Stay Awake Stories Part 16

Alone in his apartment, Daddy lights a cigarette, and sits in his chair facing the television, and the dog rests her muzzle sympathetically against his thigh. He is not unhappy, not exactly, though sometimes it occurs to him, sometimes he realizes: This is how his life has ended up.

Not really what he would have expected.

He used to spend so much of his time in a state of dreadful anxiety about the future, so worried about the choices he'd made, so terrified for example, he could have gone to college, he was smart enough, he thought he would just work for a while and then go, but before he knew it, he was caught up in his contracting business, all the tools and equipment and a new truck and the mistakes he'd made with his taxes, he was so far into debt, there was so much overhead, and he remembers that moment when he saw that he'd never never go to college and he was married to his high school girlfriend, in fact the only person he'd ever slept with, and sometimes the guys he worked with would start bragging, ten women, they'd say, dozens of women, and even though he knew the guys were exaggerating he'd blushed inwardly and it wasn't just being married but there were children, the three girls one after the other and he had adored them in some ways but there was also the sense that once they were born he was trapped. He had built his own future brick by brick around himself but there were no doors or windows, at least that was the way it seemed at the time he had thought to himself, I am locked in, it was like one of those ghost stories where you wake up and you are sealed into a coffin and you begin to thrash around, thinking, I must escape He peers for a time at the television and rests the palm of his hand on the muzzle of Angeline the dog and she nudges it as if to remind the hand to pet, to continue to pet.

He actually did manage to escape, that's the thing. He extricated himself. He pulled free

8.

Eden is the youngest of us, she doesn't even remember Daddy, really, though there are times when she is in the cla.s.sroom, when she is teaching her cla.s.s in remedial composition and there is an older student in the back of the room and she asks them to open their books: What are your reactions to the text? Is the work unified, with all the parts pertaining to a central idea? Is it coherent, with the parts relating clearly to one another?

The man is in his thirties, she would guess, dark-haired, dark-eyed, a stillness leaking out of him as she speaks to the cla.s.s about a.n.a.lysis, interpretation, synthesis of texts and he has the face of someone who is pa.s.sing a terrible accident in his car, trying not to look. He doesn't seem like someone who is paying attention and so she calls on him: Christopher? she says and he just stares at her with his s.h.a.ggy tired glare.

I don't know, he says. I didn't get a chance to read it this time, and she feels uncomfortable about her authority in the cla.s.sroom, and she feels actually shaky and so she speaks sharply, Christopher, talk to me after cla.s.s, please, and afterward he stands there grimly in his muddy work boots and cheap janitor pants as the other students file out.

"Christopher," she says, "I don't see how you are going to be able to pa.s.s this cla.s.s if you're not doing the reading and you're not turning in your work."

"I'm sorry, Ms. Bell," he says, a broad-shouldered, bearded Yeti of a man, slumped and moody, an odd sort of spittly speech impediment, "I just can't make sense of what you're talking about," he says, "I've got to have this cla.s.s but this is not my thing, I'm not much for a.n.a.lysis," he says, "I just need the degree or I'm never going to get promoted," he says, "I've got a kid," he says. "I'm a single father."

"I sympathize with your situation," she says, "but you have to do the work," she says, "you understand that don't you?"

"No," he says, and she stiffens, he's not threatening in any obvious way but, "I don't understand. That's the problem. You're not a very good teacher, Ms. Bell, I can't seem to grasp anything you're talking about," he says, there is a thick hostility emanating from him and of course she can't help but imagine the long walk she has to take alone through the parking lot, 10:15 P.M., Monday night, what if he followed her and even when she gets home she will be in bed and she closes her eyes and she can imagine Christopher in her room, the heavy shadow of him leaning over her and she turns on the light and opens her book. Outside her window she can see the blurry golden smudge of the moon behind a miasma of clouds, the moon sinking in the west and she wonders where Daddy is right now what he is thinking about

9.

When he was a boy Daddy's mother lost custody and for a while he stayed with his grandmother and then after she died he was in foster care for a time.

He was placed in the home of an old farmer called Mr. Athen, back in Shenandoah, Iowa, and Daddy was sixteen years old, old enough for work, five in the morning and Mr. Athen was bending down to shake Daddy awake Time to get up Mr. Athen said, not mean but not gentle, either. There was no love lost between them. Mr. Athen took in a foster boy to have someone to work for him for free, an indentured servant, that's what Daddy thought.

This was on a pig farm. He remembered the smell of it, of course, the noise of the hogs snorting and banging against the metal bars of their pens, the sows in their stalls and farrowing crates. The hazy blue eyes of the piglets, their clean wet nuzzling snouts. He put his fingers in their mouths and let them nurse, cradling them in the crook of his arm. It was a kind of love, he realized later, a certain glimmer. To care for something helpless, knowing it was doomed.

