Suburban Ghost Stories

I.

The snow falls sideways. It flits in the night and gathers on the branches of maples. To Evelyn, this makes the trees look skeletal. The snow-covered branches wave toward the window as if the maples are losing their balance and about to fall. She wants to reach out to them, hold their cold, bare arms, but she is on the other side of the window, in the warmth of Jimmy and Denise’s den.

A fireplace casts shadows on the walls—flat, warped shapes of Evelyn and Denise on the couch, of Jimmy on the recliner. Their cat, Sister Mary Francis, lies near the hearth, curled like a fingernail, watching them with slow-blinking eyes. During dinner earlier, Denise mentioned how Evelyn looked distant. Evelyn said it was nothing, but that was a lie. Ever since she saw a ghost, she’s felt empty. Yesterday, she looked into a mirror and seemed barely there: transparent, diffused, as if her actual self, her inner-self, was shrinking within the husk of her body. She could almost feel the shrinking, the cavity between flesh and being. It brought to mind her childhood, when she would try on her mother’s oversized clothing. Or how Walter, the five-year-old Evelyn nannies, looks when he shoulders on his father’s hunting jacket, the camouflage devouring him. He always asks Evelyn if he can hold his father’s rifle, too, and she tells him no. He’s a good child. But she knows even good children need to be watched closely.

Denise persists, and so Evelyn gives in and tells them she saw a ghost a week ago, but she doesn’t want to talk about it. Evelyn takes Denise’s hand. The fire snaps. Denise says, one night, when I was a kid, I saw a ghost. A Chainrattler—it’s what my mom called the boogeyman. It was large and shadowy, and it had a human shape, but disfigured. Like its bones were bent in all the wrong ways. It crawled on all fours and went under my bed, and I screamed. When my mom got there, I only wanted to hold her. She always told me to talk things like this out. Otherwise, it’ll just bother me more, and for longer.

Did it work? Evelyn asks.

It did, Denise says. Everything was better when she listened to what I saw.

Chainrattler, says Jimmy. The name alone is scary.

Evelyn remembers when Walter called out to her one night, both his parents away on business. His voice, high-pitched and hollow, woke her from sleep. He was standing with his back against the window of his room, as if he were trying to stop the night from pushing its way through the glass. The closet, he said. Tears on his face, chest heaving in sobs. Evelyn opened the closet door. Nothing but his clothes hanging from the tension bar, a mix of shoes and toys on the floor. She showed him. Then she tucked him back in bed and lay next to him. He was still shivering, so she gently pushed his bangs away from his face. It’s OK, she said. There’s nothing there.

Would it help if I told you I saw a ghost, too? Jimmy says.

Evelyn shrugs.

You never told me you saw a ghost, Denise says.

Jimmy nods. He explains how, when he was a kid, he was halfway up the neighborhood woodpile, out where they were still building new homes. He sat on a tall stack of plywood, flipping through baseball cards. Dusk settled in, but he brought a little spy flashlight, so he looked at the cards that way. At one point, the air felt different. Electric, like holding an arm over sheets just out of the dryer, the hungry draw of static. Then, at the bottom of the woodpile, near where the trees started, stood a man, a stranger. The man was mostly in shadows. Lost in the image, Jimmy accidentally dropped his baseball cards. He looked down at them instinctively and, when he looked back up, the ghost was gone.

How did you know it wasn’t just some man and not a ghost? Denise says.

I just knew, says Jimmy.

Evelyn tries to picture the scene as Jimmy explained it. She grew up in the same neighborhood and so she knows the woodpile well. She imagines the strange ghost there, not there, leaving behind only the dark woodland and the white flutter of mosquitos and the snarled Spanish moss hunched over branches.

* * *

Stay with us tonight, says Jimmy. With this snow and all.

Evelyn says thanks, but no. She wants to wake up tomorrow in her own house. She pictures herself walking the six blocks home, her boots sinking into the snow, her body curling up into her bed. The hardest part of going home won’t be trudging in the snow or peeling off the layers and getting warm. After entering the front door of her townhome, there is a set of stairs that lead up to her living space. The entry level is more of a storage area, a purgatory that’s both her home and not her home. The hardest part will be walking up those entryway stairs.

