Problems at Home

Turn the glare this way, and the rings of his eyes tighten, in the center of each a shadow in profile marches nowhere on a runged wheel like a lab rat. Lower the shine and crows shudder and squawk on the shore of midnight in hers. Further down, to the right: sea harvest churns against the child’s, soaking its blue rims brown, and there, on the horizon, beyond the upswell of litter, coasts the dot of a cruise liner, trailed by exhaust.

They do not stir while I probe, pinching their eyes open and clicking a torch. I’m not sure they can hear me or want me doing this or even want me in their midst; that they know of my existence. But as the oldest ghost in this year-round rainy town and longest occupant of the damp, two-story stump that creaks as it rises from night, I am a steady voice to narrate their wants, the surest hand to raise the curtain on their lives.

Hi, my name is Sam, and I do not think there’s a problem at home. What we’ve got here is long, thin silence between finger-pointing outbursts. Wintry days in which one or two accusations flare. Problem sounds huge. Problem sounds manic. Problem is the cosmic dust from planets colliding. The s at the end of that title would be yelling at me to call child protective services if I didn’t know better. Come on, now. Like every couple, Beth and Brahms have spells of not speaking to each other or looking at each other, for sheer disgust. And maybe last night she threw a soup bowl at his head and he spat at her and the boy saw all this happen. Maybe he’d had a drink and in his stupor pinned her to the wall and called her names and glanced a blow across her cheek. I’ve seen problem. This isn’t it. Also, why at home? While they fester in a zone of silent reproach, they also occupy lengthy winters of the mind. Home here is all broken up and dispersed in cold daydreams and teary rumination. Chunks of it float elsewhere. Each builds an interior life of solitude, walled by the flesh, even when forced together, say over dinner or as he huffs on top of her. The boy hasn’t been home since June, though his body brims wet hay and gypsum through the rooms, though his exhale flutters now against my face. You can glimpse a person’s true home, their earnest destination, in either hole of their irises, places that will stun you by their distance from the life you offer.

With horror I have watched the hive fall away, stranger after neighbor after servant after aunt, and family shrink to an overworked, histrionic pair who seem baffled by the crawler in their midst.

Long before their bond started to fray, Brahms trembled onto one knee in a sweet and sepia dusk and grazed Beth’s hand and looked up at her, the rumble onshore drowning out his words. Doubts popped in and out of Beth’s mind as in a game of whack-a-mole, like, Do you even love this man? And when she said yes, it was not the least bit teary or fumbling; it sounded like victory, the fist-pumping yes of a spectator whose team has scored again, the yes of a lucky draw. A baby squealed into their lives six months later, but being the first, it had to go (no one keeps their first; friends and family will enact the usual fanfare around the birth of a baby then wait for the nest to slacken and the baby fall out like theirs did. They should have aborted it, but Beth really thought she’d beat the 0.0001 percent odds).

After the loss, Beth would sit forward on the chaise lounge downstairs from dusk till dawn, staring into space, uneaten cuts of fruit graying in front of her, her features rumpled—and Brahms would slip out of the house and tail a friend to oblivion. She would hush Brahms’s stumbling attempts to console her and squirm out of his embrace. She would flinch at the slightest sound-heels clicking up the driveway, boots creaking on the porch, a knock at the door, a whisper, “Beth, are you there?” Knock-knock. The plop from a faucet, the beating of withered wings. A clump of plaster spinning to its reflection in the kitchen floor and skittering into bits. A pregnant monkey foraging in the yard, sniffing then tossing red and blue and purple bursts in a basket, reaching higher among the vines for nectar as its three kids hooted at one another and rolled across the grass. The twins next door squashing their faces to a window in the nursery, over the empty cradle, mist forming on the glass from their laughter, around their tiny fangs. This nearly convinced Beth that her life here, with Brahms, could only be an appalling joke. She slid his ring off and turned it over in her palm as she debated the next destination. Then he came home. “I figured it out,” he called from the hallway. She sat stiff as he shrugged out of his coat and stumbled to her. A thing like madness leapt in his eyes. “Life has no meaning and you’re unhappy because you insist that it should.”

