Ghost, page 22
While Susan fumbles with her jacket, Robert slows the motor, but they are still moving briskly through the water, with each gust of wind shoving the hull like a fist and the wake falling behind them in a seething white V.
“Are we there yet?” asks Susan.
There? Where is there? When will they know? Martin specified only that his ashes be scattered “in the middle of the lake.” David still marvels at Martin’s instructions to Jenny, evidently spoken years ago, that he not be buried in the family plot but instead be cremated and scattered in the lake. Finally, Martin will mingle with the world.
Jenny stands up, holds herself steady against the gunwale of the boat, and looks about. “Here,” she says at last.
“Here?”
“Yes.” Jenny stares at the water and begins weeping. After a few moments, she dries her eyes with her scarf and gathers herself. “Here,” she repeats.
Robert slows the engine to an idle and does a circle. They are somewhere in the middle. In the distance, the dock is now a thin line, almost invisible. David peers through binoculars and can barely make out the smudge of something on the dock. In the wind and the waves, the boat pitches and rolls. Susan moans in her discomfort.
“We would have to have a windy day,” says Abby.
“It’s the way it should be,” says Ophelia. She turns around from her perch at the bow, strange with her bald head, and stands ready to scatter the ashes.
Yes, David thinks, admiring Ophelia. For Martin’s death seems to have given her a solidity. Ophelia has been a wandering soul, bored with her life, unfulfilled in her romances, and now she seems to have gained something. Something has been clarified. Martin’s death has rung in her ears like a struck bell, collected her and pointed her to the future. David always felt that she had a strength. There she stands, the steadiest person on the boat, clutching Martin close to her chest, ready to scatter him over the waters. She has scarcely spoken to Robert, David has noticed. Robert, for whom she pined so long. With her new confidence, Ophelia doesn’t need Robert. She doesn’t even glance at Robert, but she knows that he is looking at her, and she quietly exalts in her new strength. Yes, it is the way it should be.
The moment has come. Robert swings the boat around in one last circle and turns the stern to the wind.
“Maybe you should read the poem now,” says Terrence.
Jenny nods and takes out the Blake book. Holding the boat’s gunwale with one hand, the gusty wind flapping the scarf on her head like a flag, she begins reading.
Little Fly,
Thy summer’s play
My thoughtless hand
Has brush’d away.
Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
Her voice wavers once in the middle, but she finishes. She will move on with her life, David thinks. She was the one who believed him from the beginning. She never doubted him. And when he wept the day Martin died, when he said it was all his fault, she said no. No one was to blame.
“Ophelia,” she says, finished with the poem.
Ophelia turns around, taller than David has ever seen her, and empties the urn. Martin’s ashes fly out and away. Some get hurled straight down to the water and float gray and powdery for a moment before disappearing, while others get lifted up by the wind and sail off in the air, high above the lake.
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MONTHS, Martha opens the draperies, and the light comes pouring in, almost with a pressure, erasing the clogged shadows as if sweeping dust from the corners of a long vacant room. “I’ve been wanting to do that,” says Martha, teary-eyed. Moving slowly, she goes to each window and lets in the light. “It’s all wrong,” she says, and wipes her eyes with a handkerchief. “I can’t believe what’s happened.” She looks around the bare room. There’s a strangeness to it now.
“You don’t need to stay,” says David.
“No, I won’t stay. We all have to be out by noon, Mr. Bigelow said.”
“Yes. Ellen and I will stay just a few minutes more.”
“Well, then. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, Martha.”
“Is that the woman who was such a beast?” Ellen asks after they hear the front door close.
“I thought so at the time,” says David.
“So this is the slumber room,” says Ellen, sitting beside him. “I’m glad that I’m finally seeing it. I’m glad that you brought me here today. I guess we won’t be able to come again.”
“No.”
