hollowness, I thought of how her closeness felt, summoning her near again and wishing it were true. Eventually I couldn’t tell the difference anymore. I finally opened my eyes, with a hopeful kind of fear, and she was standing at my bedside just as she had been.
“I couldn’t do it.”
“Did you feel me here?”
“I thought I felt you leave.”
“I did,” my mother said, haloed by the nightlight. “But then I came back so you wouldn’t feel alone.”
Three weeks later, a full season after my mother had changed, I was drawn out of bed at 3 a.m., wearing green flannel pajamas, with the kind of mysterious purpose only children and somnambulists are wont to understand.
My father’s distant snores harmonized with the refrigerator’s hum. I walked down the hall and found my mother in the living room, sitting in her chair beside the window in the dark. She wasn’t looking outside but faced me as I entered, and I crossed the carpet barefoot and stood in front of her chair.
She wiped her glassy eyes but only made them glassier.
“I dreamt that I was here and it was wonderful,” she said. “I had bones and blood and fat and hair. My muscles changed shape underneath my skin. There were vibrating sounds, and colors I could touch, and if I pulled the air inside me, I could turn it into words.”
I balled my fists, wishing she would simply be my mom again. I felt an urge to slap her, as people do in movies, and it made me feel queasy and demonic and adult. A parallelogram of light lay across her chest. The sky outside was moonless and the lamps weren’t lit, and I was suddenly convinced the light was from a window that was hovering between us like a portal in the air.
She said, “I love you, William. Hold my hand.”
I couldn’t move my arms.
She was radiant but thin like a flame about to gutter. “I’ll tell you something secret. Something you’ve forgotten. We choose a way forward, at the start and at the end. It’s time for me to choose again. It’s time for me to go.”
I felt the space broadening and shadowing around us, and a cold, prickling updraft floated from the floor. She reached her hand toward me with an upturned palm, and since I didn’t have pockets in the pants of my pajamas, I slid my hands deep beneath the tight elastic waistband and held my own legs. They were goosefleshed and skinny.
A pine scent, evergreen and gray, wafted off her.
My eyes focused hard on anything but her. Her chair’s stout legs stood firmly in the carpet. The radiator’s heavy old bulk looked cold, with a skin of white paint over thick, scaly rust, and the 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
