A Sunny Place for Shady People

My Sad Dead

But now it’s time for you to come back. You have been away long enough.

—Lydia Davis, Can’t and Won’t

First, I think, I should describe the neighborhood. Because the neighborhood is where my house is, and my house is where my mother is. You can’t understand one thing without the other. You can’t understand why I don’t leave. Because I could leave. I could leave tomorrow.

The neighborhood has changed since I was little. These houses, originally for workers, were built along these narrow streets back in the ’30s: stone houses with lovely little gardens and tall windows with iron shutters. One could say that it was the residents themselves who gradually ruined the houses with all their innovating: the air-conditioning units, the tiled roofs, a tacked-on upper story made of different materials, exterior facings and paint jobs in ridiculous colors, cheaper knockoffs replacing the original wooden doors. But aside from the residents’ poor taste, the neighborhood suffered because it became an island. On one side we’re bordered by the avenue: it’s like an ugly river we have to ford, and there’s nothing much along its shores. To the south we have the housing projects, which have grown ever more dangerous, with kids selling crack on the stairways and sometimes pulling guns on one another when they fight, or firing into the air if they’re mad after a soccer loss. To the north is a tract of land that was supposed to be developed into some kind of sports field, but that never happened, and now the area is occupied by very poor houses, the best ones made of concrete blocks, the more precarious ones of tin and cardboard. The housing project and this slum merge to the east of our neighborhood.

I understand how things go: if misery is stalking you the way it does everyone in my country and my city and you have to resort to crime in order to survive, then that’s what you do. There’s more money in crime than in lawful work. In any case, there isn’t much lawful work available, not for anyone. And if living a better life entails risk, well, it’s a risk many people are willing to take.

Few of my neighbors—the inhabitants of this island of little houses built when the world was different—think the way I do. I want to be clear: I get scared sometimes, too. I don’t want a stray bullet to hit me, either, or my daughter when she (rarely) comes to visit. I don’t want to be regularly robbed at the bus stop or whenever I’m in a car waiting at a red light on the corner by the projects. I, too, go home crying when a teenager pulls a knife on me and snatches my phone. But I don’t want to kill them all. I don’t think they’re a bunch of freeloaders and immigrants and miscreants and deadbeats, all expendable and unsalvageable. My ex-husband, who works for an oil company and lives in Patagonia, tells me that the neighbors are just afraid. I tell him that fascism generally starts with fear and then turns into hatred. He tells me I should sell the house and move to the south to be closer to him. We’re divorced, but we’re friends. We’ve always been friends. His new wife is delightful. I tend to use our daughter, Carolina, as an excuse for staying here, but it’s just an excuse. Carolina lives far away from me and from this house, and she works as a fashion editor at a glossy magazine. She doesn’t need me.

I stay because my mother lives here. Can I say that about a dead woman? She’s present, then. Ever since she first appeared to me, I’ve understood that word better. She was here, she occupied a physical space, and I sensed her presence before I could see her.

My mother was a happy woman until she got cancer and came home to die. Her agony was long, painful, and undignified. It’s not always like that. The wise patient with bald head and yellowed skin who sits in bed imparting life lessons is a ridiculous romanticization, but it’s true that there are people who suffer less. It has to do with physiology, and also temperament. My mother was allergic to morphine. She couldn’t use it, and we had to resort to other, impotent painkillers. She died screaming. A nurse and I did what we could for her. It wasn’t much. I’m a doctor, but I haven’t worked with patients in a long time; instead, I do administrative work at a private medical company. At sixty, I don’t have the energy, patience, or passion for hospital work anymore. Also, it’s true, for a long time I denied (denial is a powerful drug) a fact that I finally had to come to terms with when my mother appeared. Namely, that ghosts exist, and I can see them. Though they seek me out, I’m not the only one who sees them: in the hospital, the nurses used to go running. I tried to reassure them, saying, “Come now, you’re imagining things.”

It was morning when I first heard my mother scream. Not the wee morning hours under cover of night but the full-on sunlight of day, so ill-suited to haunting. The houses in the area, though very pretty, are built close together in a semidetached style, and noise carries. My next-door neighbor Mari, who hardly ever leaves her house because she’s terrified she’ll be robbed and murdered and who knows what other phobic fantasies, leaned wide-eyed out her window that looks into my little front yard just as I was going out to see if there was someone in the street. It was a stupid, knee-jerk reaction driven by my own panic: I couldn’t believe that I was hearing my dead mother’s cries, and I thought maybe it was someone outside. An accident, a fight. Mari remembered my mother’s real screams, too, and she was shocked and dumbfounded.

“It’s the TV, Mari. It’s okay,” I told her.

“It’s just—you realize what it sounds like, Doctor?”

“It really does. I can’t believe it.”

And I went back inside.

Since I didn’t know what to do, I started looking around the house for the source of the cries, and asking my mother, as if I were praying, to be quieter. I didn’t urge her to stop wailing entirely—just a little discretion, that was all I asked for. I’d made the same request of other ghosts, first at the hospital and later on at a clinic. Sometimes that pleading worked. My mother always did have a sense of humor, and my appeal to turn down the volume made her laugh. I didn’t find her that day—which I took off from work—but I did that night, sitting on the floor of the room where she’d died, which is now a storage room for furniture I never take the time to toss or give away. She was thin, but thin like she’d been at the beginning of her cancer, not the brittle and feverish wraith of her final months. I didn’t dare approach; leaning in the doorway, my knees shaking, I sang to her. And as I sang I sank down until we were seated face-to-face, me with my legs crossed, her kneeling. I sang the song I used to sing when her pain had been unbearable, the song that used to soothe her, or so I chose to think. That night, she didn’t scream.

But ghosts, I’ve learned, get upset. I don’t know what they think, if they think at all, because it’s more like they repeat themselves and the repetitions seem like thoughtless reflexes, but they do talk and have opinions and bad moods. My mother wanders the house. Sometimes she seems to know I’m there, and other times she doesn’t. Sometimes it seems that the fury returns to her, the fury of her degraded body, the colostomy bag, the humiliation; she used to be so elegant, and I remember how she cried, “The smell, the smell!” Sometimes it was worse than the physical suffering. So she screams, and her screams can be pure rage. I have several ways of calming her down, but there’s no reason to go into them here.

The interesting thing is what started to happen around the neighborhood. It made me realize I wasn’t crazy—I’d considered the possibility, as anyone would after seeing her dead mother climbing the stairs—and also that my mother wasn’t the only ghost around.