Mickey’s Ghost
This is a true story – a ghost story – from what seems like long ago, so long ago that my dad can’t even remember the girl’s name. He claims he has a photo of her somewhere. He claims he remembers it all so well. Perhaps I haven’t lived long enough, but I can’t think of ever being so old that I would forget the name of a girl that was almost my daughter. Yet still, he says he cannot remember, so I fill in the details from my imagination. I remember nothing of her, of this girl I name Mickey. There are just the bones of her coming into our lives, and the ghost that followed.
I was only a couple years old when my dad brought her home. I can just about picture my dad. He’s a composite of photos I’ve seen as an adult and my earliest memories of him. He has a new sister for me, carried in his arms.
He is a young man then, working in Chicago while my mom raises me and my two older sisters in Wisconsin. He has a mustache covering his whole upper lip, and his hair is a bit shaggy, so dark brown it’s almost black. His eyes are just the same, still pale blue, but maybe with a bit more laughter and wildness. I especially imagine his hands being softer then. Not soft, just softer. The years of hard work to follow have yet to crack his skin, tear away his nails, split his cuticles, etch dry white lines between dirt and tan. But they’re still hard hands, a working man’s hands. He manages property in Chicago.
He takes care of buildings there, mostly in the poor parts of town. He’s handy with a hammer and nail, with plumbing and electricity. He’s the type that sees the workings of things and knows how to fix them. And he’s seen how poor works in Chicago – how people might do anything for a roof over their head, food in their bellies, a few days of work, one last hit, a little sex, or a bottle of booze.
In the many buildings my dad maintains, there are children, some better off, some worse. But Mickey is different. Perhaps only because she lives in the building where he keeps his office, so he sees her often. But then maybe it’s her personality. She seems mature, determined, yet able to laugh and be a child. She is boyish, with her dirty fingernails, hair tangled and long, and her odd enjoyment of throwing things – anything, be it balls, pencils, or paperweights. He couldn’t have known how old she was, maybe six or seven – close enough to his oldest daughter’s age to make it hard to see her unattended, unwashed, unfed. My dad’s seen it all, though, and you’d think it would have made him as calloused as his hands.
So Mickey comes by my dad’s office a lot. He shares his lunches with her, always asks how she’s doing, lets her hang around. Sometimes, she’ll take everything off his desk, throw it in the wastebasket in the corner of the room, then bring it all back. But mostly she’s quiet, not full of questions and screaming like his girls back home. The only noises she makes are the soft whisperings to herself as she plays with the little rag doll my dad has given her, a doll his own mother made. She won’t part with it, even for a washing. The doll’s hair and lacy pink dress are as dirty as her now.
And then, my dad realizes she’s been around even more than usual. She waits outside his door. A few days of this and he asks her what’s wrong.
I try to hear her voice in my head, how she talked. I hear a voice breathy and shy, but articulate enough. No lisp, though her front tooth must be missing. No whine, though she’d have every right. “I can’t get inside,” she tells him. She is locked out of her apartment.
I can almost feel the anger that was always in my dad. (“Don’t tell your father,” my mom would say when we broke something. “Let’s just fix it.”) It had to come at him from his stomach, a hot, tightening fist that pushed up his throat like indigestion and caused him to clench his teeth. This was more than he could stand.
So he finds the ring of keys for this building, each labeled with a piece of masking tape. They take the stairs up because there is no money from the property owner to fix the elevator. He holds her hand until they reach the door. He lets go then, to sort through the keys.
I have a vivid picture of them standing there. Her hand is still suspended, as if waiting to be taken up again. She wears a faded purple dress with yellow flowers, a hand-me-down sent from my mom. Dirty blonde curls are tangled around a rubber band at the back of her neck. On her arms are tiny pink flea bites which she has scratched raw. My dad wears jeans, splattered with paint and grease. A white t-shirt, also full of paint. The hallway is lit through yellowing plastic squares in the ceiling and reeks of curry, incense, and urine. My dad hates all three smells, but the curry is the worst and makes him clench his teeth even harder. He rattles the keys angrily, trying to get Mickey’s into the lock. He glances again at the number on the door, written in black marker because the plate fell off months ago.
