouse’s kitchen, in case his lost girl ever came back, before drowning himself in Lake Huron. When the lighthouse was rebuilt, the key was lost. The ghost of the little girl has lived there ever since, looking for her key, and the marker where her daddy was supposed to be. It would have been scary enough if Mom’s story had ended where the boy’s did, but for Cass she’d always continued the tale. How one day she’d egged the boy on to take her to the lighthouse and show her the ghost. How they’d found a window that wasn’t boarded up; how they’d shattered the glass and crawled into the kitchen. How a bouquet of purple lilies lay wilting on the sink’s drain board. They’d poked around until they found an old-style skeleton key on a knick-knack shelf above the window they’d shattered. She’d been impressed until the boy she liked admitted he’d stashed it there. They’d laughed, lit a joint. The boy she liked filled his mouth with smoke, then kissed her in front of the

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parlor fireplace. He pulled off her tank top, stripped her shorts, had her down to her flip-flops when they heard a thump from the tower vestibule. Must be the ghost, he’d joked. But it was Mom’s own dad who’d burst through the door. Nude above the waist. Pants unbuckled, low on his hips. Behind him, hovering in the vestibule on the cast-iron spiral staircase winding up the tower, was the ghost. Sunny, tumbling ribbons of hair. Silver tears. Crimsonsoaked lips, puckered like rose petals. Mom had screamed. The boy she liked had fled through the broken kitchen window. The ghost floated, weeping, out the tower door and down the path to the lake. And Mom’s dad had struck her hard, right there in the nude. She’d pointed to the ghost. She’d shown him the key. He’d hit her again, knocked her to the hearth, slapped at her breasts before snatching the key to hurl it into the lake. On his way out the door he’d turned to her. “That’s what you’ll tell your mother,” he’d said. “All you saw was a ghost.” The marks he’d left on her took all summer to heal. Mom would always stop the story there, pause, and raise a charcoal sculpted eyebrow at Cass. “You see,” she would say. “Sometimes it’s better to believe in the ghost than the man.” She wouldn’t have told the whole story to John, Cass thought as John unzipped the tent and waited for Nell to duck in first. “You’re going to have to lighten up, you know,” Quinn said, stretching out in the carpet of pine needles.

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“Mom shaped her whole life around that incident.” “Maybe she really did see a ghost.” “Maybe her father was a rapist and she couldn’t face it.” “Maybe he had a lover and she couldn’t face that.” “She had no business dumping that story on me.” “Cass, your mother was harmless.” “She’s not harmless.” “OK, put it another way. I don’t think your mom meant you harm.” When Cass didn’t answer, he said, “Anyway, if there’s no such thing as ghosts, why is that seagull still watching us?” Cass looked at the log. The gull hunched unruffled, staring straight at the fire. “Stop it, Quinn.” “It can’t be your mother. She’s locked in the trunk.” “If you don’t stop treating everything like one big joke, I’m going to divorce you right now.” “Well, look who’s telling the ghost stories.” Quinn studied her. “You’ve never used the ‘d’ word before.” “Out loud,” Cass said. Quinn was silent for a moment. The seagull shook itself, preened its feathers restlessly. Cass waited for it to take flight. Annoyingly, it didn’t. She suppressed the urge to shoo it away. “So you want to separate,” he said at last. “Keep your voice down,” Cass whispered. Behind them the canvas flaps snapped in the breeze. The kids hadn’t tied them down. Their only shield from the conversation was the mosquito mesh they’d zippered shut. “They can’t hear us. It’s just you, me, and the bird.” Quinn rolled over on his back, stared up at the canopy of stars, silver pins piercing velvet. “Say something, Cass.” “We can’t have this conversation drunk.” “We can’t seem to have it sober.” “Not now, Quinn.”

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He rolled over to face her, propped his chin on his broad hands. “What am I supposed to do? Walk out on you? Turn into your dad so you can face the kids guilt-free?” The seagull chose that moment to fly away, and Cass felt tears sting her eyes. “Afraid you’ll be the bad guy for once instead of the fun guy?” “It’s fun to be the fun guy. Maybe you should try it sometime.” Quinn knelt at the fire, cupped his hands, tossed in just enough sand to douse the last spit of flame. “Cass, all you know is a fatherless family. But I’m not going to give in to that. I love the kids to pieces. And I love you. Enough to put up with you until things get better.” He stood up. “Anyway, we can’t afford to get divorced.” He stowed the gin jug in the Igloo cooler and walked to the tent. Cass called after him. “Hey. Take the food back to the car. We can’t leave it out.” “You do it.” He unzipped the mesh and disappeared inside. Cass stared at the crumpled chocolate wrappers and the marshmallows that had tumbled out into the dirt, and her head spun sickly to think of approaching the trunk in the dark. Alone with Mom’s bones. She gathered the candy and the box of graham crackers, stuffed them in the Igloo. As she walked to the tent her eyes caught the ivory sheen of the bone nested in Nell’s jacket, and although it made her skin crawl she bent down to swaddle it. Overnight the single bone amassed a whole heap. They were piled neatly on Nell’s jacket. Long bones, stubby bones, skinny bones, all bleached smooth. Delicate; a skeleton in miniature. When she emerged from the tent to brew coffee, the bones were all Cass saw. She suppressed a scream and backed into the tent. John was sitting up in his sleeping bag,

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eating the chocolate bars out of the Igloo. Quinn was pulling on his jeans. Nell was fast asleep. “There’s a pile of bones now,” Cass whispered to Quinn. “Spooky.” Quinn shrugged. Last night’s argument shone fresh in his distant expression. “Really. Come on.” John wriggled out of his bag, lips coated with chocolate, and darted outside before Cass could stop him. Quinn took his time pulling on a T-shirt and sneakers. Cass followed him out, shrinking instinctively behind his shoulders. “Wow,” John cried when he saw his dad. “There’s a bunch.” “OK. Let me look.” Quinn crouched down, squinted at the pile. “Maybe the gull stacked ’em. Right, honey?” Cass glared at him. John said, “I bet it’s a whole human.” “John, Daddy said it’s only a deer. Right, Daddy?” Cass kicked Quinn’s sneaker. “I couldn’t find all of her.” Cass spun to see Nell standing by the tent in her lacy buttercup nightgown, yawning. “What, sweetie?” “I couldn’t find the little girl’s head.” “Nell!” “Or her pinky fingers.” Quinn crossed to her, knelt down, grasped her shoulders. “Nell, did you go off alone again?” Nell nodded serenely, not at all concerned. Like Mom, traipsing around cemeteries and haunted houses all night. When she spoke, Cass had to struggle not to yell. “We told you never to do that again, honey. It’s very dangerous. Something bad could happen to you.” “I know. I mean, I know you told me. But I know that nothing bad is going to happen.”

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“We can never tell what will happen, sweetie. We have to be careful.” Nell looked up at her calmly. “I can tell.” “When did you go exploring?” Quinn’s voice was strung tight. “Last night.” “You went out to the shore at night?” Now Quinn was losing it, too, on the verge of shaking her. Cass walked over to put a hand on his arm. “You wouldn’t have done that, Nell. Tell Daddy you wouldn’t ever go out alone at night.” “Night’s when you hear bones best,” Nell told them. While the kids slurped Kix and cider at the picnic table nestled in the pines, Cass battled Quinn in whispers by the bones. “We have to leave. I never should have come,” Cass insisted. “Come on, Cass. Looking at it rationally, we were both drunk. You know Nell sleepwalks.” “There’s nothing rational about this.” “What’s wrong with you? You criticized your mother relentlessly for marketing superstition.” “This is different,” Cass said stubbornly. “How?” “This is bones.” “Deer bones.” “Those are a child’s bones. I’m calling that sheriff.” “Deer.” Quinn bent down, poked through the pile. The bones rattled. It was all Cass could do not to throw up. “Look,” he said, holding up a scuffed black bony wedge. “What’s this?” Cass folded her arms. “OK. It’s a hoof.” “Think it’s Lucifer’s?” “Don’t be a jerk.” “Wanna see a piece of antler?”

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“OK, OK, cut it out.” Nell ran up, eyes flashing. “Daddy, don’t touch. She’s shy.” “Nell, that’s enough.” Quinn spoke gently, but Cass heard the warning behind his calm. “I don’t want you exploring for bones anymore.” “I’m not exploring. I’m gathering.” Quinn tossed the hoof to the dirt. Cass watched it roll crookedly until it thumped against a tree trunk and came to rest, listing on its pointed tip. You don’t have to believe to see. She felt a sudden boundless resentment toward the box of lumpy bones in the trunk and for the first time she couldn’t wait to get to Lighthouse Point to scatter Mom. Quinn oiled the bikes while Cass sent the kids to the trunk for lunch supplies. They had decided to drive the Mustang down the two-track toward Lighthouse Point as far as they could manage without scratching up the car, and bike from there. When the path constricted to a single track and aspen and birch branches swiped at the car doors, they parked. Quinn unloaded the bikes while Cass peered down the road. Deep holes pocked the dirt. Roots heaved in the path like unearthed knuckles. The tangle of branches made it impossible to see beyond a few yards. “We can’t bike this,” she said to Quinn. He had strapped Mom’s ashes to Cass’s rear-wheel rack and the insulated picnic bag to John’s. He tossed her a helmet. “It’s not so bad.” It was terrible. After a half mile Cass’s jaw was sore from mashing her teeth on every rut. Her butt bounced rudely on the gel seat. The close net of branches slapped her bare shoulders, scratched her cheeks. John wobbled crazily and had to hop off his bike every few minutes to navigate around the

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roots. Cass had lost sight of Quinn and Nell, who was perched in a child seat on the back of Quinn’s bike, her purple helmet bobbing like a buoy in a squall as her dad peeled off down the path. He circled back once, urging John to stay on the bike and jump the roots. Cass scowled at the unhelpful pep in his voice. Quinn frowned and took off, leaving Cass and John to muddle through the woods all morning. Just when it seemed they couldn’t go on, Cass spotted an azure slice of horizon through the tunnel of leaves ahead. “Honey. There’s the water.” John grinned tiredly and said in his best-sport voice, “Cool.” Quinn came sailing through the trees again, cheerful and relaxed. “Lots of rocks to explore, guys.” “It’s pretty, Mom,” Nell piped. She wasn’t wearing her helmet. Her golden hair spilled from her ponytail, illuminating the dim path. “The lighthouse is neat.” “Can we go in it?” John asked. “No.” Cass gave Quinn a hard look. “Definitely not.” “Maybe we can peek in.” Quinn returned her glare. Cass and John wheeled their bikes out of the trees and laid them on the bar of sand that separated the forest from the pebbled strip of beach sloping down to the water. The lighthouse was a hundred yards northwest at the tip of the point. The forest extended to the back of the house, hiding the old brick tower from view. Cass took John’s hand and hiked with him up the shore. The day was brilliant. The sun swallowed the cloudless sky. Lake Huron glittered blue, the glare from the water diamond-hard, so bright Cass couldn’t make out the Upper Peninsula’s skinny shoreline. As they rounded a curve, the trees receded, and John slipped his hand from hers to run the rest of the way. Cass saw the living quarters first, a cedar-sided addition jut-

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ting from the original brick house. She hiked around to see the lighthouse tower and stopped. It was smaller than she expected, barely forty feet high. Faded yellow plywood panels boarded up two tall windows flanking the front door. A widow’s walk surrounded the old lens casing at the top of the tower. At the base was a weathered oak door, splintered along the hinges. A steel padlock looped through an iron latch. Nell appeared next to her, grabbed her hand, tugged her forward. “Come on, Mom.” John ran up to her, flushed with excitement. “There’s a board off a window in the back. The glass is broken, too. I think it’s the kitchen. We could climb in, Mom.” Cass swallowed. Mom’s window; never fixed. “No, honey. It’s wrong for us to be here at all. It would be doubly wrong to break in.” “It wouldn’t be breaking in. The window’s already broke.” She felt Quinn come up behind them. “Mom’s right,” he said, backing her up for once. “We’re trespassing. Let’s be on our best behavior while we do it.” He looked at Cass. “Do you want to eat first, and then do the—the memorial?” “Let’s have our picnic.” She tried to keep her voice light. “Don’t worry, Mom,” Nell said. “Nothing bad is here.” Cass smiled weakly. “I know, sweetie. There’s nothing here at all.” They walked down a dirt path lined with scrubby beach bushes to a grassy patch by the water’s edge. The kids ate quickly so they could wade for shiny gems of mica and shale. Cass forced down a sandwich and chips. Quinn kept his back to her as he watched the kids play. Once John asked for Money Fish. Quinn shook his head. “Not here, buddy. We’ll play back at camp.” If he meant to please Cass, he didn’t let on, only gathered

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their trash in silence and stuffed the leftovers back in the insulated picnic bag. “You want me to get your mother?” He stood and slung the bag over his shoulder. “Would you?” Cass smiled at him gratefully. He didn’t smile back. “Where do you want to put her? I mean, do you want to scatter her behind the house, or near the water? Or were you thinking to bury her?” “I don’t know. I didn’t expect to make it this far.” Quinn didn’t answer. Cass watched him jog to the bikes, deposit the picnic tote by John’s bike, remove the bungee cords from around Mom’s box. She turned back to the water, remembering how Nell had slipped out of sight so quickly, but there she was with John, both of them bent over some exciting rock at the water’s edge, completely engrossed. As Quinn sat down next to her and placed the box on the sand, Cass fought back tears. Quinn saw her brush her eyes. “You all right?” She nodded. “You didn’t cry much when she died.” “I’m not crying now.” “Fine.” Quinn sighed. “Let’s call the kids up and get started.” “Wait.” Suddenly, the thought of interrupting their rapt attention to their stones was too painful. “Can we just . . .” What was she going to say? Can we just get our jobs back? Can we just keep the car and leave her in the trunk? Can we just fall in love again? “Can we scout a place first, so we know where to, you know, place her?” “House, tower, or water?” “Flip a coin?” Quinn flashed a brief smile. “Leave it to fate? That’s not like you.”

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He hefted the box, tucked it under his arm. The lid tilted dangerously. Cass heard the slide of bones and bit her lip against the automatic urge to scold Quinn’s lack of care. In silence they scouted the dry grass and shrubs lining the lighthouse living quarters. Quinn ducked briefly behind the building to look for a clearing in the trees while Cass kept an eye on the kids. “Getting any vibes?” Quinn rounded the corner. Papery remains of aspen leaves clung to his hair. “What do you think?” Cass felt uneasy, nauseated, just like the other times she’d tried to scatter the ashes. Even the ankle she’d twisted in the wood nettle patch was throbbing. Yet this was what Mom wanted, this very place. “Look, I don’t know. Let’s find a spot out back where if the owner does show up one day, he won’t find anything.” “I think I found a good place, lots of ferns as cover.” Quinn turned around, still swinging the box carelessly. Suddenly his toe caught on the buckled knob of a bush root. Cass cried out as Quinn went down. The box flew from his grasp, glanced off the brick wall. The lid popped as the box somersaulted and landed upside down in the grass. Cass dropped to her knees. Quinn crawled over, wiping his hands on his jeans, the color draining from his face. “Jesus, Quinn.” “Shit. Let me do it,” he said, reaching for the box. He lifted it, the plastic lining inside unfurling with a crinkle, and bones tumbled out, bleached smooth. As Quinn rocked back on his heels, the black hoof dropped from the box and looped crazily before bumping up against the house. Cass met Quinn’s shocked gaze. “Oh my God,” he breathed. Cass leaped up. “Nell,” she called, struggling to suppress

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the fury mottling her voice. She felt an irrational urge to hurl that heap of bones as far out into Lake Huron as she could. Nell skipped over. “What is this?” Cass demanded, pointing to the heap. “The bones,” Nell said. “Did you put them in this box?” Quinn looked as ill as Cass felt. Nell nodded solemnly. “OK.” Quinn breathed in. “You know this is Grandma’s . . . box, right?” “I swapped bones,” Nell said calmly. “Nell.” Cass knelt down. “Where did you put Grandma?” “In the Igloo.” “The cooler?” “I took the s’mores stuff out first. And Daddy’s gin.” “Why on earth would you do such a thing?” “Grandma doesn’t mind. But you aren’t supposed to put the girl here, Mom. She wants to go to the marker. We’re just here to get her key.” Cass’s knees wobbled. Behind her Quinn cleared his throat, a queer, wrenching sound. Nell stared at her. The fiery ash of her pupils shrunk to pinpricks. Like Mom’s, when she was channeling spirits. Pretending to channel, Cass reminded herself. She glanced over her daughter’s head at the shimmering water. They’d leave at once, damn Mom’s wishes and this pile of bones. Cass wanted off the island for good, and if Mom didn’t like it, she could stay in the Mustang to haunt the next owner. She raised her voice, called John’s name before realizing the shore was deserted. Her steady John, now. Gone. But he wouldn’t have run off, she thought in a panic. Even as a toddler he’d never been impulsive.

