Read More: A brief Q&A with Claudia Putnam
Let’s call the ghost Marie. Fay’s middle name, one she’d liked; sad how middle names got lost once you started taking on husbands. Her ghost Marie considered Fay a total loser. Fay guessed most people were haunted like this, a younger self flitting at the corner of their eyes. A perpetually eighteen- or twenty-year-old ghost who knows everything.
Beautiful Marie. She’d fallen silent on the drive, looking at the familiar scenery—it must seem like yesterday to her. Fay glanced over and caught her whole for a few seconds. Honey-shot brown hair tangled by the breeze from the half-cracked window. Marie’s eyes were so large Fay realized that over time the skin around her own eyes must have drooped. When not reprimanding Fay for all her failures since college, Marie had an open smile. She was sure of her bright future.
They pulled up to the house on Sugarloaf. There lay the old path through the woods. Walk this way. Click here. The landscape looked the way it had always looked, like something out of a storybook. Pale aspen bark, late morning sunfall, dark evergreen branches. Mid-August snowfield shards glittering on the Rockies. Fay was thinking of all those stories where they warn you not to turn around, don’t look back.
This is a waste of time, Marie said.
Fay strode past the paddock and through the kitchen door, the way she always did. In the kitchen, Alex stood at the counter, the way he always did. A bald spot shone at the back of his head. He was visiting from Yakima, the reason for the reunion at the Sugarloaf house.
Don’t go, Fay’s friend Liza had said. You’ll only regret what it stirs up. Like Alex, Fay was visiting Boulder. A doctor’s appointment in her case. She was staying with Liza.
Come to the party with me, Fay said. No one will mind.
What’s the point? Liza said. She had a hair appointment; she was agonizing over cutting off her long, graying braid.
Marie agreed with Fay: no point in attending the party.
As she entered the kitchen, Alex held his arms out. You look the same as you always did, he said.
In college, she and Alex had worked together at the restaurant. Fay was a waiter and he a short-order cook. He was Italian-ish and artsy, neurotic and potbellied, with curly black hair that stuck up like the steel wool he used for refinishing furniture he found cast off on Boulder’s side streets. One day Alex brought Fay, who was hardly distinct from Marie then, to his house in the mountains to get high. She’d met his roommate Carlo.
Carlo was the person Fay ought to have married. Everyone has one of those. She only thought of him once in a while these days; it wasn’t like she tortured herself with it. He wasn’t even the love of her life. She met Carlo after she’d become engaged to her first husband, and despite what that husband thought, she’d been faithful. They’d all been very young.
The Sugarloaf house lay long and low and dark, but it had views of the mountains from most of its small windows. The whole place had always smelled of beer and bongs. During Fay’s college years, about five guys lived there. They had a home-brew set-up. They had five dogs. They had a room full of stereo equipment, TVs, and amps. There was another room full of toy trains. A hot tub on the deck overlooked the lights of Boulder. There were gro-lights in the basement. In winter they flooded the driveway to make a skating rink. And there were the two horses.
The guys in that house had loved Fay. It’s probably no wonder: just look at Marie. Alex wrote her love letters, no matter that she was engaged. At work, late at night, he would tell her how they talked about her, how they speculated on why she was with Des.
Why are you with that guy? Carlo asked her once. They were really stoned, lying on a picnic table along an old railroad bed mainly used by mountain bikers now. Fay was tired of spinning the story of her and Des. He was a little slow. Despite his good looks, he was a nice guy, the kind who brings you tea in the morning when you’re not a morning person, who walks your dog, who pays the parking tickets you can’t be bothered not to get, because you are getting straight A’s, you are planning on catching up to your Harvard friends and running the world. All men were a distraction. It freaked Fay out to get male attention, though Marie always seemed to enjoy it. Fay was scared of guys, in a weird way. Des was Des, she would marry him. She was glad to have that settled.
Carlo probably didn’t like her answer, if she even explained it out loud.
Carlo called his horse Flicker. He’d wanted to name it Flicka, though it was a gelding. He’d loved the book that much, was willing to say so. Swoon right there. The skinny guy who owned the Sugarloaf house—what was his name? Mike? Mark?—had a series of girlfriends. Legend had it most of them wound up waking Carlo in the middle of the night trying to give him blow jobs. Fay dismissed this on the grounds that women generally didn’t out of their way to give guys blow jobs. In certain contexts, but generally women didn’t say, Oh I’ll just go wake a guy up so I can suck his dick.
