Ghosts of What If?

A midwest summer storm battered the small ranch house. Inside a mother held her daughter, the room barely illuminated by their small array of candles. When the lights went out the mother had stumbled through the darkness cursing herself for not replacing batteries in their emergency lighting. Her father had only reminded her several hundred times. 

The wind howled, shaking the walls of the house. It was an old house that settled often, and at the most inconvenient of times. Thunder struck and jolted the door from where the latch just barely clung to the frame causing it slowly sway open. The daughter shrieked. 

“Mommy, do you believe in ghosts?” The mother thought for a minute before brushing a sweet kiss over her daughter’s hair. 

“I do, but not in the way that others do.” 

The young girl looked up at her mother frowning. “What do you mean? Ghosts are dead people.”  

The mother shrugged. “Death isn’t something to be feared, or else it wouldn’t be a fact of life. It’s simply a change.” 

“But we don’t know what happens when we die.”

“Then why assume it’s something horrible?” 

The daughter contemplated her mother’s words, the only sound in the room the rain pounding the windows. 

“Then what do you think ghosts are,” the daughter asked. 

“Ghosts of untaken paths,” the mother smiled. “They’re reminders of what could have been.” Seeing the confusion on the girl’s face she reached for the nightstand where her abandoned sketchbook and drawing pencils sat under a thin layer of dust. She flipped quickly to a blank page. “Think of life as a line.” Pressing the pencil to paper gently. “Time moves us forward, but we don’t know what direction we’re going. But everyday we make choices that choose the direction of our lives for us.” 

“Mommy, I don’t understand,” the daughter whined. Her mother smiled. 

“We were supposed to go over to Grandpa’s house for dinner right?” The girl nodded. “But we decided not to.” The mother jerked her pencil, shooting the line upward on the page. “Because we didn’t go, we were home when the storm came through.” She moved the pencil down the juncture of the line and continued it in the original direction. “If we had gone to Grandpa’s we might have been driving home when the storm hit.” 

“That wouldn’t be good,” the young girl frowned. 

“We don’t know,” her mother replied. “Maybe we would have been fine. Maybe Grandpa would have talked us into a game of Monopoly and we would have been at his house. Maybe we would’ve been blown off the road.” The Mother drew several lines in a million different directions. “The point is that we don’t know, but every single time we make a decision, we create all these what if’s and could have beens.” The daughter watched as her mother’s delicate hands moved across the page, jotting left and right randomly, before returning back to make multiple off-shoots. “And when you regret those decisions, you’re haunted by a ghost of that untaken path.” The daughter traced the lines on the paper with her eyes, absorbing her mother’s words. 

A flash of lightening and roaring thunder cracked across the sky making the girl jump. In a hurry to distract her, the mother said, “do you remember last year when you started dance, you had to choose between ballet and tap?” The daughter nodded. “You went back and forth between the two for weeks before you decided you wanted to ballet.” 

“I wanted to do both,” the daughter said. The mother grimaced, a pang of guilt whipping her harder than the wind whipping the willow tree outside. 

“I know baby, but do you remember what you came into my room crying about almost every single night last summer?” The girl’s eyes widened in realization.

“There was tapping in the attic.” The mother smiles again and nods. 

“You weren’t sure you made the right choice choosing ballet.” 

The daughter’s mouth forms a small O. “You think I was being haunted by the version of me that chose tap.” 

“You woke up almost every single night last summer crying. Up until your recital, when you saw the girls do their tap routine. Do you remember what you said on the way home?” 

“I said that our ballet was so much prettier,” the young girl stated, losing herself to the memory. The mother watched her daughter, and could practically see the fear turning to dust before her eyes. For once, she felt like a good mom. The daughter tucked into her mother’s side, more relaxed than before, and the mother began to hum. 

Just when the mother thought her daughter was asleep, the young girl turned her head up to look at her mother. “Mommy, what ghosts haunt you?” Shocked by the question, the mother racked her brain for an answer that she could give her nine-year-old daughter. 

“Nothing simple enough for you to understand. Grown-up things,” the mother settled on. She waited for her daughter to answer. 

“Is it Daddy? Does he haunt you?” The mother looked down at her daughter’s face. The face that looked so much more like her ex’s than her own with his deep brown hair and hazel eyes. 

“Of course not,” the mother scoffed, “Without your dad I wouldn’t have you, so I could never regret anything about your father.” The daughter smiled at least for a minute before her mouth turned. 

“Grandpa says you were broken when you met Daddy, and that I fixed you,” the daughter yawned. The mother rolled her eyes. She was going to have to have another conversation with her father about keeping his mouth shut. “Are you haunted by whatever broke you?” The mother grew sad, and was quiet for a moment. 

“Yes baby, but those are things that don’t belong in the heads of nine-year-olds.”

“Ugh, I hate when you say that.” The girl stuck out her lip and pouted. The mother brushed her daughter’s hair. 

“I promise one day when you’re older I’ll tell you about all my ghosts, in the hope that you won’t create ghosts of your own.” Her daughter seemed pleased by this answer, and closed her eyes once again. The mother resumed her humming. 

The storm weakened to a regular downpouring of rain. The mother had blown out all the candles and laid in bed listening to the mix of the rain on the roof and her daughter’s breathing. She rolled over and sighed at the sight. There, on the edge of the bed was the ghost of the man she once loved. The man she expected to spend eternity with. The man who had made so many promises to her. The edges of his beautiful face fading in and out like the days of satellite TV. He turned towards her, and she saw the child in his arms. A small baby boy with a plop of blonde hair, and green eyes, a mirror to her own. The man raised his hand and caressed her cheek, the way he always did. 

“Come love, our son needs his mother.” His voice echoed in her head, perfectly smooth as it once was. The mother squeezed her eyes shut, thinking of the daughter asleep next to her. 

“I can’t,” she choked out. The man’s face grew sad. 

“I should have loved you right,” he said. “You would have let me come that night.” The mother dug her hands into the blankets, refusing to let the memories in. She began to count, it usually made his beautiful ghost disappear. She heard him sigh. When she opened her eyes he was gone, and she let out a long breath. But the man’s voice rang out hauntingly. 

“Maybe in another life. Maybe then I could love you right.”