Everyday People Read online

  Shelly gets off the elevator at the next floor and takes the stairs down.

  • • •

  Shelly does her best to hide the ghosts from Grandma. She buries them in her dresser drawers and tucks them into her hair when she walks into the house so she can carry them down the hall without being stopped. Her room fills up slowly.

  Grandma makes them dinner every night and they eat together. Every night Grandma tries to talk to Shelly.

  “I have a job tomorrow,” Grandma says. “A family keeps finding things knocked over in their apartment. They say they have a poltergeist, so it’s probably a bird.”

  Sometimes, birds crash into windows of tall buildings and their spirits pass through the glass without their bodies. Birds are always destructive because they flap around trying to get free and throw things about.

  “Birds are boring,” Shelly says. “They just squawk until you catch them and put them outside. They give me a headache.”

  “Birds are a good way to make a living,” Grandma says. “Birds will always crash into buildings.”

  Shelly looks down at her dinner. “Do you think there are a lot of chicken ghosts on farms?”

  • • •

  The bird family is nice. They offer Grandma and Shelly lemonade when they arrive.

  “I thought it was just Maria throwing her toys around at first,” one of the women says as she shows off the cracked glass in picture frames that were knocked off the wall. “Hannah or I would put them away on the shelf and then they’d be scattered everywhere when we got in.”

  Hannah nods. “When we found the pictures all knocked off the wall we knew Maria wasn’t just trying to get out of trouble. She’s only four. She can’t reach them.”

  “Besides,” says Hannah’s wife, “two days ago we were watching TV and something knocked it over.”

  The bird is sitting on the top of a bookshelf. Its feathers are ruffled up and it looks about as disgruntled as a bird can look. Grandma takes down her hair.

  “Don’t you worry,” she says. “We’ll see to your poltergeist problem.”

  Birds aren’t like people. They don’t stick to you the same way. Grandma, with her hair down, creeps toward the bookshelf, clucking her tongue at the bird like it’s a shy cat. It hops back, away from her, wary, and Grandma stills and coos at it again.

  Shelly sometimes wonders what they look like to the women who hire them to free their home of ghosts, and to all the other clients who’ve seen her and Grandma hop around chasing phantoms. Weird, probably, but they get stuff done. She and Grandma always earn their weirdness.

  Shelly moves around the edges of the room and picks up a pillow. She waits until she’s sure the bird is entirely focused on Grandma, then whacks it with the pillow, off the shelf and into Grandma’s waiting grasp.

  • • •

  Shelly kind of wants to keep the bird. All the ghosts she has hidden in her room are human.

  “We’ll let it out at the park,” Grandma says. The bird is still disgruntled but is too wound up in her hair to escape. “Where it can fly around without hurting anything until it gets tired and decides to move on.”

  “We could take it home and feed it,” Shelly says. “We have lots of milk.”

  “It’s just a bird, Shelly,” Grandma says. “If it wasn’t for people sticking tall buildings everywhere, it wouldn’t be here at all. When I was a girl, you never saw as many birds around as you do now. Everything was lower to the ground then. It wasn’t nearly as confusing for them.”

  “Just because it’s a bird it doesn’t matter?”

  “Because it’s a bird, we should take it to a park with lots of trees and other birds and let it go free,” Grandma says. “Ghosts like it aren’t meant to stay forever. Most of the time it’s better to let ghosts fade. You know that.”

  “Sometimes ghosts deserve to do their haunting. Some things need haunting.”

  “True.” Grandma agrees because she’s the one who taught Shelly that. “But those ghosts will let you know. You know that. Those ghosts know where they are. They know what they’re about. You know the dead, Shelly. Most ghosts don’t realize what’s happened to them. They just need a hand getting to where they’re going.”

  Shelly thinks most ghosts are pretty stupid.

  Shelly and Grandma walk to the park and Shelly watches Grandma let the bird out of her hair. She watches the bird take off, straight up into the sky, and keeps watching until she loses sight of it in the clouds.

