My Ghost Named Alice

Originally published in Capulet Magazine.

My ghost has red hair and green eyes like some ancient Celtic nymph. She often wears her mother’s old cable knit sweater that shrunk in the wash. She tends to scrunch up her nose this time of year on account of the manure smell as everything is planted in the earth anew. She always knows what to say before I do and she isn’t a very good listener. Her name is Alice.

Right now, I’m telling her about a book I read on exhumation, as we walk side by side through the uneven streets of Turner. I explain that in a rural Greek village, they dig up their dead five years after the burial to “re-mourn” as it were. Then the body is reburied in the village crypt. I wonder aloud if that faraway village and our hometown have anything in common. I wonder to myself if my ghost is anything like those exhumed bodies.

“Where are we going?” Alice asks and I realize she’s hardly listening to me. I patiently remind her that we’re walking to 125 Darian Lane — her old house where a woman named Rose Angelos now lives. She moved in last month and has supposedly found a few leftover items from the last tenants — discovering Alice was once my best friend, she asked that I come by to collect them.

“I still can’t believe they moved,” Alice says in her bird-like voice. “And here you thought your parents would never leave Maine,” I tease.

“Ah yes,” she sighs and though I know what she’ll say next, I allow her to finish, “Turner, Maine, where you can live and die without seeing a damn thing.”

“I don’t know,” I reply as we pass the familiar red house on the corner, “it’s kind of nice being back.”

Alice looks at me and her eyes sift like water by a dock.

Turner, Maine, is an unkempt and hidden place, full of half-finished farms and homespun houses.

It’s wet with early springtime now, but the air still has a bit of leftover winter in it. Remainders of still melting snow collect on the sides of the road. Maine doesn’t really have a spring — just winter until April, then a cold, melting May and then the rest is hot and all is forgiven.

We reach Alice’s old house — two stories with a grey front door. Freshly dug holes corrupt the front yard and a pickup is parked in the driveway with a bed full of potted plants and fertilizer. An old woman, who must be Rose, sits on the front steps with a peony in her lap. She is yanking it from its plastic container and methodically massaging the roots with a small spade. She has grey hair and worn-in skin, but I see something alive in her dark eyes and maybe in her motions.

I feel Alice stall beside me on the street as she often does when we’re near the living. I turn to look at her and she seems uncertain. This is unlike Alice. I realize seeing the house where you once lived, must be a bit like hearing a recording of your own voice.

“Alice,” I say quietly as a wind picks up our hair for a moment. The cold goes right through my coat. “It’s fine,” she says shortly.

“Alice,” I repeat. So often I seem only capable of saying her name and nothing more. The pain Alice gives me now (the pain she gave me when she was living too) is like a phantom limb — invisible yet insurmountable. I feel it in my gut. I’ve always thought that the heart gets too much credit when it comes to feeling. I hold all my love and hurt in my stomach instead — like a fullness, a hunger, or food poisoning.

“Can I help you?” a foreign voice calls.

I turn away from Alice and approach the house slowly. Rose stands from her perch, the peony resting by her feet, its roots now freshly butchered by the spade.

“Hi,” I say, my words sticking to the roof of my mouth for a moment. “Yes, I’m Christina Townsend. You talked to my dad and he told me to come by.”

“Right,” she says as Alice and I pause at the foot of her raped lawn, “I’m Rose.”

She walks towards us and I reach for her extended hand. It’s dry from all the dirt. She welcomes us inside.

“Do you take milk in yours?” Rose asks as we sit down in the kitchen for tea.

I rest at the table, concealed by a faded blue cloth. Alice lurks by the entrance to the kitchen, skimming one hand over the back of the couch in the adjacent living room. All the furniture is new, but the bones of the house are the same. Again, it’s like hearing my own voice. So many memories slip off the walls like an echo.

“Yes,” I finally say, glancing over at Alice once more. She’s avoiding me.

Rose returns from the stove with two steaming mugs and places them on the table. She then retreats to the fridge and fetches the milk. I listen to the tea kettle mutter back to sleep as the flame is extinguished. I watch the midday light sift in through the window that overlooks the backyard. The back is in a similar state of turmoil. All that remains is the old oak at the edge of the property.

I pour the milk into my mug and watch the dark and light liquid mix within, like whitecaps skimming the ocean. Rose sits across from me at the table. It seems to take a moment for all her breath and bones to settle in. I can see her age now.

