A Haunting

An early-June night, a few miles outside Taos, New Mexico

 

I hear a lumbering through the ceiling, a distinctly masculine series of thumps like a guy moving to the couch with a beer. The room is dark despite the open curtains, dark in a way only rural land can be, but I imagine I can make out the chestnut-stained vigas, or logs, that support the ceiling as I listen to the footsteps above me. But I’m in a one-story adobe, and nobody’s midnight-roofing the place. I’m alone with Peggotty, the Boston terrier I bought to combat despair six years ago, right after my younger brother’s suicide.

I’m in rural New Mexico for a month-long writing residency; I applied because it sounded lonely. In August, I’m getting married in Scotland, then heading to France for a week, and I wanted to prepare myself for happiness with a power session of grieving and healing. I figured if I devoted a whole month to Joshua, excavating memories of my brother’s death and life, I could give myself permission to forget all about him on my honeymoon. But when I applied for this residency, I pictured myself writing all day, walking Peggotty on mountain trails when I felt discouraged. I didn’t realize I wouldn’t be able to sleep.

I know the roof sound’s a trick of the wind, or joists popping as timbers expand and contract, but suddenly I’m not thirty-six, in a New Mexico adobe. I’m twenty-four, on the bottom floor of a two-story apartment building in Morgantown, West Virginia. In the months after I moved by myself to Morgantown, two hundred miles from anyone I knew, I spent my evenings on my love seat, listening to the guy upstairs thumping around. I say “by myself” because I lived alone in Morgantown for three years, but I didn’t actually move alone. My brother slept in the passenger seat on the drive across the state, away from our childhood home in Huntington, West Virginia, and for the first two weeks, he stayed with me.

At sixteen years old, Joshua was company—giggling with me when the guy upstairs got diarrhea, a rhythm of moan and flush—but otherwise profoundly useless. He watched cartoons on my computer when I needed it to write lesson plans. He napped on the love seat while I unloaded boxes from my Beetle. I wished I’d come alone, or that Jennifer or Rebecca could have come in Joshua’s place, giving me a sister’s help with putting up curtains and scrubbing the previous tenant from the bathtub. Then one evening, I returned to the apartment and discovered he’d prepared a brownie mix, spreading batter meant for an eight-inch-square pan into a twenty-four-inch-long cookie sheet. I took one thin, dried-out bite and nearly started bawling. I knew how empty my apartment would feel after I drove my brother back home.

Twelve years later, I’m alone again, just for June this time, spending my days writing about Joshua’s funeral. I want to preserve the memories of the week after he died before I lose them entirely. I want to unload those memories from my brain, shape them into a form I can understand.

I spent April and May struggling to re-experience that week six years ago: the silence in the laminate flooring in my childhood home when I unconsciously listened for Joshua’s footsteps. The perceptible coolness I felt in that house, missing his body heat. And strange as it feels to say it, since I grew so used to hopelessness after he died, I know I struggled to re-inhabit that week of numbness and shock because I was too happy. The same months I spent trying to relive my memories, I used my free mornings calling Scotland with Robert, planning an August wedding I hope will be so lovely, so out of my family’s ordinary, we’ll be able to enjoy it without Joshua. But here, at my writing retreat in New Mexico, those memories have become more tangible and present than my daily life.

I’m okay here in the daytime, great even, if it were possible to measure mental wellness with productivity. Earlier today, I wrote for six hours on the house’s covered back deck, describing the cloudless sky in Morgantown on the morning I woke up late, without knowing my brother had hanged himself in Huntington. The burn of the asphalt on my bare feet when I burst outside, listening to the news on the phone. Peggotty did her cheer-up job: sometimes I watched her, and sometimes I just sensed her muscular, short-furred form digging in the dust, peeing carefully on a cactus, creeping toward a family of foxes then running away.

When I got stuck today, I pulled my knees against my chest and stared across a garden of lavender, cacti, and cottonwoods, out onto the Sangre de Cristos, a mountain range named for the blood that dripped from Jesus’s hands, feet, head, and torn-open back while He was nailed to the cross. The mountains are just mountains: piñon-, sagebrush-, and juniper-pocked golden mounds that glow red at sunset. But when I looked at those blood-named mountains and made myself contemplate my brother, slumped in his closet, cold and stiff at the funeral home on some hidden-away metal table, I couldn’t help but think broken body. I thought body and I wrote and wrote.

