What a Ghost Is
by Andrew Graham Martin
We lowered our chicken tenders as one. A glob of barbecue sauce dripped off the end of mine and fell with a splat onto my crotch.
“A man?” Leigh asked her mom.
“Yes!” Cheryl said.
“In your closet?”
“Yes!”
“What was he doing?”
“He was smoking a cigar! That’s how I noticed him. The orange tip. And he was wearing a flannel. Like, you know. A… I don’t know. Just a normal flannel.”
“How old were you?” I asked.
She shrugged.
“Eight? Nine?”
My mother-in-law does this thing where she kind of obscures what genre of story she’s telling until she gets to the end. So sometimes you regret not having been listening.
Next to me, Olivia popped a NASA space shuttle toy in her mouth and sucked it like it was her pacifier. I tried to replace it with a spoonful of applesauce but that made her eyes go all jiggly. I had to ask my next question over the crying.
“Who did you think it was?”
“I thought,” Cheryl said. “It was my dad!”
Leigh managed to get Olivia to calm down by humming the chorus of “Apples and Bananas.” Meanwhile I felt like shit. We all knew that in college Cheryl had come home to surprise her dad for Easter and she’d found him on the floor of his study. He hadn’t been sick or anything.
“Was it a ghost you think?” Leigh asked.
“I don’t know,” Cheryl said. She picked up her book even though she hadn’t finished her salad. “I just don’t know.”
I could tell she was disappointed in our reaction but I couldn’t tell why.
***
The part of your brain that understands dying doesn’t turn on until you get older. My high school home ec teacher told me that, while my group waited for our lemon meringues to crisp up.
“You guys literally think you’ll never die,” she told us. “I can tell you you will but it won’t matter. Psychologically you won’t be able to believe me.”
She was right. I know because recently that part of my brain finally clicked on. Clear as the red light on the oven that says when it’s done preheating.
Both of Leigh’s grandmas passed away between Halloween and Christmas of last year. Breast cancer and a hard kitchen counter. They’d both spent their final days in the hospital, and Leigh told me that despite how different the women had been in life – Grandma Lynn plump and shy and always chuckling to herself, Grandma Shrader stern and nearsighted and hypersensitive to the scent of household cleaners- they both looked the same the last time she saw them. Chapped lips, mouths gaping, the skinniest they’d been in their life.
“Like mummies,” Leigh had said.
Then, a month later, Leigh’s Aunt Jen – Cheryl’s older sister – got diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. She’d been telling everyone for months the weight loss was on purpose.
All of a sudden it went from feeling impossible to die to feeling like it was impossible we weren’t all dying all the time.
***
Leigh was in Grandma Shrader’s old garage with her mom, looking through boxes of Joel Osteen self-help books and hand painted Purdue basketball memorabilia to see if there was anything she wanted before it was hauled away to Goodwill. Leigh’s brother, Alex, was going to be moving into the house in two weeks and we were doing a kind of recon mission. He was busy playing with Olivia in the living room, which, with its lack of furniture, must’ve seemed to her as vast and alluring as the surface of the moon.
I’d wandered down the hall. The carpet was beige and extra cushiony the way it is in all grandma’s houses. Grandma Shrader always insisted when you came in you didn’t have to take your shoes off, but everyone knew if you didn’t she’d privately bitch about it afterwards. Once, when we’d visited early during the pandemic, breathing through the hot handkerchiefs wrapped around our faces, she’d observed that my hair was getting long and wondered what I thought of all the late night guys growing out their beards.
I almost felt like I could hear her brittle, hard candy voice echoing in the hallway as I wandered toward my mother-in-law’s childhood bedroom.
There was still a bed in there, but only the frame and mattress. The sheets and comforter had been stripped, giving the place a hospital feel. No art on the walls, no furniture or rugs. Even the stained-glass dragonfly sculptures that had been clipped to the window curtains were gone.
Ahead of me, the closet door hung ajar. Like it was saying, come on in.
“Sure,” I said aloud.
I went and stood inside it, having to stoop a little because there was a built-in shelf just above my head. I turned around and tried to picture my mother-in-law as an eight or nine-year-old in the bed in front of me. I tried to imagine myself as her dad who wasn’t dead yet. It tied my brain up in a delicious little pretzel.
The longer I stood there, the more a weird kind of peace crept over me. It was that late afternoon kind of peace, where it’s quiet except for birds whistling, and the sun drifts through the trees in the backyard, which are rustling slightly from a breeze, and that feels like it could be the only movement in the world. And everything sounds muffled, as though the sunlight is having a dampening effect on the air.