Finally, the key turns and the door swings open. It’s summer, and while the hall was warm, the apartment is oppressively hot and reeks of rotting meat. The stench is so strong the first thing my dad does is cross the room to open the heavy black curtains and the window beneath. A breeze slips in with the sun to stir up dust into the cloying air.
Candles, black and red, mostly without dishes beneath them, perch in wavy pools of cold wax. It seems Mickey’s mother has mounted these fire hazards on every available surface. Dirty dishes are stacked on the kitchen counter. The linoleum in the kitchen is covered with crumbs, dust, and sticky-looking spills. An open can of baked beans lies on its side, one dried, brown bean stuck to the sharp-edged top. It looks as if nothing has ever been cleaned and the practical man in my dad can’t help but think of the difficulty he always has with roaches.
He feels the brush of fingers against his palm. Mickey turns her eyes up to him as she seeks the comfort of his hand again. He takes it, wanting a little comfort himself as he walks with the girl to the one bedroom in the apartment. The door is closed, and when he opens it he is again accosted by an overwhelming stench. Sweet, cloying incense and rot. It is all he can do not to gag, and yet Mickey only clutches more tightly at his hand. There is no bed, just a mattress pushed against the wall, barely visible in the dark room. He flips the light switch but nothing happens, so he again opens the heavy curtains and the window.
When he turns around bile swells up into his throat. On a table in one corner of the room is an alter. Candles surround an upside down cross, a porcelain bowl, and a dead squirrel. Its tail sticks out of a pool of maggots. He’s frozen for a moment. Then he picks up Mickey in his arms, spins away and out of the room, closing the door behind him. All he wants to do is leave the apartment but he must check the bathroom.
The knob is cold, his hand hesitant. My dad has seen dead bodies before. He’s even helped coroners move them out of the buildings. He’s cleaned out the apartments. He’s called families if there were families to call. Yet his hand will not turn the knob. He knows what he will see, a body that is no worse than the others – its nakedness, the bluish cast to the butt and feet, the matted hair, the flies, and the smell. He stands with Mickey, hand tightening on the doorknob but not turning. They are both imagining her mother’s body, bloated and sprouting maggots like the squirrel, propped on the toilet, flopped against the wall. The band is still tied around her upper arm, the needle and the spoon are on the floor. My dad covers Mickey’s eyes and turns her head toward his chest, then opens the door.
He pulls it shut. The slam is loud in his ears. He backs away, out of the apartment, a numbness spreading over him. It replaces anger and disgust. Now is the time to take care of things, the way my dad has always taken care of things.
He brings Mickey downstairs and tries to make her sit in a chair, but she clings to his neck, so he makes the necessary calls while still holding her in his arms. The police take forever. They arrive in a tired-looking pair with a woman from social services trailing behind. She appears harried, with frizzy black hair and splotchy black skin, but she is warm to Mickey. She clings to my dad’s neck, not crying, not doing anything but making a long, high keening noise. It’s hard to imagine the conversation that ensues.
My dad making awkward explanations. “I’ve been feeding her. She’s been hanging around my office.”
The social worker touching the little girl’s shoulder. “You’ve been kind to her. Would you come down to child services?”
“What will happen to her?” my dad asks.
“Foster care. A group home. She’ll be taken care of.”
“And if her mother shows up?” Because she hadn’t been in the bathroom. She was just gone. Left only a ghost of herself.
The woman shrugs. They both know the mother is probably dead. The woman thinks the hope of her mother will calm Mickey. But Mickey knows the truth. Her mother’s gone because she’s mad at Mickey, doesn’t love her anymore, is disappointed in her. Why else would her mother just be gone, leaving an empty apartment, a ghost to taunt Mickey with her absence, to remind her what a bad daughter she’d been?
“What are her chances of adoption?” my dad asks. He knows the answers to all the questions he asks. He’s unsurprised by the social worker’s shrug.
