Hosts and ghosts are inextricable. The linguistic root ghos-ti is Proto-Indo-European—present in languages across Europe and Western Asia: in Spanish and in Hindi, in Bengali and in Russian, in Marathi and in Portuguese. In English it contributes to hospital, guest, and hotel. It is also found in hostile. In hostage. Words rooted in ghos-ti reference the reciprocal obligations of ancient hospitality. Off you would go to sail the sea, and when your ship sprung a leak, you could stop by and your host would say something like “Oh yes, I knew your father,” and invite you in or else be cursed for generations for denying you. I didn’t want to be cursed for generations. I didn’t want Clara to be cursed. So after asking Michael nicely to get going, I decided the next best thing to do was make my offerings meager, get her to move on to her next host of her own accord. Michael liked beautiful things, so I tried to make us ugly. Michael liked intrinsic mystery, so I tried to make our lives obvious and plain.
“Where did Madame X go?” Ben asked of the framed Sargent print that had hung by the bed.
“I’m redecorating,” I said. Ben nodded. He didn’t care what we put on the walls. The truth was that it smelled of too much luxury, too much sex, too much temptation for Michael. Not that she cared, not that any of it mattered. When Ben left the house for groceries, she snuck into the closet to retrieve Madame and broke its glass in a series of quick cracks that spread like the aftershocks of an orgasm. She was telling me she knew what I was doing, that she wouldn’t be fooled into submission.
The next morning, we woke up to find volume 1 of my Oxford English Dictionary shredded, its vellum-thin pages ripped deliberately from their binding, bunched up and strewn.
“Solly must be acting out,” said Ben. “I don’t know how she got it down.”
I nodded, though of course it was Michael. She was trying to hurt me; she was saying that she knew what I loved and could destroy it. She would go through my beloved objects one by one, the commodities that made up my economy of selfhood slowly ravaged. The dictionary first, because it housed the names, and thus breathed life into the physical objects. A word, broken down into its component parts, was the most powerful magic I had. Michael was a poet. Michael understood. It wasn’t garlic, not holy water, but language that would drive Michael out, and we both knew it. Margaret knew, too.
Margaret’s poetry was good, which was why she’d lasted. Michael’s lacked the lyricism, the urgency, the ineffable spark of longevity. “What will survive of us is love,” said the poet Philip Larkin. A pleasant thought, but truly what survives is art—Larkin’s Arundel tomb is a statue, a statue is a thing made out of marble and feelings. A painting, oil and feelings; a poem, words and feelings. I’d never been called to make my own art—though of course I wanted to survive—because although I had all the physical materials, I didn’t have the right feelings. This was why I struggled to write down my dissertation, though the ideas were all there. Did that make sense? It seemed to make sense, and it seemed to make me an ideal vessel for the next generation: I could give Clara the tools and the parts, and when she was old enough, she’d imbue them with the feelings.
I had the parts.
Michael had the feelings.
Here she was.
This all made an illogical sense to me, but of course I couldn’t share it with anyone. Annie was mad, and she’d issued her ultimatum. Ben just thought I was renesting. Kelsey was seventeen. My mother was difficult. I really didn’t have any friends.
IF ONLY MARGARET would come back and help me. Every time I went upstairs the door was locked.
ABOUT A YEAR ago, I’d stepped on a tiny shard of broken glass and couldn’t pick it out. My skin callused over until it disappeared inside me, and all that remained was a twinge of memory of the pain. Sometimes I thought it had moved through my blood, hardening me. Sometimes I thought Clara was born of the shard of glass meeting an egg, and this explained her transparency, and also her bite. This explained why we were special, why Michael wanted us.
WHILE I NURSED Clara, I thought about what I was going to tell Ben, now that Annie had drawn her line, since it seemed likely Michael wouldn’t make things easy and just leave us. I could say that I had postpartum depression, which was probably true. Perhaps that would be enough to placate Annie. Better to say that I had had postpartum depression, but I hadn’t wanted to worry him and now I was through it. At Clara’s checkups I filled out questionnaires about how I was doing: had I blamed myself unnecessarily, been anxious or worried, had I looked forward with enjoyment? Did I have trouble sleeping? Yes, I did, because I was still nursing every four to six hours. Did I feel like things were “getting on top of me”? Yes, an eight-pound baby. It was ludicrously easy to know the right answers, the answers that would have the pediatric nurse nodding and smiling and praising me.
