“He does,” Caroline had said. But even then she had felt uneasy; Minna had hit on something that for years Caroline had tried to deny. That was why she had left Richard, ultimately: she’d realized that he had loved her only because she belonged to him.
The short climb had left Caroline winded, and she paused just before the final step, trying to catch her breath. Her feet were so swollen she could see the skin swelling around the contours of her flats. She rested her head against the wall, which was cool. Her heart was going wild in her chest. Recently she had been imagining, more and more, that it would simply stop.
“Careful of the glass,” Minna was saying below. She had followed Amy down into the basement. “Don’t touch that. It’s rusty.”
“What is it?” Amy said.
“Who knows. Garbage. Trenton, a little help, please?”
“What the hell do you want me to do?”
“Don’t curse in front of Amy,” Minna said.
Caroline could feel their voices through the wall. She lifted her head. She was so tired. She didn’t know how she would make it up the last step.
“In The Raven Heliotrope,” Amy was saying, in a high, pleading voice, “the Caves of Werth are filled with treasure. Can we play pretend, Mommy?”
Caroline spoke up before Minna could answer. “There’s no treasure down there, Amy,” she said. Her voice was unexpectedly loud. “Just garbage, like Mommy said.”
She hauled herself up the final step and went to the kitchen to get a drink.
ALICE
“Are you proud of yourself?” Sandra asks.
“What do you mean?”
“You did that,” Sandra says. The new ghost whimpers—a low, animal sound. “Congratulations on a nice little show.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, even though of course I do.
She means the lightbulb—the explosion. And I am proud. I’m ecstatic. It has been many, many years—decades—since I’ve felt that kind of power.
And it gives me hope.
I’ve only seen one bad fire. I was seven or eight when a conflagration spread through our neighborhood in Boston and leaped across several houses before attacking St. John the Divine and the funeral parlor next to it; by morning, the houses were gone and the church was blackened with smoke and ash. The air stunk like melted glass and something chemical I couldn’t name, and volunteers were enlisted to bring coffins out of the wreckage. My sisters and I went down to watch the action, and in particular, to see the bodies come out: coffins covered in a layer of silt and ash, bodies bundled in tarpaulin and half burned away, bits of hair and fingernail.
The fingernails keep growing, my sister Delilah told me. The hair, too.
Someday you’ll be dead like that, my sister Olivia said. You’ll be nothing but bone and fingernail, and no one will miss you.
Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.
Sandra doesn’t know about my plan for the fire. How could I tell her? If I’m right, it will be the end of us. That’s the whole point. In fiction, ghosts remain because of some entanglement with the living world, something they must do, resolve, or achieve.
I assure you that isn’t the case for me. The world has nothing to offer me, no single shred of interest. I’m a woman trapped on a balcony, watching a passing parade, a blur of noise and motion that eventually turns to a single point on the horizon, a gutter full of trampled and muddy cups, and the sense of wasting an afternoon.
There was Maggie. But even she might be dead by now. I like to think I would have known, would have felt it, but I know that’s fantasy. Maggie was a stranger to me in her adult life, a stiff-backed, short-haired woman with tastes and habits I hardly recognized. Tofu, she told me, the last time I visited her in San Francisco, when she served me a plate of vegetables and brown rice and some lumpy, milk-white substance that reminded me of curdled fat. I’m a vegan now.
Amazing, isn’t it? That hearts that once beat in sync could be so perfectly and forever separated. That’s the whole process of life, I think: a long, slow process of separation. It can be cured only by the reabsorption into everything, into the single heartbeat of time.
It’s my time to go home.
PART IV
THE GREENHOUSE
TRENTON
Trenton hadn’t been inside the greenhouse in years and was startled by the bird: as soon as Trenton closed the pantry door it rose, flapping, to the sky, so close that Trenton could feel the air shredded beneath its big, black wings.
Several of the glass panes in the roof were missing—shattered, Trenton assumed, or blown away during the last big storm. A rusted ladder was still leaning against the exterior wall, as if someone had abruptly decided the repairs weren’t worth it. There was a covering of fine green grass embedded in the dirt, so his footsteps made a crunching sound.
The greenhouse he remembered was a jungle, a riot of flowers as big as a child’s head, trembling with moisture, humid and exotic and totally off-limits. He remembered the emerald light, the alien-looking orchids, the summer roses climbing trellises all winter long.
There was no longer anything green in the greenhouse, except for a dozen fake plants—squat Christmas trees with plastic bristles, fabric lilies, improbable plastic orchids, and even a miniature palm tree—crammed into one corner of the rectangular space. What plants did remain were dry, brown, and brittle.
It was Saturday, 10 a.m., and Trenton was, for all intents and purposes, alone in the house. Amy was in the den, all the way on the other side of the house. His mom was still sleeping. She’d gotten drunk in her room last night, doing whatever the hell she did, and would probably stay up there until at least noon. And from his bedroom window he’d spotted Minna skirting the edge of the woods, a felt cap pulled low over her ears even though it was already probably sixty degrees, wearing an old pair of waders.
Getting up onto the shelf was difficult; the old wood groaned underneath him as though it might collapse under his weight. But he managed. When he stretched out on his back, he was mostly concealed by the fake planters and the intersection of their manufactured leaves, and thus invisible from both the pantry side and the door that led out toward the lawn.
He had one joint left from the stash he’d bought from an older guy who worked at the Multiplex in Melville, Long Island. He sparked up, took three hits in quick succession, and stamped out the end of the joint so he could save it for later. He lay back, feeling a delicious heaviness in his legs and arms, a sudden wave of calm.