The horse-child asks, “Why didn’t the ghost horse just go to heaven?”
I suddenly realize it’s the first time I’ve heard the horse-child speak in—how long?
My daughter answers her. “The story’s really about the ghost warrior,” she says.
The horse-child asks, “Why doesn’t the ghost warrior go to heaven, then?”
My daughter says, “Because ghosts have unfinished business. Everybody knows that.”
My son asks, “Did Mom leave unfinished business?”
My husband tells them, “A mom’s work is never done.”
A health issue can be hard on a family. And it breaks my heart to hear them talk like I no longer exist. If I’m so dead, where’s my grave, why isn’t there an urn full of ashes on the mantel? No, this is just a sign I’ve drifted too far from my family, that I need to pull my act together. If I want them to stop treating me like a ghost, I need to stop acting like one.
Interesting fact: In TV movies, a ghost mom’s job is to help her husband find a suitable replacement. It’s a venerable trope—see Herodotus, Euripides, and Virgil. For recent examples, consult CBS’s A Gifted Man, NBC’s Awake, and Safe Haven, now in heavy rotation on USA. The TV ghost mom can see through the gold diggers and wicked stepmoms to find that heart-of-gold gal who can help those kiddos heal, who will clap at the piano recitals, provide much-needed cupcake pick-me-ups, and say things like, “Your mom would be proud.”
I assure you that no such confectionary female exists. No new wife cares about the old wife’s kids. They’re just an unavoidable complication to the new wife’s own family-to-be. That’s what vasectomy reversals and Swiss boarding schools are for. If I were a ghost mom, my job would be to stab these rivals in the eyes, to dagger them all. Dagger, dagger, dagger.
The truth is, though, that you don’t need to die to know what it’s like to be a ghost. On the day my doctor called and gave me the diagnosis, we were at a party in New York. Our mission was to meet a young producer for The Daily Show who was considering a segment on my husband. She was tall and willowy in a too-tight black dress, and while her breasts may once have been perfect, she had dieted them down to nothing. Right away she greeted my husband with Euro kisses, laughed at nothing, then showed him her throat. I was standing right there! Talk about invisible. Then my phone rang—Kaiser Permanente with the biopsy results. I tried to talk, but words didn’t come out. I walked through things. I found myself in a bathroom, washing my face. Then I was twenty floors below, on 57th Street. I swear I didn’t take the elevator. I just appeared. Then I was on a bus in North Carolina, letting a hard-drinking preacher massage my shoulders while my friend was dying in Florida. Then it was my turn. I saw my own memorial: my parents’ lawn is covered with cars. They must buy a freezer to store all the HoneyBaked Hams that arrive. My family and friends gather next to the river that slowly makes its way past my parents’ home. Here, people take turns telling stories.
My great-uncle tells a story about me as a little girl and my decision to wed the boy next door. My folks got a cake and flowers and had the judge down the street preside in robes over the ceremony. The whole neighborhood turned up, and everyone got a kick out of it. The next day brought the sobering moment when my folks had to tell me the marriage wasn’t real.
My brother tells a story about my first Christmas home from college and how I brought a stack of canvases to show everyone the nudes I’d been letting the art-major boys paint of me.
My mother tries to tell a story. I can tell it will be the one about the Christmas poodle. But she is overcome. It scares the children the way she folds up in slow motion, dropping to the ground like a garment bag. To distract them, my father decides on a canoe ride—that always was a treat for the kids. Tears run from their eyes as they don orange vests and shove off. Right away, the horse-child screams that she is afraid of the water. She strikes notes of terror we didn’t know existed. My son, in the bow, tries to hide his clutched breathing, and then I see the shuddering shoulders of our daughter. She swivels her head, looking everywhere, desperately, and I know she is looking for me. My father, stunned and bereft, is too inconsolable to lift the paddle. My father, who performed more than fifteen hundred field surgeries near Da Nang, my father, who didn’t flinch when the power went out at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, my father—he slowly closes his pearl-gray eyes. They float there, not twenty feet from us, the boat too unsteady for them to comfort one another, and we onshore can only wrench at the impossibility of reaching them.