I could admit that I’d lied on the questionnaires. That would be good. That would be vulnerable. Was it still vulnerable if it was so calculated? “Be more vulnerable,” said Annie’s therapist, but she didn’t specify how, didn’t specify when, not even for Annie.
But maybe I needed to be less vulnerable. After all, it was the vulnerability of childbirth that had left me, and consequently Clara, open to what I could only call a poltergeist. From the German poltern, a disturbance. Geist—a ghost. Which begged the question of what ghosts there were among us that didn’t cause a disturbance—certainly not Margaret, with her construction projects and her growling dog. Did we breathe these ghosts while sleeping in the way that we supposedly ate spiders? Perhaps this was why Clara, why so many babies, fought sleep. They were close enough to the void that they knew what else was out there, and they didn’t want to swallow anything unsavory.
HERE WAS THE problem. Amended: here was part of the problem.
At six weeks old, Clara was turning into more and more of an actual person. When she opened her eyes, it truly felt like she was seeing things, processing and heading toward an understanding. When I put her in the headband from my mother, she looked like an actual baby. She could smile. She was amused by Solly’s tail flicking across the waxy floors, Ben’s scrunched monster faces, my sneezes. She could push up onto her forearms, and for a brief moment could lift up her head. After she’d eaten, her belly bulged out like an old man’s beer gut. Her hair was still downy, but lightening. She was losing her cradle cap, thanks in part to Vaseline and our meticulous combing. In short, she was becoming less of a thing that had happened to me and more of a person who was in the process of happening to herself.
This should have been excellent, as it implied we were, to a certain extent, separating. She was learning how to exist in a body, and while it would be years before we cut the metaphysical umbilical cord, she was well on her way to becoming. We could now go, with any luck, up to six hours at night without nursing. During the day she could be by herself on her mat and not need me for upwards of ten minutes at a time.
This meant I had to reevaluate myself; I could no longer avoid my daily life with the excuse of being necessary. In those ten minutes I had to clean the kitchen, or respond to my emails, or, god forbid, open up my dissertation. The anonymous message-board chorus was still prompting me to write, reminding me I had to keep writing, reminding me I’d pinned all hope of a career, of a self-sustaining life, on this project I’d largely abandoned. Reminding me that writing was most likely the solution to Michael. I didn’t appreciate the pressure. The twelve weeks I’d promised myself as maternity leave were not yet up, though the point at which they would be was inching ever closer.
Anon1324: Get back to work. Keep writing.
Anon1325: Clara’s asleep, why aren’t you writing?
It no longer bothered me that the message board knew me, knew Clara. They could have found us out so many ways: we posted photos of her to our social media accounts, Ben not bothering to make his profiles private. We’d filed her birth certificate and insurance claims and had even put ourselves on the waitlists for day cares, just in case. Of course they knew Clara. What hung me up was that they also knew Michael.
Anon1326: She wants you to write.
It wasn’t clear to me how she’d gotten to them, how she’d persuaded them, who they even were. But it was clear Michael was using the message-board app as a door I’d unintentionally left open.
One of many doors left open. Now that Clara was closer to emerging from the hazy brume of fourth trimester, she was casting off a part of her protection. She was susceptible to influence, as we all became susceptible as soon as we could use our minds to learn. She was susceptible especially because she didn’t yet have language to help anchor herself in a concrete reality. She didn’t even know what reality was.
Michael could get Clara by jingling her dangly play gym animals in a particular order, or by playing a particular song. She could turn the crank of the jack-in-the-box and surprise her. She could break the windows and leave the glass in a crystalline pentagram across the living room floor, and while this didn’t seem her style, I couldn’t know for certain that she wouldn’t evolve with Clara’s own evolution. A rabbit can outrun the hounds nine times, but on the tenth the dog will learn, the dog will catch it. I found myself checking and double-checking and triple-checking for sharp objects hidden in the short shag of the carpet, for dead animals Solly might have dragged in from outside while I wasn’t looking, for the beads of an old necklace scattered across the floor, for tapered table edges, open outlets, dangling cords.
