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1. MY HAUNTED MOTHER

“Every room we enter is immediately haunted,” my mother once said.

She was a librarian with an effervescent love of the occult, but I never knew if she truly believed in otherworldly forces prior to the winter of 1998, when she entered a mysterious brownstone and only part of her came back out.

Her name was Charlotte. She had auburn hair, starburst freckles on her shoulders and cheeks, and a captivating gangliness that reminded me more of my second-grade classmates than any of their mothers. She laughed whenever she sneezed. She hugged a lot. She daydreamed in a wonderstruck, concentrated way that made me want to know whatever she was thinking.

Her favorite library patron was a man named Leonard Stick. He was remarkably active at the age of ninety, and he credited his vigor to meaningful work and a lifelong diet of root vegetables. Mr. Stick shared my mother’s love of the occult and was, according to her, a man of direct experience.

She delighted in helping him locate obscure texts through interlibrary loan. They were peculiar books on ultraspecific subjects: children’s teeth, winding shrouds, the effects of gravity on ethereal bodies. Many of the books existed as single copies in remote libraries, and although my mother always succeeded in filling his requests, the books would often vanish from the Dewey Decimal System, and sometimes even from my mother’s memory, as soon as he returned them.

In early January of‘98, Mr. Stick abruptly stopped visiting the library. My mother grew concerned and visited his brownstone, where she discovered he was ill and couldn’t leave the house. From that day on, she visited Mr. Stick every day after work, and often on the weekends, and sometimes late at night. I’d grown up watching my mother knitting hats for charity drives, holding hands with lost children, and wafting hornets out of the house instead of whacking them with magazines, and so her devotion to a lonely old man was unsurprising.

I was seven that year, the only child of a happy marriage, and thought of death as a fascinating misfortune other people suffered. Over dinner one night, I asked my parents if Mr. Stick was dying.

“Of course,” my father said. “He’s ninety years old. Unless he has a lightning rod that animates bodies. Has he got one of those?”

“Nope,” my mother said.

“Odds are grim, then. He ought to be in a nursing home,” he added, not unkindly.

“He only needs some company,” my mother said.

My father raised his fork, pretending to be stern. “Don’t get into his will. We’ll end up with a house full of shrunken heads and potions. And don’t let him haunt you.”

“What if I like being haunted?” she asked.

My father turned to me and said, “When I was your age, I learned that when a person very special to us dies, they float around in heaven, watching us forever. I think of that now whenever I’m on the toilet.”

“Not to worry,” my mother said. “Even ghosts get afraid.”

I liked the way my parents talked. There seemed to be a signal underneath their words, a secret language they alone understood.

“Only you can haunt me. No one else,” my father said.

My mother sipped her wine. “I’ll haunt you both. I promise.”

Most nights, my mother put me to bed and told me about her visits to Mr. Stick’s house. She said that his brownstone was special—that either its brick and iron were conducive to supernatural forces, or the space itself had something of an otherworldly porousness. The building was a ghostly doubleimage of itself, like a picture painted brightly over an older, stranger picture. The house’s deepest secrets were subliminal. Infused. It was an equinox place, Mr. Stick had told her, where light and dark things were equally in power.

The brownstone was built in 1817 by a mason who never lived there, but who was later murdered and entombed in one of the house’s walls. Its first longtime inhabitant was a spiritualist named Eleanor Cranch who was known for levitation, mothered twin daughters who spoke each other’s thoughts, and eventually died of bone poisoning.

The house had often changed hands over the next century and a half, and because its inhabitants were usually secretive or downright hermetic, the place’s full history was difficult to glean. Its various tenants and owners had included a prophetic artist, a warlock, a cult, a parapsychologist, an infamous herd of feral cats, and several people with no professed interest in the supernatural.

Mr. Stick had lived there alone for twenty-one years and had interacted with all manner of ghosts and beings. A dead baby whose immaterial form he couldn’t cuddle, but whom he soothed with the colors of a vintage magic lantern. An invisible entity he called the Bishop, who did nothing but play chess extraordinary badly. Sentient paint that communicated via landscapes. A suicidal Venus flytrap. Grotesque and glorious creatures.

