Everyone Knows That They’re Dead. Do You?

Genevieve Valentine

 

The wallpaper looks like wreaths when Susan first sees it, during the first tour through the little bungalow that Stephen wants to show her and she’ll probably agree to buy because it seems like the kind of house you could grow to love, once it’s yours.

That linked-wreath paper in the parlor marches up and down in tidy lines. It’s a reproduction from an eighteenth-century pattern, the real estate agent says; a time when people appreciated tidy things.

Susan thinks that’s a good sign. She wants a tidy life. And someone before her had wanted that, too, and had gone back in time two hundred years to find it. It felt like a promise.

 

 

1. Susan has invoked the past, one of the early warning signs of a ghost story. (The other is to ignore the past entirely—see Fig. 2 in Appendix A for the map of dramatic irony across rising action.) Why is the past dangerous?

 

a) Because what is beyond changing is beyond controlling.

b) Because it’s made of lessons we won’t learn until it’s too late.

c) Because it’s peopled entirely with strangers, even your own past, even when it’s you.

d) Because it’s impossible to be certain of anything because you can never come to a consensus in someone else’s memory, and so we’re doomed to misunderstand everything until we die, and then if we’re unlucky, even after that.

 

 

Susan doesn’t believe in talismans or signals from the universe—they’re impractical—so she tries not to take it as superstition that the wallpaper draws her in as much as it does.

She can’t decide if she actually likes it. It feels a little old-fashioned, and she can see that occasionally the hand-printing has left a little fault. (“Adds to the charm,” says the real estate agent when she catches Susan looking.)

What Susan likes is the idea that whoever had lived here before had known what they wanted. Had known what they were doing.

Still, she can’t look at the parlor for very long. The wallpaper suits her, she thinks, it suits her very much—it just feels like the room is none of her business. Something about the floor keeps drawing her eye instead, like she’s dropped something on the carpet and can’t remember what it is.

She and the realtor stand in the kitchen, light pouring in from outside. Stephen counts off paces in the little backyard, with trees in the back and golden hops a foot thick up the back wall of the house. He’s talking to himself and flexing his hands, and Susan can’t take her eyes off the curl of his fists, but sometimes it doesn’t mean anything. Sometimes he’s just concentrating.

The kitchen is quiet; whatever he’s saying, they can’t hear it in here. The refrigerator’s pale yellow. Susan wants so badly to be a woman who has a refrigerator like that. Who has a home.

“What happened with the previous owners?” Susan asks.

 

 

2. A ghost story requires a place for the fear to live. It’s never enough to just have the ghosts; we carry the ghosts with us. What item below best harbors fear of the forgotten and unknown in objects left behind for us?

 

a) A toy in an empty room waiting for you to think about the last toy you lost and hoped someone else would love; waiting for you to remember it was exactly this one; waiting for you to pick it up.

b) A locked door. All keys belong to the dead, who know better what to do with them than you do.

c) A lie, which death always lives in.

d) A house—always with the knowledge that someone stood here before you, that someone had to be removed before the ground was flattened and the posts laid; the dead leave warnings for the dead.

 

 

The real estate agent flips through her papers. “Retirement,” she says eventually, looking at an exterminator report. “Community home. His younger brother is trying to sell the house.”

It seems like a strange thing not to know before you start showing the house, but Susan imagines a woman who’d been tidy enough to make her own wallpaper and a man who must have missed her terribly and let the place go once she died. The golden ivy in the yard went to seed without her and the bugs started coming inside.

It must have been a long time ago, Susan thinks. The parlor had been sitting empty for so long there weren’t even furniture marks in the carpet any more.

(She’d looked at the carpet more than the walls, the whole time they stood there while Stephen was considering whether or not they would live in the house. It was such a rich burgundy, and seemed as if it had never been touched—as if someone had installed it especially for her, after the last lady of the house had died and taken her furniture with her. She kept looking down at it, drawn to the depth of the pile.)