I realized I was about to fall asleep standing up.
Then I heard a thunk from the other room and Olivia started crying.
***
On the drive home Leigh and I tried to name every paint color we’d used in our house so far. Eggshell White, Mahogany Coconut, Dream Lavender, Nebula Iris, Honkytonk Sunset. When we reached in our minds the last room in our house, the only one we’d yet to transform, I interrupted, knowing where the conversation was about to go.
“I’m not touching it,” I said. “I’m done painting. Look at my forearms. They’re bowed. Like cowboy legs.”
“Then I’ll do it,” she said.
I didn’t reply but she looked at me and heard what I was thinking anyway. That hurt look that sometimes comes into her mom’s eyes came into hers.
“What?” she asked. “You don’t think I will?”
“It’s just,” I said. “I painted all the others.”
The Prius rumbled against the highway and in the backseat, Olivia gnawed noisily on her space shuttle. We passed a billboard for mulch, then one for not having abortions, then one for sausage breakfast sandwiches. Feast responsibly, it said.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Leigh’s cheeks had turned red as arteries and she’d started sniffling.
“It’s fine,” she said, looking out the window. Then, she shook her head, as if rejecting whatever false thing she was about to say.
“It’s just been a really hard year and I could use this one thing to look forward to.”
We stopped at Lowe’s on the way back. A farmer with a lisp was haranguing the Returns lady when we walked in.
“Have you smelled this?” he asked her of the loose soil in his hand. “I mean, have you actually smelled this shit?”
***
Two weeks later I followed Olivia as she navigated her way around the boxes of donuts on the living room floor, dodged the legs of Alex’s friends as they hauled in banker’s boxes full of his board games, and passed the front door, which was propped open, allowing in pine needle puffs of misty air.
Eventually she made her way into Cheryl’s old bedroom, which I understood would soon be a study. A pleasurable little shiver ran up my spine as the ghost story returned to me, and since Olivia was busy kissing her reflection in the window, I decided to go stand in the closet and pretend to be my mother-in-law’s father again.
That sleepy feeling hit as soon as I crossed the threshold. This, despite me having chugged a venti americano on the drive down. The world got instantly muffled, and though I could still see Olivia bathed in the rain-streaked, early morning light from the window, I started to get what I could only describe as an evening feeling, like things in the world were winding down in an old timey kind of way. I imagined construction workers punching cards and hanging hard hats on brass hooks. Men in suits reading newspapers on trains as the light in the car flashes orange and crimson.
I startled, and my heart jackhammered as I realized I’d fallen asleep. It was dark in the room. My throat constricted, remembering Olivia. I was about to bolt when my eyes adjusted and I realized the room wasn’t barren anymore. It was full of furniture, knickknacks, construction paper chains. I was trying to comprehend how everyone could have moved in around me while I stood zombielike in this closet, when I noticed someone was lying on the bed in front of me.
The comforter –pink and brown and fuzzy and hideous – had a lump under it which was rising and falling like a docked boat. Smushed up against the pillow was a wild head of red hair, looking the same as my wife’s when I roll over and see her in the morning.
I realized I was about to pass out from my heart beating so fast. I took a step out of the closet and suddenly the room was light and empty again. Olivia was still kissing the window, and Alex was in the next room demanding to know who had finished the toffee donut.
“I’m not mad, I just want to know,” I heard him say.
I sat down on the empty mattress and put my face in my hands. Olivia wandered over and put her head on my knee and started sucking her thumb. I ran my hand through her wispy hair and for the moment the sensation of this was enough to keep me from collapsing.
***
Back home that night, I laid awake with both eyes trained on my closet door. Most nights I keep it closed – I’ve never liked that sliver of darkness looking out at me, like outer space can watch me sleep. But tonight I left it open a crack. And I laid there, and at any moment I expected to see the spark of a lighter.
But there was only the sound of rain running off our broken gutter outside, and our baby monitor hissing static beside us, and my wife snoring daintily the way she does.
The longer I watched the closet, the stranger the thoughts were that started occurring to me. This was how I’ve always known I’m about to fall asleep. The most bizarre ideas will roll through my brain and to me they won’t seem strange at all. In fact, if I find myself acknowledging one as strange, without fail, I will instantly be jolted back awake and find myself wide-eyed for the next forty-five minutes. So I try not to question the weird thoughts when they come.
