Floating Staircase(65)
“The following week, I was playing in the palmettos again. The girl with the head scarf appeared through the trees, watching me with those big, sad-looking eyes. I waved to her and she turned and ran—not away from me this time, but just as she always ran when we played, with a big smile on her thin face, her knotted knees pumping like pistons. We played our games all afternoon, and I never once asked her name again.”
Something behind Althea’s eyes grew cloudy, like splotches of ink spilling into a glass of water. “One night on the drive home after leaving the Mayhew place, my mamma said she asked about the little girl. ‘Mr. Mayhew said the family who lives there used to have a little girl, but she died of leukemia several years ago,’ she told me. This was so many years ago—decades and decades—but my memory is that my mamma was scared something terrible on that drive home. I remember her knuckles as white as pearls on the steering wheel and her skin was darker than mine. ‘You’re to stay in the house from now on when we go out there,’ my mamma said. ‘If that little girl wants to play with you, let her come find you and knock on the door.’
“I cried about it that night—not because I understood what my mother had told me but merely out of sorrow that I would no longer be allowed to run with the little girl through the palmetto grove. And next week when we went back, I stayed inside and sat by the windows that looked out into the yard, waiting—and hoping—for the little girl to knock on the door and set me free. But she never came. And I never saw her again.”
There was an unease not unlike seasickness that trembled through me in tiny waves.
“As I’ve said,” Althea said, her voice hoarse now from too much talk, “my memory is faulty, going back so far into my childhood, but I can recall with certainty that the little girl always wore the same clothes. And there were times during our play, when she would hide and I would seek her out, that I was never able to find her. I recall one time in particular when I gave up and went to the porch, feeling small and miserable. I caught a glimpse of that floral head scarf—I know I did!—and chased it down through the trees . . . but again, when I’d reached the spot, the girl was gone.”
“Is it possible you were playing with a different girl? That the girl with leukemia had simply been someone else?”
“Of course,” Althea rasped. I poured her another glass of water, but she didn’t drink it immediately. “Anything’s possible. But that’s not what I believe.”
“If she was a ghost,” I said, “why were you able to see her?”
“Perhaps that is the bigger mystery.” Two skeletal hands wrapped around the plastic cup, she sipped noisily before setting it down on the nightstand. “I like to think that maybe she realized how lonely I was that summer. How much I needed a friend.” She smiled weakly. Horrifically, hers was the face of a jack-o’-lantern gone to rot. “Ghosts are no different than anything else in this grand universe. Why shouldn’t they exist? Are they not the spirit, the part that gives the body life? So that spirit must reside somewhere after the person has died. Every schoolchild is taught the old scientific adage—that matter cannot be created or destroyed, correct?”
“Okay, sure.” It was something I’d been taught as early as sixth grade, and I remembered our frumpy old science teacher, with the electrical tape on his loafers and his comical toupee, boiling water in a glass beaker over a Bunsen burner.
“It’s true. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. So why should the soul be exempt from such laws of the universe?” Then Althea said something that I would carry with me for many, many years—something so profoundly simplistic that its clarity resonated through me like the clang of a bell. She said, “Nature does not know extinction. It knows only change. Metamorphosis. It knows that when life is snuffed out and the soul vacates the body, it must, by definition, go somewhere. And if you don’t believe in God or a god or in heaven and hell, then where do souls go?”
“Here,” I said, and it was like she had drawn the word right out of me. I hadn’t even paused to think.
“They stay right here with us.”
“As ghosts,” she said.
“As ghosts,” I repeated, smiling in spite of myself.
Returning the smile, Althea shut her eyes and let her head ease all the way into her pillow. I could tell she was in pain, but I could also tell she was trying to hide her discomfort from me. Finally, just when I thought she had fallen asleep, her eyes opened and she sought me out, as if she’d forgotten where I’d been sitting.
“I’m going to leave now,” I told her, getting up and grabbing my parka. “You’re tired.”
Her watery eyes fluttered shut.
“Are you in pain?” I whispered.
“Always in pain . . .”
“Do you want me to get a nurse?”
“To do what? Tell me I’m dying? I already know that.”
Pulling on my coat, I headed to the door. “I appreciate your time, Althea. I wish we could have met under different circumstances.”
“Make me a promise,” she said from the bed, her voice no stronger than the rustling of tissue paper.
“Anything,” I told her and waited for her to speak again. But the next thing I heard was the labored grinding of her respiration as she faded off into unconsciousness.