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Quinn was—unbelievably—stacking the bones back in Mom’s box. “What are you doing?” Cass cried. “Are you nuts? Where’s John?” Quinn looked up at the water distractedly. “Where’s your brother, Nell?” “In the lighthouse,” Nell replied. Cass jogged to the tower and saw the heavy oak door yawning open. She heard Nell’s light footsteps at her heels and put out an arm to stop her from darting into the lighthouse after her brother. “I don’t want you in there, honey.” “Please, Mom?” Cass shook her head, frowning. Quinn had joined them, a faraway look still dusting his eyes. “That door was locked when we came,” Cass told him. “Looking at it rationally, it probably wasn’t latched properly.” “Hi, Mom.” John’s high-pitched call floated gently over the point like the lake’s breeze. “Up here!” Nell shaded her eyes and looked up. Cass followed her gaze to see John’s brown hair ruffling in the watchtower’s open widow’s walk. His chubby hand pulsed in a steady wave. Cass’s throat constricted. A suspended sense of vertigo cupped her head, as if she, not John, were leaning from the tower. She swallowed hard against the lump in her throat. “John, come down.” The wind swept her voice away. Quinn took Nell’s hand. “If the steps are in OK shape, I’ll take you up, sweetie.” He met Cass’s stare with a shrug. “Like John said,” he told her. “It’s not breaking in if the door is broken already.” “Do you want to hold my hand, Mom?” Nell asked, slipping her warm palm into Cass’s. Cass squeezed her fingers as Nell

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pulled her to the oak door and they stumbled over the threshold into the dim vestibule. Iron spiral steps wound up the tower. Beyond the stairs a whitewashed door led to the living quarters. The vestibule was dark despite the sunlight streaming from the open door. Nell dropped Cass’s hand and flew up the stairs. Quinn started after her. Cass hesitated at the door to the living quarters before turning the iron latch and stepping into a tiny parlor. The boardedup windows blocked any sunlight. Cass squinted against the gloom to see that the room was empty. An ash-scarred brick fireplace yawned on the side wall. A mild odor of old cinders and lilies rose from the oak floorboards. An image of her mother, smoking pot, stripped nude, kissing the boy she liked, rose before her. It hardly seemed possible that her mother was ever here. Except for the fireplace, the room seemed built for a doll, or a child. The ceiling dropped low; Cass could touch the plaster with a fingertip. The lake’s breeze whistled down the chimney, rattling the flue. Cass thought of the keeper’s girl, just the right size for this room, huddled on the hearth as the rising water extinguished her final fire. The wind stilled. Cass glanced back through the white door to the vestibule. No clatter of footsteps on iron, no echo of voices descending the tower. Even the lily scent had dissipated. As she crossed to a low, oak-framed doorway, Cass wondered if the kitchen would be as miniaturized as the parlor, seemingly built for girlish tea parties, not mean living through long winters’ storms. She leaned against the jamb to study the little room. A cream-tinted porcelain sink, a pale blue half-sized fridge, a narrow two-burner range. The shattered windowpane above the sink by the back door, sunlight splashing the drain board. The window Mom and the boy had bro-

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ken—never fixed. No glass in the sink, Cass noticed. Someone, sometime, had cleaned up that mess. She was about to turn away when her gaze rested once more on the grooved drain board attached to the vintage sink. The wilted bouquet of purple lilies tossed on the grooves. The scent of flowers rose in the air, and a fierce sulfurous undertow caught Cass like a hand closing around her throat. She coughed and shrank back against the doorframe. The dusty sunlight streaming through the broken window dimmed to gray. A whisper of perfumed breath grazed Cass’s cheek, a flash of light popped at her toes. For as bright as she was, the ghost that uncurled before her eyes was gauzy, insubstantial. Sunny, tumbling ribbons of hair. Silver tears. Crimson-soaked lips, puckered like rose petals. Cass could walk right through her, and the ghost’s mist would cling to her skin. The girl swallowed her own mouth, the eyes winked shut, and she was merely a shimmer. She moved across the kitchen, passing over the sink and the lilies and out through the shattered window. A tail of wind coaxed to life a voice, as distinct as her mother’s had been in the hospital. Gather at the marker. Cass’s throat relaxed, and she cried out. As she turned to rush into the parlor she nearly tripped over Nell and John, who were standing right next to her in the doorway, clasping hands. Quinn was at Nell’s shoulder, his expression stripped down to fear, shock, and something else. Disbelief. “Looking at it rationally,” Quinn said as Cass huddled moodily by the fire that night, “a plume of dust, a patch of sunlight, suggestible minds in a suggestible place.”

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“You’re kidding.” “You’re as bad as Nell. How many times did your mother use tricks of light on vulnerable people?” “So you admit you’re vulnerable?” Quinn’s lips twitched. “It was a plume, Cass.” “You’re telling me that vision we both saw with our own eyes was a dust mouse?” she snapped. “What would you call it?” “A ghost.” “You don’t believe in ghosts.” “On Bois Blanc I do.” “Your mother would be thrilled,” Quinn said. He threw a handful of kindling into the fire. The flames flared up with a light show of sparks. At this, the seagull wheeled out of the darkness to take its place on the pine log across from Cass. She hugged her knees, shivering, and glared at the seagull’s depthless black eyes. “What thrills her is how badly she’s scaring me.” “She can’t scare you anymore. She’s dead.” “She’s bones. Bones that won’t rest.” “Because you won’t let them.” Quinn poured her a Dixie cup of Chianti. Cass pushed it away. She wasn’t going to drink, not after sleeping through Nell’s exploration the previous night. “I always told her I wouldn’t bury her up here. She never even came back herself after that ghost summer. This whole thing is crazy.” “Maybe she trusts you to finish something she couldn’t.” “Maybe she was nuts until the day she died and is driving me nuts from beyond the grave.” Quinn looked at her. “You could show some compassion, Cass.”

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“She never gave me the chance to feel compassionate. I was a kid when she started in on that story.” “You grew up, didn’t you?” “Meaning what?” “You know what I mean.” “So you’re going to deny seeing that ghost, deny that Mom is inhabiting Nell, deny that those bones she’s gathering are, in fact, human, and then tell me all this is happening because I won’t grow up?” Quinn reached for the wine and drained it in one swallow. “You’re unforgiving, Cass. One mistake and you take away your love. Blame ghosts, if you want, or Nell’s imagination, or my so-called slacking off. Refuse to bury your mom because she was hurting and relied on you before you were ready. It’s all a dodge.” “Dad saw me nude,” Cass said. “That’s all.” “You’re not even listening to me.” “I am listening. You’re talking about dodges; denial and forgiveness. You’re talking about Mom. I was eleven. Trying on this ridiculous white starter bra Mom had bought for me even though I’d told her I didn’t need it yet. We’d had a big fight, and I gave in. I always gave in. It was summer. We didn’t have air conditioning, and my room was sweltering. I couldn’t hook the ugly thing. I was sweating, couldn’t reach behind me. Dad walked in without knocking and saw me tangled up, in tears. So he helped me. Turned me around, untwisted the straps, hooked me up. And Mom burst in. She went crazy. She came after him with this cheap crystal ball she’d just ordered off the TV.” “Maybe there’s more to the story,” Quinn said. Cass flushed angrily at his sharp look. “No. There isn’t. He hooked my bra. He didn’t even touch my skin. She was hell-bent

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on swapping stories, mine for hers. She never forgave him, and he left us. All because he saw me nude, and for only a moment.” Quinn stared at her searchingly, then shifted his gaze to the fire. “Anyway, forget it,” she said. “I’m taking the bones home tomorrow. Straight to the funeral home.” She felt the rustling behind her before she heard it, and turned to see Nell swaying on her bare feet. “What is it, sweetie?” “Love you, Momma.” “Me too, sweet.” “Grandma likes it here. So do I.” “Nell,” Cass said gently. “No more spooky stuff, OK?” “It’s not spooky, Momma.” Nell bent to kiss her and skipped back to the tent. Cass didn’t speak until she had slipped between the canvas flaps. “We have to dump those other bones,” she whispered to Quinn. “Are they really a deer’s?” “I am absolutely positive they are.” “Just like you’re positive about the plume of dust?” Quinn rolled over on his back and gazed at the shadowed outlines of clouds billowing on the black sky. “I’m more confident about the deer than the dust. All right?” “I’m going home.” “I don’t know why. Nothing left for us there but more bones.” From its perch on the log, the gull flapped noisily and tucked its head to its chest. Cass stared at it. Not taking wing, not tonight. A thunderclap startled her awake near dawn the next morning. Her breath jammed high in her throat as she rubbed her

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eyes and looked up at the listing center pole. Rain drummed the canvas steadily, a clamor of deep-voiced bells. Lightning lit the gray air like distant stage lights, and thunder pealed close overhead. The storm felt centered on the tent. Cass wondered if all storms on the island had this character; isolated by the water all around, channeled furiously through the straits to aim chaos at the vulnerable. Little girls seeking fathers. Lighthouses flooded by the fast-swelling lake. Ships caught off guard by the quick turn of weather; sailors’ souls destined for deep water, or the buoyant bodies of gulls. She lifted her head to peek over at Nell, but John’s head blocked Cass’s view of her sweet pool of golden hair. She’d get soaked, wedged as she was against the canvas. Cass wiggled out of her bag and stepped quietly over John to roll Nell away from the tent wall. But the My Little Pony bag was empty. A lump rose in her throat as she backed away, stumbled over John. His bag tangled limply between her feet. Empty. The clump of hair she’d seen in the dim light was his shaggy dog toy. Both gone. “Kids!” Cass flew to the tent flaps and looked out at the sodden fire pit, the picnic table, the thicket of junipers and white pines beyond the campsite, and then stepped out from under the tent’s canopy to scan the rain-drenched beach. In the gray light Nell’s daisy hair and buttercup nightgown should have been easy to spot, even in the tall beach grass, stooped under the weight of the rain. But if Nell and John were bone gathering on the shore, Cass couldn’t see them. Quinn sat up, took in the empty bags, the pummeling rain, the pulse of lightning, and reached for his clothes. “Did you check the beach?”

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“I couldn’t see anything from here.” “Go down to the water. I’ll look up the road.” Cass pulled on a windbreaker over her thin gown and ran to the beach. She waded through the grass and out into the lake. If the water had swallowed them, what trace would remain? Quinn met her by the fire pit. “They’re not on the road. Or on the beach at the south end.” He ran a hand through his hair. Even under his hood, his hair was soaked. Rain pooled in his eyes. “I’m calling the sheriff.” Cass glanced around helplessly and spied a blue plastic tarp matted against a tree near the picnic table. “What’s that?” “I covered your mom’s box last night. Must have blown off,” Quinn said, and hesitated. “Wait.” “What?” He pointed. Cass saw the corrugated box tipped on its side under the picnic table, the lid toppled. “The bones are gone.” He groaned. “Where’s your mother?” “I put the Igloo in the trunk.” Quinn ran to the car, popped the trunk, slammed it shut. “Get in.” “What is it?” “They took the ashes.” “You don’t think . . .” “The lighthouse.” “They couldn’t hike that far, Quinn. It’s impossible.” “The flashlight’s gone. And the s’mores.” “I can’t believe they’d do that. We can’t leave here.” “They must be just up the path.” Quinn slipped into the driver’s seat and threw open the door for her. “Hurry.” Cass had barely shut the door when Quinn ground the Mustang into reverse and hit the sandy stretch of road toward

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the two track. They reached the path as Cass punched 911, and then tried the stored number for Hawk’s Landing, but the thick batting of storm clouds wiped out her reception. “Don’t drive so fast. You’re going to run them down.” “Try my phone.” Quinn’s voice was flat. Quinn’s cell failed to raise a signal. They pitched deeper into the woods, past the point where they’d switched to bikes the previous morning. The two track narrowed to one knotted path. An opaque net of branches slapped at the car. They couldn’t see a foot in front of the windshield, yet Quinn catapulted down the trail. When Quinn mashed the brake, Cass pitched into the dash, threw her arms out to catch herself, and was out the door before the wheels had stopped spinning. She jogged down the path, searching the woods. Rain clogged her eyes. She broke into a run. At last the trees began to thin, and she could see the faint outline of churning water against the slate sky. Her legs shook violently as she sprinted the rest of the way toward the shore, took in the strip of pebbled beach with one frantic glance, and ran up the point into a driving wind. She rounded the house, her breath lancing her chest, and stopped short. Thank God, thank God, the oak door hung open, sagging on its hinges. She raced into the vestibule, calling for the kids. The Igloo lay on the first tread of the iron spiral stairs. An abandoned picnic of graham crackers and chocolate littered the stone floor. Had they climbed to the tower? She called up the stairs. Her own panic echoed back down to her. As she turned to check the parlor, she heard Quinn yelling Nell’s name, or maybe it was her own. Cass hurried outside, down the narrow dirt path to the water’s edge, dreading with all her heart what she’d see at the lake.

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Whatever fate she feared facing, she didn’t expect to see Nell swimming boldly to shore, her thin arms cutting confidently through the storm-tossed waves. Quinn was wading in to meet her. John watched calmly, bundled in his jacket, shining a flashlight along the beach like a beacon. As Quinn raised Nell up out of the water, Cass ran to John. Nell wiggled in Quinn’s arms, her long hair streaming water. “Oh, honey,” was all Cass could manage as Quinn brought her out of the lake. “Look, Mom.” Nell uncurled her fist. In her palm rested a skeleton key. “We played Money Fish, and look what I found.” They didn’t need to follow a ghost through the carpet of waterlogged ferns and bramble bushes in the woods behind the lighthouse. Nell knew exactly where to go. Cass walked with her, holding her hand. Quinn followed, carrying the Igloo. John trailed solemnly behind him. When the brambles and short-stemmed junipers became so thick that Cass and Nell’s gowns shredded around their ankles as they struggled through the twining branches, Nell suddenly slipped her hand from Cass’s. She darted through an opening between two fallen logs. Cass plunged after her and found her standing in a clearing surrounded by papery birch and sky-spiking pines. In a nest of pine needles and fallen leaves stood a tall granite monument with block letters engraved on a polished surface. Halfway down the sides the smooth finish turned to rough-hewn granite. Cass traced the letters with her finger. us lhe. “LH for lighthouse?” she asked. “Must be.” Quinn dropped the Igloo and studied the marker. “E for what?” “I don’t know. Established? It’s big. Must weigh a ton.”

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“Bet it was a job to haul it this far, whoever did it.” “Are we going to bury Grandma here?” John asked. “It’s what she wanted, honey,” Cass said. “It’s lonely.” His voice trembled. Nell nudged him. “She won’t be alone. She’ll be with those other bones. Only we never did find the little girl’s skull. Maybe her head will haunt the lighthouse now forever and ever.” Cass looked down at the Igloo and sighed. “Should we separate them out?” Quinn asked her gently. The thought of fishing the hoof out of Mom’s remains made Cass’s stomach lurch. “Let’s bury the cooler.” “I may have to go back for a shovel,” Quinn said, but the ground was soft with the rain, the soil sandy and loose. A few inches down, Cass’s knuckles rapped something hard. She and John scraped until they unearthed a small treasure box with an iron band encircling the rounded lid. In the middle of the band was a skeleton keyhole. Cass held up the box. When Nell saw the box she fell to her knees and slid her key into the lock. With a smooth click the lock unclasped. Cass popped open the lid. “Too small for much treasure,” Quinn said. Nell drew out a folded square of paper. Cass took the paper gently, expecting it to turn to dust in her hands. But it was a newer sheet than the parchment she’d expected. Stiff, like typewriter bond. Cass unfolded the sheet to read the words scribbled in a looping hand. Mom’s handwriting. Cass hesitated, and then reached for the treasure chest. She flipped it over. A modern stamp was engraved in the flimsy wood-veneer bottom. A hawk winging to a dock. Hawk’s Landing. “What’s it say?” John asked. Cass looked at Quinn. “It says, ‘Daddy’s here.’”

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Ford Credit was about to reclaim an island car, Cass thought as Quinn hefted John’s bike and nicked the Mustang’s roof with the handles. Their mad dash down the two track had destroyed the paint job. Long, deep scratches ran the length of both sides of the car from the branches they’d plowed through so recklessly. Rust-colored, mud-spackled whatever paint was left. The Mustang wouldn’t stand out on the ferry this time around. After Quinn strapped the bikes to the rack, the kids begged for one more game of Money Fish. Quinn shook his head. Just enough time to catch the boat. But Cass said, “One more time, OK?” Quinn looked at her hard, surprised. They settled together on the boulder. Quinn jingled a handful of coins and tossed them high into the water. The kids squealed and belly-dived into the lake. “Their lives are about to change forever,” Cass said. “Ours, too.” Quinn wrinkled a wary glance at her. After they’d buried the Igloo, Cass had felt a cool tide of relief flood her, but Quinn had maintained a steady silence since leaving the marker. He must have shared her reluctance about the bones after all. Bury them. Lose everything else in grim, tidy order. “So are we keeping our bones together when we get home or what?” Cass grinned. “All in the same cooler.” Quinn’s pucker relaxed as he watched the kids dive for the money. “Well. We can keep our bones. We just can’t keep your Mustang.” “Or our house.” “We’ve got Dad’s tent.” “The one you can’t put up?” Quinn grinned. “I’ve got you for that.”

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“Guess I should gather the last of our cash, then.” Cass slipped off her sneakers, sprang from the rock, and jogged toward the beach to dunk headlong into the cool lap of the shimmering lake. As her feet slapped the wet sand, her heel came down hard on a stone, and she stumbled. She looked down, rubbing her foot. A hump heaved from the sand, bleached smooth. She’d tripped over a ridge in the rock, shaped like a frown, or a pucker of skin. She sucked in her breath. Quinn came up behind her. “Is that a skull?” she whispered. He bent down to run a steady hand over the hard ivory brow. “Looking at it rationally,” he said, “absolutely not.”

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They say spider ghosts run among the deaders in my family—deaders is what my Aunt Toots called those of us who have kicked the bucket. According to her, spider ghosting only happens to the women, some to a greater degree, some to a lesser. ’Course no gal in the family actually knows if she is a spider ghost until she’s dead, so there’s that. Aunt Toots told me it wasn’t a very good name for the phenomenon, because it wasn’t about the way you looked—that don’t work in this family of big-boned hussies—but it was a thing about sticking people together. Spider ghosts were women who, after they Author’s note: I heard the core of this from my friend Peggy who is an old construction worker in the U.P. She told me this tale about how her first husband died. I’ve tried to capture her voice. She said she didn’t mind that I put it down in her words.