Carlo was older than the set of people Fay normally hung out with. A geologist working as a mud logger in the Wyoming oil fields, he was often traveling. Fay frequently wound up taking care of his horses, and when he was in town, she went riding with him. They rode all over Sugarloaf Mountain, along the Switzerland Trail, imagining that they were early pioneers.
Carlo said nothing about all the women of his nights. He did say he believed in ghosts. Looking back, Fay couldn’t say how that came up, probably just the kind of thing young people are always fascinated by. He thought there was a ghost in the house at the top of Sugarloaf Road, although it wasn’t an especially old house. But who knew what it took to have a troubled spirit invading your space? Someone could have died, or just left some unsettled bit of themselves behind when they moved. Maybe a child died in another house, but got lost and remembered this one.
What do you think? Fay asked. Have you seen it?
They were getting ready to leave the meadow, ride back along the Switzerland Trail to the house. Flicker didn’t want to give up grazing around the picnic table. Flicker was a palomino so pale he looked white, of Arabian stock, willing but mean. The other horse, a bay Quarterhorse stood with his head halfway drooped, scornful and hurt both, Fay thought. You weren’t supposed to assign human feelings to animals, but Fay always did. How did you know you weren’t actually assigning animal feelings to humans, when you thought about it? Sorry you’re stuck with me, she murmured to the castoff. He’d been the original, before Carlo bought Flicker. She figured he was jealous.
Did you see the ghost? she asked.
Carlo looked at her over his shoulder with his pale moon eyes. Yeah, I saw the ghost, he said. It was a shiver of light and a rearrangement of the air. And the room was different afterwards, everything in a slightly different place, the things that used to be right in reach were just a bit further. Things that weren’t there before, you tripped over. This went on for several weeks after Trish moved in. Then it stopped.
Trish was Mike or Mark’s girlfriend, one of the alleged blow-job girls.
Maybe it was just her moving stuff, Fay said.
He gave her a look that said, Oh, now you’re skeptical? Fay had mentioned before that she thought it better to err on the side of belief than not. You shouldn’t miss out on things for fear of being a sap. Have a cynical sense of humor but don’t be a cynical person. Though it wasn’t always easy to draw such a fine line.
Well, Carlo said, Trish is fucked up, but she isn’t that subtle. Or that cluttered.
Carlo really did speak that poetically at times. He’d read Sherwood Anderson and Willa Cather and James Fenimore Cooper. He could recite whole pages of Moby-Dick, and sometimes he did. Fay’s fiancé Des had only ever read The Catcher in the Rye and 1984, even though he’d gone to a prep school back East. Some people could get stoned and remember things and some people couldn’t.
Fay led the bay over to the picnic table so that she could step into the stirrup more easily. Let me help, said Carlo. His hand slipped off her butt and into her crotch and he left it there and just pressed. She gave him a look. He held the gaze, but then they dropped it. A few years later she might have had the poise to say, Hey, did you just grope me? But she was only twenty-one or twenty-two, she’d only slept with about three people, with her eyes closed. If she’d known what to do, she wouldn’t have been so stupidly engaged in the first place.
And even though he was ten years older, Carlo was probably stunted by all the pot he smoked, and therefore too young to demand more seriously, Hey, why are you so stupidly engaged? Looking back, there was no excusing this moment at all, but at the time she hadn’t thought too much of it, was excited, a little. It was never repeated.
Carlo swung into the saddle. This is where the cowboy image failed. Flicker was a small horse. Carlo liked the intimacy and purity of the English saddle, with a light bit. But Flicker also had a strong head and a hard mouth. Fay thought he needed a sterner bridle.
Fay and Carlo left the meadow with the picnic table. Carlo rolled another joint. They had a view in one direction of snowy peaks and in the other of the hazy plains. They passed the burned-out chimney from a ruined cabin; she and Carlo were in this fantasy of having that cabin to themselves, back in pioneer days. This was the kind of domestic dream they often shared, a deep intimacy rooted in the past with no link to any future of theirs. Fay’s Lee jeans were tight through the crotch and the pot made her hyper-aware of Carlo just ahead of her, slouching in his English saddle, then waiting so he could pass the joint back to her, the zing as their fingers touched. There was no one near them, no one in miles. Even back then sex with Des wasn’t terrific. She didn’t even realize how great a lover he wasn’t for years, how would she? It would have been so easy to go back to that picnic table. Fay did a lot of crappy things in her marriage, but she never fucked around. Maybe she was honorable, or maybe she was chickenshit.