  • • •

  Grandma finds Shelly’s ghosts while she’s putting laundry away in Shelly’s room. She opens a drawer and the dead tumble out. She goes through the dresser and Shelly’s closet and finds them both filled with ghosts. Shelly’s little bedroom is so full, you could hardly move.

  Grandma waits for Shelly when Shelly gets home from school, and she’s covered in ghosts.

  “Those are mine,” Shelly says, since she can’t pretend they’re not.

  “These are people,” Grandma says. “They belong to themselves. They don’t belong here.”

  Shelly can’t tell if Grandma has let some of the ghosts go already or not. Shelly has a lot of ghosts.

  “You can’t surround yourself with the dead all the time,” Grandma says. “You’re still alive, Shelly.”

  Shelly scowls. “You’re always with the dead.”

  “No, Shelly, I’m always with you.”

  Shelly leaves.

  • • •

  Shelly goes to the cemetery. She storms up to Joseph’s grave, where he’s sitting and murmuring to himself in French.

  “Where is she?” Shelly demands. “Where’s my mom?”

  Joseph looks up with his black eyes and frowns. “Your mom’s not here, Little Shell.”

  “No,” Shelly says. “This is where she’s buried.”

  “Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you’re a ghost.”

  “Why not?” Shelly demands. “Why you and not her? If a bird can be a ghost, then why not her? Where did she go?”

  Joseph looks terribly, terribly pitying for a dead teenager who talks through a Walkman. “I don’t know. I’ve been here. I’ve always been here. This place is all I know.”

  “You have a tape player,” Shelly says. “You’re not that old.”

  “This is all I remember,” Joseph says. “This place, which is mine, and watching over the graves for the Old Lady and now you, Little Shell. Did you bring me any tapes?”

  “Why would I bring you any tapes when you’re no good to me?”

  Shelly lashes out and kicks her foot through Joseph’s immaterial body and he topples over from the force of it, coming uprooted from his spot on the ground by his grave. Joseph looks startled—at moving, at being suddenly unmoored, suddenly ghostly in a way he wasn’t before. He flickers, like the man that Grandma once dredged up from the river.

  “Little Shell, what did you do to me?” Joseph asks, mournful as he twists in place and tries to claw his way back toward his grave, his spot. “Where have you put me?”

  Shelly does the only thing she can think to do and catches Joseph up in her hair. She turns and she runs from the cemetery and doesn’t take the bus. She runs all the way home, where Grandma is sweeping ghosts out the door and away.

  Grandma takes one look at Shelly’s frightened face and Joseph in her hair, and sighs. “There’s nothing to do, Joseph,” she says. “We’ll give you some milk and help you get to where you’re going.”

  Shelly carries Joseph into the kitchen and sits with him at the table, quiet and sorry, as Grandma puts a mug full of milk in the microwave and warms it up.

  “I didn’t mean to,” she says when Grandma sets the milk in front of Joseph.

  Joseph prods the milk carefully. “I’d rather have music,” he says. “Little Shell, you’re a kid. You shouldn’t be caught up in death all the time anyway. Right, Old Lady?”

  “We carry our dead with us everywhere we go,” Grandma says, touching Shelly’s hair. “The
important people don’t leave us, even when their ghosts are gone. Even if they never come back.”

  Grandma combs Shelly’s hair, and Joseph gets blurrier and blurrier until he fades away completely and it’s just Grandma and Shelly sitting at the table, alone. Shelly blinks tears off her eyelashes and Grandma keeps combing her hair until the tears stop coming.

  “Do you feel better?” Grandma asks, handing Shelly Joseph’s milk, now just lukewarm.

  “No,” Shelly says. “Not really.” She takes a sip of milk and reaches up to touch her long hair. “I want to cut it.”

  Grandma hesitates. Cutting your hair has meaning. Cutting your hair is a choice. “Are you sure?”

  Once it’s out in the air, once Shelly says it out loud, it’s obvious it needs to be done. It’s time to cut it so it can grow out new and shiny, not tangled up with the dead, not dragging at her shoulders with the weight of the memories it carries. “I need to cut it.”

