Some Real Writing

A revision of the only story I've ever put up here, All You Ghosts Again Beware.

Rebecca Adams
All You Ghosts Again Beware


Two deer are picking their way down our sloped and crackling November lawn when she says it. I can see them through the sliding glass door in the breakfast nook, smooth sides rippling as they dodge roots and frozen clumps of Kentucky Blue. The sky is an uncompromising gray. I was shocked at their appearance against the dark pines, so close to the house and the squirrel-noisy bird feeder on its green metal post, but they move without any indication that they’re aware of me at all. The younger of the two, a buck just budding antlers, stops to smell the gravel edge of the drive. I’m still trying to figure out whether they’ll cross when she startles me away from the glass.

“Harlan?”

I turn. Lacey is skimming wheat bagels out of the toaster with two fingers, waiting a moment and then buttering them over a paper towel. “Harlan, Mrs. Keillor’s little boy died last week.”

“Oh my God!”

“She actually called a few days ago, but you were having so much trouble with the Kettlewells’ boat house I thought sharing might not be kind.”

“Well, thank you,” I say, remembering briefly the horror of trying to reshingle the rotting fruit-crate the Kettlewells store their ancient Ski-doos in. “But what happened? Was there an accident?”

Emily Keillor is the young blind woman Lacey reads to on Wednesday nights. The arrangement started as a favor to one of the other manicurists at the Mane Attraction, whose husband is apparently Mrs. Keillor’s cousin’s stepbrother, but has blossomed into something Lacey does for herself. I’ve never actually met the woman or her child, but Lacey has told enough stories through the eight months or so she that and Mrs. Keillor have been friends to make me feel personally affected by her tragedy. I run a hand through the head of hair that’s still dark, though the ends are curling in silver, and the short beard I keep trimmed for my care-taking clients. Lacey shakes her red curls, puts two more bagel-halves in the toaster.

“It’s horrible. He was playing on the jungle gym at school and he just slipped and broke his neck. I guess at first the playground aide didn’t even know he was dead, just thought he’d been knocked out. She went to turn him over and his eyes were all open and full of sand.” Her back is to me now, the shoulders of her sweater bobbing as she works.

“That’s awful.”

“Emily still can’t get ahold of her husband to tell him what’s happened. He’s somewhere out in the Rockies, I guess, taking his yearly “sabbatical.” Emily says he leaves his cell phone and his wallet in the car and then hikes out into the mountains for ten days. Can you imagine? His son dead almost a week and he doesn’t even know.”

“I don’t even want to think about it,” I say. I pick up one of Lacey’s bagels and put it down again. The small kitchen glows around us, pots bubbling on the stove, water glasses already on the table, full and gleaming. Suddenly the clear winter light and the smell of our cooking food seem terrible, hurtful.

I don’t ask Lacey how she knows all the details of the boy’s death. If Emily Keillor hasn’t told them to her—and it’s likely at least that she hasn’t shared the eyes-full-of-sand thing, not after a week, and maybe not at all—there are six or ten regular customers of the Mane who have probably been more than prepared for some gossip-worthy tragedy. With so few year-round residents of Blue Sands, WI, (Population, according to our Welcome sign: 2,320) there’s usually little to titillate the public ear until May or June, when the summer people start flooding back into the shingled cottages that ring our lake. A dip in school funding or new rumors of vandalism perpetrated against Mr. Cooley’s infamous greenhouse full of marijuana bushes (a place much discussed and never seen) is about as racy as autumn gets around here this time of year. Two Octobers ago, when the roof of one of the cottages I watch blew down on me during a squall, talk of my near-death experience didn’t subside for nearly a month.

“I just assumed our readings were cancelled till further notice,” Lacey says, turning down the heat on the potatoes, “but Mrs. Keillor called this afternoon and asked me to come tomorrow as planned.” She pauses. “Actually, she asked both of us.”

“Both of us?” I slide an iron hot pad with “San Francisco” glazed on it in slanted cursive under a dish of green beans. The air over the beans goes wavy with their heat. “But she doesn’t even know me.”

