Sharyn McCrumb - Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

I stood in the doorway, smiling vaguely, as if I had come upstairs to ask him something, but had forgotten what. Stephen was sitting in the lounge chair beside the window, putting on his running shoes. He looked up at me, and when I didn’t say anything, he shrugged and went back to tying the laces. His father was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching this performance with interest.

“Stephen, look at the bed,” I said.

He frowned a little, and glanced at the bed, probably wondering what sort of response I was expecting. Was I propositioning him? Did I want new furniture? Was there a mouse on the pillow? He gave the question careful consideration. “The bed looks fine,” he said at last. “I’m glad you made the bed, dear. It makes the room look tidy. Thank you.”

Stephen was looking straight at his father. He could not miss him, and yet all he saw was a blue-flowered bedspread and four matching throw pillows.

My father-in-law looked at me and shrugged, as if to say that Stephen’s lack of perception was not his fault. He was certainly visible, plain as day, and if Stephen could not or would not detect his presence, there wasn’t much that either of us could do about it. I could have said, “Stephen, your dead father is sitting on the bed,” but that would have gotten us nowhere. In fact, saying that would have been worse than ignoring the matter, because Stephen would have insisted on analyzing my medication to see if I was taking anything that might cause delusions, and this would distract me from considering the real problem at hand: what is my father-in-law doing here-and what does he want me to do about it?

Upon reflection I was not surprised that Stephen failed to see this apparition. Stephen never saw rainbows when I pointed them out through the car windshield as he was driving. Finally I stopped pointing them out, and then one day I stopped seeing them, too. He is completely unable to tell whether people are happy or sad by looking at them. And he insists that he never has dreams, nightmares or otherwise. Of course he would not notice anything so unconventional as a ghost. It is beneath the threshold of his rationality. As he is not likely to take my word for it, I have abandoned the idea of telling him about his father’s visit. Some people do not qualify to be haunted.

We ate a hastily prepared meal of soup and salad. (In the excitement I had forgotten to cook dinner.) I asked Stephen a question about a project at work, and he answered so volubly that I knew he was talking to himself and had forgotten I was there. It was a very restful dinner. No awkward silences while one of us tried to think of something to say.

When we went upstairs afterward, my father-in-law was nowhere to be seen. I wandered from room to room, on the pretext of shutting windows and making sure that the lights were off. I peeked into closets and behind doors, but he was not in evidence. I did not think that this absence was permanent, however. I suspected that he was on some astral plane biding his time until Stephen had left the house again. Perhaps even ghosts find it awkward to communicate with Stephen.

I had thought about the problem all through dinner, which I barely touched, and I puzzled over it later in bed. While Stephen read Architectural Record , I scanned the room beyond the pool of light from the reading lamp to see if one of the shadows was grinning back at me, but no one was there. Later, when Stephen’s breathing evened out into the monotone of sleep, I lay awake wondering about the visit. He must be here for a reason , I thought. Since I am the only one who has noticed him, I suppose it is my problem .

He has been here for five days now. He does not speak to me. Perhaps he can’t. I see him here and there around the house, and sometimes we exchange looks or smiles, so I know he is aware of my presence, but he makes no sound. He does not seem distressed, as if he were anxious to communicate some urgent information to me about a lost bank account, or a cache of gold coins buried in the backyard. He does not seem to want any messages of love or regret taken to his wife or conveyed to Stephen. (I think if my father-in-law ever had any gold coins he would have cashed them in for Jack Daniel’s long ago. I have more money in my savings account from my grandmother’s legacy than he probably left to his family after a lifetime of desultory jobs. Messages for his loved ones? My father-in-law was a gentle and pleasant man, but I do not think his love for wife or son was the sort that would extend beyond the grave. They have certainly recovered from the loss of him, and I have no reason to suspect that the feeling is not mutual.) He is just… here.

I am no longer shy about his presence in the house. He is a courteous ghost. He never materializes in the bathroom, or sneaks up behind me when I am dusting. I find, though, that I am less inclined to sleep late, and I spend less time polishing the furniture. Even with uninvited guests there is the obligation to play hostess, I suppose. I tried turning the television on to the news channel, because I thought that he might be interested in what is going on in the world-an idle curiosity about familiar things, the way one might subscribe to a hometown newspaper after one has moved away-but he only glanced at the screen and drifted away again, so I gave it up. Perhaps the news is no longer interesting when nothing is a matter of life or death to the viewer. I didn’t find it very interesting myself, though. I wonder what that means.

Today when Stephen came home I had fixed beef Stroganoff, and he grudgingly said that I seemed to be snapping out of it. I wish I could say the same for him. He is as monotonous as ever. I find myself thinking that I have more to say to the ghost than I do to my husband.

I wonder where he keeps the piano. In the attic? The broom closet under the stairs? Sometimes when I am downstairs with the polishing cloth, I can hear sounds floating down the stairs, the tinkly lilt of a barroom piano: Scott Joplin tunes. I polish to the rhythm of a ragtime piano, and I wonder what he is trying to tell me. It has been a week now, and I find myself talking aloud to the ghost as I work. I still call him the ghost. He had a first name in life, of course, but I never used it. I called him Ummm , the way one does with in-laws. I still think of him as Ummm, and I make an occasional remark to him while I vacuum the dust bunnies under the bed and dust the tops of the bookshelves, because who knows where a ghost goes when he’s not in sight. It took a couple of days to get the house back into decent order, and then I began to wonder what else I could do. He was still there; he must be in need of something. Or perhaps he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.

The next time I cleaned the living room, I considered turning to ESPN, on the off chance that a horse race might be broadcast. He always did love a good horse race. But I decided that I have to watch enough sports as it is during football season with Stephen around. I certainly wasn’t going to defer to the wishes of a dead man. Something else, then.

I switched to the Discovery Channel, and we watched a nice program about castles in the Alps. He seemed to enjoy the travel documentary much more than he had the news channel. He floated just behind the sofa and watched the screen intently. After a few minutes I put down my dust cloth and joined him, and we marveled at the splendors of Neunschwanstein and Linderhof for nearly a quarter of an hour, until at the end of a long commercial I looked over and found that I was alone. Over-decorated castles can fascinate one for just so long, I decided, but I had thoroughly enjoyed the tour, thinking how horrified Stephen would be by the glorification of nineteenth-century crimes against architecture. Still, his father had seemed to enjoy it. I felt I was on the right track.