“A million fish in the ocean but they don’t be catching none of ems,” the woman said. “You got a fine baby. A manchild, innit?”
“Yes.”
“What do his name be?”
“Caleb.”
The woman nodded, halved the distance between them, got up on her feet and peered down at Caleb. She nodded again, smacked her lips once and sat down. “You live round here,” she said.
“Yes.”
“One of them old houses?”
“Yes. Just a few blocks from here.”
“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.