My Ghosts (21 page)

Angus used to say that he came to me wrapped in a cloak of invisibility, and once, when the fog rolled in from the lake, he told me about the magic mist that could be called up to surround all of Ireland, keep it hidden from those looking to cause harm. He’d lived in Inverhaven almost as long as I had, but maybe he really didn’t know how it is, the way someone always sees something, and passes it on. A sign, I suppose, of how well he was regarded, that talk never made its way back to Bella. Or maybe it was more to do with how people didn’t quite know what to make of her. A kind of paying back for what they assumed was thinking herself better, the way she held herself apart.

They didn’t know what to make of me either, until Reuben gave me his camera and I started carrying it with me. I took pictures of circus parades, the Dominion Day races, the wire walker high above the river. Sometimes people asked to buy them, and they started coming to me when they were putting together souvenir booklets for the Old Boys and other reunions and events. People got used to seeing me with my equipment, and it gave them something to latch on to, when they thought of me, and that brought with it a kind of acceptance, though
maybe no more than a stray dog would have when its habits become predictable. And I followed the rules; when Angus died, before the war, I knew that his funeral was a place for people with a right to grieve. Most of the town turned out, it seemed, and sang the hymns so loudly I could hear them tumbling over the bluff, passing over my head where I sat on the damp sand, near the place where we sometimes met, growing fainter, those words, as they moved out over the lake.

I didn’t know her well, of course, but there was something I recognized in Bella, some darkness she was folded around. It showed in the way she held herself, always, the way she seemed to slip away, without ever leaving a room where other people were talking. Everyone thought she’d fall apart after Angus died, but she surprised them, at first. She kept the house but went back and forth to the city, where Edie was studying, where her aunts and uncle lived together in a main-floor apartment, the people above them always rapping with a broom handle when the piano playing got too loud. Robbie told me how jolly it was there, with music and singing and all the tricks they played. Like a second childhood, he said; their minds were all right, except maybe Charlie’s, but it seemed they’d decided to do whatever they wanted, and not care who minded. And I could imagine it, knowing them all from those years they came to stay at the Lakeview. I noticed other families, of course, but those MacFarlanes always made me think what it could have been like, growing up, growing old with my own sisters and brothers.

Then the war came and Robbie was gone. Edie came home again and Young Rob was born, Bella and I two grandmothers, spending time with each other because of that, and sometimes
pushing the baby’s pram around town when Edie needed a rest. Once we rounded a sunny corner and the youngest Connell girl was skipping ahead of us, her hair aglow, flipping up and down, her thin arms and legs, her thin voice singing a bubbly song. And it may have been my fancy, but it seemed that for a moment we both had the same thought. That it could have been each of us, skipping along in a life we might have had, with the sun warm on our shoulders, the tops of our heads, and the green leaves shifting high in the trees.

I’ve known this place for more than thirty years, and I don’t exactly have friends here, but I have a place. I’ve known people who’ve died and people who’ve been born, jokers and liars and gossips, as well as the kindest you could ever find. Buildings and businesses have come and gone, the storefronts painted a different colour each time, fresh at first and glowing in the light. So many changes, in thirty years, and now a criss-crossing web of wires everywhere, carrying light, carrying voices and the whole modern world, right into people’s homes. There have been fires and catastrophes, there’s been sickness, and that time so many ships sank in the November storm I went down to the shore with all the others, bringing our own sheets and blankets to cover the dead as they washed up. We rolled bandages and packed boxes in the war, and held our breath when the telegraph boy appeared in the distance; whatever I sensed that first day has proved right, that this is a place to stay.

And always there’s the changing water, the sky in all its seasons. Lives overlapping through years and years, and we’re part of it for our own brief time, but comforted, or at least I am, by knowing it will go on and on. Even the young ones, who
couldn’t wait to leave, come back from wherever they’ve ended up, take off their shoes and walk through the sand, sometimes holding their own children by the hand. On the train home from our appointment in the city, Edie said that she’d realized she no longer missed it. The bustle and the entertainments, the crowds of people who didn’t know the first thing about you. She said that maybe a place like Inverhaven was better, like a family in the way everyone knew everything about everyone else and you could be whoever you were, and know that you still belonged.