But now, after dark, it’s too cool to sit outside. I’m too brain-tired to write or read, and after a day of exhuming that first shock of Joshua’s death, sleeping doesn’t feel like an option. So, I’m staring at vigas I can’t see in the dark and listening to thumping on the roof. I remember a Saturday evening during Joshua’s two weeks in Morgantown, when that guy whose diarrhea we’d laughed at came down and knocked on my door.

“You just moved here too, right?” he asked. I walked outside and stood barefoot on the hot gravel parking lot, closed the door behind me on Joshua’s skinny, sixteen-year-old living body, curled up for his couch nap.

“Yes, I moved here from Huntington,” I said, smiling. The guy looked a little older than me, thick blond ponytail, the kind of plumpness under his T-shirt and running shorts that comes from Hot Pockets and cheap beer. He told me he’d just started medical school, and I found myself attracted.

After we chatted a few minutes, he said, “Hey, you wouldn’t want to go out for a drink somewhere, would you?”

I blushed and said, “My teenage brother’s here, and I don’t go to bars.” It was true—I’d never been in a bar before, and I felt like he’d asked me to defy my Christian mother. But I meant, Why don’t we go to a restaurant that’s kid- and Christian-girl-friendly and take my little brother? That’s not the nuance he heard.

His face darkened and closed, and he responded, “Hey, it wasn’t a creepy-upstairs-guy date. I just wanted to get out of my apartment.” Before I could say anything else, he’d thumped back up the stairs, and when I went back inside, I heard him switch on his TV.

An hour later, I woke my brother up to eat chili, a heavy, under-seasoned concoction I’d made with half my usual ingredients. While he was eating, crouched on my thin Walmart rug because I didn’t own a table, I told him I’d talked to diarrhea guy, and it had gone badly. I asked if he thought I should take the guy some chili, to show I was up for being friends. “Or is the chili too bad?” I said.

“Well, it is bad, Sarbef,” Joshua said, thoughtfully chewing, “and he’ll think you like him.” He stood up, cocked his cargo shorts to one side, and held out his half-eaten bowl. In a cartoonish, high-pitched girl-voice, he said, “Hi, do you want some chili?”

“You’re right, Smoo,” I said, using the name I’d given him in babyhood. My body turned hot. I joined my brother on the rug with a bowl.

While Joshua’s advice probably came from shyness—he was nearly as shy as I was—I think he was right. Occasionally, he had flashes of wisdom. At twenty-four, I’d never been kissed, never been on a date, and that guy could have read the chili as a sexual advance. But after I drove Joshua home, I listened to the guy moving around upstairs, a guy who never asked me to go anywhere or do anything with him again, and replayed my conversation with him in my head. If I’d offered him that terrible chili, maybe I wouldn’t be sitting on my love seat alone.

In the one-story adobe, the bed is on wheels, and it rolls several inches through the darkness when I turn over. Peggotty rolls with me across the room, follows me across the bed, retucking herself into the back of my knees. I’m marrying Robert in Scotland in two months; it’s idiotic to think about a man I met twelve years ago and wish I’d taken him a bowl of chili. But alone with the Sangre de Cristos, I can conjure up nearly any moment of my life and tinge it with regret.

▴ ▴ ▴

A mid-June night, the adobe outside Taos

 

Over the next couple weeks, I manage a few good nights of sleep. But now I’m awake again, riding the bed around the room. The ceiling noises are back, but this time, I hear a series of small, sharp plunks: black walnuts dropping onto the roof of the house where I live alone in Indiana. I’m thirty-one, and Joshua has been dead a year.

Seven years after Joshua baked that crunchy pan of brownies, I had kind friends and an apartment with my sister Rebecca in Morgantown, but I could only see the city as the place I was living when my brother killed himself. I fled to Indiana by myself to escape my grief, but of course, I carried my grief with me. When I wasn’t teaching, I lay in bed, my body fat and muscle melting away, while puppy Peggotty shredded hairbrushes and shoes.

