Genevieve has been dead for years now, since before I was even born. What I know is hearsay. As the story goes, she drowned in some hotel bathtub while her mother was in the neighboring room, attending to a baby, incognizant of the way five-year-old Genevieve slipped beneath the water and drowned. There was no scream like people do when they’re hurt or in danger, but rather a silent death, the sagging underwater and drifting off to sleep. She never cried out; she never gasped for air. That’s how the story goes.
In time, the accounts of Genevieve’s death became romanticized to say the least: a little girl immersed in a cornucopia of bubble bath and soapsuds so that all that remained above water were a few random strands of brunette hair. They were in a lavish hotel room, on vacation. The description of the death scene was redolent: the puce-colored bubbles with their raspberry sorbet scent, the girl’s creamy skin, reddened by the warmth of the water, though none of the people telling the tale were there to see what it is that they describe: the few random bubbles, silvery bubbles floating in the air, sticking to the bathtub tiles. Genevieve had drowned, forgotten in the bathtub thanks to a little moppet in the adjoining room, her sister, only a year or two old at the time, who had fallen from the bed and cried, taking her mother’s attention away from the girl in the bathtub.
It was too expensive to ship the body across state lines, or so they say, those neighbors who are old enough to remember the day the family car pulled into the driveway of the yellow home, the three-foot corpse tucked away in the trunk to skirt whatever legalese was required of moving a body from here to there. Neighbors say they’ll never forget the way they hovered in the cracked, concrete driveway, waiting to help lift the rudimentary wooden casket from the trunk and into a hole they’d dug up at the cemetery in town. The news of Genevieve’s death had already arrived, leading the way into town well before her corpse.
People were shattered. Little girls weren’t supposed to die.
All that was left behind was Genevieve’s ghost, said to haunt people even in sleep, their dreams filled with bath water spilling over the sides of a tub, a little girl like a seraph: dead. Her skin, ashen and white, wings sprouting from her body. Her hair jet-black and wet.
I don’t believe any of those things.
“Genevieve,” I say to Pearl. “That’s her name, the girl’s name who died. The ghost’s name supposedly.”
“It’s pretty,” she tells me. “It’s a pretty name.”
“It is.”
“And she died?”
“She did.”
“Here?” asks Pearl, doing a sweep of the room with her slim arm, but I shake my head no. I follow the path of her arm, anyway, to the shadows that linger in each and every corner of the room, the spiderwebs that hang from the ceiling like lace. I have half a mind to excuse myself and come back with a mop and a vacuum, to clean this place up. I think that I would do that for Pearl. I would make this place somewhat more livable and nice. I couldn’t fix everything, no, of course not. But I could sweep the floors and dust the webs. That kind of thing. She shouldn’t have to stay here in this hellhole.
The cold room has drifted to hot, thanks to the heater. Hot enough that Pearl has removed her coat and my sweatshirt and sits beside them on the floor in a thin cotton shirt and her jeans. Her arms move with the grace of a ballerina, moving through their positions in the air. I want to ask her if she ever danced, if she ever took ballet classes, what the nature is of her relationship with Dr. Giles. But I don’t. Of course I don’t. None of these things are my business. Everyone has their own secrets. She doesn’t ask me mine, so I won’t ask her hers. Though I’d tell her, of course; I’d tell her anything and everything she wanted to know.
We’re friends, right? You and I. We’re friends.
“No,” I say then, focusing on the conversation at hand. “Not here. Genevieve didn’t die here.” And then I go on to tell her about the family vacation, about the lavish hotel. The cornucopia of bubble bath and soapsuds and all that stuff. I watch as her face saddens with my narrative of little Genevieve’s death.
“She didn’t know how to swim?” she asks me, and I shrug my shoulders and say, “Apparently not.” Because of course if she did know how to swim she would have held her breath under water, and not inhaled deeply and let the water fill her lungs. There was speculation that Genevieve tried to stand up in the bathtub and hit her head on the ceramic tile, causing her to become unconscious before she drowned. That’s just one hypothesis. No one was there to say for sure. No one saw her die. There’s also the assumption that she was playing a game, trying to see how many seconds she could hold herself under water, but the water won out in the end. Oxygen deprivation, they think, summoning a breathing reflex, the body’s natural need to breathe even when submerged in soapy water, filling the stomach first, and then the lungs, with fluid. Hundreds of thousands of people die each year from drowning. Of these, a huge percent are five years old or less, like Genevieve was. People can drown in anything from bathtubs, to toilets, to puddles. I think of Pops drinking himself nearly to death; he’s liable, one day, to die in his own bottle of beer.
“I wonder what happens when you drown,” Pearl says. “I wonder if it hurts.” She looks at me then, her sad eyes wanting to know.
“I don’t know,” I say, “but I bet it does. I bet it’s scary, not being able to breathe.”
These aren’t the words she wants to hear; I know that. She wants me to tell her that Genevieve merely closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep. That Genevieve didn’t know any better, that one minute she was blowing bubbles in a bathtub and the next she was dead. In the afterlife. Heaven. At the pearly gates, and all that. She never knew she was dying. That’s what Pearl wants to hear. But for some reason or other, I tell her the truth. Maybe because I think she’s been lied to enough and she deserves the truth.
“Really scary,” she agrees. “Did you ever see her after, you know...after?”
“You mean, like her body? After she died?” I ask, and she says yes. That’s exactly what she means. “No,” I tell her. “I wasn’t even born when Genevieve died. All I’ve heard are the stories.”
“Oh,” she says, and she seems a bit let down, like she wants to hear more. Like she wishes I had seen Genevieve’s corpse. But I don’t have any more to tell. “I bet her family was sad,” she says, and I nod my head and say, “Yeah. Really sad.” But this I don’t know, either. I don’t know anything about Genevieve’s family. They were long gone before I was born.
And then I get to wondering. “When you die, do you think you’ll come back as a ghost?” I ask. It’s tangential, sort of, and entirely hypothetical. Theoretical and speculative and completely make-believe. Of course, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I ask, anyway, for the sake of conversation.
“No,” she tells me decisively. “No way. There’s no such thing as ghosts. Besides, if there were, I hardly think anyone would be scared of me,” and she holds her flashlight up under her chin and dons a morbid expression on her face, ghostlike sounds emerging from her chest. Ohhhh... Ohhhh...
I laugh.
She’s not scary at all. She’s the flip side of scary. Her tone of voice and her warm smile and her kindly eyes, they’re soothing. I find that I’m not so nervous anymore. Well, sort of. I’m still scared to death I’ll say something stupid to screw the whole thing up. But I’m not so scared of her. There’s something about her that puts me at ease.
“What about you?” she asks, meaning whether or not I’d come back and stalk loved ones from the beyond.
I tell her yeah, I would. Well, not loved ones exactly. But other people I would. “I’d screw with all those guys who used to pick on me in school. The girls who ignored me. My boss, Mrs. Priddy, for all the times she was mean. That kind of thing,” I say, and for just a minute I savor the thought of an apparition of me tormenting Priddy from the great beyond. I smile. I kind of like that idea.
“Do you ever think about it?” she asks.
“About what?” I ask.
“About death,” she says to me. “About dying.”
I shake my head. “No,” I say. “Not really. I try not to think about that kind of thing. You?”