Back inside the New York party, I realized time had ceased to flow: my husband and the producer were laughing the exact same laugh, the lime zest of their breath still acrid in the air, and I saw this was in the future, too, all these chilly women with their iron-filing eyes and rice-paper hearts. They wanted something genuine, something real. They wanted what I had: a man who was willing to go off the cliff with you. They would come after him when he was weak, I suddenly understood, when I was no longer there to fend them off. This wasn’t hysteria. It wasn’t imagination. I was in the room with them. Here they were, perfect teeth forming brittle smiles, hips hollow as sake boxes.
“That story is too funny,” the producer said. “Stop it right there. Save it for the segment!”
In a shrug of false modesty, my husband accidentally sloshed his soda water.
“Well,” he said. “Only if you think it would be good for the show.”
I suddenly put my hand on the producer’s arm. She turned, startled, discovering me.
I used my grip to assess her soul—I felt the want of it, I calculated its lack, in the same way Lady Montagu mapped the microscopic world of smallpox pustules and Voltaire learned to weigh vapor.
You tell me who the fucking ghost is.
There is a knock at the door. It’s Megumi!
My husband answers, and the two of them regard each other, almost sadly, for a moment.
They are clearly acknowledging the wrongness of whatever it is they’re up to.
They head upstairs together, where I suddenly realize there are Costco-size boxes of condoms everywhere—under the sink, in the medicine cabinet, taped under the bedside table, hidden in the battery flap of a full-size talking Tigger doll!
Megumi and my husband enter our bedroom. Right away, the worst possible thing happens—they move right past these birth-control depots. They do not collect any condoms at all.
My kind of ghost mom would make it her job to stop hussies like Megumi from fucking grieving men, and if I were too late, it would be my job to go to Megumi late at night, to approach her as she slept on her shabby single-mom futon, and with my eyedropper dribble one, two, three purple drops on her lips, just enough to abort the baby he put inside her. In her belly, the fetus would clutch and clench and double up dead.
Megumi and my husband do not approach the bed. They move instead toward the armoire, beside which is a rolling rack of all the vintage dresses I could no longer wear once I lost my bustline. I moved them to the rack, but couldn’t bear to roll them out of the room.
Megumi runs her fingers along these dresses.
She pauses only to eye a stack of my training bras on the dresser.
Interesting fact: While you can get used to being titless, the naked feeling of not wearing a bra is harder to shake. You just become accustomed to the hug of one. I recommend the A-cup bras from Target’s teen section. Mine are decorated with multicolor peace signs.
Megumi selects a dress from the rack and studies it—it’s an earthy pink Hepburn, with a boat neck, white trim, and pleated petticoat. At the Florida university where I met my husband, I was in his presence three different times before he finally noticed me. I was wearing that dress when he did. I wonder if he remembers it.
Megumi holds the dress to her body, studying herself in the mirror. Then she turns to my husband, draping the dress against her figure for his approval.
Interesting fact: The kanji for “figure” is a combination of the elements ??
?next” and “woman.”
I study my own figure in the mirror.
Interesting fact: The loss of breasts doesn’t flatten your chest—it leaves you concave and hollowed-looking. And something about the surgery pooches your tummy. My surgeon warned me about this. But who could picture it? Who would voluntarily conjure themselves that way?
Megumi waits, my dress held against her. Then my husband reaches out. He has a faraway look in his eyes. With his fingertips, he tugs here and tapers there, adjusting the fall of fabric to the shape of her body. Finally, he nods. She accepts the dress, folding it in her arms.
I do not dagger her. I stand there and do nothing.
Interesting fact: My first novel no one would publish was about Scottsdale trophy wives who form a vigilante group to patrol their gated community. It contains, among other things, a bobcat killing, a night-golfing tragedy, the illegal use of a golf-ball-collecting machine, and a sex scene involving a man and a woman wearing backpack-mounted soda pistols. It was called The Beige Berets.
