Ghosts of the Missing Read online

  When they’d gone, Jorie led Michan into the room, where he sank to his knees.

  “I’m immortal,” he said.

  Jorie touched his red hair, so like his father’s.

  “You can’t possibly be,” she said.

  “I’ve been tested and tested. I don’t have it. I can’t die,” he said. “My whole life I’ve been told I could bleed to death from a fall, but it’s never been true.”

  “Michan.” Though he was over six feet tall, Jorie pulled him up and guided him to a chair.

  She put her face near his so he could not look away.

  “You will die of AIDS. You will.”

  “Listen to me. Please.” Michan shook his head. “I am immortal.”

  Jorie lay her hand against her cheek.

  “Stay here forever, then.”

  He did. Jorie gave him a room on the third floor, down the hall from her own, and she gave him a job. He drove the shuttle van. He repaired sinks and splintered steps. He did grounds work, mostly raking leaves and performing other easy tasks that the landscapers gave him.

  Michan also began writing poems again, a pursuit begun in college, one he was too embarrassed to tell his family about. He had abandoned writing, though, lost it in the terror of his brother’s last months and then his death. Renewed at Moye House, Michan left his poems on Jorie’s desk, the sheets of paper folded and unsigned. Jorie made comments and edits and suggested books for him to read. She left the pages right where he had, for him to collect.

  If Michan could have kept my HIV status a secret, he might have considered it, though he was not entirely sure of the ethics. But the question was moot, because Culleton knew what had happened to the McCrohan family. Each loss had been thoroughly and sympathetically reported in the Culleton Beacon.

  When Michan tried to enroll me in the public school, the principal told him that they had to consult with doctors and the parents of the children who would be my classmates. Homeschooling was suggested. Michan turned to the Catholic school.

  Sister Regina, the principal of St. Maren’s, declared that Adair McCrohan would be admitted. All necessary precautions would be taken, but she would be allowed in. Monsignor Fitzgerald let it be known that he would not overrule Sister Regina, less on moral grounds and more because he did not have the energy for a fight with the nun. He did, however, make it clear that only she would be accountable, should anything happen.

  Yet as fierce as Sister Regina was, she could not make my classmates step aside and open the circle when I came near. Rowan was the only one who patted the bench beside her at the lunch tables. She didn’t avert her eyes when we passed each other in the hallways.

  For so long, I had expected to join the dead. I dreamed of my uncle and myself, two relatives who would have seen each other only on holidays, together surviving the plagues of history. The black death of the Middle Ages, smallpox and diphtheria. Influenza and polio and tuberculosis.

  There we are, me sitting up in a feather bed one morning, healed of noxious blisters, a swelling throat, limb paralysis and sticky, bloody lungs. Michan, in a chair beside me, unscathed. We stare at each other as he wishes I were his brother, and I want only my parents.

  I dream of the two of us in a burning forest from a fairy tale full of eyes and back-throated growls. The wind is a hiss. Sometimes I’m grown but Michan is still a young man, and other times I’m small but his red hair is tinged with white. We can see the smoke and hear the flames and we are always running. When I’m a child, I reach for his hand, and when he is older he is reaching for mine. Neither will leave the other alone. The smoke thins. The roar of the flames ceases and we stop, and when we stop, I have his hand or he has mine and the forest is ash and we are alive but everyone we love is dead.

  8

  Jorie Pearse

  Quicken Day might have remained an antique holiday, a footnote in Culleton’s history, if not for the fact that Moye House was sold in the spring of 1946. For a decade it had been vacant, the façade aging, the garden growing toward the woods. The empty house became an illicit drinking spot for the more daring high schoolers.

  The daughter of the poet and the writer had abandoned the property because she could no longer afford the upkeep. As a child, she’d seen her parents forgo their own work in service to the estate and those who came to stay, trapped by their good deed in publishing The Lost Girl and Other Stories. They could not have known that they’d lose their own names to it. In October, when Cassius’s grave was heaped with marigolds, she would steal a few bouquets and arrange them on her parents’ graves, which lay in sight of the Moye family plot.

  When the news broke that the house had finally been sold, the assumption was that the buyer intended to turn it into a hotel. Culleton had its own stop on the railroad, making it ideal for those who wanted neither city life nor suburbia. A train ride into Manhattan took about two hours. The town’s literary history and its proximity to Degare Mountain State Park were additional draws.

  While the necessary work was being done on the house and grounds, the buyer took a room on the top floor of the Falling Leaf Inn. The staff noted the addresses on the letters she left to be posted, and they watched her when she sat down to eat supper in their restaurant. They began saving the corner booth for her, the windowless one, best for privacy. She always brought along something to read while she ate. No company ever joined her.

  Jorie Pearse made for an unlikely hotelier. She spent her first weeks in Culleton riding around town on the red bicycle she bought from the shop on Vine Street. She answered questions about her life without elaborating. Thank you for the information about Mass on Sundays, but she was not Catholic. She didn’t need directions to the Episcopal church either, or any religious establishment.

  She was thirty years old, though from a distance she was often mistaken for a girl, partly because she favored loose clothes and partly because she wore her hair short, over her ears but well above her shoulders.

