Ariel Read online

  “Do there be haunts in it?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Do there be haunts or ghosts?”

  Roberta stared at her. “Last night,” she said. “And the night before.”

  “You saw sumpin?”

  “An old woman. She was standing by the window. And then she … disappeared.”

  The woman nodded. “A haunt,” she said, satisfied. “Must be she lived and died there.”

  “I thought she was a real woman. And then I thought I was seeing things, and—”

  “Haunts is like that. She lived there and died there. Happens sometimes a body dies and don’t know it. Could be she were murdered. Killed of a sudden.” She rubbed her old hands together and shivered with delight. “All them old houses has their haunts,” she said. “That’s what you saw.”

  “I was afraid.”

  “Only natural. Anybody be fraid. Nuffin to be fraid of, though. Haunts don’t do nuffin. They just be.”

  “I never saw her before. And then I saw her two nights in a row.”

  “Maybe it be the season. Fall comin on.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe it be she died this time of the year. Haunts will do that. One house I lived, long long ago, you could hear a dog. He would howl the night away. And there were no dog in that house. He were nuffin but a haunt, and you never did see him. You only did hear him.”

  “I think I really saw her.”

  “Course you did.”

  “I thought maybe it was a dream, or a lighting trick. But I really saw something.”

  “What you saw were a haunt.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “Haunt won’t never hurt nobody,” the woman said. Then her face grew animated and she was pointing. “Look at that! I said they wouldn’t catch nuffin and look at that! That be a flounder.” The man who’d caught him, an elderly white man in bib overalls, gripped the fish in his right hand while deliberately disengorging the hook with his left. This done, he held the fish aloft for a moment, then dropped it into a galvanized pail. “Them flatfish be good eatin,” the old woman said. “Flounder be sweet clear to the bone.”

  Just a ghost, Roberta thought. A mere haunt. Nothing to be afraid of. An asset, really, on the house’s balance sheet, like the original glass panes in the mullioned windows and the brick floor in the kitchen. An authentic touch of pre-Revolutionary Charleston.

  She wondered idly who the woman might be. Perhaps she’d been around at the time of the Revolution, when Francis Marion, the old Swamp Fox himself, had harried the British with his own brand of guerrilla warfare. Perhaps she’d occupied the house in the early days of the Republic, perhaps she’d known John C. Calhoun when he was the clarion voice of South Carolina. Or was the Civil War her time? Roberta hadn’t felt anything of the southern belle in her aspect. She’d seemed more like an immigrant woman in one of those sketches of nineteenth-century slum dwellers in New York, a new arrival freshly transported from Ellis Island to the Lower East Side. Huddled in upon herself, wrapped in a shawl, carrying something—

  She didn’t mention the woman, not at dinner or afterward. Ariel spent the evening doing homework in her room, interrupting her work now and then to pipe tuneless music that pervaded the old house. David talked with her a bit over coffee, telling her about something that had happened at the office. She kept up her end of the conversation without paying much attention to what he was saying, and in due course he withdrew to his den to smoke his pipes and drink his brandy.

  But she did talk to Caleb as she readied him for bed. “We’re not scared of haunts, are we?” she cooed, powdering his soft little bottom, fixing a clean diaper in place. “We’re not scared of anything, Caleb.” And she kissed him again and again, and Caleb gurgled and laughed.

  David went to sleep early, taking himself off to bed without saying goodnight, and she was grateful to hear his heavy step upon the stairs. She had spent a solitary evening, but now she could enjoy the special solitude that came when one was the only person awake in the household. She sat in the front room with coffee and cigarettes, her coffee flavored just the tiniest bit with some of David’s brandy.

  Would she see the ghost again?

  She hoped not. It helped, curiously enough, to think of it as a ghost, although she was by no means certain she believed in such phenomena in the first place. Believing that the house was haunted, however, seemed to be rather less threatening than believing either that the woman was a real living creature or that she, Roberta, was going quietly mad. Perhaps that was how people had come to believe in the supernatural, she thought; perhaps they were relieved to latch onto an alternative to something even less acceptable.

  If there was a ghost, did that mean she had to see it every damned night?

  Perhaps not. Perhaps she could sleep through the nightly appearance of the ghost, even as Caleb had learned to sleep through his two A.M. feeding. The fact that she had only just taken to seeing the ghost did not mean the ghost had never walked before. Perhaps the ghost had appeared every night for years but she’d slept through the performance until the night before last, even as David had continued to sleep on through it.

  And perhaps familiarity would eventually breed some form of contempt, so that if a night sound woke her she could sit up, blink at the apparition, say “Oh, it’s only the ghost again,” and drift calmly back to sleep.

  Had Ariel seen the ghost?

  The child had certainly said nothing, but would she? She was so secretive she might have witnessed the apparition nightly for weeks without seeing fit to mention it.

  If Ariel encountered the ghost, she thought, it would be the ghost that ran screaming.

  She giggled at the thought, then flushed with guilt. Something was happening, some change in the way she related to Ariel, and she didn’t know what it was or what to do about it. She penned a quick mental letter.