“Sorry about the mess,” she begins and I catch pieces of a leftover accent in her voice, “I’m still moving in.”

“Where from?” I ask.

“Virginia,” she says, “but I’m from Lewiston originally.”

“What brought you back?” I press. Perhaps it is this unchanged house where I once lived part-time that lulls me into the conversation.

Rose looks through the air like she might find something in it. “In the end, it’s my home,” she finally says.

I wonder if I too will someday move back to Maine when I’m wrinkled and alone — like an exhumed body returning to the soil for good in that Greek village. There’s something poetic about beginning and ending in Turner.

“Easy for you to say,” Alice scoffs from behind me, “you got to have some sort of in-between away from here.”

Every so often, Alice knows what I’m thinking without my having to say a word aloud. It always frightens me when she does this. And now I’m embarrassed because she’s right of course. But I don’t turn around to look at her. I can feel her enough already.

“So you mentioned you found a few things,” I trail off, waiting for Rose to finish my sentence.

“Yes, right, thank you for coming all this way. Well as you can see,” she says, pausing to take a brief sip of tea though it’s still too hot for my taste, “I’m redoing the outside.” I find something rambling in how she talks — a rush of water that has yet to decide the path it will carve through the dirt. “And one of my gardeners was planting out back by the oak, and he dug something up.”

“Dug something up?” I repeat, my voice stalling. I have many memories in this house, but none that involve the burial of anything.

“You weren’t with me when I buried it,” Alice says wryly.

I catch her out of the corner of my eye as she grows closer to the table. She looks smug now — she loves to know something before I do. This is how I know Alice is in pain. She is always more hidden when she feels something.

“Well,” Rose sighs, slowly standing from the table, “I’ll just go get it then.”

The moment Rose is down the hall, Alice takes a seat at the table. I turn to look at her. “What did you bury out there?” I whisper.

“I don’t fully remember,” she says, but I can tell there’s a bit of a lie in her voice.

“What is it, Alice?” I press, leaning forward slightly until my forearm brushes up against the hot mug of tea.

“You remember the oak tree don’t you?” she sighs in quick distraction as she looks out back. Her freckles grow dim in the grey light. The earlier blue in the sky already seems to be corrupted by an afternoon haze.

“Yeah,” I whisper, looking over my shoulder to join her gaze on the distant tree.

We spent our childhood with that oak — thick, reaching arms weighed down by aged leaves.

When we were in second grade, we got married beneath its branches. Alice’s mother officiated the wedding and we both wore daisy chains in our hair, the loose knots that held them together quickly coming undone by the end of the ceremony. It was back when our understanding of love was something different.

“Here it is,” Rose calls and I straighten as she reenters the kitchen.

She joins Alice and me at the table, carrying a withered and dusty shoebox. She places the item in front of us like a centerpiece. I lean forward to inspect it while Alice reflexively leans back in slight aversion. It was once glossy and red, but these features have long been tempered from the box’s time underground. Dirt works into the wrinkled grooves of the exterior. I can just make out Alice’s faded handwriting across the lid:

Property of Alison Margaret Schiller. In the event of my untimely death, please pass on to Christina Townsend.

I sit back in my chair. I peer at Alice from the corner of my eye, but she is staring at the table, her cheeks suddenly matching her red hair. For a moment, I wonder if Alice knew she was going to die. I listen to her breath sift through the air in the silence and it gets caught up in my throat. It sounds a bit like the mumbling tea kettle that rests away from the heat now.

“I didn’t know either of the names,” Rose says quietly, “not until I asked around. They said you were her best friend. Which brought me to your father. Which then brought me to you.”

“Brought her to you,” Alice exhales.

I’m afraid to look at her. I don’t know what her expression will hold. Instead, I look at the box, a perverse and touchable extension of my untouchable ghost.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d want to open it or not,” Rose goes on, after a long moment of listening to the tea kettle — or maybe she can hear Alice’s breath too. There is a lack of decorum in all of this. Most don’t press me about Alice once they know who she is to me. But Rose doesn’t seem to pay attention to this. Surprisingly, I’m not offended. It’s actually a comfort to find someone aside from myself to take up an interest in Alice that has nothing to do with her body.

“I don’t know,” I whisper, staring at the box.

Rose abruptly stands and retrieves the now empty mugs on the table, though I don’t remember drinking from mine. She returns to the stove and begins to boil more water. We listen to the muttering of the kettle grow louder once again and drown out Alice’s silence beside me.