“I love it,” Stephen calls out, scraping dirt off his shoe on the rim of the back door. Susan flinches when he raises his voice. The sun catches his hair, his shoulders, the edge of his smile. “Susan, honey, what do you think?”

They take the house, of course. Sometimes you just have a good feeling.

The wallpaper looks like wreaths for nearly six months. By then, the thrill of decorating and of looking out the wide kitchen windows onto the little garden and weeding around the ivy have begun to wear off. Stephen’s started getting restless—the anger he used to explain as frustration with their cramped apartment and the neighbors, just needing more space, just needing a house of their own, just needing her to shut the fuck up long enough to let him think, just needing her to stop getting blotchy and embarrassing herself. Susan blinks into the butter-yellow refrigerator as she gets ice out for the bruising.

Autumn comes. Susan rakes leaves carefully away from the ivy and the flower beds, goes to the library to find out how to make them compost. Turns out you can break down anything, if you work hard enough on it. Some bugs can eat a body down to the bone.

She puts the leaves in bags and lets the garbage men take them.

She cleans summer dust off the wallpaper in the living room with a toothbrush. That paper stayed just as it was even as a new stove and new counters and new plumbing made their way in by inches, and Susan wants to take care.

The walls are warm under her hands, too warm for a room that gets no sun in the afternoons, and she wonders if the whole house is less sturdy than the real estate agent told them. The ivy vines creak at night. The doorknob rattles, on windy days, when Stephen’s gone.

Mid-winter, the floorboards start to groan.

It sounds like robbery the first time, and Stephen startles awake and gasps, “Jesus Christ,” and goes downstairs with the baseball bat he keeps by the bed. When she comes down to check on him he’s standing in the doorway of the parlor, staring like he’s cornered someone who broke in, but there’s no one.

After that night he pretends not to hear it. He’s embarrassed not to have checked the foundations better before they bought the house, she thinks.

She doesn’t speak about it either. It horrifies her—it’s someone walking, the rhythm of steps; no cold snap or old house sounds like that, and she starts to dream about walking downstairs and meeting something terrible—but she knows better than to complain.

The winter is dry. The floorboards start to groan all the time, wherever Stephen goes. She’s worried about the house—she’s worried he’ll be angry at himself for missing this, because Stephen never stays angry at himself for very long—but all that winter, she at least knows where he is, and it’s nice to hear him coming.

He travels for business in the spring. The house breathes while he’s gone. Susan spends a few warm afternoons in the backyard, planting flowers in the wide dirt beds, watching birds drop into the trees. The rest of the time is work; the molding on the walls is impossible to keep clean, and the rooms upstairs have charming log beams that cut below the arched ceiling just enough to collect dust along the tops. It all has to be kept clean. No excuses.

She sits in the parlor, when she can. (It hasn’t happened much before—Stephen won’t go in it, and she has to be where he is.) The wallpaper makes her eyes ache, late at night, that heaviness of avoiding someone’s gaze. Sometimes, when she’s too tired to look up at the walls, it looks like the carpet’s wet, and she lifts her feet for a moment before she can blink herself awake enough to realize she’s being silly.

When he’s back from one of his trips, it’s usually all right for the first few days. It fades. He gets snappish if she does something wrong, angry if she cries; he says she has to pull herself together or he’s going to get angry.

She stays up all that night. The branches tap against the house like the garden’s trying to come inside; someone’s walking downstairs.

Susan finds herself sitting in the parlor for a few minutes every night, despite Stephen making fun of her for hiding. She finds things to do with her hands so she has an excuse not to look for him, waiting for him to follow her in. He never does.

One night when he’s out at a conference and Susan’s darning socks, she looks up at the parlor wallpaper and sees that it’s nooses.

Eventually Stephen burns down the house. She’s still inside it, watching herself swing.