My Indiana house rental came with a detached garage in the backyard. I often wished I could walk into that garage, start my Beetle’s engine, and find out if that little building with flaking paint was sealed well enough to let me die. I envied my brother the courage it must have taken to squat in his closet, cutting off his airway until he passed out. As my dad said during that week I was home for the funeral, “Joshua could have changed his mind and just stood up.” Then I remembered courage had little to do with it. I recited the first line of the note Joshua left on his pillow: I’m sorry, Mama and Daddy, I’m just too stressed about the things I have to do. He listed the friends from work and high school he wanted Mama and Daddy to tell, not the things that worried him, but I remember the things he’d been talking about. An upcoming history paper. The art films he dreamed of directing. The obstacles between himself and a move to Manhattan. All those years left in his life.

In bed in Indiana, I listened to the walnuts striking my roof, sometimes singly, sometimes a walnut hailstorm. I’d heard that other people ate the walnuts. Other people piled walnuts on their cornfield-flat driveways and cracked them open by crushing them with their cars. I wondered how anyone could find the energy to gather and pile walnuts, to catch them in that window between unripe and wormy-rotten. Sometimes, I moped into the backyard, staying away from the garage, and tossed a walnut for Peggotty. She ignored the bad-tasting rock and brought me a stick.

Three days ago, a puppy appeared in the cactus and lavender garden, a male, pointy-faced, black-and-white mutt just Peggotty’s size. For two days, the dogs blurred across the deck while I wrote, and they splashed my legs with water from the plastic cup I kept by my feet. They napped together on the sun-warmed gravel; the puppy woke first and nipped Peggotty’s ear.

Today, the puppy didn’t show up. Peggotty stood for an hour at the edge of the garden, crying in the direction he’d come from before. In the late afternoon, a teenage boy with shiny black hair came from the puppy’s usual direction, yelling Joe every few steps. When the boy saw me, he described the puppy’s fur and shape, and squatted to pat Peggotty. I showed him pictures I’d taken of Peggotty and Joe, one dog home and safe, one perhaps reduced to digital images. He pointed across two hundred yards of dust and sagebrush to his family’s adobe: a house like my house for the month, and every other house I could see from the edge of the garden, single-story and orange with a turquoise door.

Peggotty mourned by my feet all evening as I sat with my laptop, not writing, worrying about Joe and his owner, contrasting the boy with dead-Joshua, with alive-me. I’m in New Mexico to take a break from my life; the boy lives here. When he looks at the landscape, he likely sees something akin to what I see in the hardwood-covered mountains of West Virginia: beauty rendered nearly invisible by familiarity. I’m guessing he knows what Sangre de Cristo means, but surely he doesn’t see the mountains and think body. When I read hurricane, west virginia on a highway sign, I don’t think storm, but see the town near Huntington where I took Joshua to the wave pool, and the McDonald’s where we ate soft serve with sunburnt hands.

I walked Peggotty at sunset on the High Road to Taos. We passed a campo santo vivid with polyester flowers and bright statues of Mary, Jesus, and saints; we passed an Adopt-a-Highway sign announcing that a family picks up beer cans and burger wrappers in memory of dead people named on the sign.

In bed, I cringe as I think of my brother’s grave, marked only in winter and in summer drought, when the cemetery’s bluegrass dies in rectangles over caskets, in squares over buried urns. Writing Joshua’s funeral, I’ve relived the decisions I helped make: to cremate, to put off buying a headstone. I’m thankful my family cremated, so my brother’s skin and organs couldn’t rot like a wormy walnut, but I wish we’d had the courage to mark his grave. When Joshua died, buying a headstone felt like an expensive declaration that he’d succeeded in killing himself. Now its absence makes me afraid I’m ashamed. I try to push aside the thought of centuries of suicides, condemned to hell by churches and whole towns, buried at crossroads in unmarked graves. The buriers chose the crossroads to confuse the suicide victims’ ghosts, to keep them from pestering people they’d loved and hated when they were alive.

I wish the ceiling noises really were walnuts, so I could take a flashlight and find one in the garden. This bedroom has a door that opens onto the deck; I could slip out and back in before Peggotty woke and cried for Joe.

