I worry about the dead who have died unable to finish the last book they were reading and that they are haunted by questions of a story that has an end they were not able to reach.
*
Though I am the youngest, my eyes are ruined, worse than anyone in the family’s, worse than genetics suggest they should be. My greatest fear, nonsensical, like the way a friend is certain she will be framed for murder and sent to prison, her pleas of innocence rejected, her insistence of a conspiracy mocked, is that there will be a disaster in the night on such a scale that I will have to run, weeping, and naked, and terrified, and blind into the street, fire, or the roiling, rainbow bubbles of a toxic spill, or the skin-serrating keratin barbs of a tiger’s tongue licking at my back, my glasses left behind, which means I will be useless, except as food, morally obligated to offer myself up for cannibalism, because unaided by a prescription lens, I cannot tell one black and white dog from another, even when they look nothing alike.
*
My father blamed books, reading daily in dull light, for my pathetic eyesight and the expenses associated with a child who, at less than an arm’s length, could see only shape and color. Like a stone, I fell from the climbing tree, my fingers closing to grip a branch they only grazed. Watch it, my father said, and I stepped straight into the blue tunnel left by an ice auger’s bit, dropped from sight under winter water, and was hauled back into the breathing world by a handful of wet hair and the hood of my sodden down jacket. Though I was saved, a winter boot was lost. When the optometrist slipped my first pair of glasses into place, I did not recognize my mother or my brother. I did not know the fine details of their faces: the pale, apricot freckles high on my mother’s cheeks, the golden stripe through my brother’s blue eye. My father looked no different. I knew him, as I always would: by his squat bulk, his mean, boiled redness.
*
Above our heads, in the walled off loft, grew a Jurassic jungle of marijuana, my father a small town dealer with grand plans to be a northeastern kingpin. He lived in a paranoid terror of discovery and capture, certain the police surveilled all his movements: the to-and-fro from the fridge for another glass of milk, the way he unbuckled his belt and opened his fly before reclining in his chair, eyes closed, smoking a joint pinched in the metal jaws of a hemostat.
*
My mother worked an overnight shift at the regional hospital. She sat at the front desk directly through the emergency rooms doors, trying to gather information from men who staggered in with tuna hooks through their hands, the wicked barb fighting all attempts at removal. On worse nights, she watched men, blood spurting from a wedged wound where a chainsaw had kicked back and cut deep, be carried in limp. Then she bashed at the red button that rang into the room where the on-call doctor slept, then used the intercom to request a janitor with a mop and bleach. On the worst night, a frantic girl, her own age thereabouts, came wailing through the doors and thrust a baby over the desk into my mother’s arms, and the moment she took its tiny weight, she knew the baby was dead, but still the baby’s mother was screaming, Help me! Oh, help me! and in my mother’s arms, the baby’s body was like a bag, she said, of broken chips, and she knew, knew like she always knew when the neighbor boys were hiding, watching her hang the laundry in her bikini, knew the screaming mother had shaken the baby, had dashed it against the wall, had hurled it to the floor. Like a bag of broken chips, she said, sitting, in the dark, at the edge of my bed holding my stuffed deer in her lap. And, I, still a baby, just two or three, touched her hand and asked with all sincerity, Can I have a chip?
*
The police, my father said, know what to look for. A man I thought of as an uncle would call collect with a bad connection, his voice wrapped in a vibrating gray sound as if he was dialing from inside a hive of wasps. Under the curved roof a Quonset hut filled with light and dripping water, he had kept a Jurassic jungle too, but had not thought to offset the power usage of banks of grow lights. That’s how they got him, my father said. His power bills. At night, after my mother left for work, we did not use electricity in the house, except in the loft, where special lights operated on twelve-hour timers, ensuring the jungle’s rapid growth. In the living room, there was a set of antique oil lamps with tall, thin glass chimneys. I would lay on the floor below their soft, smoky light, my cheek to the page.
*
I have always loved dioramas, but the unfinished book left by a reader who finished everything, haunted me. The water glass, three-quarters full on the floor at the bedside, its rim overlapped with pink imprints where a glossed mouth had kissed, I wanted to keep just as it was forever, but the book, like cupped hands, like wings, its spine cracked and covers facing upward, was intolerable. What I have always wanted is a cabinet of taxidermied terns, posed nesting in shallow divots dug below the seagrass, painted waves unfolding behind them, one strung with wires to simulate flight. I have imagined pushing a button to activate a recording of beach sounds and bird calls, and how it would feel for my bones to soften, my body to become give, the hard floor turning to sand because I would be sinking. In a dream, I broke the frozen moment, cracked its stand-still-mirror-stare. I opened the case and cut one of the wires keeping the gliding tern suspended in the air. One was enough. Twisting at an unnatural angle on the remaining wire, any illusion of life captured in the cabinet was ruined. It was so obvious: everything was dead.
*
When a person leaves life suddenly, they are both absent and present. In a book, the younger sister moves through the older sister’s house, tracing again and again a mark on a stair which might have come from moving furniture, or from a struggle. She touches everything, but changes nothing. The final chapter dedicates itself to the younger sister’s decision to throw away a bowl of tomatoes turned to gray pulp, fogged by hundreds of tiniest flies. They are symbolic tomatoes. In the end the older sister’s disappearance remains unsolved. The younger sister returns to her own life, and in three years, has a baby, a daughter, and chooses, in the final line, not to name the infant girl for her dead sister.
*
In graduate school, a professor asked the girls from her class to dress in loose white sheets and serve wine at the party for her book’s release. You will, she said, be naiads. Drifting silent through groups of chatter, holding a decanter around its thin glass throat, I thought I was more evocative of a ghost. As a gesture of thanks, the professor later invited us to her house for what she described as a special treat. Pizza, I thought, or small, fancy cakes, but it was instead, a woman who claimed psychic abilities and arrived with an elderly chihuahua under her arm, her first business to take a white, plastic backed pad from her purse and spread it on the floor so the tiny dog could strain and struggle out a tiny shit, which she then folded the pad around and returned to her purse. After this, the hostess instructed that we should sit in a circle around the psychic with our eyes closed, arms stretched forward, and fingers spread. Somewhere down the street, little kids were playing tag, and a cat in the side yard was meowing in distress or demand, and there was the smell of jasmine, and of hot dust, and the chihuahua was panting hha—hha—hha. It was like a moment from a horror movie—the tactic that is called a jump scare—when the psychic grabbed my wrists. Your dead, she said, are all here.
Jenny Irish is from Maine, but lives in Arizona. She is the author of two collections, Common Ancestor and I Am Faithful.