Haunted

By Jane Greensmith
www.janegs.com

Copyright © 2003.
 All rights reserved.

 “Mama, can Mikey and me look at your wedding pictures?”

Amanda Jessen stopped spreading peanut butter on graham crackers for a split second as she searched for an alternative that would be attractive to a five-year-old.

“Katie, we don’t have time to get out the album.  You guys need to eat your snack and then you can put on your swimsuits and I’ll fill the pool.  I’ll even let you wash socks.”

The sequels that greeted Amanda’s alternative assured her that she had hit pay dirt.  Better to let them get every sock in the house soaked while they played “washday” than to have to open that album again.  It had been a week since she had first seen his face, and she hadn’t yet found a rational explanation for it.

“Mama, I think that’s enough for now.”  Amanda looked down in dismay to find that her daughter was right, she had made enough peanut-butter graham crackers for the neighborhood.  Then, her two small children watched in amazement as their mother proceeded to dump the whole plate of crackers down the disposal, “But Mama,” they wailed, “we’ll eat some of them.”

Amanda slumped to a chair, distracted, near tears.  Katie, the older of Amanda’s two children, put an arm around her mother’s thin shoulders.  “You okay, Mama?  I’ll get Mikey and me a banana if you just want to rest.”

“No honey.  I’m sorry.  Your ole Mama is just going bonkers, sweetie.”  Amanda smiled bravely and ruffled her daughter’s hair and pulled a face at her son, making him laugh.  Then she mustered her much-vaunted self-control and managed to spread peanut butter on six more crackers and pour two cups of milk without further incident.

The truth was, Katie’s simple request to look at the wedding album had thrown her into a tailspin.  After the last time, she had put the album in a box, vowing to not look at it again until she was over whatever stress had caused her to start seeing things.

As the kids finished their snack and donned their suits, Amanda dragged the pool to the shady part of the lawn and filled it.  Then she did the only sensible thing she could think of.  She called her mother.  Of course, Mother would come over and watch the kids play in the pool while Amanda rested.  Amanda needed rest, her mother heartily agreed, she would have come earlier if Amanda had just called her.  Amanda sighed—so many tradeoffs.  Was a rest really worth having her mother in the house again, taking over again? 

Amanda lay in the bedroom she shared with her husband Mark and stared at the blinds that were supposed to darken the room so that she could rest.  They didn’t do a very good job, she thought. The edges were bright as if the sunlight was a liquid seeping through the cracks between the blinds and the wall.  Amanda focused on the blinds and the sunlight and trying to rest so that she wouldn’t think about the box in the closet where she had buried the wedding album.  And the more she tried not to think about the box, the more it asserted itself…like the sun creeping around the blinds, the album in the box kept creeping into her mind, making rest impossible. 

Amanda could picture the box, buried under a stack of winter sweaters.  She rolled onto her side and watched the closet door.  She pictured the album in the box behind the door.  She had nestled the album in amongst scarves and gloves.  Its ivory sateen cover buried by Peruvian alpaca and lined leather and mohair.  Finally she could take no more, and in a moment she across the room and on her hands and knees flinging aside the clothes and shoes and trappings of life under which she had buried her the pictures of her wedding day.

She lifted the album out of the box and sat back holding it gingerly in her hands.  She smoothed the cover and then with her heart pounding and her palms sweaty, she opened it. 

She started with the title page.  Her name and Mark’s.  The date they were married.  The name of the minister.  She turned to the first page of photos and methodically looked at each picture, reliving the day.  The chapel, the candles, the processional.  She almost didn’t even see herself or Mark in the pictures.  She looked beyond herself, searching in the shadowy background for the face she knew so well.  She looked at the guests, friends and family members who had witnessed her wedding, trying to see the man she knew had not been there.

The first time she had seen his face in the album, just last week, he had appeared in a reception picture. Katie had called her over to quiz her on who was who. 

Ever since Katie had received a Barbie and Ken Bride-and-Groom doll set for her fifth birthday, she had obsessed on brides.  From dress-up to stories to ogling wedding cakes at the bakery, things bridal had filled Katie’s world.  Discovering that her mother had once been a bride was the icing on the cake. She had begged to see Amanda’s wedding dress, wrapped in a brown box in the basement.  She had poured over the wedding album, asking questions about the guests, the music, the food, the minister, the ring.

