by Tod Davies.
I’ve been a chronic insomniac since I was a little girl, so it wasn’t strange that I was wide-awake that particular Tuesday night. What was strange was that Denny Donahue’s ghost was there, too.
I wasn’t scared, which you might think was strange, too — especially since I live in the woods, in the mountains, half an hour from the town named in my address, and since my neighbors are only close enough to see if my house is on fire, but not, I hope, to see if I’m sunbathing naked on my deck.
Also, I was alone. My husband was off on a job. This happened a lot, at that point in our marriage, but was something I was used to, and even, in a way, liked. The house was mine before we fell in love, and I loved it even before I loved him. I’d always felt as warm and secure in its arms as in his, if I can put it that way, and that, in a world that had seemed to turn increasingly mean, was no small thing. There was something about my house, next to its year round creek, and surrounded by its old growth trees, that said ‘home’ to me, with everything that deep word implies. I traveled a lot — too much — but whenever I came home, I came home.
I had come home, in fact, two nights before Denny Donahue’s ghost showed up, damn him. I’d picked up my dog from the dear friends and neighbors he lived with during my too frequent absences, gone home and played with him in the early evening twilight before putting the groceries away. Then, after a walk out back to look at the stars through the tall trees, we went to bed in our usual spots: him on his favorite worn down circle of rug in the living room, and me in the big, wide, ship-like bed my husband and I had set against the broad bedroom window that looked out on the trees.
I slept twelve hours the first night, as usual. Nothing remarkable happened the next day or night. I pottered, as usual, talked to my husband on the phone — but to no one else. My neighbors all knew I tended to hide for a few days on reentry, so that wasn’t at all strange. On the next day, Keri, my friend who watches my dog, telephoned to tell me that Denny Donahue had shot himself in his car, by the side of our mutual road, and that another of our neighbors had found him, poor thing…by which I mean my neighbor Meg, not Denny Donahue.
“That bastard,” I said — my first reaction, I’m afraid. Keri and I were in the habit of trumping each other with our real feelings about things (we’re Western women, after all, and we’re all like that out here, thank God), so it just came out naturally.
“I know,” Keri said. And she sighed.
The next morning, another neighbor, Violet, called to tell me, as well. She didn’t know I was home — she was leaving a message so I could pick it up from my travels, the way I usually did. But I called her right back to say I was there. She had spent the day with Elizabeth, Denny’s almost ex-wife, and what she told me about did not soften my feelings toward the dead. I tried to call Elizabeth, with some probably burdensome sympathy, but the line was busy. So I put it off.
The word about Denny’s suicide got worse by the hour. Not only had he shot himself on the road, but the day he picked was his daughter’s sixteenth birthday.
“Bastard,” I said again to Keri when she told me this.
“He was suffering,” she offered unhappily after a moment.
“Yes,” I said shortly — which was all I thought Denny Donahue deserved. “He must have been.”
Not as much, I thought, as Elizabeth and their daughter Ariel. Not to mention poor Meg who found him, and would never now, probably, get that grisly picture out of her mind.
I tried to call Elizabeth again, but the line was busy.
I lived — I should tell you — in a neighborhood made up largely of what you might call compassionate bliss ninnies. God bless them. Everyone always seemed to be searching for some ever greater enlightenment and happiness, some way to deal — once and for all — with the ineradicable tragedy of life, set forever like a stubborn stain on the front of the favorite dress of life. My neighbors seemed to me to try everything: a brooch? a scarf? maybe dye the dress blue? And their efforts not only touched me, but I saw myself — with a slightly meaner edge, of course — in them, too.
There were massage therapists and homoeopaths, there were osteopaths and people taking the Little Course of Miracles. There were Deepak Chopra fans, and Ganga-ji disciples, ex-Rajneeshis, and people who channeled the Virgin Mary. All clustered around a Tibetan Buddhist temple. Most of my neighbors were Tibetan Buddhist — Keri, for example. For some reason, most of these were born Irish and Catholic. I don’t know why, unless it’s that when the Church canceled the Latin mass, it lost that exotic edge that spirituality needs to have for a lot of people. But, in any case, the Irish Catholic/Tibetan Buddhists were a lot of fun. They all drank, and they tended to like a good party.