  Dear Ann Landers, / Twelve years ago my husband and I adopted a baby girl, and now I’ve just had a baby of my own, a son, and I don’t know what to do about my daughter. She’s not what I had in mind. Do you suppose there’s a way I could give her back? Just sign me / Having Second Thoughts.

  Her own thoughts disturbed her. She frowned, crushed out her cigarette in the ashtray, and tried to force herself to substitute thoughts from an earlier time. Images of the three of them immediately after the adoption, she and David going on long walks with Ariel, then a montage of mental family pictures over the years. Ariel growing, learning to walk and talk, developing over months and years into a person.

  A person Roberta knew less with every passing day.

  She gave her head an impatient shake. This would all pass, she told herself. She had a new baby now, and any negative thoughts and feelings she had toward Ariel were almost certainly part of the process of nurturing that new baby. Older children were traditionally assumed to resent infants, and it struck her that their jealousy was well-founded.

  In time, when her great love for Caleb became less obsessive, when she took his presence a little more for granted, her feelings for Ariel would be what they had once been.

  Or had they started to change before Caleb was born? Even before he’d been conceived? She was a strange child, curious and remote. There was no gainsaying that. Even David admitted as much, although he seemed to take delight in the very strangeness that Roberta found unsettling.

  And just when had she begun to find it unsettling? Before Caleb’s birth? Before his conception? Well, she’d been so unsettled herself during that stretch of time that it was hard to separate causes and effects. Twice-weekly visits to Gintzler for maintenance doses of therapy and Valium.

  The whole business with Jeff was going on then, impossible to handle but more stimulating than the therapy and more addictive than the Valium. She could see now that she’d been skating closer to the edge than she’d ever realized. Now that she’d come back from the edge, now that she was settled again with a baby and a house and a stable daily routine, she c
ould begin to appreciate just how unstable her life had been for a while there.

  She put her cup down. Shouldn’t drink coffee late at night, she thought. It made her mind race. She’d come a long way from ghosts and haunts and things that went bump in the night.

  She lit another cigarette. If she just stayed up late enough, perhaps she’d sleep through the ghost’s command performance.

  She was dreaming. In the dream the old black woman from the park bench at the Battery was sitting on her haunches beside an enormous wicker basket filled with fresh fish. She was taking up one after another, gripping each fish in turn in one bony hand while with the other she wielded a nasty little knife, slitting the fish up the belly and expertly gutting it. While she did this she spoke of the supernatural, of ghosts and haunts and the walking dead, of voodoo curses and the power of a mojo tooth. The wicker basket gradually emptied and the pile of gutted fish at the woman’s feet grew steadily.

  Then she was holding not a fish but a human infant. “The manchild, he be good eatin,” she said, and smacked her lips. Roberta noted for the first time that she had no teeth. Her mouth was black and bottomless.

  Roberta tried to move. She was frozen, incapable of motion. She could neither act nor cry out. The old woman cackled, and the knife flashed, and Roberta sat up in bed and wrenched herself out of the dream.

  It was a dream, she thought, fastening onto the thought and repeating it to herself.

  Then, in the corner of the room beside the window, she saw the woman. As on the previous night, the figure was facing the window, with hip and shoulder toward Roberta. Tonight, however, her form was more completely defined, as if her presence became more concrete with each appearance.

  She’s a ghost, Roberta tried to tell herself. Ghosts are harmless. You had a bad dream and now you’re seeing the ghost, but dreams can’t hurt you and ghosts are harmless.

  It didn’t help. The dream had shaken her badly and the sight of the woman was considerably more frightening than it had been on the two previous nights, her thoughts notwithstanding. An air of evil was present in the room. The woman bore it like a perfume and it was palpable in the thick night air.

  “What do you want?”

  Had she spoken the words aloud? Was she talking to this apparition?

  Slowly, like a statue on a revolving platform, the woman turned to face her. Roberta saw the heart-shaped face, the bloodless lips, the pale eyes burning in the pale face.

  The eyes held Roberta’s own eyes. Something unspoken and unspeakable passed between the woman at the window and the woman on the bed. Then, against her will, she dropped her eyes to see what the woman was holding in her arms.

  A baby.

  A male infant, his body swaddled in a part of the woman’s shawl, only his face visible. His face was as pallid as the woman’s own and his wide eyes burned with the same pale fire.

  Slowly and magically, like trick photography in a television commercial, the baby’s face lost flesh and turned to a gleaming skull. And the woman, too, was a bare polished skeleton wrapped in a shawl. And she drew away, the skeletal infant in her arms, floating through the closed window and out into the night.

  Roberta cried out. She opened her mouth and screamed.

  There was a gap, a blank space. Then she was being held, a hand patting awkwardly at the back of her head. She breathed in the smell of alcohol sweat and knew then that David was holding her, trying to comfort her.

  “A dream,” he was saying. “You had a bad dream. That’s all.”

  She wanted to correct him but she couldn’t, not right away, because her heart was racing and she couldn’t catch her breath, and if he didn’t continue to hold her very tight she felt she might shake herself apart.