There are so many things that bind us, and I couldn’t have known that first day, but I soon learned what it meant to feel the first warm sun, after a hard winter. How giddy people become, when the snow begins its trickling melt, doors thrown open and scarves and layers shed, turning their faces up to the pale sky. There’s still a party in the town hall every April, all kinds of wildness and laughter, not just for the promise of warmer weather, or so I think, but relief at coming through once again. All winters are hard here, and everything more difficult, from leaving the warm nest of your bed to making your way home again, with the setting sun blood-red on the snow. The dark comes sooner and sooner, months when the whole world is a dead and gloomy place, and those clear blue days that make your skin tingle are too rare to be more than a cruel reminder. I’ve known that from other places but not
felt
it the same way. Here there are also the storms that blow up, days on end with the wind beating and howling, the woodpile dwindling, and people driven deeper into their own dark thoughts.

I suppose it’s there in all of us, that darkness, though in some it’s buried deeper. Like those circus parades I used to
photograph, all glitter and big smiles, but when you look harder, stand closer, you see the cracks in the thick face paint, the tears and the soil on those flowing capes. There can be a desperate need to keep busy, to fill our days and our minds with lists and entertainments, with errands and news of any kind, about anyone. A need to be in company, to seal up any crack with talk and tasks, with feuds and jokes, anything to muffle the call of the long white field, to keep from seeing every rafter, every bare tree limb, as a place to sling a rope. Maybe that’s what happened with Bella in the end; much as she wanted to, I don’t think even Edie believed that the sleeping draft was an accident.

This morning I climbed the old steps, and I walked to the place where the Lakeview once stood; I walked down the main street, along Centre Street and all the others, out to the station and back again. I walked until my feet were sore, my legs so tired, and then I went back to Robbie’s house, climbed the stairs and closed the door to the room where I stay. It was meant to be for a short time, when my plans for the Lakeview were gone, but it was harder than I thought to work out what to do next, and took longer. Things happened last winter, I know, but when I try to remember it seems like all I did was look out through the new window while the snow fell, unfamiliar mounded shapes in the yard and I had no idea what would be revealed when the spring thaw came.

Last week Maggie’s great-nephew wrote, and offered me work at the new hotel, getting things prepared and running smoothly for the opening next spring. “What a nerve,” Edie said, but I’ve been thinking about it, principles and pride being luxuries I’ve rarely been able to afford. Robbie and Edie
have done everything to make me comfortable here, make me welcome, and I know I am, but I don’t think they understand how it feels, living at the edges of other people’s lives. Not a thing I know how to explain without seeming ungrateful, but I’ve had my eye on a narrow storefront on the main street, where Lily Trimble has her hat shop. People say she can’t hold on much longer, can’t keep up with the changing styles and the way it’s so easy now for people to do their shopping in bigger places.

If I had a wage from the hotel, along with what I’ve been able to put aside over the years, it would be enough to cover the lease and set it up as a little studio, with space for me to sleep and cook at the back. I know everyone owns a camera these days, but there are still special occasions to mark, and events, and I’m sure Stinson will take prints for the newspaper. I’ll feel better there, I know I will, on my own and with all my things, my equipment unpacked from the boxes now piled in a corner of Robbie’s parlour. I’ll put up all my pictures again, and maybe enlarge one or two to go in the window. Though I would never have thought it, lately I’ve been wishing that I had that photograph of Sam and me, the one where we’re laughing, with our heads close together. For a long time I couldn’t remember, but there was a time we were exactly like that.

I haven’t mentioned my plan for the studio to Robbie, or to Edie. They’d think it too difficult, too uncertain, not understand why I might want it, a woman my age sleeping on a cot behind a curtain. They’d point out, carefully and kindly, that I’m going to need more help, not less, that they’d worry. They mean well, I know they do, and I’ve always found it hardest to deal with people who have good intentions. It’s different because they’re family, but I learned long ago that people who think they know
what’s best for you usually don’t. Sometimes they march you up a gangway, and set you loose in a vast, empty sea.

