For the Living

Just this once, the message could bleed through the wallpaper. 

It seemed to Andrea as if everybody else's ghosts made themselves crystal clear — hard to forget TRASH DAY when the letters curled out of the fog in the bathroom mirror. Hard to ignore a bookshelf crashing down, a single book flipping open to a page where the letters were circled in blood red: 

“IT WAS MO M FOU ND OUT ABOUT A M Y”

But Andrea’s dearly departed preferred subtlety.

The morning after she burned up a letter to her mother asking whether she should take a promotion across the country, the rosebuds in the front garden burst into supple pink blooms, despite the snow that lingered on the ground. 

Permission to grow, Andrea thought at first.

But as she turned back to the house, the gleam of the window in the morning light caught her eye. And her gaze traveled from the red brick her grandfather had placed, to her grandmother’s garden in supernatural florescence, to the swing beneath the maple tree that had been her mother's and then hers. And an anchor dropped in her stomach to hold her on the sidewalk, reverent.

“I get it,” she said aloud. 

So, she stayed. 

When she wanted to know about the man she had then just started seeing, she wrote a letter and shredded it to pieces, buried it beneath the maple tree.

Was this the one, she had asked her grandmother, with his accounting degree, his penchant for Scottish whiskey, his idea of a romantic night out at a baseball game? 

For weeks, no answer came. Andrea wondered if she had destroyed the note well enough. She searched for an answer in the robins' song that trilled outside her bedroom window, in the traffic patterns of her commute. Could the water boiling over on the stove be a sign of great passion? That the sweater he left draped on her bannister still smelled of his aftershave — could that signal longevity? 

Over the weeks, as she waited, Henry took her to dinners and movies and the occasional museum, texted her each night and every morning. He delivered flowers to her house, red roses that in truth showed up the rosebushes outside. 

Finally, over cold glasses of a strong whiskey that Andrea could hardly sip, Henry confessed a strange coincidence: For weeks, each time he had tried to leave the house to see her, he misplaced his keys. Each time, he was certain he had placed them on the dresser, and each time, they vanished, reappearing in the same spot only after it was long past time to leave. Andrea had noticed this, of course. 

"I was embarrassed to tell you, but today I kept the keys in my pockets, and I kept checking on them while I was getting ready," he said, his smile sheepish against the glass.

Andrea laughed along with him as if it were all a coincidence. But she steadied herself on the barstool against the sudden rush of lightheadedness that had nothing to do with the whiskey. Of course, she saw the meddling of her ghosts, who had tried to keep him away.

And yet, he had thwarted them — something it had never occurred to her to do. Perhaps her ghosts did not approve of this man; but he'd defy their will to be with her. 

She squeezed his fingers in smitten forgiveness. 

So they stayed together. Living was for the living, after all.

And Andrea asked fewer questions and stopped looking for messages in the way that the tomato vines were growing this year (all awkward angles, tortuous), or in the pieces of the coffee mug she dropped (was that a frown?) partly because she was upset at their disapproval, but mostly because Henry had never asked a ghost anything.

"There's nothing you'd want to know?"

She propped herself up with one hand in the bed, after she'd explained to him her ghosts’ penchant for omens.

He smiled toward the ceiling. His mother and father were living, his grandparents the stalwart fixtures of a retirement community down the road. Only children addressed their messages to anonymous ghosts.

He turned to her, brushed a lock of hair out of her face and Andrea wondered if her ghosts just didn't want to see her happy.

"I have everyone I want to talk to about everything right here.”

The next week he moved in. 

And months went by before she wrote another message. And only out of desperation after she had ransacked the house looking for the old cookbook. It was short, simple, impossible to toy with.

APPLE PIE RECIPE? QUICKLY PLEASE? She printed the query carefully on a notecard and turned the kitchen faucet on full until the paper dissolved into pulp. 