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died, show up again whenever something looked like it really needed sticking together, the way a web would stick one thing to another. She even went so far as to say they could serve as phantom matchmakers. I said that was just what we needed, a phantom matchmaker up here in the U.P., last wilderness and all that, but she didn’t get the humor and just blew out her generic cig so the smoke gathered in the red nest of her hair. She just said there were lots of variations but it always had to do with linking one thing to another. When I suggested that maybe it was like fly tape she got all offended and said, “No girl, it’s like spiders. You’ll see.” Then she’d wax philosophical. “There is a fragility to the world—but it’s connected by the merest slip of things—like dust, or molecules of nothing.” She was a lonely woman, but she loved me and protected me from my mom who was crazy religious. She was the kind of carpenter who got respect, even from the men, and she read a lot of books, and we both had red hair and we were not fat, just built. I never believed about the spider ghosts myself. Never had any evidence that it might be true. Unless of course, you count our profession, which is construction—all us women ended up either in building or marrying it, so we know all about king studs and lap studs and, for that matter, male studs, not to mention how much weight a rafter will carry before it sags with the snow load. Aunt Toots could tell you why sometimes a house shouldn’t hang together but it does. She’d say, “There is that one crossbeam, it’s the one,” and it would be. That would be the structural point that joined one wall to another and held a house together despite all the forces to the contrary. But I don’t think that makes us potential spider ghosts, just good builders. When I asked my mom, she wouldn’t own it, her being a good Christian in the fold down at Seney Reformed, and she

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said, between her finishing the roof on the chicken coop and delivering one more baby, she’d had enough of that talk, that what we made stuck together because of real work and factual materials and hammers and nails and God’s will. She said, “You ever seen a spider ghost?” I hadn’t. ’Course it didn’t occur to me that she might be a skeptic because my daddy didn’t stick, making the whole concept uglier than what is usual, even for her. But one night on the porch with Aunt Toots—she was drinking hard then—she looked at me and said, “It’s not spiders bringing fibers out of their stomachs like the old comics, or chemicals out their gloves like that new movie. It might be something beautiful.” Maybe she knew the cancer was closing in on her already and she could see some things I couldn’t, but I just smoked my doobie (my vice of choice), thinking there wasn’t much beauty in the world I knew, what with its mudbogged nights and chew-boogered men. Even if you found a good man, and there were some I guess, you still had to contend with the bad economy or throwing a tie-rod in the middle of a snowstorm. Men couldn’t stop fate, or chance, or whatever it is that runs the world. There was the way a bungee cord could snap and tear across your eyes or a tie strap could let go of a load on a flatbed—take you right out. Nothing was guaranteed. So there wasn’t much that seemed to want to stick together in my view. And beauty wasn’t even in the picture. But Aunt Toots and me would sit on the porch with our boots on the railing, talking. She told me stories of things that were delicate—not like the lumber and thud work we all lived out between bouts with the halfway decent men we could find. We sat there, Aunt Toots rubbing her carpenter’s elbow and cursing any builder who could not put a nail down in three

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blows, then talking about the silver minnows she saw in the shallows of the creek bed. And a wind came up like it always did when she was in pain, and we both stood it for a minute. Then she said, “You wait, it ain’t like you think.” And tipped her bottle into the chipped Elks mug from the last fundraiser and kept tossing back the Jack D to ease the pain. I finally had to dump the last of her brown liquor into the hound’s dish before she got too slurry and my mom walked out and scolded us both for being the sinners we were. Still, what she said stuck—pun intended—and when she died of lung cancer, I thought about the “sticking together part” on a number of levels, like if there would ever be a human being in my life who I would be able to talk with the way I had with her—or if there would ever be a man for me. Granted, I’m just in the middle of the terrible twenties but a young body can get a little panicked up here, living on the fringes through these winters with dogs gone wild and snowmobiles on the fritz. So nothing came of the spider ghosting for a long time. She sure as hell didn’t show up when the entire sheet of cheap linoleum needed to stick down on old Hooster’s basement floor— you only get one chance with linoleum. Nope, the moisture and cock-eyed, cantankerous concrete floor just made it bubble. Not sticking there. Then I met Shed Clinton in the Luce Talk Bar and Grill. He was what’s called an “independent” builder, and I thought, well, let’s see how far this goes. But after enough barhopping and construction talk, which I am good at because I do it, we still looked like a moonless midnight without any stars. Then one night, I’m kind of in my cups with too much cheap Bud Light. I’d spent the day slamming down a floor over some bowed joists and I had slipped on the glue you put on the joists

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to reinforce the plywood you are putting down. Fell right through to the basement and the only thing that saved me was a pile of rolled-up insulation—which of course did my own lungs little good. I should’ve took it for a sign. I was feeling sore and lonely and all Shed wanted to do was shoot pool. So here’s how it went down: he’s teetering over the table, sets up, says for me to break, and I send up this thing—Mom might call it prayer—but it was really just a thought, and then I miss the break entirely and he just shakes his head like I’m an idiot. I sit down and pop another Bud. Before long I notice this woman on the other side of the bar, and it’s my Aunt Toots, just there in the dim of the light, smoking and drinking her brown liquor. She doesn’t look like a deader but when she rises she’s like Tyvek in the wind, the way it balloons away from a building if you don’t tack it down right. She points her finger like it was a popgun right at Shed and tips her head like she’s asking a question. I don’t believe it but I nod, and she sort of pools near me and leans over and reaches out her long arm and puts one hand on his shoulder and her other hand on mine. It’s not like wind, more like a kind of cool goo—not like Spider-Man and all the Marvel comic BS, but a real-from-the-other-side ghost superpower, from the “deaders” themselves, coming back to help out. Sticking things together—like any good construction worker. Making a web. And I can smell the glue I been breathing all day and I think that must be it. Some kind of hallucination. But after that, he’s all over me. Beautiful. So I think, that’s how it’s done, but I never told him about having seen my Aunt Toots in her spider ghost routine, or her helping us out. What would a born and bred Yooper say about spider ghosts?

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So one thing led to another and Shed and me got married by the local justice in our first half-finished house, second story wide open to the weather, with a handful of crooked carpenters, framers, plumbers, and drywallers (there’s a breed!) standing around waiting to tap the keg. I felt proud of getting married wearing a hard hat with some lacy tulle glued to it, and didn’t mind that Shed never even looked at the new steel-toed boots I bought for the occasion. It all seemed like a good thing, especially when we got to dancing on the subfloor, and then some of the guys took to swinging like monkeys on the trusses, and the party got wild and they talked about it for years down at the bar. Except then, as those years went by, there was the other thing—just who Shed was. And I realized that the sticking together part was just a figment of whatever passes for imagination in me. It started small. Like, my name is Peggy, but he shortened it to Piggy. He’d yell when he needed some spikes, or tenpennies. “Hey Piggy, where’s that ta by fur.” Or if he was trying to be nice. “Hey piglet, bring a Budster like the budster you er.” At first I liked it, but after a while. But who would have thought he’d end up like that, wrapped up like a dark mummy at the bottom of a two-story, ninetwelve pitch roof. Sometime in there, I had a bad streak of luck—lost a load of lumber taking a short cut through the McMillan swamp. Spent an entire day cutting a set of trusses half foot too short— couldn’t do anything but bite the dust on that. Shed was not kind about it, and then there was the family crap. Mom was

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having another baby and laid off from driving truck for the Home Depot in Newberry, and I was busting ass on our third house but started wishing I could just sit on the porch with Aunt Toots—even though she was a deader. Started wondering if I had any spider ghost in me and what it would be like to be a deader too. And just like that, Aunt Toots started showing up. Peeping in the window with a haze of generic cigarette smoke wreathing her red hair. Or sitting on the edge of a building site, holding a hammer, tool belt wrapped around her waist like an apron. I would of dismissed Aunt Toots’s visitations as my just being down in the dumps, but mom said it just proved I was weird right down to the bones and I should march myself to Seney Reformed and talk to Pastor. But there was also the fact that three different women in Newberry took the time to track me down or call me. One sent me a picture. Shed never noticed Aunt Toots. Wasn’t in him. He was tough as ironwood, that’s why the carpentry came easy to him. If anyone had in-your-face ways, it was him, but imaginings, ideas? The dead? ’Nuff said. He could stick things together all right, but it was more like force things together, and when he did, they stuck. Houses, garages, people. Sometimes he hit things so they’d stay together. So falling wouldn’t have come easy. Falling isn’t a stuck-together thing. But the way it happened, maybe it was. I wasn’t with him that morning on the roof. I’d told him I was leaving and I’d said it that morning over oatmeal and the chaser I needed because that was what it took to say the words. He said, here we are in the middle of this new house project, the one we’d been working toward for years, our best yet, this one we’d sell for big money, this one we’d do

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right. He’d told me all this, but I just finished my cereal with those little shriveled up raisins and said, It’s OK, I’m going now in that voice I know could make him feel like he needed a clean shirt and to wipe mud off his boots. Of course, he just laughed and when I said, No, really, I’m going, he said, Aw, come on Piglet, don’t do that, it’s you and me and nothin between us but your red c-hair. Now I don’t want to offend nobody but the c in “c-hair” stands in for the four-letter word for a woman’s intimate parts. I’m giving you the abbreviation, but he said the word. Now I am no prude about cussing, but that’s a word I don’t like to hear tossed around like loose nails. (OK, I hate this kind of talk but it’s a funky carpenter’s term for a unit of measurement. A “c-hair” is a small measurement, but a “red c-hair” is the tiniest of all, like a sixty-fourth of an inch. That’s what it’s called, believe it or not.) Like I said, I don’t want to offend, but it’s the language of the work and it’s not beautiful. That whole line was his version of how close we were supposed to be. That’s when I told him I knew about Dot down at Dot’s Landing. He said I misunderstood, but I didn’t. I know because I been dreaming about the dot of darkness when a nailhead starts to rust that means something’s gone wrong in the wood. Or the bitty iota of muck a fly leaves on a window—it’s really shit. Dots of it. And then the picture the one woman sent. Dot kissing him, his hand down her pants. Looked like a real good party. But he said no, he’d just picked up building supplies. Bituthene, he said. It’s roofing material. Brand name, Grace’s Ice and Water Shield. But then I actually produced the receipt from the hotel—when he’s always said he stays with Brany Muggles out on the river, and they go fish. Even I know that’s what they call predictable in bad movies. After I said that, he got real hard.

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But here’s the thing I didn’t want to say. Twice he left a foam sheet of insulation placed over a two-story drop through an unfinished stairwell. Just as I was about to step on it, Aunt Toots had showed up in the wind, right then, rubbing her carpenter’s elbow. Came out from under the rafter tails like a piece of plastic blowing in the wind—the way you see it float around building sites—and came right up that stairwell and lifted the piece up so I saw what I was about to do. Accidents happen all the time around building sites. They do. So after our talk, Shed heaves himself out the beat-up Winnebago we live in at our work site and lumbers across the sand and debris to the extension ladder leaning against the roof. He’d just cut thirty feet of that Grace’s Bituthene real straight with his utility knife and rolled it up and heaved it on his shoulder. A thirty-foot roll—more than we’d ever stuck down together, and now he crawls up the ladder, steps onto the scaffolding, which is just a plank hanging off the roof, and he’s balanced between the top rung and the two-foot step onto the planking, right up there in the canopy of the trees. Usually I am right behind him, stuck to the work just like he is. Not today. I step out and stand on what passes for a porch at the side of the trailer. I can just see him climbing the ladder to the roof, but I’m not really paying attention. I am thinking about how things come apart. About unsticking. I am thinking about if you have the power to stick something together, doesn’t the reverse seem true—you could unstick it, too. The wind picks up and that’s when she, Aunt Toots, just floats right out of the cement mixer—just like she spends every night there. He slams the roll of Bituthene down on the roof and sets up to pull off the brown backing paper. It looks like extra thick

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tar paper and that’s what it is, but with a sticky side, like that contact paper some gals put on kitchen shelves. For fun, he calls it “bitchathane.” Everyone does. All the boys down at the Luce Talk’ll just hoot you out of the place if you say the name like it looks. They say bitchathane. I always thought the word would sound like beauty-thane. I had pointed this out one night at the bar. Shed said he liked that, said it slow like, Beauty-thane, in front of the gang, but when he said it like that, the boys got kind of uproarious with their cue sticks. I’m not real smart but I know sometimes words don’t mean what you think they mean, and sometimes they mean the opposite. It was an idea I could just barely hang on to, but I know when he said, “Beauty-thane,” drawing it out like every part of the word was dirty, he might as well have said bitchathane. He might as well have called me a red c-hair, I felt that small. So, I am just watching, and then Aunt Toots is standing right next to me. I should have known then. I should have said I believed right then and let it go at that. But with spider ghosts, you are caught in the web. All I can do is stare as it happens. Back-fill dust rises in little tornadoes. Dogs mill like they do when they’re nerved up and itching to hunt. Shed knows it won’t be an easy job to do alone—not dangerous except for the height, but just easier when two people do it so one can unroll the bitchathane while the other keeps the tarry, sticky edge lined up with the drip edge of the roof. You have to keep it unrolling all even and clean along that edge. It’s made to cling to your roof forever, keep the ice dams from building up. It’s got serious glue. You have to get it just right. If you don’t, you can still lift a section off the roof but it’s real tricky and takes a lot of patience. The stuff sticks where you don’t expect it to, and if you somehow let it touch itself—

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sticky side to sticky side, then you’re up shit creek. And that’s when the cursing starts. But if you’re lucky, bitchathane just unrolls like toilet paper off the roll, and then it feels like there can’t be any big deal about working with this stuff and that’s what Shed is thinking. We’d done it before when it went like that. He is hoping for that. He is hoping that the paper liner will slide off one way and he’ll unroll all that sticky-side down tar paper right to the edge of the roof, even Steven, sealed and done by coffee break, when he will climb down and tell me he doesn’t need me. Ever. He would have too. But I hear my Aunt Toot’s whiskey-turned voice right next to me, and she is lighting up a bent generic, saying, “Something like beauty” with a wicked-ass grin. You can be saying beauty when it’s really bitchy you mean, and that’s what throws off his timing, her bitchy wind. He’s unrolled a good ten feet of the bitchathane when that wind hoists up a nightmare gust and twists the brown paper liner into the air like a dark sail. While he is trying to sort that out, he realizes he has to lift up and reset that whole section because now it’s slipped a couple inches off the roof. So he does something he’s never done before, something I’d suggested a couple of times—that you get right off the scaffolding and climb up the roof, using the roof jacks to hang on to and to brace yourself. Then you come at the bitchathane from above. He always said that I could try it if I wanted to but I never did. Just didn’t have the nerve, facing down the roof like that. But that day, he’s mad, and that’s how it happens. Because that’s the only way a ten-foot section of that Grace’s Ice and Water Shield can be up in the air far enough that wind can lift it and blow it back on itself.

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He doesn’t want that sheet of black tar sticking to itself so he stands up, trying to yank it apart. Then he slips from the pitch, gets his shoes in the glue, and the force of his moving weight slips more of the bitchathane off the roof. Tough as he is, he nearly gets it free, gets himself free. He’s tugging one end, thinking he’ll get it straight yet, when the wind pushes the loose flap and it blows up against his body, wraps right to him. He steps onto the slippery part of the roof, then falls onto the already exposed glue and tries to roll sideways, but I guess he loses his sense of direction. He twists the way that makes more of the stuff come up and wrap around him. So now it’s stuck to itself and he’s in the middle of it. I see the danger, start moving, start shouting to hold still, and I see him being real clear about what’s happening, trying to move slowly, getting an arm free to hold himself up off the roof and using the other to slide this crazy man-sleeve down, but it’s caught on the fabric of his wifebeater, getting tighter and tighter, and the stuff just keeps rolling him up and then his arms are caught like in a straitjacket. He’s trying to wiggle down to the scaffolding where he will be safer, but he can’t gain footing. His body comes to the edge of the roof. Trembles. If he’d fallen on the plank, that might of saved him. But no, the man-mummy he’s become slowly slips sideways and over the edge, real simple, and though his head may have struck the corner of the scaffolding on the way down, it is, as they say in the building business, pretty much a fatal fall from the start. It happens quicker, harsher, with more points of measurement than how I tell it. But even in that moment when he gets so trussed up that even his spirit won’t ever come undone, I understand, there is a beauty in it, too. Right alongside horror, there’s this other-

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worldly moment, like a strand of dust from some high place just hanging over our lives, floating and glimmering for a long time, maybe all the years we were bad together. That kind of delicate strength. And then it connects. Linked to another thing. And it sticks, pulls taut. Tighter. And then it breaks. When that happens, you can’t do nothing, you only watch like you aren’t there at all, like time isn’t real, like death and life don’t exist how we think they do. One minute the thread is floating, then connected, then not. Gone on the wind. It’s all tender and quiet where that happens. That kind of beauty. Then you’re screaming. Because you wished it. And the spider ghost that is the closest thing to family helped you get what you wanted. It takes the paramedics a half hour to cut him out of all that bitchathane. I sit on the porch, cold as first snow. But as I watch, words are with me in a different way. Bitchathane. Beauty-thane. Leaving. Loving. Loathing. The thickness of a red c-hair, not as a measurement of closeness, but of distance. Aunt Toots sits with me until my mother comes all the way from Newberry before she eases into the trusses and under the flatbed, slipping away like the deaders do.