Denny Donahue was an ex-Irish Catholic, but not a Buddhist or a bliss ninny of any kind. He had been in Viet Nam — which was all I knew about his past — and he liked to ride up and down the valley on a big, rangy, chestnut-colored mare. He never seemed to have a job, while Elizabeth worked constantly. (This, on reflection, was true of most of the couples I knew in my valley.) I had assumed, when he and Elizabeth split up, that she had left him, and then, automatically, that he had killed himself to get back at her. But no, it turned out (I found in the backwash of compassionate chatter that followed his death) that he had left her. No warning. One day everything was fine, or so she thought, the next day he was off to live in Hawaii alone. He sold the horse. Elizabeth hadn’t had any chance to prepare any support for herself, and found she couldn’t handle the isolated house alone, so she rented it out and moved, with her daughter, to town.
But Denny came back from Hawaii, and they were dating again. Elizabeth assumed they would get back together. Then he went to their house, chatted with the new tenants, left, went to a locked outbuilding where he’d left his guns. He got out the shotgun, drove to the road, and shot himself. Just like that.
On his daughter’s 16th birthday.
No warning, another neighbor told me. Elizabeth and Ariel were in shock. She’d like it if you called, but she probably won’t answer.
I called again and got through, this time, to an answering machine. I left the inadequate message dictated by the circumstances, hung up, and made myself a cup of tea.
The rest of the day was normal. I walked the dog. I talked to my husband, whose work was going well. I made a pleasantly confined dinner of lamb chops and spinach. And, after a bath, I went to bed. When I woke up at 2:30, I wasn’t surprised. I always wake up at 2:30. What did surprise me was Denny Donahue. He was sitting there, on a chair he’d brought with him, next to the bed. I could see him by the light of the full moon.
“What the hell are you doing here, Denny?” I hissed furiously, before I realized what a ridiculous question it was under the circumstances. (And when I woke up a little more, I also felt it was impolite.)
Denny didn’t answer. He just sat there looking morose, his legs crossed, and his left foot tapping nervously in the air.
Of course I thought that I was dreaming. Especially since my dog didn’t stir from his spot in the living room. But then I sat up and turned on my husband’s bedside light. I was naked — I always sleep naked — but I figured that if I was dreaming it didn’t matter. And even if I wasn’t, seeing as how Denny was dead, it STILL didn’t matter.
But I wasn’t dreaming. He was there. My dog was up now, yawning in the doorway. He was a truly terrible watchdog, and he hadn’t even known Denny was about till he saw him. Then he gave a yelp and tried to climb up on the bed.
I pushed him back. “Not on the bed,” I said automatically. He was a big dog, more than a hundred pounds, but when he was stressed, he acted like a pup. He once tried to climb onto my lap in the waiting room at Les Schwab Tires, while we were getting our snow tires put on. “Down, dammit,” I said again, but I tickled his ears soothingly, and he sank down below the side of the bed opposite to Denny. The dog was shivering, so I knew Denny was really there. Also, the hair on the back of my arms was standing up.
Still, for some reason, whether because I was half asleep or what, I wasn’t scared. I was…well, I was annoyed is what I was. I had found it kind of a drag the one time Denny came by my house to visit on his horse, back when he was still alive. He just sat there that time, too. He must have felt the unsympathetic vibe, because he never came back again. Until tonight. The last visit had been years before, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why he’d come by after shooting himself in the head.
“You stopping by many places in the neighborhood, Denny?” I said. I think I was just trying to make conversation. He still didn’t answer. He just looked at me with those brown eyes of his. He looked embarrassed.
