They Come In Through the Walls

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

 

CLAIRE’S PAPA DOESN’T know her anymore. When they sit for dinner, he pushes his bowl of chili onto the floor. The bowl is plastic; after the first four times, she learned her lesson, but still it cracks as it hits the tile. The beans spread in a puddle beneath his feet.

“I won’t eat your poison,” he says.

“It’s not poison, Papa. See.” She eats a spoonful from her own bowl. “Aren’t you hungry?”

“Not hungry enough.”

Papa crosses his arms, surveys the rest of the table. It’s a long table with twelve chairs, and before each chair a place is set. The phantoms will arrive soon, and when they do—Claire hopes—her father will eat. He always eats with the phantoms around.

In the kitchen the fluorescent light flickers. In the dining room, the flicker registers as a flash in the corner of Claire’s eye, a minor annoyance but enough to drive you mad night after night. She needs to fix the light but has little time for household chores. Too much else to do: clean and cook and try to convince Papa to take his pills.

Claire goes into the kitchen to fill bowls for the phantoms. With the chessboard floor tiles below and the flashing light above, she feels like she’s in a game, one of those video games maybe, the kind that comes with a warning: may cause seizures. She hurries, takes a bowl out for each place at the table and sets it atop the placemat. She fills the water glasses with wine and the wine glasses with water. She pulls the bread from the oven and covers the basket with a cloth, places it in the middle of the table. The phantoms won’t eat the bread, but they’ll devour the butter, leaving greasy stains all over her mother’s white tablecloth. Claire places another bowl of chili before Papa. He doesn’t touch it.

The phantoms come in through the walls, passing through the plaster and pink puffs of insulation as Claire imagines ghosts would. They look like silhouettes of people Claire may have met before, vaguely familiar in the outlines of their bodies. They take their places at the table. As they pull the chairs out, wood scrapes wood. Already there are rivulets dug in the floor. Claire will have to replace the floor if she ever wants to sell the house, after Papa goes. And the lights. Of course she’ll have to fix those lights.

The phantoms eat with their mouths open, gray light pouring from behind their teeth, surprisingly white in their shadow faces. If Claire were to touch the light she imagines it would burn the skin. She never touches the phantoms.

They speak in deep voices, shaky as old men, and they speak often. Every night the same conversations.

“I was only twelve, and the man came to bring us our milk. He had a streak of black in his blonde hair, and I asked him what was the matter with his hair. He leered at me, always leering at me. I thought he was the devil,” says one.

“Was he the devil?” asks another.

“Of course he wasn’t. What are you, crazy?”

It’s hard for Claire to place the voices to the mouths, for they talk even when their mouths are full of food. Chili drips down their chins. Outside the dogs bark at the door. The phantoms don’t like dogs. They made that clear.

“What are those blasted noises?” Papa asks. “Can’t a man eat his dinner in peace?”

Claire fixes another bowl and places it outside for them. They’re Claire’s dogs. They were her girlfriend’s, before she left them and everything but her books and a brief note, another relic. Papa liked Claire’s girlfriend more than he liked Claire. He used to call her Madeline, though her name was Anne. He liked her, he said, because she was funny. Claire has never been funny, and she suspects her father sees too much of him in her, that it confuses him. Anne was a blank slate, but too blank, it turned out; she absorbed too much. She couldn’t take it, watching someone go like Papa. Claire never thought she should have to.

Now Claire lives alone with her father, and each night they dine with phantoms. Claire never asked them to be her guests. She isn’t quite sure why they’re there, in fact. She wants them to leave. Cooking for so many is expensive; it’s hard enough when half of what her father eats ends up on the floor.

The truth is that the phantoms comfort him. When they’re there, he seems less confused, less angry. He eats his dinner to the last bite. He laughs and tells stories. Makes it seem like the rest of the day was just a nightmare. Claire wants them to leave. She wants them to take her father with them.

It’s a horrible thought she has more and more these days.