 

 

3. Who is the worst person in this story?

 

a) Stephen, for abusing her and surviving.

b) The real estate agent, for never asking why Susan jumped when her husband said her name.

c) The last woman in that house, whose warnings were so frightening that Susan abandoned the parlor, and instead of bracing herself in the only room beyond his control when the time came to save herself, she was in their bedroom, dusting the open beams and thinking about wallpaper.

d) The reader, for wondering more about what’s under the floorboards than about Susan, because there’s no point caring about the doomed.

 

 

The parlor was untouched by the fire. Not a single ash had landed on that carpet. The construction company had to knock the walls in with the excavator so they could get down to the foundations and start over.

They found the body in the wreckage: an ulna and some finger bones churned up by the backhoe, a skull fragment hanging off one of the metal teeth by the eye socket, and then the rest of it a few bones at a time, under the hands of a handful of solemn underlings from the coroner’s office and few beat cops still green at the gills.

They couldn’t tell where the body had originally been buried; the earth had been moved too much before any bones were discovered. Could have been anywhere in the house, the front patio, the little garden.

Finally, someone said, “Under the parlor, maybe,” because someone had to.

No one agreed, but no one offered any other suggestion, all the time they were picking bones out of the ground.

 

 

4. If one of the police officers took a little garnet ring out of the dirt for the girl he wanted to marry—new cops don’t make much, and this body had so many other questions about it that it wouldn’t matter if one thing was gone, and even if the ring could have helped, any detective knows you never get everything back once a body gets buried—who would be haunted?

 

a) the police officer

b) the fiancée

 

5. Essay question: Discuss the ethical implications of the transitive property as it applies to ghostly retribution. (You may use the blank space beneath Appendix B for diagrams if necessary.)

 

 

Her name is Lucy, and she knows immediately that the ring is haunted, because when Greg gives it to her she looks over his shoulder for someone’s approval, which makes no sense since they’re alone. A lot of people second-guess things like that, but Lucy doesn’t see much point in it; you know what you know. This isn’t his to give.

She keeps it. It fits perfectly. The stone still keeps sliding down and pressing into her palm, so it hurts every time she closes her hand, but she knows that has nothing to do with the ring.

She’s pretty sure she doesn’t want to actually marry Greg any more, now that she knows he’s a fucking grave robber, but she doesn’t want to get rid of it. The ring is still a promise. It’s just the one she made with whoever she was looking for over Greg’s shoulder.

And she doesn’t know what she’d do with the ring if she wanted to give it back. Who would she give it back to—his bosses? Does she want to ruin his career? Bury it in the foundations of the new house? It’s too late for her not to be haunted, so handing it back won’t help that, and she’s not sure how angry she is at Greg for being stupid and thieving from the dead.

She decides to wait and see what the department finds out about the body. That might be enough to keep this ring from tugging at her.

The precinct closes the case in three weeks; inconclusive evidence.

Greg doesn’t understand why she’s so angry.

“What did you even find out? Do you even know who she is? What if someone’s been waiting all this time to find out what happened to her?”

(She’s sure it’s “all this time.” That woman’s body belongs to her ring, and the ring is old. She can feel it pulling on her whole arm. It’s heavier whenever Greg is home.)

Greg shrugs. “The coroner’s office didn’t really want to talk about it. Said every test made the bones come back a different age—some of them must have been from the woman who burned the place down, they were a lot newer. They assume the other body is eighty-ish years old, but—I mean, people are buried everywhere.” He shrugs. Some woman’s old bones.

“She still needs a name, Greg. A burial. Some woman molding out in that backyard—what if we found some poor murdered woman in our backyard someday? Wouldn’t you want to put things right?”

He frowns at her, peevish. He’s been having trouble moving off the beat, and he gets annoyed when he thinks she’s trying to be a better detective than he is. “I get it. But they said old age and closed it. If I open it up now I’ll look like a troublemaker about that other woman, and it might not be anything.”

The ring pinches; the hair on her neck stands up. “Did they look at the other woman, too? The one who burned the house down?”