For the first time in two weeks, Beth’s voice creaked out of repose and crawled to the edge of her tongue. “How am I insist—” but then she whimpered, “Oh, Enoch.” For that was his name.

“You doubt me,” Brahms took her hand, “because we experience it one event after another, instead of all at once, life. Play dead for a minute.”

Beth winced.

“Say we’re reunited on the other side or whatever rubbish people dream up to cope. He’s with us. We’re looking out at the world together. Now zoom in on a couple like us, who could be us, and tell me what matters, in the end: That he died or that we had a child?” Brahms tensed through a thought; Beth tugged her hand almost free of his fierce grip. “It can’t be the first since we all go, it has to be . . . we brought him here, we rocked him to sleep, night after night. He was here.”

Beth groaned. “And now he isn’t.”

“There’s no meaning or order: if we hold this position, we can rearrange how things happened in our heads. Death came first, then our son, who, though absent, is alive.”

Beth often quips that the boy was conceived during this talk, by Brahms’s blind insistence on life: absent from this dank hole, yes, but a faint twitch in her belly, as if Brahms spoke him into being. By summer the cradle was full, the windows of the house flung open, the rooms overflowing with gifts, and the yard teeming with well-wishers for the sprog scowling in its cap of fleece, its pinkish fingers curled tight. “This one will stay,” the mothers and grandmothers here assured Beth, over something else, their tones uneasy. Beth squinted at the baby and dread crept in her chest. “Can we be honest?” whimpered the youngest mother, and the others stared daggers at her, whispering, “How dare you,” “I don’t know what you mean,” “Now is not the time,” and they stood over her, closed her from Beth’s view, their slick smiles unwavering. “Tell her she’ll need more help than an entire town can provide,” the girl called, pressing against the fence of bodies—and then, huffing defeat: “Good luck, Beth.” Caught in the glare from all the smiling, Beth turned away and dialed her mother and fought an urge to order everyone out. All the ghosts indoors—most Beth’s relations, lively in their death attires, eel suits and ball gowns and picaresque hats—gathered over her as the line cracked open and a voice buzzed the speakers. “Where today?” Beth said with false cheer, a trick from childhood to stop her mother’s long and breathless accounts of her travels since they last spoke. “Good for you. The baby’s fine. Quick one: Was I a problem for you, at any point?”

The line crackled on and on.

“Hello?”

Beep-beep.

A storm stirred under Beth’s skin as she lowered the phone on her heaving chest and tried not to weep. Brahms glimpsed her then, her shaky pallor, between talking heads, and his cup tipped and he dribbled wine down his arm rushing to her. Too late. “Get out,” Beth roared into the gathering, and clapped. “You . . . out!” to the families trickling in with boxes, startling the mothers and their toddlers, the birds in the orchard, us ghosts. “Did you hear me?” she dodged the hand Brahms tried to clamp over her mouth and howled, “Did you hear that? Get the fuck out of my house.”

If you ever wonder why Beth has no friends, why former allies from work and school steer away from her and keep walking as she fumbles an apology, look no further than this outburst in a town where decorum holds more value than a paycheck and will fetch you things money can’t (it’s no coincidence we’ve produced two First Ladies). The next day, Brahms’s boss at the local conservatory, the last man to stagger out the door—he took his gift with him—pulled Brahms from a project with NASA and placed him on “father’s leave,” which, at the time, wasn’t even a thing.

“Looks like the line went out on us,” her mother joked, when she called back, after Beth had bolted the main door and locked the windows. “You were saying?”

Brahms spent the time off work on a diet of cloudy bongs, playing Call of Duty in his den. “Fuck you and fuck the baby,” he murmured at Beth’s sole intrusion, her stutter and lowered gaze. The baby’s choked squealing from the living room, through the hours, somehow missed his ears.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Beth began.

