Spirit Lost (6 page)

By nightfall it was raining, and the wind had come up. The four friends sat in the high-ceilinged dining room and ate Thanksgiving-dinner leftovers by candlelight. They lit a fire in the living room fireplace and played a game of Pente, the women against the men.

“I love these little stones,” Willy said, fingering her deep blue pebble-sized playing pieces. “They’re like jewels.”

“Mmm, I know,” Anne agreed. “This is a beautiful game. And it seems so ancient. I can believe it really is ancient.”

Mark was leaning an elbow on the coffee table, studying the game, pondering his next move.

“What is that warning I get to say?” John asked. “We’ve got one move, partner, or something like that?”

“Something like that,” Willy said.

“Well, I’m saying it,” John said.

The wind howled and threw itself against the windows. Now and then the wind made screaming noises, and the windows shook as if someone were trying to get in.

“Some night,” Mark said, placing a stone on the board.

“The fire’s wonderful,” Anne said.

“I’m glad you’re enjoying it,” John said, smiling. “It cost us enough. We had the movers bring a cord of firewood over on the ferry—there’s no timber on Nantucket Island, no trees tall enough for firewood. So a good log is worth its weight in gold. It cost us a thousand dollars to bring over all our stuff, including the wood. Can you believe that?”

“Well,” Anne said, “all your furniture’s so heavy. All these antiques. They must weigh a ton. But they look wonderful here. They look as if they were meant to be here. Much better than they did in your apartment.”

There was a great puffing noise as the wind hit the chimney just the right way to
enter the flue and send a gust of smoke back into the room. For a moment rain splattered the logs.

“I don’t know,” Anne said. “I don’t think I could live here all year. I mean, this is only November, and the weather’s so wild.”

“Well, Nantucket’s flat and so far out in the ocean that the wind can really work up some force,” John said. “I’ve heard that it does really blow here. This is nothing.”

“I think it’s romantic,” Willy said smugly.

“I think I’m glad I won’t have your heating bill,” Mark said just as smugly.

“I think we’ve beat you.” Anne laughed, placing her deep-blue stone on a square that gave the women five stones in a row.

“So much for men being superior at logic!” Willy laughed, pleased at winning. She rose. “I’m going to make us all some Irish coffee.”

“Oh, great!” Anne said. “I haven’t had Irish coffee for years. I don’t suppose that much alcohol will hurt the baby, do you, Mark?” She moved over to sit next to her husband on the sofa. “I didn’t have any wine with dinner tonight.”

“My sweet, you drink just enough booze to make our child into a
bon vivant
and not enough to turn him into a drunk,” Mark said, pulling Anne closer to him and rubbing her stomach.

John put the colored stones back in their bag, rolled up the Pente mat, and put the game away. He rose and dropped another log on the fire. The friends sat together in silence for a while, relaxing, stretching out, watching the dancing flames. They were familiar enough with one another to be companionable in silence. For a few minutes the whir of the electric mixer as Willy whipped the cream for the Irish coffee joined the other noises of the night. It had a nice controlled mechanical sound about it—a civilized sound—and when she turned it off, the storm outside seemed even more savage by contrast.

“I’m glad I’m not on the ferry,” Mark said, making seasick noises and faces.

“It may not be running tonight,” John told him. “I’ve heard it doesn’t go when it’s really bad.”

Willy entered the room carrying a silver tray with four crystal goblets filled with Irish coffee and four long silver spoons. She was wearing jeans and an old cotton turtleneck and an even older gray-and-heather cable-knit wool sweater she had knit herself years before. She looked enormously comfortable and warming, and with the
silver tray in her hands, she was a bearer of gifts. She set the tray on the coffee table, and everyone looked at the Irish coffees, which she had prepared perfectly, so that the white cream rose in swirls, sweet islands on dark, intoxicating seas.

Anne clapped her hands together like a child. “Oh,” she cried, “this is such a luxury! The walk and the waves and the wild beach, and now this fire and this rich dessert. Willy, you’re wonderful.”

Willy smiled. “Well, it’s a luxury for us,” she said. “To have friends in our house. We don’t know anyone here, you know. I mean, we know the Realtor. And there are some people in Boston who come here for the summer, but no one we know stays for the entire year. Imagine, we really don’t know a
soul
on this island.”