Interesting fact: My second novel no one would publish concerns two young girls who have rare powers of perception. One can read auras while the other sees ghosts. To work the ghost angle, I had their father live in Charles Manson’s old apartment. To make the girls more vulnerable, I decided to kill off their mother, so I gave her cancer. To ratchet up the tension, I had a sexual predator named Mister Roses live next door. My husband came up with the name. In fact, my husband became quite enamored with this character. He was really helpful in developing Mister Roses’s backstory and generating his dialogue. Then my husband stole this character and wrote a story from Mister Roses’s perspective called “Dark Meadow.” I can’t even say the name of this novel without getting angry.
My husband does not return to the novel he was working on before my cancer. After the kids are asleep, he instead calls up the website Bigboobsalert. He regards this on slideshow mode, so ladies with monstrous chests appear and fade, one into the next. My husband has his hand lotion ready, but he doesn’t masturbate. He stares at a place just past the computer screen. I contemplate these women. I can only see in their saucerous nipples and pendulous breasts the superpower of motherhood. Instead of offering come-hither looks to lonely men, these women should be feeding hungry babies, calling on foundling wards and nursing the legion orphans of the world. We should air-drop these bra busters into tsunami zones, earthquake epicenters, and the remote provinces of North Korea!
I kneel beside my husband, slouched in his ergonomic office chair. I align my vision with his, but I can’t tell what he’s looking at. Our faces are almost touching, and though he is lost and sad, I still feel his sweet energy. Come to bed, I whisper, and he sort of wakes up. But he doesn’t rise to face our bedroom. Instead, he opens a blank Word document and stares at it. Eventually, he types “Toucan cereal.”
“No!” I shout at him, “I’m the one who got cancer, I’m the one who was struck. That’s my story. It belongs to me!”
Interesting fact: Cancer teaches you to see the insides of things. Do you see the “can” in “uncanny” or the “cer” in “concern”? When people want to make chitchat with you, even though, if they took the time, they could see that under your bandanna you have no hair, it’s easier to just say to them, “Sorry, I have some uncanny concerns right now.” If you’re feeling feisty, try, “I feel arcane and acerbic.” Who hasn’t felt that?
But sometimes you’ve got chemo brain and your balance is all woo-woo and your nails are itching like crazy and you don’t want to talk to anybody. Be prepared for that.
Person 1: “Gosh, I haven’t seen you in forever. How’s it going?”
You: “Toucan cereal.”
Person 2: “Hey, what’s new? I’m so behind. I probably owe you like ten messages.”
You: “Vulcan silencer.” Smile blankly. Hold it.
Our daughter takes on my voice. I study her as she admonishes her brother and the horse-child to take their asthma medicine and do their silent reading before bed. When lice outbreaks arrive, she is the one who meticulously combs through their hair after my husband succumbs to frustration and salty talk.
I keep a hairy eyeball wide for Megumi. She doesn’t come around, which makes me all the more suspicious. I wonder if my husband took some of that Pulitzer money and bought a “studio” in the neighborhood. You know, a place to hide your book royalties from the IRS and “get some serious work done.” I flip through his key chain, but there is nothing new, just keys to the house, his Stanford office, the Honda Odyssey, five Kryptonite bike locks.
I use my powers of perception to scan the neighborhood for signs of this so-called writer’s studio. I try to detect the effervescence of my husband’s ever-present sparkling water, the shimmer of his condom wrappers, or the snap of Megumi’s bra strap. My feelers feel only the fog rolling in, extinguishing the waking world block by block, starting with the outer avenues.
Interesting fact: The Miwok believed the advancing fog could draw one into the next world.
Interesting fact: Accidentally slipping into the afterlife was a grave concern for them. To locate one another in the fog, they darkened their skin with pigment made from the ashes of poison-oak fires. They marked their chests with the scent of Brewer’s angelica. They developed signature calls by which they alone would be known.
