Before and Afterlives
Sylvie’s mother had inherited the Warner flaw of heart, and because of this she married Sylvie’s father, a young man whose careers had ranged from convenience store clerk to selling cemetery plots to working in a cabinet factory by the time he’d turned twenty. She had married for love, and love led her into a falling-down house with her new husband, already carrying a child. And though the Warner family had come down the ladder, they had not come down so far that they would approve of Anna marrying such a man. “What kind of life can he give you?” her father had asked in the front room of their family mansion that was always cold, even in summer.
Anna had said, “Why does it matter what he can give me? What canIgivehim? What can we give each other?”
Her father had pursed his lips, closed his eyes and sighed, knowing sense would not reach her. He turned, lifting his hands in resignation, and left Anna standing under the candelabra with the wide staircase curling up on either side of the room to the second floor. She shivered for a while in the cold draft that came through the hallways. Then she made a decision. A decision that would take her to Sylvie’s father’s family home, into the ramshackle section of unemployed laborers and their raucous families, where Sylvie would be born eight months later.
“Hello, my big girl,” says Anna. Sylvie wishes she could hug her mother instead of just see her and talk to her in the photo. It’s been so long since she felt her mother’s arms around her. Her father’s hugs are tight and hot, but her mother’s felt like spring mornings, light coming under the window shade, the smell of growing things pushing their way up and out of the earth.
“Hi, Mom,” says Sylvie, though she’s not sure what else to say. How many times has she opened this book of dead people just to look at her mother? Just to say hello? It’s hard to have a conversation now that her mother’s dead. Sylvie keeps on changing, but her mother will always be who she was when that picture was taken. She will be like that forever.
“What did you do today?” Anna asks. “I thought I’d see you this morning, but it’s already afternoon.”
“Dad had a job. At the Boardman mansion. She’s at the back of the book with Mr. Marlowe. He’s explaining everything to her now.”
Anna sighs and shakes her head, leaning against the border of the photograph. “Your father is doing well then?”
Sylvie nods. “He got another e-mail today too. A baby ghost. Guess it’s crying too much for the woman’s husband.”
“I wish he would stop,” says Anna.
“I wish he would too,” says Sylvie.
“I wish he’d never found out what you can do,” says Anna.
“I don’t mind, I guess,” says Sylvie. “I mean, I just wish he would stop. That’s all.”
“Did you do your homework?” her mother asks, trying not to appear too obvious in her switching of the subject. Sylvie nods, then shrugs and says no. “You better do that, honey,” says her mother. “I know it’s hard right now, but you have to keep studying.”
“What good is it anyway?” says Sylvie. “You’re smart. Where did it get you?”
“Don’t say things like that, Sylvie.”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” Sylvie says. “I just wish you were here. I mean, really.”
“So do I,” says Anna. “But you need to be strong, okay? I need you to be my big, strong girl.”
Sylvie nods, even though she is neither big, nor strong. She kisses her mother’s picture before closing the album and putting it aside to do her Algebra homework. She’s fourteen, neither big, nor strong, but she can at least do Algebra for her mother.
While Sylvie does her homework, while she watches a movie about rich warlocks taking over a town their great grandfathers founded long, long ago, while Sylvie showers and walks around with her hair wrapped up in a towel like a beehive, while she puts herself to bed and falls asleep, while she dreams she is trapped in one of those police department rooms where people can see in but you can’t see out, the ghosts in the photograph album gossip, debate, inform the new ghost—the old woman, whose name is Mrs. Clara Boardman, formerly ofthe Boardmans of Warren, Ohio—about the general condition of her recently transformed existence. Mrs. Boardman is outraged to discover that Sylvie’s father believes he has freed her from ghosthood, that she’s now resting at peace in some place people imagine to be heaven. “Only Sylvie can see and hear us then?” she asks.
The other ghosts murmur or mumble their confirmations, but Mr. Marlowe adds, “Well, the people we were haunting too. They could see and hear us, of course.”
“It’s why the ghost hunter’s business is doing so well,” adds the annoying policeman, who only the crazy mumbler can see is angrily pointing and wagging his finger as he speaks.
The rich woman in the fur coat and hat with the golden pin of the butterfly on the side of it says, “They’re no longer crazy once Sylvie sees the ghosts too. When she’s nearby, she makes us visible.”
“Hence the photos,” says Mr. Marlowe.
“Hence this album,” says Sylvie’s mother. “I’m sorry, everyone,” she says. “I’m afraid I’m the one who started all this.”
“Not at all,” says Mr. Marlowe.
“It’s not your fault,” the mumbler says.
“You didn’t make him capture you, or any of us,” says the police officer.
The little girl with pigtails jumping rope smiles across the page from Anna. The dog chasing his tail barks twice. Anna sighs despite their effort to buoy her spirits. “I don’t know,” she says. “If I’d never haunted Sylvie, she might never have been able to see the rest of you. That could be enough reason to lay blame.”
“Pish posh,” says the rich woman, tugging at the collar of her fur coat. “Don’t be silly, dear girl. You could never be blamed for this. It’s not as if you’re a magician who’s given away trade secrets. Ghosts have a right to haunt, now don’t we?”
