There’s no one behind the wall this morning. That mint-green wall out my window… Usually, I can sense MJ behind it—her faint, nervous buzz—but not anymore. She’s dead, the building manager says. She won’t waylay me again in the parking lot or by the mailboxes to ask after Nana… (She’s dead, I used to say. MJ only remembered how long I’d been gone nursing her and how exhausted I looked when I got back.) There won’t be any more invitations to card games at her apartment, which is just as well. She was old, I’m young: that’s my first thought this morning. Then I notice how numb my arms are. I sit up and shake until phantom ants skitter up the fine hairs on my skin. My feet are stiff, too, so I reach under the bed for an empty glass bottle I keep there and roll it beneath my soles until the blood returns (I always have a tiny fear of shattering the glass). I sing a little as I look out the window, then I lie back down. Nana is lying in the sunroom. Aluminum screens flatten the light. A space heater ticks in the corner, and there’s a sweet smell: my aunt spraying rosewater. That’s our routine. Come in, spray the room with rosewater, moisten Nana’s tongue with a dropper kept in a water glass. She doesn’t move for days. Then she stirs and tries on the masks laid out on the bed. All different shapes, one after another. She even puts on her own, but she doesn’t recognize it and takes it off. There’s nothing under it. No face.
***
Grandfather isn’t here; he died when I was eight, so in this memory I’m nine. Mom isn’t here either, though she must be around. I can only picture Dad, my brother, and Nana. She pays for all our trips to Ocean City (“You wouldn’t come if I didn’t”) and our meals, too, even if she skips them; she spends most of her time in her room. Dad waits for her in ours. I’m in the hotel lobby with my brother. The air is thick with sweet smells. Next to the front desk, behind glass doors, there’s a candy shop where you can watch the confectioners pull strips of pastel-colored taffy. I like spinning postcard racks and stealing sheets of hotel stationery, charmed by the watermark: that same sea-blue heron that flies across the menus and emergency exit maps. My brother and I play hide-and-seek among the potted palms and lamps (black, solemn pillars topped with pink orbs). There isn’t much else to do. We aren’t allowed to go down to the bowling alley alone, though we peer through the windows at the pins standing quietly on the narrow lanes. When Dad appears, he’s alone and in a bad mood. “We’d better go,” he says. At the beach, he makes us move spots several times. My brother refuses to go into the ocean, to my delight. I rush to the surf and scoop up water to hurl at him. Most of it runs down the front of my swimsuit. Eventually he goes in. I remember him glaring afterward, wrapped in his towel like a furious Moses. Standing by the water and looking toward the pier, I realize it was right about here during our last visit that Grandfather told me if I went far enough, I would reach Portugal. I thought he meant if I walked along the beach. Now I know better. He meant if you sailed across the Atlantic. I turn to my brother, who has just walked up, to repeat what Grandfather said. But as I speak he turns around and it isn’t my brother; it’s a different face.
***
I’m at my aunt’s house, where there are no hallways. It’s a winter night. We huddle under huge comforters: my aunt, father, brother, and I. To get to the bathroom, I pass through one room and then another. In the third, Nana’s feet are resting at the edge of a bed. I run back, screaming: Her ghost is here!
***
The hotel windows glitter in the sun. It has so many rooms. I count the windows from the water to see which is ours, but I forget which floor it’s on. Then I try to guess which is Nana’s, but all the windows look the same. She could be hiding behind any one of them. Dad calls me back when the water reaches my hips. I’m not allowed to go any further out, so I duck down to give him a scare. Then he really starts calling. But the waves push me up; I bob with a little squeal as saltwater rushes up my nose and balloons my swimsuit. He doesn’t want to get in. He paces by the towels, arms crossed. He’s smiling self-consciously. (I only realize that now.) He isn’t even in a swimsuit—just khaki shorts and a seersucker shirt. I love wearing my indigo swimsuit. Even when I walk along the boardwalk, looking at the shop windows and the arcades—even when he insists I put my sandals on so I don’t get splinters, and drapes the towel over my shoulders like a cape. My brother wants to return to the hotel to buy saltwater taffy but I protest. I want to go on at least one ride. I never get the chance to go on rides, and here they’re everywhere, packed with kids my age, clattering and blaring tinny, manic music—music