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Mary Ellen’s friend Sasha had convinced her that estate sales were the way to save money in this terrible economy. The items were cheap to begin with and, if they weren’t reasonable enough, they could easily bargain them down. Mary Ellen didn’t want to go because she was too broke to buy anything— even if it was on sale—but in the end she relented because she lacked an alternate plan. The sale was being held on Moran Road, one of the nicest streets in town. According to Sasha, news of sales at ritzy addresses usually drew scads of shoppers. If they wanted to find anything worth anything, they ought to arrive right at nine. At 8:55 am they turned down onto the block. Both sides of the street were already lined with cars. A clump of dumpy-looking

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people was congregated on the front lawn waiting for their entry numbers. Sasha found a spot near the end of the street underneath an elm tree. All of the trees on Moran were imposing; impervious to the diseases that had brought down the spindly elms on Mary Ellen’s street. Pesticide, like everything else, was meted out to the rich first. The house was the only ugly one on the block, a gray splitlevel with latticework running up on either side of the plywood door. “Oh no!” Mary Ellen exclaimed when she realized which house they were headed toward. “Whoever built this little turd of a house on this street must have been on drugs,” Sasha said as they made their way up the front walk. For Mary Ellen, the fact that the house was unappealing wasn’t the problem, it was the location. On the left side of the estate sale house was a beautiful red brick colonial in which Mary Ellen’s friend Reyna Buhler had once lived. Mary Ellen had been jealous of Reyna Buhler before everything went awry. She’d met her at a Junior League meeting. Mary Ellen had joined the Junior League when her husband Ed was in law school. When he dropped out to become a police officer, she’d resigned because she’d imagined some of the sustainers looked askance at his new profession. Whether that was true or not, she found that these days she felt more comfortable with people like Sasha, who was married to a schoolteacher. Sasha never offered condolences when Mary Ellen said she and the kids were spending Christmas vacation at home instead of skiing. Reyna was from Honduras. She’d met her husband Craig at MIT, which she’d attended on scholarship, the first from her village. The colonial, the Mercedes SL500, the unlimited clothing budget had been an overwhelming boon for her but she’d

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always seemed ambivalent about it. She once said that even though she didn’t have much when she lived there, she’d been much happier in Honduras with her family. “All people there watch over each other,” she said. “I don’t get that feeling here.” In Honduras she had not had to deal with mean neighbors like the old woman in the ugly house next door who called the police if her children made whooping sounds in her backyard or hit a baseball over the fence or even laughed raucously for more than two minutes at a stretch. “He won’t give candy to Democrats,” Reyna told Mary Ellen once. She’d meant the old woman. She meant to say, “She won’t give candy to Democrats.” Pronouns were a problem for Reyna. That was part of the reason Mary Ellen hadn’t realized what was going on with Craig right away. Reyna had said, “She drinks too much,” and Mary Ellen had assumed she was talking about her mother-in-law, not her husband. She’d spent a couple of weeks wondering why Reyna was so worked up about her mother-in-law’s drinking when the woman lived in Boca Raton. According to Reyna, one Halloween during an election year the old woman next door refused to give candy out to Democrats. A local television station had set a camera up on her front lawn and filmed her slamming the door on Democrats and all those who resembled Democrats and even on those trick-or-treaters who’d had the nerve to reprimand her. “She hate me,” Reyna said. “She can’t figure out where I’m coming from. She thinks I’m a Democrat. She said she had a maid one time who looked just like me. It made him crazy in his head that I wouldn’t say where I was from! But no matter how many times he asks me, I never gives him the satisfaction.”

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Now, standing in that same mean old woman’s entryway, Mary Ellen would have given anything to see the old woman’s face as interlopers scurried from room to room snatching up lamps and end tables and taking down pictures. It was only 9:05, but several people were already struggling under the weight of their acquisitions. Neon green carpeting covered the floor in the foyer, living room, dining room, study, and staircase. The house smelled like rotting bananas, ashtrays, and smelly shoes. “Why do old people stink?” Sasha whispered. Mary Ellen shrugged. “I think it’s because they lose their sense of smell. You know they say that’s the precursor to dementia.” “Really?” “Promise me you’ll tell me when I start to reek,” Sasha said before rushing up the stairs and nearly knocking over a portly gray-haired antiques dealer Mary Ellen recognized from his shop on Mack Avenue. Mary Ellen stood in the middle of the foyer and looked around. In the living room, two small armchairs upholstered with a pink-and-green floral print flanked the fireplace. A checked pink-and-green sofa sat opposite it. Mary Ellen wound her way through the crowd in order to take a closer look. When she did, the checks on the couch immediately started to pulse. Upstairs several women were rifling through the old woman’s closet. A size-14 red taffeta dress hung from the closet door. It looked like something Nancy Reagan might have worn to her husband’s inauguration, albeit in a smaller size. Mary Ellen walked around the bed and peeked out the window, which looked down into Reyna’s yard. The old woman must have sat up in this bed in the lavender terrycloth robe

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that was now being offered up for $1 and looked down at Craig from this very window. It was too terrible to believe! Mary Ellen couldn’t wrap her mind around it. She closed the sheers and hurried to the other side of the room. If she’d known the sale was going to be in this house, she would not have come. Opposite the twin bed where the old woman had probably expired was an old 19-inch television on a rolling cart. No wonder she’d heard him outside the window. She probably couldn’t get any reception on that antiquated TV. All she could hear was her drunken neighbor stumbling around in her yard. She’d probably had all sorts of theories about him: the rich boy stifled by his father who resorted to alcohol and a sexy, moronic wife. Reyna, in reality, had been anything but a moron but how would the old woman have known that? She’d never been able to see past her accent. Next to the old woman’s bed was a Bible, a rosary, an avocado green rotary phone, and a paperback novel called Bones. Someone touched Mary Ellen’s shoulder and she let out a little whoop of surprise. A tiny man with a pencil moustache apologized for trying to slip past her. He wanted to examine the phone. “I’m a collector,” he said. “For some reason these old phones really get me.” The basement walls were knotty pine and a full bar lined the back wall with a plaque over the top that read mi casa es su casa! All sorts of mixers and tumblers and shot glasses and other party paraphernalia lined the bar. In the other corner of the room there was a fireplace. The stools were the kind that spun all the way around. Mary Ellen’s parents also had a bar in their house when she was growing up and they’d had similar stools. The stools had provided Mary Ellen with a lot of entertainment when her parents were busy with their guests.

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“Every time I get my hands on something this snooty bitch slaps me down.” Sasha had appeared out of nowhere carrying a blue porcelain lamp and a small red oriental rug. “She’s got the sterling and the bookshelf, but she is not getting these things.” “You have to be tough,” Mary Ellen agreed. “People are so aggressive,” Sasha sighed. “This basement is the bomb. They used to have more fun than we do now.” She nodded at the bar. “Did you see the patio furniture?” The patio furniture was black wrought iron with more pink-and-green floral cushions. It reminded Mary Ellen of her grandmother’s house in Florida. She’d stayed with her grandmother every Christmas. Her parents had booked a hotel about a mile away right on the beach. Her grandmother’s house had looked out onto the Intracoastal Waterway. Every now and then a manatee would make its way into the canal. A couple of times Mary Ellen had been sitting on the dock when one surfaced. They were slow and gentle-looking creatures. Of course, that’s why they were nearly extinct. If her grandmother hadn’t sold the house, these days she could probably sit on the dock for weeks on end without spotting one. The same people who voted for the manatee preserve sped through the conservation areas in their motorboats, chopping them to bits. Mary Ellen sat down in a wrought-iron chair and bounced a couple of times, pretending to test the cushion for comfort. Her mother had held an estate sale after her grandmother died. It was very successful. They’d only had to ship a couple of items back. Who had purchased her patio furniture? Had people swarmed through the house running their germ-ridden hands over all of her belongings? “I found a couple of great chairs upstairs,” Sasha called

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from the kitchen, motioning Mary Ellen back in from the porch. “And I’m going to nab them before that witch gets her hands on them.” Mary Ellen didn’t want to go back up to the bedroom, but Sasha didn’t know Reyna’s story and Mary Ellen didn’t want to explain her reluctance, so she followed her up the stairs. In the bedroom, Sasha pointed out two cherry dining room chairs stationed on either side of the television cart. “What do you think?” Sasha glanced around frantically. “The lady working the sale said these are Duncan Phyfe. That must be a good brand. My brother’s an upholsterer. He can fix the cushions. Let me know quick so I can get them down the stairs before anyone nabs them—” “They’re nice,” Mary Ellen said. When Sasha lifted the chair up to examine the underside, Mary Ellen noticed that the carpet underneath it was worn clear to the floor. The chair had been sitting in that spot for years and years. It had served no purpose whatsoever. Now it would move to Sasha’s house. Someday a bargain hunter would pick it up in her bedroom. “What do you think?” the shopper would ask her friend. “Should I buy it?” “I think I’ll take it.” Sasha picked them up and made for the door. “I’ll meet you at the car.” Mary Ellen went back over to the window. She couldn’t resist peeking out one more time. The old woman was the one who called the police. Reyna’s husband Craig had crawled halfway into her tool shed. It was a mystery to Reyna how he’d ended up in the old woman’s yard. Perhaps it was because she’d locked her own gate to keep the kids in. When he was drunk he always had trouble with the latch. Usually she heard him. He’d returned that night on his bicycle like he always did from neighborhood parties. He never

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drove when he was drinking. He must have tried to undo the latch. The bike was overturned in Reyna’s driveway, which was adjacent to the old woman’s driveway. He’d opened the old woman’s gate instead and wandered into her backyard. Perhaps he’d tried to scale the six-foot wooden fence between the houses. At some point, Reyna figured he just gave up. Instead of pounding on his own front door and waking his wife—or even pounding on the surly old woman’s door—he simply crawled into her shed. It was too small to contain his six-footthree frame. When the old woman looked out the window the next morning, all she could see were his legs sticking out. He was wearing khakis and loafers. She recognized his feet because he always wore dark brown loafers with tassels, no socks. “She told the policeman she thought he was just a shadow underneath that enormous elm,” Reyna said. “But then she realized it was Craig and she ran to the phone.” It would have been nice if that was true. According to Ed, who had heard it from Bill, a fellow policeman working the night shift, the old woman had seen Craig stumbling toward her shed around 1:00 am. She’d been disgusted by his inebriated attempts to scale the fence. “A man with young children! Behaving like that!” She told the police that Craig had a drinking problem. He played loud music late into the night. His foreign wife didn’t even seem to care. She’d seen them dancing provocatively in the backyard, setting a very poor example for their children. It might teach him a thing or two to spend the night in the shed. She went back to sleep. “After a night splayed out on the ground I decided he might realize just how far he’s sunk.” “That might have worked, ma’am, if it hadn’t been five below last night,” Bill replied.

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According to Bill, the old woman had shrugged when he told her Craig was dead. Mary Ellen had been enraged. She’d wanted the old woman to pay. She’d insisted Ed tell Reyna so she could press charges. “We can’t charge her with going to bed or with being a bad neighbor or even with poor judgment,” Ed said. “Nothing will happen to her.” Ed had talked her out of telling Reyna. What good would it do? If anything, it might drive her friend insane. What if Reyna attacked the old woman? Or, God forbid, worse? How would Reyna ever be able to live with that knowledge, given the fact that the woman would never have to pay? Mary Ellen was relieved when Reyna moved back to Honduras with her children six months later. It had been a lot of information to withhold. Since then, she’d received only one postcard from her. Reyna was glad to be home. She was enjoying the warm weather. She and the children were staying with her parents. All five of them had to share a one-bedroom apartment. It might be temporary. It might not be. She liked it better there, but the kids were homesick. Mary Ellen walked down the block to the car. There were so many things to feel bad about she didn’t know where to begin. She would have been a better friend to Reyna if she hadn’t been so jealous of her. She should have suggested contacting Alcoholics Anonymous or a doctor about Craig’s drinking. Maybe they could have confronted him. Reyna would not have had access to most of that information coming from a different country and Craig’s parents had been in denial about the problem. Mary Ellen and Ed had discussed the fact that they should help her, but they never had. Mary Ellen drove down the street. Sasha was waiting in the driveway. She was not holding any purchases and she was

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glancing nervously over her shoulder at the sidewalk as if she was afraid. Mary Ellen beeped to get her attention. “What happened to the chairs?” Mary Ellen said. “It was crazy!” Sasha slammed the passenger door. “I can’t believe what just happened.” “What?” Mary Ellen said. “Just start driving. I want to get away from him. I hate estate sales. Why do I do this to myself ?” Mary Ellen drove down the block and turned toward the village. “On my way to the checkout lady I stopped in the den to look at some books, so I put the chair down. While I was rifling through the bookshelf that old bitch came in the room and started yelling at me about the chair: What was I doing with the chair? It was her chair! She’d been looking all over for it. She was taking it back upstairs. At first, I was pissed. I got right in her face and I said, I am buying that damn chair. Just because it didn’t have a sold sign on it didn’t mean it wasn’t mine. I got to it first, etc, etc. I started to push past her toward the door. Then she said, ‘Why in the world would my chair have a sold sign on it?’” “That’s a weird thing to say.” Mary Ellen felt the hairs rising on her arms. “That’s not the weird part. The weird part happened after that. A man came in the room. He was really tall and blond, around forty, white as a sheet. He looked like he had a terrible fever. He didn’t say anything to the old lady; he just started staring her down. I thought he was mad at her for yelling at me. Well, she took one look at him and she started shrieking, ‘What are you doing in here? Why don’t you go home! Why are you always bothering me! Go back to your floozy!’”

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Mary Ellen tried to say something but her tongue had latched to the roof of her mouth. “It was ridiculous.” Sasha shook her head and let out a big breath. “I am not going to these estate sales anymore. I can’t understand why no one came up to see what was the matter. I mean she was totally screaming at him and he looked like he was just about ready to kill her and there were all these shoppers just walking past like nothing unusual was happening. Maybe everyone else knew their story. Maybe he was bipolar. I’m sure there’s some history there . . . Anyway, I didn’t wait around . . . I just ran out of the room. He tried to stop me. I think he felt bad, but I got out of there before he could grab me. He looked like he was really sick. I didn’t want him to touch me.” “What did you say he looked like?” Mary Ellen managed to say. “You must have seen him,” Sasha said. “He came out of the house while I was waiting for you. He was walking right past me when you pulled up. That’s why I didn’t notice you. I was afraid he was heading my way to apologize for the screaming match, but, thank God, he didn’t even seem to see me. He just kept going right past me and then he went into that big house next door.”

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by the sweat of thy brow thou shall eat bread.

From the calypso song “Jean and Dinah” by the Mighty Sparrow

lolita hernandez making bakes for yvonne

Whole night long I ent sleep from the blasted summer heat. My room was in the front and I was afraid tief would climb in if I opened the window; plus the little fan was only blowing hot air. Then too I was busy all night making bakes with Mummy. She came to me in a dream for the hundredth time to show me how to make them. Over and over again when she was alive and even since she died a couple of years ago, Mummy tried her best to show me how to proportion the ingredients and how to knead everything, but I couldn’t ever figure out how she could measure the flour by handfuls, the baking powder with her three fingers, the salt with two, and exactly how much Crisco to add. I can’t tell you how much time I spend

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trying to recall if my fingers were the same size as hers and if hers were the same as a teaspoon or tablespoon. But after her death no amount of measuring equipment was equal to her fingers and hands and could help me make the bakes, not even the little tin cup she used. Whether I was making roast bake or fry bake, they tended to come out hard or underdone or burn up. So it looked as if the poor old lady was trying again on such a hot night to see if she could make me understand how to make proper bakes. But then again, summer heat never made a difference when she was alive. She would ting up the flour, flough flough and she done. We eating bakes and the whole house filled up with the warmth of them. Since she dead we haven’t had decent bakes in this house. Daddy went so far as to question what kind of woman I am who can’t make bakes. These people are tough, you know. What kind of thing is that to say to your daughter? As I reached the entranceway to the kitchen, it must have been six or so in the morning and there was Daddy by the stove making the morning brew, half Nescafé instant and half evaporated just the way Mummy and Daddy always cooked it on the stove in a little tin pan with three spoons of sugar on slow slow fire until the mixture boiled over. This was how the two of them made coffee ever since I know myself. Whoever was up to make the coffee first would stand over the stove stirring the mixture and wait for it to boil over and that disgusting scummy skin to form on top of the coffee. Then and only then did they consider the coffee done. Oh lorse how these people could make coffee like that and then drink it and spend whole morning long eating bakes and talking a set of ole talk about life back home. Once the coffee boil, the pan would sit lopsided on the stove with the spoon in it until Mummy would wash everything up; these days it’s me to wash. And the spoon

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is always well covered with the scum. That’s the most I can do, wash the pan and the spoon because me ent have patience for boil over and scum forming and all that. So I leaned against the entranceway rubbing down the skin on my hands and arms as if the bakes dough passed through the dream and stayed on me. I stopped so watching at Daddy in his old pajama bottoms, his merino vest torn under the arm and him stirring and stirring the coffee, waiting for it to boil over on this July morning. The back door was open, letting in the same hot air from last night. Morning Daddy. He ent pick my height. Morning nuh Daddy. He was well intent on that coffee. I could see how he really needed it this morning. He couldn’t have slept well himself last night. His room was in the middle of the house right by Miss Lady next door’s kitchen. I know no breeze could pass by there, only odors lingering between the two houses from all those heavy, greasy foods she cook every day, every season. I don’t see how those people could eat food so heavy in the summer, a big set of meat and so on. Anyhow, I found it amusing how Daddy’s big belly was leaning over the stove and how he had a little bit of moisture in the creases of his mouth. From where I was standing, his nose didn’t even look so wide and he was looking healthy from the summer sun even though he was only catching it by sitting on the back porch. He looked damn good for his age, you know, big belly and all. And he was looking cool as a cucumber as if we were in January. His hair was already combed, and I could well smell the bay rum. I remained like that, leaning at the entranceway, observing the panorama in front of me. I looked over by the sink and things were clean but shabby looking, you know. The whole kitchen needed a coat of paint. In fact, the whole house needed

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painting, new furniture, rugs, and the whole nine yards. Then all in a sudden my eyes passed over by the windowsill near the stove and good God all of Mummy’s flowers were dead. Oh lorse, how we let she houseplants go like that? How long they dead so? You mean to tell me I come in this kitchen day in and day out, stand by the stove cooking, and I ent see the flowers dead brown, dead dead? Eh eh, whah happenin? He was so busy with the coffee he can’t acknowledge my presence? Ooohoo, hey now, look me here. Finally he turned toward me. I smelling something stink, he said. No good morning, no how de doo. Just he smelling something stink. Well naturally I sniffed under my arms. True I wasn’t looking great; my hair was all ramfle up, my nightgown fitting me like a jimmyswing, and I must have had bags under my eyes, but I wasn’t smelling bad, either. So I told him in no uncertain terms, Is your top lip you smelling, Daddy. I tell you I smelling something stink. But what on earth was he smelling? I took out the little bit of fowl guts from the chicken I stewed last night. And we didn’t have any pile-up of garbage in the back since garbage collection was the day before, thanks to Mr. Mayor Young. I think it was the only thing he did for us since he in the Manoogian, improve the garbage collection. Just in case, I cast my eyes by the back door. No, nothing was out there, only Mummy’s roses, which fortunately we hadn’t managed to kill. I think Mummy was returning to tend her garden because it was still flourishing, by the grace of God because neither Daddy nor I did much out there. Yes, Mummy’s roses were all over and they kept coming back plentiful over the last couple of summers since she died. So I reported this to Daddy. There’s nothing