Anne shivered. “I’d hate it. I’d feel desolate. Willy, I couldn’t stand it.”

“Well,” Willy said, picking up her coffee, “it’s only been three weeks. I’m sure we’ll be meeting people as time goes along.”

“I don’t want to,” John announced. “I have no desire whatsoever to meet anyone. I want privacy, peace, and quiet.”

“Sounds drastic to me,” Mark told him. “Too much of a change too fast. John, you’ve lived your life surrounded by people. You love people, admit it.”

“I admit it,” John said. “But I also never got any work done. I want to get some work done. Some real work.”

The wind shrieked. The windows shook. Rain splattered against the panes like pebbles thrown from an unseen hand.

“You’ll get your work done,” Willy said to her husband.

“I have to,” John said soberly.

Anne and Mark looked at each other.

“Well,” Mark said, a little more loudly than necessary, thinking quickly, wanting to change the subject, “tell me, do you two have a ghost in your house? I hear Nantucket’s supposed to be full of ghosts.”

“Ghosts!” John laughed, his good humor immediately returning. “In spite of your Halloween party, my friend, I don’t believe in ghosts. No one believes in ghosts anymore.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Willy said. She was slowly stirring her cream into the coffee-and-whiskey mixture, making hypnotic whorls of brown and white. “The other day we drove out to the moors and took a long walk. The moors are beautiful now, even with
most of the color gone. There are bayberries, low bushes, twisted trees, different mosses, everything now olive and dark green and gray, with vivid spots of deep-wine-colored berries here and there. The moors undulate slightly”—Willy dipped her hand slowly—“and there are shallow hollows in the low hills. We stood on a high spot for a while and watched the mist pass through, and honestly, Anne, the way those mists wafted and drifted along—they seemed like spirits. Didn’t they, John? They really seemed human. Or at least alive.”

“Just looked like fog to me,” John said to his wife, watching her with affection.

“And then the foghorn,” Willy went on. “It’s so melancholy. So haunting. Like a warning from a lost soul.… ‘Go … go … no … you must not come here … go.’…” Willy drew out the last word as if it were a deep musical note.

“God, Willy, this island’s making you weird!” Anne snapped, shuddering.

“Willy’s always been weird,” John said, and reached over to lightly caress his wife’s neck to show her he was kidding. He leaned back in his chair with his Irish coffee in his hands and put his feet up on Willy’s lap.

“I resemble that remark!” Willy said, laughing, making a familiar joke between the two of them to show she wasn’t hurt. “But really,” she went on, “I wouldn’t mind if we did have a ghost. I could have a friend!”

“Honestly,” Anne said. “Willy, you are always so
optimistic
. Isn’t she, John? Doesn’t it just drive you crazy sometimes? I mean, give me a break, Willy, ghosts aren’t people’s
friends
. They’re evil spirits, they’re malign.”

“Pol-ter-geist,”
Mark said, naming a movie they had all seen together, making his voice deep and ominous as he said the word.

“Yeah,” Anne agreed.

“Well, who says ghosts have to be evil?” John asked, more to come to his wife’s rescue than because he cared.

“Everyone!” Anne answered. “Everyone knows that, John. Ghosts are spirits of people who are not satisfied with what happened to them on earth. They’re angry, or sad—that’s why they’re ghosts. They can’t be at peace, and so they moan around wherever it was they were made unhappy, haunting people and trying to get some kind of revenge.”

“You see too much TV,” John said.

“No. No, not
really
,” Anne said earnestly, sitting up as straight as she could.
“Look at it this way. I’ve got a
human being
in here,” she said, pointing to her swollen belly. “A person with his or her own special characteristics, his or her own personality—spirit—someone we’ve never met before, someone who has never existed before. But does exist now. I’ve got a very small human being inside me; we all believe that. No one doubts that. So if we can believe that from out of nowhere came this new human to live for a while in my tiny space, why can’t we believe that in all the vast universe there are spirits, human beings in other forms, forms we don’t know about, who also exist?”

The other three in the room were quiet, surprised and a little embarrassed by Anne’s unexpected passion.

