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When morning rolled around, he woke up and gently slid out from under the covers.
Sleepily, this routine now five years old, he gathered the edges of the top white sheet and went to the bathroom. There, he shook the cornmeal that had fallen on him during the night into the bathtub. He ran water and watched it wash down the drain.
He turned and looked at himself in the beveled mirror over the bathroom sink. His hair and beard no longer looked red. Finely dusted in cornmeal, he looked like a very old version of himself.
He sighed and turned on the faucet at the sink.
GHOST STORY
Camille
Sometimes it feels like I’m almost gone. Weightless. Floating. It reminds me of the first time my brother John took me to Wildman Beach. It was an hour’s walk, and he didn’t want his little sister tagging along and slowing him down. All my young life I could smell the ocean from our house, which was smack-dab in the center of the island, tempting me like hot pie in an oven. That, combined with the allure of doing something up until then only John had been allowed to do, made me full of brattiness. When I pouted, watching John set out on dark summer mornings, my mama used to say, “Use your imagination and you can be there any time you want.” But I didn’t want to imagine it. I wanted the real thing. Turns out, the real thing almost killed me. Mama finally made John take me when I was eight years old. John knew I couldn’t swim, but he still dragged me into the water that first time, saying the only way to learn was to go out as far as possible and make my own way back.If you really want to come back,he said,you’ll fight it.
I nearly drowned. John pulled me out and I had no breath andeveryone thought I was dead. But Ididwant to come back—to my old dog Goodnuff, to my beat-up baby doll Mosey, and to my mama and her corn bread, which was waiting on the kitchen table, just dry enough to crumble into a glass of milk. I was a fat baby, so that feeling of weightlessness when I almost died was scary. I was used to weight keeping me grounded, every step a comforting reverberation of the earth coming through my bare feet.
I don’t mind this weightlessness so much now, not like I did then. I’m just waiting to finally be let go. In a way, it’s nice to be remembered, nice that someone in the world still needs me, still needs at least the memory of who I was. That’s what keeps me here.
My Macbaby keeps me here.
He was the biggest surprise of my life. Because I never set out to keep any children until he showed up on my doorstep. I never had any of my own and I was okay with that. I had lots of brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews, so I’d seen too many births and I’d seen too much baby poop. When I grew up, all I wanted was to leave that behind. I liked children okay. They could be cute and funny as all get-out. But I didn’t like how they took so much of you. I knew women who had too many mouths to feed because they couldn’t keep their husbands off of them. And I knew childless women who faded away to nothing because they thought they were only worth something if they had a baby. And all these women, they had pieces of them missing. They’d be walking down the road and I could actually see holes in them where the sun shone through. I never knew why they seemed so normal, so happy to have all those holes, until Macbaby.
He found my body after I died, and I wish to God I could have changed that.
I never wanted to put that burden on him.
I’d been cooking corn bread in my kitchen when I just slipped away.As easy as can be. I was ready this time. Macbaby would come to check on me every few days after he moved out. He would take me to the grocery store and all my doctors’ appointments. That day he came in with all the fixings for a millionaire pie I told him I wanted to make for our Sunday dessert. He found me on the floor, covered in cornmeal like snow. I was gone, or so I thought, until I heard him cry, cry like I never heard him cry before, and that brought me right back to him, where I’ve been ever since.
One day he’ll be ready to let me go. Until then, I’m here, weightless but not unhappy, waiting to be released like a wish or a balloon, floating up to that place where hope goes.
That’s the difference between me and that Lizbeth. She doesn’t have the right holes.
She’s avoiding me and the other ghost here, even though I know she recognizes me from when she was a little girl here on the island.
She needs help understanding the right reasons to stay.
And the right reasons to go.
Chapter Seven
Frasier was sitting in his office staring at the still-unopened brown envelope on the desk in front of him, where it had been all day yesterday, when there was a knock at his door.
“It happened again!” Zoey said, and for a moment Frasier saw her mother very clearly. He’d known Paloma, of course, those few short years she’d lived at the Dellawisp. He remembered her volatility, the way she would fling her arms around when she was riled, and the incessant fights she and Alrick Hennessey, the man who would eventually father Zoey, would have here. Alrick had bought the condo for Paloma and set her up here away from prying Charleston eyes when Paloma was younger than Zoey was now. Paloma had known more than a teenager should have known about what it took to survive. She’d been charming and calculating. She’d had to be. She was alone in a foreign country with only the ghost of her dead brother for company. Zoey didn’t seem to have any of her passion or survival instincts, and given that she’d grown up under the thumb of Alrick Hennessey, he hardly wondered why. But witnessing herfrustration right now, he considered that he might have underestimated her.
Without another word, Zoey turned and walked away. He was in need of a distraction from the brown envelope, so he went with her.
She reached Lizbeth’s patio and waited for him. “Look, it’s unlocked again,” she said, indicating the door that was open a sliver. “I know I locked it when I was through yesterday. I swear. This makes the third day it’s happened. Why is someone sneaking around here? What does it mean?”
He pushed the door with his finger and it swept open easily. He jiggled the doorknob, then bent to examine the handle. Aside from some obvious scratches that could have been there forever, it seemed fine. He looked into the condo. The stone floor was slowly widening in an arc from the boxes that had already been removed, and it brightened the place like dawn breaking. Little bits of Lizbeth were slowly leaving. He didn’t understand why that made him sad. He hated this clutter. He was glad to see it go. “Has anything been disturbed?”
“The boxes I was working on yesterday haven’t been moved. But as for the rest of them, I wouldn’t be able to tell. I’m not going into the back until I’ve cleaned out the front, in case of an avalanche.”
“Did you see someone with a flashlight again last night?”
“Well, no.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “But I was tired and went to bed earlier than usual, just after Mac got home.”
“Then I think the logical explanation is that there’s something wrong with the handle itself. I’ll replace it soon. Carry on. You’re doing a great job.”
She looked slightly mollified as she picked up a cardboard milk box that was sitting just inside the doors and held it out to him. “While you’re here, could you tell me what I should do with this?”
