I am Not the Only Ghost Here Marah Hoffman

Marah Hoffman

My most imprinted memories, selfishly, involve gift-giving. It is as if my hippocampus is only concerned with a positive self-image.

I remember all the candles I gave my Grammy: a crumbly blueberry-pie-shaped candle, a vanilla cupcake-shaped candle, a shiny red apple-shaped candle, a Yankee candle promising the smell of the sea. Every time I saw a candle, especially one shaped like food, I would think of her and beg my parents for the seven or eight dollars necessary, already imagining her wrinkled hand searching through the white tissue paper, the patient smile of her thin lips.

Her house smelled like candles. All of them at once or one standout scent, depending on the day. Spices if I had to choose, like a coffee shop on September first. Her taste in decor was ornate, natural. My oldest cousin, Shan, painted all the tiles above her gas stove—my favorite a smiling sun amid a freckled indigo background. There was wicker everywhere. My mother now complains about this wicker-fixation; our dim garage is full of her treasures, oceans of slick tan waves.

Through the portal of my memory, I walk into her guest bathroom where the woven basket of toys must still be. I spent what seemed hours playing as I pruned. Perhaps if you shook Baby Alive, water would still trickle from the holes in her perfect feet. There are ribbons in the top right drawer: silk, opaque, polka dot, stripe. Grammy ties them in my pigtails while I sit on a wicker stool, the enormous cream towel puddling around my tiny frame, and she tells me again how she was first chair violin in St. Matt’s Orchestra. Her Daddy told her she couldn’t make it, but she did. Still keeping up with that flute? she asks. Yep!

I am not the only ghost here. My Aunt Amy is eternally sixteen racing into the basement to tell her siblings the van is packed until her head collides with the upper beam on repeat. The beam is solid oak. I have seen pictures of the bruising. Her otherwise smooth forehead reminded me of old fruit—rotten yellow, electric blue. Sometimes I imagine she got downstairs. And found my daddy on the carpet with his other brother and sister making a Lincoln log tower like I used to, on the same

carpet where I sat. And they would all pile up in the van and sing Stevie Nicks songs. Aunt Amy wouldn’t have to go to the ER. They wouldn’t have to call up Uncle Tom at the boy scout camp and tell him to give up their tents. Aunt Amy wouldn’t die in a car accident at 45.

I take a roll call, and they’re all present. But suddenly it isn’t me calling, “Ross, Amy, Lori, Billy.” It is my father. He would relish the task more than I. Five years since he has seen Ross. Five since Amy. She’d been traveling up to our cabin in the mountains to grieve Ross’s death when something—bright sunbeams, a sudden blink, a headache—caused her to swerve and flip right from I-96 to heaven’s gate. Ross’s death involved less blood, more starch, antiseptic-smelling hospital rooms. Our last image of him is barely recognizable. He had a Ph.D. in biochemistry, but in his last moments, he only hummed and rubbed his pointer finger against his thumb, hearing a small sound unique to his ears. He had stopped taking the pills keeping the AIDS at bay. Again, the catalyst is a mystery. It should be little shock then that their stepfather, my Pop, committed suicide soon afterward. My Grammy heard the gunshot from the shed as she prepared pork and sauerkraut. It was New Year’s Day. He didn’t want to celebrate a year he could not bear to finish.

I talk about Grammy as if she is gone too. But she isn’t. Her body sits in her wicker rocking chair in Elmcroft, but her mind is with her lost children, unable to be summoned by us. The doctors speculate grief sped up the deterioration. My father didn’t get to say goodbye to any of them. Grammy was the worst. She had to move in with us, and we watched her leave us swiftly. I used to receive handmade cards with crisp two-dollar bills on my birthdays. But she watched the festivities of my sixteenth with vague confusion and annoyance. “What are all these little ladies doing here, Billy? I’m tired.”

So, in my last moments on this earth, I won’t imagine my own home, but instead the childhood dwelling of my father where I spent so many of my own childhood hours. I will deck it for him. Infuse it for him with all the sweetness I can still conjure with the thought of a pie-shaped candle. And then I will pad through the thin halls to see his siblings all safe there. His mother finally at home. I will tuck them in and kiss their foreheads. I will whisper to Grammy, “Still keeping up with that violin?” Then, when they wake, their bodies will be young again and move with all the vigor of a tape on rewind.