Stay Awake Page 21

  She is thinking of that night with the Ouija board, back when we were girls. She was eleven and Sydney was thirteen and Eden was nine and it was a night in October, the three of us in the room with the candles in a circle on the floor and all of us dressed in black and our pale thin girls’ hands each on the planchette (the pointer tool), and we hunched there over it waiting for it to move.

  There are things that you must never ask the Ouija board, Sydney told them. Never ask about God, she said. Never ask when you are going to die. Never ask where the gold is buried.

  “Why not?” Eden said. “What gold? Why can’t we ask where it’s buried?”

  “Because they want to keep it hidden, that’s why,” Sydney said, and then abruptly the planchette began to move in slow figure eights around the center of the board.

  “Brooke, I know it’s you moving it,” Eden said. Already a little afraid. But Brooke was not moving the planchette. Of all of our hands, hers were held the most loosely, and the most still. Of all of us, her mind was most empty and receptive and willing.

  “Spirit,” she whispered, her breath a little moth, “are you there?”

  YES, said the Ouija board.

  Brooke closed her eyes lightly. “Spirit,” she said, “who are you?”

  The planchette seemed to hesitate for a moment. It trembled a little, then made its gentle figure eight.

  W-E, it spelled at last. It began to move very slowly and deliberately, letter by letter, across the board. W-E-A-R-E-Y-O-U, it said.

  Eden took in a little breath, and she looked at Sydney, and Sydney shushed her with her eyes.

  “Spirit,” Brooke said, “what is your name?”

  B-R-K, said the Ouija board. E-D-E-N, it said. S-Y-D.

  “Brooke, I know you are doing it,” Eden said. “I’m telling.” But she didn’t take her hand off the planchette.

  W-E-A-R-E-D-E-A-D-Y-O-U, the Ouija board spelled, very slowly.

  YES YES

  “I’m telling Mom!” Eden said, her voice tight. “I’m telling Mom you’re trying to scare me!”

  “Shhh!” Brooke said fiercely. “Shut up!” But by that time Eden had pulled her hand away. She was up in an instant and had knocked over a candle as she ran to get to the light switch.

  Sydney had never admitted that it was she who had moved the planchette. She was very calm, though, calmer than Brooke, certainly calmer than Eden, she had been moving it almost subconsciously, that’s what she told herself later, though at the time she could barely contain her pleasure, she was happy that the other girls had been frightened, a kind of glow opened inside her as she looked at their faces, her hand still hovering above the letters on the board.

  And now, years later, as she stands at the door to the basement holding her basket of laundry, she thinks of the little coffin-door down there with the skeleton key in it and she is almost certain that if she went down there right now and turned the key and opened the door she would find inside the little room her own body

  There she would be, she thinks, she can picture it, her own body light as a husk, eyes closed, skin pale as paper, mouth pinched tightly closed

  W-E-A-R-E-Y-O-U, she thinks. She remembers that night with the Ouija board: Oh, she should have never done that! She should have never made those words

  those spirits.

  11

  Daddy is on his way home to kill us.

  Sydney likes to imagine this, she can’t help it. Here: He is driving through the snow in his pickup truck, and the defroster casts its thick wooly smell over him. He is black-bearded, dark-eyed, and his black hair stands up in crooked tufts from the friction of removing his stocking cap. The gun is on the seat beside him, and the wet feathers of snow land against the windshield and the wipers cast them away.

  Was it winter when he came for them? She isn’t sure. Maybe not.

  She has the picture of Daddy and the snowman, one of the few photographs that haven’t been destroyed, and naturally this is the image she is drawing on, there isn’t any real memory.

  What if she were to call him? she wonders. She has thought of it more than once, she has run his name through the search engines on her computer, Sampson Bell, also known as Spike, and there are hundreds of entries but nothing that resembles him. What if she could find him and call him on the telephone? Would he

  In the photograph, Daddy is a big bear of a man, standing next to a snowman that is as tall as he is, and his little daughters are in his arms: laughing Sydney, age three and one half, in her pink parka; baby Brooke in green, too little to laugh, eighteen months old perhaps. Eden not even born yet.

  What does it mean that she was once this, this round face peering out from beneath a pink hood, her wide delighted eyes, her upturned, milk-drinking toddler nose, a little girl with her Daddy. Does it mean anything? Did she, the real Sydney, the Sydney she knows now as herself, exist somewhere inside that child in the photograph? Or was that other Sydney, the little Sydney that Daddy knew and loved, another creature entirely, entirely separate?

