Ghost story

I am upstairs, alone in my room, alone in this whole big house. My window looks out over the back yard toward a stand of glittering trees caught in the moonlight. It's light is so bright it x-rays the whole house and makes the walls dissapear. I am a toy-sized doll spotlit on the second floor, my fear transparent.

This house makes me do things I know are crazy. I run up the stairs away from nothing. I sleep with a crucifix under my pillow. I leave the light on all night long.

I talk to her. "I don't want to see you," I say inside my head. I don't need to say it out loud.

I think about her sometimes--my stepbrothers' mother who died in this house. I think she is here. I know it, and I imagine she sits at the edge of her sons' beds and watches them sleep.

But they aren't here now, so she has nothing to do but stand outside in the hallway and watch me. She looks at me and wonders what I'm doing there in that room and makes me think twice about crossing the hall to the bathroom.

That's where she is. In the stairways and the halls. She stands at the threshold and never crosses over.

My whole time, I hardly remember any one else in that house. I know they were there, but what I recall are rooms without people. I knew the contents of every drawer and box because I spent my time searching through them. I cataloged the whole house--the linens, the candles, the old clothes, the heavy box of coins in my stepfather's drawer. I went through them and then back through them looking for what I might have missed, what had not appeared before.

And it makes me think now that she was sending me where she couldn't go. Placing in me the desire to open up closets and dig through to satifsy her own curiosity. How much of her was still there, how much was gone?