Mark and Allie spent the next week cementing plans for the wedding. They called friends and family—mostly Allie’s—spreading the good news. They nailed down preliminary details: They’d be married at the end of the coming summer, on September 5. The ceremony would be held on the western shore of Lake Tahoe, in a private lodge overlooking the water; they’d been lucky to book the place, even this far in advance. The guest list would be small. Lewis would be Mark’s best man; Allie’s sister, Darlene, would be the maid of honor.
By Saturday night they’d hastily developed a plan to introduce Mark’s father to Allison’s family. Sam drove to Columbus the following afternoon, and that evening both families toasted Mark and Allison’s good fortune over dinner at the townhouse. As always Mark admired his father’s civility; Sam charmed Allie’s mother and sister, and managed not to argue with Allie’s father about politics—he chose, instead, to tell folksy stories about the Colorado gold barons that Mark could tell were really about the Bush administration. Mark spent much of the night talking with Darlene’s dreadlocked boyfriend, Tim, who asked him for business advice—Tim and Darly were thinking about acquiring chickens, selling organic eggs. After dinner Sam helped Allison with the dishes. Mark heard them laughing in the kitchen: Allie chastising Sam for not bringing Helen, his father’s embarrassed protests.
It wasn’t until Monday that Mark listened again to the message the strange woman, Connie Pelham, had left on his phone; he did so while walking across the OSU campus, killing an hour while his father had lunch with an old colleague. He listened again to her sad, tentative voice, the sound of her child in the background.
By now he had convinced himself that Connie Pelham was someone who thought he owed her money. He’d been over and over his records, had found nothing—but he’d made mistakes before. Two years after Brendan had died, Mark had worked for a friend’s web-design start-up; it had failed after only a couple of months, bankrupting the friend. Mark’s name had turned up on forms it shouldn’t have, and he’d had to hire a lawyer to disentangle himself. Maybe Connie had something to do with that mess.
It didn’t matter. He had done nothing wrong; he wasn’t going to go out of his way to seek her out. He deleted the message, and her number.
And anyway, he had a much more unpleasant call to make.
Mark sat on a bench by Mirror Lake and dialed Chloe. She wouldn’t answer; she was teaching her second graders. Even so he struggled, leaving his message. He told her he was sorry he hadn’t checked in on her in a while—and, right away, wished he hadn’t; she would hate that kind of language from him: checking in. He told her he hoped she was well. That he hoped they could have dinner soon, to catch up. A week from tomorrow was December 18, Brendan’s birthday (and here Mark stumbled, as he always did, even though they’d almost always met on that day); he really hoped she’d have the time to meet, around then. If she wanted.
When he’d finished he sat watching the water of the lake, the semicircle of ice that obscured it. As students he and Chloe used to walk here, holding hands, kissing when they were alone. They’d probably sat on this very bench and made each other promise after promise.
I’ll always want you. I’ll love you forever. Of course I want kids.
Had he picked this spot in order to make himself sadder? He was capable of it.
It took her two days, but Chloe finally left him a message in return. Sure, she said, let’s have dinner. I’m free—I’m free that day. Tuesday. She sounded frustrated, her voice pinched, a little hoarse. I’ve got to run.
She paused a long time, and his heart beat faster and faster. Was something wrong? Did she know about Allison already? What was she about to say?
Okay, she said at last, like the closing of a door. Bye now.
The following Sunday night, while Mark browsed alone at the Barnes and Noble at the Easton Town Center, killing time while Allie shopped for her mother at a crafts store nearby, Connie Pelham appeared in front of him.
Despite a nice dinner out, and the lingering excitement of the engagement, Mark was enjoying his solitude. The past week and its phone calls and its endless planning—not to mention a dozen emergency jobs his clients had called in between Wednesday and Friday—had exhausted him. An evening shopping for books and maybe a new CD was exactly what he needed.
