I used to ask friends if they’d ever seen a ghost. Most people have, especially around here, where it rains a lot and we spend hours driving our kids around. In spite of the noise and the chaos, we are often alone with our thoughts for much of the day.
Not much lasts around here. Houses rot, tumble down, and are buried behind old cars and broken chairs and overgrown lawns. Coming across a place like that is a brush with your own future because nothing we buy shiny from the store lasts, least of all our young selves. It all gets consumed by mud, scavenged by junkie kids, or dropped off the side of the road in black garbage bags.
I’ve never seen a ghost, unless you count these old houses. But my friend Kath experienced something once.
Kath ran a home daycare center I used to take my kids to before they were old enough to be left alone. I tried a few other places, including the mean lady’s house, but Kath’s was closest to home. She had a blue manufactured home, sort of a trailer but more permanent, in a development of similar homes that was carved out of a pasture on Henrici Road. Her front yard was a strip of bald dirt, but her backyard was part of the development’s common area and it went on forever. Her kids and mine ran wild out there from morning until night.
Kath herself was a sturdy, energetic woman who had started having babies at sixteen, so even though she was younger than me our kids were much the same age. She was on a break from her husband Dan, or he was on a break from her. She spent a good part of each day on the phone yelling at him for child support while she watched our gang of kids tearing through the backyard.
Instead of hello or how are you, she’d greet me with, “He quit his job! When I get a hold of him I’m going to squeeze his balls out of his mouth!” Or, “The check came but it was light by a hundred dollars! I didn’t have four kids by that man to get nothing!”
I’d come to pick up my children wet and steaming from a day spent outside in the rain, and they’d beg to stay longer, so Kath and I would have a soda and sit on her stained and sprung blue couch. All her furniture had been new when she got married, but she’d given up by the time I knew her. The entertainment center’s doors hung on one hinge each and the carpet was blotched with the children’s various illnesses.
“There’s nothing left to break in my house!” she’d say proudly, and I always thought she meant herself, too.
Dan had a girlfriend and Kath was always threatening to call her up. “I wish someone had called me before I married him. I could have made an informed decision! I’d be doing that home-wrecking bitch a favor!”
That was one of the things I liked about Kath. Always sure she was right.
“Maybe you should try dating,” I suggested.
Kath considered it, shaking the ice in her cup. “What’s that? The only date I’ve had in the last ten years is doing it with Dan on Friday nights before he goes to shoot pool at the Wichita!”
Occasionally Kath and I went shopping together, though with my two children and her four, it wasn’t a relaxing experience. Her children maintained a wide and erratic orbit around her, often leaving whatever store we were in to rape and pillage in other stores. My children hung on me in terror, as if I was going to chase them away with the words, “Go have fun. I don’t want to see you again for an hour. If you break anything, I will wrap your guts around a stick!” Something Kath often said to her kids.
During one of these trips to the mall, Kath met a man. We were trying on bras in JC Penney, each taking turns in the dressing room while the other dealt with whatever kids were crying or bored. When I came out after my turn, I saw Kath cuffing her eight-year-old son David on the head. The man standing next to them wore a suit and tie, and I thought he was another customer’s husband or store security. With Kath’s children, store security seemed a safe bet.
As it turned out, he had come into the mall to buy the new Alan Jackson cd and had found David crying in the food court.
Kath said, “How many times have you lost your glasses, young man? How many? I think I’ll just let you run blind from now on! You’ll need a white stick and a dog to find the potty! And God help you if you miss! Do you hear me?”
“Yes, mom.”
“And where are your brothers?” asked Kath.
The man cleared his throat. “How many brothers does he have?”
Kath glared at him. “Did I ask you, bozo?”
The man looked down at Kath and smiled. He rocked back on his heels like it was Christmas Day and even Kath was, briefly, speechless.
His name was Cary. He started coming by the house with gifts. A pound of coffee, some candy for the kids, perfume. Kath didn’t seem to pay him any more attention than the rest of us, seating him on her disaster of a couch and unloading her daily complaints about Dan. I got used to seeing Cary’s Toyota in the driveway when I came to get my kids.
“Well, he’s a banker, for one thing,” she told me on one of the rare afternoons he wasn’t at her place when I arrived. “He was married but it didn’t work out and he has a boat down at Cathlamette.”
I thought it was amazing she knew this about him when he so rarely had a chance to get a word in edge-wise around Kath. The next time I saw Cary, he arrived with a dozen white roses which Kath tossed on the kitchen table. “I’m changing a poopy diaper right now, Cary! I don’t keep bankers’ hours!”
Cary went through her cupboards, pushing aside boxes of graham crackers and Rice-A-Roni to find an old pressed glass vase. The roses were beautiful.