“Look, it’s a creepy find,” Greg says, like that explains everything.

So Lucy thinks about giving back the ring. She can’t tell Greg—Greg told her he bought it online and he’d be furious if she called him a liar—but she could go to the precinct and turn it in and make them reopen the case long enough to give the ghost a name.

She doesn’t. She doesn’t want Greg to have any reason to resent her—cops take care of their own, and she’d have to be careful about looking like she’s ratting him out. There’s no way to do that when she has a dead woman’s ring on her finger.

She thinks about what she can do alone. She thinks about the empty lot where the house was, the ashes barely tilled into the dirt, except those are mostly the ashes of the other dead woman, the new one, not the one who had the ring.

It seems like her best idea, for a long time. She has to know something. Anything. She even drives past the lot, but something so cold comes over her as soon as she turns down the street that she can’t even bring herself to look, backs up onto the main road as three other cars honk wildly at her. Her hand is shaking; the ring burns.

She thinks about going down to the municipal grave site at the edge of town, where the unclaimed dead go, and digging deep enough to rest the ring on top of the ashes there, eighty years dead. Just give it back, give up, hope for forgiveness. She knows she won’t go. She’s exhausted, and she doesn’t have the nerve.

When she wakes up, her hands are dirty. The ring’s still on her finger. She can’t take it off.

 

 

6. What keeps you from the graveyard?

 

a) The fear a grave will swallow you—a child’s fear you made academic, like poison spiders. The worst will never happen if you’re careful, but you have to be careful.

b) The fear no one will visit your grave.

c) Knowing someone who can’t fucking wait to visit your grave.

d) How much you want to be there. Every time you pass it, how quiet and still and lonely it is, how much better that is than anything that’s happened to you, how much your whole body yearns to be under the dirt and finished.

 

 

Abigail Sutter drew up the wallpaper design by hand for the parlor in their house. Charles had put it together practically by himself, from a Sears kit that arrived with lumber so crisp and unweathered that Charles and her brother both got splinters. Abigail was determined to take as much care with the interior as he had with the five-piece porch columns, putting them together at the end of a long day, practically in the dark, so the house would be done before the October cold.

This house was going to be important, and she treated it that way. The carpets were hardy and plain but more refined than rag rugs, and their worn furniture took on a better patina when it looked as if they’d been selected for their age against such nice carpets. The wallpaper, she decided, must do the same job.

“What do you think?” she said, setting down the magazine clipping she’d gotten the pattern from—a painting of a woman in a gown with skirts as wide as the kitchen—just to watch his face as he looked at it. “For the parlor.”

“If you think the dress’ll fit,” he said finally, and she laughed, and after a moment he ducked his head and smiled, which for him was the same as laughing.

Charles and Abigail carved the stamp, and then he took her sketch to the man two towns over who could make it, and when it came back he helped her hang it in the parlor, grinning as they got their fingers tacky with paste. After it was done, he stood in the center of the room and nodded, and she took his arm and watched the sun setting through the windows.

Whenever they had visitors he’d bring them in and let them exclaim over how nice the place was and then say, “Abigail did the papering herself,” to make sure they’d exclaim again.

He even showed them the magazine clipping out of his wallet, with the woman in the too-wide dress and her lover pushing her on the swing, until the paper was unfolded once too often and split across the middle. (He kept the pieces in a drawer and took them out anyway, whenever they had a guest who was worth it—after dessert and before coffee, when you wanted something new to talk about.)

 

 

7. What is the most effective configuration of the torn magazine clipping? Which is most likely to be haunted? Are they the same thing?