The brownstone’s roof had once boasted a magnificent stone gargoyle, but it left. Meteorological phenomena regularly occurred indoors. Unfamiliar rooms would sometimes appear, and other rooms would move, disappear, or reconfigure. Mysteries deepened and compounded the more Mr. Stick learned and explored, and even after living there for two decades, he felt as if the house was hiding more than it was showing.

He told my mother about a spellbook made of elements—water, fire, earth, or air depending on the reader’s need. Every now and then, the book was made of nothing. It had been found and lost a hundred times, and used in fabulous ways, but nobody who read it could remember what it said.

My mother’s stories and my dreams squished together like Play-Doh. I asked her one night if all of it was true.

“How could I convince you?”

“Take me to the house,” I said.

She laughed and shook her head: Yes and no, wish and warning.

“Have you seen anything weird?”

“All the time,” my mother said.

“Like what?”

She smiled without changing expression, using the commonplace telepathy that she and I shared, and exhaled a soft breath that blanketed my chin.

“I’ve been talking to a ghost,” she said.

I sat up in bed and asked her who it was, what they talked about, and loads of other questions in a rush, and when she finally had a chance to speak again, I didn’t even notice that my first question—who?—was the one she didn’t answer.

“We talk about the ways things are different after death. How life looks from this side and how it looks from that side. We talk about the fact that it’s possible to talk.”

She paused then, as if her thoughts had wandered out of time.

“After Poppy died,” she said, referring to her father, “I looked for ways he might have been communicating with me. Do you remember how he’d sit in the kitchen with a coffee, absentmindedly tracing on the table with his finger?”

I didn’t remember him doing that but nodded in agreement. I was young enough that nodding actually convinced me.

“He did it every day since I was your age,” she said. “Traced a symbol like a six with an extra inner coil. I used to ask him what it was. He always said he didn’t know and seemed surprised he was doing it.

“One winter night, a season after he died, there was the oddest sort of snow—like those pebbly little balls that come from broken Styrofoam. I was brushing off the car and you were in the backseat. You were four that year. You loved being inside the car and watching me appear whenever I brushed another window. Something about the way you laughed made me think of Poppy. I leaned over the windshield with the snowbrush and slipped. I cut my hand falling—I never figured out what I cut it on—and the blood made a swirly little six in the snow.

“When I stood up, you were laughing. You thought I’d fallen to be funny. But seeing the symbol had made me cry, and my crying made you start crying, and I hid my cut and got in the car and told you I was fine. They were happy tears, I said. I told you Poppy said hello.”

“Poppy cut your hand?” I asked.

“No,” my mother said. “I thought he used the blood. Then I thought I might have believed it just because I needed to.”

“Have you talked to him in Mr. Stick’s house?”

“I haven’t but I’d like to. Anything can happen in a place like that.” Then she laughed and said, “Everything I’ve seen, all the stories I’ve been sharing… I can’t decide if Dad thinks I’m crazy or inventive.”

I thought of what she’d said about needing to believe and how adults—my mother included—seemed to love having doubts.

“I think it’s all real,” I said.

“Sometimes the real things are harder to believe.”

Then something happened during the night of February 26.

My mother had visited Mr. Stick early that evening and hadn’t come home. I made my own cereal in the morning and took the bus to school, with a lunch prepared by my father and assurances that everything was fine.

It was a Thursday and I was especially daydreamy in the classroom, waiting for the heavy clouds to dump a load of snow. I didn’t know until later that my father had taken the day off from work to locate my mother. He didn’t know Mr. Stick’s address—in the years that followed, he berated himself for taking so little interest in my mother’s strange friend—and he began by calling the library where she worked. She hadn’t arrived for the start of her shift, and none of her relatives or friends had heard from her in days. He checked the hospitals to no avail and was told by the police she hadn’t been missing long enough to file a report.

He picked me up from school with tension in his eyes, as if the sockets in his skull were trying to contract.

“Why aren’t we taking the bus?” I asked.

His silence scared me more than worry for my mother, who I honestly believed, at age seven, was immortal.

