Her thighs clenched a body-length pillow; her gown dampened with sweat. She squeezed her eyes shut and imagined she was elsewhere, but still she went on hearing the crying child.
Gast, she said, naming him aloud in Old English. A lich, a feond. Such words usually soothed her. They are the root of our language, our mother tongue. They are heavy with a thousand years of history and tether us to earth. Clara needed such words to hold her down when she thought about madness or escape. Hearing the ghost child, she searched her mind for other words, an Anglo-Saxon galdor to drive off elves and wicked spirits that she had written down in a notebook using a runic script Irish monks called the Insular hand, but she couldn’t remember how the words went.
As she did this, she stroked the nubs of her missing ring finger and pinkie, where the skin was worn smooth as river-tossed stones, with her good hand. The left hand was her ghost hand. Two of the fingers, blackened by frostbite, were sliced off in an emergency room when she was only a baby. But ever since Clara could remember, at night when she dreamed the hand became whole again, played through her hair, ran along her skin with a spider’s weightlessness. She dreamed of the hand writing things down in a book, things the good hand would never imagine. She had come to think of it as a gift, her own private absence, a reminder to go on searching for what was not there. Her body taught her every living day that such things as ghosts were possible, so it shouldn’t have surprised her that the boy would show up two nights after the murder. There was no denying the voice under the stairs.
The voice rose from the basement, the place she had been standing on the day the boy came to her door. There was a tortured tenor to its vibration. The skin around her belly went taut as the baby pressed a hand or foot to the surface, testing the watery limit of its cell, urging her to rise. Whatever cried down there was in pain. Sweat beaded her upper lip; she tasted it with the tip of her tongue.
Why did you come here first with your gun? I was down in the basement on Saturday because that was where I kept a pack of Old Golds hidden and I needed a smoke and a slug of Widow Larsen’s rhubarb wine if I was to make it through the tedium of another lonely afternoon. There, now you know it. Damaging my baby before it can even draw breath.
The sound of your gun sent a shudder right through me. It echoes even now. I wished I’d had the courage to climb the stairs and look you in the eye and talk you out of what you were about to do. Would your rage have dissipated if I took you in my arms? Or did you mean to murder me so that my blood and my baby’s blood might be some terrible stain on the town, a nightmare story to be told for a generation? Have you come to haunt me to remind me of my cowardice?
The crying lulled for a moment, and Clara became aware of other sounds. September had arrived after a dry summer, and even after sundown the heat pressed on the countryside. Cicadas sang in an electric hum in the cemetery trees at the edge of the yard. Rain birds, her husband called them, a sweet name for a spiny insect. They droned in the dark, but if the cicadas promised relief, the way Logan had prayed for a rain the week before, they lied. Stupid to pray for rain, he’d come home mumbling; it wasn’t in my notes, but there the words were in my mouth. The wrong thing to pray for, he’d said again without explaining why.
The sound scraped up the stairwell. Help me. Clara lay atop the sheets, wondering over it. She wanted to forget Seth. She wasn’t even going to his funeral, and she resigned her long-term substitute position with the district the day after the shootings.
She pulled up the pillow around her ears, and still the cries came to her. The palpable heat beyond the window and the sound of the wind hummed in her blood. Clara gathered up her courage and climbed out of bed. Moonlight illuminated her room, scattered with cardboard boxes, the lids peeled