The Ghost at the Table: A Novel (30 page)

What had I expected? Crumbling masonry, missing shingles, splintered front door hanging off its hinges. Open garbage cans, a chained barking dog. Children in torn pajamas, weeping on the steps. Actually, I think I’d simply expected the house not to be there at all. Deleted, along with my presence in it. A skipped space in the row of houses. But there it was, shingles intact behind the rhododendrons, windows unbroken, one of those wire cages on top of the chimney to keep the raccoons out. Though I did not look at Frances, I understood that she felt the same way, though for
different reasons. Perhaps in the whole of our lives, we had never felt so alike as at that very moment, as we stared at our old house and were disappointed by the plain sight of it, and also relieved. And disappointed to be relieved. After all the ghost stories about the past we’d told ourselves over the years, we had neglected to imagine anything so terrifyingly commonplace as a gray-shingled house with a lawn, where we had lived until it was time to move on and where nothing had been done to us that was much worse or much better than what we had gone on to do to ourselves.

And yet it was at that same moment, as we crept past the respectable home of our childhood, that out of nowhere an enormous black car came hurtling at us from the opposite direction.

A
S ANYONE WHO HAS
ever been in even a minor car accident knows, there’s a lucid, arrhythmic moment before the collision happens. Time lengthens. Colors brighten, right angles sharpen. There’s also a sense of quiet, as in music, when the tempo changes and arrives at the grace note. So this is it, you think. What it’s all been leading up to. You would like to make better use of that grace note, that glass instant, when all should be made clear. But of course, you don’t.

A
VOICE WAS CALLING
and calling, calling from somewhere outside my window, a voice that had gone thin and cracking.

You idiot
, shouted the voice.

Perhaps, I thought, this is what it feels like to be dead. An insulting flatness.

F
ROM THE FAR CORNERS
of my vision, I saw Frances shifting around in the driver’s seat. Her air bag had not inflated.

“I’m so sorry,” she kept repeating.

“Idiot!” shrieked the voice outside my window.

Slowly that voice came into focus. Straight blonde hair cut to her chin, a mouth smeared with red lipstick. A hard, unpleasant face. But something was wrong with my neck and I could not move my head to turn away from her.

“I have
children
in my car,” she screamed.

“I’m so sorry,” Frances was insisting.

“N
ECK INJURY
,”
SAID
the ambulance driver to his partner.

“How about the old guy?”

“I checked him out. Just a bruise on his forehead. They weren’t going very fast.”

“Friggin’ air bags.”

“Friggin’ SUVs,” said the driver, glancing across the road.

The driver was young and red-haired, with pink bunchy cheeks. His partner was older, with a dark, withered-looking face and thick black eyebrows above gentle furtive brown eyes. He smelled of breath mints. A drinking problem, I decided, having ample time to examine him as he leaned over my seat to examine me, recognizing that delicate, almost formal withdrawal in his face, which I’ve also seen on the faces of homeless men who sit all day in the park across from my apartment. Though his hands, as he fixed a foam collar around my neck, were perfectly steady. As were Frances’s, I realized, as she tried to offer me a thermos cap of water.

“She can’t have any water yet, ma’am,” he told her. “Not till she gets checked out at the hospital.”

“Why?” said Frances. “What are they going to do?”

“A CT scan. Chest X-ray. She’s got a possible concussion. Maybe a broken rib.”

“I’d like to call my husband.” Frances began to climb out of the van.

“You were driving, ma’am?”

T
HE AMBULANCE DRIVER
and his partner were trying to shift me by degrees onto a hard narrow board laid across the front seat.

“Try to breathe slowly,” said the ambulance driver.

“Keep as still as you can,” urged his partner.

“We can’t get you out of here unless you stay still.”

“Calm down, Cynnie,” whispered Frances from somewhere behind them. She sounded frightened. “Stop laughing and calm down, okay?”

As a child, I often got in trouble for laughing at inappropriate moments, in French class, for instance, or during graduation ceremonies, or while a visitor was saying grace at the dinner table. Frances, who never had this problem, once told me her secret: if you want to stop laughing, imagine something sad in detail. This strategy did not always work for me and in fact sometimes had the reverse effect. But sometimes it did work. The ambulance driver and his partner were both frowning now, one with frustration, the other with what seemed to be genuine concern, telling me to keep still.