And then? How long was the silence? As he held onto Mickey, did he picture her life from this point forward as a ward of the state? Did he picture a building full of unwanted children fighting and scrabbling for love and attention? Did he picture little Mickey growing cold and distant, a withdrawn teenager doomed to walk the same path her mother did?
Whatever went through his head, he made his decision and arranged with social services to take Mickey home. His wife Jo – my mom – is kind, big-hearted but strong, and stern enough to reign in even Mickey. His three daughters would be good company. They’d planned on a fourth anyway. So meetings are arranged, paperwork filled out, and less than a week later my dad drives north with Mickey.
What must it have been like for her? I wonder if she has ever been in a car before, seen open country. It is summer, and Wisconsin is startling in its beauty: trees green and lush, farms with fat grazing cows, a sky so blue and endless she has to press her face against the glass to look up and up into it.
The ride is so long she needs desperately to pee, but when they arrive, finally, her need is forgotten. The house is huge compared to her apartment and seated on an expanse of lawn that must seem to stretch to the ends of the earth, and with a garden full of shiny blobs of vegetables, and a swing-set planted beneath a tall tree with trembling leaves. A creek divides the lawn from a small stretch of wooded land to play in. Raspberries and mulberries grow with wild abandon. Only a ten-minute walk down the road is Lake Como and the beach. I can’t help but think this must seem like paradise to Mickey. Yet up here, in Wisconsin, Lake Como is the poor town. Despite their lack of money, my parents are sure the open country and a real family will help Mickey to heal.
Some unhappiness needs more than green grass and creeks and woods and hugs and love to cure, though. Can we fault my parents for their failure? They saw the cure in change and love, because those things have always worked for them before. But Mickey’s ghost could not be exorcized with sunshine and love. That bloated, bluish thing followed Mickey all the way north, invisible to those what would help her, stretching its cold fingers toward all that would try.
So I imagine those first days, as my dad described them. He takes a few days off to help my mother. They take Mickey shopping, though they’ve little enough money. They buy a few new clothes, a new doll. The rest of her wardrobe is filled out with cast-offs from their oldest daughter, Sonja. Although now that they’ve been given Mickey’s papers, my parents find out she’s two years older than their eldest daughter.
The girls are introduced. The parents try to explain how they have a new sister. Sonja warms to the idea, takes immediately to the older, mature new friend. The middle child, Michel, seems less sure. She’ll surely finds ways to antagonize the older girl. It is her way, and is mostly friendly. Getting Mickey to put a chili pepper in her mouth is Michel’s way of making friends.
The first days are a trial. Mickey won’t sleep in a bed. She won’t eat from dishes and silverware. All she eats is cereal from a box. Every meal is a trial of coaxing the little girl to sit at the table, pick up a piece of silverware, eat something homemade and healthy. When my dad is around, only on weekends after those first few days, she insists on sitting on his lap to eat. Spaghetti sauce sauce slaps her face as her new sisters teach her how to suck a noodle up between her lips, everyone laughing.
Baths are a trial. She is terrified of the water at first, thrashes and screams. Finally mom gives in and gets undressed and steps into the water herself and begins to wash. This doesn’t work. The next time she gets Sonja in. Soon they have Mickey bathing. Her skin takes on a healthier glow: pink cheeks, flea bites healing, hair falling in neat ringlets. She takes the rag doll in the bath with her and tries to float her on the plastic soap dish. She learns how to make squirt guns from My Little Ponies by removing their tails. My mom is relieved, even while cleaning the water off the bathroom walls.
Getting her to bed is a trial. Mickey won’t stop sleeping on the floor, even though my dad has built bunk beds for her to share with Sonja. She won’t even sit on a bed. If my mom sets her on any bed in the house, she screams and bolts immediately to hide in a closet. I don’t think she slept once in the bed, though my mom took her out to garage sales to find sheets and blankets she would like: Star Wars sheets and a blanket with puppy paw prints. They’re still in my mom’s linen closet, though now they’re faded almost beyond recognition.
It’s one trial after another, but Mickey is accepting her new home. My mom is taming the girl. My dad is happy, and looks forward to weekends home with his little girls and his wife. He is proud of them all. Because he doesn’t see the ghost, not yet.