If you don’t want to talk about it, says Denise.

It’s OK, says Jimmy.

Evelyn sighs, and she knows this breath is the shut door giving way. She says, I had a brother. Sam was two when he died. This was before we were friends, Denise.

Evelyn explains how, last week, she had worked late one night. She didn’t pull up to her townhouse till after one in the morning, and, when she got out of her car, she had this feeling. It wasn’t a bad feeling, at first. It was a feeling similar to when she had been in high school and she’d snuck out of her parents’ house. As soon as the house was out of sight, the night felt different. It was like she was in a parallel world, where the smells and sounds and things she touched seemed thinner. That’s how it felt when she got out of her car at her townhome. But when she got closer to her front door, the feeling changed. Something menacing hung in the air, unseen and yet invasive. A weight. I shouldn’t have opened my door, she says to Denise and Jimmy. I didn’t want to, but what else was I going to do? I was home.

Sam’s ghost was standing at the top of the entryway stairs. Still two years old, still with that little round, soft face and those blue eyes and that thin mop of curly brown hair. He was dressed in his favorite outfit, a blue and white sailor-like shirt with a tiny red anchor on the front pocket, and khaki shorts. He’d always pull them out of his drawer and hand them to his mother, and Evelyn and her mother would laugh. Not again, their mother would say. And Sam would say, with a big smile, ‘Again!’

The eyes of Sam’s ghost at the top of the stairs were wide, his mouth slightly open, as if he witnessed something terrible. I was shaking so much, Evelyn says. I said his name, but he didn’t move or anything. She stops talking, stares at the dying fire and remembers the things Walter has been scared of: the giant gnarled oak tree in his backyard at night, the boiler’s restless taps and groans, a stray belt lying snakelike in the dark of his room, the lurking closetmonsters.

He fell down the stairs when he was a toddler, Evelyn says. I heard the bumps, one after another, all the way down. I found him there, at the bottom.

Denise gently squeezes Evelyn’s hand. Jimmy sits on the other side of Evelyn, and they stare at what remains of the fire. Sister Mary Francis is on the other side of the room now, playing with her fuzzy-ball toy, tossing it up into the air and then clapping her little paws together trying to catch it.

I’ve seen her do this for twenty straight minutes, Jimmy says and laughs a little, his attempt at trying to change the subject, lighten the mood.

Do you feel better? Denise says. Now that you talked?

Evelyn nods, because shaking her head no would only prolong things. Evelyn says how she’d better get going. Early morning with Walter requires a strong sleep. But she knows it’s more than just the sleep. It’s everything leading up to her time with Walter. She must always take her shower in the morning. She must do her crossword puzzle for fifteen minutes, to stretch her mind. She can’t be a second late to Walter’s parents’ house, nor can she show up with her mind only half-sharp. Otherwise, bad things could happen.

* * *

The snow is just above the ankle of Evelyn’s boots. She feels them sink into the powder, hears the squeak with each step. She thinks of her little brother. She tries not to. She shakes her head to clear the image of him, focusing instead on the branches, how they glow white and silver, on her steps so as not to fall. She thinks of Walter’s belly laughs when she tickles him, his little body rolling back and forth like a barrel on a ship at sea. Only a couple more blocks and she’ll be home. But her mind loosens its grip. Sam jostles free.

She had been upstairs that day, a Sunday, lazing around in her bedroom, the sun pouring through the window. Her father was at work, and her mother was downstairs cooking dinner. I can watch Sam while you cook, Evelyn said.

Her friend Hannah lived in the house just across the yard. They would often look out their windows and say hello to each other, which is what they did that day. Sammy was stacking blocks in Evelyn’s room, seeing how high he could get them before they tumbled. Evelyn watched Hannah make paper airplanes and try to fly them across the yard into Evelyn’s window, but the planes never got close. Watch me, Evelyn yelled to Hannah. She carefully folded a piece of paper, bending the wings tightly, creasing the stock just so. Then she launched it out her window, watched it carry across the way, and for a second Evelyn thought it just might make it. In the end, it barely made it across the gate that separated her courtyard from Hannah’s.

The gate. Her mother had told her to put the childproof gate up, at the top of the stairs. How had she forgotten to do such a simple thing, such an important thing? She turned toward Sam, but he was gone. When she stood up, she heard the sound.