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here to smell bad, Daddy, only Mummy’s beautiful yellow and red roses perfuming the yard. By this time he was sitting at the table with his cup of coffee waiting for it to cool. Since Mummy died he ent even adjust the amount of coffee to make, so every morning her share was still in the pan after he poured. They both used little teacups to drink the morning coffee. Why not, since for them everything was tea-cocoa tea, coffee tea, and so on? You not smelling anything? No no, Daddy, not a thing. Just as I said that I remembered the time years ago when I was thirteen or so and woke up one January morning to find the two of them by the wide open back door shivering in the cold. They were having a similar conversation about smelling something. What de arse they could smell in cold weather like that was beyond me. But there they were, the two of them with their arms wrapped around each other facing a near blizzard and saying they smelling something stink. What? I didn’t smell anything back then, either, but I can ever remember that morning. Mummy was cream-colored, fat and short like a little cuddly stuffed toy, and Daddy was tall, brown, and jocular. I took after both of them, tall like him, creamy like her. Oh yes, they well looked like biff and bam. I watched them real good for twenty minutes from the same kitchen entranceway where I am standing now. Then they closed the door and Mummy twisted around and saw me, Eh eh, morning dahling. And I said, Whah happenin, Mummy? And she said. Nothin dahlin. You want bakes? But before she could begin making the bakes, the two of them shuffled around the kitchen too-tool-bay for sure. Eh eh, I might as well have said I ent hungry. What was wrong with

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them I wondered? But they weren’t saying a word. Finally, Mummy bent down in the cabinet where she kept a big tenpound rice can full of flour for the bakes. Then ring, the phone jumped off the hook in the dining room next to the kitchen, shocking all of us. It was too early for Tante to call. Every afternoon, just after lunch, Tante would call and Mummy and she would talk talk talk talk talk for nearly an hour on the phone about this, that, and the other ting. This time it wasn’t Tante but a crackly voice. I was the one to answer the phone, and all I could hear was a set of static and a voice sounding way far away, Halo, halo. Is (cehhhr cehhhr sheee sheee) dere? Up to this day, I don’t know if the voice was man or woman, or the name it was asking for. Daddy Daddy come take this, nuh. I get all nervous because to tell you the truth I sense something was very wrong. One thing I can tell you for sure, it was some island person on the other line talking fast. Me ent able when they talk fast and then the phone going cehhhr cehhhr sheee shee. So Daddy take the phone and next ting I know, he’s saying Oh lorse and Oh good God and how and when and all of those words that make Mummy freeze right there by the cabinet with both her hands around the rice pan full a flour pressing it up against the belly. She ent even take off the top. Her face changed radically as if she already knew just what Daddy would report. She could well see something was wrong on the other end of the phone. And so said so done. Daddy said all right, all right and could scarcely put the receiver down he was shaking so much. He stop so by the entranceway looking like a frightened little kid because one thing for sure, up to this day Daddy doesn’t like commesse of any sort, no confusion. He doesn’t like loud noise, arguing or any of that. He definitely doesn’t like backchat from me even now. The only person I ever see could talk to Daddy any ole how was Mummy. I see

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she take a frying pan to him one day and he cowered in the corner by the stove like a frightened cat. I still laugh when I think of that day. But on this morning, after the phone call, it was as if he couldn’t say a word. Mummy knew right away and simply asked, Who? He said, Your brother. John? You only have one brother, Mummy. He said this with his tongue rolling around on his lips, his eyes wide open, his cheekbones high as they had ever been. Then he paused, not saying a word. Then he resumed. Is John who came to say good-bye for the last this morning. You realize that? What time he die? Mummy asked. About then, Daddy replied. Oh lorse, now it’s only me left, Daddy. She called him Daddy, too. And to boot, he called her Mummy. Believe it or not, they called me Baby. So Uncle John was my first lesson in spirit coming to announce its death. Actually, he was my first experience with anyone in the family or anyone close to me dying. But I was well chupid in these kind of island tings, their myths and beliefs. So I chimed in, Mummy spirit can cross water fuh see people? Mummy replied very patiently that a spirit comes to say good-bye wherever its loved ones are. It was only then I see tears in Mummy’s eyes that I realized I asked a bad question. I’m sorry Mummy, wherever you are now. I didn’t mean to make you cry back then. I found myself lost in all these thoughts about what happened long ago. Back then Daddy was laid off from the shop so there was no money for either of them to go back home for the funeral. Mummy wailed and prayed and wailed and prayed for days. I never see she cry like that before or since.

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lolita hernandez

And Daddy looked so defeated, I suppose because he didn’t have the money to send her to the funeral. It hurt me to my heart to see them so sad, and I was only thirteen. Ever since then I learned to not think of myself so much; you have to put yuhself in the other person shoes. Poor Mummy. Just then the pan tipped over on the stove and the spoon rattled. Oh gosh, I nearly piss on myself. What is dat atall, Daddy said as if he just now wake up. Oh nothing, nuh, just the pan tipping over. The spoon musta shift. Aye-ya-yaye, I say to myself, something is going on. But I don’t know what. He says he smelling something; I ent smelling nothing unusual in the house. So if some spirit is hanging around here now, it ent come to tell me anything. I stop so looking at Daddy to see if I could see some spirit friggin around him. Ah wha a watch me fuh? He asked. Nothing, Daddy. I’m wondering what to eat. You hungry? In truth my mind had gone back to the dream and all in a sudden I was wondering if she came to tell me more than just how to make de bakes? Wait a minute, wait a minute. Is she the one making the smell trying to tell us something? Oh lorse. But she already dead? She can’t announce that she’s dying again. What an odor, he said again as he inhaled the air with his eyes closed. This is a smell like a dead rat or a human body passing the last gases. You know Mummy used to say that every time there is a smell of garbage but the house is clean, a spirit is passing through on its way to the other world. Your mother could see spirits. I guess they dohn come to me because they know I fraid dem. Daddy, there is no such thing as spirits. Don’t you say that, nuh. You remember what happened

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with your Uncle John? Mummy smelled garbage that morning. A little while later she felt something like a leaf brush across her face while she was standing right here at this sink washing the dishes. Then we got the call from home. Her brother dropped down dead. You remember? No no, Daddy, she was getting ready to make bakes. She was standing in the kitchen with the big rice pan full of flour right here by the table edge. Don’t contradict me, nuh. What the hell you know? I well shut muh mouth quick. Oh lorse, what de arse wrong with him? Something is really going on here. We stop so not saying a word for quite a while really, me leaning up against the entrance, he was staring off as if he was in another land. He ent even take a sip of coffee. Yuh coffee getting cold, nuh. You want me to heat it up? How long since mummy dead? he asked. Two years, Daddy. Ah well, after one time is another. Yes, Daddy. But we will make it, please God. We will make it. I feel she is still with us helping us along. You think so? Oh yes, she comes to me often in dreams. You ever see she spirit walking about? She ever talk to you? In the dreams, yes. I never see her any other way. Always in dreams she comes and always with the rice pan full of flour. What else she going to travel with if she coming to make bakes? And I gave a little laugh to relieve the tension because I could well feel his mind was preoccupied with Mummy and death and so on. Ever since Mummy’s brother died and then Daddy’s sister just a month or so later, the two of them always talked about death as if it was around the corner waiting for them. I spent my teenage years and up to now living with their

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thoughts of death. It hasn’t been easy, you know. Then he said, She never even comes to my dreams. I don’t see her atall atall. I don’t even feel her here. You ever feel her presence? No, Daddy. I just see her in dreams. Well how do you know she’s here? The dreams, Daddy, the dreams. She was a staunch believer in dreams. This is how she communicates with me. You know, long after Uncle John died, she told me that for a few nights before he died she dreamt of the two of them as children playing with the dogs in the yard where they grew up. It was quite an elaborate dream. Their mother called them in the house because a storm was coming, but only Mummy went in. Uncle John was hardened, Mummy said, and kept playing outside. He drowned in the storm. That was her dream. Is so? Oh yes. I forget all about dat. She told me too. So wait a minute what yuh dream last night when she come by you. You dream something last night? Oh yes, Daddy. I had a wonderful dream. He was watching every word falling out my mouth while I’m telling him about the dream. I told him how Mummy came to visit me in the dream wearing her old housedress with all those crazy blue and red flowers and the same washout-looking apron. We were right here in this same kitchen, Daddy. She was at the head of the table where you are sitting right now—now he’s feeling the edge of the table and looking around a little bit— good. Yes, Daddy, and so she was measuring out the flour from the pan with that same little tin cup she kept with the flour. I had his full attention. You remember how she used to make the circle of flour. She couldn’t make it without singing her song. You remember the song? And then a big smile moved across his face.

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Oh ho. So when yuh bounce up on Jean and Dinah, Rosita and Clementina, round the corner posing. Ha ha. Oh yes. Oh lorse, Mummy loved that song. I could well see she dancing and making she bakes and singing. Yeah, well I bounce up on she singing that same song in de dream last night. You know Mummy had a song for everything. If she was in the garden, she would come with she Tee Way Tee Way. Invader never surrender and take some kind ole stick and she put the thing up as if she in some stick fight, singing pui pui, I say tee way, tee way, oh garçon, oh mama mama tee way. Yes, yes I can well see she now. Oh lorse, I does miss Mummy so. He was quiet for a minute or so then he began a slow low song, like a dirge: Me ent no go see um see um see um; me ent no go see um no mo. I wonder if it’s she coming to tell me something. Maybe she’s coming for me. Oh gosh, don’t talk such flitics, nuh. Where you get that song from? She’s not coming for you. How you could say something like that, Daddeee? Me ent smelling nothing. Wait a minute. Me ent remember smelling anything stink in the dream, either, only the same nice smell of the bakes cooking— we made roast bake last night—and even in the dream I smelling sausage or bacon something like that to eat with the bakes. But she comes by all the time and never leaves a bad smell. Daddy, you should have seen us making bakes last night. She made that flour into a circle, and put the Crisco, baking powder, and warm milk in the middle then worked the flour from the edges gradually into the middle with the liquid. All the while she was singing about Jean and Dinah, Rosita and Clementina, round the corner posing. Bet your life is something they selling. And she worked that bottom from side to side. Oh gosh I miss that old lady. Oui foute.

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So I’m still leaning at the entranceway—not in the kitchen, you know—but striking a pose like Jean or Dinah or one of them. Then I began to sing and twist around in my jimmyswing nightie and my ramfle-up hair trying to dance like the girls in the song. Daddy ent even pick muh height. He was still sitting in the same spot at the table, looking at the kitchen door and talking talking talking. Now who was he talking to; I ent see nobody. But I heard words like oh lorse and good God and when? Is now? I guess so. And then his head lapse, hitting his chest as if he had given up in sadness for some reason, remembering something or wishing Mummy was there, which I could well understand. So I said, Eh eh, Daddy. Everything will be all right, yuh know. Nuh worry about something stink. Is yuh top lip, Daddy. True nuh. Is the bakes you smelling. Is how I was making bakes whole night long with Mummy that you smelling them this morning. You not smelling anything bad atall. You want bakes? I going to fix them for you now just like Mummy’s. You wait and see. Move aside; I coming now for the flour pan. While I was reaching up to see if I could pull my hair back and rearrange myself for the task at hand, I began singing the Jean and Dinah refrain and wining up as if I was in the streets dancing. I was trying to make him feel good. Whoo watch me, nuh, Daddy. Get ready for some bakes. I feel to make real good bakes this morning. Watch me, nuh. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy?

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eileen pollack the devil in cross village

Whenever my partner, Marian, and I eat dinner at the Legs Inn, a famous Polish restaurant in Cross Village, Michigan, we walk off the potato pancakes, bigos, and nalesniki by visiting the crypt of Father Weikamp, a pierogi’s throw from the entrance. The crypt, a white clapboard building the dimensions of a garden shed, has a window in either side, and when Marian started taking me to Cross Village, you could push a button beneath the sill and cause a light in the crypt to light up, allowing you to make out the artifacts on the shelf above Father Weikamp’s tomb. If you cricked your neck and peered in the mirror angled against one wall, you could glimpse Father Weikamp’s coffin.

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See the skulls? Marian would say, pointing to a tapered black board painted with ghostly white skulls, the fattest skull at the bottom and the smallest skull on top, like the cairns in Roman catacombs or the killing fields of Cambodia. Father Weikamp was a Satanist, he would explain. At which I would say, Come on, what does that mean, a Satanist? Did he worship the Devil? Did he lead midnight bacchanals in which he and his Indian congregants cavorted naked around a fire, chanting whatever spells might bring Beelzebub and his minions flying in to join them? At which Marian would shrug and ask, What else would you call a priest who carried on bizarre non-Catholic rituals, spent hours in this crypt, and liked sleeping in his grave? Oh, pooh, I said. Lots of European priests liked sleeping in their coffins. It reminded them of their mortality. But Marian insisted that Father Weikamp wasn’t your average priest. For one thing, he showed up in Cross Village under cloudy circumstances—someone had set fire to his church in Chicago. As to the convent he founded in Cross Village—Marian pointed to the row of modest crosses, each with a sister’s name, to one side of the crypt—instead of building separate dormitories for the monks and nuns, Father Weikamp designed a convent in which everyone lived together. Great, I said, now you have the monks and nuns carrying on orgies in the convent. That’s just anti-Catholic slander. Given that Marian is a Catholic and I’m a Jew, my defense of Father Weikamp might seem unexpected. But people born into a religion can be readier to believe the worst about its holy men than outsiders who romanticize the same. Father Weikamp’s purpose in settling in northwest Michigan was to convert the Indians, and Marian is conditioned to think the worst of colonizers and imperialists. A Pole whose homeland was invaded first by Nazis, then by Communists, he was born

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in Munich after World War II, his parents having walked out of Poland carrying nothing but a suitcase. Deeply scarred by the massacres, suicides, and betrayals they had witnessed, they made it to Detroit, where they worked hard to create a life for Marian and his siblings, only to watch their adopted city go up in flames. So Marian can’t help but be drawn to graves. No matter where we go, he seeks out the cemeteries, ruins, battlegrounds, concentration camps, the sites of mass murders and executions, and soaks up the horrors that took place there. You can almost see the blood seeping up to stain his shoes, the way water at the shore rises to fill your footprints. I see history as bloody, too. What Jew doesn’t? But I try not to seek out the gallows and crematoria. None of my immediate relatives perished in the Holocaust, as Marian’s family did. And I am wary of defining my religion in relation to the genocidal hatred of a mad man. To me, Cross Village is a vacation spot and nothing more. At least, that used to be the case. When Marian started taking me to spend time at his parents’ cabin, I loved waking up late, enjoying breakfast on the sunlit deck, taking a walk along the shore, going for a swim, finding a sheltered spot in the dunes and reading. In the evenings, Marian and I would drive through the Tunnel of Trees to Harbor Springs, where we would browse in the preppy clothing stores, walk along the dock and pick out which yacht we would like to own, eat potato-crusted whitefish, window-shop for real estate we would never have the money to buy, then head back to the Village, where we would watch the sun set across the vast, scarlettinged lake from the garden behind the Legs, exhausted by too

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much sun, more than our usual quota of exercise, and a few too many bottles of Okocim. Marian enjoys all of the above. But in his fifty-five years of summering at Cross Village, he has grown sensitive to the darkness that shadows the woods even on the sunniest afternoons. This is Odawa land. Or it was Odawa land, before the French came, then the British, and finally, the Americans—merchants, farmers, lumbermen. By the late 1800s, a substantial village had grown up here, named for the rough wood cross the missionaries set up on the bluff, with houses, churches, stores, a post office, schools, and Father Weikamp’s convent. The Indians supported themselves by taking jobs on the lumber crews, working at the mills, or weaving beautiful quill boxes to sell to white tourists. They worshipped at the missionaries’ churches, attended the missionaries’ school. Then, in September 1918, a fire started in a derelict building at the west end of town and ravaged nearly everything, after which the influenza epidemic swept through, after which the First World War carried away many young men of both races, after which the lumber industry died, after which little remained of Cross Village except the cross, the church, the ruins of Father Weikamp’s convent, and Father Weikamp’s crypt. The Village languished until 1921, when a Polish Communist named Stanley Smolak drifted up from Detroit, bought a tract of land with a spectacular view of the lake, and hired some Odawas to build his restaurant. Old-timers whisper that Smolak paid his laborers with alcohol. What no one can dispute is that, after the bar was built, plenty of local Indians bought their liquor at the Legs. Today, if you wander through the bar, you will see a painting of Stanley Smolak in a headdress, with a legend to the effect that one of the local chiefs adopted the kindly Polish

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restaurant owner and bestowed on him the honorary Odawa title “Chief White Cloud.” As a Communist, Smolak probably treated the Indians better than most other whites treated them, but his bona fides as a chief are on the same order as the authenticity of the teepee and totem poles in the parking lot. For a Communist, Stanley Smolak was an energetic entrepreneur. In the early fifties, he built a row of cabins behind his restaurant and began renting them to Polish immigrants from Detroit. Marian’s parents are fiercely anti-Communist, but they overlooked their political differences with Smolak in favor of an inexpensive vacation that allowed them to escape the city’s heat and relax in a landscape that reminded them of the country they had left, among countrymen who shared their language. Marian’s parents rarely speak to anyone outside the family, but I think they saw Cross Village as a refuge to which they could flee in case a totalitarian regime ever came to power. Why else, when they grew tired of renting Smolak’s cabins, would they have bought a plot of land that can be reached only by driving a quarter of a mile down a barely visible trail whose grass they allow to grow so tall I am afraid my Corolla will bottom out on the weeds and rocks? Why else would they build a cabin so heavily camouflaged by trees you can barely see it, with wood shutters that can be pulled down to protect the windows and doors? Why else would they insist that the gate that blocks the turnoff from the road always be bolted shut, so you have to stop and get out of your car and unlock the lock, then drive through and bolt the gate behind you, and, if you’re driving out, follow the same procedure in reverse, and that the doors and windows of the house be locked at all times, even if it’s broad daylight and you’re only walking down to the quickie mart for a muffin and the New York Times?

