Nothing but Ghosts by Beth Kephart

Author:Beth Kephart [Kephart, Beth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-02-04T13:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

All afternoon, digging and sweating, I’m thinking about Danny. About Danny, about the clues, about Barcelona, about a daughter who doesn’t show up at a father’s funeral. About varnish and color and disappeared color. About rescue and escape and Miss Martine, who maybe, if she strained hard enough, could see the dig from where she is, inside her house. Her dig. The sun pushes itself between the trees, insists on its own heat, and it feels like we’re working inside a pot of stew. There’s dirt and sticks and bug shells at my feet, and beneath Danny’s cap my hair is ruinous. By the time the shift is done, we’re all too tired to do much more than head for home.

In the kitchen there’s the in-the-oven-smell of pot roast, but everything is strangely quiet. I finally find my father on the living-room couch, no TV on. He seems asleep, but his eyes are open—staring at the ceiling, no glasses on. I used to find him like this every day for weeks after my mother died, until finally he began to work again, began to cook, like someone far away and maybe high above us was forcing him back to life.

“You okay?” I ask him.

He says quietly, “Hey, Katie.”

I tromp over to the couch, sit at one end, near his toes, untie my heavy, old, grunge-ugly work boots, which I will, I promise myself, dump in the trash once this garden gig is over. “What’s happening, Dad?”

“It’s that painting,” he says.

I wait for him to tell me more, to roll his eyeballs back down from the ceiling. It’s way too hot in the house, thanks to that pot roast. I feel drips of sweat running down my neck, down my tee. I get up to shove open a window. “If you wanted to paint regret,” Dad asks at last, “what symbol would you use?”

“Regret?” I’m too confused, tired, hot to fake an answer.

“Things that you wished you could do over. How would you paint that?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s a theoretical question, Katie. It’s not like I’m going to hold you to the answer.”

“Regret could be a bird flying away,” I say, thinking out loud, playing this game for his sake, because for all I know he’s been lying here for hours, waiting to ask. “Or it could be the shell you leave on the beach, or maybe the last leaf on a tree.”

“Would you paint a perfect city and give the whole thing a brown-black sky?” Dad asks.

“Is this a trick question?”

“Would you paint all the windows in the city black, except for one light in a single room?”

“I thought you said this painting was Everlast’s idea of the eternal.”

“I thought the darkness was dirt, but it’s not.”

“So this city of Everlast’s is dark?”

“Dark, except for the garden.”

“There’s a garden?”

“Pink, yellow, green, orange, ochre, violet, Tuscan red.”

“You can see that much already, Dad? You’ve already done that much work?”

“I’m starting to see through,” he corrects me. “There’s a difference.”

“Well, is the garden the garden? The one at Miss Martine’s?”

“I’m thinking it might be.

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