Katie had asked “who’s that dancing with Grandma” and “who’s that kissing Aunt Tessa?”  Amanda had answered her questions and then behind the man kissing her sister Tessa she saw, in the picture, the shadowy profile of a man.  And her mouth went dry and she felt a cold clamminess wash over her as she realized that she recognized the shadow.  It was a shadow that had been burned in her brain so long ago now, but it was a shape almost as familiar to her as her name, more familiar than her thoughts.  But then she laughed it off.  Her eyes were playing tricks on her.  His shadow hadn’t been there—he hadn’t been there.  He couldn’t have been, she knew that. 

Later that day, after Katie had gone off to a play date and Mikey was taking his nap, she opened the album again.  The shadow was gone from the photo.  Whew!  The last thing Amanda needed was to add to her stress by starting to see things.  In her relief, she got caught up in looking at the pictures from her storybook wedding six years previous.  She had been beautiful!  And Mark?  He looked scared and excited and so handsome—her heart melted for him all over again.  She flipped through the pages, smiling dreamily, proudly, remembering the glorious day. 

And then she saw him again.  Not just a shadow this time, but his face, one of a crowd of faces in the reception line.  His wavy black hair, setting his pale complexion into bold relief and bringing those vibrant black eyes into the foreground.  His lopsided toothy smile, half shy and a little sad.  She wanted to slam the album closed and burst into tears, but she didn’t.  She stared into his face, and her heart ached for all that she had missed.  She stared at his face until it became blurred with tears, and then she closed the album, sure that she was losing whatever was left of her sanity.

That was it, she told herself.  I’ve been shut up at home too long with two little kids.  I miss work.  I miss the people at work.  I miss the challenge of work.  I’m just stressed out being a stay-at-home mom.  She made herself a cup of tea, calmed herself down, and then opened the album again.  This time he was in the chapel, sitting just behind her parents.

“Why are you haunting me?” she sobbed aloud. This time she did slam the album shut, and this time she did bury it in her closet, praying that Katie wouldn’t miss it and ask for it.  But Amanda knew that she would.

Seated cross-legged on her bedroom floor, Amanda turned the pages of her wedding album, the sounds of her children playing outside in their pool nearly drowned out by the hum of the air conditioner.  This time she saw his face, or his shadow, or his profile in nearly every picture.  Why shouldn’t he be there, she thought, he’s in everything I do, everything I say.  So why does it surprise me that he was there too?  And with that acknowledgement of the overwhelming influence Bob Davenport would always have over her, Amanda felt the tension drain from her body.  She felt at peace for the first time since she had met him twelve years ago.

Amanda’s family had moved to a new town for her senior year of high school.  She had wanted to stay in the old town, but her father was insistent that she move with the family.  He had just gotten a hot new promotion and wanted to parade his All-American family; Amanda was a big part of the show. 

Amanda had fallen in love with Bob Davenport the minute she laid eyes on him at the back of the cafeteria on the first day of school.  Rumored as most likely to be named valedictorian, Bob was a gorgeous medley of brains, looks, sensitivity, and humor.  The problem was that Amanda never summoned the nerve to talk to him directly once all during their senior year.  She was not in the upper echelons of academics, much as she wanted to be.  Her mother’s insistence that she continue competing in gymnastics long after the desire died kept study time to a bare minimum.  Besides, he was at least fifty million times smarter than she was; she was afraid anything she would say would sound stupid, so she said nothing.

When she found out that she and Bob were both going to the college of her father’s choice, her heart leaped again. Unfortunately, self-confidence was never Amanda’s strong suite.  A studied aloof manner, however, was.  Despite classes together and common friends, it wasn’t until they were seniors in college that Amanda felt for sure that Bob knew who she was.  But hope springs eternal—she spent all her college years turning down dates in the hope that Bob would call her.  Next to Bob Davenport, all others paled into insignificance. 

Graduation day she cried.  Not because she would necessarily miss her college days but because it finally came home that in the five years she had known Bob, she had not been able to put together a relationship with him beyond infatuation.  She knew his schedules, his habits, his preferences, his wardrobe.  But she never let him know she ever even noticed him—cool, aloof, and lonely, Amanda watched Bob graduate and leave for law school.  She had blown every chance she ever had with him.