“Ay-ay.” Brahms paused the game and glared at her. “Will you close the door, please?”

Beth’s father, who haunts the family home in Rhode Island (now a museum), heard her weeping that day and flew across the country for her, to give her a hug: she walked right through him, calmer each time, focused on feeding and swaddling the boy. Not one woman in the country of ghosts—in Beth’s own lineage—grasped her making demands on Brahms, her show of creaking apart, her puddling by the cradle every night. When she mentioned finding a “nanny” (she’d started talking to herself), they sat council over her fitness to keep the child. The oldest, who reared five children alone through the Black Plague, kissed her rotten teeth and pronounced Beth, “a suffragette, resentful of her God-given place, a bit slow to her natural purpose.” Unaware of the trial, quite naked in their midst, Beth complained of stretch marks, her aching breasts with their cracked aureoles, her hormones acting up, waves of nausea from all the crying, the constant crying, so loud the boy’s tongue rattled for it, loud enough to crease the surface of water and shake the louvers and rip drifts of plaster from the ceiling. The women chuckled. “Get on with it, girlie,” one said.

“She would cope if she scaled back on work, she has to choose between two jobs—be a good mother or a lawyer,” said a doppelgänger aunt who died childless in the mid-nineties.

“I blame her mother. British women are really men in wigs, not a maternal bone in them,” chimed a grand aunt.

“In my time,” croaked another, “women were called ovarians and men semenarians, which says it all, really.” They went on in this manner as Beth mourned the person she used to be, she who could think clearly, who walked a straight line with her chin up (everyone knew to peel out of her way); the sort of woman before whom Brahms could only shudder, his eyes fretting left-right, lips working but emitting no sound when he tried to ask her out. “You mean on a date?” she helped him out, since he had the thickest lashes she’d ever seen on man, and curly raven hair. He breathed mightily. “Only if you want to.” A long kiss at the end of their outing mottled his face and set him stumbling, reaching for support, which amused her into inviting him upstairs. Absolute victory, Beth thought, as he tripped on the steps and then crawled, tongue lolling, after her. Her bared breasts calmed him, yet made him alert, intent. The shyness fell away, and the speed with which he drew orgasms from her left her sure it had all been an act. She still gags at the depth of her need that first time, all the clinging and groping and wailing, how he refused to concede so she did, had to, at dawn. Gone, those days of abandon; gone, his healing touch. Gone, the wiry arms and legs that made all styles of entanglement possible. Gone, the luster of his hair and her eyes.

“This is a rebellion. Kids should be raised by their mother,” cried the eldest ghost when Beth told Brahms of the nanny’s coming, and the women’s condemnation of Beth spread to further, non-natal regions of Beth’s life, razing the tiniest good: her crisis of faith was really a cloak for atheism in a long line of famed Protestants; her limited cooking; her showy mantras for social rights, like the needlepoint Black Lives Matter banner centered in the hallway (the family owned slaves and she knew it); the unwashable soot to her husband’s skin, despite his pale parents, the not-quite-whiteness of it.

All the ghosts indoors—most Beth’s relations, lively in their death attires, eel suits and ball gowns and picaresque hats—gathered over her as the line cracked open and a voice buzzed the speakers.

I wouldn’t know about mothers bearing the brunt of childcare. I still don’t know how that goes; I never had my own family. Beth’s great-great-great grandfather put me to work as soon as I arrived in this town. Me and the other threshers had our loins pulled out. It’s worse than it sounds. We were the first batch; our women hadn’t arrived, and there was some concern about the white women’s safety. Our women came months after, shackled from young to youngest, and he put them on pills that dried out their insides till they got a little older, say mid-thirties, not as sturdy, prone to huffing and heaving among the cane shoots. Then he took them off it. For some, too late, and those who birthed handed over their screaming infants to him anyway. Who sprayed the seeds in their wombs, nobody dared ask. I do know life back then felt like the sentient sum of a place, and the family an outgrowth of this sum. An infant meant one spot of several thousands in a hive. With horror I have watched the hive fall away, stranger after neighbor after servant after aunt, and family shrink to an overworked, histrionic pair who seem baffled by the crawler in their midst.

