LITMIR.BIZ

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window was as black as volcanic glass.

      My mother lowered her hand but kept it open on her knee.

      When I looked at her again, the parallelogram had risen and was covering her face like pale, electric water. Light filled her eyes. She flowered with relief, as if she’d lost me in a crowd and suddenly caught a glimpse. She whispered something.

      “Mom?”

      “Look,” my mother said.

      I didn’t whirl around but gazed into her eyes, expecting some telepathy of everything inside her: spectral rooms and vistas, winged and crawling creatures, multicolored fire, eclipses and auroras and, most of all, beautiful and terrifying spirits—wearing dresses, rags, uniforms, smoke, or rippling light—with the stories of their lives and deaths drifting on their faces like kaleidoscopes of sun and shade in windy, cloudy weather.

      Instead I saw my mother’s ghost, naked and translucent, sitting in the chair and doubling her body. I wasn’t yet crying so it couldn’t have been my tears, and I wouldn’t have imagined seeing her undressed. I knew what I was seeing right away and I believed it. All I’d ever felt from her as long as I’d existed—the color of her closeness, in her body and her sight, and everything that made her Mom—was visible and pure.

      The parallelogram of light wavered and dissolved.

      My mother’s ghost vanished.

      Then her body in the chair was like the window and the radiator—tangible and dead and awfully, darkly real. The tiny black pupils in her irises were empty. They were holes.

      When I looked inside, no one looked back.

      In the years after she died, my father refused to credit any supernatural power, insisting she had suffered an undetectable brain injury and raising me in a flood of practical precautions. He’d lost his wife to bodily harm. He wouldn’t lose me. He gave me bike helmets; swimming lessons; warnings about drugs, sex, and strangers; first-aid courses; and, when I was old enough to drive, a sturdy car and strategies for every sort of hazard.

      “If there’s a deer in the road and no time to stop, what do you do?”

      “Swerve,” I said.

      “Wrong. You’re liable to hit a tree or oncoming traffic. Hit the deer but take your foot off the brakes before impact. Brakes lower the car and make it likelier the deer will crash through your windshield.”

      “I couldn’t kill a deer.”

      “Better it than you.”

      He said it gently, though, and sadly, as he did whenever he talked about catastrophe and death. The world was flesh and sticks, he thought, and minimizing breakage was the best we could hope for.

      “I’d swerve and save the deer,” I said, “and avoid crashing.”

      “It isn’t worth the risk. Save your own life first. It’s all you’ll ever have and it’s important to protect it.”

      “Would you risk yourself for me?”

      He sighed from a place much deeper than his lungs. “Of course I would, William. That’s a whole different thing.”

      We talked about my mother a lot, focusing on her life. But there were bounds to what the two of us would share about our grief, especially as our everyday outlooks diverged. He never openly discouraged my ongoing interest in the occult—throughout my childhood and adolescence, he paid for any book, magazine, TV-advertised encyclopedia of the unknown, sinister record, movie, artifact, or mail-order specimen I wanted—but I knew he always viewed it all as therapeutic play.

      Exploring the occult mollified my loneliness and gave me spectral lenses everywhere I went. I saw meaning in random symbols, in the movements of insects and birds, in the gaps between songs I listened to at night, and in the books no one else my age seemed to read. Secrets were a fingernail scratch below the surface. My mother, I believed, was close enough to touch if only I could hit upon the right way to reach.

      I meditated. I prayed. I hypnotized myself so deeply that I achieved, through self-suggestion, the ability to speak an unidentified language for three and a half hours—a language I believed my mother could hear but didn’t answer.

      I took Polaroids of empty spaces whenever I sensed another presence, and although the film captured luminous orbs and smudges, and one time a fully-formed, ghostly male body, I never managed to photograph a glimmer of my mother.

      I looked for her in Tarot spreads and saw nothing but myself.

      I used a Ouija board with a bone planchette. I made fleeting contact with many different entities, most of whom confined themselves to yes-or-no answers, and almost befriended one nervous spirit of undetermined gender until he or she, like everyone in my life, went away without explanation.

      One night in winter, I took a knife outside and crunched across the yard. The snow had partially melted during the day, and the surface had refrozen into a thin crust of ice. My boots left a trail of foot-shaped holes. Fresh snow was in the air and somehow the atmosphere prevented it from settling. It whirled around and hovered, rising up as much as falling. In the dark rear of the yard, I held the blade against my hand. I shut my eyes, visualized my mother sitting in her chair, and made a quick, bright cut across the middle of my palm.

      I waited for the flow to start and flung my hand downward. I made a fist and opened my eyes, and there was just enough light to see the splatter on the ice. My boots had broken through to the softer snow below, and I stood a long time, sunken to my calves, until it felt as if my feet were frozen underground.

      No matter how I tried interpreting the pattern, the blood looked meaningless on the ground.

      One night when I was seventeen, my father walked into my room and caught me getting drunk.

      “I want to talk to her again,” I said.

      “You will.”

      “You don’t believe that.”

      He picked up the pint of vodka, two-thirds gone, I’d tried to hide on the floor behind me when he’d entered. I pushed the bottle away. He finished it off, took a breath, and looked at me intensely.

      “I trick myself,” he said, “believing there’s an afterlife. It helps me live. It helps me not remember that I’ll die someday. What’s strange is that the older I get, the more I really believe it—that there’s something after everything. It isn’t just nothing.”

      “I know. I’ve talked to ghosts,” I said, electrified—and buzzed—that he’d finally broached the subject we had tacitly agreed never to discuss.

      “That isn’t what I mean,” he said.

      “I’ve done it, though,” I told him. “I just haven’t found a way to contact Mom.”

      He threw the empty bottle against the wall and it exploded. I flinched and kept my head down, feeling twin urges to apologize and shove him.

      “I love you, William. Look at me.”

      He stared at me so long, I had to stare back. I smelled the vodka in the air and saw the whiskers on his jaw, and he was real and fake and vaporous and solid all together.

      “Even if you’re right and people live forever,” he said, “sometimes you’re going to have to let things go.”

      I was twenty-five years old the night my father died. He was driving on a rural road, next to a cemetery of all places, and collided with a maple tree. His airbag failed and the crash killed him instantly.

      A witness said he swerved to avoid a crossing deer.

      He was buried next to my mother with a simple granite headstone bearing both their names. On the day of his interment, I sat alone at the gravesite after the mourners and diggers had gone, wondering if my parents were together or apart, or if the best they’d ever have was neighboring in dirt.

      I was living in a one-room

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