What are ghosts? What is memory? What are we afraid of?
A narrow gravel road ran between the highway and the railroad tracks. It went across a one lane, timber-framed bridge and ended in a copse of pine trees. Halfway between the railroad bridge and the pine trees stood an old blue house. I lived there when I was a child.
The house was dark blue. The window shutters peeling white and the roof rusted metal. The window panes frosted in the winter.
One of those frosted winter nights I was told by my mother to go downstairs where no one ever went. There were some old blankets on a bed in a little room down there. It was cold and we had no heat. Go get them and come back, was all I had to do.
I don’t like it down there.
Just go, my mother said. My father was watching me from his bed.
I didn’t want to go. It was dark and I was only seven years old. It was cold. But we were all cold, I was reminded, and I had to.
The steps down the stairs were carpeted and dark. I held my fingers along the wall to find my way. At the bottom of the stairs the room was through an empty doorway on the right. I felt the end of the wall on the last step, then the empty doorframe. The door was open and I leaned to look inside.
The bed was against the far wall. Behind the bed was a window and outside a full white moon shone its pale light into the room. I saw a black silhouette in front of this window. It was shaped like another child like me sitting and looking through the window out into the moonlit night.
I didn’t breathe. I was seeing the blankets I was supposed to bring upstairs. They were just in a pile on the bed. There they were.
I stepped off the last stair. My step made a sound on the cold floor and the silhouette turned quickly to look at me. I saw a little girl.
I couldn’t scream until I was halfway up the stairs. And even then it was not a scream but a childish moan. I ran to my mother standing in her bedroom. She asked me what was wrong and where were the blankets? I looked up at her and told her I saw a girl sitting on the bed down there.
She looked at my father on the bed. “Will you go get them?” she asked him. I looked at him, too. He said nothing and shook his head no.
By the next summer I had mostly forgotten that winter night. I’d met a boy that lived down the road and we ran and played together every day. He showed me the place beside the railroad tracks where running rain cut a deep ravine into the bank. He showed me where the hobos camped out in a thicket beside the bridge. Freight trains thundered past and we laughed. The boy said he knew where everything was and would show it all to me. I saw the old well overgrown way in the woods where his father threw away a dead dog one time.
At dusk we were sitting in the pine trees at the end of the road. We were tired and the sun had gone down. Leaned up against a tree the boy from down the road asked me if I knew what happened in my house.
I didn’t know what he meant. Nothing happened there.
No, it happened before you lived there. I remember.
Stop lying. I thought he was bored and about to start trouble. I stood up.
I’m not telling a lie. You don’t know what happened to that little girl? It was her daddy and it happened in that room downstairs. Her daddy killed her down there.
Thirty years later I had my daughter Ava Rhea with me one rainy Sunday morning. She wanted to go wherever I was going to find a Halloween story. We pulled into a small parking lot off of Vance Road, about a mile from the airport.
“What is this place?” Ava asked.
“It’s just a place,” I told her.
But it was not just a place. 6230 Vance Road was once the site of Chattanooga’s only abortion clinic. From 1975 until 1993, thirty-five thousand abortions were performed at what was then the Chattanooga Women’s Clinic. In 1993 a pro-life Christian group purchased the property and the abortion clinic was shut down. The following year the site was reopened as what it is today: The National Memorial for the Unborn.
We passed through the iron gate of a tall stone wall. Inside the wall was a courtyard of crushed brown stone. Weird granite sculptures rose up from the brown gravel. The faces on the rock were barely formed and only half-there. Rain drizzled down on a faded steel sign near the door to this Memorial. The sign said this was a Place Of Healing Dedicated To The Memory Of Aborted Children.
I pulled the door open for Ava and followed her inside.
A tall wooden cross wrapped in thorny vines and white flowers stood over the room we entered. A stained glass window colored the floor. A ledge beneath the wall was covered with little dolls, baseballs and stuffed animals, white candles and small white crosses. There were two pencil drawings on the ledge. One of a boy and one of a girl that looked like police composite sketches of unknown human remains. Plastic white roses and heartbreaking letters from mothers were scattered beneath it all.