“Well, it’s not as if I don’t rave a bit about you.” Lacey takes the steel pan of potatoes over to the sink and starts churning through them with the beveled masher. Her action startles a couple of cardinals, bright in their winter plumage, away from the nearly empty bird feeder. They flap away into the pines like fallen leaves rising on a breeze. “Anyway, I think she just needs some people to be with her right now. People who...well, people, I think, who don’t have any kids. She must think terrible thoughts when she’s alone.”

“Well, yeah, but doesn’t she have any—” I almost say “friends,” realize it sounds like a critique of Lacey, and settle on “family.” “Doesn’t she have any family like that to stay with her?” The idea of having to lift in the company of a stranger the lids of boxes Lacey and I have been opening and shutting for years isn’t very appealing.

“Her brother will come, I suppose. But he lives in Phoenix, and I gather they’re not very close. Her parents are dead. I don’t know about anyone else. I guess I don’t really know all that much about her family. But she just lost her son, Harlan. I think we should go if she wants us to.”

“Okay.” I put my hands on Lacey’s small hips, squeeze. She’s like a deer herself today, smooth and fawn-colored. She’s got a little Celtic cross on a gold chain around her neck and a mole under her right ear. The neck of her sweater is cut low enough to suggest the tops of her clear, buffy breasts. My hands move up to her waist. We’ve been married for seven years and I want seventy more.

“We’re running out of daylight,” Lacey says. She puts a Jim Croce album in the little CD player we keep on the kitchen counter and angles the player toward the table. She waits a moment, pushes “random.” “Let’s eat while it’s still nice and bright.”

We sit down and chew our food through “Operator,” “Time in a Bottle,” and “Photographs and Memories.” I don’t remember ever hearing the CD player select so many songs from the same CD twice. The sound of Croce’s desire is sad and sweet, and eventually our conversation fades out under his narrative need. When we sit down I’m hungry, but by the time we start clearing away the plates, everything I’ve eaten has settled in me alien as wind-blown soil. Lacey and I lay still beside each other in bed that night, and when I dream I see the two of us, young, watching a group of faceless children run along the lakeshore. One of them, a boy with dark, dark hair, runs toward us with a white, wind-scoured mussel shell and evaporates just before he reaches my outstretched arms. Lacey misses my disappointed cry, too busy watching the rest of the children scatter into the swelling waves. By the time she turns back to me all of the children are gone. The moon is framing my half of the bed and I am awake in the quiet of our bedroom, clock ticking quietly on the night-stand, Lacey fast asleep.

The next afternoon Lacey comes bumping down our rutted drive at a quarter to three and finds me out back, chopping sections of one of our three dead oak trees into firewood.

“Howdy, stranger.” She slips in behind me and throws her hands over my face. I pretend to be shocked, lift the axe threateningly. She’s wearing fuzzy green hand-warmers that shed yarn fibers into my eyes. As I’m picking them out, she tells me about calling Mrs. Keillor this morning.

“The entire house was absolutely silent,” she says. “I’m telling you, Harlan, if you’d ever spoken to this woman on the phone before, you’d know how out of character that is. She’s always got 89.X in the background, or a shrieking kettle, or Inside the Actor’s Studio. I’ve never been able to hear her so well. And she just says, “Okay,” when I tell her we’re coming, and hangs up. Nothing else at all. It was so sad.”

“Well, she is sad,” I say.

“I know, but there’s a big difference between being sad and being so sad you don’t even try to hide it,” Lacey says. “I don’t know how to explain it. I’ve never been that...sorrowful. I don’t think you can ever feel that much sorrow without having kids, and losing them.”

“I’d be like that if I lost you,” I say, hugging her into my arm. Lacey pulls away and leans against my back, blows away a puff of down that’s slipped from a hole in her quilted vest.

“No, you wouldn’t. No offense, Harlan, you just wouldn’t. I wouldn’t be if you died. I mean, I’d miss you all the time, and it would be horrible, but I wouldn’t be...defeated. Not as bad as if we had a baby, and...” She trails off. The non-existent baby sits between us like so many long and difficult conversations we just aren’t strong enough to have today. I can feel my old ache like a migraine, starting deep behind my eyes. Lacey looks away. “Anyway, it was upsetting.”