Some pink gladioli lie on the one table, left over from a recent service. David turns around in his chair and gazes out the window. The world never stops, he thinks. Outside, the leaves of trees flutter, two men and a woman walk along the sidewalk in oblivion, the air brims and glows. The world branches and branches. The world swerves unpredictably. He turns back to the room, and to Ellen. He understands that she would like to say something to comfort him, but he also understands that she knows him well enough to be silent. They have come closer together. She sits beside him, holding his hand.
His eyes move about the room. It is almost empty. The beautiful old porcelain lamps and the crystal decanters, the tables and the fraying Oriental rug, have all been taken away. Jenny will sell most of it or give it to charity. For some reason, the chairs have been left behind, the embroidered chairs purchased by Martin’s grandfather long ago. David’s eyes follow along the semicircle of chairs and then move to the center of the circle, the imaginary pivot. The space is both empty and full. The air there seems to have a thickness and bulk. Squinting, he has the sensation of seeing the air there, a dull fluid, suspended at the center of the circle. This is where it began. The center of the circle. What happened here that dim afternoon? He stares at the pivot, and he wants to feel it and see it again, but now the image that burned through him for months will not return. Even in his mind, it will not return. He looks down at Ellen’s hand holding his hand. He studies the shapes of her fingers, he studies the lines running and splitting, the map of a country. It is all in the details, he thinks, the world underneath. It shimmers and waits. It is right there.
Beyond the window, a woman is calling her child. He can hear her voice, now louder, now fainter. The radio blares from a passing car. The world never stops.
With a sigh, Ellen lets go of his hand, and her own hand falls to her side. She turns to him. The world is branching again. What would she say to him? He remembers the damp smell of her hair that night they went to hear Schubert, the blend of lily and fresh rain. He remembers how she wouldn’t get out of her seat, she was so full of passion. I feel like he sees into my heart, she said. Perhaps that is what she would say. See into my heart. Is that a way through?
The air is denser there. He strains to see something, to see again what he saw then. It was so fleeting, so quick. Is something true if it happens only once? If it is experienced only by one person at one time? The seconds and years stretch to infinity, but a thing might be felt only at one moment. It might always be there, the world underneath and the miracle, but felt only in brief, fleeting stabs. Another voice from the street. Suddenly, he feels very tired, despite the early hour, and leans back in his chair. There will always be that line between them, Ellen and him. But here she is beside him. Outside the glass window, a cloud skates over the sun, the light dims with a rush, the light blooms again. Yes, he thinks, it is like that. Did Ellen notice? In just a brief moment, something happened. Did Ellen notice? He wants to tell her. This instant, this light falling, this table, this chair, it is all more than it seems. But how can he put the thing into words.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A deep gratitude to Charlie and Susan Dee of Dee Funeral Home for many meetings and discussions. To John Zaffis of the Paranormal Research Society of New England. To LaRose Coffey, high school teacher of long ago, for her insightful comments on the developing manuscript. To Lucile Burt and Janet Silver for their good critiques in the final stages. To my literary agent and friend, Jane Gelfman, for her continuing encouragement over the years. To my excellent and encouraging editor and friend, Dan Frank. And finally, with love and appreciation, to my wife, Jean, and daughters, Elyse and Kara.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alan Lightman is the author of four previous novels, two collections of essays, and several books on science. His novel Einstein’s Dreams (1993) was an international bestseller, and his novel The Diagnois (2000) was a finalist for the National Book Award. His writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Nature, and many other publications. A Ph.D. in physics, he has taught astronomy and physics at Harvard and MIT and is currently adjunct professor of humanities at MIT.
ALSO BY ALAN LIGHTMAN
Origins
Ancient Light
Time for the Stars
Great Ideas in Physics
Einstein’s Dreams
Good Benito
Dance for Two: Selected Essays
The Diagnosis
Reunion
A Sense of the Mysterious
The Discoveries
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by Alan Lightman
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lightman, Alan P., [date]
p. cm.
1. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3562I45397G48 2007 813'.54—dc22 2007005298
www.pantheonbooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-375-42529-5
v3.0
Alan Lightman, Ghost
