The kids were so excited to come home from school to find Scoot sitting on the porch. His backpack was on the floor, and he was practicing the chords for Folsom Prison Blues. Marianne managed to tear herself away long enough to let me know with the required after-school phone call to check in.
“Mom, guess what! Uncle Scoot is here! “
At that news, I wrapped the coiled cord of the business’s landline around my neck and pulled. I often did this as a joke to amuse my colleagues, but today? Today I did want to strangle myself.
They think I don’t hear them. They think I’m oblivious and lost in a haze of weed. They think I’m a retro Goth.
I don’t care what my senior class thinks. I quit caring about sixth grade when the cliques got serious. I really stopped caring when my great-grandfather died. I wore black to his funeral and have worn black ever since.
They all have no idea, and I like it that way. I’m not just an introvert, I’m very private. I don’t even talk to the therapist my social worker has been making me see for two years. The one my state insurance pays for because we don’t have any money.
I don’t care what my family thinks. I was a mistreated child that nobody could be bothered to rescue. My summers with Great-Grandfather are the only reason I’m not a real mess.
One doesn’t usually think of a priestess as vivacious, but Vivienne was that and more. In a future lifetime, she would have been the perfect cheerleader for the local high school team. She was pert, petite, cheerful and possessed a giggle that could make even curmudgeons laugh aloud.
But as the seventh daughter of the seventh daughter, her path was foretold in prophecy and her parents had no choice but to turn her over to the Temple at Ivance. She was not sad for Vivienne was excited as always was at the thought of a new adventure. Her father, however, was bereft.
He had hand-built her trunk for her. Wiping a tear he hoped no one would see, he loaded it into the cart the temple sent to carry Vivienne off. It weighed next to nothing because it was filled with nothing as instructed. She would arrive at Ivance with only the trunk and the clothes on her back. This felt wrong to him. He was a fortunate and proud man. He could provision his daughter.
She was his favorite child. The last of 13 – all who had survived. But Vivienne was the only one who had thrived. She was the life of the household, and he knew things would be very different without her. He was filled with a type of remorse he couldn’t admit to. He wished one of the other girls had been the seventh of the seventh. Agnes perhaps. She seemed more temperamentally suited to the life he imagined the temple would entail—not that he or anyone knew. The temple was self-sufficient and cloistered. The daily routines of the women there were shrouded in secrecy. The only glimpse the villagers had was on the holy days and then all they saw were well-practiced rituals with everyone silent and in step.
It was hard to imagine Vivienne silent for any length of time. She’d been chattering nonstop since her first word.
Vivienne bounced around from sibling to sibling stopping to nuzzle the horse’s neck now and again. The women sent to fetch her stood silent and dignified. Vivienne was a bird flitting from branch to branch. She understood that it would be some time before she saw her family again, which concerned her, but what an adventure awaited her! Rumor had it that she would be taught to read. She couldn’t even imagine the wonders about to unfold.
As she said her goodbyes, punctuated with giggles and exhortations to live a good life, the priestesses began moving about checking the reins and adjusting the cart contents when one of them finally said “Vivienne, the time of fulfillment has come. Let us leave.”
Vivienne hopped into the back of the cart and sat amidst the bags of wheat—offerings from the village folk—and her empty trunk.
As the cart made its way down the rutted path, the villagers came out to wave goodbye. They too would miss Vivienne. Everyone’s heart was heavy, but Vivienne’s eyes sparkled.
I felt Lucy come up behind me and hug me. Both of her arms wrapped tight around my abdomen as she squeezed. Warmth suffused me. I loved Lucy’s hugs. So much better than her rage.
Lucy was usually all hugs and gentle caresses. A curtain billowing on a still summer day. The sofa cushions plumped when I came downstair after a night of good sleep. But she hated men. Every man. If I had a repair person in the house, she was all slamming doors and breaking glass. Gusts of ice cold.
Lucy was a ghost. She came with the house.
There wasn’t anything of Lucy to see. She was nothing but a change in the quality of the air. An occasional fragrance now and again. She wears Tabu which I hate, but I wouldn’t hurt her feelings for anything in the world. She is my ghost and I had wanted one since watching the Ghost and Mrs. Muir as a child.
Would I have preferred a good-looking sea captain? Maybe. But instead, I ended up with Lucy. I researched my deed one time. Unusual for a house the age of mine, it had only been deeded to women ever. The first one being Miss Lucy Adams. I assume that is who watches over me.
I don’t know anything about her other than the 1850 census lists her as a spinster school teacher. She is the first owner of the house and presumably, she had it built. The deed just appears as a transfer from The First Huntington Bank.
I had a roommate for a short while. A gay gentleman who was quite lovely to me, but scornful of his lovers. He could do a wicked impersonation of his then-current paramour. Robbie needed to vent his spleen to love. I often felt sorry for his conquests. Not Lucy. She hated Robbie and would trash his room. Over and over. Each day he returned home from work I could hear the sound of “Damn it, Lucy! I’ve done nothing to you.” After six months or so of Lucy’s bad behavior, he moved out. He was an otherwise ideal roommate. Gone most of the time, on time with the rent, and handy with a hammer, and taking out the trash.
I got lots of hugs when the cab came and carried him off for the last time.
Lucy was pleased. I found the couch cushions continuously plumped with a soft indentation where Lucy had sat waiting for me to get home.
Things were idyllic at home until I met Roger.
We worked together at the university—he was new to the English Dept. I was in Classical Languages. Our paths crossed now and again. Then it was lunch together. Then he asked me out. I thought of Lucy before saying yes but arranged to meet him somewhere. We went out for a while. When I would come home with the smell of him on me, Lucy would slam doors and rage. She broke my favorite vase the night I finally invited him over for dinner.
Roger saw the vase rise from the center of the foyer table and land on the African sculpture hung over the fireplace. The hearth was littered with jagged cobalt blue glass and ebony.
What the hell was that? He exclaimed.
I replied, “That was Lucy. My ghost. She doesn’t like men and I don’t know why.”
W. Va. Fur and Root 