Sharyn McCrumb - Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

He did not even glance around to see if anyone was watching him before he went upstairs. Perhaps he was looking for Stephen, but Stephen is never home at this hour of the day. For most of the year I scarcely see him in daylight. He works very hard, unlike his dad-or perhaps because of him-and he doesn’t talk to me much these days. He is impatient with my depression, although he always asks if I am taking my medicine, and he is careful to remind me of doctors’ appointments. But I know that secretly he thinks that I could snap out of it if I wanted to. An aerobics class or a new hairdo would do wonders for me, he suggests now and then, trying to sound casual about it. He thinks that depression is a luxury reserved for housewives whose husbands have adequate incomes.

Perhaps he is right. Perhaps those who are forced to go out and face the world with such a mental shroud about them throw themselves in front of trains or run their cars into trees rather than endure the tedium of another dark day. I have thought of such things myself, but it would take too much effort to leave the house.

I always promise to cheer up , as Stephen puts it, and that ends the discussion. Then when he leaves for the office, I crawl back into bed and sleep as long as I can. Sometimes I play endless games of solitaire on Stephen’s home computer, watching the electronic cards flash by, and scarcely caring if the suits fit together or not. I do not watch much television. Seeing those noisy strangers on the screen making such a fuss over a new car or a better detergent always makes me feel sadder and even more out of step with the world. I would rather sleep.

I am tired all the time. I manage to get the washing done every day or so, and by four o’clock I can usually muster enough energy to cook a pork chop or perhaps some spaghetti, so that Stephen won’t get annoyed with me, and ask me what it is I do all day. I push the emptiness around the polished surfaces of the coffee table with a polishing rag. It takes up most of my time. There is so much emptiness. I force myself to eat the dinner, so that he won’t lecture me about the importance of nutrition to emotional health. Stephen is an architect, but he thinks that being my husband entitles him to express medical opinions about the state of my mind and body. It is practically the only interest he takes in either anymore.

He is not so observant about the state of the house. He never looks under the beds, or notices how long the cleaning supplies last. With only the two of us, there isn’t much housekeeping to do. He has offered to hire a maid, but I cannot bear the thought of having someone around all the time. I do enough housework to get by and to stave off the dreaded cleaning woman, and he does not complain. I am so tired.

My father-in-law was still upstairs. At least, he hadn’t reappeared. I could not be bothered to go and look for him. I sat down in Stephen’s leather chair, running the polishing rag through my fingers like a silk scarf.

“Stephen isn’t home!” I called out, in case that made any difference to my visitor. Apparently it didn’t. Shouldn’t a ghost know who is home and who isn’t without having to make a room-to-room search? Surely-ten months dead-he was sober?

I wondered if I ought to call my mother-in-law in Wisconsin to tell her that he was here. He died last November. She’d be glad to know where he is. She had wanted to go to Florida for the coming winter, but she said she didn’t like to go and have a good time, with her poor husband alone in his urn. They had been married fifty years to the month when he passed away, and they had never been apart in all that time. He had always talked about taking her somewhere for their fiftieth anniversary, but by then he was too ill and too broke to manage. They spent their anniversary in his hospital room, drinking apple juice out of paper cups. Now his widow talks wistfully of Florida, and Stephen has offered to pay for the trip, but she says that she hates to travel alone after all those years of togetherness. Why shouldn’t she, though? He is.

I wonder why he has decided to call on us. It seems like a very unlikely choice on his part. I can imagine him haunting Wrigley Field, or a Dublin pub, or perhaps some tropical island in the South Pacific, or a Norwegian fishing village. We gave him a subscription to National Geographic every year for Christmas so that he could dream about all those far-off lands that he always claimed he wanted to visit, if his health would stand it. You’d think he would make good use of his afterlife to make up for lost time. But, no-after all those years of carefully paging through glorious photographs of exotic places, he turns up here, two states from home, uninvited. Surely if he could make it to Iowa, he could reach Peru. What does he want here? His pre-mortem communication with us consisted of a few cheery monologues on the extension phone when Stephen’s mother phoned for her monthly chat. Why the interest in us now? He cannot be haunting us out of malevolence. In life, he never seemed to mind about anything-no empty bottle or underachieving racehorse could darken his mood for long. Not the sort of person you’d expect to stay bound to the earth, when presumably he could be in some heavenly Hialeah, watching Secretariat race against Man o’ War and Whirlaway in the fifth- with a fifth. How could he pass up such a hereafter to haunt a brick colonial tract house in Woodland Hills, Iowa? He never came to visit us. Stephen said the old man wouldn’t be caught dead here. Apparently he was wrong about that.

He can’t be angry at us. We went to the funeral; we took a wreath to the crematorium. I even wrote the thank-you notes, so that Stephen’s mother could concentrate on her bereavement. Stephen packed his clothes in cardboard boxes, and took them to Goodwill, and he took the whiskey bottles in the top of the closet to the recycling place. We ordered the deluxe bronze urn to put his ashes in, and we even paid extra to have his name engraved on a little plaque on the front. And now here he is, swooping down on us like a migrating heron, dropping in for an unannounced rest stop on his way south-or wherever it is that he is going.

If I called my mother-in-law and asked her if the brown leather suitcase was there in her hall closet, I wonder what she would say. Perhaps it is a ghost, too. After all, it is leather.

In the end I sat in the recliner in the living room, and took a nap. We can resolve this when Stephen gets home , I thought. It is, after all , his father .

Stephen finally arrived home at eight tonight, moaning about the heat of Indian summer, and the tempers of his co-workers. With a feeling approaching clinical interest, I watched him go upstairs.

What will he say when he meets his father on the landing? Should I have warned him? I could have told him that a relative dropped in for an unexpected visit. He would scowl, of course, but then he might have said, “Who?” and I could have said, “Someone from your side of the family,” and thus we could have eased into the subject of his late father, and I could have broken the news to him gently. But I was too tired to plan conversational gambits, and Stephen’s attention span for discussions with me is many minutes shorter than such a talk would have required, so I merely smiled and gave him a little wave, as he pulled his tie away from his collar and hurried upstairs.

Then I waited-I’m not sure what for. A shout perhaps, or even a scream of terror or astonishment. Certainly I expected Stephen to reappear very quickly, and to descend the stairs much faster than he went up. But several minutes passed in silence, and when I crept close to the bannister, I could hear drawers opening and closing in the bedroom. Stephen changing his clothes, as he did first thing every evening. I made myself climb the stairs to see if the apparition was gone. If so, I won’t mention it to Stephen , I thought. He would only think that my seeing ghosts is another symptom of my disorder . Not seeing the ghost may be a symptom of his .