← Lantern's Glow

Paper Ghosts

Paper Ghosts

On the last afternoon of October, under a sky the color of dishwater that had been threatening rain since breakfast, Caitlin parked where the gravel gave out at the bottom of the Willow Inn's hill and reached over to unbuckle the skeleton arm.

It had not always worn a seatbelt. Why, just the previous October, it had ridden loose on the passenger seat like any other plastic limb, right up until a squirrel shot across the inn road, Caitlin stood on the brake, and the arm went flying into the footwell and wedged itself under the gas pedal. She had fished it out on her knees in the open car door while a man walking a beagle stopped on the shoulder to watch. He didn't say a word. He looked at her, then at the arm, then at her again, and walked on. A year later she still couldn't drive that stretch of road without her ears going hot.

So now it wore a seatbelt. Unclipping it, she noticed that the arm was the only passenger that seat had carried since spring. She noticed it the way you notice a sore tooth, by poking at it, and then she made herself stop poking.

Her phone buzzed in the cupholder. Did you pick up the dress? Maggie wrote, and a second later: The RED one. Not a librarian one.

Caitlin typed back that all her dresses were librarian dresses, that was the whole point of them, they had pockets, and deleted every word of it a moment later, because Maggie would screenshot it and read it aloud at the party in a voice, and sent a thumbs-up instead. Maggie sent back a flame. Caitlin looked at that flame for longer than any emoji deserves, felt her stomach give a small hopeful lurch she had no intention of discussing with anyone, and put the phone away.

The Willow Inn waited at the top of the slope, where it had been waiting for a hundred and some years. It was a white clapboard farmhouse that several generations of owners had added onto without consulting one another, gone gray at the corners, with a wraparound porch that sagged a little on the north side and a pair of great willows leaning over the roof as if they were listening at the upstairs windows. The maples along the drive had turned stop-sign red and were letting go of their leaves by the handful. It had never been a grand inn, whatever the postcard in the foyer claimed. It was a loved one, and it showed: fresh paint on the porch rail, bittersweet wound around the front door, and the drive left to go to mud every October, because Ms. Hawthorne had once made a delivery driver get down on his hands and knees and help her reseed the ruts he'd put in her lawn. Nobody in Glensford had parked on that grass since.

Caitlin opened the back door, considered what she had bought, and loaded her arms anyway.

She made it six steps up the hill before a roll of spiderweb slid out from under her elbow and bounced away into the wet grass.

She looked at the roll. She looked up the hill.

"Nope," she told the lawn. "Two trips."

The second trip went beautifully as far as the halfway willow, where the wind came off the branches and plucked a paper ghost clean out of the top of the bag. Caitlin went after it with everything else clamped against her ribs. Her boots slid on the leaves. Her knee came down on a willow root she had known about for years and forgotten every one of them, and the pain was the bright, white, all-the-way-to-your-back-teeth kind. She said a word she had never once said at story hour. The ghost fetched up against the trunk. She pinned it there with her other knee and stayed down, breathing hard through her nose, waiting for the white to go pink again.

Still kneeling on it, she looked up at the porch.

This is the part Caitlin would not have told you, and I'll tell it anyway, because I'm her grandmother and I'm allowed. Every October she climbed this hill with her arms full, and every October, somewhere around this willow, she looked up. When she was small, somebody had always been up there: me, in the rocker beside Ms. Hawthorne, with a thermos of cocoa and strong opinions about how she was carrying the pumpkins. I have been gone four years now. Caitlin would tell you she had long since stopped expecting anybody on that porch. She looked anyway.

The porch was empty. Wet boards, the rocker with a pumpkin sitting in it, the bittersweet on the door. The little drop in her stomach was so familiar by now that she ought not to have felt it at all, and she felt it, kneeling in the wet with her knee throbbing and a ghost pinned to a tree, and for one mortifying second her eyes stung over a porch.

I would have given a great deal to be in that rocker.

She did not cry over the porch. She was twenty-nine years old and had an inn to decorate. She peeled the ghost off the bark, found that one corner had gone soft with wet, and limped the rest of the way up holding it out in front of her so it could dry.

A willow leaf let go as she reached the steps. It landed cold on her neck and slid down inside her collar, and she was still hunching and swearing at it, more quietly this time, when she tried the bell with her elbow, missed, and lined up her heel for the brass kick plate instead.

The door opened before she could kick anything.