We sat there for a while, me and Denny, in silence. I could hear the creek running past the window open at my shoulder. It was a cold night — although mild for February — but I always kept the window open when my husband wasn’t home. The air made me shiver now, and I pulled the bedclothes up around me, looking around for my robe.
“You want a cup of tea, or what?” I said distractedly as I felt around on the bed for where I must have dropped it before going to sleep. But Denny just sat there. Now he was pulling at his mustache with his fingers, and all of him flickered back and forth between solidity and transparency. It was as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether to go or stay.
“Well, I’m having one,” I said in what I hoped was a firm voice. I found the robe, on the floor where it had slipped off the bed, got up, marched over to the door and through the living room to the kitchen closely shadowed by my quaking dog. I loudly made a cup of tea. I half thought — hoped, really — Denny would be gone by the time I made it back to bed, but, no, he was still there. He didn’t just look embarrassed now. He looked anxious, too.
I sighed and gave it up. Denny was obviously here to stay.
“Okay,” I said as I climbed back into bed. I closed the window and banked the pillows against it. I took a sip of the tea. I was beginning to feel philosophical about the whole thing. I remembered another neighbor and her story of seeing a ghost, one of the poor woman who had lived in the house last, but had fallen asleep behind the wheel on the icy highway and slid to her death in a ravine. My neighbor asked our local Buddhist lama what she should do with the ghost, who seemed very nice, but confused. “She doesn’t know she’s dead,” he told her. “Tell her she’s dead and she can move on.” This had worked as I recalled.
But why was it up to me to tell Denny Donahue that he was dead? It didn’t seem entirely fair. Still, there he was, and I had to do something about it or, for all I knew, he would never go away.
“Do you know you’re dead, Denny?” I said, thinking that this was the first sensible line of inquiry. If he showed he was startled by this news at all, I could just explain the whole scenario to him — I hoped I could keep the irritation at how he’d done the thing out of my voice. But in the end, none of that was necessary. He nodded his head sadly. Denny Donahue knew he was dead all right.
Then what was it? What in God’s name was he doing here, by the side of my bed?
“Okay, you’ve got to want something,” I finally said, exasperated. Still no answer. This annoyed me and I began to get sarcastic. “Don’t worry,” I said with exaggerated reassurance. “I mean, I’ve got all night.”
That got some response out of him. He gave a ghost of a smile and shook his head. He opened his mouth to speak.
This was the next surprise of the night. Because what came out of Denny Donahue’s mouth wasn’t words, it sounded more like the rustling of dead leaves. Like a mountain maple on the trail behind my house, in the fall, when the afternoon winds come. It wasn’t a beautiful sound, exactly but it was an interesting one. Well, it interested me. But Denny was obviously distressed by it.
“Try again,” I said helpfully to his look of chagrin.
He opened his mouth again. This time, his ghost voice sounded like a foghorn, faraway, one like I used to hear from my childhood home in San Francisco. It was a sound that made me inexplicably happy — joyous, even — wrapped in my black terry cloth robe there in my big bed in the woods. I don’t know why this was so. The happiness passed through me, surprising me by its delicacy, and then vanished as quickly as it had come.
Denny had felt nothing like that, I saw. His face scrunched up now, and he looked as if he might burst into tears.
“One more time,” I said encouragingly, as I took another sip of tea. And this time, when he opened his mouth, a stream of words flew out like a colored banner and curled around the room.
This was very interesting, to say the least. I had dropped acid a few times in my twenties, and once seen something very similar: I had been able to read whole sentences in the air (nothing very interesting, mind — the one I remember the most vividly was a recipe for a banana split). This was like that, only the letters were more colorful. I squinted to get a bead on them, and eventually their dancing settled down so I could see them more plainly. What they said was this:
“I didn’t get her anything for her birthday.”
I kind of gaped at that for a minute, and then I remembered Ariel. I said — admittedly without thinking — “What a moron you are, Denny. You shoot yourself on her 16th birthday, and all you can worry about is you didn’t get her a present?”