For some reason, my family skips archery tonight. And there is no Native American story when the kids are put to bed. Even Bigboobsalert has to wait. In his office, my husband calls up his document and continues stealing my story. I don’t shout at him this time. He is a slow and expressive writer. He works most of the night.
Interesting fact: My third, unfinished novel is about Buffalo Calf Road Woman, the Cheyenne warrior who struck the felling blow to Custer at Little Bighorn. I wrote about her life only because it amazed me.
My husband has my research spread before him: atlases of Native American tribes and field guides for botanicals and customs and mythology. I think this is good for him.
I’m there when he hits one last Command-S for the night.
I follow him upstairs. The children are sleeping in the big bed. He climbs in among their flopped limbs, and I want to join, but there is no room. My husband’s head comes to rest on the pillow. Yet his eyes remain open, growing large, adjusting focus, like he is trying to follow something as it disappears into the dark.
Interesting fact: My husband doesn’t believe that dreams carry higher meanings.
Interesting fact: I had a dream once. In the dream, I stood naked in the darkness. A woman approached me. When she neared, I could see she was me. She said to me, or I guess I said to myself, “It’s happening.” Then she reached out and touched my left breast. I woke to find my breast warm and buzzing. I felt a lump in a position I would later learn was the superior lateral quadrant. In the morning, I stood in front of the mirror, but the lump was nowhere to be found. I told my husband about the dream. He said, “Spooky.” I told him I was going to the doctor right away. “I wouldn’t worry,” he said. “It’s probably nothing.”
Eventually, my husband sleeps. An arm passes over one child and secures another. All the pillows have been stolen, then half-stolen back. The children thrum to his deep, slow breathing. I have something to tell him.
Interesting fact: My husband has a secret name, a Sioux name.
He’s embarrassed by it. He doesn’t like anyone to say it as he feels he doesn’t deserve it. But when I utter the Lakota words, he wakes from his sleep. He sees me, I can tell, his eyes slowly dial me in. He doesn’t smile, but on his face is a kind of recognition.
Through the bay windows, troughs of fog surge down Frederick Street.
“I think it’s happening,” I say to him.
He nods, then he drifts off again. Later, this will have been only a dream.
I near the bed and regard my children. Here is my son, his back grown strong from pulling the bow. Still I see his little-boy cheeks and long eyelashes. Still I see th
e boy who nursed all night, who once loved to hug fire hydrants, who ran long-haired and shirtless along a slow-moving river in Florida. His hair is buzzed now, like his father’s, and his pupils behind closed eyes track slowly, like he is dreaming of a life that unfolds at a less jolting pace.
My daughter’s hair is the gravest shade of black. If anyone got the Native blood, it is she. Dark skin and fast afoot, she also has fierce, farseeing eyes. She is the one who would enter the battle to save her brother, as Buffalo Calf Road Woman famously did. Tonight she sleeps clutching my iPhone, the alarm set for dawn, and in the set of her jaw I can feel the list of things she’ll have to accomplish to get her siblings up and fed and off to school.
And then there is the horse-child.
Interesting fact: My youngest’s love of interesting facts was just a stage. When my illness turned her into a horse, she never said “interesting facts” again.
Interesting fact: Horses cannot utter human words or feel human emotions. They are resilient beasts, immune from the sadness of the human cargo they carry.
She is once again a little human, a member of a weak and vulnerable breed. Who will explain what she missed while she was a horse? Who will hold her and tell her who I was and what I went through? If only she had never been a horse, if only she could remain one a little longer. What I wouldn’t give to hear her whinny and neigh her desires again, to see how delicately she tapped her hoof to receive a carrot or sugar cube. But it is over. She’ll never again gallop on all fours or give herself a mane by drawing with markers down her back. It will just have been a stage she went through, preserved only in a story. And that, I suppose, is all I will have been, a story from when they were little.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Planet Lion
FROM Uncanny Magazine