We arrived home to a ringing telephone. My father took the call, furrowed portions of his face I hadn’t known were furrowable, and immediately packed me back into the car. My mother had been found in a secluded archival room of the library. No one had seen her enter the building that day, and since the room was off-limits to the public and rarely visited by the staff, she was discovered only when a young boy heard my mother talking. He’d thought she was a witch, her words were so peculiar.

One of the librarians—a friend of my mother’s named Mrs. Janowski—investigated the room to ease the boy’s mind. She found my mother reaching out and pushing at the air like a sleepwalker moving through a dream full of doors.

She didn’t recognize us when we got to the library, and while my father checked her head for lumps or hidden blood, I stood aside and listened as she started mumbling nonsense. She talked about words people heard without ears. She spoke of closets full of loneliness, and bodies made of memories, and spaces you could mold like butter in your hands. Ghosts were everywhere, she said, and maybe we were not.

I watched my mother closely, afraid to be afraid, and hoped if I could understand everything she told us, it would mean that she was making sense and wasn’t really crazy.

My father held her face and looked deeply into her eyes. “Where were you? Are you hurt?” he asked. “What happened last night?”

Her forehead crinkled like a burning sheet of paper.

“Night,” she said. “Night…”

She concentrated hard but swirled around the word, as if recalling what had happened but confused about when.

“Ask Mr. Stick,” she finally said. “He’ll remember.”

Mrs. Janowski leaned toward her, looking puzzled. “Leonard Stick?”

My mother half-smiled, half-nodded at the name.

Mrs. Janowski told my father, “Mr. Stick died a month ago. We went to his funeral together.”

“She’s been visiting him for weeks,” my father said. “She’s told us what they’ve talked about. She went to see him last night.”

Mrs. Janowski shook her head. My father palmed his mouth.

Suddenly my mother felt light-years away, and she regarded me with a spectral sort of longing in her gaze, as if remembering my face instead of seeing me directly. The short gap between us felt impossible to cross.

“Mom?” I said.

I don’t believe the sound reached her ears.

It was true: Mr. Stick had died a month earlier.

His obituary was brief, and all we eventually learned was that his funeral had been scantly attended and his body had been cremated. My father failed to locate any relatives or anyone who’d known him better than my mother. Mr. Stick’s information had inexplicably vanished from the library database, and no trace of him existed in public records. Unable to learn his home address, neither my father nor the police could investigate his brownstone. It was as if the man’s existence had been cremated with him.

Why my mother had gone to Mr. Stick’s house after his death remained unexplained, but the fact that she’d behaved as if nothing was wrong indicated one of two things: either my mother had been keeping secrets for reasons unknown, or she’d been subtly losing her mind well before the night she went missing.

She was tested for concussion, stroke, tumor, drugs, and alcohol but appeared to be in perfect physical health. Her change was psychological, my father was informed, and so began months of tentative answers, treatments, and futility from various professionals, including therapists and priests, who taught us there are mysteries that nobody can plumb.

Her memory was scattershot. Her cognizance was warped. Certain times she knew us and began to feel like Mom again, but other times our faces sparked terror in her eyes, or flashes of euphoria, or unvoiced epiphany. Her life was dream and nightmare with hazes in between.

Some days, no one could penetrate the haze and she would sit at the living room window, breathing on the glass, convinced the snow was falling from the otherworld. Most days, it seemed as if the opposite were true and she was falling from the world and settling beyond us.

She would not—or could not—answer simple statements, or replied as if the statements had been something else entirely, or asked her own questions that defied understanding.

“Do you want a piece of cake?”

“Rooms are bodies when we’re in them.”

“Are you cold?”

“Three o’clock.”

“I love you, Mom. It’s me.”

“What if the spiral wasn’t hungry but expanded like a flower?”

My father was patient, loving, lost. He sat with her and held her hand. He cooked our meals, cleaned the house, and helped her in the bath. He steered their conversations, falling silent when she spoke to him in mysteries and riddles, and trying to guide her back to concrete memories and facts.