  Then, when she could speak, she tried to explain. She told about what she’d seen for three nights running.

  “A dream,” he said.

  “Night after night?”

  “A recurring dream. I’ve had one off and on for years, I’m someplace dangerously high and trying to get down from it, endless fire escapes and catwalks, and I’m frightened and I can never get back to ground level. Variations on a theme. You know about dreams, all those months with Gintzler, stretched out on his couch.”

  “This wasn’t a dream.”

  “All right.”

  “I had a dream first, a crazy dream about a black woman cleaning fish.” She hurried on, not wanting to recall the dream’s ending. “Then I was awake and I saw her again. She was standing right there.”

  “She’s not there now.”

  “Of course not.”

  “You think you saw a ghost?”

  “I don’t know what I saw. I don’t know anything about ghosts. It was some sort of … some sort of spiritual presence.”

  “A being of another world.”

  “It had that feeling to it, yes.”

  “Why was it so frightening?”

  “She was holding—I can’t say it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t make myself say it. I’m afraid.”

  He looked at her.

  “Hell,” she said. “She was holding a baby.”

  “So?”

  “The baby died. She turned to show me the baby and I watched while the baby turned into a skeleton. Then the woman was a skeleton too, and they went out the window and disappeared.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I’m telling you what I saw, David.”

  “Now tell me why it’s frightening.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  He shook his head. “Why’s it frightening to you? What are you scared of, Roberta?”

  “You know.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Why do I have to say it?” She turned her eyes away. “The baby,” she said.

  “You’re afraid of the kid she was holding?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I think you should say it.”

  She closed her eyes, lowered her head. “Caleb,” she whispered.

  “What about him?”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “God damn you!” She made a fist, struck out at his chest. “I’m afraid my baby’s dead, you son of a bitch!”

  He said nothing. Her hands dropped and her shoulders sagged and she wept soundlessly, the tears streaking her cheeks. After a time the crying stopped and she wiped her tears away with the back of her hand.

  “Roberta?”

  “What?”

  “Do you really believe—“

  “I don’t know what I believe. I never believed in ghosts until I saw one. Or whatever the hell I saw.”

  “Why don’t you go check Caleb.”

  “Now?”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t—I’m afraid.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “I’m afraid. Isn’t that ridiculous? I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

  “You had a bad dream and then you either saw something or thought you did, and maybe it amounts to the same thing. Would you like me to check him?”

  “Would you?”

  She sat up in bed and waited for what seemed like a very long time. He returned with a comforting smile on his face. “He’s fine,” he said.

  “You’re sure he’s all right?”

  “He’s sleeping like a baby. Do you want to see for yourself?”

  “No.” She took a deep breath and let it out very slowly. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m crazy tonight, I really am.”

  “You had a rough time there.”

  “Thanks for going. And thanks for making me work it out.”

  “You’re all right now?”

  “I think so.” She looked at him, drawing from him a sense of strength he hadn’t given her in years. His body was growing softer with the years. A sedentary life had changed his body shape, and the droop in his shoulders mirrored the quiet desperation of so many nights spent in his study with his pipes and
his brandy. He was bare to the waist, his chest hair matted with perspiration, and as she looked at him now she felt an unfamiliar surge of desire.

  “Well,” he said. “We’d both better get to sleep.”

  “Could you—“

  “What?”

  “Could you come into my bed for a little while?”

  He slipped out of his pajama bottoms and joined her under the covers. She really only wanted to be held, but when he began making love to her she was surprised by his passion and at least as surprised by her own. Afterward she held onto him but he deliberately extricated himself from her embrace and returned to his own bed.

  She felt herself drifting off to sleep. She was on the edge of it when he spoke.

  “When you screamed,” he said. “Do you remember what you said?”

  “I just … screamed. And then you were holding me.”

  “You don’t remember what you said.”

  “No. What did I say?”

  She didn’t think at first that he was going to answer. Then he said, “I don’t know. I was asleep. Maybe you just cried out. I thought you might remember.”

  “Maybe I called your name.”

  There was a pause. “Sure,” he said at length. “That must have been it.”

  She heard his alarm clock when it rang. But she stayed in bed until he had showered and dressed and gone down for his breakfast. Then, reluctantly, she dragged herself out of bed. There was an emptiness within her, a hollow void, and she didn’t know what it meant.

  She went to Caleb’s room. He was lying on his back in his crib. His eyes were wide open, rolled back in his head, and his face had a blue tinge to it. She made herself extend a hand to touch him. His skin was cool beneath her fingers.

  Then she must have turned from him, because the next thing she knew she was in the doorway of his room, her back to the crib. Ariel was just emerging from the bathroom. Roberta stood still, feeling her breasts rise and fall with her breathing, as the child approached.

  Ariel said, “Is something wrong? Is something the matter with Caleb?”

  Roberta couldn’t answer.

  “That’s what it is, isn’t it? What’s the matter with Caleb? Is he dead? Is Caleb dead?”

  Roberta threw her head back and howled like a dog.