*
The ghost comes to Ricky in a dream, and Ricky, five years old now, has no choice but to take her hand and follow. Into the night sky they fly, the stars of Orion’s Belt and Perseus sparkling above them, the only town Ricky has ever known sleepy and dark below. From this high the roofs are pitched in rows like the tops of crypts in Louisiana graveyards, the distance turning houses for the living as small and perfect as the houses for the dead. The ghost and Ricky fly for what seems like a very long time. Ricky can’t see her face, only sense the way her white robes blow in the wind, and though Ricky is scared and tired in the dream he doesn’t dare let go of her hand, not with the ground so far away. They fly for a longer time still, the air cold and whistling around them, and on the ground below he sees pink and purple flowers that are somehow lit up even in the dark. He knows they are the flowers his mother remembers from California, the ones she speaks of in her stories of a happier time.
They keep flying.
Then he sees, far below on the ground, a man sitting cross-legged by the side of a highway road, cradling something in his lap as he rocks back and forth over it. His father, Alcide, is a young man, younger than Ricky can remember ever having seen him, with a full, dark head of hair and a trim body. Next to him is a long brown station wagon, its front end smashed in like Ricky has seen in cartoons, all around it broken glass glittering like the stars.
His father is cradling the head of a boy, singing to it. Brown hair like Ricky’s, dark eyes like Ricky’s, a ring of blood where the neck has been severed. He knows, somehow he knows, that the boy is five years old like him. But the boy is not dead—the head turns and the boy’s brown eyes open and look into Ricky’s and the boy smiles. He smiles at Ricky as if Ricky is his friend.
For a long time, the dream confuses Ricky. He’ll remember it even thirty years from now and tell it to a room of corrections officers. At five he thinks on it and he thinks on it, and then one afternoon when he wakes up from a nap, he asks Bessie who the boy is. The boy with the brown hair, like him.
*
When I was growing up, my mother kept a white filing cabinet in the long playroom my siblings and I shared. The rest of the room was ours, unmistakably the domain of children, its floor serpentined with mazes we’d built from blocks. Bits of Play-Doh crusted between the floorboards lent the air a faintly salty smell. In one corner sat a piano my parents had purchased in the hope that at least one of the four of us might turn out to be as musical as they were not; it was always going out of tune because we banged on it so hard. High up on one wall hung two laminated maps: one of the continents and the other a close-up of the United States. Whenever we returned from a family trip, we children would gather beneath these maps and tilt our small, satisfied faces up to watch as our father traced where we’d been in black grease pencil, plotting our ventures into the wider world.
The playroom was conquered land, ours and ours alone. Yet I knew without ever having been told so that the white metal filing cabinet was not. It belonged to my mother, to some other home and some other life, a life before the fact of us. The cabinet was a steely, shiny white, cold to the touch and stubborn, with a single drawer that had to be braced and then jerked. I watched my mother perform that move with the palm of one hand. What she put in never came out. Copies of our medical records, report cards, copies of our birth certificates, and, most commonly, the photographs we’d smiled for just days before were all shoved in, to be swallowed by the cabinet. My father often told us stories of his childhood, but my mother rarely did, and I felt about the cabinet as I felt about my mother’s past. It was a thing guarded from me, and held both the allure of anything forbidden and a kind of silence as solid as stone.
So when, one rare afternoon that I was alone in the room, I mimicked my mother’s flat-palmed lift and was rewarded with a hospital chart that I slowly realized wasn’t referencing me or my sisters, but another girl, I didn’t tell anyone. I hadn’t been looking for the chart. I hadn’t known it existed to be looked for. But there it was: proof of a baby, proof of the sister now gone.
*
Bessie braces her hand against the door frame and leans hard against her crutch. The rooms are small but clean, the wallpaper new. She’s been making up the beds in Darlene and Ricky’s room, and the effort, the balancing, has winded her. The baby Jamie is down for his afternoon nap. The girls and Ricky are home from school. Ricky has fallen asleep on the couch in front of the television and when he wakes up he runs to her and pulls at the corner of her housedress. She knows the look on his face, spooked. He must have had the dream again. “Mama,” he says, “who’s the boy?”
She’s just about to tell him that the dream isn’t real, just a dream, and the boy’s not real either. Neither she nor Alcide has spoken to the children about the crash. But when she speaks, different words come out. “Follow me, sweetie.” Who knows why the past comes through in the moments it does; who knows why a secret suddenly becomes too much to keep? She’s never talked to the children about Oscar. The afternoon stretches dangerously before her, all those yawning hours to fill. Maybe time lets it in. Or maybe she’s always planned to tell them. Maybe she’s planned so privately she’s kept the plan a secret even from herself.
Francis, Darlene, Judy, and Ricky follow her into her bedroom. Darlene’s nine and I imagine her as overly responsible, a little grown-up, the one who’ll shape the family’s story. Slightly plump for her age, she takes after Bessie. Judy is eight and so stubborn she sleeps in the living room rather than share with her sister. For Judy I see both my sister’s tomboy gait and my own scowl—in the way forty years from now she’ll keep her answers curt on the stand at the trial. Francis is eleven and she trails behind, already one foot out of the door.
Then there’s Ricky.
Bessie gestures into the closet. “Darlene, why don’t you see if you can pull on that handle there?”