Because it is when the entire family is growing the most comfortable, bringing Mickey slowly back to life, that the ghost drags her away. Summer is drawing to an end. Mickey is enrolled in school, the little blue building with the mural painted on it. The school has the same pale, faded tinge of her not-dead mother who follows her everywhere. This frightens Mickey. She sees its walls, its windows closed up with blinds, the monkey bars and merry-go-round in the yard. Her new mom thinks this is a safe place, tells her she’ll spend five days each week here. If she was good, they’d let her use paint on the wall, add her own little something to the mural.
“And I’m not far away. You can have anyone call if you want me to come get you.”
She is a good mom.
She thinks Mickey is ready.
She’s been eating, washing, sleeping – though still in a sleeping bag on the floor. (She has asked for the puppy blanket, but is told she may not have it until she sleeps in the bed.) Mickey agrees to go to school, though she is afraid. She’s put in a class with Sonja. They’re allowed some time before the rest of the class arrives to explore the room, while my mom discusses Mickey with the teacher out in the hallway.
The inside of Mickey’s desk smells of melted crayons and she spends too much time with her head plunged inside, examining the contents. “They won’t put me in here, will they?” she asks Sonja. Sonja assures her that no, they only sit at the desks, not inside them. But the closets in the back are worrisome, too. “They won’t put us in there, will they?” Mickey wants to know. Sonja doesn’t think so, though she remembers – sometimes the older kids are cruel, will make you get inside.
“I won’t let them,” Mickey tells her. “I’ll protect us.” But Sonja has her doubts. Mickey’s older, but not much bigger than her.
“I have special powers,” Mickey says. She gives Sonja a reassuring hug. “I can teach you them if we need them.” With the assurance of their shared strength, Mickey starts school for the first time.
The first week my mom receives calls from every teacher. Mickey won’t sit in a desk. She stands in the back of the room. Sometimes she starts, her feet making a quick shuffle from side to side: an animal caught in the open, dodging for cover that isn’t there. She doesn’t talk to the other children. Yet she’s quick with lessons. She’s protective of and helpful with Sonja, a sweet sister. She painted a lovely rag-doll on the mural. Everyone is hopeful for her. My mother feels such relief, such pride.
She cannot see Mickey’s ghost.
But the ghost is there. It is there in the low, late afternoon sun as my mom trudges up the stairs with a basket of laundry. It’s in the room with the girls, where my mom finds Mickey and Sonja. It’s there with Mickey, who has Sonja’s Raggedy Anne doll hanging from the ceiling. A white tuft of stuffing sticks out of Raggedy Anne’s stomach. My mom’s butcher knife is clutched in one of Mickey’s hands, the doll carefully steadied in the other hand.
She is teaching Sonja how to play ‘kill.’
Her tone is academic, motherly. She shows how the blade tip should enter the side. “It is most powerful if you cut up, toward heaven,” she tells Sonja.
I remember when Raggedy Anne was passed down to me, how I’d always been curious about her stitches. Maybe she’d been jumping on the bed, or fallen from a tree.
Now when I pick up Raggedy Anne I see my mom in the door, her hand going to her mouth. This frightens her more than anything she has seen in her life, because that’s her little girl, her Sonja, that is watching Mickey, learning from her. And what if Mickey decided one day to turn that knife on something alive? Maybe one of her little girls even?
That instant is frozen in my head, my mom watching the girls with a hand over her mouth. Raggedy Anne hanging from the ceiling. The knife. Mickey’s steady, instructive speech. Mickey is trying so hard to be a good big sister.
My mom must have called my dad then, cried, told him to come get her, take Mickey back. And how sad he would have been, how practical, coming for her, taking her back to the city. The long drive silent as the car left the lovely green paradise behind. A hug good bye, a pat on the head, a “be good.” These are all sad as I watch them in my imagination, but still I see Mickey, in that room with Sonja, playing kill, playing the big sister as best she could while her mother’s ghost stood behind her, the expression on her face unreadable.