That morning he was walking through the barn with the farrowing crates, this was one of his jobs, to look for the baby pigs that were lost or had escaped or were in trouble. The piglets were fenced off from their mothers by a grille of bars, they could reach the teats but the sow was in a separate pen so that she could not roll over on her children or step on them or eat the ones she was dissatisfied with, and the piglets were always getting stuck as they tried to reach her or finding little gaps in the pens that they tried to squeeze through and he rescued the ones that he could, sometimes finding the ones that had broken their necks or suffocated and throwing their bodies in a wheelbarrow that he was pushing along.

That was the morning that his mother died. She hanged herself in the Iowa Correctional Inst.i.tution for Women in Mitch.e.l.lville, a convicted drug felon, thirty-four years of age, a little nutty the guards said, always a bit unstable, she had been singing all morning and then the singing stopped.

Daddy looked up.

He was in the barn with the piglet in the crook of his arm with his finger in its mouth and it was as if he heard the melody cut off abruptly as her neck broke. It was as if the noisy barn became suddenly silent.

She was standing down at the end of the barn near the open door and the sunlight made a blur against the dark edges of the wood. His mom. He would never tell anyone about this.

Later, he wasn't even sure that he had really seen it, he thought that maybe he had made it up and it seemed so real in his imagination that it turned itself into a memory.

There she was She stood there dressed neatly in her jeans and her pretty peasant blouse with the orange flowers on it, and she smiled at him in her kindly, teasing way.

"I couldn't get out," she said, "I wanted to leave but I couldn't get out," she said, and she turned and of course she never spoke to him again.

10.

We ourselves have never seen ghosts, though we would like to. Brooke would like to, particularly. She likes to read those stories, True Tales of the Paranormal and Supernatural, that sort of thing. Even today, even as an adult woman she watches the TV show about ghosts and mysteries and anomalies, a segment on a two-headed baby on the Discovery Channel as the sleet patters against the window of her apartment, and she looks anxiously at the room reflected on the windowpanes; there is herself in a wingback chair watching television.

She is thinking of that night with the Ouija board, back when we were girls. She was eleven and Sydney was thirteen and Eden was nine and it was a night in October, the three of us in the room with the candles in a circle on the floor and all of us dressed in black and our pale thin girls' hands each on the planchette (the pointer tool), and we hunched there over it waiting for it to move.

There are things that you must never ask the Ouija board, Sydney told them. Never ask about G.o.d, she said. Never ask when you are going to die. Never ask where the gold is buried.

"Why not?" Eden said. "What gold? Why can't we ask where it's buried?"

"Because they want to keep it hidden, that's why," Sydney said, and then abruptly the planchette began to move in slow figure eights around the center of the board.

"Brooke, I know it's you moving it," Eden said. Already a little afraid. But Brooke was not moving the planchette. Of all of our hands, hers were held the most loosely, and the most still. Of all of us, her mind was most empty and receptive and willing.

"Spirit," she whispered, her breath a little moth, "are you there?"

YES, said the Ouija board.

Brooke closed her eyes lightly. "Spirit," she said, "who are you?"

The planchette seemed to hesitate for a moment. It trembled a little, then made its gentle figure eight.

W-E, it spelled at last. It began to move very slowly and deliberately, letter by letter, across the board. W-E-A-R-E-Y-O-U, it said.

Eden took in a little breath, and she looked at Sydney, and Sydney shushed her with her eyes.

"Spirit," Brooke said, "what is your name?"

B-R-K, said the Ouija board. E-D-E-N, it said. S-Y-D.

"Brooke, I know you are doing it," Eden said. "I'm telling." But she didn't take her hand off the planchette.

W-E-A-R-E-D-E-A-D-Y-O-U, the Ouija board spelled, very slowly.

YES YES.

"I'm telling Mom!" Eden said, her voice tight. "I'm telling Mom you're trying to scare me!"

"Shhh!" Brooke said fiercely. "Shut up!" But by that time Eden had pulled her hand away. She was up in an instant and had knocked over a candle as she ran to get to the light switch.

Sydney had never admitted that it was she who had moved the planchette. She was very calm, though, calmer than Brooke, certainly calmer than Eden, she had been moving it almost subconsciously, that's what she told herself later, though at the time she could barely contain her pleasure, she was happy that the other girls had been frightened, a kind of glow opened inside her as she looked at their faces, her hand still hovering above the letters on the board.

And now, years later, as she stands at the door to the bas.e.m.e.nt holding her basket of laundry, she thinks of the little coffin-door down there with the skeleton key in it and she is almost certain that if she went down there right now and turned the key and opened the door she would find inside the little room her own body There she would be, she thinks, she can picture it, her own body light as a husk, eyes closed, skin pale as paper, mouth pinched tightly closed W-E-A-R-E-Y-O-U, she thinks. She remembers that night with the Ouija board: Oh, she should have never done that! She should have never made those words those spirits.

11.

Daddy is on his way home to kill us.

Sydney likes to imagine this, she can't help it. Here: He is driving through the snow in his pickup truck, and the defroster casts its thick wooly smell over him. He is black-bearded, dark-eyed, and his black hair stands up in crooked tufts from the friction of removing his stocking cap. The gun is on the seat beside him, and the wet feathers of snow land against the windshield and the wipers cast them away.