It took awhile, but Amanda grew up.  She started working and found friends and fun in all the right places.  And then she met Mark.  He wasn’t coy or glib.  He didn’t play games or hide behind false bravado.  He asked her out.  He let her know that she was the smartest, prettiest, most wonderful woman on the planet, and when he asked her to marry him she didn’t say ‘yes’—she said, ‘oh, yesss.’

Two months after Amanda and Mark announced their engagement, she got a letter from Bob Davenport.  He was lawyer and was coming home to see his mother and wanted to see Amanda if she would let him.  She honestly thought her heart stopped beating while she read the letter—she knew she didn’t breathe.   She didn’t tell Mark.  She didn’t tell anyone.  She wrote Bob back and told him that she would meet him.  They met for coffee one night after work.  He told her that he had leukemia.  Part of coming to terms with the disease was to take care of old business.  He had some really old business that involved her.  He knew that she had never really noticed him but he wanted her to know that he had fallen in love with her when they were seniors in high school but had never found the courage to tell her or to ask her out.  Then all through college he had waited for the right time, but the right time never came.  She had always been so remote and distant that he could never find the nerve to try to break through her reserve.  And then college was over, and she was gone.

She started to tell him how she had felt about him, but he stopped her.  “Please, this isn’t about you.  It’s about me.  Don’t tell me you liked me too because I won’t believe you.  Just let me deal with my own lack of courage.  Let’s just say that I loved you and I wanted you to know that.  Have a nice life.”

And then he left. Amanda sat in the coffee house too stunned to move, too stunned to cry.  And yet, would she trade Mark for Bob?  Mark, who loved her and hadn’t hidden it from her.  Mark, who had brought her out of herself and showed her that she needn’t pretend to be aloof or distant.  But Bob was the golden boy—the smartest, the handsomest, the best.  How could she love Mark when there was Bob?

She married Mark.  She thought about Bob, almost daily.  Even in the whirlwind of planning a wedding, she wondered where he was and what he was doing.  But she married Mark.

Six months after the wedding, she was working in the yard on a beautiful bright day when the mail came.  She eagerly opened her quarterly college alumni newsletter, flipped to the section on graduates from her year, and read that Bob Davenport had died of leukemia.  He had died three weeks before her wedding.  There was a memorial fund for the college in his name.  She sent a check, and his brother wrote back thanking her for always being a good friend to Bob—“Bob mentioned you a lot,” Dan had written. 

A knock on the door jarred Amanda out of her reverie.

“Come in,” she said.

Her mother pushed open the bedroom door.  “Tessa’s here,” she said.  “Do you feel like coming down now?  Tessa’s playing with the children.”

Amanda beckoned her mother to her side.  “Do you remember Bob Davenport?”

“Oh yes.  I know his mother from the club.”  Amanda’s mother sat on the bed and patted her daughter’s shoulder.  “She said that he used to have a crush on you in high school.  He died, you know.  Cancer, I think.”

“Do you believe in ghosts, Mother?”

“I believe people are haunted.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“It’s what I mean.”  Her mother slipped to the floor, and picked up the album and thumbed through it.  “You were a beautiful bride, sweetie.”  Then she closed the album and stood up and pulled her daughter to her feet.  She held Amanda’s face in her hands and kissed her tears.  “When people see ghosts, honey, they have to ask why they are haunted.”

Amanda looked into her mother’s eyes and read in them a sad wisdom she had never seen before.

“I’ll be down in a minute, Mother.  I just need to clean up a bit.”

Her mother gave her a quick hug and told her to take her time.  She and Tessa weren’t going anywhere.

Amanda placed the wedding album on her bed, and then picked up the gloves and scarves and put them in their box and put it in the closet.  Then she stacked winter sweaters on top of the box.  She went over to the windows and snapped up the blinds, flooding the bedroom with afternoon sun. 

She looked down at the children’s pool that was now reflecting the glare of the sun into her eyes and she thought about what her mother had said.  She didn’t know whether she was haunted by the man who had died just before her wedding, or the girl she used to be, the one who had never told him that she loved him.  Either way, she knew she would see his face forever—it might startle her at first, but in time she would come to expect it and it would always remind her to step forward instead of looking back.  If I’m going to be haunted, she thought to herself, at least it’s by a face I love.

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