Ms. Hawthorne filled most of the doorway. She was short and round and somewhere past seventy, with white hair pinned up in a knot that was already losing the argument, flour on one sleeve of the maroon jacket she believed made her look organized, and the pink, breathless cheeks of a woman who had been running tonight's party in her head since August. She had owned the Willow Inn for longer than Caitlin had been alive. She had thrown a party in it every Halloween of that time, and every Halloween, at about four in the afternoon, the party got away from her.

"Oh, look at you, you're soaked," she said. "Give me that. No, give me that. What did you do to your knee?"

"Fought a tree."

"Did you win?"

"I got the ghost." Caitlin held it up.

Ms. Hawthorne looked at the ghost, then at the skeleton arm hooked through Caitlin's elbow, then past her down the hill to the car, where the back seat was still bulging. Her eyebrows rose over the tops of her half-moon spectacles and stayed there. It was the exact look I used to give Caitlin over a stack of library books too tall to carry to the car, and I'll admit I was pleased to see it had outlasted me. It went straight through her before she could brace for it.

"That's the first load," Caitlin said.

"Of course it is, sweetheart." Ms. Hawthorne relieved her of the spiderweb, then of the arm, which she held away from herself by the wrist. "And who's this?"

"He's on loan. He sat in the lost and found at the town library for two years, and nobody ever came back for an arm."

"Well, I can't think why." A dimple showed in one soft cheek. She tucked the arm under her own elbow and stood aside. "Come in and drip on something."

The foyer was warm enough to make Caitlin's fingers ache as they thawed. It smelled the way it had smelled every Halloween of her life, of woodsmoke and of something with cinnamon happening in the kitchen, and she stood on the mat for a moment and let it get into her coat. The staircase curled up from the foyer to the guest rooms. The old postcard hung beside the door in its frame, showing a front hall roughly twice as wide as the real one.

I decorated this inn for thirty Octobers, and Caitlin trailed after me with the tape for most of them. The September after my funeral, Ms. Hawthorne telephoned her to say she supposed she'd do without decorations that year, in a voice that meant she couldn't stand to, and Caitlin had turned up on the thirty-first with a car full of paper ghosts. Nobody had ever discussed it. She had come every October since. Ms. Hawthorne tried to pay her every year, and every year Caitlin left the envelope in the cookie tin by the stove, and by the end of the night it had turned up in her coat pocket again. They had been passing that envelope back and forth for four years without either of them mentioning it once.

Every year, too, Caitlin told herself she came for the decorating and put up with the party: three hours near the cider bowl while couples who had met at this party explained to other people how they had met at this party, and Maggie narrated Caitlin's love life to anyone who stood still long enough. It was a sensible account of herself. It did not explain why she had been awake at five this morning cutting ghosts at her kitchen table, or why the red dress was hanging in the back of her car in its dry-cleaning bag, where she could see it in the rearview mirror the whole drive over. I was glad of that dress. I'd been hoping for that dress for years.

"Where do you want all this?" Ms. Hawthorne asked, depositing the arm on the foyer table. "The party's at seven. I'd like to find my own front door by seven, if it's all the same to you."

"You'll find it. It'll have bats on it."

"Bats." Ms. Hawthorne said it the way other people say termites, and then laughed at herself. "Fine. Bats. Only not on the good mirror. The tape pulls the silvering."

Caitlin set the bag down and drew out the top ghost. Its mouth was crooked where her scissors had slipped on a stack of folded paper, and at story hour the children had voted that it looked surprised, and one small, serious boy had informed her that ghosts didn't need to be symmetrical anyway. She had loved him a little for that. She put the crooked one on top of the pile. It was the best of the lot, if you want my opinion, and you're getting it.

Ms. Hawthorne was holding a black paper cat up to the light. "And this?"

"Kitchen door."

"My kitchen's closed tonight. I've got four pies in there and a floor I mopped twice."

"That's why it gets the cat. If I tape up a sign that says keep out, somebody reads it as a dare. Nobody argues with a cat. And if they get past the cat, they get you."

Ms. Hawthorne considered this, then set the cat down beside her purse, which was how Caitlin knew it was going on the kitchen door. After four Halloweens of doing this without me, and a good many before that doing it beside me, Caitlin could read most of Ms. Hawthorne's answers from where she put things down.