His enjoyment ran deep. In the chilly, numb year after Chloe left him, Mark had gotten into the habit of visiting any number of bookstores around town, especially in the evenings, when he was most often at loose ends. He liked to wander the shelves, nursing a coffee, picking up books—fiction, usually, or history—without even looking at them. He’d close his eyes and lightly run his fingertips across the spines, until a book felt right, pushed subtly back. He’d stay until the bookstore closed, before returning, reluctantly, to his tiny apartment, or to an all-night diner (anyplace where he had to seem normal, composed—anyone but the man he was), where he read whatever he’d purchased ravenously, without allowing his own thoughts any time or space to intrude.
He was glad to be back in this place, now, as himself: happier, more relaxed, needing no trickery to distract him from his life. Even so, he had to admit he missed those old days, just a little. Especially that odd period of months when he had begun, slowly, to accept what had happened to him. When the pain had begun to subside; to recede, tide-like.
Once, during the spring when Brendan was five, Mark had taken him to Goodale Park, to learn to throw a Frisbee. Brendan, while running headlong across the grass, had turned an ankle; fifty feet away he’d collapsed as though shot, and had begun to wail. Mark had run to him, put his arm around Brendan’s shoulders, let him sniffle into his chest—and then Brendan had surprised him.
It feels so good, he said.
Twisting your ankle feels good?
No, Brendan said. That hurts worse than anything. But when it goes away? That feels better than anything.
He’d laughed, turning his ankle from side to side, the laces on his sneaker flopping and dirty. Mark had laughed, too.
A woman’s voice said his name, then: “Mr. Fife?”
Mark turned, startled, and saw her, five feet away: the woman who’d stared at him through the coffee shop window. Here in front of him, she was younger than he’d thought—younger than he was, maybe—but this was the same round, tan face; the same narrow brown eyes; the same dark halo of curls. She wore the same black coat. Only the color of her scarf had changed, from silver to cerulean.
She still, however, looked frightened of him. Her eyes darted across his face; her hands worked and twisted. He wondered if she wasn’t just a random crazy, after all, about to harangue him about the evils of the Democrats, or to ask him over and over what time it was. The crazies liked bookstores—he’d noticed that, when he was crazy and spending a lot of time in bookstores himself.
“I’m Mark Fife,” he said.
The woman drew back—fearfully, Mark thought. “I’m Connie Pelham. I called you?” Her voice—it was indeed the same voice that had left him the odd phone message—was high-pitched, quavery. It sounded, he thought, like her hair—curly, too large, out of control.
She offered her hand, awkwardly, and he nearly fumbled his coffee trying to shake it.
He didn’t know what else to say, so he asked, “Connie, have we… met?”
Connie Pelham glanced out the bookstore window, toward the parking lot, at the cold rain that had fallen steadily all evening, refracting each headlight in such a way that the window seemed broken into jagged shards.
“No,” she said. “I’m—no. We haven’t. Not really. I’m—I’m doing some amateur detective work, I guess, but I’m not very good at it.” She took a deep breath, as though summoning will. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee, Mark?”
Detective work? “What’s this about? Do I owe someone money?”
“No! It’s not like that. I don’t work for anyone.” She smiled. “I’m just me.”
And who was that, exactly? A woman frightened of him before, frightened of him now. Any curiosity he felt was undone by deep misgiving.
Connie glanced at the window again. “I’m sorry,” she said, when she saw him staring. “My—my ex-husband is due soon. He’s dropping off my son.”
He remembered the child’s voice, speaking behind hers on her phone message. This strange woman had a child, and he did not.
“Ms. Pelham, what’s this about?”
She nodded, as though listening to a voice inside her. “I’ll just say it. Mr. Fife, I live at One Fifty-six Locust. In Victorian Village.”
He started. Connie had just given him the address of his house—his and Chloe’s old house, from the old life. The place where they’d lived with Brendan, where Brendan had died.
She said, “My—my ex and I bought it nine months ago from Margie Kinnick. I—your name was on the papers. I found your picture online, on your website? I’ve been thinking about whether or not to call you. Then I thought, no, I ought to tell you in person. I saw you at the coffee shop when I went to find your address, but I saw you in the window—you remember?—and I got nervous, and I thought, I can’t do this, I should leave this poor man alone—”
Her voice hitched, as though she might cry. His misgivings curdled into alarm, and he scanned the store, hoping to see Allison, returning for him.
