Dismantled (6 page)

W
HAT IS A GHOST
? Danner says it’s not always the way people think. A ghost doesn’t have to be someone dead, rattling chains, stuck between two worlds. A ghost is a spirit and everyone has a spirit, living or dead. Animals, plants, people.

They’re bumping along in Emma’s dad’s Blazer. Her dad is always saying this stretch of road is the worst and wondering where the hell his tax dollars go.

“Potholes the size of Rhode Island,” he says.

He’s watching Emma in the rearview mirror, his eyes all worried and strange, which is the way he looked at her each time she coughed when she had pneumonia last year.

“Imagine,” Danner tells Emma, as she sits beside her on the crumb-covered, juice-stained backseat, “that the world is like those layers of clear pages in encyclopedias and biology books: put them all together, and you get a whole image, like a frog or a person. But making that up is layer after layer: sheets with heart and lungs, the nerves, the muscles, the skeleton, the skin. This is what the world is like. Do you understand?”

“No,” Emma admits. She doesn’t get it at all. If Mel were here, Mel might get it.

Danner looks out the window at the world going by: a barn with a broken back; a woman watering the pansies around her mailbox; the Heigh-Ho Cabins, which promise satellite TV and have a glowing red
VACANCY
sign. Danner’s wearing an old faded green college sweatshirt of Emma’s dad’s.
SEXTON
, it says, in big white letters.

Emma’s never been to Sexton College, even though it’s less than an hour away from their house. She knows it’s where her parents met. Where they studied art
A Long Time Ago.
Sometimes, Emma says, “I’m going to go to Sexton when I grow up,” and her parents talk in their irritated-but-trying-to-sound-calm voices, and tell her there are plenty of schools out there and we’ll just have to wait and see, and besides, Sexton might not even be around by then.

Emma’s dad turns down the radio, which is fine by Emma. She doesn’t get baseball at all. B-O-R-I-N-G. Emma shifts in her seat, puts her hand on the worn green sleeve of Danner’s shirt and asks the question again.

“How did you die?”

Danner turns back toward her, shakes her head. “Who says I did die? Who says I’m not some future version of you, or the daughter you’ll have one day, peeking in from the transparency all the way on the bottom?”

“You’re not me,” Emma says. Her head is starting to hurt. She wishes they’d hurry up and get home.

“Your parents think so. They think you invented me,” Danner tells her.

Is it Emma’s imagination, or has Danner’s face changed a little now? She looks a lot more like Emma. A grownup-girl version of Emma wearing a Sexton College sweatshirt. Emma closes her eyes tight. She doesn’t like it when Danner plays these games.

“But I didn’t.”

“Are you sure?” Danner asks.

“Yes,” Emma answers. “You’re real.” To prove her point she reaches out and touches the sleeve of the sweatshirt again.

“So you can’t invent something real, imagine it to life?” Danner pinches the thin skin on the top of Emma’s hand.

“Ow!” Emma cries, pulling her hand away. “Whose side are you on anyway?” Emma asks, annoyed.

Danner laughs. It’s that quiet, cat-sneeze-sounding laugh.

“Yours,” she says, smiling a sly smile. Her face is her own again. “I’m always on yours.”

T
ESS HAS WORKED LATE
into the night to finish the grotto. Coleman lanterns hiss around her. Her fingers have holes burned in them from the cement. At some point or other she always takes off the thick, clumsy rubber gloves, needing to feel the sculpture take shape against her skin, forgetting, in the moment, the acid-burn pain that contact will bring.

The grotto is the latest addition to her ferrocement sculpture garden.
The Island of Doctor Moreau
is Henry’s name for it—he jokes, but the truth is, great artwork or not, she knows he finds the whole thing unsettling.

Emma, on the other hand, has always loved the garden. She’s spent hours, whole summer days, playing out here, imagining it to be its own country, a land she’s named Freesia. She even made up a little song, a sort of national anthem:

Everyone’s free in Freesia

The lions, the dodos and me

We wear what we like, we go swimming at night

Everyone’s free in Freesia!

