Ghost Story

CREATIVE NONFICTION

by Annabel Jankovic

        Maja, our husky, started disappearing into the woods by our house. To my child’s eye this modest congregation of trees made a lovely forest, chattering and green, but I grew to know it in later, more discerning years as a mere buffer, sickly and sheer, between our small world and the highway.
         There’d be no sign of her for an hour or more. At thirteen, her hearing had long been on the decline: she wouldn’t heed your calls, however imploring or loud. You could follow her cow trail through the grass and my father’s potato patch, right up to the stringy brown nerve ending of the trees, at which point her path became confused. From there, you’d stand at the edge of the yard, hands on your hips, unsure what to do. 
         Several times she emerged with rawhide bones—taut, round-knuckled—the kind that upset her stomach for days, the kind we never gave her. These were later eclipsed by the two bowls of dog food that appeared, less than two weeks apart, out in the yard.
         My mother wrote the neighbors (people my parents had known thirty years): 

If someone feels bad for Maja—don’t!

         And:

It’s all we can do to keep her inside!

The vet says she’s 15 pounds overweight!

         And they—clog-clad, Harvard-educated, urban horticulturist types—wrote back, of course you don’t feed other people’s dogs.
         These events cast into relief earlier strangeness:

1. The time, two weeks before we discovered the tumor blooming in his belly, our cat, Kolya, was chased into the woods. We stood on the deck at sundown calling him, waiting to see his wild orange leap through the grass, as we had for sixteen years. My brother, Sasha, who has always been the most thoughtful of us, was the only one to hear his distant meows, long and reaching. We followed their shape into the night, into the impervious heart of the trees, through rain and mud and prisms of wood, eventually finding Kolya halfway up an old cedar. My father, who’d followed behind with a twelve-foot ladder, said nothing at the time when his flashlight crossed over a knife (slight, serrated) and jacket (nylon, ripped), seemingly forgotten, protruding from the weeds and leaves.

2. The twin lawn chairs we found, one spectacular morning in early autumn, perfectly inverted after a windless night.

         There was an evening, like many, that Maja pleaded to be let out and my parents fell asleep in the glow of the late-night news. When she didn’t come to the porch, my father circled the yard in his raincoat, then traced the path through the woods. Together, they pursued each dead end in the neighborhood, the adjacent streets, headlights looking long into the greenery. The rainswept highway at last fell silent. When they got home, Maja was asleep at the foot of their bed. We have never had a dog door.
         I’d been living in Portland. I was getting older away from home. My face was changing. I was trying to take my life more firmly in my hands. It seemed to me that every time I came home, there was new word of the events my parents had shaped into, affectionately named, ‘forest man.’ These events didn’t provoke any real apprehension in them: something that confused and unsettled me; they’d accepted these things, the dog food and disappearances, like the weather, or a benign growth.
         Sitting in my childhood bedroom, long after the sun’s wordless retreat, I’d look out into our yard—multidimensionally black, gilded on moonlit nights—filling with fear, looking until it was excruciating. Never knowing what I was looking for.
         Most often I imagined darkness, sovereign and sooty, changing the air around it. Other times, a hermit in the woods, slowly building Maja’s trust, so she wouldn’t protest when he walked across the yard and slit our throats. Much less, I imagined a man with a good heart, who loved animals. Every time, it was my own face I saw in the window, filled with the distant lights of the houses on the bay.
         Maja died on an afternoon in early spring, when my father, her true person, was below the deck of a ship on the Gulf of Mexico: a cruel and inopportune fate from which I fear he will never recover.
         When my mother called to tell me, I was wandering the aisles of an unremarkable Walgreens far from home, waiting for a prescription to be filled. As she spoke, I plumbed the absence my freshly extracted wisdom teeth had opened. 
         A plastic composite tombstone arrived in the mail:

If love could have saved you, you would have lived forever, it said.

         (Words that felt and feel to me too heavy for plastic.)
         It never left its box, regardless. And it’s possible my mother returned it.
         Because in the end, my father couldn’t bear to bury her ashes outside beside Kolya, as we thought we would. They remained in a simple wooden urn above the kitchen hutch, between the detritus of a life, long and deep, in a house. 
         One year. Two. Three. Our days arrive, exact their small toll, and scatter without disturbance or magic.