The rope was already up across the narrow west passage at the back of the hall, looped between its two brass hooks. "People get into the cider and go looking for the attic," Ms. Hawthorne said, following her look. "I have no idea what they think is up there. My Christmas boxes and a wasp nest. Every year." She went off toward the kitchen, patting her pockets for something, and called back without turning around, "Every year!"

Caitlin hung a row of bats along the public side of the hall and left the rope clear. One bat kept tilting toward the forbidden stairs no matter how she pressed the tape. She straightened it three times and then let it tilt.

In the front parlor, somebody had lit the fire. The room was small and warm, lined with built-in shelves of old books nobody read and a few newer ones Caitlin had quietly donated. It was too small to hold the carving tables, which waited in the side parlor next door under their newspapers. She laid paper ghosts along the shelves and moved the bowl of toffees off the mantel before anyone could set one to melting against the brass lantern.

"Careful with that, dear," Ms. Hawthorne said from the doorway, arriving with a mug in each hand.

"The toffee?"

"The lantern. One of the little panes has come loose."

It sat above the fire where it always sat, squat and tarnished and heavier than it looked, with glass so old it had gone wavy and a pair of small figures cut into the brass. They ran through a row of trees, toward each other or away from each other, depending on where you stood. I always loved it. Caitlin, if she was honest, found it a little smug for a lamp. To her mind it had spent a hundred years sitting on that mantel taking credit for other people's nerve. She usually came round to the things I loved, in the end. She liked to take the long way. I have my own opinion about that lantern these days, and I'm keeping it.

Because that was the story, of course. Every October someone told it. A couple would explain that they'd met at this party, right under the lantern, and look at them now. One year an old man insisted he had proposed to his wife in this room, while his wife insisted, every bit as firmly, that it had happened outside the bakery on Main Street in the rain. Ms. Hawthorne had let them argue over the cider and topped up both their cups, which, as far as Caitlin could tell, was her entire position on the lantern.

Ms. Hawthorne handed her a mug and went to poke the fire. Caitlin stood looking at the little running figures and thought, without meaning to, about a party three Octobers back, and a woman from the Tuesday knitting circle who had spent the whole evening hiding behind the punch bowl until a man she'd been in love with since high school came over and asked her for a cup. They were married now. They'd told the lantern story at their wedding. Caitlin had watched the whole thing happen from across the room with a stack of used paper plates in her hands, and had gone home afterward and eaten cereal standing up at the sink.

Would it be so embarrassing, wanting somebody to cross a room for her?

Apparently it would, because she checked that Ms. Hawthorne's back was turned before she lifted her hand toward the loose pane. Her fingers stopped a half inch from the glass. She could feel the fire's heat on her knuckles. She took her hand back, drank her tea too fast, and burned her tongue.

"The illustrator's due this afternoon," Ms. Hawthorne said to the fire. "From the magazine, the one doing the old inns. I expect he'll want to draw the rooms before everyone arrives and starts knocking things over. Or he might want a nap. He's coming up on the train from Boston, poor thing."

"I'll stay out of his way."

"Or you could show him around." Ms. Hawthorne straightened, one hand in the small of her back. "You know where everything is better than I do."

She looked at Caitlin over the tops of her spectacles, with her lips pressed together in the particular way of a woman keeping a smile where it belonged. Caitlin felt the heat climb her neck and knew Ms. Hawthorne could see it climbing, which only sent it higher.

"Show him around," she said. "Because I know where the light switches are."

"You do know where the light switches are."

"That's not—" Caitlin put her mug down. "Is he—no. I'm not asking. How old is he?"

"Oh, about your age, I'd think."

"I didn't ask."

"No, dear." A timer went off in the kitchen, and Ms. Hawthorne turned toward it with the look of a woman who has remembered all four pies at once. "Tape the ghosts on the stairs, would you? The ones from last year kept falling off."

She hurried away down the hall, and Caitlin stood alone in the front parlor with her tongue stinging and her face hot, feeling ridiculous and, underneath the ridiculous, something that fizzed. About your age. She told the fizzing it could stop that at once. It did not stop.

She took the ghosts to the staircase, climbed until she could reach the banister, and began taping them along the rail. Somewhere along the way she knelt on a glitter pumpkin she had forgotten she'd set on the step, and after that there was orange glitter on her hands, her skirt, and, judging by the itching, her left eyebrow. She pressed the tape down hard. The ghost beside her let go of the rail anyway and floated off over the banister toward the front door.