By the time I’ve washed my face and put on a clean collared shirt and Lacey has traded her down shell for a subdued sweater jacket, both of us are thoroughly depressed. We leave Lacey’s rust-feathered pick-up in the driveway and take my Jeep to town instead. The Jeep is quieter, has a smoother ride, and sometimes the heat works properly. Today it doesn’t. Lacey bunches her hands inside her sweater’s kangaroo pocket and I hunch deeper into my Packer’s jacket. We pass a few fields and a long stretch of brown woods without saying anything. Occasionally we catch a glimpse of the lake, dark and sparkling, chopping the afternoon light into thin slivers and swallowing them.

“The reflections look like French fries,” Lacey remarks finally, witnessing this motion.

“Fish and chips out there, then,” I say. The joke falls flat, and I feel a little guilty for trying to introduce a note of levity. A few more miles of silence.

“I’m glad I didn’t know him,” Lacey comes out with suddenly. “I know that makes me sound like a terrible person. He was always at daycare when I came over. Mrs. Keillor had these pictures up—for other people, I guess, all these pictures in heavy frames of him swimming and playing and drinking from a snaky hose. That’s as close as I got.”

From the tears I hear in her voice, even photographs were too close. I can’t help feeling a tiny, selfish pang. “What was his name?”

“Elliot.” Lacey’s eyes are looking far beyond the windshield. She doesn’t offer anything else.

“I’m glad we’re going over,” I say. “Maybe we’ll be some help.”

“Yeah.” We grow silent again. I try to concentrate only on my driving but I can’t stop thinking about our own situation, about Elliot, about Lacey. A scenario off balance, dismayed, lacking children and cluttered with adults. An image of the boy from last night fills my head, transfixed now by a snake with a fist-sized head that weaves dangerously over a manicured lawn.

Ten minutes later Mrs. Keillor herself ushers us into a small sitting room so far from what I expect of a blind woman that for a moment I literally stop in my tracks. Two tasseled accent rugs explode in riotous color to either side of the entry. On each rug sits a three-foot stone gargoyle, snarling a griffin grin into the shins of passerby. The carpet is soft and springy and the deep color of May grass. Pictures in varnished wood frames are everywhere—on the mantel, over the radiator, clotted together on iron accent tables and the bamboo coffee table. There’s even a collection of antique men’s monocles matted on velvet. Lacey has alluded to the Keillors’ eccentric tastes in her stories, but no story could bring to life the reality of all this. I put out a finger and poke a taxidermied eider duck forever in flight against the left wall.

“There’s coffee in the kitchen,” Mrs. Keillor says. The woman herself does not fit at all into the boisterous vivacity of her living room. Her voice is so quiet I’m afraid I’ll lose it in all the colors and textures her home presents. Her chin-length black hair is stick-straight and very fine, soft looking as the hair on a horse’s flank. She can’t weigh any more than Lacey even though she’s nearly a foot taller, and her hips jut like competing prows from either side of her black jeans. As she walks it seems that it’s the memory of her hips tugging her in each direction that gets her through without a spill, her faded and off-focus eyes vestigial and blank.

Lacey and I follow her back to a breakfast nook the size of a modest walk-in closet and wait on some cushioned wooden chairs while she pours three cups of coffee, black, and sets them on a tray. To watch Emily Keillor maneuver through her crowded home you’d never know she was blind. She slides her fingers along the edge of tabletop before resting her tray and that’s it. No cane, no dog, no Marco-Polo calls, no zombie-like shuffle with fluttering fingers—everything I thought I knew about blind people quietly implodes. I sip my coffee. Lacey puts a hand over Mrs. Keillor’s.

“Harlan and I just wanted you to know how sorry we are about Elliot,” she says. “If there’s anything at all we can do...”

“Thank you.” The way Mrs. Keillor keeps her pain bobbing in front of our sight is disconcerting; I’m used to the sighted trying to train that emotion on their shoes, or their hands, or out the screen door. Her eyes are puffy and tired-looking. She squeezes Lacey’s hand and my wife smiles, even though the other woman can’t see her. I think they are both about to cry and I don’t have any idea what I should be doing about it. The coffee cup I’ve been given is thin as snow-crust and probably antique. If Lacey starts weeping I’m afraid my fingers will puncture its smooth surface as certainly as boots on moon dust and then I will have done something irreparable to a grieving woman.

