How I Live Now

29

I knew Edmond would come back to us if he could.

I tried doing the thing they do with dogs in the movies, saying JET FETCH EDMOND! and pointing in the general direction of the Wide World but he didn’t bound off like Lassie following a hot scent, just sat down and stared at me politely for a few seconds and then lost interest when it turned out I wasn’t going to clarify my request.

Can’t you at least send Jet to look for Gin? I asked Piper in a What Kind of Dog Whisperer Are You tone of voice. But she shook her head and said He’d find her if he knew where to look.

We both looked over at him sitting with his nose slightly raised into the breeze.

See, Piper said, he’s keeping tabs on the neighborhood. All the smells from miles around are filtering past his nose.

I came across Piper deep in conversation with Jet one afternoon and when I asked her what they were talking about she shrugged and said Dog Things. Sometimes the loneliness of being the odd man out in these conversations got to me but most of the time I just ignored it. I like old movies. She talks to dogs.

As the days passed and there was no sign of Edmond or Isaac I had to fight the unbearable fear that always lurked at the back of my mind. It took a long time to admit that I could no longer feel his presence and sometimes I lay awake until dawn listening desperately to the silence and trying to remember his face.

Sometimes I thought I heard Edmond’s voice in my head but it always turned out to be my subconscious replaying old tapes out of some perverse kind of nostalgia.

I denied what appeared to be fact.

And yet, I had seen the dead people. I had looked carefully at every hideous, nightmare face just to be sure.

I found myself drawn more and more to the big house just to make sure Edmond wasn’t waiting for us there, or had managed to drag himself that far but no farther.

I made excuses to Piper about being gone for a few hours, or just told her I’d found something in the vegetable garden that would be ripe any day now like tomatoes or maybe we needed something like more clean socks. She didn’t mind my going alone because she didn’t much like going there herself on account of the ghosts and also she probably more or less knew why I was going and was glad to have someone checking on the off chance.

She always took Jet with her for company so I had no early-warning system and every time I approached the house I searched for portents, strange cloud patterns, thirteen magpies, frogs the size of antelopes, that sort of thing. Some days I was convinced I could sense something or I experienced an uncanny mystical feeling but it won’t make the six o’clock news if I tell you I was always wrong.

It didn’t matter. Each time my heart would race at the smallest suggestion that we had company. Usually it was a moth thudding against a window. Or mice. Or nothing at all.

Once there I tried to put things back where they belonged.

I moved furniture. Swept rugs. Washed plates with cold water and bars of soap. Scrubbed dirt off walls.

Sometimes I just sat in the room that Edmond shared with Isaac, hoping something would happen.

Sometimes I put on his clothes and drifted around the house looking for something but I didn’t know what.

I frightened myself. I became the ghost Piper was so scared of.

One day we went down to the house together because Piper wanted a bath. There was no use pretending I had a premonition when Piper was around because if any manifestation was going to make itself manifest, it wasn’t going to be to me.

We had to haul buckets in as usual and the bath was cold but at least it took place in a bathtub, and then we sat around for a little while in the garden and swapped books we’d read for unread ones and I guess it was a little like going to a movie in the olden days before the war, something different to do.

For a while there was total peace and quiet, with nothing but the sound of Piper humming quietly and a chiffchaff chiff-chaffing in the apple tree and me turning the pages of a book.

Then the telephone rang.

It was such an unfamiliar sound we forgot how to react.

For an eternity neither of us moved.

Piper sat terrified. Eyes wide.

But I’ve never left a ringing phone in my life and I wasn’t going to start now.

I brought the receiver up to my ear but said nothing.

Hello? said the voice and for a moment I couldn’t place it.

Hello? it said again, and then in a pleading tone: Whoever you are, please say something.

And then I recognized the voice.

Hello, I said. It’s Daisy.