 

THE FIRST TIME the phantoms came for dinner there were fewer of them. Four months ago, right before Anne left. That night the fridge had nearly been empty, and Claire too tired after working her shift at the cemetery—she did ground maintenance there, in that silent paradise—to go to the store. She cooked what she could. Vermicelli spring rolls with peanut sauce, spaghetti with canned Alfredo, onion rolls two days past the expiration date. She cooked a lot of food without thinking; once she was in the hang of it, she didn’t want to stop cooking. When she stopped, she would have to serve it. She would have to explain again to Papa that this was his home now, this was dinner. She cooked too much. So the phantoms came to eat it.

Walking into the dining room with Papa’s plate in her hand, she saw the first one. It was only a vague shape then, a shapeless body and head made of black mist like car exhaust. But the elbows that seemed to rest on the tabletop were of a thicker consistency, nearly solid. Claire could make out an indistinct hum, like the low static of a television left on. Then she noticed there were more of them, three seats full, and her father seemed to be listening to something they were saying that only he could hear. She did what she could; she brought them plates.

After a couple of nights, their bodies began to turn as solid as their elbows, and Claire could hear their words like whispers. Unintelligible but full of inflection, hidden meanings she was sure. She tried harder. Every now and again she picked out a word: house, third, remember. Papa, it seemed, heard them as if they were part of him. Even when Claire heard nothing, he responded, and the phantoms bowed their heads and moved the holes that Claire came to call their mouths.

They were rude guests. They slurped their soup. Bits of food flew from their forks across the table. Claire cleaned up when they left. The phantoms always left through the walls as well, but they never went through the kitchen.

“It’s the lights,” Papa said. “You got to fix those damn lights.”

 

ANNE HAD ALWAYS fixed the broken things. When the lights in Papa’s room went out, Anne carried in the ladder from the garage and changed the bulbs. She changed the oil in Claire’s car, bought a new hose for the washer. She knew how to do things like that. Claire had never been taught. She’d never been motivated to teach herself.

“I can’t,” Anne said the night before she left. “If we can’t fix us, who will?”

They were in bed together, their clothes bunched at their feet, the blankets fallen to the floor. Their breath had steadied. The air in the room was stale in the absence of their sweat. That staleness had hung there, nameless, for weeks. It was overdue that Anne should mention it.

“I know what you’ll say when I go. That I couldn’t handle this whole situation, with your dad and all. But that’s not it, Claire, and I think you know that.”

“Right,” Claire said, turning away. “Sure I do.”

“If you won’t talk to me, if you won’t try. How can I help you if you won’t talk to me about it?”

Anne tried to touch her, but she shrugged Anne off. It was this way no matter what. Claire wanted so badly to talk, but she swallowed it. It had to wait, until later, until later again, until later became months and the words she’d swallowed hardened like lead in her belly. There was no bringing them up again.

In the morning Anne packed the few things she kept there and left while Claire pretended to sleep. Once Claire heard the click of the front door, she wrapped her arms around her knees and rocked in bed.

The anger came later, though it was brief and soon replaced by the acquiescence of a caregiver, taking in events as they rushed forward to meet her. Swallowing them. Keeping them down with soda water and starch crackers, like the sick do.

 

“WHO IN THE hell is this?” Papa asked when he first met Anne. “What in the hell does she want?”

“This is Anne, Papa. She’s my girlfriend,” Claire said.

Anne shook his limp hand. He had always said that women should not shake hands.

“She looks like a man,” Papa said.

Anne didn’t look like a man. She had short hair, that was all, cut to her ears, black. Her skin was dark, her eyes brown. She wore black pants and a button-up purple blouse with a collar, a gray pea coat. Claire always thought she looked like she stepped out from a painting faded with age. It fit, because Anne was an artist of the digital era. She designed websites.

“It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Pierce.” Anne took her hand back but didn’t look away from Papa. He was forced to smile.

“Are you here to bring me my lunch, Ms. Madeline?” he asked. “I’ll take a tuna sandwich on rye.”