“—But then tonight, I saw you walk in through the door, and I thought, that’s him, and then I thought, maybe it’s meant to be, you know? Maybe I’m supposed to talk to you?”
Connie smiled, then—suddenly, weirdly hopeful. “Do you think things are supposed to happen?” she asked. “Like in fate?”
Mark heard this question more frequently than he could bear, from friends and strangers alike, as though it might comfort him. They asked the man whose mother had withered to a moaning skeleton before dying whether he believed God had a plan. They asked the man whose son had broken his neck falling down the stairs whether or not he believed things happened for a reason. They asked a man whose wife had abandoned him for her grief what he thought about fate.
“No,” he said tightly. “I don’t.”
Connie frowned. “Well, I do. And seeing you here is—I guess it’s no stranger than anything else that’s happened.”
He heard his father’s voice: You guess?
Mark could guess, too. Connie could only want to talk about one thing, couldn’t she? Weeks after Brendan’s accident, he and Chloe had put their house on the market—they couldn’t bear being in it anymore, surrounded first by their son’s toys, his strewn clothes, and then by the absence of them. They couldn’t bear the walk, every day, up and down the narrow stairs. Their own echoing voices.
But no one would make them an offer. Turned out there was a law—for three years, you had to report to buyers if someone had died in the house. Mark and Chloe had resigned themselves to a year—but three? Three seemed impossibly cruel.
Then after six months of silence, their realtor, Margie Kinnick—dear Margie, who’d been so friendly with them when they bought the place, who for years had stopped by to visit whenever she was on their street—had offered to buy the house from them. She was in the market for a place in the Village, she said; she’d always loved their particular house. Her heart broke for them, she said. Why not make a deal that would help everyone? They’d sold the place to her for less than its value, with relief.
Mark hadn’t spoken with Margie in ages; he’d simply assumed she still lived at the old place. Just last year he’d gotten a Christmas card from her, with 156 Locust as the return address.
So Margie had sold the house to Connie Pelham. And—Mark guessed—she hadn’t said a word to Connie about its past. Someone in the neighborhood must have tipped Connie off, told her the history of her expensive new house, the tragedy that had occurred there. And now this woman who believed in fate was playing amateur detective. Seeking him out.
“Mr. Fife,” she said, “can we sit down?”
He wanted to run from her.
“Sure,” he said, his voice soft, conciliatory. His angry-client voice. “Sure, Connie.”
She led him to the café at the front of the store, and asked again if he wanted a drink, then looked so sad and dismayed when he held up his coffee cup that he almost ordered another just to keep her from crying. She left him to stand in line, casting nervous glances both at him and out the front windows.
When she was in line he took out his phone and texted Allison: Come get me. Urgent. A middle-aged man with a ponytail was setting up an acoustic guitar amplifier in the corner of the café. The music would provide a good excuse to break away, even if Allison didn’t come.
Connie returned with a mug of tea and smiled. “I wish I could have coffee, but it’s too acid.”
“Ms. Pelham,” he said, “look, I—”
“I know. I’m a crazy woman and I should just go away. I know. But I have to ask you something. Something really important.”
She placed her hands around her mug and looked down into the steam. As though it contained a sign. God’s plan, just visible in the depths.
“Mr. Fife. Did you have a son? A little boy?”
So he had been right.
“I did.” His voice measured. “My ex-wife and I lost our son in 2001. His name was Brendan.”
Connie lifted a hand to her mouth. “Oh God.”
“Ms. Pelham,” Mark said, “you have to understand. I really don’t like to talk about this.”
She closed her eyes. “And it happened—there? In my house?”
Her house. The same old voice that had spoken to him during his long years of grief offered up its familiar whisper: Unfair, unfair.
“Yes,” he said. “It happened at the house.”
She was crying, now, tears rolling out from the corners of her eyes. “Where?”
“The stairs,” he said. “He fell down the top flight, onto the landing.”
