GHOST STORY (FINAL PART)

      No one shooed us out this time. The room was crowded with people touching each other – hugging, or holding hands, or perhaps with just hanging on to a sleeve or resting a hand on a neighbor’s shoulder. My parents almost never touched each other, but my father had my mother’s hand in his.

      Grandma was lying in bed, her eyes closed. The machine next to the bed was making loopy, graceful waves, whose peaks were stretching farther and farther away from each other. She opened one eye, then the other, and looked straight at Ray Green, who looked young and nervous, his eyes very wide and his back very straight. One of her hands lifted slightly and Ray was there, holding it and talking to her, very quiet and very fast. He had the most beautiful smile.

      Noreen looked at me, then at the window. Everyone was looking at my grandmother, and Noreen went and put her hand on the pillow, and one finger on Grandma’s cheek. It made a lovely picture, even for those who couldn’t see the American soldier, his long black fingers resting gently on an old woman’s palm. I edged to a window, which looked like it hadn’t been opened in years, and nudged it up an inch or so. It squeaked, but one of the cousins and my mother was crying, and no one seemed to notice. Grandma’s fingers curled around Ray’s, and she died.

      I didn’t look then. I didn’t want to see whose ghost it was who had joined Ray, rising from the bed. So I don’t know if Annie Wilk, eighteen, walked by me, her short curls bouncing, or the old woman, a bit stout and short of breath, who made wonderful scones on Sundays and knew without being told that the gift I wanted most of all when I was seven was a jackknife with two blades and numerous attachments, including a little scissors and a fish-scaler. There was a touch on the back of my head as they passed.

GHOST STORY PART 5

      The elevator opened; a doctor and a nurse came by, both making a sort of fast strut straight to Grandma’s door. When they were inside, my grandfather (Grandfather? He looked much too young and soldier-like for that) fiddled with his rifle for a moment; almost the way some men I knew fiddled with a pipe while the words they needed came to them.

      “I’ve been dead a long while, and she’s lived her life. Met people, done things, raised a child. People change; even dead people change. I suppose I’ll know in a few minutes whether we’re still enough of who we used to be to still love each other.”

      “So you don’t know?”

      “No. I have a suspicion and a hope, but we’ll see.”

      “She’s definitely dying, then?”

      “In about 15 minutes. I’m her escort.”

      Noreen swallowed a giggle when I repeated this. The local paper had been running an advert for “escort services” lately, and our father had hummed and muttered and hinted his way through explaining what such services entailed.

      “Our soldier grandfather quirked his lip, somewhere between amusement and annoyance. “It’s not quite a dance I’m taking her too. “

      I wanted to impress him, so I said “You’re a psychopomp! Noreen, he’s going to lead her to the Land of the Dead.”

      He wouldn’t tell us much about what it was like being dead. “It’s just like being alive, if you set aside the fact that it’s totally different. Some things stay, and others that you thought would never change just fade away. I can still assemble a rifle, or the ghost of one. I’m pretty sure I used to be able to wiggle my left ear, but I can’t now.”

      “We should go in now; there’s just a few minutes left. If you want to do me and your Granny a favor, see if you can open a window in there, even a crack. I am very pleased I got to meet you.”

GHOST STORY PART 4

(part 5 on Monday)

     Noreen came with me. In part, I wanted her moral support. A ghost turning up was no good sign for how long Grandma had. I also wanted her in the hall with me so people walking by might assume I was talking to her and not to someone they couldn’t see. I think also I wanted to show her off to Greenray, in case he was disappointed in me.

      He was still there when we got back. He was sitting on the ground with his eyes closed, and he’d taken his rifle apart. “Do you have a watch?” he asked. I told him yes. “Does it have a sweep hand?” It did. “When I say ‘go!’ start timing.” He took a breath, said “Go!” and began putting his rifle back together. It took him 76 seconds. He shook his head and said “It used to be under a minute.”

      I told Nory what was happening. “Why would a ghost carry a rifle? Ask him if he shot anyone.”

      “This your sister? Tell her I can hear her fine. I never shot anyone.” I repeated what he said. It would be boring to have to write in all the repeats; if you want verisimilitude, just imagine an adult American’s voice being echoed by a nine year old English girl’s. The American’s voice is deep but, to my disappointment, doesn’t drop g’s or use slang.

      “Ask him if he has to wear his uniform because he died wearing it.”

      “What sense does that make? Besides, I was just wearing my underwear when I died. I’m in uniform because Annie liked my uniform. Tell you the truth, she hasn’t seen me for a long while; I’m counting on the uniform to help her recognize me.”

      “Do you love Grandma?”

      There was a thoughtful pause, as if he was trying to pick the exact words for what he wanted to say. “I was in love with an 18 year old girl named Annie Wilk. She had green eyes and freckles and short, curly hair. She was white, and that bothered me; I didn’t like white people, as a rule. I had a hard time believing she didn’t care I was colored.”

      “Colored?”

      “Black, girl; black. I knew her for just under three months, and I never heard her lie, or even come close. She and I were a good fit; if I’d’ve lived I think, despite all the white-black problems, we might have made a good life. I still think about her. But do I know the old woman in there? Does she remember me, or just my uniform, and being young?”

GHOST STORY PART 3

Yesterday was Part 2. Tomorrow, Part 4. Builds nicely, don't it?

Noreen wasn’t in the snack bar, which meant she was in the ladies room, looking at herself. It wasn’t vanity, quite, which made Noreen spend so much time with mirrors. Years later, I decided she simply needed reassurance.