  She considers. She is fond of this kind of vague philosophical conundrum, and perhaps that is why her life feels sad to her even though she should be happy. She wants to find connections where there are none, meanings and structures that she can’t completely discern, that are perhaps indiscernible.

  Metaphors for what?

  12

  Actually, if you look closely, our ghosts are fluttering everywhere, dispersed and dispersing, smoke and glimmers of ash rising up from Daddy’s cigarette, earthworms emerging from the soil when it rains and lifting up with birds to grip the power lines in our claws, we fall as leaves upon a human finger, curled in the grass at the edge of a house and never found, we settle as dust upon a key in a basement door that leads nowhere. We cast down through the sixty-watt lamplight onto the page that Eden is bent over, reading diligently.

  “Could anything be more miraculous than an actual, authentic ghost?” she reads. Thomas Carlyle, the nineteenth-century Scottish essayist, how the students loathe him. She reads:

  The English Johnson longed, all his life, to see a Ghost; but could not, though he went to Cock Lane, and thence to the church-vaults, and tapped on coffins. Foolish Doctor! Did he never, with the mind’s eye as well as with the body’s, look round him into that full tide of human Life he so loved; did he never so much as look into Himself? The good Doctor was a Ghost, as actual and authentic as heart could wish; well-nigh a million Ghosts were travelling the streets by his side. Once more I say, sweep away the illusion of Time; compress the threescore years into three minutes; what else was he, what else are we? Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air and Invisibility?

  She will read this passage aloud to them, Eden thinks, she will read it with great inflection and feeling and they some of them

  She will look out at the students at their desks and there will be Christopher with his dark sad eyes

  Are we not all of us Spirits? And she will look directly at him right into

  13

  Let us say that there is soon to be a moment when Daddy wakes up and he cannot breathe; the dog Angeline is sound asleep on his chest and his mouth opens to try to take in air and there is nothing, his throat clenches and his lungs don’t fill up

  and there is that feeling of someone bending over him. A face is pulling close to his own face, and in the dream he is having he is a little girl whose father has come into the room to kill her while she sleeps

  and in the little girl’s dream she is a woman who is walking down the stairs into the basement, where in a little earthen room she will see a woman hanging from a noose made of knotted sheets, a woman who looks almost exactly like her

  a poor fucked-up woman in the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women in Mitchellville, Iowa, a convicted drug felon, the cloth of the sheets tightening around her windpipe and her legs kicking, her hands as if with a mind of their own scratching at her throat, her mouth opening and
closing, eyes rolling up and she can see a boy with a baby pig in his arms, standing there watching her

  and there is a woman who wakes up suddenly from a dream and she knows that she is still in her apartment in Portland, it is still raining, she can hear the patter and rattle of rain against the windowpane and she thinks

  She knows: My father has just died.

  Let us say that this, all of this, has a logic to it. We understand each other, don’t we? Are we not, you and I, both of us spirits?

  Reader, do not ask me who at this very moment is dreaming you.

  Do not ask me when you are going to die.

  Do not ask me where the gold is buried.

  For good friends:

  Tom Barbash, John Martin, Imad Rahman

  For family:

  Jed, Sheri, Philip, Paul

  For Sheila:

  Thinking of you

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to the Ohio Arts Council and Pauline Delaney Professorship Fund, which offered financial support during the writing of this book. I’m also indebted to my agent, Noah Lukeman, and my editor, Susanna Porter, as well as Gina Centrello, Libby McGuire, and all of the great people at Ballantine/Random House who have made the past decade so remarkably easy—I know I’ve been incredibly lucky to have found such a warm, friendly, and patient home for my books.

  Many people helped me with individual stories, and I owe thanks to the editors of the journals in which some of these stories first appeared, as well as to a great number of friends who indulgently read and commented on these pieces.

  ALSO BY DAN CHAON

  Await Your Reply

  You Remind Me of Me

  Fitting Ends

  Among the Missing

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DAN CHAON is the acclaimed author of Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; You Remind Me of Me, which was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications; and Await Your Reply, which was a New York Times Notable Book and appeared on more than a dozen “Best of the Year” lists. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, and he was the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and teaches at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline M. Delaney Professor of Creative Writing.