The garden began, eight years ago, with the sculpture of Henry and Tess themselves, stuck in the middle of a long-abandoned, overgrown flower garden just between the house and Tess’s painting studio. She created a form with rebar and chicken wire, then covered it with layers of carefully sculpted cement.

Tess named that first piece
The Wedding Dance.
It’s a life-size sculpture of the two of them dancing, his arm around her waist, her right hand clasped tightly in his left. From the waist down, they have the bodies of lions, tufted tails held gracefully. Their human faces seem frightened, a little horrified even, like they’ve just glanced down for this first time and discovered what’s happened to them. They understand there’s no going back. They’re stuck this way forever.

“Why lions?” Henry asked. “Lions are supposed to represent strength, right? Power? So why do we look so scared?”

“Lions are killers, Henry.”

His face went pale. He never asked about the sculpture again.

After
The Wedding Dance
came the dodos, a parade of them, each wearing a sign around its neck telling its name. There’s Faith, Hope, and Charity. Honor, Wisdom, and Obedience. Flightless birds, all long extinct. Some people don’t get the joke. Others, like Henry, call it too obvious, but Tess finds it amusing, which is good enough for her.

The next project was a cement-and-stone goldfish pond with a fountain in the center in the form of a spitting frog.

Met-a-morph-o-sis, babycakes.

Along the east and west side of the small pond, Tess built curved benches shaped like a mermaid and merman, the concrete rough and inlaid with stones and shells. Landlocked, they eye each other across the water with serious faces, cross eyebrows, as goldfish jump and the frog spits on and on.

Beyond the pond, a pair of five-foot-tall owls loom, facing each other in menacing poses: wings open, claws reaching as if a fight is about to begin.
Who?
they seem to ask out loud, the unanswered existential question that feathers will be torn over, beaks broken.
Who? Who? Who?

Here and there, a scattering of flowers Henry’s mother planted years ago: foxglove, bee balm, jack-in-the-pulpit squatting in the shade of the owls, clematis clambering across the merman bench. Tess has been thinning, moving, nursing the garden to life. She brings home new perennials from the farmers’ market, planting them here and there; she has no plan.

Then, last week, at the north edge of the garden, which is bordered by trees leading into the woods, Tess dug up a patch of hostas and started the grotto. She constructed an arch made from stone and cement, embedded with a mosaic of broken glass, beer bottle caps, and assorted things from the junk drawer: springs, dials, washers, cog wheels from an old bicycle—a tribute to the broken and neglected, to things taken apart and never reassembled. And now, in the center of the grotto, in the niche, behind the row of votives in glass jars, sits a photo of Suz encased in a clear plastic box, protected from the elements. Our Lady of Compassionate Dismantling.

The picture was taken just weeks before she died. Suz sits on a chair outside the barn, whittling a piece of wood that would become part of an antler. Henry had caught her by surprise with his camera. In the picture, Suz is looking up, startled almost, raggedy blond hair falling into her eyes, which are amber flecked with gold. Her face is a question mark, a
who goes there
?

It is Tess’s favorite picture of Suz because the camera captured this sense of vulnerability. Of being both startled and startling. It is the one thing Tess saved from that summer.

Tess has been in a frenzy to get the grotto done—spending every free moment on it for a week now, mixing cement by flashlight in the dented wheelbarrow. Soaking her aching wrists in a mixing bowl full of ice water before bed so she won’t be too sore to work out with the heavy bag in the morning.

“What’s the hurry?” Henry has asked, but how can she explain the fierce necessity she feels? The burning need to work faster, to have it done. And today, now that she’s heard about Spencer’s death, the postcard he was found with, she’s more driven than ever.

Tess does not believe in signs. Or curses. Above all, she does not believe in ghosts.

But she has no explanation for the vermilion-paint incident that precipitated the building of the grotto.