The bell rang. Ms. Hawthorne came bustling out of the kitchen hall, wiping her hands on her apron and calling "Coming, coming," and opened the door. Caitlin leaned out over the rail after the ghost, got her fingers to within an inch of it, and nearly went over.

A man stepped in out of the gray afternoon and caught it by one corner.

He was a strapping young man, and a handsome one too, if I have any opinion on the matter, with a canvas bag on one shoulder and dark hair falling across his forehead, damp from the drizzle that had finally started. There was graphite on the side of his fingertip, a gray smudge now pressed into the ghost's white face. He didn't look at the ghost. He looked up the stairs, at her. What he was thinking, I couldn't have told you. I had my hopes.

Now, Caitlin had been looked at before. She was a librarian; people looked at her all day, mostly to ask where the restroom was. This was a different kind of looking, steady, taking her in one line at a time with no hurry to finish, and she didn't have a shelf for it. Her heart gave one hard, stupid knock. She was aware, all at once and in no particular order, of the glitter on her eyebrow, the wet patch on her knee, and her arm still stretched out over the banister toward a paper ghost he had already saved.

She ought to take the arm back. She left it where it was, and forgot to look away.

The ghost in Liam's hand had been cut out by somebody in a hurry. Its mouth had slipped sideways, and one eye sat higher than the other, so that it squinted at him, deciding whether he could be trusted. He liked it at once. It was the first thing in a month that had made him want to draw.

He had left Boston that morning with a bag of pencils, a return ticket for Friday, and an assignment he'd taken because it paid and because it meant three days somewhere nobody knew him. His phone had buzzed twice on the train. He had left it face down on the seat beside him, which in Boston he would never have done, and watched the towns go by until they got smaller and redder and the trees took over.

Now he stood dripping on a doormat, holding a paper ghost, and a woman with glitter in one eyebrow was leaning over the banister above him with her arm out.

"Does this belong up there?" he asked.

"It did. They keep jumping off the banister." She came down fast, the way people do on stairs they've used all their lives, fast enough that he took a half step toward the rail in case she didn't make it. Her hair was red and was losing a fight with its pins at the back. A strip of orange tape clung to her wrist. She took the ghost by its clean side and looked at the smudge he'd left on its face, and her mouth twitched.

"You got pencil on him."

He turned his hand over. The graphite ran along the side of his finger, where it always did. He should have washed it on the train. "Sorry. I'm the illustrator. Liam."

"Caitlin. And don't be sorry." She held the ghost up beside her face to compare. "He looks better. He finally has an eyebrow."

"I could do the other one."

She laughed before she was ready to. It came out sharp and surprised, and she looked a little surprised by it herself, and then she looked at him again with her head tilted, hazel eyes narrowed, as though he were a book she hadn't expected to find on this particular shelf. Liam felt the back of his neck go warm and shifted his bag to the other shoulder so he'd have something to do with his hands.

"Liam, you poor thing, you're wet through," said the innkeeper, who had watched all of this from beside the door with an expression he couldn't read and suspected he wasn't meant to. "I'm Ms. Hawthorne. You've met Caitlin. She does my decorating, and she knows this house better than I do, so anything you want to know, ask her. I'll put the kettle back on." She was already moving. "Caitlin, show him the front parlor while it's still tidy."

In another moment she was gone down the hall, and it was the two of them in the foyer with a damp paper ghost.

Liam had a list of rooms to draw and illustrations due on Friday. He could have asked for his key and gone upstairs to work, and ten minutes ago he'd have wanted to.

"Which room first?" he asked.

"The front parlor," Caitlin said. "It's almost done. Well. It's almost recognizable, which at this point in the afternoon I'm counting as done."

She taped the ghost beside the front door with his smudge facing out, where everyone would see it, and set off ahead of him, talking over her shoulder while she picked a strand of fake spiderweb off her sleeve. "Kitchen's back that way, but it's closed, she's got pies, don't even look at it. Guest rooms are upstairs. And please don't sketch anybody's luggage up there, because she'll chase you, and she's faster than she looks."

"Has that happened?"

"The chase or the luggage?"

He looked at her. She let the question hang there and opened the door to the front parlor, and Liam found he had taken his sketchbook out without deciding to.