“She isn’t crawling yet,” said Ben when he came home from work the Monday following Thanksgiving to find me on my hands and knees, one arm fanned under the couch, looking for stray pieces of popcorn. I could hear the ghost of the even, the extra syllables of judgment. Ben said, “You can relax.”
I’d been meaning to tell him. I was going to tell him. I just didn’t know what to tell him. The overhead lights flickered.
“I’ll take a look at the breaker later,” said Ben. This was the opportune moment, and I slithered up from under the couch, readjusting my sweatpants, breathing deeply. Dust bunnies gathered on my sleeve, made mostly of dog hair: prey formed from predator, ironic. Clara cooed in her bouncer, and I gave her my finger to hold. I thought in doing so she’d lend me some immunity.
“We need to talk,” Ben said, before I could begin. “Annie called me.”
I had lost the opportunity, the messaging. I hadn’t been able to get out in front of it. Ben sighed and came over and sat on the floor next to me, so that we both looked down on Clara, our backs against the bottom of the couch.
“I was going to tell you,” I said. I was being honest, yet all the while strategizing how I would discover what Annie had already told him, how much I would have to admit to, how much I’d keep myself from giving away.
“She’s worried about you,” said Ben.
“Hmm.” I scrunched my mouth to the side, and decided to start simply. “Did she tell you I was locked out on the balcony?” Warmth was gathering in the corners of my eyes.
“She didn’t.”
I turned to look at him, to look right in his eyes so he would know I was telling my version of the truth. “I was locked out on the balcony,” I said. “I was getting some air. I’d left Clara inside.” I was fully crying now, but not for the reason I knew he would think I was crying. Not because I’d lied to him, or because I’d endangered our daughter. No, I was crying because I was still so calculating, because my brain was still counting the beads on some imaginary abacus, weighing and balancing and planning. Annie’s therapist—were we ever to meet—would not be pleased. This was a poor man’s vulnerability, a lying man’s truth, and I was ashamed of how easily I fell into these clichés, how I took the most undesirable man’s descriptors and combined them with that age-old archetype, the faithless woman.
From my research, I’d discovered Michael always behaved as if she had no reason to mislead you. The way she felt was not a feeling but an objective fact that you already innately understood, only needed to be guided toward, firmly and gently. I tried to channel her confidence, though I didn’t know how much of that confidence was a facade.
Ben was the opposite of Michael in all ways: substantial where she was transubstantiated, tactful where she was blunt, kind where she was funny.
I was still holding my daughter’s hand, and I was crying because I knew that this was the closest I would ever be to my husband, and it wasn’t close enough.
“It’s okay,” he was saying, “it happened and it’s over and I understand why you didn’t want to tell me.” His willingness to give felt like a concession. He would hide the hardest parts of me in some dark recess of his mind, pave them over and lock them away. In doing so, he thought he was offering me the opportunity to be unequivocally myself, but he was actually just excusing bad behavior. I felt now that there was nothing I could do that he wouldn’t explain away, both to himself and to me.
“I didn’t want to make a scene,” I said, because I knew he didn’t like scenes, and the easiest thing to do now, as I was accepting his truest nature, was to placate him. I would, for now, be who he imagined me to be.
The lights flickered again. Michael did not approve, nor should she. But what could I say to a man who was willing to leave what should have been a larger conversation—why had I left Clara, why had I locked the door, why had I told him nothing—at it’s over? How could I tell him now that what he thought was just a footprint was a cavern a thousand feet deep? Ben wanted things to be easy, and because of this he had convinced himself that they were, had placed his faith not in God but Occam’s razor. I was unspeakably sad for him. For us. For Clara.
“Don’t worry,” said Ben. “It’s okay to let yourself cry.” He was prying Clara’s fingers off mine, rubbing the small of my back in methodical circles, resting his chin on the top of my head. He was trying to comfort me, and in doing so comforting himself.
I could never, ever tell him.
“Did Annie say anything else?” I asked through a large hiccup.
“Just that you were stressed,” Ben whispered into my hair. “That she was worried about you. Should we be worried?”
I knew what he wanted to hear, and because I still loved him in love’s simplest form, and still wanted to please him, I said, “No. No you shouldn’t be worried. I have it all under control.”
“Thank you,” said Ben. “Thank you for being so honest.”