My mother was placid and easily cared for but my father refused to leave her alone for long periods of time. A friend of his suggested several nursing care options but my father wouldn’t hear of it.

“She only needs some company,” he said.

He found a new job and moved us two hundred miles away, into the middle of New England, where my mother’s retired aunt could stay with her during the day.

I was lonely and generally friendless, a state of being that intensified in an unfamiliar school, where I spent my days preoccupied and tried to disappear. My withdrawal was so subtle, I was scarcely teased or bullied. My teachers didn’t notice. Vanishing was easy.

At home in the evenings, I read books and comics next to my mother in the living room, predictably obsessed with supernatural material.

Sometimes my father put the television on and we would sit there and try to make a new kind of normal. He did his best to focus on her moments of lucidity, as if by ignoring her weird pronouncements and dementia he might, piece by piece, reconstruct the ordinary woman he remembered.

I saw her as I knew her, different but herself—a mother who chuckled when she sneezed, and hugged a lot, and daydreamed. I focused on her puzzling words and thought of them as clues, desperate to believe the mystery had meaning.

How else could I believe her when she told me that she loved me?

One night she came to my room and touched me out of sleep. Her eyes were oddly blue, like miniature jellyfish, and the rest of her was darker than the night should have made her.

“Mom?”

“Don’t be scared.”

I jolted up in bed.

“Shhh,” my mother said. “I need to show you something important.”

I relaxed at the soothing timbre of her voice, and once I’d settled back in bed, she almost seemed herself again—enough to make me wonder if she’d finally recovered.

“Close your eyes and cover your ears,” she said, “and try to feel me standing here. Then see if you can recognize the difference when I’m gone. Will you do that for me?”

“OK,” I said.

“Good.”

I closed my eyes and covered my ears, distracted by my thoughts and peeking once or twice, and then I did my best to visualize her standing in the room. She was between the side of the bed, closer to the foot, and my battered wooden dresser, topped with books, against the wall. My nightlight had backlit the edges of her hair. The open door to the hallway was behind her to the right and if she backed away, five short steps, she’d be gone.

My nose had grown accustomed to her milk-and-nutmeg smell, and since I couldn’t sense her bare feet moving on the floor, I trusted in the feeling she was teaching me to recognize. Her thereness and her beingness. Her room-filling motherness.

She’d given me a terrible task—to learn another way of feeling she was gone—and my heart beat heavier and sadder as I tried.

Hollowness emerged from the place she’d been standing. It was almost like the quiet after someone had been crying, or the space where a just-popped bubble had been floating. She’d softly left the room…or had I tricked myself with worry? I wanted to peek—I needed to know—but what if she was watching from the hall to see if I cheated, and all I wound up seeing was her disappointed face?

Instead of dwelling on the hollowness, I thought of how her closeness felt, summoning her near again and wishing it were true. Eventually I couldn’t tell the difference anymore. I finally opened my eyes, with a hopeful kind of fear, and she was standing at my bedside just as she had been.

“I couldn’t do it.”

“Did you feel me here?”

“I thought I felt you leave.”

“I did,” my mother said, haloed by the nightlight. “But then I came back so you wouldn’t feel alone.”

Three weeks later, a full season after my mother had changed, I was drawn out of bed at 3 a.m., wearing green flannel pajamas, with the kind of mysterious purpose only children and somnambulists are wont to understand.

My father’s distant snores harmonized with the refrigerator’s hum. I walked down the hall and found my mother in the living room, sitting in her chair beside the window in the dark. She wasn’t looking outside but faced me as I entered, and I crossed the carpet barefoot and stood in front of her chair.

She wiped her glassy eyes but only made them glassier.

“I dreamt that I was here and it was wonderful,” she said. “I had bones and blood and fat and hair. My muscles changed shape underneath my skin. There were vibrating sounds, and colors I could touch, and if I pulled the air inside me, I could turn it into words.”

I balled my fists, wishing she would simply be my mom again. I felt an urge to slap her, as people do in movies, and it made me feel queasy and demonic and adult. A parallelogram of light lay across her chest. The sky outside was moonless and the lamps weren’t lit, and I was suddenly convinced the light was from a window that was hovering between us like a portal in the air.

