Nothing but Ghosts Read Free

or moonlight? “Mom?” I say, as if she can hear me. “Mom, you there? Anywhere?”

Chapter Four
    T he next day the finch is at it again, earlier this time, even louder. I prop myself up on both elbows and shake the bangs out of my face. The thing is bright as a canary with a hooded face, a lovely little devil, as my mother would have said. “You win,” I tell it, but now it’s hammering again, stopping only to cock its head before it revs back up. My room is a minty green except the window wall, which my mother painted white when I was born, and the windows are the old-fashioned kind withreal, splintered-up mullions. Attacking one single, specific pane, the finch goes at it. Always the same pane, always the same exact spot, as if it is on its own excavation.
    Beyond the finch is the top of the old maple tree. Beyond the tree is the sky and the sun. It’s still the cranberry-ginger part of dawn. Not even Dad’s coffee is on. What if the glass breaks and the bird flies in? What if the whole upstairs shatters and crumbles? I imagine the finch making a nest inside my lamp shade—dropping its feathers into my shoes, over my bedspread, over my pillow, over me. I imagine everything giving way to the finch. Suddenly I’m thinking about Miss Martine, who makes her desires known through good Old Olson. “Miss Martine has requested a lavender border,” he’ll report. “Miss Martine wants the narcissi deadheaded.” “Miss Martine wants the black-eyed Susans thinned and a branch of Korean dogwood for the centerpiece of her table.”
    Once I looked her up in the local public library.She was as stunning as Ida sometimes says—the only-child heiress on every bachelor’s arm who never did get married. She was born April 8, 1938, which makes her sixty-nine years old, and it has been fifty-three years since she’s last been seen in town, last thrown a party on her lawn, or been seen with any guy—rich or old or ugly. She’s had her own kind of vanishing, and when I ask Ida why, or even Reny, they say the story goes that she stopped her socializing after a whopper of a storm blew straight through town. “Storm like a bowling ball,” Reny says. “Tore the roof off a bunch of houses. Set a barn on fire. Ripped a train right off its tracks. Things died. People got frightened. That’s what they say anyway, because I wasn’t here; I was miles from here, doing my growing in the Blue Hills.” Old Olson has known Miss Martine all his adult life. That is why, the rumor goes, he is trusted with her wishes.
    Dad is up now; I can hear the coffee huffing. I tell the finch to go and knock itself out. I grab my stuff andgo down the hall to the shower, past the door that my father keeps shut. My mother’s things are in there—her clothes, her jewelry, her boxes of shoes, her collection of tinted glass bottles. She had lined up the bottles on every inch of windowsill, so that the room would never repeat itself—would be the color of whatever bottles the sun struck, whatever ways the reflections mixed on the walls and on the ceiling. “It’s like being inside a giant kaleidoscope,” she said. And the thought of that made her happy.
    In the end, after the doctors said that there was nothing they could do, after my father had begged for a better answer, after I hated every living thing for living past my mother, the kaleidoscope was all my mother did—she watched the room change as the sun moved toward and then beyond her. There’d be spots of lilac and tangerine and moss green on the ceiling up above. There’d be shades of ruby in the creases of her pillow.
    “You’re so beautiful, Claire,” my dad would tell her. But mostly he would sit there, saying nothing. The chair where he sat is still there, empty. The colors collide, but no one’s watching.

Chapter Five
    T he dust has settled, but now there are bugs—a little blue-black cloud of them that, no matter what, won’t swat away. I’ve tried my hand, I’ve tried my