Tell me something about Russia, Carlo said. Did you walk on the Nevsky Prospekt?
Of course I did, Fay said. She’d just come back from a two-month summer Russian language program; she’d fought to get in. Not many Americans studied in the Soviet Union in those days. Most of her compatriots had been selected from Ivy League schools.
I saw the Bronze Horseman, too, she said. I waited in line with the Soviets for the release of the uncensored edition of The Master and Margarita.
Though she still hadn’t got around to reading it in Russian. She told Carlo about the lines circling around the block and far down the street, waiting for that book and, a few weeks later, for a translation of Jack London.
It was bigger than Star Wars to them, she said. Or at least it looked like it.
Will you go back? Carlo asked. I’d go if I were you.
Fay fell into the same helpless silence that swallowed her whenever one of her professors asked the same question. She ought to go back. She’d only had a summer. She guessed she needed another semester to make herself fluent. But what was she supposed to do about Des? You wanted to be free in an exploratory experience like living in the Soviet Union, you didn’t want confused loyalties, some boyfriend or husband back home.
The summer had shaken her as it was. Russian men disregarded boyfriends and husbands if your beloved were in the same room, let alone five thousand miles away. But the trouble was the American men, British men, Australian men. English-speaking men with the same interests as hers. Young men planning foreign service careers, academic careers, literary careers, men hoping to save the world. She planned to apply to Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Stanford for grad school. She was expecting fellowships.
When she got to Russia and learned there were people—both men and women—who were on her exact level, people she hadn’t met previously in her state school, she was already engaged to Des.
What’s he got on you? Carlo asked.
Basically, she didn’t know how to get out of it. I broke up with him once, she told Carlo. After an abortion. It came out that Des eventually wanted about five children. Fay wanted none. She didn’t have the money to move out.
That’s pathetic, Carlo said.
Was it? What did he know, Fay thought. He was in his thirties. Still his parents would send money if he had a bad month. Fay was on her own. It was a stretch to pay tuition and rent by herself.
Anyway, Marie said, wasn’t Carlo just another stoner? He was handsome, they had a connection, but overall, Marie couldn’t see the upside. Carlo wasn’t likely to get a fellowship to study under Brzezinski. Marie considered him as much dead weight as Des was.
After her accident, Fay and Des grew apart from both Alex and Carlo. Fay and Marie fell into a feud. It took everything Fay had just to graduate. She barely noticed that Alex went back to school, majoring in Anthropology, though she had been surprised to hear that Carlo sold the horses, gave up the geology career, and decided to study medicine.
So, a couple of decades later, here comes Alex back to visit. Turns out Mike or Mark still owns the Sugarloaf place. Fay has decided after all to leave Liza behind, drive up to say hello. Naturally, Marie is tagging along. At forty-eight, Fay is coming up on menopause. She’s finally married the man she might as well have married. He’s helped her raise Gwen, her daughter with Des, seen the girl through her teenage crises and off to college. Though with Gwen launched, Fay is secretly wondering whether she wants anyone in her life. She sometimes looks at the houseplants and thinks, What the hell do you want from me? But now that you realize you’d just as soon be alone, what are you supposed to say to the good, kind man who’s shown up and done so much for you? Fay does have this honorable streak.
Or maybe she’s chickenshit. Her friends are divided.
She drives up the familiar mountain road, the ghost of her college self smirking from the passenger seat. When she gets to the house, there is the old path through the woods, mysterious as a fairytale. Not one of the good ones. Come to think of it, are there any good fairy tales, of the real ones? The trail has narrowed, or seems to have. It looks more like a footpath now, rather than like something you’d ride a horse along. It probably isn’t very far to the yellow pine; her memory is vivid in terms of the light and the colors but hazy in many other ways. Distorted, just like those gruesome fairytales. Maybe those stories were invented by people with recent concussions, their original raconteurs having been walloped with scabbards or mugs of mead.
She walks in through the kitchen door.