She said, “I love you, William. Hold my hand.”

I couldn’t move my arms.

She was radiant but thin like a flame about to gutter. “I’ll tell you something secret. Something you’ve forgotten. We choose a way forward, at the start and at the end. It’s time for me to choose again. It’s time for me to go.”

I felt the space broadening and shadowing around us, and a cold, prickling updraft floated from the floor. She reached her hand toward me with an upturned palm, and since I didn’t have pockets in the pants of my pajamas, I slid my hands deep beneath the tight elastic waistband and held my own legs. They were goosefleshed and skinny.

A pine scent, evergreen and gray, wafted off her.

My eyes focused hard on anything but her. Her chair’s stout legs stood firmly in the carpet. The radiator’s heavy old bulk looked cold, with a skin of white paint over thick, scaly rust, and the window was as black as volcanic glass.

My mother lowered her hand but kept it open on her knee.

When I looked at her again, the parallelogram had risen and was covering her face like pale, electric water. Light filled her eyes. She flowered with relief, as if she’d lost me in a crowd and suddenly caught a glimpse. She whispered something.

“Mom?”

“Look,” my mother said.

I didn’t whirl around but gazed into her eyes, expecting some telepathy of everything inside her: spectral rooms and vistas, winged and crawling creatures, multicolored fire, eclipses and auroras and, most of all, beautiful and terrifying spirits—wearing dresses, rags, uniforms, smoke, or rippling light—with the stories of their lives and deaths drifting on their faces like kaleidoscopes of sun and shade in windy, cloudy weather.

Instead I saw my mother’s ghost, naked and translucent, sitting in the chair and doubling her body. I wasn’t yet crying so it couldn’t have been my tears, and I wouldn’t have imagined seeing her undressed. I knew what I was seeing right away and I believed it. All I’d ever felt from her as long as I’d existed—the color of her closeness, in her body and her sight, and everything that made her Mom—was visible and pure.

The parallelogram of light wavered and dissolved.

My mother’s ghost vanished.

Then her body in the chair was like the window and the radiator—tangible and dead and awfully, darkly real. The tiny black pupils in her irises were empty. They were holes.

When I looked inside, no one looked back.

In the years after she died, my father refused to credit any supernatural power, insisting she had suffered an undetectable brain injury and raising me in a flood of practical precautions. He’d lost his wife to bodily harm. He wouldn’t lose me. He gave me bike helmets; swimming lessons; warnings about drugs, sex, and strangers; first-aid courses; and, when I was old enough to drive, a sturdy car and strategies for every sort of hazard.

“If there’s a deer in the road and no time to stop, what do you do?”

“Swerve,” I said.

“Wrong. You’re liable to hit a tree or oncoming traffic. Hit the deer but take your foot off the brakes before impact. Brakes lower the car and make it likelier the deer will crash through your windshield.”

“I couldn’t kill a deer.”

“Better it than you.”

He said it gently, though, and sadly, as he did whenever he talked about catastrophe and death. The world was flesh and sticks, he thought, and minimizing breakage was the best we could hope for.

“I’d swerve and save the deer,” I said, “and avoid crashing.”

“It isn’t worth the risk. Save your own life first. It’s all you’ll ever have and it’s important to protect it.”

“Would you risk yourself for me?”

He sighed from a place much deeper than his lungs. “Of course I would, William. That’s a whole different thing.”

We talked about my mother a lot, focusing on her life. But there were bounds to what the two of us would share about our grief, especially as our everyday outlooks diverged. He never openly discouraged my ongoing interest in the occult—throughout my childhood and adolescence, he paid for any book, magazine, TV-advertised encyclopedia of the unknown, sinister record, movie, artifact, or mail-order specimen I wanted—but I knew he always viewed it all as therapeutic play.

Exploring the occult mollified my loneliness and gave me spectral lenses everywhere I went. I saw meaning in random symbols, in the movements of insects and birds, in the gaps between songs I listened to at night, and in the books no one else my age seemed to read. Secrets were a fingernail scratch below the surface. My mother, I believed, was close enough to touch if only I could hit upon the right way to reach.