In Indiana, I often sat on my rain-warped deck and peeled an unripe walnut apart with my fingers, exposing the spongy green meat. The juice stung invisible cuts on my hands, and I enjoyed feeling something beyond heartache and exhaustion. When the juice dried, it left my fingers the color of a walnut-stained dresser for days. I balled my hands into fists at work, afraid colleagues and students would gossip about my blackened nails. Alone in New Mexico, with over a month to scrub before my wedding day, I could walnut-sting and walnut-stain my entire body, then hide inside, a private declaration that I still miss my Smoo.

Plunk. Plunk. There are no walnuts. Peggotty sighs beside me. It feels like everything is grief.

▴ ▴ ▴

Late June, the adobe, first pink light of morning

 

I’m asleep this time. Or maybe I’m not. The doors are locked, the shades and windows open to the cool night air. I open my eyes and see the turquoise outline of a man slip into my bedroom from the deck, between the doorframe and closed door.

I finished writing my brother’s funeral two days ago, and I’ve felt my outside life returning, rays of sunlight after my self-created grief-storm. I’ve emailed the chef at the wedding reception restaurant about my preferences for smoked salmon, and I’ve read travel sites about the Scottish Borders, imagining my sisters and untraveled parents touring ruined castles, picking up rocks beside the Irish Sea. I imagined Joshua with us, then shut that thought down. I can miss my brother and feel happiness, too.

Yesterday, I heard the teenage boy yell Joe, his voice hopeful, and then, “Joe, get in here.” Joe hasn’t been to see us—perhaps a fence has been repaired. Peggotty spent the day by my feet, but she seemed tired, not sad. On my evening walk, I spotted a lost dog poster for Joe taped to a telephone pole near the campo santo. I tore down the poster and crumpled it into my shorts pocket.

Those shorts lie by the door when the man comes in, strides past the foot of my bed, and climbs out the open window. He’s just an outline—pinpricks of turquoise light—but something about him reads late twenties, the age Joshua would be if he were coming to my wedding. The man looks muscular and confident, his life before him, but past the scary years when childhood is freshly over and it’s tempting to fashion a noose or drive into a tree.

While the turquoise man’s in my room, I sit up, frozen and staring. The instant he disappears, I pick up Peggotty and flee to the living room couch, where I shake and try to decide what visited me. I’m prone to nighttime hallucinations, my brain trapped in a space between waking and sleeping, but those visions have always been un-furred animal life: eighteen-inch grasshoppers, sliced open and leaking onto my sheets. Still, I know my brain may have molded an image out of my mental and physical landscape. I spent Joshua’s twenty-eighth birthday here, I walked Peggotty past a graveyard daily, and I saw turquoise everywhere: jewelry, license plates, doors. I’m wondering now, after a month of inhabiting my brother’s absence, if instead of healing, I’ve stirred up something awful in my brain.

But I also wonder if the turquoise man wasn’t a hallucination. After my hallucinations have vanished, I’ve always shaken myself awake, stopped screaming, and stumbled back to my bed. When the sliced-open grasshoppers appeared, I understood so well that the creatures weren’t really there, I didn’t bother getting up at all. I know I’m on the couch because I suspect, and maybe even hope, that my visitor was a ghost.

A friend, who also has a brother who died young, once told me he wished he’d see a ghost. “It would be so hopeful,” he said, proof that there’s something after death. Unlike that friend, I believe in an afterlife without proof. I believe my brother is fishing with my dead grandfather or lazing on a couch somewhere. But I’m not above using a possible ghost as another reason to hope. A few weeks after Joshua died, my sister Rebecca and I separately smelled smoke from Joshua’s cigarettes in the Morgantown apartment we shared. Once Rebecca caught that distinctive Marlboro stench while she was heating frozen crab cakes, our main diet in early grieving, and once the smoke wafted from outside the shower curtain when I was taking a bath. We called the smell the “cigarette ghost,” and took it as proof we’d see Joshua again.

If I’m seeking hope in this turquoise vision, it has to be hope of a general sort, that other young men continue to exist after death. I know my visitor wasn’t Joshua. I’m sure he’d never put that time into a gym or hard labor, even as a ghost, to earn those muscular legs and arms. I also know he wouldn’t be in New Mexico, a place that never interested him when he was alive. If Joshua is a traveling ghost, I’d like to think he’s haunting an unrented Manhattan apartment, taking walks by the Hudson River. But I suspect he’d be in West Virginia, on the Huntington streets or on the banks of the Ohio, passing out cigarettes to homeless men who can see him.