“Look,” he said, “I had no idea Margie would—would choose not to disclose something like that.” He added, quickly, “It’s not the house’s fault.”
Connie dabbed at her eyes with a napkin. “It’s a good house. And I sank—my husband and I put a lot of money into it. It’s a good school system. I mean, we wanted that for our son.”
“Yeah,” Mark said. “So did we.”
Didn’t she know about libraries? Couldn’t she have looked up the article in the Dispatch?
“Ms. Pelham,” he said, “I’m sorry, but I really don’t like talking about this, okay? You have to understand—”
Connie plunged forward as though he hadn’t spoken. “My son, Jacob. He’s almost nine. Two weeks ago I got a call from Parkhurst Elementary. From Mrs. Dane?”
Mark didn’t know her. Brendan hadn’t lived to be nine, to have Mrs. Dane as a teacher. But he nodded helplessly.
“Jacob kept falling asleep in class, and he told her he was too scared to sleep. So I asked him about this, and Jacob—he tried to lie, and tell me he was sleeping fine. But I kept pushing him, and pushing him, and finally he told me the same thing—that he was too afraid to go to sleep. So I asked him, Why was he afraid?”
Don’t say it, Mark thought.
“And Jacob said, ‘Because of the ghost—’ ”
He stood, too quickly; his chair clattered backward. “That’s enough.”
“—The ghost of the little boy who used to live here.”
Connie’s frightened moist eyes. His own breath. The slow bubbling murmur of the voices around them. A guitar string plucked, plucked, tightening into tune.
“Never speak to me again,” he said, then turned and left.
An older couple at the next table was staring at him; the woman’s hand covered her mouth. He walked quickly past the registers to the front door, a sick taste tightening his throat. Connie Pelham might have said something to his back as he pushed through the doors. Outside the cold wind had strengthened; sleet cut at his cheeks. He looked back; Connie was walking toward the doorway after him, her eyes sparkling with tears.
He reached into his pocket, to call Allison, but then a horn honked to his left: Allie pulling up to the curb in her Honda, peering at him through the streaked windshield. He jogged to the passenger door—slipping briefly on a patch of slick black ice—and ducked into the warm car.
“We have to go,” he said.
“What’s wrong?”
“Just go, okay?”
“Okay,” Allie said. She put the car into gear and pulled away from the bookstore. Connie Pelham emerged, her face twisted, Mark thought—he watched her in the passenger mirror, the reflection threaded over with quicksilver rain, cold and sluggish—twisted up in rage, or grief, or both.
On the drive home he told Allie what had happened. She listened carefully, frowning, and when Mark told her the worst part—when the word “ghost” left his lips—she erupted:
“Oh my God! She didn’t say that.”
“She did.”
“What did you tell her?”
“Not much.” He shook his head. “I ran for it.”
“She just came up to you?” Allie glanced over at him. “How’d she find you?”
This was a good question. Connie Pelham knew where they lived; those had to have been her footprints he’d seen, just after she’d spotted him at the coffee shop. Mark had never told Allison about them, and now he began to feel a little sick. Had Connie been following him? Things happened for a reason, she’d said. He bet they did.
When Allie parked in front of the townhouse, Mark half expected to see Connie Pelham already standing at the doorway, wringing her hands. But when they walked to their door, no shadowy figures emerged from the alley. He locked the door behind him, and shut all the downstairs blinds.
In the bathroom he pressed a scalding washcloth to his face. Replayed what Connie had said to him: The ghost of the little boy who used to live here. Brendan, a ghost.
Preposterous. Worse. And yet the implications of the idea—ocean-size, icy-cold—touched at the shore of his mind, and he felt an appalling fear, old and familiar. The horrible crash on the stairs. The silence. The world he knew suddenly crushed to flinders in the palm of a giant’s hand.
He breathed in and out through the washcloth until it cooled.
When he entered the kitchen, a few minutes later, Allison asked, “What did she expect you to do?”
“I didn’t talk to her long enough to find out.”
