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 apartment at the time, rarely dating or socializing, and drifting through the kinds of anonymous temp jobs afforded to someone with an online degree in Occult and Mystical Esoterica. My father left me everything, including a significant life insurance payout, and in the weeks after he died, I stopped accepting temp assignments and spent all of my time at his house eating the food he’d never eat, packing up his things, and feeling like the ghost of a once-living family.
I found a duct-taped box he probably hadn’t opened in a decade. Inside was a small but carefully curated selection of my mother’s belongings, including love letters from my father, her favorite cable-knit sweater, my own baby teeth, and a handful of books.
I flipped through her copy of The Spiral Grimoire, a little-known but fascinating assortment of rituals and spells. I inhaled the old-book fragrance I’d forever associate with my librarian mother and discovered her handwriting on the flyleaf.
She’d written, “L. Stick,” along with an address.
2. THE BEDROOM GHOST
My father’s death made sense. I had visited the crash site, seen the trees along the road, and spotted several deer walking in the woods. I wasn’t at all surprised he’d swerved to save a deer because it fit the man I’d known—one who’d cared for me and my mother and hadn’t, despite his advice, put his own life before anybody else’s. I missed him and I grieved, but his death had given me answers.
My mother’s death had left questions. Now with Mr. Stick’s address, I could visit where she’d gone and learn what had happened. If the building was as special as my mother had described, I might be able to do what I’d failed to do at home: speak with her directly one last time and finally make sense of how and why I’d lost her.
I learned that Mr. Stick’s former home belonged to a woman named Mrs. Zabka, a widow of late-middle age whom I was able to reach by phone.
Mrs. Zabka was a shut-in, and although she declined my invitation to visit her in person, she was a friendly conversationalist, happy to answer my questions and, when I probed too deeply, polite in her refusal to divulge information.
She had acquired ownership of the brownstone from Mr. Stick a week before his death, which he had apparently known was imminent, and she even remembered speaking to my mother on one occasion.
“I liked her,” Mrs. Zabka said. “I was sorry to hear what happened.”
“What did happen?” I asked.
“Heavens, who can say? I never understood the place or most of what occurs there.”
I tried to engage her on the subject of her brownstone’s otherworldliness, mentioning some of the marvels and phenomena my mother had told me about, and Mrs. Zabka listened like a woman who believed or was simply too mannerly to baldly contradict me. I talked too long about my academic interest in the occult, trying to convince her I wasn’t a lunatic or quack, and then abruptly shifted to a personal appeal.
“I’m still haunted by my mother. By the mystery,” I said, “and not just the loss. I realize how off-putting all of this might be, but I’d like to see your house and spend some time exploring, if only so the place itself isn’t such a mystery.”
“You’re coming to a haunted house to stop feeling haunted.”
“That’s a good way to say it. So you do think it’s haunted?”
“I can promise you’ll encounter more than you expect, but I can’t guarantee it’s haunted by your mother.”
“If I can’t find my mother, I’ll try to find closure.”
“You might find a whole new opening,” she said.
“I’d appreciate the chance more than I can say. I’m happy to compensate you for letting me visit.”
“You
