I was six years old.
Practical Nonie had me collecting sticks in the back yard and putting them in the giant red wheelbarrow placed near the garage. Two days earlier, there had been a tropical storm that had hung about for days offshore, sweeping one narrow arm inland for just a few hours, bringing down several trees and power lines in our little town in eastern Virginia. I was hot and cross and plagued by the mosquitoes that had appeared quickly after the rain. The air was languid, making my hair stick to my neck and my romper to my back, and though I was not usually rebellious, I’d taken off my shoes in spite of Nonie’s admonition that I should not. What I really wanted to be doing was eating the red velvet cake that she was making in the kitchen for my father’s birthday, and so I was doing my chore reluctantly, trying to see how slowly I could walk across the grass to the wheelbarrow.
I’d picked up a particularly large stick and was dragging it behind me, pretending I was a horse put to work like Black Beauty, when the wind picked up and the air turned markedly cooler. It was as sudden as if there had been some loud horn or thunderclap to announce it, and I stopped walking, wondering if there had been a sound. First I looked into the sky, but then my eyes came to rest on a woman standing at the other side of the yard, beside the wheelbarrow. She was a girl, really, and wore a belted robe the color of lemon custard whose hem played lightly around her bare feet. I was surprised but also terribly impressed that she was outside with bare feet, just like me. When she smiled and held out her hand, I realized she was the girl in all the pictures in my father’s bedroom, and in the one beside my bed. I knew her as Mother, but of course I’d been barely four years old when she died, and her voice, her touch, the way her face really looked, had faded from my mind. Her blond hair hung in untidy waves above her shoulders, and she was inhumanely pale. But I felt no fear.
Dropping the stick, I hurried toward her, the grass cold and wet on my feet. The wind was loud in my ears, and it turned to a kind of static as though it were coming from a badly tuned radio. But as I got closer, I realized with some disappointment that she wasn’t looking at me, but beyond me. When I looked back over my shoulder, I stumbled and fell, sprawling onto the grass and its minefield of small, sharp sticks. I lay there breathing hard, waiting, half-hoping she would come to help me up.
Then the wind was gone, and Nonie was standing over me.
“You’d best get up, or you’ll be covered with chiggers.”
I stood still, watching the empty space where my mother had been, as Nonie brushed the dirt from my romper and legs and tut-tutted about little girls who should listen and keep their shoes on when they were told.
Somehow I knew not to say anything about my mother to Nonie, but that night I told my father.
“Did she look happy?” he asked.
It took me a minute to answer. Could ghosts be happy or unhappy? “Yes. I think so. I don’t know why.”
He smiled at that but didn’t offer any kind of explanation.
I was ten years old before I overheard the truth about my mother. Already at school, a rotten older boy named Scott had cornered me in the coatroom and told me that my mother had hanged herself in our garage, but I called him a liar and ran away. He had given voice to my own deepest fears. My father would never park the car in the garage, but kept a small bass boat he rarely used in there on a trailer. The rest of the space was filled with old tools and the equipment he used to keep our lawn looking neat. A few weeks after Scott’s revelation, two of my father’s older sisters, my aunts, were washing the dinner dishes in the kitchen, which looked out on the garage. When I heard one of them, Ruth, say my mother’s name, I stopped just outside the doorway.
“He should’ve torn that down right after it happened. Gives me the willies just to look at it, and Lord knows the neighbors must want it gone. I’d faint dead away if I had to go in there.” The second aunt, Beth (for Rehobeth, a name I found strange and exotic), told her to lower her voice.
“If Charlotte doesn’t remember what happened, then it doesn’t matter. It’s only a garage. Roman says he can live with it, and that should be good enough for us, shouldn’t it? It’s his shame, and he has to suffer it. We’re not going to change him now.” She made a tsk-tsk sound that she used often to express her disapproval—and she disapproved of many things. Although she was the prettiest of my father’s three sisters, at thirty-eight her scowls had already creased her brow and set deep lines into either side of her unpainted lips. “We can only pray that she doesn’t have her mother’s unstable nature. Here, pass me that pan to dry.”