She ran wet fingers over her steaming forehead and glanced at the kitchen clock. Three hours to cook dinner and dessert, get dressed, and tidy the house, which Henry's mother would surely inspect with a tight-lipped frown. 

Never mind that he had promised to come home early to help; never mind that most of the mess was his moving boxes, which he had also promised to finish unpacking how many times? She glanced at them with resentment for how they stuck out like sore thumbs.

So with the pressure on, her ghosts could, just once, just float the recipe down from the attic, preheat the oven, peel and core the apples mid-air. Andrea pleaded with them in her mind.

All she could remember of the pie crust was butter — sticks of it — two pounds perhaps? Her grandmother always floured the counter, so Andrea did that too.

As she reached into the bag again, a line began to curve into the flour on the counter, forming a distinct number:

2 ½ cups flour

Salt, a pinch

¾ cup lard

Lard. Andrea blinked — her grandmother had always insisted on butter.

“Lard?” she said aloud. “I have butter.” She tore the butter wrapper into shreds for the benefit of the ghost. 

A line appeared under the word.

“Grandma Martha?” Andrea said. Butter aside, never had her ghosts acted so quickly, so decisively. 

Suddenly her heated forehead felt clammy. She grabbed a pen and the other butter wrapper and quickly scrawled:

“Who are you?” 

She shredded the note with a slight flutter in her chest about the strange presence in the house. Only children were afraid of ghosts. 

A long moment passed and Andrea wondered if the spirit had fled. But then, in the hallway, she heard the scrape of cardboard. 

One of Henry's boxes opened.

Andrea wiped her floured hands on her apron. She had never looked inside the boxes. Henry got testy when she asked what was inside, as if the question was an accusation of his broken promises. Slowly, she approached.

Inside were books. Hefty, ancient-looking tomes. Anna picked one up, somewhat expecting to find a cookbook.

“MARITIME VOYAGES 1810-1860” was much lighter than she expected. She turned the cover to find a hollow cut into the book's pages. 

In it sat a beaded bracelet, a lock of blonde hair, a scrap of teal fabric. 

As Anna ran her fingers over the book's damaged pages, two red circles appeared like a flush of blood on papery skin.

AL MA

Andrea's hands began to shake. So it was a stranger's recipe after all — a stranger belonging to Henry.

She glanced back into the box. A smaller, much more modern book had sat below the tome. Teal and inscribed with gold detail. Andrea turned it over to find a lock in the shape of a heart.

Slowly, more lines bled through the pages, encircling individual letters in the shipping logs of 1825:

AS K HI M 

WH E RE HE 

P UT ME

Andrea dropped the tome away from herself. Her heart thundered in her chest. Surely it meant something else, surely she was imagining things —

Down the hall, a key turned in the front lock. 

“Andrea?” came his voice. 

She couldn't move. She expected footsteps. The thump of his bag. His voice asking her what she'd done. Then what? She'd ask why he'd never mentioned this ghost.

But then: “The door is jammed or something,” he said. 

Slowly, she turned toward the entry. She could see the door was unlocked. Nothing blocked its path. Still, he was fruitlessly jiggling the handle as if an unseen weight pressed against it. That was more like her ghosts, Andrea thought, the realization cutting through her panic like a dousing of cold water.

Quickly, she laid the diary in the box and closed the maritime book, placing it neatly on top and folding the box just as it has been before. She pulled her apron off and replaced it with her coat, grabbed the purse and keys that she didn't remember leaving on the table. 

She opened the door to his bewildered face. Every nerve in her body screamed to push past him. But instead, kept his gaze.

“Hi honey,” she said mildly. She hoped the smile masked her fear. “Must have been the humidity.”

His expression hardened into judgment as he took in her coat, her purse, her intent to leave. 

“Where are you going?” he said. “My parents will be here soon.”

She curled her keys in her hands and ducked under his arm. Living was for the living after all. And she intended to keep doing it.

“I'll be just a minute. I just need something from the store,” she said. “I'm trying a new recipe for pie.”