She hears it now, as she approaches the front door of her townhome. The thumps of Sam’s life being hammered out of him, her mother yelling Sam’s name, footsteps running to get the phone. These are the sounds that haunt her, her versions of bumps-in-the-night and house creaks and loose patio doors opening and shutting in midnight gusts.

She opens the door to her townhome and walks inside. The smell of old wood and dampness. She looks up at the top of the stairs: nothing. She climbs up the steps, watching her feet land on the worn carpet, the staircase’s old bones groaning with each footfall. All she wants to do is drop into bed, close her eyes and let the darkness swaddle her, let the ocean waves from the sleep machine carry her away until morning. She raises her head, slowly, preparing herself for what is at the top of the stairs, for what is there or not there.

II.

He’s not ready to go to bed. Denise kisses him goodnight. She walks to the bedroom and shuts the door. This is how night goes, has been going for some months now. Jimmy joining her only when he knows she’s asleep. They are drifting apart. Or rather, he is drifting from her. She said, prior to their marriage, that she didn’t want children. Something he had taken as etched in stone for these five years. Last week, she said her mind had changed. Not just her mind, she said, but her entire being. It had been changing for some months now. She didn’t know how or why, but she couldn’t change it back. To Jimmy, it felt like the dock rope had loosed itself from the cleat. His preferred time to talk it through was never. Each day he avoided conversation, he felt himself drifting farther away, the undertow all the more aggressive. Talk to me, she’d say. Tell me what’s stopping you from wanting a kid. And he would say I don’t know, and then he’d leave it at that.

Drift.

Now the shore of their marriage is a line barely thicker than the horizon, and closing the distance seems impossible.

He thinks of the ghost he saw at the woodpile. He has been thinking about it since she brought up having a child. But he never mentioned the ghost to Denise. He brought the ghost up earlier, when Evelyn was here, only because he wanted to see what it felt like, to let loose the lid so that a little of the steam trapped inside could come out. And, not surprisingly, it felt good.

What he hadn’t mentioned earlier tonight was that there was a second visitation after the woodpile.

One night, a year after the woodpile, he saw the ghost again, standing in his parents’ back yard. He screamed for his mother, and she came into the room. By the time she arrived, the ghost of the strange man was gone. He pointed out the window. His mother asked what the ghost looked like, and when he described it, the expression on her face was more of concern than fright. As if her gaze had gone inward. At the time, he chalked it up as the face of someone trying to picture what he was describing. Have you seen this ghost before? his mother asked. Yes, he said. When he told her of the first incident by the woodpile, there was even more concern in her face. Have you seen it, too, Mom? Jimmy asked her. She shook her head, but not as if she were answering his question, but rather a question she had silently asked herself.

* * *

Sister Mary Francis jumps onto his lap. She curls into a half-moon and purrs.

Forgive me, Sister, Jimmy says. For I have sinned.

He has confessed to her in the past. His domestic sins. The transgressions of silence, when truth would be too revealing. A therapist once told him that schisms are caused by the built-up tension of the unspoken. That was the last therapy session Jimmy attended. He didn’t think it was wrong, what the therapist said. But words like schisms and tension of the unspoken grated against him. Those types of words made truth sound like bullshit, and he didn’t need that. He decided he just needed someone to listen. Someone like Sister Mary Francis.

He is about to confess again, when he hears it, coming from the kitchen: a muted thud, like a snowball hitting a window. Jimmy jumps up. Sister Mary Frances mews, marches away.

When he walks into the kitchen, there is nobody there. But, through the little kitchen window over the sink, he sees a shadow—small, yet maybe big enough to be a person hunched over—slink into the dark copse of trees at the outer edge of the backyard.

* * *

Do you remember the ghost you saw? his mother asked him the summer after he graduated high school. He was to start at the Culinary Institute of America that fall, conveniently close to Vassar, where his then-girlfriend would be going.

He had a feeling of what his mother would say. Through the years, he thought of the ghost, of the stranger standing at the woodpile and then in his parents’ backyard, staring at him. In fact, sometimes he could feel that stare as if it were a body leaning against his back. He would turn and nobody would be there. And then he would think of his mother’s face that night, trying to place her expression.