Connie had told him she was waiting for her son. A young boy—the one he’d heard on her phone message.
“I bet the kid heard something at school,” he said.
“What?”
“She has a son. He goes to Brendan’s old school. I bet he heard something. Or one of the neighbors told him. ‘You live in the house where that kid died.’ Something like that. And then he ran with it.”
The more Mark thought about this, the more he was sure of it. The adults in the neighborhood would only speak about what happened among themselves, quietly, respectfully. The neighborhood children, though—the news that a little boy had died would have been passed down among them, in the back of the school bus, at slumber parties. Brendan’s old friends were just starting high school, now—but that didn’t mean they, or their younger siblings, would never cross paths with Connie’s boy. And if Jacob Pelham was young enough—how old had Connie Pelham said he was? Nine?—he could easily have lost himself in a story like this. Lying awake, staring into the shadows of his high-ceilinged room, thinking about the little dead boy.
Mark said, “It makes sense. The kid’s folks are split. He’s alone with his mother in a big old house. He made it up.”
“Sure.” Allie was still mad, her brow knitted. “But for that woman to—to just say that, to your face. I want to call the cops on her.”
Mark thought of all the times Chloe had gotten a hair up her ass, taking offense at some slight against Brendan, real or imagined. The ferocity she’d unleash. “Maybe Connie’s just—I don’t know. You get protective of your kid. If she truly believes this—”
Allie gave him a look. “That doesn’t excuse her.”
“I’m not saying it does. But parenthood’s a weird place.”
Her voice tightened. “I’m not saying it isn’t.”
Since the night of their engagement, they hadn’t talked any further about the subject of children—not even when Allison’s mother had looked into Mark’s office and cried, Oh! This would make a wonderful nursery! But he hadn’t avoided the topic on purpose, and just now he hadn’t meant to shut Allie out. He’d only been thinking of Brendan, of all the times he used to wake in the night, afraid of imaginary monsters. Of all the times Mark himself had woken, panicked by Brendan’s cries.
Allie began to wipe down the countertops. “Do you think she’ll try to contact you again?”
“Allie, she’s come to the house before.”
“What?” Allison turned to him. “When?”
Mark told her then about finding the second set of footprints, the morning Connie had spied on him through the coffee shop window.
“Call the police,” Allie said.
“I don’t know if that’s necessary.”
“She can’t come here again, Mark.”
“No, she can’t. But—look, what would I even tell the cops?”
He remembered, then, the young policeman who’d come by the house when Brendan had fallen; he’d shown up moments after the ambulance had. The cop had been young, Mark’s age, with thin rust-red hair. He’d said he would drive Mark to the hospital, behind the ambulance. He’d gripped Mark’s arm when he tried to go up the narrow stairs to the landing. Mr. Fife, he’d said, Wait for the paramedics to finish. Let them do their job. Mark heard the paramedics on the landing, the fizzy crackle of their radios. He could see Brendan’s foot, canted toward the top step of the bottom flight, his dirty sneaker pushed off his heel. The laces untied.
I have a son, too, the cop had said, his grip painful.
Again, Allison asked, “What did she think you’d do?”
He held up his hands. “I really need to stop thinking about this. Okay?”
Allie searched his face, then gave in. “Sure. Sure. Want me to make some tea?”
He didn’t, but he nodded.
Allie put on a pot of water to boil. She readied a mug for each of them, and went upstairs to change into her pajamas. Mark remained at the table.
The little boy who used to live here.
The very word. Ghost.
The teakettle whistled; Allie filled her mug. Steam rose up from between her hands.
Allison must have seen the anger in his face. She placed her hand, hot from the mug, across his wrist. “You don’t even believe in ghosts. Do you?”
Of course he didn’t. His father was an atheist, and Mark’s mother had been something like a Buddhist; as in most matters, Mark had decided a long time ago that Sam Fife’s view of the world served him just fine. For as long as he’d been a functional adult, he hadn’t believed in heaven or hell, or souls—and if you didn’t believe in souls, you couldn’t believe in ghosts, could you? You couldn’t believe in an afterlife at all.
