My Ghosts Read Online Free

sidestep, like the one she’s decided Heaven must be. A place where she and Charlie still sit in the hot sun, chewing on blades of fresh spring grass with their shoulders touching, not one sad thought in their heads. She’s just about to ask him what he thinks about that when he gives a huge sigh, and his hands fall open, palms up on his splayed-out thighs. “I don’t want it,” Charlie says. “A little life like this.”

    After he’s gone, his footsteps fading on the stairs, Clare smooths the rucked-up chair cover and thinks that in a strange way those few words are the most Charlie’s ever said to her. As if he slipped out of a cloak as he came through her doorway. She thinks that maybe Kez does too, something softer showing, that Clare never thought was there to be seen. Even Ben, who climbs the stairs most evenings and talks about what’s gone on at the Telegraph Office, tells her about an idea he’s working on, switches and currents and relays. It doesn’t matter that it’s nothing she can follow; as he talks he pulls out his notebook and begins to draw, to scribble down figures, and soon the only sound is the scratch of his pencil, and the soft
pss pss pss
of breath through his teeth. But lately he drifts, with a little smile on his lips, and once he asked her about hair combs, and was that a gift that a woman might like. What kind, did she think, for hair that was lighter than hers, and straighter. Hair that had a sort of
gleam
.
    Arranging the cover she thinks of the chair too, a gift from Kez and Nan when she got her certificate. Something they found on one of their prowls. Walk with them to the shops or down any street and you’ll notice how their heads swivel, how they see the worth in all kinds of things other people think they no longer want or need. A dented fire screen, the old squeezebox that made Charlie’s eyes open wide, a bouquet of flowers, barely wilted.
    Somehow they dragged the heavy chair home, found a place to hide it while Ben fixed the broken leg, the wobbly arm. They dyed a sheet deep blue and draped it to cover the leaking stuffing, huffed it up the stairs for Clare to find when she came home, a sign pinned on that said
Teacher’s Chair
. When she thinks of that, she feels a wash of shame at the way she keeps herself apart. The fever itself is long past, and maybeshe’s not as weak as she feels, maybe she needs to make herself get up, make herself set aside whatever it is that keeps her from the stairs. That keeps her from taking her place at the kitchen table, from going on with her life like a normal, happy girl.
    November
    The hard blue sky has turned a gloomy grey. Day after day a rainy light, although it must be falling softly, no sound on the roof that slants above her. No difference in the hours of the day. Clare thinks what it would be like to be trapped in an eternal, hazy present. Like the man in the problem, walking his endless road. Maybe that’s why someone began to think about measurement. Maybe someone understood that being able to mark time in a different way could keep you from going mad, from thinking that nothing would ever change.
    She wonders if that’s what it was like for Aunt Peach, who was buried with the only things she owned. A dark grey dress and shawl, a thin gold ring on her crooked little finger. They used to say that she was content enough, that she didn’t know; a blessing, really, that she had no idea at all. But maybe it was a choice, that wandering of mind and body. Leaving the chair by the stove, one way or another, to look for the place, the time when she lived a real life, when her mind worked as well as anyone’s. Clare wonders what she would choose, if she became an old woman in a house of noisy strangers. Where she would go, while she twisted her ring around and around. Maybe she’d run down those laneways with Charlie, or perch on her father’s shoulders, holding her breath while the time-ball fell. Maybe she’d choose the