Alex doesn’t ask her anything about herself or what she’s doing. He always did talk about himself, but the old stories were always self-deprecating and entertaining. There’s no sign, now, of his ever having had a crush on her. He’s describing what he’s been doing in Yakima: running the cultural museum. He’d been right in the middle of the controversy about the remains of a five-thousand-year-old skeleton some people thought had Caucasian features. This does sound interesting, because he’s interested in it, which is more than Fay can say about her own work. It had all been epic when she’d had to create a career out of thin air to support herself and her kid, after the divorce from Des, and also when her kid had been a runaway doing drugs. But now everything has turned out fine. Fay has a nice husband and a daughter at Lewis & Clark and a contract job working from home for Microsoft. Any mediocre business major could have had her life. Her ex-husband Des could have had her life.
Then Carlo walks in. Or rather stops dead in the doorway.
He’d entered through the other side of the house, and when he gets to the kitchen and sees her standing there talking to Alex, he freezes. He sees me, Marie whispers. His wife slams into his back. She almost drops her tray of chips and guac, her gaze going straight to Fay. Even with that collision, Carlo doesn’t move for a second or so. The kids squeeze around him and run into the kitchen.
He’s as cowboy lean as ever. He doesn’t look much older than he had when he’d been, what? thirty? thirty-two? Despite working under fluorescent lights all day, his skin is tanned, leathery. Those eye-creases still look great. He does seem tired. He introduces Fay to his wife, Suzanne, small and dark-haired. Fay feels chunky beside her.
However, that freezing in the doorway thing has answered a question that Fay hadn’t known she had. Or had forgotten she had.
Or raised one.
To make conversation, Fay says, Remember the orphans’ Thanksgiving dinners? What was the worst dish?
They were all the sort who didn’t go home for the holidays. No one had heard the phrase “helicopter parents” back then. Kids had flown or driven out to college sans parents even for the first term. There had been no Target. Anyway, for their orphans’ Thanksgiving, the rule had been to bring the crappiest dish from your parents’ table.
Green Jell-o with pockets of cheese whiz, Carlo instantly says.
With grated carrots on top, Alex adds.
That definitely wins, Fay agrees. The dish is conjured before them all.
Eww, says one of the twin daughters. They’re eight or so, Fay thinks. Carlo must be exhausted. What is he, sixty? The wife is a little older than she is, Fay guesses, already in her fifties. Fay can’t abide people having children so late, the whining essays you have to read in formerly serious magazines like The Atlantic about infertility treatments, all the healthcare costs society has to bear as a result of premature births.
They toss a few memories back and forth, Mike or Mark hovering as always in the background: the meals, the train room, which the kids are sorry isn’t still around. The music room still exists, upgraded to a movie theater. There is still a brew-op, and Fay sips an ale, quite good. If there are pot plants, the kids don’t get a tour. There’s a newer hot tub. One dog. No horses.
Fay can hardly articulate why she thinks she should have married Carlo, and Marie disagrees in any case. Except that he eventually did get married. At the time when she knew him, he’d seemed no more Russia-material than Des had. But Fay hadn’t gone to Russia, as Marie, enraged, often points out. She’d had a bad accident, and then a kid. Then she’d wanted to stay home to raise Gwen. That’s how it goes, right? If this, then that. If not this, then you’d rather this other that, and then also a different this. Fay certainly never cared about working for IBM and Microsoft. One of the different thises would have been not working, especially during her daughter’s teenage years, trying to keep her out of trouble. But she hadn’t had that option, either.
Carlo is a surgeon. His wife stays home.
Also, it was Carlo’s horse that had deflected her career in the first place. She might at least have enjoyed Carlo’s money and his sexiness.
Does this have to make sense?
Yes, says Marie. You should try to make sense. You never should have hung out with these people in the first place. Des or Carlo. What a choice!
Fay and Carlo watch each other from across the various rooms the mostly shallow conversations move through; he only approaches her after about an hour. Fay is standing by the window, looking out toward the sloping meadow, which used to be the pasture.
I heard you remarried, Carlo says. What does your husband do?
Steve. He’s a therapist. Fay wishes there were horses in the pasture. She’d like to get a good look at Flicker again. Though surely he’s dead by now. What Steve does isn’t as easily categorized as being a psychotherapist, and how they came to be living in a dumpy town far away is complicated, but she supposes “therapist” is good enough for most people.
Carlo picks up on the pause. Are you happy? he asks.
Christ, Fay thinks. She supposes “yes” is good enough for most people. Are you? she returns.