The day before the nanny knocked, Beth, before the audience of mothers, took a furtive sip of Jim Beam while breastfeeding, and Brahms overhead her (trying hard to calm the baby and failing) blurt, “I could give you away.” He froze. “You deserve a much better mother than I could ever be,” she was saying. “If only you knew how stupid, how worthless . . . it’s too much, I can’t do it.” He swooped in on her and snatched the baby and covered its ears. When Brahms files for divorce, he will use this episode to show why Beth should not be the guardian.

Her name was Aurora.

Have you ever expected someone yet been taken aback by their appearance? Aurora had that effect on us, a five-foot flame in the dark, come just as the sun receded, reeking of a bountiful summer through the first hours of winter. The panes, iced-over, dripped clear by her warmth. The petals and buds about to ghost out of the orchard flared anew. The doves and parakeets and starlings shook off blankets of snow and twitted our way, clack-clack-clack went their beaks on the glass. She hung up a beret and a cashmere poncho in the hallway and scraped berries and thistle from her hair as Beth showed her around. “And that’s my husband’s cave,” said Beth finally, stood at the top of the stairs to the basement. She began to move on, but Aurora bowed and yoo-hooed to the faint light at the very end, the door rimmed in gold. “Oh, he can’t hear you,” Beth said. Then the door fell open.

“She’s much younger than you,” Brahms gave his opinion at bedtime, looking up from his favorite chapter in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. “Too young to care for a child.”

Hunched at her vanity, dabbing powder on the creases in her face and hemp oil on the grey strands, Beth tut-tutted.

Brahms sat up; the headboard whined. “No, seriously. I don’t get it. Why should our child have a nanny when he has two able parents?”

Beth laughed; drops fat as melon seeds sprang from her eyes. “That’s a good one,” she told Brahms. “Keep’em coming.”

Brahms started to protest, but sulked his way into sleep. While he snored, the ghosts gathered and watched Beth mime something like confidence in a slew of toned-down outfits, the slippery suits she once wore on flights to closings and negotiations and press conferences. She swished her hips in too-tight pants and gawked at the tiny tears along their seams. She forged her redwood feet in satin heels and was surprised when the stems snapped and the stitching came apart. “This part I understand,” said her great aunt Florence, smiling sadly, and for once the women fell silent.

Thank God for Aurora, whose glow the snowed-over county could not diminish! You should have seen her step Beth and Brahms down from their screaming matches and feed them foie gras, while putting the baby to sleep. “I’m done, this is the final straw,” Beth would quaver of a morning, and Aurora would grip her jeweled hand and whisper sweet nothings. “Thank you for listening,” Brahms purred at her feet, emptied of rage and recrimination, blinking tears away as she stroked his hair. “It’s been ages since anyone heard me.” He got in a bog like this most nights, and Aurora, sylph-like by winter candlelight, would give him a jolly thump on the back and kiss his ears pink. And in this way she mediated their needs, hinting to each spouse what the other wanted, so that they almost trusted each other as in the early days, but only through her; in her absence they retreated, seething, to opposite corners of the house.

But, noticed one woman, and another, and then the rest, there was something not quite right with the girl. I looked again, though all I’d done since Aurora walked in this house was look at her. I looked twice without having ever looked away, if that makes sense—and she was the same. The most beautiful black woman I’d ever seen. Perhaps they meant the fact Beth let her do things to the baby. Good things. That when she spoke, Beth leaned into her voice and you could see Beth’s face close to the world, to us. Yes, yes, yes, Beth swayed, below the cadences that added up to huge demands. Yes. So, before Beth and Brahms, a clique of feathered-up witches leaned over the cradle and incanted trauma from the baby’s sides. Aurora, the loudest of them, thrust an oiled-up thumb in the baby’s mouth, in and out, in-out, for good luck, she said. She dangled cowries over him in place of a plastic constellation and pronounced him clean.