  When she went to the barber in Culleton to get her hair trimmed, he asked if she was sure, as though he thought her hair a mistake she was beginning to correct.

  She told him she was quite sure. “There are two reasons. The first is that I should have been a flapper, but I was a baby then. Some of us are born in the wrong era. Second, if I wear it long, I’m distractingly beautiful.”

  The barber laughed then, and every time he told the story.

  The rumor that Jorie had been widowed by the war persisted until it became a fact. Eventually she volunteered to the bartender at the Falling Leaf, where she had one cocktail every night after dinner, that there was no late husband, early husband or right-on-time husband. She was a rich daughter, not a rich widow.

  Not until she paid a visit to the library one Saturday afternoon late in November did Jorie reveal that she was putting together an anthology of stories that had been written at Moye House. She had seven already, she told the librarian, and was hoping for at least three more. The librarian said they did not keep any records of writers who had stayed “up the hill” over the years. Then she went back to steadily stamping newly arrived books. Jorie thanked her (or, rather, the part in her steely hair) and set off to see what she could find on her own.

  After scanning the sole Local History shelf, she brought her selection to the front desk, only to be told that in order to get a library card, she needed a piece of mail with her address on it, and, no, a hotel address wouldn’t suffice. Jorie put the book back on the shelf and left. A man was shoveling the sidewalk in front of the store next to the library. Several inches of snow had fallen the night before, an unusually early storm, she was assured by a waitress in the Falling Leaf’s restaurant. “Excuse me,” she said, “do you live in town?”

  When he turned, she saw that he was younger than she’d thought.

  Darragh McCrohan, who was eighteen, looked over his shoulder, but the sidewalk was empty. He’d watched her go into the library and slowed his pace, normally rapid, since the quicker he finishe
d one spot, the sooner he could move on to the next. He had fierce competition from boys still in high school who went out in pairs. They had to split the money but could get to twice as many houses. Before the war, Darragh and his brother had been such a team. Now that he was solo, Darragh stuck to downtown, hitting the stores whose owners were old men and those who had already cleared their driveways at home and were glad of the break.

  The chance to get a close look at the woman who bought Moye House was worth losing a few bucks. But he had never expected to talk to her. His face was frozen, making it hard to form the words.

  “Yeah,” he said. “My whole life.”

  “Do you have a library card?” Jorie asked. “I want to take out a book, but I’m not a resident yet.”

  He shook his head. “I have overdue books. Once the fine is over two dollars, you’re not allowed to take out new stuff.”

  He had a strange laziness when it came to returning the books he borrowed. Even the ones he didn’t much like he had trouble surrendering.

  Jorie stepped closer, tilting her head to look up at him, and Darragh lost track of his sentences. He had heard the barber repeat her remark about long hair making her beautiful, and he’d taken it as a plain woman’s joke. But now he saw that she had not been kidding.

  “I’ll have to find another solution, then,” she said. “It’s called A History of Culleton, New York. It won’t be found in a bookstore. Maybe I should borrow it without asking.”

  “Long as you get it back in fifty years, nobody’ll notice.”

  Jorie laughed. “Maybe I will, then. If you hear it turns up missing, well, we never spoke.”

  She turned to go, walking carefully in her regular shoes with a little heel. Maybe she lived somewhere warm most of the year and didn’t own a pair of snow boots.

  Later, after he’d shoveled in front of every store that was open, Darragh returned to the library. The librarian glared at him as he went in.

  “Ten minutes until closing,” she announced.

  Darragh found his way to Local History. There he found A History of Culleton, New York. That the woman had not, in fact, made off with it disappointed him, which in turn surprised him. Why should he care what some rich woman was up to?

  The book’s binding was black with gold stamping, and the author’s name wasn’t familiar. Darragh wondered why anyone, if they were going to write a book, would pick Culleton for a topic. Wondering if the author had explained his reason in the introduction, Darragh took the book down from the shelf. He plucked what he’d thought was an abandoned bookmark from a spot halfway through and found himself holding a pale yellow card with a name and address on it in cursive script. The address was in New York City, but Darragh barely noted it.

  Marjorie Moye Pearse.

  “Attention, patrons, the library is closing!” the librarian called. “You can’t check anything out, Darragh McCrohan! You’re on the list.”

  He put the card in his pocket and stuck the book back on the shelf.

  Darragh memorized every word on the card. He dreamed of approaching Jorie Pearse in town, crossing the street to speak to her, handing her the pair of snow boots he’d bought for her. That he had no money to buy her boots didn’t stop him from trying to guess her size.

  About two weeks after he found the card, Darragh was riding his bike home from Magee’s, where he played the button accordion in the Saturday-evening seisiún, and though it was a deeply cold night, just a week out from Christmas, he turned his bike off the straight route home, an unplanned detour. The clear night had turned cloudy, hiding the moon.

  Darragh stopped his bike outside the front gate of Moye House.

  He and his older brother were eleven and twelve when they began coming here at night, leaving the house before their father came home from the bar. If he wasn’t drunk enough to pass out, he might drag them from their beds to shout at them for leaving dishes in the sink or their schoolbooks on the kitchen table. Sometimes he called out for his wife, their mother, though she’d been dead three years by then.