In the kitchen Claire apologized. Her father wasn’t always mean, she said, it was the disease. It brought something out that Claire had never seen before, only heard in a rumor from her mother, of her papa’s temperament before she was born. A temperament that supposedly evaporated when he became a father. Claire’s mother, before her death, always spoke of his transformation like it came from God. Claire didn’t believe in God. Anne did. That was another reason Papa came to love her.

What he didn’t tell Claire about Anne was that she reminded him of his own wife, three years deceased. She had the same laugh, the same way of moving through the room as if she’d been there all along. He knew this about her when they first met, but as time dragged on, he lost the chance to say it. He lost the memory as he’d lost his wife.

When she’d first gone, his wife, Claire’s mother, Papa had not cried. Rather he felt a strange constriction in his chest, a tightness that kept him from holding Claire close. So he stayed in his chair, looking out the window, a book in his hand so he could claim he was busy if anyone tried to talk. Visitors. They came in droves, left casseroles on the kitchen counter, if Claire was there to let them in. If not, they left the steaming dishes on the front steps for Claire to bring in the next time she came to visit.

That was when the house had been his. It was not his any longer. He didn’t know the pictures hung on the wall; he couldn’t place the little striped bag in the bathroom or the light blue towel on the rack. The food in the fridge was foreign, exotic. All he wanted was a basket of fried pickles, but the woman in his house—she seemed so familiar—refused.

“Bad for your health,” she said. “Here, Papa, eat this.”

She called him that, and perhaps he was that to her, but she was not his daughter. He couldn’t place her, but he knew this woman, so much older than the bits of Claire he could recall, did not belong to him.

It came and went. Then it went and never came back.

 

ONE NIGHT A phantom apologizes.

“I’m sorry. I should have been there better for you. I did wrong by you.”

Claire has served a new kind of soup, French onion, which she hopes Papa will appreciate more than chili. She doesn’t look up at the phantom; he’s sitting at the far end of the table and is easy to ignore. But his words confuse her. Sometimes they do that, confuse her. They speak like her papa. They relay pieces of him he seems to have lost.

When she first noticed that they knew so much of the inside of his mind, she wished that they would give it all back. She’s given up on hopes like that. Now the only wish is the one she’s afraid and ashamed to admit. Take him, take him please. Take him with you.

“I should have told you it was going to be okay. All those words you probably needed to hear, I didn’t give them to you,” the phantom says.

Claire looks up at Papa. His expression is blank as he spoons French onion soup into his mouth. He doesn’t look at her, though she sees him see her from the corner of his eye.

“Should’ve let you know I still loved you, even though you looked so much like her. Reminded me of her.”

Finally Claire stands from the table, and without a word she walks to her bedroom. She needs a moment to breathe. It would have been a welcome apology from her father’s throat. From a ghost of a memory, she never wanted to hear anything so personal. The words creep through her skin. She shivers. On the edge of her bed, she tries not to start shaking, but she has to grab hold of the nightstand to steady her hands.

There, on the stand, is one of the books Claire can never read again. Anne used to read it to her before bed. It’s a book about the history of the movies, but it may as well have been a book of lullabies for how Anne’s voice smoothed the words. Claire can’t look at it. She ought to get rid of it, but she can’t bear to touch it. In the DVD player, there’s a movie Claire can’t make herself remove.

Alone in the bedroom, Claire hears voices from the dining room as clear as if they were there with her. They could be coming through the vents, but she doubts that’s the case. She lies across the bed and unbuttons her shirt, wriggles out of her jeans. The cotton sheets against her skin is soothing. The air from the fan blows down on her, though never will either feel as soothing as Anne’s hands, or her mother’s.

Eventually Claire will have to get up from the bed. She will have to go back into the dining room and clean up the mess. For now she will let the room take care of him. She will let the phantoms comfort him. She closes her eyes and thinks about her mother, the way she flipped her hair back to clear it from her face. Her white white teeth, the rare smile, less rare when she and Claire were alone.

Anne was something like her mother, but her smile was for everybody. It was what Claire liked most.

