She found another waitressing job, this one in the closest thing to a boho coffeehouse that the town could boast. It didn’t pay much, but then her rent wasn’t very much either, and at least they played good music and the rest of the staff weren’t total assholes. She was supplementing her income with weekend bar work, which wasn’t so pleasant, but she had already met a guy who seemed to like her. He had come in with some of his buddies to watch a hockey game, but he was different from them, and he had flirted with her some. He had a nice smile, and he didn’t swear like his buddies, which she admired in a man. He’d returned a couple of times since then, and she could feel him working up the co B shme.urage to ask her out. She wasn’t sure that she was ready yet, though, not after what had happened before, and she still wasn’t certain about him. There was something there, though, something that interested her. If he asked, she would say yes, but she would keep some space between them as she tried to find out more about him. She did not want things to turn out the way they had with Bobby at the end.
On her fourth night in the new town, she woke to a vision of a man and a woman walking up the street toward her rented apartment. It was so vivid that she went to the window and looked out at the world beyond, expecting to see two figures standing beneath the nearest streetlight, but the town was quiet, and the street was empty. In her dream, she had almost been able to see their faces. The dream had been coming to her for many years now, but it was only recently that the features of the man and woman had begun to seem clearer to her, growing sharper with each visitation. She could not yet recognize them, but she knew that the time was coming when she would be able to do so.
There would be a reckoning then. Of that, at least, she was certain.
III
So, so, break off this last lamenting kiss,
Which sucks two souls, and vapours both away,
Turn thou ghost that way, and let me turn this…
—JOHN DONNE (1572–1631), “THE EXPIRATION”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I SPENT EACH FRIDAY at the Bear dealing with our biggest distributor, Nappi. The Bear took delivery of beer three times a week, but Nappi accounted for 80 percent of all our taps, so its consignment was a big deal. The Nappi truck always arrived on Fridays, and once the thirty kegs had been checked and stored, and I had paid for the delivery according to the Bear’s COD policy, I would buy the driver lunch on my tab, and we would talk about beer, and his family, and the downturn in the economy.
The Bear had a slightly different yardstick from most bars by which to judge how things were going for its customers. The bar had always been popular with repo men, and we had seen increasing numbers of them parking their trucks in the lot. It wasn’t a job I would have cared to do, but the majority of them were pretty philosophical about it. They could afford to be. They were, with only a couple of exceptions, big, hard men, although the toughest of them, Jake Elms, who was eating a burger and checking his phone at the bar, was only five five and barely tipped the scales at 120 pounds. He was soft-spoken, and I had never heard him swear, but the stories that circulated about him were legendary. He traveled with a mangy terrier in the front of his truck, and kept an aluminum baseball bat in a rack beneath the dashboard. As far as I was aware, he did not own a gun, but that bat had broken some heads in its time, and Jake’s dog was reputed to have the singular talent of being able to grip a man’s testicles in its jaws and then dangle from them, growling, if anyone had the temerity to threaten i Bts curd tog fots beloved owner.
The dog, needless to say, wasn’t allowed in the bar.
“I hate this time of year,” said Nathan, the Nappi driver, as he finished off his wrap and prepared to head out into the cold. “I ought to find me a job down in Florida.”
“You like the heat?”
“No, I don’t much care for it. But this—” He gestured at the world beyond the dark cocoon of the Bear as he shrugged on his coat. “They can call it spring, but it’s not. This is still the dead of winter.”
He was right. There were only three seasons in this place, or so it seemed: winter, summer, and fall. There was no spring. Already, it was the middle of February, yet there were no real signs of returning life, no hints of renewal. The streets of the city were fortified with ramparts of snow and ice, the wider sidewalks etched with the treads of the machines that had cleared them over and over. True, the worst of the snow had departed, but in its place had come freezing rain and the dread siege of lingering cold, augmented at times by high winds, but, even in its stillest form, capable of turning ears and noses and fingertips raw. Sheltered streets were caked with patches of ice, some visible and some not. Those that sloped upward from Commercial into the Old Port were treacherous to tackle without grips on one’s soles, and the cobblestone paving, so beloved of the tourists, did nothing to make the ascent any less hazardous. The task of sweeping the floors of bars and restaurants was rendered more tedious by the accumulation of slush and ice, of grit and rock salt. In places—by the parking lots on Middle Street, or down by the wharfs—the accumulated piles of snow and ice were so high as to give the impression that pedestrians were engaged in a form of trench warfare. Some of the ice chunks were as big as boulders, as though expelled from the depths of some strange, near-frozen volcano.
