The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [13]
After her father’s death, Catherine, silent and spectral, would sleepwalk into Nathaniel’s bedroom. She would clear away his discarded clothes on the floor. Then she would descend, convulsed with sobs, and curl up like a dog. Already half a ghost herself, she brought herself to her brother’s room so that he might witness her grief. If there had been consolation to be offered, Nathaniel had no idea where to find it. Their father, a genial guy they had taken for granted, was now fully absent and had taken all comfort with him. What was there to say? Nothing much. Nathaniel resorted to patting his sister on the back as she lay there on the floor beside his bed.
She had been a strong solid smart girl, with brilliant blue eyes that had ice traces in them. As a field hockey player and a rock singer fronting a high school band called Strep Throat, she had been good at raising her voice. With her particular appetites and raucousness, she would have been loved early on in the ordinary course of things by some brave boy who might have noticed and admired her. She was an inventory-taker, a psychic accountant, habitually noting quantities and qualities in rooms and in people. But after her father’s death, a single inventory took over the others. “There was only one of him,” she would sigh, over and over again.
She formed a new appetite for oblivion.
Nathaniel had not guessed that his sister could be furtive, brazenness having been her usual tactic, but, freed from stability, she developed a gift for secrecy. She joyfully took up drinking, a habit for which she had a calling. Alcoholism brought out her stealthy side, the midnight joy of beer from the refrigerator and whiskey from the cupboard. Nothingness called to her and she answered. At first she drank alone or with strangers. Her mother concealed all the liquor bottles—a guileless woman, she first tried hiding them behind the detergent boxes in the laundry room, where they were as obvious as Easter eggs—before throwing all of them out.
Catherine quickly found a community of like-minded high school classmates who drank, a whole crowd of fellow students who loved getting wasted as much as she herself did. They drank and drove and staggered around the woodsy Wisconsin off-road locales they found, cursing the sky, vomiting, laughing, falling down, passing out, waking up, and crawling behind the wheel before starting up the collaborating cars and weaving their way back.
On a Friday night in early November in Catherine’s senior year, one of these boys, on a mission to take Catherine home, drove off the road into a patiently waiting tree. The impact threw her forward into the dashboard. When she came to, wrapped in swaddling clothes after several days of unconsciousness, all her words had been wiped clean from her brain’s left hemisphere. She had sustained a skull fracture, a broken arm, and her body seemed to be one large bruise. The driver, a boy contemptuous of the future, had successfully canceled his own, but she had been saved—that is, her physical life had been saved—and before very long she was up and about, seemingly as beautiful as ever, except for her eyes, which had gone blank. The neurologists claimed that something had happened in her posterior temporal lobe, and they engaged in professional mumbling about the prognosis, saying that there would certainly be more tests until that stage when they could discover the source of her asymptomatic verbal aphasia. The tests, they said to Nathaniel and his mother, were very good these days. We have excellent tests, they said proudly, brain injury is no longer the grave mystery it once was, we will figure it out. And we have therapies, many of which have been proven to work. We are scientists; this is a science.
With her light dimmed, Catherine came home. She took up her life, almost, where it had been left off.
Around that time, Nathaniel began to notice ghost-women watching him from street corners, alleyways,