Spirit Lost (12 page)

They glared at each other, stalemated.

“Come back to bed,” Willy said at last, relenting. She put John’s pillow back in its place and smoothed the rumpled covers and patted his place by her side. “Please. Come back to bed. We’ll talk about it in the morning when we’re not so tired. It will be easier to deal with by daylight, I think. Come on, John.”

Reluctantly, John crawled back into bed. He turned off the light. He and Willy lay holding each other for a while, silently making up for their moment of anger. Then John turned over so they lay like spoons, but apart, and Willy ran her hand over her husband’s back. The touching relaxed them both. Their bed was warm, and it was after four in the
morning. Willy felt her eyes closing, could feel sleep rising with its seductive comfort, blanketing her consciousness. But she sensed John lying next to her, still awake.

“It’s all right,” she said finally, longing for sleep. “She has never come twice in the same night, John. She won’t come again. You can sleep.”

And at last he slept.

The next morning, they awakened to rain and wind; it was snowing on the mainland, but here the storm brought only rain. When Willy went out to get groceries, she took a drive past the Coast Guard station at Brant Point. Through the streaming rain she saw, flying high on the masts, the red triangular gale-force-wind flags—flags of warning.

Willy hurried back to her house. She wanted to sit down with John and talk for a long time about the ghost, leaving nothing out, planning some kind of defense against it, whether it was hallucination or real. The flags had made danger seem possible.

But when she entered the kitchen, she found Kirk Beauregard there, talking to John. The wind and rain had driven the workers indoors.

Kirk showed Willy and John the sketches he’d made for building bookshelves in the front room so they could turn it into a library. That was his first project, he said, which would take only about a week, and then a few days more for his men to stain the shelves. Then he went up to the attic with John to take measurements for a new pane of glass for the skylight window. John said he’d heard noises on the roof, thought it was birds or creatures trapped there, had been hitting at the ceiling with a broomstick, and had accidentally broken the skylight.

The carpenter didn’t seem surprised, disbelieving, or even particularly interested. He recommended using Plexiglas to replace the glass and went off to Marine Lumber to get it. The electrician showed up, such a large, lumbering man that it was hard to believe he could handle delicate wires, and began to run another line of electricity up to the attic so that John could have more power there. So men came in and out of the house all day, and there was no time when Willy and John could talk at length alone.

They did speak about the ghost, in a cautious, joking sort of way, with Kirk when he sat down with them in the late morning for a cup of coffee.

“You know,” John said, smiling, “my wife and I are beginning to think we’ve got a ghost in the house.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Kirk said. “A lot of these old Nantucket houses have ghosts.” He proceeded to tell them tales of footsteps, rustlings, sighings, lifted latches, of workers who got spooked and wouldn’t work in certain houses.

“But have
you
ever seen one of the ghosts?” John asked, intent now. “Ever spoken to one of them? Or known anyone who has?”

Kirk Beauregard grinned at John. “No, I can’t say I have,” he replied, letting John know with his smile that he might enjoy a good story, but he didn’t take any of it seriously.

That night was a good television night, and Willy and John ate their lasagna and salads and fruit in the living room, watching the news and an HBO movie. They had spent the day dealing with the myriad decisions about the house, and by bedtime they were too tired to start up any serious discussion about the ghost.

As they went upstairs to bed, though, John said, “Willy, I think I’ll sleep in the guest room tonight. Maybe—maybe she won’t bother me there.”

And Willy was so glad to hear that the ghost was a bother to him—that in spite of the fact that she was beautiful and had kissed him, John wasn’t eager to see her—that she turned on the stairs and with a big rush of love put her arms on John’s shoulders.

“Oh, no, please,” she said. “There are twin beds in the guest room. I couldn’t lie next to you. And I don’t want you so far away from me, in another room. I don’t sleep well when we’re not together—and you don’t, either. Look, let’s trade sides of the bed. You sleep on my side, I’ll sleep on yours. Then maybe, if the ghost comes, I’ll see her. Maybe we’ll trick her.”

John smiled up at his wife; standing on the stairs as they were, she rose slightly above him, and he buried his head against her breasts, nuzzling into her. Just so easily, so quickly, the distance, the formality that had been between them all day, vanished.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s do that.”

Lying in bed in their switched places, waiting for sleep and what the night might bring, they both felt uneasy and restless. So they curled toward each other and lay talking for a long time.

They told bedtime stories. Willy told John about the family reunion she had gone to long ago when she had members of her family still alive. There had been a lot of them,
mostly very old people, and she had been the only child. Because the house where they converged didn’t have enough bedrooms for everyone, she had been forced to sleep with her father’s great-aunt. At the time, Willy was seven; the great-aunt was a formidable ninety-one but she had a huge eiderdown bed and said she’d love to have Willy with her for the night. It was scary enough sleeping in a strange room in a large, dark, shadowy old house, even worse sleeping in the vast feather bed that seemed to pull Willy down in a smothering embrace next to a woman so old and wrinkled and skeletal. Once settled in bed, the great-aunt immediately fell asleep, her breath regular and as rasping as a saw. Willy was afraid the old crone would die right next to her, and so she lay awake all night, terrified, listening to the loud ticking of the walnut clock on the bedroom mantel, and to the wheezing, snorting, gargling, rasping sounds the old woman made in her sleep.