Claire rolls over face down on the pillows. They smell like fresh laundry. Claire’s breath catches. They will never smell like Anne again. She’s washed it away. It’s a step she hadn’t thought she’d taken, and the pressure building in her chest tells her it’s a step she wasn’t ready for. How could she have done that without noticing? She curls against the pillows and makes herself cry, for Anne, for her mother, her papa, her everyone.

 

THINGS CLAIRE CANNOT touch for fear of losing them:

 

1. The CD she made for Anne but never gave her.

2. The books, mostly on the bottom shelf, all gifts.

3. Her mother’s old silver-plated mirror and comb.

4. The pillowcases she won’t wash again.

5. The recipes in the recipe box, written in her mother’s hand, one in Anne’s. Her father’s scratchy instructions for a “secret tortilla soup.” Food she can no longer eat.

6. The dirty pair of underwear Anne forgot beneath the bed.

7. The bandages Anne bought to bind the burn on Claire’s hand from cooking.

8. Her father’s Christmas trinkets, still up from

December in June.

9. Her father’s photo album, full of blank spaces.

10. Her father’s hand.

 

PAPA NEVER WAS one for apologies, for feelings. None of them were.

Here is Claire, the past: an open letter in her hand. She bounds into the kitchen, where her mother stands at the stove. The smell of fish frying, the greasy scent of hot oil, catches Claire at the threshold. She pauses only a moment before she waves the letter through the air.

“I got in!” she yells.

Her mother turns, smiles, turns back to the stove. “That’s great, dear.”

As if her excitement were a balloon suddenly popped, the air wheezes away. Claire stands with a letter in her hand, unsure. Tosses the letter on the table.

Despite her initial excitement, after a semester Claire drops out.

Instead she holds as many odd jobs as she can until she happens on the cemetery position. Claire’s been there now for fifteen years. Without a home to call her own, the cemetery grounds become the place she most likes to be. There she can fix things. When the grass gets too long, she cuts it. When the flowers die, she replaces them. When she happens upon someone crying, she in no way feels obligated to comfort them. Her place is in the background of their lives, safe.

Being the center of Anne’s life made her uncomfortable. Always she felt on edge, her limbs rigid, her back tight. Anne tried to massage the knots away, but it didn’t work, because when Anne’s hands left her skin, the knots returned. She didn’t know how to explain this, to tell Anne it wasn’t her fault.

Claire can’t remember ever seeing her parents kiss. She can’t remember them kissing her. Now, in her bedroom, she does not remember Anne’s lips.

 

IT WASN’T A surprise when the doctor called Claire and told her she would have to find care for her father. Her father had been forgetting; it started when her mother was sick and worsened after the funeral. Little things. When Claire would call, he would tell her the same story in the course of thirty minutes. He forgot where he put his wallet. Claire became the caretaker of his credit cards, as he could no longer keep track of the payments. He wrote bad checks.

Then he forgot where he was. He asked for his mother, long passed. The first people he forgot were insignificant: actors, politicians, cousins who never visited. Then it was the post man, his nephew. Finally it was Claire, as the doctors had warned.

“Where’s my little girl?” he would ask, and she would explain. She would explain again. At first it was temporary; it would, eventually, come back to him. “Claire,” he’d say, squeezing her hand. “You’re back. I sure do like it when you visit.”

“Of course, Papa,” Claire would say. “Don’t worry, I won’t stop visiting you.”

The memory of her mother, on the other hand, was harder for him to lose. It seemed as if, though it too came and went, it was more often present. He remembered her, but her absence was something he couldn’t explain to himself. He asked about her all the time back then.

These days he doesn’t ask about her at all. Claire envies him his ignorance.

Claire didn’t move in right away. At first she hired caregivers to stay with him 24/7. Then the money ran out, the savings dried up, the cards maxed out. Social security and Medicaid paid for only half the care, and Claire didn’t make enough to pay the rest. She broke the lease on her apartment and moved back in.