The minute I said it, I was sorry. The look on his face was so miserable, so kicked and trampled on, that I really felt bad I’d hit the poor guy when he was down. Just because he was dead was no excuse for not taking his feelings into account.
“You got a TV?” he said suddenly. I gave a jerk and spilled some tea on the bed. I mean, this time he sounded perfectly normal, just like Denny had when he was alive. When I just blinked in surprise, he repeated the question.
“No, I don’t have a TV,” I said, annoyed. “Why, you have some show you’re missing? Or what?”
Again, he just looked unhappily at me, this time rubbing his nose. And when he spoke now, it sounded like the far off honking of the geese, in November, when they travel out of the north past the long window at the pool where I swim, where it looks out onto the foothills that rise yellow into the mountains in the fall.
For a moment, I seemed to float there, as if I were alone in the salt-water pool on an afternoon where the evening bore down on the day and winter bore down on us all. Then I shook myself, and I was free of that — or I thought I was. There was a sadness creeping up on me, the same sadness I always feel when night comes, so it seems, too damn early. Or earlier than it has to. That, anyway, was how it seemed.
I shook myself again, to get rid of the sadness. And what was left, of course, was annoyance with Denny Donahue — even anger.
Now this was the first ghost I had ever seen — come to think of it, the last one I’ve ever seen, too — and I felt unsettled, intruded upon, and, as I said, annoyed. Yet, even though I only showed Denny’s ghost my irritated side, I meant to be kind.
No matter how hard I tried, though, I couldn’t get a kind of ugly, taunting tone out of my voice. I suppose it was fear. I suppose that was what caused the anger. It takes me that way sometimes.
Why was I afraid? I thought about that as we sat there in silence. Well, why wouldn’t I be? Wasn’t this Denny Donahue’s Ghost? But that wasn’t it. I knew that wasn’t it. I wasn’t at all afraid of Denny Donahue, dead or alive.
Denny tried occasionally to speak, but, after that one successful attempt, all that came out of him now was the sound of a squeaking door, or the sound of mice scuffling in the walls, or of a tire slow-leaking air.
After awhile, the fear I felt went away as quickly as had the joy. Instead, I was back to feeling sad, which in a lot of ways was worse. It didn’t creep up on me now, as I recall. It more like jumped up on me from behind and got me by the throat. “I’m sorry, Denny,” I said — I had by now finished my tea, and I was, I thought, finished with the whole experience as well. If Denny wasn’t going to go, then I was going to have to ignore him. Surely if I ignored him long enough he’d wander off and find someone more appropriate to haunt.
“I’m going to turn the light out now, Denny,” I explained, wanting to be fair. “I’ve had enough of sitting here looking at you like this, especially since you don’t seem to have anything particular to say.” Then I did what I said. I turned out the light and snuggled down into the pillows again. My dog’s nose snouted under my hand. When I hadn’t been looking, he’d managed to climb onto the bed.
I could still see Denny when I opened my eyes, of course. The light from the near full moon, which reflected off the patches of snow on the ground outside, filled the room and lit him up, though he wavered and waved in it from time to time, like a banner in the breeze. As I drifted off back to sleep, I was still sad — as often happens between sleep and wakefulness I positively ached with it. And no matter how I tried to float away from Denny onto a tide of sleep, it was instead as if he had gotten into my boat with me, and set out with me and my dog onto an open sea. Half dreaming, I saw him sit in the bow, wrapped in some long drab colored coat. The look on his face was tormented and wild, and he opened his mouth and let out a bloody colored moan.
That woke me right back up, I can tell you. I sat up, staring, and turned the light back on. “What the hell do you think you’re DOING?” I hissed, but Denny just hung his head and sat there without making a move. “Look,” I said. “I know you’re dead. I know that’s a drag. But it was your own idea, pal. And I’ve got work to do in the morning. So either tell me what you want, or GO AWAY.”