John told Willy about the night he had camped out with his scout troop the year he was eleven. Each tent held two people; the scoutmaster made them draw tentmate names out of a hat. John had drawn Martin Sylvester, a boy all the other boys suspected of being a fairy. Resigned, John had unrolled his sleeping bag as close to the side of the tent as he could get and had faked sleep immediately so he wouldn’t have to get involved in even a private conversation with the weirdo. It had been awful lying there on the hard ground, hearing the stifled giggles and whispers of his friends in the tents all around him. But at last he had fallen asleep, only to awaken at some point in the night to feel something pressing against his thigh. The awful Martin, he thought, and had moved away, inching even closer to his side of the tent. The pressing continued, a live, warm nudging; John, enraged and ever prepared, grabbed the Boy Scout flashlight that he had placed near his head and in one wild movement turned over, flashed on the light, and yelled, “Goddammit, Martin, leave me alone!” And had seen a long black snake that had come in to shelter against him from the cold go slithering peacefully out of the tent, back into the night. He had been razzed about that for months.

Willy and John snuggled close, talking and laughing, and the night darkened around them, friendly and normal, just another night. At last they turned over, facing away from each other, and fell asleep, hips touching; it was comforting, falling asleep this way.

In the middle of the night Willy’s dreams became confused, and she dreamed at first that she was a doll, a baby, being fussed over and undressed.

She came awake at once when John thrust his penis inside her, hurting her. She
had been sound asleep; she was not ready for him.

“John,” she said, “hey.”

She tried to push him away, to slow him down, for he was pounding against her. He had pushed her flannel nightgown up around her arms and somehow gotten her underpants off; she could feel them hanging around one ankle.

“John,” she said again. This is like being raped, she thought, for he was smashing his mouth against hers, holding her arms down with his hands, and thrusting into her heavily, as if he were battering his way into a room.

“Goddammit, John, stop it!” Willy cried at last, and tried to shove him away, but he came then and fell against her in a heap.

Willy lay with her head turned away from her husband, gasping for breath. She felt him subsiding against her. Then he rolled off of her onto his back, groaning.

“What on earth was that all about?” Willy asked.

“What do you mean?” John asked.

“I mean what you just did!” Willy said angrily. “That wasn’t very nice, John. You’ve never done anything like it before.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have started it if you didn’t want it,” John said.

“What? What do you mean I shouldn’t have started it? What are you talking about?” Willy raised up on one elbow to look at him.

“Christ, Willy, I’m talking about the way you were touching me,” John said. “You’ve never done that before, either. You woke me from a deep sleep. Not that I didn’t enjoy it,” he added in a smug tone, reaching out to put his hand on Willy’s hip.

“John,” Willy said, pulling away from his hand. “I didn’t touch you. I was asleep, and suddenly you were on top of me. Couldn’t you tell I wasn’t ready for you? Couldn’t you tell I was asleep?”

John took his hand away. Willy could feel how quiet he had gotten.

“Now, Willy,” he said at last, determined, raising up on his elbow to face Willy in the dark, “I felt you. I felt you wake me up. You were touching me. Kissing me … 
fondling
me. God, don’t you think I know what I felt? It wasn’t any dream, I can tell you for sure. I wouldn’t have pounced on you if you hadn’t been arousing me like that.”

Willy stared at her husband. “John,” she said carefully, “believe me. I promise you. I swear to you. I was not touching you. Not kissing you. I was sleeping. I was sound asleep.”

They stared at each other.

“Shit,” John said under his breath, and punched his pillow. He turned over, facing away from Willy, and lay staring into the dark.

Willy lay flat on her back, rigid, also staring, wide-eyed, at the darkened room.

They did not speak. They lay together, side by side, afraid to speak, afraid to take their thoughts to the logical, and unbelievable, conclusion.

Willy began to cry. She was very quiet about it, stifling her sobs, letting the tears roll down her face onto the pillow, into her hair. John could feel her crying. Finally, he turned over and put his arm around her.

“It must have been a dream, Willy,” he said. “One of those supervivid dreams.”

They needed the lie to make them feel safe.

Chapter Five

“The mind is a strange thing,” George Glidden said. “I’ve seen patients who swore they had lunch with Jesus Christ.”

John twisted uncomfortably in his chair and took another large swallow of white wine. He didn’t care much for white wine, but he wanted the dulling effect of the alcohol. Willy looked across the table at him, steadily, trying to send him waves of sympathy.

They were at the Hunters’ apartment in Boston, where Willy had insisted they spend Christmas, because after the night John had awakened her so violently, she was determined that they get away for a while, take a break from the house.

The ghost, fortunately, had not followed them, and for the past three nights they had slept peacefully all through the night in the Hunters’ guest bedroom.

Willy did not think they had been mistaken in confiding their problem to Mark and Anne. The mistake had been in letting Mark bring it up now, at their dinner party. It was a small party, just the six of them: the Hunters, the Constables, and George and Diana Glidden. Diana was all right, wonderful, really, pleasant and smart. And George was smart, too, but a terrible know-it-all. Mark probably had had only the best intentions in bringing the ghost business up with George, who was, after all, a very successful psychiatrist. But George wasn’t going to let the subject drop. He never did when he could get his hands on any topic that he knew more about than most people. He loved the sound of his voice. He loved appearing to be wise. But if he really had been wise, he would have realized from John’s expression that he should shut up.

“Now this ghost business,” George went on, “is definitely in your mind. Absolutely. I mean, we’re all intelligent people here, let’s just agree from the start that we’re going to look at it from an enlightened point of view. This is not the Middle Ages. We know now the sort of games the mind can play. We know why the mind plays them. Anxiety, stress, self-defense against knowledge too difficult to bear.… However, in
your
case, John, I’d say the cause is different, and really much more interesting. Fascinating, really.”

What could they all do then but look toward George with bated breath so he could give them the answer? And perhaps, Willy thought hopefully, perhaps he really does
have the answer.