And the real reason I know Joshua didn’t appear to me in turquoise: he could never hold his body so upright, muscle so confidently through a room. If that guy’s a ghost, I bet his name’s on an Adopt-a-Highway sign. I bet his family replaces his grave flowers every time they fade. Or maybe he’s moldering, undiscovered and unmissed, on a mountaintop in the Sangre de Cristos, but, whoever he is, I don’t believe that guy wanted to die.

One of the last times I saw my brother was a month before he died. I was thirty, and he was twenty-two. We walked with Rebecca at Huntington’s hot dog festival, checking out hot dog vendors and petting shelter dogs that needed homes. Joshua chose a hot dog from Stewart’s, said there was no point in trying anything else. He was the family hot dog connoisseur, so Rebecca and I did the same.

We were looking for a park bench—one free of ketchup, puppy pee, and teenagers on dates—when we ran into a guy Joshua knew from working at a call center. I’m pretty sure that guy’s still alive, so he isn’t my ghost either, but he was about twenty-eight and handsome, and he walked like the turquoise man. Joshua moved to the guy’s side, smiled shyly, and seemed to shrink four inches. I’d heard about this guy—he’d dated female coworkers Joshua liked, and Joshua thought it would be worth just about anything if that guy would consider him his friend. That guy’s life was far less together than Joshua’s, but Joshua couldn’t see it, and I lost track of that fact myself when he shook my hand, slid his eyes over my body, and said, “So you’re Josh’s sister.” I talked to him for several minutes, time I could have focused on my brother.

I’m guessing Joshua listed that guy in his suicide note, along with other people who walked like my turquoise visitor, and people who hunched and shuffled, like he did. I never saw the note; the police officers who examined Joshua’s body and bedroom took it—“evidence,” they said, of a straightforward suicide. My parents told me a few names they remembered, but focused on the apology at the beginning and end. “I’m sorry, Mama and Daddy,” my dad quoted, and then he added, “as if that helps anything.” Rebecca called the friends she knew loved Joshua; she didn’t bother with the guy from the hot dog festival. I tackled family calls, too angry to help with my brother’s friends. Those friends got a personal mention in Joshua’s note. He didn’t list his sisters at all.

Joshua didn’t list me. He wasn’t thinking about me when he died. Every day this month, I meant to cleanse myself of this detail by putting it into writing, but it kept slipping away, too painful to touch. On the couch in New Mexico, I feel so much anger welling that I know, ghosts or no ghosts, I’m not going to sleep again for days.

To calm down, I tell myself what I told myself that week: if Joshua had listed his sisters, he might not have killed himself. Ultimately, I chose walnuts over car exhaust because I remembered my sisters. I pictured myself with Jennifer, Rebecca, and Joshua in the blue sled our dad crafted from a barrel, snow-soaked plastic grocery bags tucked around our socks, and I knew I couldn’t continue the math, four minus one is three, three minus one is two. I know the fire Joshua felt in his brain was far worse than mine. He had bipolar disorder; I had grief-induced depression. But I still think he might have stood up in that closet if he’d remembered he was our Smoo.

I get off the couch, take Peggotty into the garden, stand barefoot on the night-cold gravel. The turquoise man has come and gone, and I’ve finished my essay. Joe is back with his owner with the shiny black hair. It’s time to take a final walk with Peggotty, to say good-bye to the mountains and the polyester grave flowers, to watch what’s left of this sunrise.

Someday, we’ll buy Joshua a headstone. But headstone or no headstone, ghosts or no ghosts, and whether I write about him or not, I know my brother will always haunt me. Even a crossroads burial couldn’t confuse him. I don’t want him to go away.


Sarah Beth Childers is the author of the essay collection Shake Terribly the Earth: Stories from an Appalachian Family (Ohio University Press, 2013). Her essays also appear in Brevity, [PANK], Colorado Review, Quiddity, Guernica, and elsewhere. She lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma, where she teaches creative nonfiction at Oklahoma State University, serves as the nonfiction editor of the Cimarron Review, and juggles online pandemic teaching with her new baby girl.