How many times since Brendan had died had he explained this to people? So many well-meaning relatives and friends had told him, at the funeral, Brendan’s in heaven now. Or: He’s in a better place. If his father and Chloe hadn’t been standing beside him he’d have argued with every one of them: No! He’s gone. He’s utterly and completely gone. Don’t you get it?
He was something, and now he’s nothing at all.
Mark worked the rest of his tea down his tightened throat. “I’ll be all right.”
Allie said, “I have to ask. Chloe, does she…”
Does Chloe need to know? Mark hadn’t thought that far, yet. But Chloe would have to be told, wouldn’t she? She had signed the papers on the house, just as he had; she could be found, too, by someone playing amateur detective.
But she had signed those papers as Chloe Fife. Since the divorce she’d gone back to her maiden name—she was Chloe Ross, now, C. Ross in the phone book. She barely ever turned on her computer, let alone left any sort of trail on the web. She’d be a lot harder for Connie Pelham to find than Mark had been.
“We’re having dinner Tuesday,” he told Allie. The day after tomorrow: Brendan’s birthday. His throat closed. “I guess I’ll tell her then.”
How, he couldn’t begin to imagine.
They went upstairs to bed, but Mark couldn’t sleep. He was heartsick, in a way he hadn’t been in years—not since the year after the accident, when everything he saw, every noise he heard, every scent and texture in all the wide world, reminded him of Brendan’s absence. That Brendan was dead. The very word a slow bubble in tar, expanding and popping and swelling again. Dead. Dead. My boy is dead.
Connie Pelham had returned that word to him. Allison, tonight, had held him, kissed his cheeks, stroked his face. He could have made love to her; she would have welcomed it. But he would have hovered over Allie’s warm body thinking Dead, Dead. Tomorrow, when he tried to work, he would think Dead, he would think Gone, he would think Ghost. If he called his father. If he lay perfectly still. Dead, Gone, Ghost.
On Tuesday, Connie Pelham would make him say Ghost to Chloe, and then the disease would spread to her.
He couldn’t. He couldn’t tell Chloe this.
Two weeks after Brendan died, he’d found Chloe in Brendan’s old bed, knees pulled to her chest, clutching fistfuls of his sheets to her mouth. Mark had wanted to lie down beside her, to press his belly to her back, but even then she would not have allowed it; already Chloe had begun to jerk away from his touch.
I thought I heard him, she said.
Soon after, they began to argue about selling the house. Brendan was everywhere, there; they’d given away his things, but still stumbled upon objects they’d missed: an action figure beneath the armchair, a Cheerio on the windowsill, a mateless sock tucked into the folds of a towel.
Both of them were having nightmares. Both of them dreamed of Brendan, laughing in distant rooms, crying in the middle of the night. They traded off episodes of insomnia, wandering the hallways in shifts, as they had when Brendan was an infant, squalling for comfort every two hours on the dot. Chloe cried; when Mark woke in the night, he walked downstairs to the kitchen and poured himself a drink.
When he finally asked her if they would be better off leaving, Chloe had erupted, begun to beat her hands against him. We can’t! We can’t!
You can’t make me leave him. You can’t.
But he had. Slowly he’d made her agree that the house was a danger to them, that its memories were too potent—that if they were going to have any chance, the two of them, they had to move on. But his gambit hadn’t worked. Not long after they moved out, Chloe had left him for good. And then Mark returned to the house, by himself. He’d spent a week alone there. He’d drunk whiskey by the bottle. He’d had terrible, vivid dreams.
Mark slipped his arm from beneath Allison’s. “What?” she murmured, into her pillow.
“Nothing.”
“I thought—”
“Shh,” he said. “Nothing’s wrong.”
He pulled the covers over her bare shoulder, then stood and crept downstairs. In the living room he turned on the television, the sound lowered, and watched a movie about a giant, tentacled thing pulling swimmers down below the surface of a lake.
He remembered the end of that solitary week at the old house: Waking. Not knowing himself. Finding his father cleaning the kitchen, a box of empty bottles beside the door.