And so because it was the first sad thing that came to me, I pictured December 16, the day my father’s mother died. Killed, perhaps by accident, perhaps not, by stepping in front of a streetcar at the intersection of Main Street and Asylum Avenue.

It would have been cold that day as well, just a week or so before Christmas. The streets would have been gray and crowded, already getting dark at four o’clock. Her little boy lagged behind
her, whining about the cold, complaining that his feet were wet, asking for toys she could not afford. Still she walked on, ignoring his cries, seeming not even to hear them. One last shop to visit. One more shop. This was how she got through the tiring duties of her life, by repeating to herself that she had to do them until they were done. One more shop. She began to cross the trolley tracks. Then suddenly, for no reason that onlookers could later explain, she stopped. Hesitated in the middle of the tracks that snowy late afternoon, in a big black coat, her arms full of packages, the child clutching at her sleeve. Wet trolley tracks stretched to either side of her, vanishing in opposite directions. Voices called out to her. The clanging of the streetcar became deafening, then even louder.

Loud enough to wake the dead. But it was not upon her yet; she had one more endless moment to hesitate. And as she stood there she repeated to herself that she was tired. Her back hurt; she had a cough; she was sick of shopping. Her life had been unhappy and was unlikely to improve. That could very well have been her last thought, a trite self-pitying reflection.

But I don’t believe it. She was a mother, after all, no matter how worn out and uninvolved. As the screech of brakes filled her ears and a smoky wind blew her black coat about her ankles, she reached out to seize the little boy’s wrist, hard enough to leave a mark, hard enough to thrust him back, and out of the way.

Don’t watch
, she said.

“T
HERE YOU GO
,” said the partner with relief.

Someone took my hand. I felt a sharp pressure above my wrist. The ambulance driver was busy with some equipment, a pole with a clear plastic bag attached. “I just gave you something to relax,”
he told me. He seemed to be speaking to my father as well, whose wheelchair had been pushed close to where I was now lying on a rolling metal cot. Above us the sky was beginning to darken.

“I’m fine,” I tried to say.

“It’s all right,” a voice said. “Just an accident.”

My father’s face was level with mine, not six inches away. It was the same face he’d always had, a long triangular elegant face, only much older. After a moment or two I expected him to turn away, perhaps to look around for Frances. But he kept his eyes on mine.

“T
HEY SAID
I
CAN GO
,” I told Frances, when I found her sitting in a row of hard-looking plastic chairs near the emergency room door, my father asleep in his wheelchair beside her. Evening had come on. The waiting room windows were dark. A potted palm tree stood under the fluorescent lights a few feet away from the reception desk, its green fronds casting long slender shadows on the floor that stirred whenever anyone passed by.

“Oh my God.” Frances stood up and reached out to touch my neck brace.

I moved away from her hand. “The doctor said I’ll have to wear this thing for a while. Otherwise I guess I’ll be fine.”

To avoid looking at Frances, I looked at my father, who had a mottled purple bruise on his forehead.

“Is he okay?” I asked Frances. “Did someone examine him?”

Frances explained that an emergency room doctor had taken his blood pressure, then given him an EKG and found that his heart rate was normal, then ruled out the need for an MRI. As she was finishing this report, a stout nurse with gray bangs appeared and repeated all the same things. My father opened his eyes to listen to her.

“We were concerned about that,” the nurse pointed to the bruise on his forehead, “especially since he’s had a stroke. If it were up to me, I’d keep him here overnight for observation, but she”—the nurse looked at Frances—“won’t agree to it.”

“But is he all right?” I asked.

“Dr. Kirsanov says he’s okay,” the nurse went on, squaring her shoulders. “She’s our attending that talked with your sister here. That bruise looks worse than it is, but he should go to his own doctor tomorrow and have a full physical. He’s an old man.” The nurse frowned at Frances. “It’s not doing him any favors, you know, putting him through all this.”

“It was an
accident,
” said Frances.