Was it winter when he came for them? She isn't sure. Maybe not.

She has the picture of Daddy and the snowman, one of the few photographs that haven't been destroyed, and naturally this is the image she is drawing on, there isn't any real memory.

What if she were to call him? she wonders. She has thought of it more than once, she has run his name through the search engines on her computer, Sampson Bell, also known as Spike, and there are hundreds of entries but nothing that resembles him. What if she could find him and call him on the telephone? Would he In the photograph, Daddy is a big bear of a man, standing next to a snowman that is as tall as he is, and his little daughters are in his arms: laughing Sydney, age three and one half, in her pink parka; baby Brooke in green, too little to laugh, eighteen months old perhaps. Eden not even born yet.

What does it mean that she was once this, this round face peering out from beneath a pink hood, her wide delighted eyes, her upturned, milk-drinking toddler nose, a little girl with her Daddy. Does it mean anything? Did she, the real Sydney, the Sydney she knows now as herself, exist somewhere inside that child in the photograph? Or was that other Sydney, the little Sydney that Daddy knew and loved, another creature entirely, entirely separate?

She considers. She is fond of this kind of vague philosophical conundrum, and perhaps that is why her life feels sad to her even though she should be happy. She wants to find connections where there are none, meanings and structures that she can't completely discern, that are perhaps indiscernible.

Metaphors for what?

12.

Actually, if you look closely, our ghosts are fluttering everywhere, dispersed and dispersing, smoke and glimmers of ash rising up from Daddy's cigarette, earthworms emerging from the soil when it rains and lifting up with birds to grip the power lines in our claws, we fall as leaves upon a human finger, curled in the gra.s.s at the edge of a house and never found, we settle as dust upon a key in a bas.e.m.e.nt door that leads nowhere. We cast down through the sixty-watt lamplight onto the page that Eden is bent over, reading diligently.

"Could anything be more miraculous than an actual, authentic ghost?" she reads. Thomas Carlyle, the nineteenth-century Scottish essayist, how the students loathe him. She reads: The English Johnson longed, all his life, to see a Ghost; but could not, though he went to c.o.c.k Lane, and thence to the church-vaults, and tapped on coffins. Foolish Doctor! Did he never, with the mind's eye as well as with the body's, look round him into that full tide of human Life he so loved; did he never so much as look into Himself? The good Doctor was a Ghost, as actual and authentic as heart could wish; well-nigh a million Ghosts were travelling the streets by his side. Once more I say, sweep away the illusion of Time; compress the threescore years into three minutes; what else was he, what else are we? Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air and Invisibility?

She will read this pa.s.sage aloud to them, Eden thinks, she will read it with great inflection and feeling and they some of them She will look out at the students at their desks and there will be Christopher with his dark sad eyes Are we not all of us Spirits? And she will look directly at him right into

13.

Let us say that there is soon to be a moment when Daddy wakes up and he cannot breathe; the dog Angeline is sound asleep on his chest and his mouth opens to try to take in air and there is nothing, his throat clenches and his lungs don't fill up and there is that feeling of someone bending over him. A face is pulling close to his own face, and in the dream he is having he is a little girl whose father has come into the room to kill her while she sleeps and in the little girl's dream she is a woman who is walking down the stairs into the bas.e.m.e.nt, where in a little earthen room she will see a woman hanging from a noose made of knotted sheets, a woman who looks almost exactly like her a poor f.u.c.ked-up woman in the Iowa Correctional Inst.i.tution for Women in Mitch.e.l.lville, Iowa, a convicted drug felon, the cloth of the sheets tightening around her windpipe and her legs kicking, her hands as if with a mind of their own scratching at her throat, her mouth opening and closing, eyes rolling up and she can see a boy with a baby pig in his arms, standing there watching her and there is a woman who wakes up suddenly from a dream and she knows that she is still in her apartment in Portland, it is still raining, she can hear the patter and rattle of rain against the windowpane and she thinks She knows: My father has just died.

Let us say that this, all of this, has a logic to it. We understand each other, don't we? Are we not, you and I, both of us spirits?

Reader, do not ask me who at this very moment is dreaming you.

Do not ask me when you are going to die.

Do not ask me where the gold is buried.

For good friends:.

Tom Barbash, John Martin, Imad Rahman.

For family:.

Jed, Sheri, Philip, Paul.

For Sheila:.

Thinking of you.

Acknowledgments.

Thanks to the Ohio Arts Council and Pauline Delaney Professorship Fund, which offered financial support during the writing of this book. I'm also indebted to my agent, Noah Lukeman, and my editor, Susanna Porter, as well as Gina Centrello, Libby McGuire, and all of the great people at Ballantine/Random House who have made the past decade so remarkably easy-I know I've been incredibly lucky to have found such a warm, friendly, and patient home for my books.

Many people helped me with individual stories, and I owe thanks to the editors of the journals in which some of these stories first appeared, as well as to a great number of friends who indulgently read and commented on these pieces.