 

a) The lady on the swing decapitated by the fold, taking just his hat with her, so that her lover is pushing a corpse back and forth, forever smiling, chilly at the scalp and unaware.

b) The lady bisected just below the waist, so it looks as if she’s grabbed onto lucky ropes to escape her lover. Their bottom halves look strange without the line from one of them to the other—broken doll parts.

c) Clean through the center, so that the lady on the swing is whole and the lover is whole, neatly separated. She looks more and more like she’s closing her eyes. The lover seems to be turning his head, as if he’s just realized something’s missing. Charles and Abigail are dead before the lover ever turns enough to look out at them.

d) Between the photograph of the painting and the long caption discussing the exhibit it was in. Neither Abigail nor Charles ever look for that part. Someone will buy the table at a flea market thirty years later and throw it away, and the last of Charles will vanish.

 

 

After two months of dreams, Lucy gives up.

“I think we need a break,” she says, and Greg frowns at her in that way that’s really starting to drive her fucking nuts, and says, “Is there someone else?” like the only reason she’d dump a grave robber was if she had someone else waiting.

“No, of course not,” she says, as calmly as she can (never piss off a cop), and says, “I still have the ring on, don’t I?” He looks a little pacified at that.

She can’t take it off. She hasn’t been able to take it off for two months.

Finally, Lucy goes down to the library and the Historical Society and reads about the house, because as someone who accepted a ring that was obviously haunted, she’s in it now, and she’ll be damned if she asks Greg for help.

(In her dreams she looks at Greg holding out the ring and turns and runs, just at the moment someone who she never sees but who is not Greg reaches out to stop her. In her dreams she tries and tries to return the ring to the graveyard or the wreckage of the house, and wakes up with dirt under her nails and the ring immovable on her left hand. She’s getting used to it.)

At the Historical Society, she gets into the archives by saying she wants to convince the town to bring back the town’s old Flower Festival. The Festival used to have a photo catalog every year so the gardeners could stand amid their handiwork.

“Wouldn’t it be so nice if we could bring back some of the charms of the past,” she says, as the lady at the desk nods, considering, already opening the door.

There’s a woman sitting in the parlor of the house that burned down. The photo’s in black and white, so she looks like a ghost. The wallpaper behind her looks like a ghost. She’s wearing the ring.

The wallpaper behind her looks like nooses.

Lucy’s fingertips sting as she touches the page (“Mrs. Charles Sutter, Secretary of the Women’s League”), and she stands up and leaves without even asking for a photocopy. The nooses wouldn’t show up to anyone else, she knows that already.

Then she goes to the offices of the Ledger and asks if they have any photos of the aftermath of the fire. Greg had said someone came by from there, when the Fire Department guys were still early in the process of cleaning it out. (“Made everybody uncomfortable,” he’d said. The ring pinched her as he spoke.)

They do have pictures. There’s just nothing in them that Lucy recognizes as what it used to be—a ceiling beam, a length of rope, the corpse of a woman whose body had to be burned to the ground because otherwise it would be clear what he had done.

Susan hadn’t wanted to die. That’s what Lucy saw, in the photograph of a parlor from a hundred years ago. Whatever happened to Susan Lennox was murder. There’s no proof in the pictures, but Lucy doesn’t question it; you know what you know.

Stephen’s at one of those clinics that’s like a hotel, because they think his mental health needs some supervision. He’d been suspected of manslaughter, at first—Greg told her when it happened, husbands always look good for something like this—but he’d cried so hard when he talked about his wife, and everyone who had seen her that spring knew she’d looked a little depressed all along. That’s what Stephen Lennox is getting treated right now—his depression. He has two weeks left.

But Lucy will never prove anything. Not the murder, not the ghost. Not where her ring came from. That house is conveniently ashes, and whatever ghosts are there now don’t mean anything to anyone living, except her. The coroner’s office didn’t think it was even worth sticking a shovel into a grave to see if Abigail Sutter was where the headstone advertised. Absolutely no one is going to help her look into Susan’s murder if she turns in the ring and rats Greg out.

She drives by the house again. She combs through the ashes until a neighbor calls the cops on her, and then she has to explain to one of Greg’s cop friends that she was looking for any wallpaper that might have survived.

“Don’t you think this is weird?” she asks, like it just occurred to her. “Like, do houses just burn down? This really seems like a murder.”