      For forty days each year, we were the same age. She was born February 9^th, and I came December 31^st, just on the stroke of midnight of the same year. A bit eager my parents were, but they were both pretty old and there would be no grace in my complaining.

      My sister, as I expected, was making faces at herself, leaning her elbows on the counter. She could do this for hours, twisting her mouth to one side, then the other; tilting her head at different angles or raising her shoulders to shorten her neck. It didn’t matter; mirrors liked her and she looked no less beautiful. (Oddly, she never came out right on film, and those who didn’t know us then look at the photos and think I was the pretty one). I had given serious thought to detesting her, but it would have been too much work so, a bit reluctantly, I was fond of her.

      “Noreen. I need you to come upstairs right now.”

      “Is Grandma okay?”

      “If she was okay she wouldn’t be here, would she? But that’s not why you have to come. Greenray is standing in the hall, outside her door.”

      My grandmother had never talked to us about our mother’s father, but our mother had. Unfortunately, all she knew about him was that he was an American soldier who had gotten Grandma pregnant without marrying her and then absent-mindedly gotten himself killed before righting the situation. Noreen found this romantic, and had insisted on his being the hero of at least some of the stories we told each other when we were supposed to be sleeping. Thinly disguised as Greenray the Invincible, he’d rescued any number of princesses and the odd mermaid, all of whom had been eager to bestow their favors on him. Chastely, he had always refused them, out of loyalty to our grandmother. (We weren’t quite sure whether bestowing favors involved having babies or giving a sort of filmy scarf.)

     

      It bothered me that I couldn’t tell when Noreen was lying – which she did, but not to excess – but she always knew when I was making things up. I could tell her about three dwarves and a nixie chucking stones at each other in the high street and she’d ask me if they’d looked angry or were just playing. She would leave the occasional pan of milk for the snaky princess who sunned herself on the roof of the shed in the garden. But if I told her something as ordinary as that I’d seen Charlie Sands stealing Chloe Petulengro’s pencil she’d toss her head and say “Didn’t.”

GHOST STORY PART 2

Part 1 was yesterday. Part 3 will be tomorrow. Trust me.

      The soldier – he was a handsome man, I suddenly noticed – startled and looked hard at me. “O-kay,” he said “complications.” I stood my ground; there were people behind the closed doors who’d come running if I yelled; any minute the pale-yellow doors of the elevators would open and nurses or doctors or visitors would march out. I wasn’t scared. The soldier straightened his back – he’d been leaning on the wall – and did a sort of sideways nod. “Ray Green,” he said. “Not that I was expecting you, but I’m glad to meet you. You must be Annie’s – granddaughter? I can see her in you, a bit.”

      During the last few weeks, all sorts of stray kinfolk had been turning up. There seemed to be no end to my grandmother’s family, and I’d met any number of cousins whose names I’d mostly forgotten right after hearing them. Here, then, was one more, and what did it matter if he’d been dead a while? “Grandfather. Can you wait here a minute?”

      “I’ve got time.”

      “I’ll be right back.”

      It always drove me crazy how foolish people were in books, refusing to see what was right in front of them. If Professor Nosferatu had no reflection and yelped when splashed with holy water, he was a vampire and you needed to take precautions against him. When you woke up because your cat had climbed up next to you in bed and was whispering urgently that you had to get up and run right now since a truck was about to crash through your wall, it was not a time to wonder who had taught Mittens to speak, or to say “Am I dreaming?” It was time to run. So, if my grandfather was in the hall outside my grandmother’s hospital room, he had come for my grandmother’s sake, and goggling at him or pretending I didn’t believe in ghosts would have been a waste of time.

GHOST STORY PART 1

      If you believe the poets, it is a privilege and a gift to be born to see things invisible to see but I’ve generally found it to be more of a distraction. No matter how glamorous she may be, it is unnerving to have a tall, pale white woman in a trailing dress suddenly appear in the road ahead of you, her cold, gleaming eyes ignoring the traffic which drives through her as if she wasn’t there. It took me seven tries before I passed my road test. Nor is it easy – in fact, it was impossible – to tell ones first serious boyfriend that you won’t make love to him in a secluded patch of woods because there’s a weeping giant sitting on a hillock and cradling a battle axe in his lap and he’ll see you.

     

      Mostly I’ve led my life as if I saw only this world; even when I was small I was never one to go babbling about the pretty fairies in the garden or the fork-tongued princess on the roof of the shed. I left that to my sister Noreen, who was nearsighted and beautiful and had no second sight at all, but liked to make up stories. Even when I was small, I think, I knew that my stories wouldn’t get a response of “what a delightful imagination that child has!’ but would make grownups ask what was wrong with me. I got that enough already, so I usually pretended I saw only what everyone else seemed to see.

      Still, the black man who came into the hospital corridor where I’d been left to wait while my grandmother made her slow, painful exit from life, looked entirely human. Perhaps the fact that he was wearing an American army uniform from a war that had ended before I was born should have alerted me, but I was tired and out of sorts. I was nine then, and loved my grandmother dearly, but I was impatient that no adult, besides her, would admit to me the obvious fact that she was dying. Besides, the corridor was over-brightly illuminated by buzzing fluorescent lights, and seemed far too sterile a place for a spirit to come creeping.

      I was bored; I knew grief was coming, but it wasn’t quite there yet and I stared at the soldier since there was nothing else to look at in that hallway except closed doors and my feet. “Damn!” he said. “Who the hell are you?” I was insulted; I had a great sense of my own dignity in those days. I was preparing myself to play the bereaved child (and never mind that Noreen would do it far better than I ever could) and being asked who the hell I was didn’t seem right at all. “I the hell am Melissa Jane Jacobs. Who the hell are you?”