Last Tuesday, Tess had been in her studio, a small barn that sits at the eastern edge of the sculpture garden, between it and the house. Behind the barn lay the quarter mile or so of thick woods that act as a barrier between their yard and the road. Tess had been working on a painting (one she doubts she’ll ever finish now) of a bunch of sweet peas in a rusted watering can. She was squeezing a dab of vermilion paint from the nearly new tube to the piece of thick glass she uses as a palette when she had the now familiar sensation of being watched. But it was stronger this time, and soon accompanied by a noise. A crashing in the bushes outside.

Tess dropped the tube of paint and hurried outside to investigate. She jogged a ways into the woods in the direction she’d thought the sound had come from.

“Hello?” she yelled. There was definitely someone out there, running through the woods.

“This is posted land!” she called out. “We prosecute trespassers!”

She continued zigzagging through the trees, unable to hear any footsteps but her own.

“I own a gun!” she threatened, though the only weapon in the house was Emma’s water pistol.

She stopped every few steps, held her breath, listened. She heard a car going by on the road. A hermit thrush. Her own heartbeat in her ears, loud as club music, a rhythmic throbbing she felt from her hair to her toenails, but nothing she would dance to. It was dusk. The shadows played tricks in the woods. She returned to the studio unnerved, and went back to her painting.

Only she couldn’t.

The tube of paint she’d been using, Winsor & Newton vermilion hue, was missing. When she’d heard the noise in the woods, she’d dropped the tube onto the top of the little rolling cart she stored her paints in. She’d left it right next to the thick glass palette.

Now, impossibly, it was gone. She pushed the cart away, got down on her hands and knees, searching the floor, but it wasn’t there.

All that afternoon and evening she told herself she must have had it in her hand when she ran into the woods, must have lost it there without somehow realizing. She even went back, trying to retrace her steps, searching the forest floor, but there was no tube of paint.

The next day, she returned to her studio after lunch to find the tube of vermilion paint set next to her easel, crumpled and almost empty.

“What the fuck?” she mumbled, reaching for the paint, her hand trembling a little.

Emma was outside, playing in the garden. Tess could hear her talking to someone—Danner? the cement owls?—and saying, “Ready the army! Freesia’s been invaded!”

So it had. Tess resisted the urge to open the door to her studio, scream for her daughter to come quickly, run inside, where it was safe.

But clearly the studio was not safe. Maybe there was nowhere to hide from whoever, whatever, was stalking them.

“It’s your imagination,” Tess tried to tell herself. Paranoia, the destroyer.

But what about the paint, Tess?

It was then, at that moment, as Tess held the nearly spent tube of vermilion hue in her hand while her daughter fought imagined enemies with a stick sword outside, the idea of the grotto came to her, a vision of perfect clarity, a solution.

And she thought…what? That maybe the feeling of being watched might go away? That no other tricks might be played on her—no noises in the woods, no missing tubes of paint? That by this one simple act, she could protect her daughter?

If she named the ghost, built an altar for her, faced her in this way that bordered on worship, then, maybe then, she’d be left alone?

It was crazy. Superstitious. Maybe even a little dangerous. Hadn’t they promised to never again speak of Suz or that summer? Made a pact that their very lives depended on them keeping? And yet here she was now, a week later, placing a photo of Suz front and center in the niche of the altar. Flaunting the one piece of evidence she’d kept.

How could she ever explain this to Henry? She was supposed to be the skeptical one, the levelheaded adult who always laughed at the idea of ghosts and curses and bogeymen.

“It’s just art,” she told him when he wandered over after getting back from the grocery store and let out an audible gasp at the sight of the photo of Suz. Surely, she thought, he’d remember what it was like, being guided by the muse, feeling like you had nothing much to do with it.

“The photo has to go,” he told her. “Evidence,” he said.

“It’s a snapshot, Henry. Putting up a photo doesn’t make me guilty of a damn thing but being sentimental.”

“So that’s what this is about?” Henry asked. “Being sentimental?”

Tess shook her head. “I shouldn’t have to explain my art. Not to you.”

She’d been furious. Furious with herself for not being able to explain the true reason for the grotto, furious with Henry for being such an asshole about it even though she knew he was just trying to protect her, to keep their family safe.

Ironic. That’s just what she’s trying to do too.