“You have a beautiful home,” I say, painfully aware of my status as an absolute stranger, “It’s very cinematic.” I can’t believe how acutely idiotic I sound. What am I talking about? Lacey gives me a look.

“How are you holding up?” She asks quietly, but Mrs. Keillor doesn’t answer. Instead she runs her fingertips against the grain of the table and stops where two joined slats of wood don’t meet quite evenly. She pushes her index finger along the ridge as if sanding it down to buttery uniformity, repeats the motion.

“We don’t have to talk about him if it’s too hurtful now,” I say, gripping my cup with borderline pressure, “only if that’s what you’d like. We don’t mind just sitting here if that’s what you need.” The finger moves back and forth again, then stops.

“I...no.” Mrs. Keillor shakes her head. “No. It’s too quiet here as it is. You’re nice, Harlan, but no.” She touches her neck, stares at some point far beyond us. “It’s strange. I thought that once you two were here, I would be so uncomfortable. I almost uninvited you. But now that you’re actually sitting in the room...I don’t know. I don’t really know what I’m doing. God, I wish his father were here.” She puts her hands over her face, leans onto the table. The gesture is so pitiably defeated that I have a wild and ridiculous urge to run into the woods and hew down some logs to build her a house. When the moment inevitably passes, I just feel hopelessly sad.

“Oh, Emily.” Lacey says. “I’m just so sorry.”

“That’s alright.” Mrs. Keillor brings her hands together at her chin, then folds them neatly on the table. “Maybe it would be good to talk about him.”

“That’s fine,” Lacey says, reaching over to squeeze my hand. Her small, inclusive gesture is touching. “We’ll listen.”

We do. It’s surreal at first, sitting in the over-stuffed home of someone I don’t know, drinking Maxwell House and listening to her tell the story of her child’s life and death, but after awhile it’s like a radio program you’re fascinated by and want to call in to. My fear that at any moment Mrs. Keillor will turn like a summer storm, raging or weeping or icing over at some unintended but entirely inappropriate inference leached from my stock of rapidly depleting comfort phrases, softens. Lacey and I actually find ourselves smiling over her funnier stories. The time that Elliot rode a pony at the zoo and fell into a pile of dung, sparing himself a broken arm. The day that Elliot and his father took their metal detector to the beach and discovered a “Roman coin” that turned out to be a New York City subway token from 1909. The Sunday her son tried in vain to teach her to belch the opening bars of her favorite song, Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.” Our awkward pauses and double starts grow fewer and farther between. Twilight rises in the little window above the sink.

Once we’ve all taken a break to pee and have traded coffee cups for wine glasses and a decent Riesling, Lacey says something that stops my heart.

“Elliot’s so vivid in your stories, it’s like he’s still here. I wish I had that much.” The ghost child finds me again, settles heavy on my chest, so close I’m breathing its air. Mrs. Keillor smiles wetly in Lacey’s general direction.

“That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me this week.” The two women hold hands. Lamplight has rounded into a puddle on the center of the table, illuminating the wine bottle, threading down the stems of our glasses, glittering in Lacey’s hammered-gold earrings. Outside everything is dark, but reality intrudes only a little here.

I try to imagine a young boy living out his life amidst the concrete statues and fibrous artworks and reflections of his own experience. I decide that the sort of child I’m coming to believe he was would have either deeply loved or absolutely hated the texture and clutter of his family’s home, and, because I’m beginning to like Emily Keillor very much, I settle on love. I wonder about Mr. Keillor, walking through the Rockies, still picturing two souls waiting for him at the end of the journey. Does he have any kind of inkling that something is wrong? It doesn’t matter right now, really. What matters is that we are here, and we are helping, and after seven years, Lacey...well, my pulse is high. She might. I’ll leave it there, for now.

Mrs. Keillor is talking to my wife. I walk to the sink and run a glass of water, the window above a pane of navy glass. Outside on the chilly hills, deer are kneeling for the night. The lake is icing over, foxes are slipping from their dens. By the time Lacey and I head for our own house, the lake will be indistinguishable from the sky. Leaves may be skating across the frosted surface then, dancing under dark wind for the end of autumn, the end of falling, the beginning of a crisp new something.