Still nothing from Denny Donahue’s ghost. Just that hangdog look. I remembered the day he had visited me on his horse. He’d had nothing much to say even then, and I’d been bored. I couldn’t figure out why he’d come. Come to think of it, I realized, looking at him, exasperated, now, I’d had the same feeling then: that Denny wanted to say something, even if, for whatever reason, he couldn’t, and whatever that thing was, I guessed it was the same thing that Denny wanted to say now. I hardly knew the man, alive or dead, but the more I thought about that, the more I saw it was true. That was the one thing about Denny Donahue that everyone had sort of known. He had something to say that he never did. And now I guessed he never would.
I guessed, though, that he was trying. I tried to help. It wasn’t just that I wanted him to get a move on, I really do try to be a help to my neighbors, even if this was the only time I had tried to be a help to a neighbor who was dead.
“Is there something you’ve been trying to tell me, Denny?” I asked. And Denny Donahue’s ghost perked up for the first time in our conversation (if you can call it that) and gave me a nod.
Encouraged, I went on. “Me especially for some reason, Denny?” I said cautiously. But at this he only looked sad again and shook his head. “Phew,” I thought to myself, relieved. Out loud, though, I said, “No one else listening tonight?” And at this, I struck pay dirt. He nodded his head up and down so hard that his outline bounced.
Oh, swell, I thought gloomily to myself. No one else on the whole road was awake tonight. If it hadn’t been for my insomnia, I might have missed this show too.
It was nearing dawn now, at least, by the clock, though the moon was still up and shining its light inside. And now Denny finally made some kind of move. He stood up and went out the door, but not before he turned around and just as clearly as if he’d said, “Come on,” asked me to follow him out. I gave a sigh at that. I hadn’t liked Denny much when he was alive, so you might wonder why I was bothering much about him now that he was dead. But maybe it was that when he was alive, I didn’t notice what he was trying to say. Now I noticed. I didn’t know what was causing the pain that came off of Denny Donahue’s ghost in juddering waves, but, caught in the backwash, I sure felt it. And once felt, it was impossible not to want to help get rid of it, in any way you could.
I found myself wondering, as I got out of bed again, how many of us, still alive, are colonized, unknowingly, by the pain of the dead.
I followed Denny Donahue’s ghost out onto our front deck, bathed in the half-light of the predawn moon — he floating through the wall, and me, the more conventional way through the sliding glass door. I hesitated a moment when the cold air hit me, then went to the railing where’d I seen him float through. It’s a rickety old thing, that railing — I really should have it fixed, I remember thinking — and I automatically held myself back.
And there, in the meadow in front of my safe little house in the woods, under the tall felt benignity of the old trees, there was what Denny Donahue had tried, all that time, with his stupid, gross jokes, and his drinking, and his final death, to say.
I’m sorry that I can’t describe it. Well, it’s not that I can’t — I won’t. I have a good reason why not: privacy. Privacy and courtesy and a belief that to describe horrible things is to pander to that part of all of us that secretly wishes horrible things to happen. I don’t want to encourage that part, in myself or in others…too much of what has made the world go mean and cold comes out of it, and the only way I can think of to put my shoulder to a wheel heading the other way is to just opt out. So I can’t describe the horror that Denny Donahue’s ghost showed me, in the meadow in front of my little house, in the hour before dawn, a few days after he’d shot himself on his own daughter’s sixteenth birthday. I can only say this:
There, in the meadow, in the moonlight, I saw what had happened to Denny…what he had made happen…a long time before. What was worse, much worse, actually, was that I felt it too. Maybe that’s how it is with ghosts: you feel them more than you might have when they were alive like you.
At first the scene in front of me was like those clichéd ones in buddy movies — war movies, television serials about World War II or Viet Nam. We’ve seen so many of them by now that it’s just about impossible to feel any truth behind them, or to feel, really, anything at all but some slight boredom and impatience for another program to come on.
