Ghost Lights

Abstract

50 CARLEA HOLL-JENSEN Ghost Lights  hey stand at the dead end of the street and watch her ex-husband ’s truck pull away. The boy raises his hand to wave, but the truck is already rounding the corner onto the main road, disappearing from sight. He’ll be fine, she assures herself. Children are adaptable. Soon they’ll be somewhere new. He won’t even remember this when he’s older. When she asks if he’s ready to go inside, the boy turns to look up at the house. Its windows are dark, as if it’s already empty. The boy peers up at them, expectant, like he’s waiting for the house to say something. In the tall pine, a cardinal asks, then answers, a question: Bir-dy birdy bir-dy? Birdy birdy birdy bird! “It’s quaint,” the realtor tells her when they’ve concluded their short tour. We were happy here, she wants to say, but doesn’t. “Of course,” the realtor says, “it could use a little work. If you really want to get the most you can for it.” The woman is a friend-of-a-friend who’s agreed to sell the house at a fraction of her usual rate. She doesn’t mention the grim divorce settlement arithmetic that comes with selling this house they once owned together, or the slow subtraction of her savings now that she’s alone. What she says is, “What about as it is?” The realtor smiles. “I’ll make you a to-do list.” She begins by cleaning. There’s a film of grease on every surface in the kitchen she never noticed before. Everywhere she turns, she sees another shortcoming of her own housekeeping: the stale smell in the air, t 51 the grit of accumulated dust in all the corners. It looks to her now as if nobody’s lived in the house for years. She wonders how it escaped her notice for so long. She throws the doors and windows open, inviting the cold wind to cut through the house. She sweeps and mops and washes the windows. There’s bleach for scouring and furniture polish to make every surface slippery and bright. She’s scrubbing the countertops when a small black dog arrives. It stands in the middle of the kitchen and stares at her with its mouth hanging open. “Hello,” she says, but the dog pays her no mind. She watches it trot out of the kitchen and through the living room as if it knows exactly where it is going. It leaves by the front door. In the attic, she discovers the scraps of someone else’s life: clothes she can’t remember wearing, photo albums full of people she doesn’t recognize . Dirt and brittle leaves are strewn across the floor, as if someone left the window open for an entire season. When she leans close to check the window’s latch, she can smell a faint hint of smoke clinging to its frame. Curled around a cardboard box is a snake’s shed skin, almost perfectly complete, translucent as rice paper. She cannot make herself touch it, so she leaves it where it is. Later that afternoon, her sister calls to see how they’re adjusting to being alone in the house. Her first instinct, recalling the snakeskin, is to protest that they aren’t really alone. But, of course, they are. The boy asks if it’s going to be just the two of them from now on. “Yes,” she says. “OK,” the boy says and goes back to coloring. He hums to himself as he draws, a song she doesn’t recognize. The boy is never silent. She can track his movements by the noises he makes: singing to himself as he pushes his toy cars across the carpet, 52 clattering over the floor on his hands and knees when he plays puppy, narrating stories he illustrates on thick pads of newsprint. When the boy was younger, they used to pretend that inanimate objects could speak to them. Excuseme, said the tea cup in a fussy voice. Oh,Idobegyourpardon, the dresser exclaimed. The boy would...