He knew what she was going to say now.

That man, she said.

Is my dad, he finished for her. She nodded.

He thought this moment would have some kind of weight to it, but no. His mother had already told him, in a way, with her expression all those years ago, giving Jimmy the wood and nails to hammer together the truth himself. DIY truth. As for the man, Jimmy felt nothing, even with his mother officially confirming what he had pieced together. The man was a stranger, always would be. Gone before Jimmy’s brain could sponge up enough of the guy to wring out even the smallest memory of face or smell or gait. The man might as well have been a ghost.

Really, it was the next assemblage of sentences from his mother that held all the weight.

When you were a child, his mother said, I told you that you were adopted. That I never had a husband. That obviously wasn’t true.

She paused. Then she said, he used to hit me. He used to shake you when you wouldn’t stop crying. I told him that’s what babies do, they cry, and he said he’d—

She stopped again, took a breath. There were restraining orders, she said. He shouldn’t have been near you. I called the police when you told me that night. Remember how many times I asked if you ever saw him again? It was because I was scared for you. You told me you hadn’t seen him. Was that true?

His mother had to repeat the question before he could answer yes.

And so therefore, like a ghost, the stranger was something to be frightened of. Something to be angry at. Something violating and disturbing.

For Jimmy, it was also something of an omen, a genetic foretelling of what he could become.

* * *

Arc of pale light on the snow, blending into gray, into black. He trudges through it, toward the trees. In one hand, he holds a flashlight. In his other, a baseball bat, cold and aluminum. He no longer plays ball; rather, he keeps the bat handy for when he goes for a walk and it’s still dark out. Neighbors have spotted coyotes and bears. He himself has never seen any of them, but still. He white-fists the bat, as the shadow he had seen lurking earlier could well have been a bear.

There are oblong divots in the snow, but the snow is too deep to discern what made them. Just inside the threshold of the woods, the divots are the only signs that something was once here. The angle of light reveals nothing else out of the ordinary. Except—

There is a bent branch a few yards ahead. Not a heavy one, but no twig either. It would take some weight to move the branch, to bend and break it. As if in a panicked run. As if something did not want to be seen. Jimmy steps further into the woods. He doesn’t know what compels him to do so. It’s likely an animal, the kind that could do serious harm or worse. But it might be the other thing. The other thing could still be alive. The other thing could have found him easily with enough searching. Despite the fact that Jimmy, with all his searching, could never find the other thing.

Do me a favor, his mother told him that summer after high school. Try, with all your might, to pretend like you never saw him.

The snow is up to the middle of his calves, but his duck boots do their job. Still, it forces slow movement. His senses are on high alert.

Jimmy looks back at his house, at the small, glowing square of the kitchen light. It might as well be on a different shore. He pats his back pocket and realizes he didn’t take his phone, making the house seem even farther away.

He turns back toward the woods. He thinks, how much farther should I go? And then, as he steps forward, a tiny breath of the world shifts a thin tree limb, and he thinks, how do we know the wind is still there? Answer: by the movement of everything it touches.

III.

There is no such thing as Chainrattlers. She knows that now, and she knew that when she was a child. She had been lying in bed, in more ways than one. Lying in bed, lying. She likes that about language, how sometimes you can have it both ways. Lying, lying. The words are like looking at an object with one eye shut: it’s here, in this one location. Then, switching so just the other eye is shut, the object is now over there, despite the fact that it never moved.

She was lying to her mother about the Chainrattler.

Denise sinks into this memory, in bed now. She turns onto her other side, so she faces away from the window. Then she pictures Evelyn in bed, too, trying to sleep past the loss of her little brother. Denise thinks of her potential loss of Jimmy. Not to death, of course. Rather, the loss of their marriage.

Mawwiage, she thinks, picturing the characters of The Princess Bride. She does this sometimes, tries to use the heat of happier memories to bend the metal of sadness.

Wuv. Twue wuv.

She knows Jimmy sits in the living room, staring at the embers in the fireplace on cold nights, wondering what to do. Her talk of children. Five years into the marriage. Even knowing she originally didn’t want children. Adamantly didn’t want them. It wasn’t fair to him. But the weight of the unfairness was hardly enough compared to that of the want, which had quickly hardened into need.