The room made sense once he looked past the paper bats. A fireplace anchored it. Tall windows faced the willows, and the rest was shelves, and a half-folded paper pumpkin sat abandoned on the table with a length of thread trailing off onto the floor. Someone was in the middle of using this room. He liked it exactly as it was, and he was already annoyed on its behalf about what the magazine would want him to do to it: widen it, straighten it, paint out the fire extinguisher and the thread. If he drew from the corner by the door, he could get the mantel, the windows, and the table with its lopsided pumpkin all on one page. He took the chair there.

Caitlin went straight to the shelves and climbed a little wooden ladder after a bat that had come loose. She hummed while she worked. It was four notes, uneven, with the last one held a beat too long, and then she started again from somewhere else, having lost her place in it. She got the humming from me. Not the key. I could hold a key.

"Am I humming? I'm humming. Tell me if it's wrecking your lines," she said, without looking round.

"I'm trying to figure out if it's the same song."

"That's rude." She turned on the ladder to look at him. "It's also fair, because I've been humming it since I got out of the car and I couldn't tell you what it is. It might be three different songs stuck together."

Her socks showed above her boots when she reached for the top shelf: black, with small white skulls grinning on them. She could not seem to keep still long enough to press a piece of tape flat, and yet she didn't drop anything. Liam had drawn posed people all month, clients in good clothes holding still in good light, and his hand, before he could stop it, put the curve of her reaching arm into the margin of the page. He looked at what he'd done. The magazine was paying him to draw the inn. He drew the shelf in around her, as though that had been the plan.

The brass lantern sat on the mantel. Bubbles were caught in its glass, and on the side nearest him a pair of small figures ran through a row of trees. He sketched its outline where he thought the mantel ended, found he'd made the mantel too long, crossed it out, and started over.

"You've found the celebrity," Caitlin said.

"Should it be in the article?"

"Depends how much room they give you for local romance."

He glanced up. She was watching him over the paper bat in her hand.

"People meet under it?" he asked.

"People meet at a party every year, which if you ask me is the actual reason. You put a roomful of people together with hot cider, and then whoever ends up married gives the credit to the lantern." She pressed the bat to the shelf. "Nice work if you can get it. And nobody ever comes back to yell at it when they break up. I'd love that deal. I recommend one bad book and I hear about it at the desk for a month."

She went back to her tape, but her hand stayed flat on the shelf a moment longer than the tape needed. Liam noticed it the way he noticed where light fell, without meaning to, and something in his chest pulled tight. He wanted to ask what she'd meant. He drew the shelf instead. Her shoulder came into the corner of the page again, and this time he left it.

"Cider's here!" Ms. Hawthorne called from the foyer, over the sound of the front door and somebody stamping their feet.

Caitlin hopped down off the ladder, then stopped beside his chair on her way out. "If you want the staircase, the good angle's from across the hall. But finish in here first. It's the only room that's almost done."

"Is the tour now or later?"

"Now, if you want to see the place before I've put bats on every wall." She hesitated. "You don't want Ms. Hawthorne to do it?"

"She has cider."

"Sure, but she'll tell you what every wall used to look like and which guest put a nail in it in nineteen seventy-eight, and you'll still be standing in the foyer when the party starts."

"And you won't?"

"No, I will, I have opinions about all of them. Mine are just faster." She tipped her head at the door. "Come on."

He left his tea on the side table and followed her. She took him through the side parlor, where cardboard pumpkins waited on the newspaper-covered carving tables, and pointed through the glass at a little conservatory full of ferns and stacked folding chairs. The kitchen door already wore its black paper cat. Liam marked each room on a fresh page as she named it, a rough plan growing box by box. The whole inn fit across two pages of his sketchbook. It ought to be an easy building to learn.

At the far end of the public hall a rope hung across a narrow passage. Behind it the stairs rose steeper than the main ones, and the wallpaper beside them had gone darker where years of hands had steadied themselves against it. Liam drew the doorway, the sag of the rope, the first few steps.

Caitlin stepped in close to look at his page, still humming that stubborn scrap of tune. A loose strand of her hair brushed his shoulder. He felt it through his wet jacket, all the way down his arm, and held his pencil still. She noticed, and tucked the strand away behind her ear, and for the first time since he'd come in out of the rain, she stood quietly beside him and waited for him to finish a line.

"You left out the important part," she said.

He checked the sketch. Doorway, rope, stairs. "Which part?"

She tapped the west passage on his page with one glittery finger and looked up at him.

"That one comes with a story."