Edie tapped on my door at lunchtime, but I said I was resting; before she went away she reminded me that we needed to let the surgeon know, as if I might have forgotten. It’s not the thought of a knife in my eye, though it’s not surprising that’s what she thinks, and Robbie too. And it’s not the small chance the operation won’t work, or even make things worse; there’s nothing I can do about that. I know I’ll do it in the end, but I’m not quite ready. When the surgeon explained about my vision like a tunnel, what I thought of was looking through the lens of a camera, the way everything else disappears and you see so clearly the small, perfect view that’s left. The thing that’s exactly what you want it to be.

I heard my grandsons come raucous through the door downstairs, their voices smashing together as they argued about one pushing the other, and unfairly winning the race up the front steps, until Edie rapped hard on the stove. In some ways I feel I knew them better before I moved into the middle of their lives. Not that they behaved better, I don’t mean that, but we used to take long walks together, and they asked me all kinds of questions, as small boys do, and listened to my answers. Little Stevie wondered once if seagulls recognized each other, if they looked as different to each other as people did, and then we talked about how people have two eyes, a nose and a mouth, but don’t look anything the same. “And two arms and two legs,” Stevie said, and his brother said, “Not everyone, stupid,” and they called each other
stupid
for a while, as they sometimes did. Edie says if they have another child she hopes it will be a girl;
she asked me once if I’d been just a little disappointed when Robbie was born, but I told her that instead I’d been so relieved.

All through the afternoon I kept thinking that I should get up, that I should splash water on my face and tidy my hair, go down and eat the meal I knew Edie would have set aside for me. She’s a good girl, is Edie, and a caring one, and there’s not much, except spiders, that frightens her. When she sets her mind on something it’s not often she can be knocked off course. With a decision to make she sits down with a piece of paper, columns for plus and for minus; that’s a thing Robbie teases her about and she can laugh at herself too. Edie’s known sorrow and hardship, like everyone, but I’ve always admired the way she gets on with things. People like to say that suffering makes you stronger, as if that’s a reason for it, but I don’t believe there’s a reason and no point in looking for one. Things happen, and they can bowl you right over, but what can you do but go on? It’s harder for some, though I didn’t always understand that. Hard not to cling to it, the wrong or the loss, as if letting go would be some kind of betrayal. As if that would make it a trivial thing, make you someone who didn’t matter at all.

I meant to get up, but instead I drifted through thoughts that turned into dreams and back again, different light when I opened my eyes, changing shadows. Still aware of the noises, slamming doors and the boys home again from school, Robbie’s deep voice, the scrape of a spoon in a pot. The sounds of lives going on but at a remove and muffled by my closed door. Then I opened my eyes into silence, the shadows reaching farther on the ceiling, and knew that I’d slept deeply but
had no idea how long. Downstairs the dishes stood clean in the rack, no one there, and I thought maybe they’d taken the boys to the early show, thought I’d half heard talk about that. There was no plate warming but I wasn’t a bit hungry, so I carried on out the door.

Outside it was earlier than it had seemed, but the only people about were just shapes turning the corner far down the street; I tried to remember what picture had been advertised on the stand outside the Verity that must have drawn so many to see it. And though it was a different season, I was reminded of the walks I used to take in the weeks before Robbie was born, at the hour when everyone was making their way home. The streets lined with solid brick houses, lamplight glowing in the windows, and how lucky I felt to have found this place, where people stayed warm and together.

I’d intended to walk to the bluff, but I found myself on the winding harbour road, moving faster as I went down but my legs weren’t too tired, my feet barely touching the ground. I carried on along the beach, wrapping my shawl a little tighter against the breeze coming off the lake, and there was a faint sound of music that must have been the town band practising in the bandshell near the top of the rickety stairs. The autumn sky was a tumble of clouds, all shades of purple, of grey, with a glow near the horizon where the sun must have been. A great peace settled on me, and I remembered the girl who had felt the same thing, on the bench near the edge of the bluff up above me. The girl who couldn’t have known, no matter what she told herself, that things would turn out all right.