Beth scoffed. “From what?” she asked Aurora.

“His father’s bloodline,” Aurora said, lifting the baby.

Beth and Brahms traded looks of concern. “But my husband is from New England’s finest.”

“He’s adopted,” Aurora said. “His real ancestors were cargo-ed in from West Africa.”

Beth laughed through her nose, a string of honky sneezes. “Right.”

“Yours kept field hands,” Aurora said, “and worked them to their deaths.”

The laugh died mid-peal; Brahms stepped back from Beth.

“Wait. Who told you that?” Beth said.

We, too, wondered how Aurora knew these things.

“We’re taking your son with us,” Aurora said. “He’s ours for one night.” Ignoring Beth’s why and where and when will you be back, she floated to the door, the coven closing behind her. Before they left, she paused in a stance I would remember her by for the rest of my earthly sojourn: the baby clinging so hard to her body it was hard to tell where she ended and it began, as if transplanted there, pawing for a nipple, whimpering in a half-sleep; Aurora, haloed with moonlight, looking tenderly upon him.

Of course, the women of this house trailed them past the blinking cones from streetlamps, the strays crowding mounds of garbage, a busker blowing on a busted harmonica, the long, silvery notes lost in roaring spindrifts. At each junction a witch vanished, until it was just Aurora and the baby, solemn at the border, before the teeming sea. “I was a mother, ages ago,” Aurora confessed then, “but my son was an experiment to them: let’s see how long he lives before we thwart him. It was a different time. He would have lived today, I think.”

Beth’s baby patted her cheek and smeared a line of tears glowing indigo, neon against the night. The wet left a sweet phosphorescence on the baby’s palm, its fingers pruned with damp.

Meanwhile, collapsed on the couch, Brahms held the phone away for the weight of his mother’s confession. Paler and wrinklier than usual beside him, Beth stamped both hands over her mouth. “I woke a full American, and I’m going to bed a quarter Igbo. Make it make sense, ma.”

“What’s there to say?” snapped Dorothy, the sweetest lady you’ll ever meet. “No one can tell, I know that’s what really bothers you. We wanted you the moment we set eyes on you. Okay?”

Brahms snatched the phone from his ear, as if it stung. “Fuck this quadroon shit,” he bawled, and I just about blew my camouflage laughing. I roared so loud the dogs could hear me and almost the neighbors. Loud enough for Brahms to sit up and squint into the dim. When the ladies returned and pressed me for what happened while they were away, I played mute. It was Simeon, the thresher peeled open and tossed in a vat of boiling oil for disobedience, who told them: “Brahms black.” The grandmas clucked and the aunties worried at their bonnets. “The baby,” they seemed to be thinking: “Oh, God, no. No.”

Well, the baby looked to be of New England’s finest stock, if you asked me. Aurora brought him home at midnight, looking windswept, washed out of a chaotic memory, the baby calm at her breast. Beth and Brahms looked up at them and flailed harder to get out of a mental haze. “He looks a lot bigger than when you left,” Beth said. “I’m fresh off the phone with my mom,” Brahms said. “How did you know?”

Aurora made past them for the cradle.

“By the way,” Brahms called after her, and Beth gripped his knee, tight, “it’s all shades of fucked up to cleanse my son of his Igboness, as if there’s something wrong with it.”

“Your ancestors formed the largest banished tribe,” Aurora said after a pause. “Far from noble, less than human, they occupied the hinterlands of South Eastern Nigeria and couldn’t wait to get far from home—they offered themselves while other clans resisted, fled, carried out suicide pacts en masse. They fought to get on the white man’s boat, and on arriving the shores of Louisiana, wept for joy.”

