The Voice That Calls You Home by Andrea Raynor

Author:Andrea Raynor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ATRIA BOOKS
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

20

LIVING WITH GHOSTS

ONE OF THE CENTRAL stories of my childhood has nothing in a way to do with me but rather with the ghost of someone I never met. Her presence permeated our home, like the soft fragrance left behind by a beautiful woman, giving one the impression that she had just been there, had just gone, slipping silently out the door so as not to cause a fuss—my father’s mother. She died when my dad was nine years old from an illness never fully understood or diagnosed, altering his childhood and his life, and in turn my childhood and my life, in innumerable ways. She was thirty-four, petite and soft-spoken, with rivers of dark brown hair and shining black-brown eyes. She had deep dimples that framed her small face like parentheses or cupped hands, and pretty lips whose bell-shaped curve hinted at a slight overbite. It had the pleasing effect of bringing her whole face forward, like she was about to tell a secret or break into a conspiratorial giggle. Her eyes, and that imperfect smile, made her somehow accessible and present, while the reality of her absence made her perpetually mysterious.

As a child, I would stare at the few pictures we had of her. One, taken for her high school graduation, shows her sitting demurely with legs crossed in a white sailor suit, a style popular in the twenties. Her hair is parted in the middle and neatly arranged in tight curls that encircle her head in a mahogany halo and spill softly down her cheeks. There are two shots of her in her wedding gown, one by herself and one with my grandfather. She appears tiny and vibrant next to his athletic, six-foot frame. A lace cap rests on her twenty-year-old forehead, accentuating eyes that I still search—for their secrets, for my father, for my DNA.

My grandfather, on the other hand, is staring into the camera with the uncomplicated ease of a happy groom. As I look at him, I bring the cache of my childhood memories—the sound of his voice, the smell of Old Spice on his neck, the weight of his body reclining in a chair. He is young and old at the same time for me. In the groom of twenty-nine, I see the blueprint for the seventy-year-old man I knew as a grandfather. I accept the parts of him I do not know, will never know, because he exists in my tactile memory. But the young woman beside him is another story. She, too, exists in memory—but not mine. She exists in the memory of my father. She was his mother but never my grandmother. She was real to him. She belonged to him. She birthed him and knew him and counted his toes and brushed her lips on his baby head. She quietly delighted in his perfection in the secret way that mothers do; she fretted over him, grieved for him, and bore the heartache of knowing he would suffer when she died.

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