  Grandma and Shelly go outside to sit on the steps with Grandma’s little silver scissors. The light is fading, but the sky is pink-purple-red as the sun goes down. It’s pretty, and Shelly watches the sun setting while Grandma combs her long hair one more time.

  Grandma gathers Shelly’s hair into little ponytails and cuts them off carefully, her touch gentle, and hands Shelly each lock as she goes, until they’re all gone.

  Shelly shivers when the evening wind brushes her neck, and shakes out her newly shorn hair, feeling the crisp ends brush against her skin. It feels like sudden weightlessness. All the things she’s been carrying with her are still there, but they seem lighter now. Easier.

  “We took a lot off,” Grandma says, touching Shelly’s hair, brushing her fingers through it.

  Shelly winds the strands of her hair around and around her hand. There’s so much that isn’t attached to her the same way anymore, and now she can’t fish for ghosts as she walks the street. She can’t load her shoulders with the weight of their lives. She can’t kidnap anybody from a graveyard.

  “What do you think?” Grandma asks. “How do you feel?”

  Her hair is gone, and all the feelings from before remain, but it’s not bad.

  “I like it,” she says. “It’ll grow back. I’ll be ready for it.”

  • • •

  One day, Shelly will have a baby of her own—a little being to care for like her mother and grandmother cared for her. She will teach her baby about ghosts and how they get caught in your hair and how you can choose to carry them with you or cut them away; about the burden of knowing the past when so many people can forget it so easily. She will teach her baby that not all ghosts need to be exorcised and that some people, some places, need to be haunted.

  Shelly will take her baby with her when she exorcises a ghost and will say to the ghost, “See? See this new being that has come into the world? Let the sight of them fill you with hope and good feeling as you go where you’re going. Say hello to my mom and Grandma when you get there.”

  LAST RITES

  Dennis Norris II

  SOMEONE WILL COME. Someone will find me.

  Sirens will sound in the distance. Lights will rise from darkness like seraphs, dancing red and blue. Salvation will be brought by men sent from God. These men will come from the east. There is a campus not too far in that direction, a satellite of the state university. The men will move as quickly as possible along the highway, over black ice, close to the barrier that divides east and west.

  Tread marks will lead them to an indentation in the guardrail, scratched with white paint. The men, always moving, will jump down from their trucks, rubber boots clomping to the pavement with the strength of hooves. One of them will wonder aloud how that white car got all the way down the hill by the quarry. “You can hardly see it,” he’ll say, with his hand at attention. His eyes will strain under the swirling clouds that block the moon, that mute the stars. Another, braver, will lead them over the guardrail, hooves romping easily down the hill. They will follow the path cut by the car as it flipped, over and over, and landed on its now caved-in hardtop.

  The Reverend remains strapped in his seat, upside down, his nose only inches from the ground, unable to move. His Toyota crashed into a tree with such force that several branches, heaving from the weight of the snow, broke from the trunk, tumbled through the wintry air, and landed on the overturned car. Periodically the tree creaks, warning him. At some point he knows it will give under the excess weight. But by then he will be saved. The men will have come and gone, and in between ripped him free.

  They will come shouting into their walkie-talkies, demanding backup, cursing, not caring if their words offend him. The glare from their flashlights will find him, then blind him. Someone will shout for the men at the top of the hill to aim their headlights at the quarry, give them some light. The Toyota’s lights will be extinguished by then; the battery will have died. Once there is light, the Reverend will see how the snow has frozen beneath him, how every window has shattered, how the car he gave his sixteen-year-old son eight years ago crumpled around him as though it were nothing more than a toy, a Matchbox model like the ones Davis used to play with.

  The youngest, newest trooper will kneel as close to the car as possible. He will extend his arm through the broken window. He will shine his flashlight into the Reverend’s face, then up and down his body.

  “Are you hurt?” he will ask.

  “Davis?” the Reverend will ask the man. “Is it you?”

