Page 18 of Paper Ghosts

Wills was now staring into the foyer in a daze. Her tears made Jack blurry. It was almost as if there were two of him—one lying, one standing and looking back at her. Maybe this was just a bad dream. Maybe she would wake and find that he wasn’t really gone.

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” she said to Jack.

“In the morning,” Gram said gently. “I will tell you.”

PART TWOFast Forward

CHAPTER EIGHT

Present Day

Willamena was already in the foyer, staring at the door, when the doorbell rang.

She didn’t move.

“You’re a remarkable woman, Wills, but even you can’t open a door without turning the knob first,” she heard Jack say from behind her.

“I don’t know if I can do this.”

“Of course you can.”

She nervously flapped away some imaginary wrinkles on her skirt, then she smoothed her bob-length blond hair behind her ears. She took a deep breath to compose herself. Then she finally opened the door to a man and a little girl on her doorstep.

“Hello, Mother,” he said.

One Month Earlier

The arguments, late at night after five-year-old Bailey was in bed, were always the same. They started and ended with her mother’s resentful question to her father, Why can’t you love me the way I love you? But there was something different about tonight as her mother woke her quietly from sleep, wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, and shuffled her outside. The blanket trailed behind Bailey in a satisfying way, like the train of a gown. It was like when Bailey would play her favorite made-up game, Wedding Bride, alone in her room.

“Where are we going?” Bailey asked as her mother slid open the side door to the gray minivan, revealing that the back was full of suitcases. The air felt shivery and exciting.

“Who knows?” her mother answered, her eyes rimmed with pink and her nose stuffy. She buckled Bailey in, then got behind the wheel and pulled out of the driveway into their cul-de-sac.

Later, Bailey was told her mother had mistaken the interstate off-ramp for an on-ramp and had driven onto I-40 the wrong way. There was little traffic at that time of night, so she hadn’t realized her mistake until a bank of headlights from a cluster of oncoming cars disoriented her. The impact had caused the minivan to roll several times across the interstate, breaking windows and littering a long line of luggage in its wake. It had taken a few confusing moments for the people in the other cars to assess their own injuries and get out, to finally rush over to the minivan. By that time, Bailey was sitting by the interstate with her blanket still over her shoulders, unharmed. The only thing she remembered clearly was her mother leading her away from the minivan, then sitting with her until the people approached. Bailey told the same story to the bystanders, the EMTs, the police, her father.

It was, of course, impossible. Her mother had died on impact.

The one thing Bailey was sure of was the one thing everyone said couldn’t be true. So she tucked it away, stuffed it into the closet where we store all impossible things. By the time she and her father moved into the Wester House in Hen Town weeks later, she had already accepted that while some things were real and some things were not, she wasn’t the best judge of the difference.

Which meant the unusual occurrences within the house were perfectly in keeping with what she knew of the world.

Bailey used to have cul-de-sac playmates who would visit their grandparents on summer vacation, and when they returned they would tell stories of being allowed to watch daytime TV and eat candy, of money stuffed into their pockets for no reason at all. This was a source of considerable envy to Bailey, because she didn’t have grandparents. Her entire family, as far as she knew, consisted only of her father and mother. They were both too much and not enough, and she often felt trapped between her mother’s loud resentments and her father’s quiet self-loathing.

But all along, there had been a grandmother.

Everyone who came around after the funeral with food and sympathy—neighbors, coworkers, friends—understood her father’s decision to move back home, even validated it. He needed support, they would say. He needed family.

But there was one man who came around, always at night when Bailey was supposed to be asleep, whom her dad never let in. He whispered through a crack in the door and Bailey remembered this man once saying, “You don’t have to do this. You hate it there. You always hated it there.”

Her dad said, “This isn’t about me, Ash. This is for Bailey.”

The man replied sadly, “Your wife punished you for being you. Now you’re doing the same thing to yourself.”

“Next stop, Hen Town!” Her dad sounded like an exhausted train conductor when he buckled Bailey into the back seat of his SUV.

“If I have a grandmother, why did she never come see me?” Bailey asked, just one of dozens of questions she’d asked over the past few weeks.

“I told her when you were born,” he answered patiently. “She sent flowers. She said it was best if she didn’t meet you.”