My body fell into its natural rhythm: dropping into unconsciousness when most people woke, waking when most people were coming home from work. I hardly ever looked outside, sliding ever deeper into the worlds I was building for Penelope to explore. Once the books began to appear in print, I had no interest in how well they were doing. The only reader I cared about was Christine. I had my publisher send copies to Meredith in the hopes that she would read them to her out loud, and I personally mailed her as much of the profits as I could spare. I never told Meredith where I’d gone, but she’d clearly found out, as regular letters began to appear in my mailbox: weekly at first, then monthly, and eventually, once a year, around Christmastime. Unable to bring myself to read them, I stuffed the envelopes, unopened, into a shoebox on the fridge.
Time blurred past. An ungodly amount of time. Sometimes I could still feel Christine’s sturdy little body against mine, still smell the baby shampoo in her hair. But for the most part, the house did its job and distracted me. I wasn’t just seeing the ghosts now, I was hearing them too. Some nights, I could hardly think for the noise: shrieking laughter, monotonous barking, Dad yelling up the stairs, Mother’s soft, uncertain voice somewhere at my shoulder. They might not have been aware of me, but I took a voyeuristic, almost godlike pleasure in observing them when they thought they were alone: Dad straining on the toilet, Eileen lip-synching in the mirror, my teenaged self, masturbating furiously in bed.
When the letters from Meredith stopped coming, I assumed the worst, that the end I’d foreseen for Christine had arrived. She was gone. I made an instant chocolate cake on her birthday, covered it with candles, and waited for her ghost to appear. Eventually, seeing nothing but Dad’s old kitchen table and three empty chairs, I blew out the candles and threw the cake in the garbage. From that moment on, I stopped keeping track of time, cancelling my newspaper subscription, deliberately averting my gaze from the dates on my written correspondence. But time hadn’t forgotten me. Grey threaded its way through my hair and beard, my flesh slackening on the bone, my joints tightening with arthritis. A dozen books into the Penelope series, I couldn’t have said just how old I was with any degree of certainty. I was dying, that was all that mattered. I could be patient for this last part. As long as I had royalties, my solitude would be preserved. And for the longest time it was. Then one day, a letter from the postal service informed me of an imminent change. They were, I was told, phasing out the old door-to-door postal system in favour of a more efficient network of community mailboxes, for which I would soon be given a key. My box would be at the end of the block, on the north-east corner of Poplar and Rose (the exact intersection where I’d been struck down as a boy). I had to collect my mail somehow. I was going to have to leave the house.
I started by stepping out onto the porch, a thin note of terror ringing through my head as I gripped the railing. A few days later, I took one step down the stairs. By the end of the week, I’d made it all the way to the yard, discovering years of accumulated trash and a few resourceful weeds among the rocks. On my next outing, I moved beyond the perimeter of the fence, lurching down the block to snatch a handful of flyers from my assigned cubby. Once a week, I forced myself to make that terrible journey, the peace of mind I’d worked so hard to achieve shattered as I dwelled on small moments from the walk—a child observing me from the passenger window of a slow-moving car, a beautiful young woman saying hello, my disastrous reply. Gradually, the weather began to cool. The leaves changed colour and spiralled to the ground.
One afternoon, I was standing at the kitchen window by the coffee machine, when a flock of geese passed over the house. My skin tingled as the scene around me grew eerily familiar. I’d eaten breakfast by that same window for years. I’d seen dozens, if not hundreds of geese pass over the house. But there was something about that breakfast, those geese, the precise quality of light in the window, the way I was holding my cup, that left me feeling I’d experienced the moment before. Only when I burned my mouth and slammed down my cup did my very first trip to the future return to me: the long walk to the bank of mailboxes down the road, the unexpected letter from Meredith.
I leafed through several half-finished books (just as I’d done in my vision), before putting on my shoes. Outside, all the familiar details were there. The wind around my naked ankles. Dad’s ghost working on the fence. A boy on a bike. A speeding car. I moved down the sidewalk on a rigid track to the mailbox, not at all surprised to find Meredith’s letter in my cubby. I carried it home, spotting Dad’s ghost on the roof. My neighbour appeared and I awkwardly saluted her, hauling myself up the front porch, as hail began to fall from the overcast sky.
That was the point where my vision had ended and Christine had jumped into my arms, but now I could follow the story further, into the house. Rather than tearing the letter open immediately, I took down the shoebox with all of Meredith’s unopened letters. Judging from the postmarks, she hadn’t written in five years. I hadn’t seen her in nearly ten. If Christine had still been alive, she would have been twelve years old. Unable to think of anything that Meredith could say that might lessen the pain of that fact, I added her latest letter to the shoebox and went back to the window. The storm had passed. More geese flew over the house, plaintively calling. Next door, the neighbour’s lawnmower roared to life. A fist-sized shadow drifted over the rocks in the yard, though I could see nothing to cast it. I went back to the fridge and grabbed the shoebox of letters. Before I could change my mind, I carried the box over to the old woodstove in the living room and shoved it in, lighting a match and setting the whole thing on fire.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A half-dozen empty yellow vehicles sat in a row outside the airport terminal. I stood on the curb with my bag for a long time before an airport employee finally noticed me and came over to explain how the autocabs worked in a loud, patronizing voice, as if I were ninety years old.