  “Sir, are you hurt? Can you move?” The trooper’s voice will ring with easy authority over more sirens sounding in the distance, coming their way; over the slow rumble of traffic that will begin to pile up, though it’s after midnight, and the roads are relatively bare. Over the chatter of the Reverend’s teeth, for by this time he will be delirious and so cold that his words will be nearly unintelligible.

  The Reverend will try to turn his head until he can see the trooper’s eyes. He will try, but he will fail. He will know that the trooper’s voice is not his son’s voice, the trooper’s hands—large, pale, and strong—are not his son’s hands. He will wonder if these are the hands that will keep him alive, bring him to safety. He will wonder if safety is what Davis sees in That Man, the white one, the one he plans to marry. He will wonder if Davis ever saw these things in him.

  “Sir, don’t worry. We’re going to get you out of here.”

  “Sunny Boy,” he will say.

  “Everything is going to be fine.”

  “I need my son. I need to save my son,” he will say.

  “Your son isn’t here. He’s safe. It’s only you in this car.” The trooper will consider the fact that he, too, would be thinking of his son if it were him trapped in that seat, hanging upside down, waiting for help to come. With his free arm he will slowly reach his hand through the broken window until he can gently press his palm against the driver’s shoulder. He will do his best to look the driver in the eye. “Sir, we’re going to get you out of here.”

  • • •

  His intention was to go for a short drive, just a little ride to clear his head. He’d driven past the church, the Popcorn Shoppe, and Shirley’s Gourmet Ice Cream Parlor. He’d driven past Montgomery’s Country Store, home to the world’s chewiest pecan pralines. And though he’d slowed down, that moment as good as any for a drink, eventually he drove right on by the local dive. He’d been done with all that for twenty-five years, minus a few bumps along the way.

  He’d turned from Main Street onto Route 34, heading south. He drove past True Value and the Gemini Boutique. Past the post office and Cooke’s Violins. It was in the east garret of Cooke’s where Davis, at seven years old, first learned how to hold a violin, scratching out two ugly notes before calmly setting the thing down and declaring that he wanted to play an instrument that allowed him to sit. The place finally shut its doors after years spent struggling to stay afloat.

  When the Reverend called Davis to tell him the news, Davis had said, “You could have texted me
that,” and hung up. So the Reverend had texted him, “I’d like to see you, son.” But Davis—young, living all the way out there in New York City with That Man, caught up in his life—doesn’t make much of an effort. Davis wouldn’t know what it is to call your son with news that should be important to him and be dismissed as though you are some kind of nuisance, when at one time, for a long time, you were everything to him.

  From home, New York City was an eight-hour drive, a straight shot. The tank was full, the road mostly cleared from the storm that had dumped six feet of snow earlier that week. He paid attention to the signs warning him to watch out for deer crossing and boulders that might stumble to the road from the mountains of Pennsylvania. The Reverend was glad for the late hour and the sparsely populated highway.

  • • •

  The Reverend caught glimpses of the quarry when the car tumbled down the hill. Every so often, because his ears are well-trained to the noise of the creek that travels along his property, he hears the water moving underneath the quarry’s icy surface, everything normal, as is, going about its day. He knows he must be perched near water’s edge. He listens:

  A young boy screams. The sound is faint—distant but present.

  He remembers when those horrific screams came from Davis—an aftershock of his mother’s death. Davis and Olivia without a mother. A Reverend without a wife. Davis, at five, practically a toddler, a rug rat, his sister already a woman. The first time Davis screamed—just hours after the funeral—Olivia woke, bounding from her bed, and ran to her brother’s aid. It was she who stood beside him, momentarily unsure of what to do as she witnessed Davis twisting, turning, shrieking like a thing possessed. Senses gone. Limbs flying every which way. She turned on the bedside lamp, took a seat on the bed, and wrapped her arms around him.

  The next morning the Reverend sat at the kitchen table, head aching in his hands, doing his best to listen.

  “I stayed with him until his arms stopped moving, until he stopped kicking,” Olivia said. She was pouring coffee into a travel mug, her suitcase by the door, her back turned to him. After she set the coffeepot down, she went to the refrigerator, looking for milk.