I meditated. I prayed. I hypnotized myself so deeply that I achieved, through self-suggestion, the ability to speak an unidentified language for three and a half hours—a language I believed my mother could hear but didn’t answer.

I took Polaroids of empty spaces whenever I sensed another presence, and although the film captured luminous orbs and smudges, and one time a fully-formed, ghostly male body, I never managed to photograph a glimmer of my mother.

I looked for her in Tarot spreads and saw nothing but myself.

I used a Ouija board with a bone planchette. I made fleeting contact with many different entities, most of whom confined themselves to yes-or-no answers, and almost befriended one nervous spirit of undetermined gender until he or she, like everyone in my life, went away without explanation.

One night in winter, I took a knife outside and crunched across the yard. The snow had partially melted during the day, and the surface had refrozen into a thin crust of ice. My boots left a trail of foot-shaped holes. Fresh snow was in the air and somehow the atmosphere prevented it from settling. It whirled around and hovered, rising up as much as falling. In the dark rear of the yard, I held the blade against my hand. I shut my eyes, visualized my mother sitting in her chair, and made a quick, bright cut across the middle of my palm.

I waited for the flow to start and flung my hand downward. I made a fist and opened my eyes, and there was just enough light to see the splatter on the ice. My boots had broken through to the softer snow below, and I stood a long time, sunken to my calves, until it felt as if my feet were frozen underground.

No matter how I tried interpreting the pattern, the blood looked meaningless on the ground.

One night when I was seventeen, my father walked into my room and caught me getting drunk.

“I want to talk to her again,” I said.

“You will.”

“You don’t believe that.”

He picked up the pint of vodka, two-thirds gone, I’d tried to hide on the floor behind me when he’d entered. I pushed the bottle away. He finished it off, took a breath, and looked at me intensely.

“I trick myself,” he said, “believing there’s an afterlife. It helps me live. It helps me not remember that I’ll die someday. What’s strange is that the older I get, the more I really believe it—that there’s something after everything. It isn’t just nothing.”

“I know. I’ve talked to ghosts,” I said, electrified—and buzzed—that he’d finally broached the subject we had tacitly agreed never to discuss.

“That isn’t what I mean,” he said.

“I’ve done it, though,” I told him. “I just haven’t found a way to contact Mom.”

He threw the empty bottle against the wall and it exploded. I flinched and kept my head down, feeling twin urges to apologize and shove him.

“I love you, William. Look at me.”

He stared at me so long, I had to stare back. I smelled the vodka in the air and saw the whiskers on his jaw, and he was real and fake and vaporous and solid all together.

“Even if you’re right and people live forever,” he said, “sometimes you’re going to have to let things go.”

I was twenty-five years old the night my father died. He was driving on a rural road, next to a cemetery of all places, and collided with a maple tree. His airbag failed and the crash killed him instantly.

A witness said he swerved to avoid a crossing deer.

He was buried next to my mother with a simple granite headstone bearing both their names. On the day of his interment, I sat alone at the gravesite after the mourners and diggers had gone, wondering if my parents were together or apart, or if the best they’d ever have was neighboring in dirt.

I was living in a one-room apartment at the time, rarely dating or socializing, and drifting through the kinds of anonymous temp jobs afforded to someone with an online degree in Occult and Mystical Esoterica. My father left me everything, including a significant life insurance payout, and in the weeks after he died, I stopped accepting temp assignments and spent all of my time at his house eating the food he’d never eat, packing up his things, and feeling like the ghost of a once-living family.

I found a duct-taped box he probably hadn’t opened in a decade. Inside was a small but carefully curated selection of my mother’s belongings, including love letters from my father, her favorite cable-knit sweater, my own baby teeth, and a handful of books.

I flipped through her copy of The Spiral Grimoire, a little-known but fascinating assortment of rituals and spells. I inhaled the old-book fragrance I’d forever associate with my librarian mother and discovered her handwriting on the flyleaf.

She’d written, “L. Stick,” along with an address.