“We can find empirical evidence that babies exist in women’s bellies,” John began. He spoke hesitantly, gently, as if he were afraid of insulting her. “Babies come out of women’s wombs. If we cut women open, we find babies in there. Now we can film, live, babies
in utero
. I don’t think that mankind, in general, over time, has ever had the same sort of evidence that spirits live an afterlife. The same sort of proof that ghosts exist.”

“I think we all
want
to believe in ghosts,” Willy agreed. “The same way we want to believe there’s a God. But I think John’s right. There just isn’t enough evidence to prove that ghosts exist.”

“Oh, hormones,” Anne said. Then, seeing the confusion on the others’ faces, she laughed, and the mood of the room lightened. “I
mean
, it’s my hormones, this pregnancy, that gets me into such a state. All worked up and sentimental and so
concerned
. So mystical and romantic. I’m sorry, you guys.”

“We should go to bed,” Mark said. “It’s late, and you need your sleep,” he told his wife.

“It’s true,” Anne agreed. She smiled at the others. “I have to stay in bed nine hours to get eight hours of sleep because the baby always wakens me several times a night, kicking. It kicks Mark, too, if he’s lying close enough to me.”

“Well, have a good sleep,” Willy said. “It’s still vacation tomorrow, sleep as late as you can.”

Mark and Anne went upstairs. Willy and John stayed by the fire.

“You envy Anne, don’t you,” John asked Willy, watching her face.

“What?” Willy asked. “What do you mean?”

“I mean the baby. You wish you could be having a baby, too. I saw your face
when you looked at her stomach.”

Willy rose and went over to her husband. She knelt beside him and wrapped her arms around his legs and laid her head on his knees. “John,” she said, “of course I want a baby. Sometime. There’s no hurry. I can wait. I’ve told you that. I want
you
. I want
us
. I want us to be happy. I’ve got what I want, really. Believe me.”

“I love you, Willy,” John said.

She smiled and nestled against his legs while he stroked her dark blond hair. They stayed that way for a long time. Willy closed her eyes and gave over to the sensation of John’s gentle hands on her hair. John caressed his wife and stared into the fire, wondering if he could ever be as content as she was. Outside their circle of warmth and light and love, the wind and rain rampaged in the dark night.

Chapter Three

Early Sunday afternoon Willy and John drove Anne and Mark to the airport to catch their flight back to Boston. When they returned to their house, it seemed much emptier to them than it had before their friends’ visit. It seemed so quiet. Outside, a fine cold rain descended very steadily, slipping down along the walls of the houses and escaping downhill in rivulets. Inside, the house was cold, the fireplace dark with mounds of ashes.

They turned on all the electric lights and turned up the heat. Soon their oil-fired hot-air furnace was making its predictable, companionable blowing sounds. But still they could not get settled in their house. The
New York Times
and the
Boston Globe
lay in scattered piles all over the living room floor. The four friends had read the papers in the morning, drinking coffee and interrupting one another to read some item aloud, laughing or making comments. These papers, which always filled Willy and John with a kind of greed and hunger when they were picked up in the morning, fresh with smeary ink, now seemed just messy. So did the coffee cups and plates that had held their late-morning brunch of coffee, ham and cheese croissants, and green grapes. Crumbs and small brown stems littered the plates; cold coffee lay murky in the cups.

It didn’t take long to clean up the mess. They carried the dirty dishes into the kitchen and rinsed and stacked them in their dishwasher; they piled the papers on the back porch. John ran a dust cloth over the coffee table and set the furniture back at its formal angles. And still the house wasn’t right. The windows held no welcoming change of scene; only a grim light that struggled through the thick clouds and rain-dense air. And it was late November, they were headed toward the winter solstice, so night would fall early.

“Anything on TV?” John asked, sitting on the sofa, stretching his legs out before him.

“Masterpiece Theatre,”
Willy answered. “At nine.”

They both looked at their watches, even though they could guess what time it was: only a little after one o’clock.

“There’s an hourlong Alfred Hitchcock at six,” Willy said. “That might be fun.”

“All right,” John agreed. “Or we could go out to eat.”

“Oh, let’s,” Willy said. “I’m tired of cooking. Let’s go pig out at the Atlantic Cafe and then come home and read and watch TV.”