Haunting

Early on in her relationship with Maggie’s father and his summer house, Maggie’s mother saw a ghost. Now Maggie lay in the dark and imagined her mother doing the same, lying here awake. The ghost was Mr. McDonough and he had worked for the lady who first owned the house. Mr. McDonough fell in love with her and when she died in a car accident, Mr. McDonough sat on the porch in a rocking chair and stared out to sea. He died of a broken heart.

Sometimes, on a windless day in August, the empty rocking chair on the porch would move. That was Mr. McDonough, Maggie thought, looking out at the ocean still. The air would be rich with warmth and summer. Shadows stretching across the lawn in August were just shadows, even if Mr. McDonough still rocked on the porch. Maggie’s mother said she heard him come upstairs one night and smelled his pipe smoke on the landing. But the stories of Mr. McDonough held no fear for Maggie. Just memories of her mother, who she missed with all her breaking heart.

Maggie’s mother knew so much about the people who had lived in the house before them, before her father had ever opened the salt-swollen Dutch doors on the front porch and stepped inside. Maggie knew that she, and her mother before her, slept in the bedroom that had been Mr. McDonough’s. She knew that his love was a Broadway actress and that the actress’ mother had also summered in the house. It was her huge old-fashioned iron treadle sewing machine that sat in the upstairs hall. Lying here, strung out and sleepless, Maggie realized that her mother didn't know those things, how could she. But Maggie's mother was as gone as Mr. McDonough and his actress-love. There was no one to ask now.    

Maggie thought of Mr. McDonough at night when she was awake. When her high began to fade and still she had not found sleep. September had gone to October, and it was past time she went home to New Hampshire. But home held no comfort for her now, only a hundred subtle ways each day that her husband could remind her of her flaws, like buckshot spread just under her skin. So Maggie stayed on and lay awake in the dark.     

In October, the house was silent except for the regular creaks and groans of an old wooden house in a stiff northeast wind. Back home, fall came in a blaze of glory, literally. An end time to end all times, every year. Look at me, said the trees and the dark looming mountains, the shadowy afternoon, and of course the pumpkins glowing on porches, paper ghosts strung on trees and dancing in the breeze. But here the light just got brighter and brighter as the fall wore on, a thin white piercing light that mocked the rich blue sky of August or September while it replaced them.  Summer was gone. 

Maggie put the porch rocker away inside, stacked the porch furniture in the living room, stripped beds and fought with storm windows. The wind picked up until it was constant, a physical presence of biting cold and damp salt air. The ocean poured itself onto the shore in a heavy roll, roiled and white capped for miles in the open water, until Maggie sang her mother’s favorite hymn to it in the evenings, begging it to stay in its own place before it took her memories, this house, and washed them away.

           It was not a time to be sleepless and longing in a cranky summer house, where new noises sounded like thumps in the attic, where warmth came from a tiny ceramic heater, and where the wind and the waves settled on her like sadness. It was not a time to come out of her high and stare at the dark, with hours to go before daylight.   

           And Maggie could not sleep.

           She turned off all the lights and shut the door. She made herself turn off the hall light and the bathroom light, forcing herself to be a grown up who would not believe in ghosts and could make it through the dark cold corridor to the bathroom without blazing lights. She would not look in any of the rooms she passed, although the doors had to be open. She couldn’t stand a closed bedroom door while alone in the dark house. 

           Mr. McDonough – Maggie thought his name was Donal, an odd old-fashioned name it seemed to her. He once stood in this doorway, bathed in a light that came from nowhere. Her mother counted to ten and he was still there. So she counted to twenty but still there. Counted to thirty and she was going to wake Maggie’s father. But when she opened her eyes he was gone.

Maggie wished she had her mother’s strength, her matter of fact solution for the ghost that stood in her door. Shame washed through Maggie like the crushing ocean, like the ever-present northeast wind. Maggie wished for her mother’s ghost but did not want to see it.  Lying in the dark in the blurry deadening high of her last hit, Maggie was afraid of her mother, afraid of what the ghost might say. Yes mommy, she thought, here is your big beautiful girl. Look what I have become. 

           Heroin haunted Maggie and it was stronger stuff than the ghost of Donal McDonough. Maggie closed her eyes, and then closed them again and finally gave up. She shifted the covers and got out of bed. She turned on the hallway lights. She carefully cut her eyes away from each dark doorway as she walked to the end of the hall.    

Maggie settled at the table in her mother’s room, falling into movements she could make in her sleep. Here the credit card to crush the drug into fine white powder. Here the razor blade, here the cut off straw. Crush, cut, inhale. And when she took her first hit, one nostril pinched, she knew her mother was not coming back. Maggie would never see a different ghost but this one. The ghost that held her in its cold and merciless grip was heroin, a haunting that had settled in her shoulders like the damp and the wind. It would never let her go.