W
ALTER LOOKED HARRIED
and upset when he arrived in the emergency room waiting area in his Burberry coat but almost comically relieved to see the three of us more or less ambulatory. In the car, Frances sat up front with him and I sat in the back with my father. My father fell asleep right away, while I listened to Frances’s murmuring voice explain to Walter what had happened (“Who was driving?” he’d asked, almost immediately). Otherwise it was a quiet trip home. Snow was falling again, not very hard, more of a cold white mist.

Most of the house was dark when we arrived sometime after nine o’clock. Walter unlocked the back door to the kitchen, then returned to the car to help my father into his wheelchair. In the dark kitchen a tiny green light shone from the dishwasher, indicating that it had completed its cycle. I switched on a lamp by the door. The house was warm after the chilly outdoor air, yet once we took off our coats I felt a draft and also noticed the acrid smell of smoke, left over from two nights before. One of the kitchen windows was open an inch or two, letting in cold air mixed with a
little snow. Frances must have opened it before we left that morning, to air the room out, then forgotten to close it again.

“Home sweet home,” sighed Frances, coming in behind me.

She offered to make something for a late supper, but my father indicated that he wanted to go to bed. Jane came into the kitchen to greet us and ask questions about what had happened. She peered with concern at my neck brace and hoped my neck didn’t hurt too much; but once she had satisfied herself that we were all right she said that she was tired and went upstairs to her room. While Walter was getting Dad settled for the night, Frances went into the dining room and came back carrying Jane’s Thanksgiving centerpiece, which she set on the kitchen table. Then she poured herself a glass of red wine from a half-empty bottle on the counter. She offered a glass to me. I said that I’d like water instead.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” she said, getting up to fill a glass for me at the sink. “Why were you laughing this afternoon? What was that all about?”

“Nothing.”

“No really. What was so funny?”

“Just something I remembered.”

“You do know I’m sorry”—she set the water in front of me—“for everything that’s happened.”

“No, you’re not,” I said. “You just realize you should be.”

Frances sat down again across from me and took a sip of her wine, then leaned her elbow on the table. “One would think,” she said, gazing at me tiredly, “that after a day like today, you’d at least want a glass of wine.”

“One would think,” I agreed.

“Oh well, you probably shouldn’t, anyway. After those tranquilizers.”

“Probably not. By the way,” I said, pointing to a sprig of bittersweet in the centerpiece, “that stuff is poisonous.”

“But it’s pretty,” said Frances.

For a silent moment we looked at each other. Then Frances sighed and got up again. She opened the refrigerator and took out a pot of turkey soup she’d made the day before to heat on the stove. When Walter came back to the kitchen, he placed a few calls to his hospital to arrange for my father to have a physical examination in the morning. He wanted an orthopedic surgeon, a friend of his, to take a look at me and at Frances as well. Just to be on the safe side.

“You’re not leaving tomorrow,” he announced to me gruffly. “We’ll have to call the airline.” He accepted the glass of wine Frances had poured for him.

“Poor Walter,” said Frances, sitting down with him, wisps of reddish hair curling around her face. “What a lot of trouble we’ve been.”

“To trouble.” Walter raised his glass, though he didn’t look at me.

They sat together at the kitchen table and drank while I sat and watched them. Walter put his hand on Frances’s shoulder as he got up to retrieve a second bottle of wine from the basement. She smiled up at him, a slow contrite smile, then reached out to pull his empty chair closer to hers. With his rescue of her from Hartford, their gravitational system had been restored. Frances relied on Walter, he needed her to rely on him. Elementary.

Frances stood up again to check to see if the soup was hot, saying that Walter must be starving. She found a loaf of French bread in the pantry and a wedge of Parmesan in the refrigerator. In a few minutes she had made a salad of spinach leaves, walnuts, and sliced apple. The warm salty fragrance of turkey soup lit the air
and I realized how hungry I was. Frances grated cheese to sprinkle on split quarters of the bread, which she placed on a cookie sheet to slide under the broiler to toast. Hardy, nourishing fare, the perfect supper after a long day. It was wonderful to watch Frances concoct something good and meaningful out of almost nothing. She had a real talent for such things.