Brahms’ stare spaced into thought.

“Don’t listen to her,” Beth said.

The baby whimpered; Aurora kissed it quiet. “Banishment remains the most severe punishment in Igbo land. What did they do to deserve it? Do you want to know?”

“He doesn’t.” Beth drew a shuddering breath. “It’s time for you to leave.”

The chill Aurora’s presence had staved off crept in the house as Beth and Brahms mourned with their backs to each other; it gnawed at the baby, biting through swaddle and talc to its veins. The baby’s tortured pout blew into a scream, but, through the night, not once did Beth wake to soothe it.

Aurora seemed to expect this on her return at dawn, the baby’s coming apart, the blue face and bluer lips, the crystals dug in its tongue. She raised it and the crying stuttered off, and it was her turn to weep. The baby’s cheeks turned rosy again under her touch. “There, there,” she sang. She reeked of the subway.

Downstairs, Brahms topped the Christmas tree with tinsel; Beth, shrunken overnight, rubbed his back and whispered in his ear. He was blonde, the kinks in his hair ironed out.

---

“We’re going for a walk,” Aurora told the baby, and she crept off without a second glance at the parents. It must have been that afternoon plums and apricots and passion fruit tumbled out of her hair and plopped on the pavement and rolled into the corners of the house, and wings stirred about her face, tiny and papery and bright. The baby returned a foot taller, outgrew its pram and leather carrier in the time it took them to tour the town. He toddled behind her sans pacifier, on dimpled knees.

The aunties panicked. “She has claimed him the way women of her station do,” they said. “They let children feed on their essence.”

Beth barely noticed. Even when leaflets sprouted after her touch, her bootsteps, from her spittle and urine, when the glow grew so strong that it cast the night town in relief and foxes trotted and bears stirred out of repose towards it, not when the women who had shunned Beth burst into the living room and draped themselves everywhere. “Beth, we can’t go home,” they said. “Please forgive us.”

Thank God for Aurora, whose glow the snowed-over county could not diminish!

By New Year’s Eve the boy stood to Aurora’s waist, and the cops no longer mistook her for his kidnapper, none of that “Ma’m, step over here for a moment” business, for the air of complete bliss about them as they strolled downtown. At the border, this time, Aurora knelt and held his face.

“I gotta tell you something,” she huffed, but seemed to think again. “You’re so grown, I bet you can walk home alone now.”

“Momma.” The boy tensed. “Why?”

“Don’t ever forget who you are,” Aurora said; “how you feel about things deep down. You will be right in your feelings more often than you’re wrong. So stay open to feeling.”

The boy nodded twice, as if he could understand.

A ferry slid across the sun, carbon unspooling in white ribbons from its many exhausts.

“And if you do get married,” Aurora said, through tears, “hit yourself a thousand times before you think to hit her once. You hear me?”

The boy stared through her, his lips pinched. “Not get-getting married,” he said finally.

“We’ll see,” Aurora said. She untangled from him and stood. “Now turn around.”

Her bright, tinkling laugh was the last thing he heard. Beth and Brahms found him crumpled on the lawn, sobbing into the snow.

“Where’s Aurora?” Beth squawked, and she looked around them as if Aurora might surface from a bush. “Did she leave without notice? Do you think?” She gasped. “Well, how rude. I resume work on Tuesday!”

“She went back into the sea,” the boy said. He sniffed and roughed away more tears.

“Oops,” Brahms faced Beth. “You have no choice but to step into your natural role.”

Beth downed the rest of the bourbon in her glass and burped.

By June Beth is pregnant again and without work, and we’re watching Brahms drag her by her locks downstairs to make his dinner. “Learn your place,” he warns her, when she resists, clinging to a door post and whimpering. The boy runs out of the house, but his cries for help drown in his throat.

“Beth, do as he says,” we howl over centuries, “and you won’t have a problem at home!”