Tonight they looked like this: I imagined someone showing up in my closet, with a lit cigar in his mouth and the power to reorient my life with a single ashy breath. If he were to appear now in the dark he would look like a demon. I would find it hard not to be frightened of him. But I figure he’d only be scary for as long as I kept my face buried in my pillow. If I were to sit up and shine a little light on him, perhaps his shadowy features would reform and he’d turn into an angel.
A crude and awkward angel, made holy not by his nature, but by the gifts he bore.
***
The backs of Alex’s ears were getting tomato colored as he tried to explain a board game to us called “Intergalactic Truckers.” My rum and Coke was nothing but tan ice. The bathroom was calling.
The formerly bare walls of Grandma Shrader’s house were now cluttered with pennants and banners and framed seashells and screen-printed stills from allegedly canceled too soon shows and blown-up replications of obnoxious internet comics. The walls weren’t beige anymore but deep purples, hot pinks, trendy aquamarine blues. It filled me with a kind of melancholy knowing the kitschiness of the old place was gone forever. Like how sometimes you miss the before version of the nerd who gets transformed in makeover shows.
Even as I approached the bathroom I knew that was not where I was heading, despite the pressure in my pelvis. My feet glided me past it and down the hall and to the left, into Cheryl’s childhood bedroom.
I stepped into the closet and turned around and there she was. It didn’t take long at all this time. And because I was expecting it I had the foresight to look around and appreciate my environment a little. I was breathing in 70s air. The president was Gerald Ford, probably.
A Star Wars poster hung over the bed. Outside the window, crickets were chirping. It occurred to me that there were frogs in this world who were yet to go extinct. My stomach started getting tickly like I’d driven too fast over a dip in the road.
And there was Cheryl, ahead of me, snoring. She did it the same way my wife does. Ladylike, like she thinks she’s on camera. What a thing to have inherited, I thought. I realized I could almost make myself cry, understanding that I’d just learned of a genealogical trait that would have forever been unknown to me had I not stumbled upon this closet.
I watched her, wondering if she would wake up this time, or the next, or the next. And when she did, I wondered if I’d have the courage to turn this cosmic magic trick, this tether to the past, into the miracle it so desperately wanted to be.
***
We were dying eggs on the patio when twinkly harp music began ringing out from Cheryl’s phone. She scooted her folding chair back and stood up. Olivia grabbed the egg she’d been working on and popped the small end in her mouth. Her face looked like she’d been gnawing on a wet rainbow.
As Cheryl walked down the steps, we heard her adopt her measured voice and say, “what’s happening.”
We all gave each other funeral looks while our eggs continued to soak. Cheryl was too far away in the yard to hear anything, but the way she started gesturing and then stopped gesturing and then started again we could tell it wasn’t a phone call any of us wanted to hear.
Aunt Jen had lost her husband to Covid three years ago. He’d worked for a Heating and Cooling company and they’d insisted on everyone coming back into the office two weeks before he was due to get his first shot. He spent a month on a ventilator and died on his birthday, leaving behind his wife and an eleven-year-old son, a blond boy named Trevor who used to love telling me about the engines in European sports cars but not so much anymore.
When it happened I’d thought a lot about how easy it would have been for any of us to tell him what he should’ve done. Use vacation days. Retire. Say no to the powers above. But no one intervened. Only afterward did it seem obvious we should have.
When Cheryl came back she told Leigh she ought to visit her aunt sometime this week. Earlier in the week would be better, she added.
***
I’d started jotting down thoughts as they came to me:
Tell your sister not to let her husband go back to work until he gets his shot.
Tell her to find a doctor – a real doctor, a good doctor, in the city – the second she starts losing weight.
Don’t bring up politics with your mother in the year 2024. Just steer clear of the topic entirely.
Don’t go with your friends to Greece Christmas break of your junior year. Go see your dad instead. Stay up all night talking to him. Squeeze him as hard as you can before you go.
I wondered what all this would do to the fabric of space. Walking the dog at night, I’d gotten in the habit of looking up at it. The sky did indeed look more fragile than normal. Thinner, somehow. Like a run in a pair of stockings.
“What’re you writing?” Leigh asked, pulling the sheets back and sliding into bed.
“Journaling,” I lied. Since the beginning this whole thing had felt like a violation. There was a heaviness in my gut I’d labeled guilt, and I could not decide whether telling Leigh everything would lighten this load or douse it in gasoline. There was an ickiness to this story that was hard to articulate but existed on my hands at all times, making me feel as though I’d always just plunged them into a bowl of raw turkey and egg and breadcrumbs.