“Well said,” says Mr. Marlowe, and the dog chasing his tail barks once again.
Their voices seep out of the album while the ghost hunter’s beautiful daughter sleeps. All night long she hears their voices without comprehending them; they are like songs teenagers hear in the buds of their turned-down-low iPod earphones while they dream. They make sense to Sylvie while she is sleeping, but in the morning, when she wakes, they fall away from her memory like sand through spread fingers.
At school Sylvie enjoys a sort of fame that she had never felt before her mother died. Since the journalist from theWarren Tribune interviewed her father, everyone knows he can get rid of ghosts. Sylvie had read the article like anyone else ten months ago, in the Sunday edition. At first she’d been confused. Why had her father allowed a reporter to interview him? But quickly she came to understand that it was money. Money was almost always the reason for anything her father did, probably because he had so little of it.
In the article, he is quoted as saying, “After seeing how much it upset my daughter, after all my family and friends told me I was delusional, I decided to buy the equipment necessary to help my wife on her way to the afterlife.”
This is the part of the interview Sylvie hates most. How he lied about her being upset. And the end of the article announcing that he could do this for others, that it was a service he could provide.
When she arrived at school the next day, everyone was waiting with sad eyes and invitations to parties or sleepovers. They believed she’d been through hell and, though many of them had never been haunted, enough had and now they were talking, sharing secrets, surrounding Sylvie with their stories of grief and torment. She’d understand, they thought. She knew the horror.
But Sylvie hadn’t been horrified. She had loved seeing her mother walk around the same rooms she’d walked in when she’d been living. It was almost as if she wasn’t dead. True, she could no longer touch her mother, but she could see and hear her, and sometimes she thought she could smell her perfume,Eternity, but she realized that was just a lingering memory after she started to see other ghosts. Ghosts don’t hav
e a scent, she now knows. Not unless you can remember what they smelled like when they were living.
So it had only been Sylvie that saw her mother at first. Her father didn’t tell the reporter that. And then one day he had come home from working at the cabinet factory early, a stomach ache, and found his beautiful daughter in her bedroom of their slanted, narrow house, talking to his dead wife.
Sylvie had kept it secret until that day, which was also the day she realized others could see her mother if she didn’t take precautions: arrange for times when she and Anna could sit and chat like nothing had ever happened. When her father saw, though, he told everyone, and everyone had patted his back and consoled him while disbelieving. For months afterwards he complained to friends and relatives that his wife was haunting him and his daughter, and for months friends and relatives made sympathetic faces, nodded politely, placing a hand on his forearm or putting an arm around his shoulders as they walked through the park, saying things like, “My mother thought my father was haunting her for a while after he died. Don’t worry. It’s just a phase.”
He had been outraged by their belief that he was just another ordinary mourner. He had seen his wife standing right in front of him, talking to his daughter. It was no intimation, no product of his imagination. He could see her, speak to her, when Sylvie was in the room. But his friends and family would only bat their lashes while they pondered polite responses, trying to consider how to help him through his grief.How must Sylvie be handling this,they wondered,if this is how Richard grieves?
And then, as he said in the article, he found his father’s old Polaroid camera and took a picture of Anna. He’d prove what he saw. He hadn’t realized that, when he snapped her picture, she would disappear. He received his proof in the photo that she had been there, but when he looked at it, she was still as stone and no longer talking. Sylvie had cried and cried, curled her fists into balls and beat his chest until he grabbed her wrists and stopped her. “You killed her!” Sylvie screamed.
“No, Sylvie,” her father said, “the cancer did that.”
Later, her father gave her the picture to keep, after having passed it around to friends and family to prove his sanity.
It wasn’t until he gave the picture to Sylvie, after he was through with it, that Anna spoke again. “We can’t let him know about me this time,” said Anna. And Sylvie, who had been crying, nodded and said, “I’m sorry, Mom. I’ll be careful this time. I won’t let him know you’re still with us.”
In the newspaper interview, her father had done something that Sylvie’s mother said was noble. He had lied about how it was Sylvie who made his wife visible. He didn’t admit that he’d never been able to see her without Sylvie nearby. He said nothing about the camera. He had told the reporter he’d bought the usual ghost hunting equipment for the job: infra-red temperature gauges, negative ion detectors, Geiger counters, electromagnetic field sensors. He owned a few of those things now, for props. He had protected Sylvie.
“Dislike what your father’s done,” Anna told Sylvie, “but don’t hate him. His intentions were good.”
Now Sylvie is popular. Previously she’d been just another poor white girl who hadn’t learned how to fight, avoiding everyone, head down, watching her feet pull her through the hallways of Western Reserve Middle School. When she gets off the bus now, there is always someone waiting to walk and talk with her in the hallways.
“Did your father catch any ghosts this weekend?” Ariel Hyland asks during lunch on Monday. Ariel is probably the darkest-skinned black girl in Warren Western Reserve Middle School. For years she and Sylvie have shared a bus seat, talked in a minimal way about each others families, but other than that, the girls barely know each other.