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I’m no stranger to paranoia. I grew up thinking that if the Nazis showed up at my parents’ house in upstate New York, I could hide in the laundry chute, clinging there by my fingers. Unlike Midwesterners, who assume that hiding in the wilderness is their best chance to evade whatever ultra-leftie government forces come parachuting down from black helicopters to confiscate their hunting rifles, I view my proximity to the sea as crucial to my chances of escaping whatever fascistic forces might try to herd me to a concentration camp. But I don’t actually believe my nightmares. And until recently, I found myself resenting Marian’s insistence that the dark forces of history might be lurking around every bend, even in America, even on a lovely summer evening in Cross Village, Michigan. In the evenings, I preferred to drive to Petoskey to see Hairspray or Meet the Parents, while his idea of entertainment was to watch reruns of Combat! or documentaries about the Holocaust. The first few summers Marian took me to Cross Village, I didn’t even realize that most of the people who live there are Odawas. Marian is wary of claiming to be an adopted member of the tribe, but his connection to the Odawa families who populate the Village is deeper than most. Not only did he spend his boyhood playing ball with the Odawa kids, swimming with them in the lake, and running wild with them in the woods, his dark skin, broad Slavic cheeks, Asiatic eyes, and straight, shiny black hair make him appear more Native American than many Native Americans. When he was young, he wore his hair to his waist, and white tourists would offer him money to take his photo. Now, when we go to the beach, a burly man with a bear claw tattooed above his heart might grasp Marian to his chest and say, “Hey, bro, how you doing.” When we stop by the Legs to shoot pool, guys his age who are

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missing so many teeth they appear to be in their eighties fill him in on who’s been caught dealing dope, who’s found Jesus and kicked his bad habits, whose kid just made it through U of M. One of Marian’s friends became a doctor and returned to the Village to practice; when he and Marian get talking about who’s on the skids and who’s put his or her life together, you can sense that Marian is as much of an insider in this community as an outsider could hope to be. Which means that he gets invited to whatever parties are going down. A few summers ago, he asked me to accompany him to a birthday celebration thrown by a skilled carpenter who helped Marian’s parents build their cabin. The man and his wife were warm and kind, the food and drink plentiful. The crowd milling about the couple’s backyard was tipsy but subdued, with cute kids chasing each other and chasing dogs, and one guy, over by the canoe, carrying on a spirited conversation with himself. By the barn, a knot of tattooed, shirtless men with long hair and braids stood shooting the shit and nursing beers. As usual, I stood beside Marian, nodding politely and feeling as left out as anyone feels when her partner catches up with his childhood friends—doubly so, given that the sorrows they were discussing seem to have occurred not decades ago, but centuries. Then again, as William Faulkner so famously said, the past is never dead; it isn’t even past. Not long after that party, Marian gave in to my request to eat dinner at the fanciest restaurant in Harbor Springs, a restaurant named for my liberal East Coast home state. We hadn’t bothered to call ahead, but the dining room was only a third full and we figured we wouldn’t have any trouble getting seated. Sure enough, the two couples ahead of us—fair and blond, in the sort of plaid and pastel garments that tend to be sold at the overpriced, nautically themed

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clothing stores in Harbor Springs—were quickly escorted to their tables. But when Marian and I reached the podium, the pert young hostess frowned, looked down at her seating chart, and told us there would be a half an hour wait. Marian said, “Forget it” and walked out. When I caught up to him, I asked what had just gone on. Why wouldn’t they serve us? “They thought I was Odawa,” he said. “You’re not serious.” “Yeah? How else can you explain what happened?” When the truth dawned on me—really, there was no other explanation—I wanted to go back to the restaurant and complain. I wanted to punch the hostess. That’s when I began to take the history of Cross Village personally. The ghosts that haunted the woods around Father Weikamp’s crypt began to haunt me, too. Not long after Marian took me to that party, he heard that one of the Odawa men he knew—Marian was fairly sure the man had been at the party—had died under mysterious circumstances not far from Marian’s parents’ cabin. Apparently, the car in which the man had been sitting had exploded; the only way the police were able to identify the body was by the guy’s belt buckle. The police ruled the death an accident, but no one in Cross Village believed that. The guy didn’t own a car, and he was such a terrible alcoholic that no one in his right mind would have lent him one. Besides, he hadn’t been driving the car. The car had just been sitting in the woods. How could it have just blown up? The guess was, either the guy had been freebasing crack in someone else’s car, or the explosion had been a payback for a drug deal gone sour. I couldn’t claim to be too broken up by the death of a guy

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who might or might not have attended a party I had attended against my will. But I couldn’t help thinking of the soft-spoken, longhaired men standing by the barbecue pit that day. Had the dead man been among them? A parent myself, I couldn’t help but wonder what the dead man’s mother must have felt being handed a belt buckle by the cops and told this was all that was left of her son. Even if you consider each of us to be responsible for his or her own fate, you have to admit that if no whites had settled in Cross Village, few Odawas in the century and a half that followed would have died of alcohol, meth, crack, or drug deals gone sour. I don’t believe in the supernatural. Marian and I were once walking along the waterfront in Harbor Springs when we saw a giant apparition of the Virgin Mary outlined on a mansion. The most obvious explanation was that the spotlight shining up from the lawn was projecting the shadow of some Madonna-like object between the spotlight and the house—after all, the apparition did bear a vague resemblance to a folded beach umbrella. As diligently as we searched—I got down on my knees to study the light, which must have made it seem as if I were praying—we couldn’t find any object that might be throwing such a shadow. But we still refused to believe that the Virgin of Harbor Springs was anything but a figment of our collective Jewish-Catholic imaginations. As rational as I am, I began to feel nervous staying alone in Marian’s parents’ cabin. What if I heard a gang of drug lords chasing someone through the woods? What if the man pounded at the door and begged to be let inside? What if I heard an explosion, ran out and saw flames rising from a car, heard a man screaming for me to help? Even if devils don’t exist, we might be able to sense unquiet spirits hovering above the earth where Satan’s minions have done their work.

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Which led me back to Father Weikamp. Who, I was beginning to suspect, might have earned his reputation as a Satanist by doing more than praying to a bunch of skulls. At first, I turned to that most supernatural of research tools, the Internet, which yielded an article about Cross Village from a 1920 issue of Michigan History Magazine and a chapter titled “The Strange Case of Fr. Weikamp” from a book called The Crooked Tree: Indian Legends of Northern Michigan, written by John C. Wright and published in Harbor Springs in 1917. Neither of these sources proved that Father Weikamp consorted with the Devil. But their authors clearly demonstrate that the inhabitants of Cross Village have been uneasy about Father Weikamp since he showed up on their shores in 1855, debarking from a sailboat with a dozen monks and nuns and, according to the author of The Crooked Tree, announcing that the convent he had founded in Chicago “in conjunction with a wealthy woman who came with him from Germany, his native land,” had been “mysteriously set on fire and destroyed,” which had led to his decision “to labor among the Indians.” Almost immediately, Father Weikamp built a convent, as well as a sepulcher he kept in readiness to receive his remains “whenever the time came for him to lay aside his earthly cares.” This sepulcher, Wright tells us, “consisted of a deep cellar, well walled, covered by a small building that stood perhaps six or eight feet above the ground.” Situated in an open field at a distance from the convent, the crypt was always locked, and “only a few intimate friends” knew what it contained, namely, “a casket in the center of the cellar, surmounted by a skull and cross bones, beside which the priest daily made three hours of meditation.”

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The author of The Crooked Tree hardly seems serious in accusing the Franciscan priest of witchcraft, adding that Father Weikamp “went to the gruesome place to read books and papers or for his after dinner smoke, of which he was said to be very fond.” Dismissing stories that the priest filled his crypt with choice wine or held trysts there with his wealthy benefactress from Germany, Wright maintains that Father Weikamp continued about his business, paying calls on the sick, tending his duties at the church, and directing the school for Indians he had set up at the convent. If, after carrying out these responsibilities, the good father felt the need to spend three or four hours praying in his sepulcher, what could be the harm? Yet Wright can’t help but pass on the deliciously spooky claim that after Father Weikamp died he rose from his grave to demonstrate to a friend that the afterlife did exist. Apparently, Father Weikamp often allowed this friend to visit him in his sepulcher. On one such visit, the priest so eloquently described his belief in heaven that the friend begged him to promise that after he reached this exalted place, he would come back to prove his claim. Sadly, a few days later, Father Weikamp was dragged from his horse cart and suffered such grievous injuries that he couldn’t last very long. The friend hurried to Cross Village, arriving at the convent after dark. Hitching his horse beside the road, he noticed a light in Father Weikamp’s crypt. Here is the man’s account of the events that followed: As I neared the little building, I could distinctly hear Father Weikamp’s voice alternately singing and praying. The door was flung wide open and looking in I beheld him on his knees as I had seen him many times before. I could not have been mistaken—I was too well acquainted with that short, rotund

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figure and full red face, surmounted by a fringe of white. I, of course, concluded that he had recovered from his illness and, not wishing to disturb him, quietly withdrew to the convent, where I knocked at the door and was admitted by one of the sisters of the society. Informed by the sister that the priest had died of his injuries, the visitor and two nuns hurried to the tomb to see if a miracle had occurred. When we arrived there all was dark; the tomb was securely locked; with absolutely no sign of any living thing within. To satisfy my curiosity, the sister, who remembered me well as a friend of Father Weikamp, unlocked the door and we entered with a lighted lantern. All was still as death and everything in its proper place. The lid of the coffin containing Father Weikamp’s remains was firmly fastened and appeared to have been neither moved nor molested. We opened the casket, to more thoroughly convince ourselves regarding the matter, and beheld the familiar features of the dead tertiary, whose body was in precisely the same position in which it had been placed the day before by the members of the Benevolent, Charitable and Religious Society of St. Francis.

Although the author of The Crooked Tree claims he isn’t at liberty to disclose the name of the person who told him this story, he assures his readers that he cannot doubt the tale’s veracity because he knows his informant to be “a man of sterling qualities and utmost reliability. . . . As it is, we can only marvel, and enter the incident on the list of unexplained phenomena that baffles the mind of man.” Unfettered by the necessity of selling books to the ghosthungry tourists of upper Michigan, the author of the scholarly article about Father Weikamp in Michigan History Magazine doesn’t mention the story about his subject rising from his grave. Not only does he dismiss the rumors of Father Wei-

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kamp’s debauchery and corruption, he turns the blame for such slanders back on those whites who were narrow-minded enough to whisper the accusations in the first place. Even now, men defame the dead with tales of hidden wealth and immorality—all untrue. Weikamp had shrewdly secured enough acreage to support his work but was not laying up for himself any treasure upon earth. The brethren and sisters lived entirely separate lives, not being allowed so much as to speak each with the other. They had given up the world; and therefore the world, after its fashion, was not slow to vilify them.

In a pamphlet called Old Arbre Croche: A Factual and Comprehensive History of Cross Village, a longtime local resident named Mary Shurtleff confirms that the convent was “constructed in such a way that the nuns could perform all of their duties without ever coming in sight of the male members.” Mrs. Shurtleff admits that it was Father Weikamp’s custom “to descend into his grave each day to spend some time in meditation,” but she mentions nothing about his worshipping the Devil. The only surprising fact she offers is that the crypt no longer stands in its original location. Somehow, I had assumed that the convent was located in the middle of the Village, beside the current church. But the institution Father Weikamp built (not only the convent, but its adjoining hospital and parochial school, with two thousand acres of farmland and pastures, a carpenter shop, a saw mill, a grist mill, a blacksmith shop, and a brewery where the Franciscans brewed their currant wine) stood a few miles east, near what is now Wycamp Lake. The ruins were still there when Marian was a boy, but the land had been purchased by a farmer who didn’t want the graves of a bunch of nuns and the crypt of an eccentric, Devilworshipping priest to be included in the sale. And so, in 1948,

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the graves and crypt were relocated to their current site. The crypt where Marian and I visited Father Weikamp’s remains wasn’t the sepulcher in which he had meditated in his grave and prayed to the skulls above it. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something about Father Weikamp was waiting to be uncovered, and so, when I learned that the town had started a museum in the basement of the church parish hall and that one entire room was devoted to Father Weikamp, I couldn’t resist a visit. The museum is only open on Saturday afternoons, but Marian persuaded the curator, Frank Francis, to let us in. Frank (his grandfather’s surname was Kenoshemeg, but the white people who hired him as a driver couldn’t pronounce it, so he petitioned the court to use his middle name instead) unlocked the parish hall and led us to the basement. “Father Weikamp was an odd duck, no doubt about it,” Frank said. “He would point his finger at you—” he cocked his fingers like a gun and stared us in the eyes—“then he’d tell you what to do, and by gosh, you did it.” The hallway was hung with photos of Cross Village before and after the fire of 1918, and while Marian and I waited for Frank to turn on the furnace and the lights, we squinted at the exhibit, which included the image of the Virgin Mary that a local Odawa boy had hung on the Holy Cross School to save it from the fire; according to the caption, the wind miraculously turned, saving the convent, church, and school. The surname of the boy who saved the town marked him as an ancestor of the man who had burned to death in the woods near Marian’s parents’ cabin. With that, Frank came back and ushered us into a room arrayed with artifacts from Father Weikamp’s convent: an earth-

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enware jug fashioned by the monks and nuns; a washboard; pickets from a fence. On one wall hung a photograph of Father Weikamp’s original sepulcher, which resembled nothing so much as an ivy-covered cottage on a pleasant summer day (except for the inscription above the doors: Memento mori et ora pro defundis), along with copies of the engravings that Father Weikamp nailed inside his crypt so he could see them as he prayed. And there, beneath the photos and engravings, stood one of the narrow, black, skull-covered boards from Father Weikamp’s tomb; three and half feet high, it reminded me of the hand-painted warning that a gang of twelve-year-old pirates might set beside their fort to ward off intruders. Clearly, whoever wrote the captions for the exhibit was as puzzled as the rest of us as to the meaning of Father Weikamp’s rituals. After venturing that the board “served to center the father’s prayers,” the legend writer throws up his hands and admits, “Who knows what it meant to him. It is described in Father Jacker’s letter of 1858. There is no precident [sic] for it in spiritual life literature. He must have designed and painted this himself.” The best the writer can do is note that the skulls are painted in the shape of a Prussian officer’s helmet, “flared out so rain would not drip down into the collar,” and instruct us to “[l] ook also at the nasal openings. They match the steeple of the convent’s St. Francis Church.” After that, the writer loses confidence and lapses into pure speculation: “The reason for the three teeth on each side of the jaw in every case except the one at the lower right [4] is not known. It must have meant something to him.” Far from condemning Father Weikamp, the writer tries to understand the man by drawing on his own knowledge of Western anthropology and Eastern mysticism. Perhaps Father

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Weikamp, in meditating on his boards, would start at the bottom with the largest skulls, reflecting on man’s mortality and need for redemption. Then, the writer speculates, as the fear of death diminishes with age and a person’s “growth in God,” so the skulls diminish in size until, near the triangular crest of the board, they change into garlands, symbolizing the resurrection (although, to my eyes, the figures evoke sea horses, or the squiggles on violins, with the garlands disappearing into infinity at the top, as the soul merges with eternal life). Then again, Father Weikamp might have started at the top, with the nothingness that symbolizes the void before birth, then moved down through babyhood and childish innocence, “the little child’s dependence on mother, a favorite toy, family, first friends, achievements, school, first love, job, money, marriage, children, profession, security, home, honors, and then death, with skulls growing in size until all the material garlands are gone and we are nothing but bones. This parallels Maslow’s hierarchy of ego needs.” If you don’t like that explanation, maybe the skulls represent a divinely inspired optical illusion. To support this theory, the priest who wrote the legends invites you to stare for thirty seconds at an image consisting of a blob and four dots, then close your eyes and tilt back your head, at which you will see Ulysses S. Grant in black, then Jesus Christ in white, an experiment I tried with exactly the results predicted, except that when I repeated this procedure with a skull on Father Weikamp’s board, what I saw was the symbol for radioactive materials, followed by Darth Vader in his mask. Finally, the legend writer speculates that Father Weikamp may have picked up the essence of Eastern mysticism during his travels as a young man and that he was actually meditating on the seven chakras, a detailed description of which I skipped

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in favor of a visit to the archive Frank Francis was eager to unlock next door. There, amid Father Weikamp’s letters to his bishops, newspaper clippings, and a biography of Father Weikamp written in 1988 by his great-nephew, Klemens Vlaswinkel, I pieced together an understanding of Father Weikamp not as a demonic Mister Kurtz, but as the sort of well-meaning, self-dramatizing, and ultimately misguided man so many missionaries tend to be. Born in Prussia in 1818, Johan Bernard Weikamp knew at an early age that he wanted to become a priest, but the wars raging through Europe prevented his being ordained by his local bishop. Given to wanderlust, the young Weikamp used this as an excuse to spend the next fourteen years journeying through Germany, Hungary, Turkey, Rhodes, Cyprus, Patmos, Palestine, Egypt, and Malta, before ending up in Rome, where he toyed with the idea of becoming an actor and played bit parts at the opera house. (One photo shows the thespian dressed up in a long black coat and tall black top hat, as spooky and severe as Nosferatu; other photos show him costumed as the priest he wasn’t yet ordained to be, striking melodramatically pious poses.) Eventually, the actor was ordained a priest. “Burning with zeal for the salvation of souls,” as one biographer puts it, Father Weikamp was dispatched to Chicago in 1850. Whatever dispute resulted in his eviction from that city was ugly enough that the bishop in Chicago wrote to the bishop in northern Michigan to warn him not to allow Father Weikamp to set up shop, although Bishop Baraga eventually changed his mind and gave Father Weikamp permission to build his convent. The part about the coffin and tomb I already knew. What interested me were Father Weikamp’s relations with the Oda-