“What do you wish your mom had told you?” I asked. She gave me a startled look.
“Mom’s still alive,” she said slowly.
“I mean when you were younger. What do you wish she had said to you.”
She plopped her head back on her pillow and scanned the ceiling. In our wedding vows, I’d said my favorite thing to watch her do was think. Still is.
Finally, she rolled over, pulled the sheets up to her chin, and said:
“When I was little I asked her if I was fat. She said to pinch my belly and if I could ‘pinch an inch’ then that meant I should start exercising.”
She clicked on the space heater beside her. I clicked on my fan. Near us, our baby coughed. I heard it from the hall first, then, a microsecond later, through the hissing monitor.
“So what’s your answer?” I asked.
“For what I wish mom had said to me?” she said. “…Not that.”
***
I believe now it was the flannel that did it. How dumb I had been not to wear one on each visit. The shirt I picked out of my closet, incidentally, had been gifted to me by Aunt Jen a couple Christmas’s ago. She always did all her Christmas shopping at Bass Pro Shops, and she always made sure to get clothes for everyone three sizes too large.
So we’d have time to grow into them.
In my mouth was not a cigar, but my daughter’s space shuttle toy, which glowed orange on the end to indicate the flames of launch. When I saw her click the light on it the other day, my future became clear to me.
“Dad?” Cheryl called to me from the bed. “Dad?”
Splayed out on the carpet between us was her vinyl collection: Fleetwood Mac, The Cars, Joni Mitchell. I knew that a few years from now Cheryl would sell those records to help pay for school, where she would meet Leigh’s dad. He would dance the worst salsa she’d ever seen up to her from across the frat room dance floor, and he’d call her by her sister’s name accidentally.
“Dad? Is that you?”
On her dresser was the remains of some half-drank commercial diet shake in a glass. The pink goo coated the interior like algae. A tipped over yellow carton behind it read “lose the weight, gain the confidence!”
“Dad? Dad?”
A friendship bracelet she was in the middle of constructing was spread out across her messy desk. I could see from the letters she’d chosen that she was making it for her sister. It was nearly complete. She would finish it in the morning, I imagined, if she didn’t get distracted.
“Dad?”
My eyes found hers. The words I’d planned rushed through my throat but got clogged at my lips. In my hand, the crumpled page of my journal was cutting into my palm. Sweat soaked the paper, making the ink bleed. I tried to will myself to drop it, drop the paper, then step out of the closet and away forever. But my fingers remained clenched and numb.
“What’re you doing, Dad?”
Around me, the closet seemed to jiggle, like it was warning me to do what I’d come to do or get the fuck out. I inhaled the plastic smell of my daughter’s toy and tried to imagine a version of this situation where what I was doing was not contemptible. Looking into Cheryl’s eyes, I tried to convince myself that what I’d come here to do felt hard because it was noble. Not hard because it was cruel.
But how could it not be cruel, inflicting life on a child? What had she done to deserve that?
“Dad?”
Eventually, she stopped bothering to call out. The paper remained crushed in my fist. My mouth tasted like the beach. We stayed still and stared at each other through the darkness, both of us listening to those frogs outside croak their dumb hymns.
***
At Alex’s high school graduation, the first official time I’d been introduced to Leigh’s family, there had been a gurgling chocolate fondue fountain, in which guests could dunk shortbread cookies that Aunt Jen had baked in the shape of Alex. The event was held in a convocation center, and the bartering of children filled the echoing air with shrieks. Grandma Shrader scolded a boy for standing on his chair. Grandma Lynn worked on a crossword in the corner, chewing her pencil thoughtfully.
Cheryl had spoken to me from across the plastic, confetti-colored tablecloth, asking me what I thought of Colbert taking over for Letterman, and if there was any good Mexican food to be found in the small town I was from. As she looked at me with her weary, elementary school teacher eyes, I wondered if I saw a brief catch of recognition interrupt her gaze, like a sleeve snagging on a nail. As quickly as it came it went, and it’s possible I imagined it entirely.
The truth was I was distracted. Distracted by the chocolate stain on my crotch, and by the way the sunlight drifting in from the large window nearby kept glinting off a loose strand of Leigh’s copper hair, caught against her pale eyebrow. I wanted to grab it and pull it away. But also I was afraid to.
Andrew Graham Martin‘s writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Post Road, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. He lives in Indianapolis with his wife and two daughters. You can find him at andrewgrahammartin.com.