  Later, in high school, they’d buy beer and drink it in the old chapel. It was always the same crew, him and his brother and four or five of their friends. Sometimes a couple of girls tagged along.

  The chapel doors were never locked. When they went in, they caught the stale scent of beer from either their own spills or others’. Except for one lone church pew, the space was empty. Darragh always thought his friends found the place as creepy as he did. His mother used to tell him about the woman who’d lived here, the Irish widow. Some believed the lost dead were still drawn to this place, looking to pass a message through Helen, even though those who’d grieved for them were no longer among the living.

  Now Darragh’s brother was gone, and their friends went out to the bars.

  At the start of Chapel Road, which was little more than a barely-there path, he lay his bike down and walked on without it. As he was beginning to worry that the beer he’d drunk at Magee’s had made him veer off course, the spire of the chapel rose up out of the dark.

  He was half expecting to find the door chained shut now that the big house was occupied, but when Darragh hesitantly turned the doorknob, it opened with a sound like the cry of a bird.

  Leaves littered the floor. The blankets he and his brother had kept were still in a heap in one corner. Darragh set his button accordion down on the floor. He unfolded one blanket and shook the dirt out and probably a few bugs. It was dry at least. Uncomfortable as the floor was, it would have been worse if he were sober.

  Shapes formed from the dark and moved toward him, but when he looked away and then back, they were gone. Darragh knew he should get up and go home; when the beer wore off, he’d be freezing. Instead, he shut his eyes to better picture his brother after his dark red hair had been cropped close, turning him into a stranger. He had not believed he’d come back from the war.

  “Don’t stay here, Dar,” he’d said on the night before he left to fight. “Fuck Pop. Get out.”

  Darragh sat up from a dream, shaking, to see Jorie Pearse—Marjorie Moye Pearse, according to the card she’d left in the book—standing in the doorway. Darragh realized the shot of fresh cold from the open door had awakened him. His muscles ached. He must have shivered through the night.

  “That’s your bike out by the road?” she asked.

  Darragh nodded. He stood up, gathering the blankets. “I didn’t break in. The door was open.”

  Jorie rubbed her arms. She wore a coat, but no hat or gloves.

  “Come into the house. I don’t have a housekeeper yet, but I can manage coffee.”

  She asked him to take off his boots in the small room off the kitchen. In a regular house, it’d be a mudroom, but here he imagined there would be some fancy name for it. He pulled his boots off and tugged on his sock until the hole was hidden between his toes.

  Jorie Pearse asked Darragh if he would build a fire in the first-floor parlor. She’d had the wood chopped but she was nervous about the chimney, though she’d been told it was in working order. He wondered what she thought might happen and why she wasn’t worried about it happening to him. But he went ahead and did as she asked.

  Mismatched armchairs faced the fireplace. She gestured to the better one of the two and he sat, uneasily. She sat across from him.

  “What’s your name? I guess we start there.”

  “Darragh,” he said. Then, resigned, he spelled it so she would stop picturing D-a-r-a.

  “It’s Irish.”

  “Irish,” she repeated. “Your grandfather was in the old works?”

  Startled, he nodded. “We’re further back, even. Before the Civil War. We’re called foundry families. Like a play on ‘founding.’ But nobody new knows what it means. The foundry’s closed a long time now. I guess you’d know that.”

  She nodded absently.

  Darragh sipped the coffee to keep himself from asking what she wanted with him. If she was going to have him thrown in jail, she would
have called for the sheriff already. Houses like this had to have a phone.

  “This isn’t bad,” he said.

  She smiled. “Surprised?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and she laughed.

  “What’s that called?” Jorie asked, pointing.

  He turned and looked.

  Unable to abandon it as easily as his boots, he’d carried the instrument with him, and now it sat against the wall.

  “It’s a button accordion,” he said.

  “May I see it?”

  But she was already on her feet.

  He watched as she inspected it. Even when quiet, the fiddle and the penny whistle were pretty to look at, but the button accordion was a big block of an instrument with round white keys, awkward to hold at first. Only those who learned the exact spot on the lap to rest it, the precise angle to hold it at their side, could ever play it well.

  Darragh waited for her to try to play it, or to ask him to, but she did neither. She gently set it down.

  “Why were you asleep in the chapel?” Jorie asked.

  He’d begun to relax, but now she seemed suddenly like a teacher.

  “Me and my brother used to go there sometimes. Before the war.”

  “The war,” she repeated, and then said, “He was killed?”

  “Far as I know, he’s alive,” Darragh said. “He came home for a while, then he took off. I don’t know where he is.”

  Jorie sat back down. “It’s hard getting back a different person. Not as hard as losing them completely, but still—not easy,” she said.

  Darragh stared down at the china cup he was holding. He bet he could break it with one hand. If he shattered it, he might be able to admit that he had indeed wondered if a brother who was a dead hero might be better than one who had let the war do to him what their mother’s death had done to their father.

  “You—you had someone in the war?” Darragh asked without looking at her.