the reader’s need. Every now and then, the book was made of nothing. It had been found and lost a hundred times, and used in fabulous ways, but nobody who read it could remember what it said.
My mother’s stories and my dreams squished together like Play-Doh. I asked her one night if all of it was true.
“How could I convince you?”
“Take me to the house,” I said.
She laughed and shook her head: Yes and no, wish and warning.
“Have you seen anything weird?”
“All the time,” my mother said.
“Like what?”
She smiled without changing expression, using the commonplace telepathy that she and I shared, and exhaled a soft breath that blanketed my chin.
“I’ve been talking to a ghost,” she said.
I sat up in bed and asked her who it was, what they talked about, and loads of other questions in a rush, and when she finally had a chance to speak again, I didn’t even notice that my first question—who?—was the one she didn’t answer.
“We talk about the ways things are different after death. How life looks from this side and how it looks from that side. We talk about the fact that it’s possible to talk.”
She paused then, as if her thoughts had wandered out of time.
“After Poppy died,” she said, referring to her father, “I looked for ways he might have been communicating with me. Do you remember how he’d sit in the kitchen with a coffee, absentmindedly tracing on the table with his finger?”
I didn’t remember him doing that but nodded in agreement. I was young enough that nodding actually convinced me.
“He did it every day since I was your age,” she said. “Traced a symbol like a six with an extra inner coil. I used to ask him what it was. He always said he didn’t know and seemed surprised he was doing it.
“One winter night, a season after he died, there was the oddest sort of snow—like those pebbly little balls that come from broken Styrofoam. I was brushing off the car and you were in the backseat. You were four that year. You loved being inside the car and watching me appear whenever I brushed another window. Something about the way you laughed made me think of Poppy. I leaned over the windshield with the snowbrush and slipped. I cut my hand falling—I never figured out what I cut it on—and the blood made a swirly little six in the snow.
“When I stood up, you were laughing. You thought I’d fallen to be funny. But seeing the symbol had made me cry, and my crying made you start crying, and I hid my cut and got in the car and told you I was fine. They were happy tears, I said. I told you Poppy said hello.”
“Poppy cut your hand?” I asked.
“No,” my mother said. “I thought he used the blood. Then I thought I might have believed it just because I needed to.”
“Have you talked to him in Mr. Stick’s house?”
“I haven’t but I’d like to. Anything can happen in a place like that.” Then she laughed and said, “Everything I’ve seen, all the stories I’ve been sharing… I can’t decide if Dad thinks I’m crazy or inventive.”
I thought of what she’d said about needing to believe and how adults—my mother included—seemed to love having doubts.
“I think it’s all real,” I said.
“Sometimes the real things are harder to believe.”
Then something happened during the night of February 26.
My mother had visited Mr. Stick early that evening and hadn’t come home. I made my own cereal in the morning and took the bus to school, with a lunch prepared by my father and assurances that everything was fine.
It was a Thursday and I was especially daydreamy in the classroom, waiting for the heavy clouds to dump a load of snow. I didn’t know until later that my father had taken the day off from work to locate my mother. He didn’t know Mr. Stick’s address—in the years that followed, he berated himself for taking so little interest in my mother’s strange friend—and he began by calling the library where she worked. She hadn’t arrived for the start of her shift, and none of her relatives or friends had heard from her in days. He checked the hospitals to no avail and was told by the police she hadn’t been missing long enough to file a report.
He picked me up from school with tension in his eyes, as if the sockets in his skull were trying to contract.
“Why aren’t we taking the bus?” I asked.
His silence scared me more than worry for my mother, who I honestly believed, at age seven, was immortal.
We arrived home to a ringing telephone. My father took the call, furrowed portions of his face I hadn’t known were furrowable, and immediately packed me back into the car. My mother had been found in a secluded archival room of the library. No one had seen her enter the building that day, and since the room was off-limits to the public and rarely visited by the staff, she was discovered only when a young boy heard my mother talking. He’d thought she was a witch, her words were so peculiar.
One of the librarians—a friend of my mother’s named Mrs. Janowski—investigated the room to ease the boy’s mind. She found my mother reaching out and pushing at the air like a sleepwalker moving through a dream full of doors.
She didn’t recognize us when we got to the library, and while my father checked her head for lumps or hidden blood, I stood aside and listened as she started mumbling nonsense. She talked about words people heard without ears. She spoke of closets full of loneliness, and bodies made of memories, and spaces you could mold like butter in your hands. Ghosts were everywhere, she said, and maybe we were not.
I watched my mother closely, afraid to be afraid, and hoped if I could understand everything she told us, it would mean that she was making sense and wasn’t really crazy.
My father held her face and looked deeply into her eyes. “Where were you? Are you hurt?” he asked. “What happened last night?”
Her forehead crinkled like a burning sheet of paper.
“Night,” she said. “Night…”
She concentrated hard but swirled around the word, as if recalling what had happened but confused about when.
“Ask Mr. Stick,” she finally said. “He’ll remember.”
Mrs. Janowski leaned toward her, looking puzzled. “Leonard Stick?”
My mother half-smiled, half-nodded at the name.
Mrs. Janowski told my father, “Mr. Stick died a month ago. We went to his funeral together.”
“She’s been visiting him for weeks,” my father said. “She’s told us what they’ve talked about. She went to see him last night.”
Mrs. Janowski shook her head. My father palmed his mouth.
Suddenly my mother felt light-years away, and she regarded me with a spectral sort of longing in her gaze, as if remembering my face instead of seeing me directly. The short gap between us felt impossible to cross.
“Mom?” I said.
I don’t believe the sound reached her ears.
It was true: Mr. Stick had died a month earlier.
His obituary was brief, and all we eventually learned was that his funeral had been scantly attended and his body had been cremated. My father failed to locate any relatives or anyone who’d known him better than my mother. Mr. Stick’s information had inexplicably vanished from the library database, and no trace of him existed in public records. Unable to learn his home address, neither my father nor the police could investigate his brownstone. It was as if the man’s existence had been cremated