Ava walked the length of the wall looking at all the toys. She touched some of the stuffed animals but she seemed to know not to pick them up. I told her she could. She shook her head and backed away from the wall. “It’s sad in here,” she said
“I know it is.”
We sat down on the long pews.
“And it’s too loud.”
“Loud? It’s silent in here.”
“Yes, daddy. It’s the loudest silence I’ve ever heard.”
I heard her voice break. I shouldn’t have brought her there.
“Come on, girl. We’ve seen enough.”
I stood up but she stayed. “Do you think there’s ghosts in here?”
I looked at her and told her I didn’t know.
“What even are ghosts, daddy?” She asked me in a way that I knew I had to answer.
I didn’t know how to answer.
What even is a ghost?
My first thought was of an orange-haired girl I once knew. This girl had a spirit so tormented that I wondered how her body had remained animated by such a soul for so long. But hers was the most beautiful spirit I have ever known. She was ethereal and harsh and was always too busy for me but one day I finally caught up with her. Standing before her I was as afraid as I was of that little girl at the bottom of the stairs when I was a boy. I didn’t expect to be and tried to hide my fear. She laughed at me and I’m sure I seemed like a complete fool but that spirit inside her was such that I allowed myself to be the fool.
Later we went walking together over a bridge in a cold March wind. It was not yet dark and she looked up toward a full moon in the sky. She wrapped herself around my arm, pointed toward it and said, “Oh! Look at that moon!”
She wanted to know where I was from so I took her to sit beside a river in the valley. We sat on the ground with cold coffee and crackers and talked for hours. I don’t remember anything we said. I only remember that we fell in love there.
I was going to make a home in that valley. She would garden there and I would build paths through the woods. I’d make wine and she would make a place to pray under the moon. I would write about her under a lantern.
I saw her lying in a field of grass one time, half-hidden and still. Her hair was the same color as the sun going down. I knew she wanted me to come to her but she was too pure to offer herself and I was still afraid of her.
She sat in a plain wooden room at the Society of Friends house one Sunday morning. I was there beside her, holding her hand in that quiet room.
I heard Leonard Cohen sing about a woman who “held on to me like I was a crucifix / As we went kneeling through the dark,” and when I hear that song now there’s a yellow perfume in the air and I hear again the naked truths the orange-haired girl whispered to me when the fear fell away. We lay on her bed with her windows open to the night. Hidden in her dark room she told me what her father did to her mother when she was a little girl.
“I just heard a lot of screaming,” she said. “My father was yelling and then there was just her screaming. I was in the other room and I was so scared and I was little. Nobody ever believed my mother.”
I couldn’t speak after she told me this. I just held her.
“Don’t let me run away,” she whispered. “You have to not let me run away.”
The loudest ghosts have always followed the orange-haired girl. I heard them when she was quiet.
“I think I like you because you remind me of my father,” she told me once.
And then she pushed me away. She told me not to let her but I didn’t know how to stop her. And when I was pushed far enough away, she ran. I could not make her stay. I wanted to follow after her but I knew I had to let her go.
She was the most haunted and beautiful person I have ever known.
“What even are ghosts?” Ava Rhea asked me.
Ghosts are the things that haunt us. The little girl down the stairs and the orange-haired girl.
The little girl died at the hands of her father. Seeing her scared me when I was a boy. But it’s not the girl in the moonlit room that has haunted me for so long. It’s what her father did to her.
“What even is a ghost, daddy?”
I couldn’t tell my daughter these things. I heard the orange-haired girl whisper to me again that I reminded her of her father. I heard her even in that place and I had to get my little girl out of there.
I told Ava Rhea I didn’t know what a ghost was.
“Are they real?”
I couldn’t tell her the truth and pushed her toward the door.
She looked at me and she knew I was lying. When the father is afraid the truth is told. She stepped in front of me wide-eyed and she reached for my hand as I reached for the door.
“Should I be scared of them, daddy?”
“Yes.”