I think you’d be a great father, she had told Jimmy. And she truly believed this. He was patient, selfless, reliable.

Weliable.

Some nights, she’d crack open the bedroom door, peek out, see him there in the living room, with Sister Mary Francis sleeping on his lap. The cat would never have done that back when they first started dating. Now the feline is practically his, despite it being hers from before she and Jimmy even met. Sister Mary Francis had borne witness to other men before Jimmy, had sat and watched her sleep with them, break bread with them, play Scrabble with them. And with each farewell, Denise would confide in the cat, and it would lie there with the focus of a therapist. Sister Mary Francis staring, looking half-bored, but willing to listen anyway, jotting notes on the yellow pad in her head. Denise would ask the cat how Jimmy felt, and the cat would stay true to its pet-patient relationship. Not a word. As if the cat were saying, why don’t you ask him yourself?

And she could. She could do it now. He’s out there, just beyond the door. Like every other night. What is it, Jimmy? she could ask. What’s stopping you from wanting a kid as much as I do? Is it the extra wesponsiblity?

She had done this as a child, too, in the days of the Chainrattler. Used humor to soften and bend sad thoughts. She had imagined the sad thoughts as metal, cold and iron-hard. Vitamin-taste. Abstract junk-sculpture, spiked and boxy, jammed with random cylinders. Sometimes, if she closed her eyes tight in the dark, she could see them floating behind her lids.

But it didn’t always work, this particular coercion. So, she had other ways, too. One of those ways was to pretend to her mother that there was a Chainrattler in her room.

She gets out of bed now and walks to the closed bedroom door. A friend once told her how you can judge the state of a marriage based on the gap of a door between the spouses. But Denise thinks a closed door between two people simply means: I want to be alone. What determines the state of a marriage is the punctuation at the end of that sentence. If there is a period or an ellipsis or, worst of all, an exclamation point.

She stands with her back against the shut door. She looks at her empty bed. She imagines herself, as a child, lying in the bed. She pretends she’s her own mother, looking at the young Denise lying there.

I don’t want to be alone, she told her mother on the night of the Chainrattler.

Do you want me to leave the hallway light on?

No, she had told her mother. I mean fine, but I want you to stay, too.

You want me to stay?

I want to tell you about it, Denise had said. You always say it helps.

And does it? her mother asked.

Yes, Denise told her.

So her mother climbed into bed and everything was all right, because every moment with her mother was a moment more, because soon Denise would be losing her mother, and Denise thought how her mother couldn’t die from cancer in front of her, that would be impossible, a watched pot never boils, a watched mother never dies. When her mother spoke to her, Denise greedily drank in her voice. When her mother touched her arm to console, Denise imagined the little particles that made up her skin trapping the feeling, capturing it in microscopic cages. She fought sleep as hard as she could. She didn’t want to take her eyes off her mom. She kept talking, hoping her voice could prop open her consciousness, to keep awake.

For the Chainrattler wasn’t the addition of a being in the home, but rather the subtraction of one.

It was like a shadow, she told her mother. Like a man, but it crawled on all fours.

* * *

Denise is back in bed now. She stares at the door she had just stood at and thinks of the word metastasize. What if it were an exercise? What if Richard Simmons was the trainer, in his red shorts and tank top and unflinching smile? Clapping his hands with each leap of a jumping jack, telling the camera to keep going, stick with it, you’ve got this.

Metastasizing to the Oldies.

Ready, Set, Metastasize!

Bending the sadness. Richard Simmons’s smile. Wuv, twue wuv.

What if she told Jimmy to come to bed, told him it was OK with her if they didn’t have a child? Lying in bed, lying.

She takes a deep breath. She calls out to him. She waits. The bedroom door stays shut. She gets up, walks to it. Puts her hand on the knob. She can make things better. They can make things better. All they need to do is talk. All she needs to do is open the door and see him sitting there, in the chair, staring at the fire that, by now, is almost certainly dead.

GENE ALBAMONTE

Gene Albamonte’s fiction has appeared in the minnesota review, CutBank, LIT Magazine, Southern Indiana Review, and other publications. He has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Central Florida. He and his family live in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Find him online at albamontegene.com.