you’d never imagine a human being would write. “Waste of money,” my father says. I don’t get it. It isn’t clear to me how much he relies on Nana even to afford this. “We should go back and see her. That’s why we’re here, after all.” But she doesn’t want to do anything, I say—she won’t leave her room even. “This year’s been hard for her.” Well, aren’t we all sad? I’m sad, too, but out here I’m having a great time! I tap my foot in front of the haunted house at the far end of the boardwalk. It only costs three dollars…look! I point to the gabled roof, covered in off-white shingles and crooked chimneys, just as a car full of passengers bursts through a set of double doors, snakes along the balcony, and re-enters the house. Up there, among the obtuse angles, a bat with bloody fangs slowly flaps its wings. Repetitive howls of cruel laughter come from the lobby below—crashes of thunder, screams, moans. A headless vampire with a cummerbund welcomes me as I step closer to observe the moving lips of the head he holds under his arm. My father lifts my brother up to watch too. “The dreariness and gloom of my ancestral mansion are the result of many years of meticulous interior desecration,” the vampire explains while frenetic organ music loops from a speaker hidden behind his animatronic body. Dad concedes. The ride operator helps us into a wooden car mounted on rails. It looks like a cross between a coffin and a four-poster bed. Dad warns us to watch out for splinters. Then, almost too quickly, the ride lurches into motion. We jolt forward through a pair of swinging doors into a darkness broken only by violent streaks of fluorescent paint. A giant green rat lunges at us, squeaking, then retreats. As the car tilts and shakes, other bodies and faces emerge from the gloom. I scream. Wooden beams creak overhead, and from the far end of the corridor—lit by slanted timbers of yellow and red light—comes a roar of falling barrels and slamming doors. Suddenly, I have a fear—one that makes me laugh—that we’ll get stuck on the tracks and have to walk the rest of the way. A lamp clicks on as we enter a dingy room; I can’t bear to look: it hangs upside down from a nightstand piled with books, the shade coated with dust. The floral wallpaper is faded, browned as if by leaks and plumbing failures. On the bed, which also hangs over us, I make out a papier-mâché hand and foot, wrapped in spider-brown sheets. The woman screams but does not fall. I hear her screams, but she remains naked under the sheets as dust gathers on the lampshade. Outside her window lies a night of absolute blackness. From now on, I look only briefly. Once to glimpse another naked mannequin—blonde, with vivid lips and nails, shackled to a conveyor belt—slide screaming toward a circular saw that splits her from vulva to throat to reveal a scarlet interior. Then, again, to watch an old woman—her back to us, rocking as she knits—turn to hold up a spiderweb, her face a blackened skull with bulging eyes. A curtain with red tassels sways over her niche; behind her, in an oval window, a sickly green lunette glows in the black sky. I shut my eyes again and feel us ascending—accompanied by the screech of brakes—until we burst through double doors onto the rooftop, where I watch (I know it’s safe to look now) the bright ocean and the boardwalk pass by, the blood-covered bat, the mint-green gable, and the chimney with impossible angles, as the organ music loops beneath us. Then we crash through another set of doors and my eyes shut once more. I hear the shriek of metal wheels overhead as my brother screams and laughs, but I refuse to look until a clock strikes twelve close by. Another rat leaps at us, then we turn onto a stairwell with banisters like dead white trees and descend rapidly in a howling wind.
***
The storm knocks out power. The night is black. Nana places battery-operated candles on the kitchen table, their amber glow barely reaching the window. She knows I’m scared, so she opens the box of chocolates we brought her and lets me share them. A radio on the counter is still announcing the names of counties the storm is passing through. Sometimes, other stations bleed in. One voice in particular breaks through: an old man’s, halting and familiar.
I see the sea.
Nana groans. “Now why didn’t he just leave?”
Is he okay?
“He’s perfectly fine, he’s just—”
Marianne? Honey?
“Be a hon and turn that off, sugar.”
When I stand, a scratching starts in the speaker, like fingernails clawing to escape.
“Oh, no.” Nana shuts her eyes. “I hate this.”
As I touch the dial, I realize that I feel it perfectly. Everything is sharp. The dream has become lucid. When I turn around, Nana stares at me like a startled bird. Dream people have nothing to say once they’re exposed. They go very still and gray—heavy, like sculptures—and dissolve.
