Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [148]
Ghosts
OUT ON THE FRONT LAWN, Melinda was weeding her father’s garden with a birdlike metal claw when a car drifted up to the curb. A man with brown hair highlighted with blond streaks got out on the driver’s side. He stood still for a moment, staring at the house as if he owned it and was mulling over possible improvements. In his left hand he held an apple with teeth marks in it, though the apple was still whole. Melinda had never laid eyes on the guy before. Her father’s house was located in an affordable but slightly run-down city neighborhood with its share of characters. They either gawked at you or wouldn’t meet your gaze. Many of them were mutterers who deadwalked their way past other pedestrians in pursuit of their oddball destinations. She returned to her weeding.
“Hot day,” the man said loudly, as if comments on the weather might interest her. Melinda glanced at him again. With a narrow Eric Claptonish face, and dressed in blue jeans and a plain white shirt, he was on his way to handsomeness without quite arriving there. The apple was probably an accessory for nerves, like a chewed pencil behind the ear.
The baby monitor on the ground beside her began to squawk.
“I have to go inside,” Melinda said, half to herself. She dropped her metal claw, rubbed her hands to get some of the topsoil off, and hurried into the house, taking the steps two at a time. Upstairs, her nine-month-old son, Eric, lay fussing in his crib. With dirt still under her fingernails, she picked him up to kiss him and caught a whiff of wet diaper. At the changing table, she raised her son’s legs with one hand and removed the diaper with the other while she observed the stranger advancing up the front walk toward the entryway. The doorbell rang, startling the baby and making his arms quiver. Melinda called over to her father, whose bedroom was across the hall, to alert him about the stranger. Her father didn’t answer. Sleep often captured him these days and absented him for hours.
She pinned the clean diaper together, and with slow tenderness brought Eric to her shoulder. She smoothed his hair, the same shade of brown as her own, and at that moment the man who had been standing outside appeared in front of her in the bedroom doorway, smiling dreamily, still holding the bitten apple.
“I used to live here,” the man said quietly, “when I was little. This was my room when I was small.” After emphasizing the last word with a strange vehemence, he seemed to be surveying the walls and the ceilings and the floors and the windows until at last his gaze fell on Eric. The baby saw him and instead of screaming held out his arm.
“Jesus. Who are you?” Melinda said. “What the hell are you doing up here?”
“Yes, I’m sorry,” the man said. “Old habits die hard.” The baby was now tugging downward at Melinda’s blouse buttons, one after the other, which he did whenever he was hungry. “I heard him crying,” the man said. “I thought I might help. Is that your father?” He pointed toward the second bedroom, where Melinda’s father dozed, his head slumped forward, a magazine in his lap.
“Yes, it is. He is,” Melinda said. “Now please leave. I don’t know you. You’re a trespasser. You have serious boundary issues. You have no right to be here. Please get the fuck out. Now.” The baby was staring at the man. “I’ve said ‘please’ twice, and I won’t say it again.”
“Quite correct,” the man said, apparently thinking this over. “I really don’t have any right to be here.” He made a noise in his throat like a sheep cough. He had the unbudging calm of a practiced intruder. “Truly I didn’t mean to scare you. It’s just that I used to live here. I used to be here.” With the hand not holding the apple, he held out his index finger to Eric, and the baby, distracted from the button project, grabbed it. The man loosened the baby’s grip, turned around, and began to walk down the stairs. “If I told you everything about this house,” he said as he was leaving, “and all the things in it, you wouldn’t live here. I’m sorry if I frightened you.”
She followed him. From the landing