On the wharfs, the lobster boats were shrouded in snow. Occasionally, a brave soul would make a foray out onto the bay and, when he returned, the blood of the fish would stain the ice pink and red, but mostly the seagulls fluttered disconsolately, waiting for summer and the return of easy pickings. At night, there was the sound of tires seeking purchase on treacherous ice, of feet stamping impatiently as keys were sought, and of laughter that teetered on the brink of tears at the pain that the cold brought.
And March still waited in the wings, a miserable month of dripping ice and melting snow and the last vestiges of winter lurking filthily in shadowy places. Then April, and May. Summer, and warmth, and tourists.
But, for now, there was only winter without the promise of spring. Here there were ice and snow, and the traces of old footprints retained amid the crystals like unwanted memories that refused to die. The people huddled together, and waited for the siege to break. But that day, the day that Nathan spoke of the dead of winter, brought something strange and different to this part of the world.
It brought the mist.
It brought them.
It had been bitterly cold for days, weeks, unusually so even for the time of year. Snow had fallen, day after day, and then, just before Valentine’s Day, it turned to freezing rain that flooded streets and turned the drifts of accumulated snow to rugged slabs of ice. Then the Jrillen rain stopped but the cold stayed, until at last the weather broke, and temperatures climbed.
And the mist rose off the white fields like smoke from a cold burning, carried by air currents unfelt by man so that it seemed almost a living thing, a pale manifestation with a purpose untold and unknown. The shapes of the trees became indistinguishable, the forests lost to the enveloping fog. It did not diminish or falter, but appeared to grow denser and deeper as the day drew on, dampening the towns and cities and falling like soft rain on windows and cars and people. By nightfall visibility was down to a matter of feet, and the highway signs flashed warnings about speed and distance.
And still the mist came. It took over the city, turning the brightest lights to ghosts of themselves, cutting off those who walked the streets from others like them, so that all felt alone in the world. In its way, it brought closer together those with families and other loved ones, for they sought solace with one another, a point of contact in a world that had grown suddenly unfamiliar.
Perhaps that was why they came back, or did I still believe that they had never quite departed to begin with? I had set them free, these ghosts of my wife and child. I had asked their forgiveness for my failings, and I had taken all that I had retained of their lives—clothes and toys, dresses and shoes—and burned them in my yard. I had felt them leave, following the marsh streams into the waiting sea beyond, and when I set foot in the house again, the smell of smoke and lost things thick upon me, it seemed different to me: lighter, somehow, as though a little of the clutter had been cleared from it, or an old, stale odor banished by the breezes through open windows.
They were my ghosts, of course. I had created them, in my way. I had given form to them, making my anger and grief and loss their own, so that they became to me hostile things, with all that I had once loved about them gone, and all that I hated about myself filling the void. And they took that shape and accepted it, because it was their way to return to this world, my world. They were not ready to slip into the shadows of memory, to become like dreams, to relinquish their place in this life.
And I did not understand why.
But that was not them. That was not the wife I had loved, however poorly, and the daughter I had once cherished. I had caught glimpses of them as they truly were, before I allowed them to be transformed. I saw my dead wife leading the ghost of a boy into a deep forest, his small hand in hers, and I knew that he felt no fear of her. She was the Summer Lady, taking him to those whom he had lost, accompanying him on his last journey through the thickets and trees. And so that he would not be frightened, so that he would not be alone, there was another with him, a girl close to his own age who skipped in winter sunlight as she waited for her playmate to arrive.
This was my wife and child. This was their true form. What I released in smoke and flames were my ghosts. What returned with the mist were their own.