But, like I said, this was more feeling than not. And while I watched the flickering images, boredom was not what I felt. No. Boredom would have been grand, I would have loved to feel boredom, I would have escaped, just then, from the feelings of Denny Donahue’s ghost into a war movie any day. And so, I think, would he — dead or alive.
The One Big Thing Denny Donahue’s ghost had never been able to say when he was alive (this much was clear) was how he had felt. To tell that now I don’t need to describe, thank God, the minutiae and horror of the scene. Instead, I can try to say something about the pain and guilt of being young and strong and terrified and cocky all at once. I can point out the fury, the being knocked forever off your tenuous balance, that comes with the sudden violent death of a friend at your side. Of the pain, the anxiety, the shadows, the relentless rat-a-tat-tatting in the head. And of the frantic hope that this constant anguish, that never lets up, no, not once, not when you’re asleep, not — it was so clear that night — when you’re dead, that all this can be soothed by the sacrifice of another, and of some other bloody killing in the hopes that the demons that have hold of you will somehow be appeased.
Vain hope. Oh, vain, vain hope!
Then, what Denny Donahue’s ghost showed me, was the silence after such a killing…after a murder…because no matter how you try to dress it up, as justice, as defending one’s country, as self-defense, as revenge, no matter what you try to call it, murder is what it is. And the secret that Denny Donahue’s ghost had found, all unwilling — at how young an age? how young are the young men we send into such horrors? — and the secret he showed me now, was that murder leaves the murderer possessed by the victim. In every case. Forever and ever — and possessed even after death. What I saw…what I felt…on my deck that early morning was that hard, clear, cold fact: there is no recourse, no respite, no special cases, no appeal.
As I pondered this — as I felt myself pound against it, like a helpless wave against an unyielding rock — Denny Donahue’s ghost showed me then the most horrible thing it had to tell…and that thing, I am sorry, I cannot tell you now. I cannot tell it, because I know the only way for it to be gone, for it to be redressed, for it to be let free into the air so that it can never poison another sweet thing, the only way is for someone to hold it without flinching until it disappears. And that is what I have tried to do since it was shown to me.
For what Denny Donahue’s ghost showed me was how Denny, when alive, had tried to rid himself of his anguish. And how he used as a sacrifice some girl who came, by chance, across his way.
The final thing that Denny Donahue’s ghost showed me, in the first rays of sunlight of the new day, beside the picture of her body all mangled and maimed, was that before she died, she told him she was just sixteen years old.
He had tried to tell many other people this, and in many other ways, many times, both when he was alive and after.
He stood there for a while as the scene blessedly began to fade away in the light, and I stood on the deck above, clutching my robe to myself, the dog pushing hard against my knee. Where the picture of the girl had been was once again only a big of trampled turf and pine needles, with a patch of snow or two.
And I stood there for a while, too, until the sun made its way more forcefully through the trees, and until Denny Donahue’s ghost flickered, faced, and finally went away.
I stood there for a while, after that, and thought confused, strangely lighthearted thoughts. I knew I would forget all of this in the full light of day. I knew when I read of soldiers killing and torturing and maiming and raping, I would hate them, and I would think, “I am not like they are.” I knew all of this, and I wondered if it was possible to overcome this, the natural course of things.
Wondering still, and to the sounds of the first birdsongs of the day, I went back into the house with my dog. He lay in his usual place on the carpet in the living room, and I went back to my usual place in my big bed. I drifted back into a warm and pleasant sleep, where I dreamed I floated, unknowing and uncaring, on a dark, gently rocking sea.
When I woke up later that day, a little after my usual hour, I fed the dog, had a cup of tea, and took up some work I had in hand. It was a beautiful morning, and though the news on the Internet was, as usual, bad, I was happy to think that I, at least, was safe and sound and far away from any horrors of that kind.
Killing and torture, maiming and rape, what had these things to do with me? And so, with a guilty light heart, I forgot all about Denny Donahue’s ghost and got on with the business of my day.