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was. On the positive side, one of his biographers maintained that the only reason Father Weikamp was the “object of hatred and venomous slander” was that he so often frustrated the efforts of local land-sharks, “who used every mean trick to beguile the Indian of his little holdings.” A letter from Father Weikamp to Bishop Richter of Grand Rapids dated November 5, 1883, expresses the priest’s dismay that in the past week alone, three saloons had opened in Cross Village, which until then had none, and this would certainly work to the disadvantage of the Indians. More ambiguous is a dispute between Father Weikamp and some of the brothers in his convent, who were punishing the Indian boys for misdemeanors that mostly involved playing with their food. Was Father Weikamp angry that the brothers were punishing the boys too harshly? Or was he the only one with the authority to punish the Indians in their charge? The more I read, the more I believed the latter. The picture that emerges from Father Weikamp’s letters is of a man who is less diabolical than imperious. Having promised the Indians that if they repaired their church he would allow them to hold services there, he refused to bring back certain religious articles because the Indians insisted on retaining the keys to the church, and he wasn’t about to hang around waiting for some irresponsible Indian to show up with the keys while he stood there holding their altar pieces. The Indians’ demand to retain the keys was insolent, he complained. Like all Indians, they were behaving like children, who scream and cry to get what they want from their father, and giving in to such tantrums would only encourage them to scream and cry the next time. The tone of the letters meshes with Mary Shurtleff ’s description of Father Weikamp—she never met him, but her grandparents remembered him well—as a small, round man

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with a high, squeaky voice who used to go around town in a two-wheeled cart, calling out in a voice that everyone found “very comical.” In fact, the self-pitying tone Father Weikamp uses to convey his tribulations to Bishop Richter makes it hard to sympathize with his woes. While still suffering the lingering effects of dysentery, the priest says, he fell from his wagon, injuring his left shoulder “considerably” and breaking his left arm, which left him in such pain he couldn’t bear to lie down or ascend the altar to say mass. A few months later, he wrote the bishop, he was “still a cripple,” and probably would remain so for whatever short period of life remained him. His general health was “not good; old age is pressing upon me. On April 5, I will be 68.” With all that, he managed to live another three years, finding the vigor for that quarrel with the Indians about who would get to hold the keys to their church, until, in March 1889, while he was paying a call on a sick parishioner, his horse bolted and Father Weikamp was dragged from his cart, causing such grievous injuries that he died. In the archives at the museum, I also found a copy of the article from The Grand Rapids Herald that first gave life to the story about Father Weikamp rising from his grave. The article, published a quarter of a century after Father Weikamp’s death, provided the same anonymous account that the author of The Crooked Tree had copied verbatim in his book, which leads me to doubt that Wright ever met the man who witnessed the dead priest’s posthumous appearance in his sepulcher or could vouch for his informant’s “sterling character.” In some ways, I felt as if I had cleared Father Weikamp of the Devil-worshipping charges long lodged against him. But I couldn’t shake my suspicion that some other—far worse— evil was associated with the man. And so, when Frank Francis

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asked if Marian and I wanted to accompany him on his annual spring visit to Father Weikamp’s tomb, I couldn’t bring myself to turn him down. We drove a few blocks, left our cars, opened the gate to the fenced-in plot, then crossed the empty field to the sepulcher, which, when Frank unlocked it, was as dank as a boathouse, with cobwebs wafting in the draft from the open doors. “First time I’ve been here all winter,” Frank said, brushing away the webs. The sepulcher might not have been that unpleasant—the pale blue ceiling shone with gold stars and a crescent moon—if not for the skull-painted board that was a companion to the one in the museum, or the tangle of wires that once held a wreath for Father Weikamp’s brow but now resembled a barbed-wire crown of thorns, or the engravings of Christ and his disciples surrounded by the fourteen (gory) stations of the cross, along with St. Joseph, the “patron of the happy death,” and “Our Lady’s Sorrows,” the centerpiece of which was Mary’s heart pierced by swords. The mirror had been taken down, but if you stood on the ledge above Father Weikamp’s grave and looked down, you could see a pane of fly-specked glass protecting his coffin, which was incredibly small for a full-grown man. Other than the cross on the lid, the coffin was constructed of a few panes of wood so warped you could see between them. When Frank said that he needed to get down in the grave and apply some sealant to the wood to prevent the coffin from deteriorating even further, I couldn’t suppress a shiver, although that would have been true even if the coffin hadn’t held a man who reputedly worshipped Satan. After Frank had relocked the crypt, we stood outside—the

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rain was more of a drizzle than a downpour—and he and Marian talked about how the plot we were standing on used to be an Indian burial ground. Really? I said. I thought the Indian cemetery was down in Middle Village. Marian had taken me to see the simple white crosses, most blank, others with small brass plaques (Eliza Assogon, 1879–1910; Moses Shenanaquet, 1888–1970). Dozens of the crosses lay jumbled on the ground or jammed in hollow stumps, but other graves showed evidence of recent visits, with flowers, candles, wreaths, and tiny American flags. This was an Indian cemetery, too, Frank said. There used to be hundreds of crosses. The cemetery was so crowded, the bodies were stacked one atop the other. Over there—he waved—was a mass grave for the victims of a smallpox epidemic. But what happened? Where did the crosses go? Well, Frank said, when they moved Father Weikamp and the nuns’ graves here in 1948, they cleared everything away. The bodies were still down there, but the graves were no longer marked. The white people just swept away all those crosses? Who would do such a disrespectful thing? Suddenly, I didn’t care a fig about Father Weikamp’s ghost, or whether he went to Heaven or to the Devil. The ghosts I cared about were the Indians’. As I stood there in the mist, staring at my feet and trying to imagine the layers and layers of unmarked bones beneath the dirt, it came to me that evil is usually more complex than someone praying to a bunch of skulls. Sometimes, evil rises from the ground and won’t let go. Standing beside Father Weikamp’s tomb, I felt the evil of a man who traveled across an ocean because he thought he had the right to force other people to worship his god and attend his schools. The right to

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punish their children as he wished. The right to demand the keys to a church his parishioners had labored so mightily to restore. I felt the evil of men who thought it was acceptable to tear up the crosses of other people’s dead so their own dead could enjoy a nice empty expanse of lawn around their graves. I still didn’t believe that what Marian and I had seen in Harbor Springs was an apparition of the Virgin Mary. What we saw on that mansion wall was a shadow of the image that so often haunts us both: the sorrowing Mother of Us All, grieving for a child for whom no one else will sorrow because his grave remains unmarked.

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“If we’re taking the kids there, we gotta have a gun,” Dan said, just minutes after they found out that the annual statewide career fair would be at Wayne State, down in Detroit. “Come on, man. Nothing’s going to happen,” Mike had responded. But he knew he’d have to do it. People in his part of the state went to Detroit only for a Tigers’ game, once or twice in their lives, and when they did they always took something for protection, even if only a tire iron hidden under the driver’s seat. He had never known anyone who actually had to use it, but they always felt better just knowing there was something there. When his friends or neighbors talked about Detroit, which wasn’t often, it was only to shake their heads about a wasteland of dope and abandonment.

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It was a standard joke at the state teaching conventions that everyone understood everything they needed to know about a school district by knowing whether it closed for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in January or on the first day of hunting season in November. Mike’s school closed in November. When the career fairs were in Mt. Pleasant or Kalamazoo, or even in East Lansing or Ann Arbor, the school had to take a bus filled with juniors. Even though he felt he understood the fears of the families, and after trying to talk them out of it, Mike was surprised and disappointed when only ten students signed up for the trip to Detroit. With the four teachers who had volunteered for chaperone duty, it meant they would only have to take three cars. Then two more students dropped out, looking relieved when they said their parents just didn’t want them going into Detroit. On the actual morning of the trip, late in April, when the group gathered at 5:00 am in the school parking lot, only four junior boys showed up. Like Mike and Dan, Adella, one of the English teachers, and Eric, the government teacher, were already assigned to the trip, and substitutes had been hired to fill in for them. Everyone felt a bit silly putting two students and two teachers into Mike’s Escort and Adella’s Suburban. Someone made a comment about the education budget, but no one backed out. “I’ll ride shotgun,” Dan said, and smiled when he climbed into the car. He’d already asked about the gun, and knew that Mike had his old Duramatic .22 under the seat. His permit to carry a concealed weapon had expired a couple of years ago, but he figured he could play dumb on the slim chance that the car would ever be searched. “Damn, why’d you bring an old plinker like that?” Dan had complained when Mike told him earlier. “It wouldn’t hurt anyone even if it went off right in their face.”

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“But it’s not going to go off,” Mike said. “Right?” And then to reassure Dan, he added, “At least it looks like a gun.” They were pulling into the visitor parking lot at Wayne State before ten. The small piles of snow that still filled the ditches at home had disappeared by the time they got to Clare. By Saginaw, they noticed it was getting warm, and when they drove through Flint, one of the kids asked Mike to turn on the AC. He was enjoying the humid air after six months of winter, so he said that his AC wasn’t working. The interstate, its pavement cracked and rutted after the winter, was crowded and dirtier as they moved into the city. They were able to see some burned and boarded-up houses high up along the sides of the road, but Mike had been surprised by how green the city looked, with the trees just beginning to leaf-out, and he was very pleased at how easily they’d gotten to the parking lot. They’d driven by some hospitals and museums, past a few recently built housing projects, made a couple of turns between buildings that had university signs on them, and they were there. They’d barely seen anyone on the streets. When they drove past a young man, hood pulled up over his head as he strolled down the street, one of the kids joked, “You got that gun handy, Mr. Morton?” “Right here,” Dan said, leaning over dramatically and sticking his hand under his seat. “It feels good.” They had all laughed, but Mike hoped the boys didn’t really know about the gun. Mike usually volunteered for this duty, even though everyone else complained about it. He actually enjoyed getting out of town, and he felt it was his job as the history teacher to know all the museums around the various universities in the state.

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Visiting them was his plan for career development. Recently, as he’d been preparing a senior Advanced Placement course on American history, he’d noticed how many of the illustrations in the new textbooks were actually reproductions of paintings—landscapes, portraits, action scenes of Indians chasing buffalo, even pictures of factories. He didn’t know much about painting. Mike had once asked an old college friend who worked in Chicago and would go on about the art museum there, what he did when he went. “You just walk around and look at things?” he asked. And his friend had looked puzzled, as if he didn’t quite know how to respond. So on this trip, he decided that after he dropped the kids at the seminars, he would take several hours to explore the Detroit Institute of Arts, just a few blocks away. He figured he could spend most of the day there. If he finished looking at things, he could buy gifts in the shop or have a long lunch in the café. Dan and Eric had teased him a bit about going to look at statues of naked ladies, but had never even hinted that they might want to come, too. Mike had worried a bit about walking alone on the city streets, but he didn’t pass one person. There were bursts of cars on Woodward Avenue, but it didn’t seem to be very busy, either. He found his way to the side entrance of the museum without any problems. Inside he picked up a map and found the section labeled nineteenth century american art, although he had no idea how to get there. Feeling a bit reluctant to ask directions from the neatly uniformed guards, he set off slowly wandering through the halls. He passed between some African statues, things he was sure were idols of some sort, although they didn’t look very religious. They looked more frightening than

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anything else, and all of them were naked, some with pendulous breasts, others with oversized penises. He was glad he didn’t have to try to explain this kind of art to his students. He wouldn’t know what to say. He felt uncertain of his sense of direction and climbed some stairs, where he found himself in the classical section, this time surrounded by more naked men and women, although they were much more realistic. Still he marveled at the beautiful young bodies that looked as if they must have been captured in stone a couple of thousand years ago. On one statue he noticed a thin veil of gauzy fabric barely covering a young woman. When no one was around, he reached out to touch it, trying to reassure himself that it too was cut from stone. Just when he thought he was close to the American paintings he wanted to see, he found himself in a large, echoing room with murals painted on the walls. From the door he entered, he first saw colorful panels that all looked as if they pictured disembodied organs of the female reproductive system. On either side of the room were massive scenes from Detroit factory life, back in the days when cars were actually rolling down the lines. The paintings were large and the room felt like a cave. Sounds echoed back and forth between the paintings. None of it made much sense to him, and all that looking up made him dizzy. He wanted to get back to something smaller, more manageable. He found more halls and more stairs that led up through older paintings of saints and angels and crucifixions. He felt relieved when he got to a room labeled dutch golden age. He knew the Dutch; his best students were the descendants of Dutch farmers; he would be comfortable here. He saw paintings of old European churches with big patches

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of sunlight illuminating pillars and altars, portraits of plump white women looking healthy and normal with rosy cheeks, and landscapes of farms with solid-looking cattle grazing at sunset in green fields. There was a painting of a table filled with food, dead turkeys ready for plucking and butchering next to grapes and plums, even a deer—too small to be a whitetail— dripping blood from its mouth. The deer hadn’t been dressed or gutted yet and seemed very out of place next to the clean fruit, but still it was recognizable. These Dutch were like him, and what they understood, he understood. Even though he was getting tired, and his back had a sharp pain right at the base, he felt better. He felt like he was getting it now. It was history, and he was a teacher of history. He went back down some stairs, still looking for the American paintings he’d come to see, but he kept getting lost among all the rooms of European art. His feet were also beginning to hurt now, and he was pleased to sit on a bench in a quiet room. He noticed that the painting in front of it was of a large party, with colorful people dancing about wildly, men swinging the women almost off their feet, couples kissing, people drinking from large beer mugs. Everyone in the painting looked very happy, and all the men appeared to have enormous erections pushing out their tight pants. Mike chuckled a bit nervously, and then looked over his shoulder, uncertain whether or not it was alright to laugh about erections in an art museum. When he got up to check the label of the painting, he noticed that it, too, was Dutch. He smiled again; at least he had learned something about the Dutch today. After reading the label, he looked at the corner of the painting, where a man was playing an extravagant instrument, maybe some kind of bagpipe. He leaned in to look more closely. And then Mike saw it. Right behind the musi-

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cian was a dark figure disappearing out of the right side of the painting, almost hidden in shadows. All his clothes were black, and he was so deeply in the shadows that even his face looked black. He was the one thing in the painting without color. He looked like a ghost who had come to visit the party and was now sneaking away. Mike heard someone laugh behind him, although when he turned to look he couldn’t see anyone. Through a different door he heard a loud clanging noise, as if somewhere in the museum someone were washing pans. A fan hummed overhead and suddenly the air felt dry. The dizziness he felt earlier returned. He sat back down on the bench and closed his eyes. Back at the car, he found Dan and Eric waiting for him. “The kids were done,” Eric said. “They all left with Adella half an hour ago. Where’ve you been?” “Looking around,” Mike said. “Just looking.” “There’s a restaurant around the corner,” Dan said. “I’m starved. Let’s grab a burger and hit the road.” “I want to get the hell out of here,” Eric said. “This place scares me.” But Dan insisted, and they went to the restaurant. Mike drank coffee, because he had to stay awake during the fivehour drive home, but Dan and Eric drank a couple of beers. By the time they left, it was dark. They headed north down Woodward Avenue, past the museums, looking for an entrance to the freeway. Just heading north, even while still in the heart of the city, made Mike feel good. He opened his window to feel the air, now cooling into the spring evening. “OK. There’s the freeway,” Dan said as they drove over it. “We’ve got to get down there. Look for a sign.”

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“There,” Eric yelled. “Turn right.” And Mike turned quickly onto a small street just past a boarded-up church and a seedy-looking gas station. The street was narrow and dark, with only one working streetlight. A couple of abandoned houses gaped beside empty lots. A new set of apartment buildings that looked as if they might be a housing project glowed a bit down the block. “This can’t be right,” he said. “No. Really. I saw the sign. It was really little.” “Jesus,” Dan said, “where’s that gun?” “Shut up, man,” Mike said, his voice quiet and tense. “Don’t even joke about it.” A block down, just as he was thinking they should turn around and go back to Woodward, they came to a four-way stop. “Where do I go now?” “Wait. There’s another sign. See how little it is? Turn right.” Just as he was ready to turn, a man staggered in front of the car. He was very dark-skinned, but had a touch of graying hair at his temples and a scruffy beard turning to white. In the brightness of his headlights, Mike saw that the cuffs on the man’s jacket were frayed, with long strands of fiber hanging off. He squinted into the lights, then walked toward the front of the car and leaned on it. He kept leaning on the hood as he moved around the car, approaching the open window. Mike felt a twinge of fear, but he didn’t drive away. He thought he might hurt the man if he did. “Can you help me?” the man asked, almost leaning inside the car. “I just need a couple of bucks so I can get some coffee. A sandwich.” Mike could see the man’s watery eyes, and he thought he could smell either booze or the musky feral odor he sometimes smelled on the animals he hunted.

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“No,” Mike said, his heart speeding up and his voice shaking. “We’re just going home.” He had no idea why he said that, why he felt the need to tell the man anything. “But I need some . . .” At that point Dan started to yell. He was very loud, but Mike could tell he was afraid. “Get the fuck away from our car, asshole. I mean it. Now! Drive, Mike, drive! I mean it, man, we’ll run you down.” The man at the window looked wide-eyed, scared, startled by the anger. Dan leaned in front of Mike, still yelling. He thought Dan was pointing his finger at the man, shaking it right in front of his nose, over and over. And then he saw the barrel of the .22 glint in the darkness. “Back off, motherfucker. Let us go. I’ll shoot your black ass. I really will.” And the man seemed to fall away from the car, just as Mike heard the gun go off. Right in front of him. His ears rang and immediately felt stuffed with cotton. The scent of gunpowder blew past him toward his open window. The first thing he heard was Eric yell. “Jesus, Mike, drive! Now! Right. Turn right.” He did. He heard his tires squeal as he rounded the corner. “Do you see him?” he asked. “No, man. I don’t see anything,” Eric yelled as he looked out the back window toward where they’d just been. “Keep driving.” Mike saw another small sign, directing him right again. He followed it, even though he felt he was just going in some kind of weird circle, but this time he found himself driving down a ramp onto the freeway, cars speeding by at seventy miles an hour. He entered the flow of traffic easily. “Jesus, did you hit him?” he asked Dan.