I finally look at Alice. She looks back. Her eyes are pictures in her head. I see Range Pond and AC fluid dripping on my forehead and a wild daisy hanging from her rearview as we drive to school. I see all these strange, nonsensical things and wonder what kind of ghost she is.

Rose returns with two fresh mugs of un-steeped tea and nudges the milk back towards me. I thank her and pour the white into the dark to watch it cloud together once again.

“I’ll admit, I was tempted to open it,” Rose smiles at me as she settles back into the chair. I watch her skin turn around her lips from the movement like sand shifting in an hourglass. “Did you open it?” I ask.

“No,” she replies definitively.

I peer over at Alice and she’s staring at the unopened box now.

“I don’t know if I want to open it,” I confess, though I’m uncertain if I’m talking to Rose or Alice now.

“Well, eventually you will,” Rose replies, sipping at her tea mindlessly, “women always do.”

“Why?” I mutter back, glancing over at Alice once again. I always think of her when I think of women.

“We’re descendants of Pandora,” Rose smirks, her eyes suddenly older than mine and Alice’s put together, “opening jars that are supposed to stay closed. Digging up boxes in the backyard that are supposed to stay buried.”

I sense Alice lighten at the sentiment, and I can tell that she likes the way Rose talks too.

“Sorry,” Rose smirks and then gestures to herself as if it’s an explanation, “my family is Greek.” I don’t know how this explains anything. But I also don’t know if I agree with her.

“This wasn’t supposed to stay buried,” I finally say, nodding to the box, “it has my name on it.”

“I like that,” Alice finally says in an uncharacteristically calm voice.

I glance over at her and she’s looking at the box like she’s waking up from a dream. I wait for her to finish her thought, as I know she will. She finally looks at me.

“Descendants of Pandora,” her voice is like falling asleep.

I know what she refers to — when she was living, Alice wanted to be a singer and she and I would always brainstorm names for her future band. She had landed on Alice and the Lullabies before she died. But it seems she’s changed her mind now.

“How did she die?” Rose asks.

Her question is not blunt, but it’s not hesitant either. I look to Alice who nods at me with encouragement. She wants me to tell the story.

“Car accident,” I say.

Rose watches me with a paradoxical expression of naiveté and knowing.

“She was driving back late from a music class up at Bowdoin our senior year of high school,” I go on, “and she hit a moose.”

“A moose?” Rose frowns.

Alice begins to chuckle in her ignorant and unexamined way. I glance over at her and attempt to manage my expression.

“Oh come on,” Alice smirks, “it’s a little ridiculous.”

“Fitting,” I say to Alice and then look back at Rose, “fitting for her to die like that.”

“How so?” Rose asks, taking a long sip of her tea.

“She was just,” I looked up at the ceiling in thought.

I searched for those glow-in-the-dark plastic stars Alice and I stuck up there one summer. It had been raining all week that August and the clouds had been blocking our view of the nighttime sky. We were desperate to see the lights, so Alice decided we’d construct our very own constellations on the kitchen ceiling. But I know these are long gone. Alice watches me as I struggle to describe her. Her laughter has sifted back to quiet just like the fickle tea kettle.

“She’s Alice,” is all I can think to say.

Alison Schiller. Red hair. The remains of a daisy chain caught up in it. Shrunken sweaters.

Pinched noses and long swims. Sweaty, screaming summers. False constellations. Dirt under fingernails from a long autumn day in the backyard.

“The moose went right through the car,” I explain, “it’s actually a thing up in Maine. I’m sure people who aren’t from here think it’s a joke. Most people have never heard of someone dying from hitting a moose. But that’s a way to die up here.”

“That’s right,” Rose nods slowly, “I had heard about that before.”

“And that’s Alice,” I shrug in finality, “she lives and dies in unusual ways.”

“Thank you,” Alice smiles at me quietly.

“Do you think she’d want you to open it?” Rose asks.

I maintain my gaze on my ghost, waiting for her to answer Rose’s question, though I know she won’t.

“What do you think?” I ask her.

Rose looks at me with all the darkness in her eyes, like it’s just past dusk and she’s forgotten to turn the lights on in the house, having lost track of the day’s end. I wonder if she herself is Pandora incarnate, dug up from her grave in Olympus, and living out her punishment in this small heaven. As I think about it, I realize I can’t remember what wound up happening to Pandora in the myth.