He laughs.

She sits two blocks outside the clinic gates in her car, waiting to run Stephen down when he gets out. She’s too far away, though; by the time she gets the car turned on she has a red light, and when she tries to run it anyway she gets sideswiped. Not badly, but enough that a cop comes. She remembers him from last year’s charity spaghetti dinner—he’d been one of the clowns for the kids. He talks the other driver down. Then he tells Lucy he’s called Greg, just so Greg knows.

“You seem really shaken up lately,” he says. “Greg’s getting worried.” The ring pinches.

“Thank you so much, I appreciate it,” she says. She throws her phone in the garbage at the car repair shop. She tells them she’ll be back in fifteen minutes, and heads for the only place in the world where no one will ask what she’s doing there.

Abigail’s ghost wants vengeance for Susan; there’s nothing else that will sate her. Lucy understands. It’s just that she has nothing else to give.

When the security guard at the graveyard finds her, just before the evening rounds, she’s slumped over the annual municipal grave, getting cold. Her ring finger is missing—looks like she’d cut it off. He doesn’t know why; not like there’s a ring.

 

 

8. The dead have forfeited fear. They need not be reasoned or just. They aren’t beholden, which makes them a horror. If you could be as ruthless as you wanted about anything at all, would you? (Show your work.)

 

 

Sometimes a home collapses under silence. Sometimes not. Once when Charles came home from a week of jury duty, Abigail came down the stairs just to walk back up to the house with her arm tucked into his. They hadn’t spoken again until after dinner, when he handed her a hair ribbon he’d bought and said, “Thought of you,” and that was all they said until it was time to turn in.

She wore the ribbon all the time, a little glimpse of green against the red carpet in the parlor, and whenever he looked up from his paper he smiled like a fool.

One winter he got pneumonia. As he recuperated into the spring, Abigail kept him in the parlor. “So I know where the sickness is,” she said, as she wiped his forehead and pressed a bowl of broth into his grip, and he covered her hands with his hands.

When he was well enough to go up the stairs, he said, “Safe to catch it now, I can play nurse,” and she laughed.

She stepped on a loose nail on the floor of the parlor one night. Water had gotten into the new lumber; the nail had rusted. She was dead in a week.

The doctor called in a minister even though neither Charles nor Abigail were really church folk, and the minister brought a funeral director and a coffin they set up in the parlor, and they talked about funeral arrangements while Charles nodded calmly, as if he was actually going to let them take Abigail away from the house she loved so much.

When he turned on the tap in the bathroom, he forgot, for a few seconds, how to swallow. He forgot to dry his hands, and when he came back into the bedroom and took her hand, it slipped. He waited until he had some strength back in his wrists before he picked her up. Wouldn’t do to trip carrying your bride down the stairs.

He buried her in the backyard, under the ivy, and carried the dirt back inside in sugar bags to weigh down the coffin.

At night he’d listen to the wind in the branches and worry she would feel it, but the fear never lasted long. She had loved it here even when the branches fell. And it was just a grave.

He knew where she really was; whenever he passed it he knew she was inside, working on something that pleased her, a flash of green against the carpet floor. All he had to do was not look, and she was still alive.

 

 

9. Essay question: Are ghosts a function of time or of grief?

 

 

10.   What is the ghost story?

 

a) Every story is a ghost story.

b) Grief is smoke, and memory fails you. Better to think the dead come back.

c) Cook your grandmother’s soup. Touch something for the last time. Lose the way to a place you lived. Forget the name of a person who loved you. The part of you that loves is a maker of ghosts.

d) The ghost is sated, or it isn’t. The living prevail, or the grave finds room. Someone’s held to justice, or else ghosts; the dead leave warnings for the dead. The grave is safe, or someone is walking through a brand new house, pausing in the dining room as if there’s something in there she forgot. She won’t know why. She’ll take the house. The first night she’s alone, she’ll find a ring.