I had my own problems around this time, and I didn’t pay much attention to Kath’s love life. It was the rainy time after Thanksgiving when the world fills with water and darkness in equal measure. My husband was out with a bad back, our car needed new tires, and Christmas was coming.
One day, breathless, Kath called to tell me Cary asked her out on a date, and could I take her kids for the night.
“The whole night?”
“Yes, the whole night. I can dream, can’t I?”
I got everyone off to school the next morning, and Kath called me at work. “I had the nine ninety-five prime rib and Cary had the shrimp scampi.”
“That sounds nice. Then what happened?”
“Dan called during dessert, of course. So now he knows about Cary. Suits me fine!”
For the next few weeks, Kath and Cary were an item. I took her kids one or two nights a week, and in exchange Cary bought all of us dinner at Izzy’s one night. The way Kath’s kids ate it was probably a bargain, but still it had to be hugely expensive. He didn’t say much but that didn’t make him any different from other men who don’t talk, my husband included. The two men sat at one end of the table not talking while Kath carried on enough for all of us.
Dan took the kids over Christmas. Kath closed the daycare center and spent most of her time at Cary’s place. She gave him a captain’s hat for Christmas and he gave her a beautiful gold bracelet.
And then, on New Year’s Eve, she called me. “I think I need to come home. Can you pick me up?”
It was almost dinner. I had hamburger frying in the pan. “Now?”
“Yes, absolutely now. That’s why I’m calling you!”
I left the kids at home with their father and drove to the address she gave me. It was near the old high school and up one of streets behind the swimming pool. I didn’t know the area well, all those little houses and huge old trees. Kath was standing on the porch of a white house with icicle Christmas lights around the windows when I arrived. She waved at the screen door and stepped down the porch steps without a backward glance.
“Live and learn,” she said, buckling her seat belt. “Live and learn.”
“What happened?”
“Well, he’s crazy, that’s what happened. They all ought to have big tattoos on their foreheads, that’s what I think! He’s C-R-A-Z-Y.”
“Are we talking about the same guy? Cary?”
“Oh, my, yes. Someone ought to drive a dump truck of thorazine up his wazoo. The man hears voices. I kid you not. He thinks nine- or ten-foot tall angels speak to him from the foot of his bed. Every night!”
“Were they there when you were there?” I asked.
She gave me an exasperated look. “Honey, they weren’t there at all!”
I drove her home and we wished each other happy new year. For someone who’d just ended a love affair, she seemed happy to be done with the whole mess and ready to get back to regular life. She was dialing Dan’s number as I left, something about child support. All relationships should end so peacefully.
Of course, there were a few rough spots in the next week or so. Cary called her all the time, begging to come back.
“You are insane and you need help, Cary! I’ve got my own problems and you are not one of them!” She slammed down the phone. “He’s as bad as Dan. Now I’ve got two crazy men!”
He brought gifts over, and when she wouldn’t open the door he left them on her welcome mat. She would brush aside the rain-spotted little boxes with her shoe as she went out. Eventually the kids unwrapped them-packages of potpourri, scented talcum powder, smoked salmon.
On Tuesday of the next week I arrived to find her struggling with a tall ladder.
“Help me with this thing.”
I grabbed one end and she took the other. “What are you doing?”
“I have to. . . get. . . up on the roof.” She put her end down in the muddy flower border next to the front door. “Now hold it steady.”
She got about half way up and came back down. The one thing she couldn’t tolerate was heights.
“I’ll go up if you tell me what I’m looking for, Kath.”
She looked at me for a long time. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
I hadn’t seen her for three days because of the Martin Luther King holiday. She had puffy shadows under eyes and her hair was flat against her skull, as though she hadn’t washed or styled it. Kath always dressed well, even though her only job was running a home daycare. I’d seen her with a hundred and three fever and she looked better than this.
“Kath, if there’s a leak in the roof, let Dan deal with it. There’s no reason on earth for one of us to go up there.”
“Please, just climb up and tell me what you see.”
I sighed and went up. Her roof had a very shallow pitch, so I climbed over the top of the ladder and onto the roof with no problem. Dan must have cleaned it after the leaves fell because there wasn’t much up there—a few twigs, a stray soggy leaf, and four or five children’s toys and balls which I gathered and threw into the backyard.
I leaned over the edge. “There’s nothing up here.”
“Would you mind. . . stomping around for a minute?”
“Stomping?”
“Your feet.” She demonstrated. “Very loudly.”
So I did, clomping around the roof, up one side and down the other. One of Kath’s neighbors watched me from across the street and I waved as though this was (clomp clomp clomp) a perfectly normal thing to do.
I climbed down the ladder and Kath came out of the house. “Well, are you going to tell me what this is all about?”
We went inside and Kath poured us each a glass of wine. Her hands were shaking. “Three nights ago, I woke up in the middle of the night and heard the most terrible racket. It sounded like someone was on the roof. It sounded like they were stomping all over the place, as loud as possible. I called Dan, but by the time he got here, it had stopped.”