“I had an Alice once,” Rose finally says in a near whisper, “and she never left me a box to open.”

I purse my lips and watch Rose live out before me. I wonder about her. I wonder how she’s settled into this conversation with such ease and expectation. I wonder why I have allowed it. I look at Alice momentarily. Then I drag the box toward my body and lift the lid.

I peer inside like looking over the edge of a dock. Within, are creased up stacks of loose papers covered in messy writing. They lie in the box like fallen leaves on the earth. I recognize the pages well — Alice’s ramblings and unsung songs. I had watched her write much of this down in the back pages of her notebook during history class, on scrap papers in the library, and on her shaky lap as we took the long way to the ocean in her mom’s old sedan. I even remember Alice using my back as a surface to write down a stray thought as we walked home from a party once. I can feel both women at the table watching me. I tentatively reach inside and leaf through the words.

“Why did she leave this for me?” I say aloud, for the sake of Rose, but to truly ask Alice herself.

“I don’t know,” Alice whispers, all the performance in her voice gone.

It’s like seeing her naked. Actually, I’ve seen Alice naked, dead and alive, many times and this is nothing like that. These words are somehow more intimate than her body. I skim through pages of pen and pencil all mixed up together. My eyes rest on the thoughts that most disturb me:

I write things down because I want to be able to look back and see where my thoughts fit into history.

I’m all these different things but I’m not good enough. Like I’m stalled out right now.

I believe I am suffering the human condition of longing and sitting still. I feel like I’m in love but absent from the object.

I’m dried up of story. I don’t know where it all went.

I’ve become obsessed with knowing how much time I have left on all this blue and green.

I don’t know if I’m reading these words or if Alice reads them aloud to me. She stands beside my chair now, skimming the pages over my shoulder with slight embarrassment on her cheeks. I can smell the pomegranate in her hair from her shampoo. I look over from Alice and these thoughts, to find Rose still sitting across from me. She peers at me like an owl perched on a branch. It seems she’s caught onto my expression.

“It’s strange to see the inside of someone’s head, isn’t it?” she says quietly, and part of me wonders if she lied about not opening the box earlier.

“Yes,” I say.

“Not what you expected?” she prompts softly with a knowing disappointment.

“Yes and no,” I reply, delicately resting the papers back inside the box, “kind of a disappointment actually.”

“How so?” Rose asks. Alice answers for me.

“I was just like the rest of you after all,” she sighs, her voice complete.

I look up at her and feel Rose shift. For a moment, I wonder if Rose can see her too. Alice looks down at me and her eyes are spent. I can tell she’s tired. I’ve never seen my ghost in such a state.

“Not as different as I thought, I guess,” I say, still looking up, but allowing the words to reach

Rose as well as Alice.

Alice smiles at me, her hair falling over her face just slightly, and suddenly I see daisies caught up in the red.

“She always seemed so ahead of everything,” I go on, “so fearless.”

“The dead ones always seem that way,” Rose sighs quietly and now I’m certain that she can see

Alice too.

“She’s right,” Alice shrugs and takes a step away from me. I lean for her in inclination and habit, but Alice shakes her head and takes another step to the backdoor. And then she walks outside toward the upturned earth. I look back to Rose.

“I don’t think I want to read this after all,” I say, closing the lid back over the box. Rose looks at me sweetly and I wonder who her Alice was.

“Best to leave things buried then?” she says to me. “I guess so,” I sigh.

Exhumation. It is not to leave something buried. It is to dig up. It is to rebury. My people might think it perverse. To dig up is to find a ghost, a corpse, or a zombie. But I realize Rose’s people might see it differently. To revisit, to re-mourn, to rebury. A second goodbye. Something to embrace once more as it passes by. Exhumation. It is my ghost. My Alice. My beautiful, Pandoric paradox. I recall that in this Greek village, there is something about the state of the body when it is exhumed — if the bones are clean of flesh, then the dead have found peace in their afterlife. Or something like that. Alice’s bones have been dirty for nine years. And as her box and words are exhumed from the ground and shed of their dirt, I figure it is Alice’s time to return to the earth, beneath the surface of the living, and wash herself and her bones of our filth. Her exhumation is complete.

I look out over the garden and catch a glimpse of the oak tree out back. I imagine Alice had stepped outside to stand beneath its branches as she once did on her false wedding day. But she’s gone now. This doesn’t surprise me. Ghosts are fickle creatures.