But sometime before Sam had come looking for him, Mark had woken up alone, in the dark. He’d been sleepwalking—how else to explain that he was in the upstairs hallway, kneeling on the floorboards, out of breath? He’d been talking, he thought; the sound of his own voice had woken him. He felt he’d woken up in the middle of a secret, at the edge of a revelation. He was just outside Brendan’s room, and he’d been talking, and then he had been awake in the dark.
Because he’d been drunk, far too drunk.
And ghosts weren’t real. He did not believe in ghosts. Ghosts made no sense.
When he was Brendan’s age, though—when he was the age of Connie Pelham’s son—he had believed. Mark had been an early, avid reader, and, until he was twelve or so, he’d believed nearly every story he found in a book—especially if these stories involved the supernatural, the unseen, the monsters that—he was sure—inhabited the shadows of his room, the recesses of his closets, the half-empty spare bedrooms in the upstairs of the farmhouse, ticking with silence.
One book had especially terrified him: a collection of essays about haunted houses across the world. One such house was Borley Rectory, in England—he could still remember a photographic plate at the book’s center, showing a pale smudge on the Rectory’s staircase that was supposed to be the specter of someone lost. Who? He couldn’t remember, now. Someone dead and gone, descending the stairs, over and over, playing out an old misfortune. That photo made him consider what it might be like to be a ghost. To do nothing but walk his house, alone at night. To reach for the people who lived there. To understand they could not hear you.
Brendan had believed in ghosts, too. In the old house, he had often woken, crying out for help—especially during his fifth year, when Chloe’s grandfather had died, and Brendan had first learned about death. Thereafter, their old house was alive with threats from the beyond: Branches tapped his window, pipes rattled in the walls, old timbers flexed in a stiff wind. One “ghost” Brendan claimed to have heard groaning down the hall had been—Mark was pretty sure—Mark himself, straining atop Chloe.
Finally—at two in the morning, after Brendan had woken screaming for the second time in as many nights—Mark had a long talk with him. He told Brendan about how there were no such things as ghosts; about how their big old house was scary in the dark, but when you turned the lights on, it was okay. Mark sat on the edge of Brendan’s bed, beside Brendan’s small form, wrapped tight in his covers. He flicked the switch just above the headboard: the Ghost-Killer.
See? Now it’s dark. But here are the lights—and look!
Their house, their friendly happy house, all its rooms painted in cheerful yellows and turquoises and pumpkin-golds, returned.
The ghosts are in your imagination, Mark had said. I promise.
Brendan, unblinking, the covers pulled to his pointed chin, said, I believe you.
Two nights later, however, Mark woke again to Brendan’s panicked cries.
After that he tried another strategy. If you see a ghost, he told Brendan, just say, You’re not real, and I’m not afraid of you. Over and over, until you don’t see it anymore.
And that works? Brendan had asked doubtfully, his eyes still wild and red-rimmed.
Sure it works, Mark told him, his voice rich in fatherly confidence. Even inside of dreams.
And, miracle of miracles, this did work. Brendan was a serious boy, full of doubt and fear, but he learned to vanquish his ghosts. That week Mark often heard him, murmuring the words like prayers: You’re not real, and I’m not afraid. The words gave him enough courage to sit up and flip the Ghost-Killer, and flood the room with light.
Mark stood, turned off the television, plunging the townhouse into darkness.
He remembered waking, kneeling in the hallway, his head ringing with the echoes of his own voice, and, just maybe, Brendan’s—
No. This was ridiculous. So, all together now:
You’re not real. I’m not afraid.
He walked upstairs and climbed back into bed. Allison didn’t wake.
Maybe, Mark thought, the mantra had been his mistake. Maybe he hadn’t gone far enough. Maybe what he should have done was tell Brendan there were ghosts everywhere: in the closets; in the walls; in the attic; in the basement; on the narrow, creaking stairs. Especially on the stairs.
He should have said, The ghosts live anywhere I’m not. You’re only safe with me. Stick close to Dad, okay?
Stick close, and I’ll keep watch.