Anne came along later, at Claire’s yard sale. She’d cleaned out Papa’s old things, antiques he let rot in the garage, a bicycle missing its tire, the clothes he no longer wore—these days he mostly donned his favorite blue robe and plaid pajamas. Anne wasn’t really interested in the merchandise, but she bought the bike so she could talk to Claire. She arranged to pick it up later, when she wasn’t on her way to the store. She lived in the neighborhood, she explained. Claire thought she talked too much, a trait she would learn to love.

Now she misses the voice. Silence fills the empty air. Except when the phantoms come and take it, and there is no comfort in their stolen words.

 

THE STORIES THE phantoms tell are familiar to Claire. Every night at dinner she feels nostalgic with each mouthful of chili, and it isn’t the food, though that too comes from a memory of limbo years with a crockpot and three cans of beans. She likes the nostalgia of taste buds. What falls from the phantoms’ mouths, she likes much less.

Papa told her some of the stories the phantoms have adopted, and her mother told her others. The rest are new to her, but they ring with her father’s voice. She hates hearing her father’s words from so many gray mouths. She hates not being able to look at him when she responds. He finds the phantoms entertaining; the stories are new to him.

The evening of the apology, once Claire returns to the dining room, she finds her father still there, his guests gone.

“It’s time to go,” he says.

“Okay,” says Claire. She moves to help him, wraps her arm around his arm. “Let’s go to bed now, Papa.”

“No.” He jerks his arm away. She thinks she knows what’s coming next; he will throw a fit, tell her to leave him alone, tell her to take him where he belongs.

But he doesn’t. Instead he looks at the wall, the spot from which the phantoms leave. Claire looks there as well. One of the phantoms is still on this side of the wall. It extends a gray arm. “Time to go.”

Her papa pats the table. “Be right back,” he says. Suddenly Claire knows it’s a lie. She can’t explain how she knows it. Her father will go, and he won’t come back.

She leads her father to the hand. The shadow consumes him, his arm, his shoulder. It pulls his body forward, and together he and the phantom walk through the wall. Through the plaster Claire hears her father’s voice. “Those damn lights. Hope she remembers.”

Once he’s gone, Claire can’t quite move. She stares at the spot where he stood. It was sudden, she thinks, more so than she thought it would be. She’s not quite sure—she has to consider what has happened—if she’s had time to build herself up to this. If she’ll be able to get through this without anyone anymore to call hers. She wraps her arms around her chest. The room is cold. The dogs outside howl. She lets them in. There is some vague kind of comfort in their fur. They lick the smell of onion from her hand.

Once they’ve settled down, she goes into the kitchen, pours the soup into a plastic container, slides the container into the fridge. She rinses the dishes and loads the washer. Stands on the cabinet and tries to pull down the light cover. The side cracks in her hands, and a shard of glass crashes to the chessboard floor. Like a pawn, she thinks, too small to be significant. Back on the floor she moves the glass from square to square. Crumbs dig into the palms of her hands. One square at a time, she slides the glass to the edge of the kitchen, then over, into the dining room. She considers picking it up, throwing it away, but she doesn’t. She crosses her legs where she is and waits to see if the light will stop flickering, if her father will after all come back.

 

AS FOR ANNE, there’s a phone and a number. Claire still remembers, after all.

“The first order of business,” Anne says once Claire lets her in, “is that light.”

Claire has already thrown away the glass on the floor. She’s already cooked a pan of tomatillo enchiladas for them to eat for dinner. The table she has set for two.

“Okay,” Claire says.

It’s really all that need be said.

 

~

Although Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam has tried, she has not thus far succeeded in walking through walls or cooking a meal without burning it. Her fiction has appeared in magazines such as The Toast, PRISM International, Clarkesworld, and Hobart. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the USM’s Stonecoast program and curates the annual Art & Words Show in Fort Worth, Texas. You can visit her on Twitter @BonnieJoStuffle or at www.bonniejostufflebeam.com. She is represented by Ann Collette at Rees Literary for her first novel about a mother, a daughter, and a siren.