***
In a cool gust of mist, the car ascends through a gray transitional light and slams into the final doors. We’re damp and excited. My brother and I can’t stop laughing as we stumble out onto the boardwalk; he clutches his stomach theatrically and I drop my towel onto the planks. A gull bursts into the air, startled off the carton of fries and soft crab apron it’s picking at. “We should go collect Nana for dinner,” Dad says. NO! I yell, laughing harder. “What do you mean, no? She’s your grandmother.” He tries to sound stern but he’s fighting a smile. “She very nicely paid so you could be here and she bought you all kinds of stuff…” We are NOT eating Nana for dinner! Dad groans and reaches down. “Okay, get up.” He shakes my arm until I stand and drapes the towel back over my shoulders. “Come on. You owe her some time. You know that?” I don’t want to go to the hotel. “We discussed this. We went on the ride; now we’re getting your brother some taffy and going back to the hotel, where you’ll see your grandmother.” The awnings flutter in a way that feels unreal, like the sun has slipped into my head. My brother tugs at Dad’s hand. “I’m talking to your sister.” There’s a yellow glint of broken glass between the planks under my feet, and the shadow of a pigeon toddling beside it. He’s gentler with me in the candy shop. He offers to buy me taffy, but I opt for fudge—a large, cold brick of chocolate and spearmint. All the lobby lamps are on now. My eyes seem almost to have stopped working; there’s a graphite haze to everything. In our room, Dad cuts the fudge with a plastic knife and wraps a third of it in a napkin. “I want you to spend time with Nana,” he says as he hands it to me. “You haven’t seen her enough on this trip. Remind her we have a reservation for six-thirty, because that’s the time she said worked for her.” Dad walks me down the hall and knocks on her door. Nana is sitting in a wingback chair by an open window. The light outside is still bright, but has a tired quality. Dad says a few words and leaves us be.
***
In the dying light, I’m driving home when I see the silhouette of a woman pacing in the street. She looks lost. Only when I roll down the window do I recognize Nana. Her hair is blacker than it’s been in thirty years. I have never seen her so young. She’s dead, yes, she tells me, but she has come to say a proper goodbye, so I take her home. We make up a bed in the walk-in closet and sit by the open door to keep her company. She’s cheerful and lucid; she speaks freely about her brothers, her trips overseas, the places she painted (in life, she was a painter—amateur, but enthusiastic). She talks for days. If we get up to go to the bathroom, she says she must be boring us. No, no, we say, and sit back down. At night, black bears prowl around the house. They pry at the windows and claw at the screens. Sometimes, to avoid one, I step into the next room, only to find another pawing at the door. If I sit in a chair and sing to them, they begin to calm down. Their scratching grows softer. They fall asleep or retreat into the trees. Every night becomes like this. Little by little, we forget about Nana. There are the bears, the dishes, the groceries, the laundry, the phone calls—an endless stream of daily tasks. We only open the closet door to smile at her or offer something to drink.
***
She says, “Well, now. You’ve been neglecting me.” No, I haven’t! “You could sit with me now and then—yes, you could. Come on, honey, sit down. Did you want to come, or did he send you in here?” It was him. “Thought so. I don’t know what it is about the men I give birth to or marry. Are you supposed to drag me out of here? What’s that smile for?” He says to tell you dinner is at… “What time, hon?” I think six-thirty. “Lord, I know that. I made the reservation myself. How was your day, sugar?” Good. “Well, tell me about it.” We went to the beach. “Uh-huh.” Dad didn’t want to get wet. “Go on.” Then we went on the haunted house ride. “Was it scary?” A little. I kept my eyes closed the whole time almost. “I had a haunted house in my own home. The house we were living in when your father was born. Did I ever tell you that?” No. “It was the house I grew up in and where your grandfather and I lived, until he sold it out from under me, which is neither here nor there. But it was a very old house, and when we took it over after Daddy died, we stripped off a lot of the old wallpaper and freshened it up. And on the wall in the one room—we called it the nursery, which I suppose is what it was—there was a painting we found when we stripped the paper. A huge black castle on a hill, with a night sky behind it. Can you imagine? Having something like that painted for your children? But that’s what was under there.” Do you have a photo? “I wish. Maybe I do somewhere. Because I spent a long time looking at it. Both when we stripped the paper and later that night, when I went back in because I couldn’t sleep. I stared at it at least an hour. Just smoking and looking—I still smoked then, it was more than thirty years ago. I took a photo but my camera wasn’t good enough to catch more than the general shape. Another night I went in with the dog and we sat in front of it while I made a sketch with my colored pencils. I think I did a full sketch, then I tried to take more photos, and then…” And then? “We papered it over, dear. What are you hiding there? Is it for me?” Yes. “You aren’t giving me your whole piece of fudge?” No, just a part of it. “My goodness, that must have been a huge piece; no wonder you’re such a stocky child. What flavor?” Chocolate and mint. “I like chocolate and I like mint, but I never learned to like them together.” Can I eat it? “I won’t tell a soul. But you can hand me the pillow over there.” This pillow? “Exactly. And the blanket, sweetheart.” But as I touch the bed, I know how old I am. I look back and see her staring with her pasteboard face. No, you’re dead. There’s a hint of triumph in my voice. You’re dead, and I’m dreaming again. Your face is turning wine-colored and still. Soon you’ll disappear and I’ll wake up, because I’m asleep. Nana, you’re dead and I’m dreaming again.