Sylvie nods. Tells Ariel about the Boardman mansion. The girls and boys that line up on the benches of her table lean in to listen closer. They are always waiting to hear about another ghost, another capture. Sylvie’s father is famous. He’s been the lead story forGhost Hunter Monthly. He’s been invited to Pittsburgh to rid a hotel of a spirit that’s stalked the place for four decades. What he’s waiting for is a call from Hollywood, asking him to do a show. Sylvie tells the other students enough to satisfy their curiosity. But it’s never enough. Even after she finishes telling them about Mrs. Boardman, how she had offered Sylvie tea when she came upon her in the attic, how nice she had seemed about being found, even after it is clear Sylvie will tell no more and changes the subject to the Ghost Walk that’s coming up next weekend and would anyone like to go, they eye her greedily. They have no interest in community theater actors who just pretend to be dead. Only real ghosts matter.
Having made plans to attend the Ghost Walk on Saturday night with Ariel and a few of the other lunch table crowd, Sylvie starts to worry. For months she’s tried to pretend her new fame will disappear, that at some point she can go back to being nobody. She doesn’t know how to tell who really wants to be her friend and who wants to hang around her because of her father’s escapades. She likes knowing where she stands. There are girls who leave letters in her locker now, telling her about their own ghosts. There are boys who come up to her at her lunch table and offer her trinkets of misplaced affection: photographs of glowing lights in their back yards they’ve taken, DVDs ofGhostbustersorCasper, once a silver charm bracelet with tiny, ghostly faces dangling from it. Before, when her mother was still alive but sick and losing her hair and refusing to take money from her family for a better doctor, for better treatment—and even before that, when Anna refused to take money for a college education from her father the art historian, because he’d offered it like she was just another charity organization after marrying Richard, and she would rather live and die working at Wal-Mart, as her mother once said—Sylvie had had few friends. Ariel Hyland hadn’t been what she considers a real friend. Ariel had talked to Sylvie, but had never befriended her in a way that made Sylvie feelknown, the way a true friend knows you, the way Sylvie’s mother knows her. But still, out everyone at Western Reserve Middle School, Ariel is the closest thing she has. She’ll stick close to Ariel at the night of the Ghost Walk, she decides.
“That’s a good idea,” Anna says when Sylvie confides in her. Sylvie tries not to burden her mother with her own problems, but sometimes she can’t help herself. She tries to be big, to be strong, but sometimes she just wants her mother. “It’s good that you have friends, Sylvie,” says Anna. “You can’t hide from the world forever.”
“It isn’t hiding,” says Sylvie.
“What is it then?” Anna asks from the front page of the photo album. In the background Sylvie’s dresser is pressed up against the wall of her bedroom in their old falling-down house, her old mattress thrown down on box springs that have been thrown down on the scratched up hardwood floor. It’s where Richard took her picture with the Polaroid months ago. Haunting Sylvie’s bedroom, as usual.
“It’s refusing,” Sylvie says. “I’m not hiding from the world. I’m refusing it.”
“But why, honey?” her mother asks. It’s times like this that Sylvie finds herself annoyed with Anna, like most girls at school act annoyed with their mothers. Whenever Sylvie admits that she doesn’t love the world or life as much as her mother loved it, Anna begins to nag like any mother. “There’s so much out there for you, Sylvie,” says Anna. “Don’t refuse the world. Embrace it.”
“Mom,” Sylvie says, “whatever’s out there isn’t you. I love you, but can we drop it?”
The church where Sylvie and Ariel meet the others from their lunch table is on a corner of courthouse square, all lit up on this October evening, leaves tumbling end over end across lawns, scraping across the sidewalks like the severed hands of zombies. Sylvie has always been a fan of Halloween—her favorite movie isThe Nightmare Before Christmas, her favorite candy are those little sugary pumpkins, her favorite colors: purple, orange and black—and now it all seems a little ironic to her as she stands in the front room of the First Presbyterian Church sipping cocoa with Ariel and
five of their cafeteria friends whose parents have dropped them off or sent them on their bikes with enough money to buy a ticket to the realm of the dead for the evening, making them promise to be back by ten o’clock.
An older woman comes over to ask if they’re all part of a group or willing to mix with other travelers along the River Styx this night. Everyone laughs or smiles; she’s obviously excited to call the Mahoning River the River Styx and to use grammatical constructions like “this night” to her heart’s content. No one answers her immediately, so Sylvie speaks up. “We’re going together if possible.”
“All righty,” says the old woman, who smells exactly like the church smells, Sylvie notices, a little musty and a little like Avon perfume. “Then go ahead and wait outside on the front steps. Your guide for the evening will meet you shortly.”
Ariel says she’s getting a refill of cocoa—“The damn ticket for this cost so much,” she says, “might as well get my money’s worth.”—and everyone agrees. Their Styrofoam cups steaming with cocoa again, they wander out to the steps, which are wide and steep and face the tree-lined road of mansions their guide will take them down. They wait, sipping, discussing the potential the Ghost Walk has for being incredibly cheesy. “Too bad your dad’s not here, Sylvie,” a boy named Aaron says. “I bet he could tell better stories.”