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“I don’t know. I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t even see him after the goddamned gun went off.” Dan was breathing hard now, and he sounded frightened. “God, I have to get rid of this.” He started rolling down his window. “Not here, for Christ’s sake.” Mike reached over and stopped him. “That gun is registered under my name. They’d find me in a minute.” All the signs were suddenly very clear. I-96 to Lansing. They followed the interchanges easily and moved out of the city, through the suburbs, speeding out to the countryside, where the night was very dark and quiet. “You didn’t see the guy?” Mike finally asked Eric, who had been quiet since they left the city. “No. I looked. I thought he’d be on the street. You know. Lying there.” Eric sounded as if he was going to cry. “But I couldn’t see him. It was so dark there, man. I even looked up on the sidewalk, but I couldn’t see anything.” “Maybe I didn’t hit him,” Dan said. “It was like he disappeared. Like he wasn’t even there.” When he dropped Dan and Eric off, Eric said he’d check the Detroit papers and watch the news. Mike’s house was dark when he got there, his family asleep for hours, and he hid the gun in the rafters of his back shed before he went in. He tried to sleep but tossed and turned, ending up spending most of the night sitting at the kitchen table. When a car drove down the road early in the morning, he almost convinced himself that it was the police coming for him. Someone must have seen his license plate and had reported it. But the car drove by as if nothing had happened, as if he didn’t even exist. He was relieved. As soon as it was light, Mike went out to check the side of

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his car for blood spots. There was nothing on the driver’s door but a layer of dust from driving down the gravel country road his home was on. None of the dust was smudged or smeared. No sign of anything. Still, as soon as it warmed up a bit, he hosed down the car. That afternoon, Eric called. “I saw the papers, Mike. Nothing. Nothing on the TV news, either. No story about anything like this.” “Maybe just another shooting doesn’t get reported in Detroit. Maybe they’re trying to hide it while they chase down leads.” “You’re watching too much TV,” Eric said. “Maybe it didn’t even happen. At least not the way we remember it.” “What do you mean?” “I mean I looked, Mike. I looked really hard, back at that street as you drove away. And I didn’t see anything. No body lying on the road. No one running away. Nothing.” “You’re crazy,” Mike said. “It was really dark. Something happened. Something had to have happened.” When Mike called Dan, he sounded cheerful, said he didn’t want to talk about the trip to Detroit, asked if Mike was going to chaperone the prom in a few weeks. Mike couldn’t believe anyone could put it out of his mind so easily, and that night he, too, watched the Detroit news that was beamed in on his satellite dish. The reporters sounded upbeat and light about every story they reported, but there was nothing about a shooting close to the freeway. On Saturday, the second day after the trip, he got up early, making sure not to wake his wife. He went out and found the pistol where he’d hidden it. He looked at it closely. Smelled it. It had definitely been fired. There couldn’t be any doubt about that. He knew he had to get rid of the gun, and he felt bad

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about that. He got it for a good price at a gun show in Cadillac, and he enjoyed target shooting with it. He grabbed a spade and carried it and the .22 out into the woods behind his house. He knew every corner of this secondor third-growth lot of scrub pine. He walked it all year long and had hunted on it every fall for the last twenty years. About half a mile behind his house, he entered state land, and the pines gave over to oaks and hickories. He walked back several hundred yards into the state forest, making sure he wasn’t following any kind of trail. He found a likely spot, carefully clearing away the branches and the leaf litter, and then he started digging. It was hard going, getting down through the roots. He had been worried the ground would still be frozen, but he didn’t have any trouble. Once he was down about three feet, he threw the gun in the hole, then refilled it, carefully scattering the leaves and branches over the fresh dirt. In a couple of weeks the spring growth would disguise everything. Even he wouldn’t be able to find the place again, not that he had any intention of ever looking. Once he got back to his own land, he sat down beneath a pine and looked back out into the state land. There was no sign he had been there, and Mike felt relieved to be rid of the gun. He could still see puffs of his breath clouding up around him, but he could already feel the first signs of warmth. When he heard a rustle off to his right, he jumped and turned just in time to see the shape of a white-tailed deer disappear into the forest. He thought he saw the white flag of its tail for just a second, but he wasn’t sure.

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The day Aunt Ezzie told us about it, we rolled our eyes. We were not a good audience. I was about ten at the time; my hair was long and especially blonde. I had spent the majority of the summer outdoors, playing in the nature preserve behind our house. I was one of those kids who caught frogs, turtles, and snakes in my father’s car-wash buckets, though I always let them go before I came inside. Insects, like fireflies, crickets, and butterflies, weren’t as lucky. Someone taught me to put them in mason jars with a small cotton swab soaked in rubbing alcohol. I screwed the lid on tight and waited for them to stop moving. I can’t remember who taught me but I remember that pretty soon after they were dead, I shook them onto our lawn, making a haphazard graveyard.

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We didn’t stay on the farm when we visited Aunt Ezzie. She was renting it from us that summer, so it wasn’t ours to stay in. Aunt Ezzie needed the place to get things in order. Her husband and she had separated, due in large part to what she felt to be “spiritual obligations.” Aunt Ezzie was a Believer, and attended mass biweekly, depositing large sums of money in the offering tin when it passed her way. Her husband, on the other hand, was faithful to the Silver Dollar, a local bar where he drank away what was left of their money. Aunt Ezzie was starting over, living in our house while she decided what to do next. She initially told us she liked the house because it was close to church and close to the cemetery. “Closer to God,” she said. We lived across the state, in suburbia. The farm was an escape from so many sidewalks and strip malls. And at ten years old, I thought it was otherworldly. The farm sat right on the edge of a forest that sloped downward and ended where the Paw Paw River sliced through it—a punctuation mark in the landscape. The five pines in the front yard were over fifty feet high, evidence from my father’s childhood that nothing went to waste, not even the Christmas trees. They looked like slender fingers, gauntly pointing toward the sky. And the house was just as large and ominous. At first glance it could have been mistaken for a church. White paint chips were scattered in the lawn, blending in with the alyssum growing in the green. The poison ivy, creeping along the north side of the building, gave it a sacred, holy look. Inside there were hardwood floors in each room. They were perfect for ice-skating with socks, but bone-stiffening to walk on with bare feet. Unfortunately, I would not be ice-skating this time. This was going to be a quick visit. Aunt Ezzie was wearing blue jeans and a yellow shirt, her

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brown hair tied back with a floral scrunchie. She looked desperate, a woman who was sick of staying at the house alone, and grateful for company. There were hugs and how are you’s. All of the usual family conversation. But I could tell Aunt Ezzie was anxious, a bit too eager to see us. She was talking with a blue mug in her hand, waving it while she explained how wonderful the farm was. Coffee was splashing out onto the pavement and eventually found its way onto her yellow shirt. She looked down at it and frowned, trying to wipe it off. Cutting her embarrassment with a grin, she said, “Oh! Look at my shirt. It’s not hot. I’m OK. But my shirt. It’s ruined. I look like a mess. You’ll have to excuse me.” My mother took a tissue out of her purse and sopped up some of the brown. But the coffee had already left its mark. While my mother was patting the stain, Aunt Ezzie turned back toward the house, as if she heard something. I checked her face for some sign of emotion, but it was blank. I could see her eyes scanning the house’s windows. She was not moving her body, only her eyes: a sign of caution. Slowly, she turned back to my mother and said, “Susan, it’s the wildest thing. The first time I heard it, it was in the hallway, right outside the bedroom. I heard footsteps pacing up and down. They were loud. A man’s footsteps.” This is when we were supposed to ask more questions. When we were supposed to ask Aunt Ezzie who he was . . . what did he look like? Was there anything that we could do? But none of us did. Instead we all became silent. We looked at one another and tried not to laugh. “Ezra, I’m sure it’s just the floors creaking. It’s an old house. It makes noise, you know?” My mother said this smiling, trying to comfort my aunt. My father was looking at the lawn, probably making a list of things that needed to be done: mow

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the grass, trim the apple trees, weed the cement in the driveway. “Susan, it’s not just footsteps,” her voice became low. She looked at me, then back at my mother. At this point my father was headed for the barn, going in to grab a tool to pull out the dandelions that had grown on the driveway. Aunt Ezzie leaned in toward my mother and said in an even quieter voice, “I saw him, Susan. A man, a young man, in a red-white-and-blue flannel shirt was standing at the edge of my bed.” “Oh, Ez. You were probably just dreaming.” “I wasn’t, Susan. But he’s not bothering me anymore. I picked out a name for him, and after I started calling him Edward, he stopped haunting me. He hasn’t been back to see me, which makes me a little sad. In fact, I feel like he’s sort of been protecting me. I’ve been saying hi to him when I come home from being out.” She gave him a name, which to me meant that she was serious. There was a ghost in the house. She had seen him. “Oh.” My mother kept forcing out her smile in hopes of changing the conversation. It didn’t work. “Molly,” asked my aunt, addressing me for the first time in a small voice with her back to the house, “have you ever heard or seen anything?” I looked up to the second story of the farmhouse, to the bedroom window, just to check. Maybe there was a ghost, and perhaps he was looking down at us right now. I wanted to see him, but all I saw was the reflection of the pine trees in the thick glass. No face. No flannel. If there was a ghost, he wasn’t interested in me. I wanted to answer yes, but I couldn’t. I had never seen a ghost. I never even had an imaginary friend. The closest I got to seeing one of the departed was looking up at the clouds and telling my parents I could see my grandparents

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peering over a cloud, waving at me. “They are up there, in Heaven,” I said. But it was a lie. I had never seen them in my life. They all died before I was born. But I wanted to see them, even if doing so meant I had to meet them as ghosts. I knew I could make up a story now, that I had seen a ghost. But something told me I needed to tell the truth. After we visited with Aunt Ezzie for a few hours, we got back in our car. My father was convinced Aunt Ezzie had lost it, a result, he claimed, of staying in the farmhouse alone for six months, of having an overactive imagination. “People believe whatever they want to believe,” he said rationally. But I had heard noises at night, especially when we stayed at the farmhouse. I always told myself the same thing: they were just house noises; there was no one outside of my bedroom door, or hiding in the closet. But if I had known that Aunt Ezzie had seen something, would I have seen Edward by now too? If I believed there was someone, then I might see him. I looked up again at the window. The reflection of a pine tree stared back. After seven years, Aunt Ezzie left the farmhouse and moved to Florida. My parents searched for renters to fill the vacant house but found no one. We hadn’t talked about Edward in years, but when my parents decided to move into the house midway through my studies at college, I began thinking about him. I was scared by the idea that he could be real, and worried for myself and Aunt Ezzie about the possibility that he wasn’t. “Do you think she really saw him?” I asked. I was visiting my parents for the first time since they moved in. We were halfway through our roasted Provencal herbed chicken with grilled vegetables when the dinner conversation turned, as usual, to our extended family.

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“Jesus. Are you crazy? You sound like her,” my father said, laughing a bit while shaking his head. I looked over to my mother while he was talking to see if I could gauge how she felt. My mother looked old; her skin was sliding further and further away from her bones while her white teeth and tight lips were desperately trying to reverse the whole situation. She was still wearing her apron from cooking. It was serving as a bib, which saddened me even more. She looked like a huge baby, round and smiling—oblivious. Then I saw it. She was clearly holding something back. A secret. Something she had never told me before. When my dad stopped talking, she spoke. “Actually, Molly, when your father and I were first married, I saw someone at the edge of the bed, in the master bedroom.” I must have looked stunned. “Really?” I asked. Nervously, she smiled back at me. “Seriously?” I asked again, still in disbelief. “Yes,” she said. “I woke up screaming, and turned to your dad, telling him there was a man in our room. He woke up and I looked back to the foot of the bed and the man was gone.” “So you’ve seen a ghost? What did he look like? Was he older?” I asked her in a fury. “Christ, you two,” my father exhaled softly, but just loud enough to be heard. “Well, somewhere in between twenty-five and thirty,” she said. “What if it’s the same man Aunt Ezzie saw?” I asked her. “Oh God. Edward? Wasn’t that what she named him? This is so stupid,” my father sighed, rolling his eyes and laughing to himself. “You should call Aunt Ezzie and talk to her about it. Far as I’m concerned, it’s her ghost.” He was right. I needed to call Aunt Ezzie and hear the de-

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tails from her. My father clearly didn’t believe that anyone was haunting our old farmhouse. And my mother only saw something at the edge of her bed once, and that was years ago. She didn’t have a name for him, and never saw him anywhere else in the house. So it was possible. Our family had owned the house since it was built more than a hundred years earlier, so if there was a ghost, it had to be the ghost of a relative. “Did anyone ever die in the house, dad?” He paused for a moment. Looked outside the window and squinted his eyes, the wrinkles in his tan skin creasing further, making tiny streams in his face. “Well, my father died here. In his bed. But that’s just the way things were in those days. It’s not really spooky.” “Which room?” I asked. “His bedroom. You know, people died in their beds back then. We didn’t take them to die in hospitals. I never want to die in a hospital, you got that?” It made sense. The ghost Aunt Ezzie saw must have been my grandfather. But why was my grandfather appearing to my aunt? It wasn’t fair. I was jealous and wanted him to find me and stand at the foot of my bed. If it was possible for the dead to come back and communicate with those who are living, then why didn’t my grandparents care to come back and watch me? My mother didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “Maybe you should call Aunt Ezzie.” The only time I talked to Aunt Ezzie was on holidays, if she was in town. She might think it was pretty weird for me to call her up now, over ten years later, to ask her about a ghost she had seen when she stayed in our farmhouse. But I had new information, perhaps that Aunt Ezzie didn’t know. My mother

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elizabeth schmuhl

had also seen a ghost. And furthermore, my grandfather died in the room in which Aunt Ezzie saw the ghost. In the end, I justified calling her by deciding that a woman who had seen a ghost and tried to share it with us deserved the audience she always wanted. Tonight I would be that audience. And perhaps in return for finally believing in the ghost she named Edward, I would meet one of my grandparents. I went upstairs to the bedroom to make the call. “He was wearing a flannel, Molly. Red and white and blue.” Those were her first words when I asked her if she would tell me about Edward. “It was the wildest thing. He didn’t even look like a ghost. He wasn’t transparent or anything. He was real, solid. But when I turned on the lamp and got out of bed, he was gone. That’s how I knew.” I was lying on the bed with the phone pressed to my ear; my toes pointing toward the dimly lit empty space at the end of the bed. Fifteen minutes into the conversation, no one had appeared. I got sick of waiting and turned my head to the left to look out the window. The sky was so black that all I could see was myself. I kept looking in the glass, hoping I would see something in the reflection watching me talk on the phone. “You know, I believe in the Holy Ghost. I’ve seen angels before. And I think sometimes God wants to tell us something.” She lost me at this point. The fact that Edward and the ghost my mother saw were both around the same age and in the same location when each was spotted seemed like sufficient evidence to confirm Aunt Ezzie’s earlier claim, and to prove her not-crazy to my father. The ghost was real. It was just my father and I who had never seen him. But angels? And now

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God? She was pushing it with me. I was not religious. Maybe you had to be to see ghosts. I kept staring at my reflection as she continued to talk about angels by her bedside, angels dancing around the ceiling fan, angels telling her about world events before they occurred in the waking world. My reflection was very clear now. Solid. My eyes looked lonely. I was tired of the phone conversation and tired of watching myself. I wanted to be watched. But my reflection was the only thing with eyes. They were comforting, so I kept looking into them, forgetting about the possibility of my grandfather standing in the room in a flannel shirt; the possibility of his eyes looking back at mine, watching me live. I stopped watching for him.

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contributors Steve Amick’s novels, The Lake, the River & the Other Lake and Nothing But a Smile, both received the Michigan Notable Book Award. His stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Story, Playboy, and the Southern Review, among others. Born in Ann Arbor, he grew up in the Geddesburg neighborhood, about a mile from the Bennett Castle, the setting of his story. Nicholas Delbanco is the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Michigan, and he is director of the Hopwood Awards Program there. He is the author of twenty-four books. His most recent work of fiction is The Count of Concord; his most recent book of essays is Anywhere Out of the World. Kelly Fordon has just finished work on her first novel, Love Fits Itself. She worked as a reporter at the NPR station in Detroit and in the editorial production department at National Geographic. She graduated from Kenyon College and received her MS in Journalism from Ohio University. Her short fiction has appeared in several literary journals.

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contributors

Lolita Hernandez was born and raised in Detroit, where she still lives. She is the author of Autopsy of an Engine and Other Stories from the Cadillac Plant (Coffee House Press), winner of a 2005 PEN/Beyond Margins Award. She worked for over thirtythree years in the United Auto Workers at General Motors. James Hynes has written five novels, most recently Next (Little Brown, 2010). A native of Big Rapids, Michigan, he now lives in Austin, Texas. Laura Kasischke is the author of seven collections of poetry, two novels for young adults, five novels, and the novella Eden Springs. She was a 2009 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry. Elizabeth Kostova graduated from Yale, received an MFA from the University of Michigan, then lived in the state for several years before returning to North Carolina. Her two novels, The Historian and The Swan Thieves, have been international best sellers. Anne-Marie Oomen is a poet, playwright, essayist, and instructor of creative writing at Interlochen Arts Academy. Her most recent collection of essays is An American Map (Wayne State University Press, 2010). She lives with her husband outside the village of Empire, Michigan. Eileen Pollack is the author of several books, including the recent In the Mouth: Stories and Novellas. One of the novellas in that collection, “The Bris,” was chosen by Stephen King for The Best American Short Stories 2007. Breaking and Entering,

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a novel about politics and passion in rural Michigan, will be published in 2011. Elizabeth Schmuhl lives in St. Joseph, Michigan, where she is a writer, a high-school teacher, and a teacher of modern dance. She is indebted to Zach and all who are Paw Paw River Farm, who continually give her inspiration and support. Keith Taylor is the author and editor of several books, including If the World Becomes So Bright (Wayne State University Press, 2009) and Marginalia for a Natural History. Laura Hulthen Thomas teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan’s Residential College. Her short fiction has appeared in Orchid, Oleander Review, the Cimarron Review, and Nimrod International Journal. She lives in Ann Arbor with her husband and two sons.

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