“You should have called the cops.”
“Oh, bite me. I called my husband, okay?” She took a sip of wine. “Anyhow, I thought I knew who it was. Crazy Cary.”
I nodded and tried to remain calm, even though the idea of a crazy man on the roof was very scary indeed.
“On Saturday, the same thing happened. I woke up in the middle of the night to this terrible racket. Only it wasn’t just one person up there. It had to be three or four people, all stomping. One would be on that end of the roof, another would be on the opposite, a third would be on the kitchen side of the roof, all stomping. And they were much louder than what you did today. Ten times louder, and the house was shaking.”
“What about the kids?”
“They slept right through it. I asked them the next day and no one heard a thing.”
“I didn’t see anything up there, Kath. Not a scuff, not a dent. Nothing.”
She nodded. “That’s what Dan said after Sunday night. I called Cary’s house phone while it was happening last night and he picked up, so it’s not him. I mean it could be, I guess, if he forwarded his home phone to his cell. But he doesn’t have a cell that I ever saw. Just the one phone next to his bed.”
“What do you think it is?”
She poured more wine and drank half the glass before answering. “I think it’s those nine- or ten-foot tall angels that Cary sees at the foot of his bed. I think he sent them to me.”
“But, Kath, he’s crazy.”
She looked at me over the rim of her glass. “I never thought I would say this. What if they’re real?”
I had Kath call me that night when it started and hold up the phone so I could hear. I heard something that sounded dimly like hammering, but I couldn’t be sure. What bothered me the most was Kath wheeling from room to room yelling into the phone. “Do you hear that? Do you hear that?”
“Yes, I hear it,” I said, just to calm her down.
When I arrived at her place the next day Kath was gathering up everything Cary had ever given her, all the cards, notes, dried roses, potpourri, teddy bears, even whatever scraps of wrapping paper could still be found in the carpet shag.
“It’s the only thing I can think of,” she said. “Getting every trace of that man out of my house.”
We put it all in a cardboard box and drove to Cary’s house in Oregon City. He wasn’t home, so we left it on the porch. Then we took the kids to McDonald’s and let them play in the ball pit until someone got hurt and our coffee was cold.
“How do we know they were angels, anyway?” Kath asked. “Cary called them angels, but maybe they’re really something else.”
“You mean like spirits?”
She shrugged. There was a milk stain on her sweatshirt which rode up and down her breast as she moved. “Like devils.”
I didn’t answer. If getting all Cary’s stuff out of the house would help Kath sleep, then she could call them whatever she wanted.
That night it was worse than ever. She called me from the hall outside the bathroom, crying. “They’re trying to come in through the bathroom roof! They are all up there, stomping and hammering! Can you hear them? They’re going to break in!”
I couldn’t hear anything except static on the line and Kath’s harsh breathing. “I’ll be right there, just hang on.”
I told my groggy husband where I was going and I drove as fast as I could. When I arrived, Kath’s house looked like all the others on the street, except for the lights on inside.
“It stopped,” she said. “As soon as I hung up the phone.”
I went into the bathroom while she waited outside in the hall. The vinyl floor was soft from the kids’ showers, the tap dripped, the towels hung in wet tangles on the rack. I saw nothing out of place. Even the ceiling, spotted with mildew as it was, seemed exactly as it should be. On the counter I saw a keepsake box jumbled with beads and hair ties. Something deep inside glistened for a second, and I pulled it out.
Kath was sitting at the kitchen table in her robe and slippers, head in her hands when I came out. I held out the warm slice of gold I’d found in the bathroom.
“Is this the bracelet Cary gave you?” I asked.
“I thought I’d lost that,” she said, catching it in her hand.
I spent the night on Kath’s couch and slept pretty well considering. She was up when I left and I made it home in time for me to get my kids to school and myself to work. Around lunch, Kath called to say she ‘d dropped the bracelet in the mail slot of Cary’s front door.
The angels never came back.
Kath and Dan got back together. I went to their recommitment ceremony and had her kids at my house while they were on their second honeymoon. After that I didn’t see as much of Kath. She stopped taking in daycare kids, and mine were old enough by then that they could be home after school by themselves for a few hours. The last time I saw her was at Fred Meyer and she told me they sold their house and were moving to Montana.
I have from time to time gone by Kath’s house, now occupied by another family. All the houses have algae and moss creeping up the siding now, junked cars in the driveway and old toys on the lawns. I remember how our kids tore through here and it was the kind of neighborhood where you could give up on your furniture and carpet, but everyone knew it was only until the kids got old enough to stop spilling. Then you’d get a new couch, the one you always wanted.
The last time I drove by I wasn’t even sure which place was Kath’s.