Carlo turns his head so the light does that sideways thing with his eyes. Fay immediately wonders if Suzanne gets to be happy, despite the fact that she was just thinking that happiness was a stupid soundbite no one could attain.
Sure I’m happy, says Carlo, bending to wipe guacamole off a daughter’s mouth with his napkin.
It seems they don’t have much to say to one another. She’s turning away when he asks, So, is he smart enough?
What?
Steve, is he smart enough for you?
He says it slightly aggressively, or maybe she imagines it. That he’s making fun of her and at the same time he knows she does need someone smart. In any case, she has no idea how to answer that question, either. In fact, Steve often accuses her of feeling bored with him.
I heard he was kind of a quiet guy, Carlo says. I can’t really see you with a quiet guy.
Great, says Fay. Exactly where are all these super-smart, way fun, but trustworthy alpha males hiding, anyway?
Fay guesses they all went to the embassy in Russia or to New York or D.C. or somewhere. They didn’t seem to have located themselves in Boulder. Irrelevant, says Marie, who only cares about what happened before the accident, before she was cut out. Carlo, Steve, blah blah. Everything that’s happened since 1986 was a mistake, according to Marie.
Fay leaves Carlo at the window because if she meets his eyes he might see something she would have to give credence to. All the old loneliness. Steve is the dark handsome man the fortune tellers always promise you, he actually is, the guy with the cop mustache and the gym biceps and the brown listening eyes, and there is nothing wrong with him, except there is nothing wrong with him. He wants nothing but her, so she is lonely still. She walks away from the party, through the living room and the kitchen and right through the outside door. And there is the old path through the woods.
Okay, she says to Marie.
It takes only about five minutes to come upon the place. The yellow pine doesn’t look the same, but Fay recognizes it anyway, they both do. Fay has to pass it, turn, and come back the other way to be sure, but even though the underbrush has grown up and the trees are bigger, the turn in the path, the arrangement of the stones has been seared into her mind. Her old cells have passed on the information as they replicated, her current being vibrates with the danger. This is where your old life died. This is where who you were ceased to be. Maybe there has never been a you since.
Marie disappears from Fay’s peripheral vision.
Carlo was out of town. She had come to exercise the horses. Even Marie never had anything against the horses. The first decision: which to ride. Flicker was more fun, harder to manage. The other horse giving her his usual passed-over looks as she tacked up. Second decision: the Western saddle. She couldn’t find the English and never learned why it wasn’t in the tack shed. Flicker hated that Western saddle. Throughout the ride he bucked and fought for the bit. And when they’d come back from the Switzerland Trail and turned onto the path to the house, she’d known. Hadn’t she? Marie thinks Fay knew. Hadn’t there been a moment when she could have dismounted, led him back—third decision? When she’d guessed he was going to seize that silly bit in his hard mouth and bolt?
Blur of trees and rocks like the Milky Way in a time exposure. Once Flicker went, Fay had many dilated seconds to realize there was no way she was going to be all right. It’s not that your life flashes before your eyes so much as it gathers itself, as if someone pushes the retract button on the tape measure and it all slithers inside. It was out of her hands and she knew it. As a child, Fay Marie Shattuck had faced violence in her home many times. She knew what to do when there was nothing to be done. Panic never serves you. Russia, Des, everything that was a “supposed to be” in her life just hung there, outside of the tape measure case she and Marie had curled up within. This could be it, she thought, saying a provisional goodbye to everything outside herself. Those ten or fifteen seconds before the impact had been the most peaceful moments of Fay’s life.
Fay finds herself sitting up among the needles and leaves, half her Ray-Bans on one ear. Blood, already sticky and clotted, covering her face and neck. Her shirt drenched. It is terribly important to find the other half of her sunglasses. She feels caught inside a painting, everything at such a severe angle she might as well be lying down even after she stands. A small tree limb pierces her cheek, pine needles and bark between her teeth. […]
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Claudia Putnam lives in a remote area of the Puget Sound. Her work appears in Confrontation, Variant Lit, Ghost Parachute, Cimarron Review, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere. A novella, Seconds, came out in 2023 from Neutral Zones Press. A brief memoir, Double Negative, won the Split/Lip Press CNF chapbook prize. Her debut collection, The Land of Stone and River, won the Moon City Press poetry prize. She has been awarded several residencies, including the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy and a stint at Kimmel Nelson Harding.
Read More: A brief Q&A with Claudia Putnam