Rahn is spending the night,” Barbara tells me. “Try to be quiet when you come home from your shift.” She covers a cream-coloured mixing bowl with a tea towel.
“Pizza dough?” I ask, nodding at the bowl. The kitchen smells like fresh minced garlic. Songbird is licking the floor along the stove.
“He claims he can eat pizza and wings every meal. Good for him, he’s tall and thin.” White flour rings her fingernails. Her hands are aging. She’s slowly becoming a nonna, a nonna without grandkids. “Wait ’til he tastes my pizza. Want to know the secret? Whole cloves of garlic baked right into the dough. That’s how Pops taught me.”
“You like him? Rahn? It’s been, what, a couple months?”
“Oh, he’s kind of an odd duck. Did you hear his laugh? He’s good in bed, though, if your old mom can say that,” she says.
“Say whatever. It’s not like I can stop you.”
“Who knows if I actually like him, or if he just keeps me entertained enough to not drive my car into the lake.”
“Mom! Don’t talk like that.”
“You’re too young to understand, Bay. A year from now, you’ll be on your way again. I’ve been here most of my life. I’ll die here. I doubt I’ll even get to pass the house down to you. You don’t want it.” She hugs me close, rubs my back like I’m the one saying the depressing shit.
Outside, it’s raining for the first time since I’ve been home. Rainwater gushes from the eaves. I tell myself I’d better get the ladder out soon to clean out Barbara’s gutters. I ought to prune the lilac bush too, to save her the trouble. What else can I do to be a good daughter?
She’s packed me another lunch: Nutella and Fluffernutter on white bread, and a Ziploc bag of crackers and cheese slices. “Take my car. It’s a real summer storm out there,” she offers. “If we go anywhere late tonight, we’ll go in Rahn’s Beamer. ‘Bey Em Vay Means Get Out of the Way!’”
The last time I drove these roads in the dark I was a drunk teenager coming home from a tailgate party. About one young driver per year crashes their car around here. Not only from driving under the influence, but from doing risky stunts on risky roads. Skateboarders who bumper surf. Jocks playing chicken. The first black ice of each winter is deadly. Same goes for the last of the muddy slush in early spring.
The wipers squeak across the windshield of Barbara’s Ford Fiesta. My hands are tight on the wheel at ten and two. Through the rain, I spot the glowing eyes of a couple of little critters as they scamper across the road. My heart speeds up as I swerve around the opossums.
My fingers turn cold on the steering wheel, then hot as frostbite. Driving’s made no difference. She’s here, she’s caught me.
Her chorus girl legs appear ahead. The kind of womanly legs that would dance in time with a towering kaleidoscope of other womanly legs. An American musical darling. As if she’s going to step brush ball change, right on the hood of this Ford. I hit the brakes. She stands fiendishly still. I flash the high beams but still can’t make out more than her legs in the rain. She is waiting for me to get out of the car. What choice do I have? I step into the storm before she forces me out. Her curls are dripping wet. She has discernible clothes now. I can pinch the worsted cotton of her red, white, and blue swing skirt.
“You’re a ghost.” Speaking to her seems to make her clearer. I see her eye colour for the first time. Sepia brown. Like sundown in an old movie, like Kansas sky in The Wizard of Oz. She shrugs her slender shoulders. Does she not know she’s a ghost? Is she one of these spirits who doesn’t understand she’s dead? I doubt it. I think she understands too much about living and dying. I’m afraid of what she knows. But looking the other way is no longer possible. Ignorance is no longer something to plead.
“Did you have a name?”
She scowls at the question. I brace, expecting to topple to the ground and black out only to wake up a minute later alone in the wet road.
“Etta Zinn. Still is my name, as far as I know. But you can call me Goblin Fruit. Suits me fine.”
“I am so sorry …” She can read my mind? “Please, I didn’t mean to insult you.”
“It’s all the same to me.” She steps toward me and I cower. The falling rain grows more icy the closer she gets. I have to say something. People in movies and books don’t just stand around speechless.
“Is there something you want from me? Is there something you need from the living world?” I ask the question Poltergeist taught me to ask. Steven Spielberg’s ghosts were gruesome, ghosts you should run from at full speed. But Etta Zinn’s skin is as soft as a living woman’s. I find myself leaning toward her. She presses her palm to my face. Her giggles in my ear sound tinny, like a sitcom laugh track.
“Ah, nuts. What am I, the ghost of Jacob Marley? ‘Boooooo. I am dooooomed tooo waaaander without rest or peeeeeace.’ That makes you Scrooge, thank you very much.”
All at once, she has me pinned against the car.
“Say my name. A girl likes to hear her name called out by the one she loves.”
My jaw wrenches open. She kisses the corners of my gaping mouth, pokes mockingly at my lower lip with her finger. My tongue swells. I can’t swallow my saliva. My nostrils burn like I might vomit through my nose. “E. E. Et” She forces her name in my mouth. “Et-ta.”
I push back. My body bucks against hers. She stumbles backward on her beautiful feet. “You touched me? No one touches me,” Etta shrieks. “Not since … Not since …” She flashes her teeth, her irate eyes, and disappears.