Seven Turns: A Ghost Story/A Love Story

Tuesday morning dawned sunny and warm. A brisk breeze blew in over the meadow and carried bird song through the window over the desk. Cally stood on the inside of the Rose Room door with her laptop case slung over her shoulder, reaching toward the knob as if it were electrified. It had got to the point, she was thinking, where she didn’t like opening that door, not from either side, not at all.

She considered just turning around and putting her computer back on the desk. If she just stayed right there, perhaps taking the opportunity to finally reply to some of her agent’s emails, maybe Katarina would miss her at breakfast and come looking for her. She would knock, and Cally could call “Come in, please!” That way she wouldn’t have to open the door herself, and that would at least get her past the first awkward hour of this strange new day.

Then she heard the sound of tires crunching on gravel outside. She turned back to the window and looked out to see the red pickup truck pulling into the front yard of Vale House. Katarina appeared from under the porch roof, running across the lawn toward the truck. Even the horses in the meadow drew closer to the fence, tossing their heads excitedly when Ignacio alit from the driver’s seat and lifted a wheelchair out of the bed of the truck.

Cally forgot her trepidation and flung open the Rose Room door. She ran down the stairs, pausing in the Hall long enough to drop her computer case on the desk, then hurried out onto the porch. The Captain and Ian were already there, applauding as Ignacio wheeled Bethany up the walkway.

“Oh, stop,” Bethany called to them, covering her blushing face with her hands. “This is all too much.” When they reached the bottom step, she insisted she could walk, but Ignacio turned the wheelchair around and expertly backed it up the stairs onto the porch. “It’s so good to be back,” she said, and dropped her head back onto the headrest. She was smiling, but her face was pale.

“It’s good to have you back,” said the Captain, tipping an imaginary hat to her. Cally held open the screen door so Ignacio could wheel Bethany into the hall.

“If you could just steer me behind the desk, then,” she said, but Ignacio wheeled her toward the staircase instead.

“Oh, no you don’t,” said Katarina. “Ms. McCarthy has kindly offered to fill in for you until the doctor says you can work again. I’ve got the Daffodil room ready for you.” To emphasize the point, Cally stepped behind the desk and began arranging her things.

“Oh.” Bethany looked up at the top of the grand staircase. “But how..?”

Ignacio was already bending down to lift her out of the chair. “Just put your arms around my neck,” he coached her.

“Mind you don’t squeeze my husband too tight!” Katarina giggled. Cally watched the two proceed up the stairs, followed closely by Katarina holding Bethany’s little bag of medicine and other things from the hospital.

After they passed out of sight, Cally sat down at the desk, but Ian came and stood before it, smiling down at her. “Your breakfast is still waiting for you,” he said. “Katarina made Eggs de Provence, she calls it, this morning. You are still a guest here, and thankful as we are for your help, it’s not so important that you can’t have a good breakfast.” He demonstrated by showing her that he, himself, had acquired a muffin, which he waved happily at her as he headed out of the Hall. “If the phone rings, the voice mail will answer it.” He paused in the dining room to grab two boiled eggs from the table before he disappeared into the south wing.

Cally didn’t feel like breakfast. What she really would have liked would have been to bury herself in work or, perhaps, to go up and talk to Bethany, but the thought of walking back up to the upstairs hall made her feel queasy. On the other hand, the scent of coffee wafting from the dining room, while it didn’t smell quite as good as the coffee at The Bean Garden, was soothing. Finding an outlet under the desk, Cally plugged in her laptop’s charger and went in to breakfast.

The Iversons were there, and Foster and Nell, heaping their plates with sausages, fluffy scrambled eggs that smelled of rosemary and thyme, and beautiful brown bread. “Oh, we get to see you one last time!” Celeste Iverson called out, waving at Cally to take the seat next to her.

Cally sat down and wrapped her hands around the warm coffee cup Katarina set before her. “Where are you headed next?” she asked the couple. “Did you see any ghosts while you were here?” She didn’t look at them, but focused on filling her plate with food she wasn’t sure she was going to eat.

“Sadly, no apparitions this time,” said Mr. Iverson, winking at his wife over the brim of his coffee cup. “Though we did hear some footsteps last night.”

Celeste nodded excitedly. “It could have been anything, of course, but when we looked out into the hallway, there was nothing to see!”

“How interesting,” Cally responded, trying to swallow a mouthful of eggs that stuck in her throat like cardboard.

“We are headed to Charleston next,” Celeste Iverson was saying, “where we are booked into another famously haunted inn.”

“They say,” said Nell, “you can’t stick a shovel in the ground in Charleston without hitting someone’s grave.”

“Well,” said Mr. Iverson, “then we promise not to do any digging while we’re there.” He chuckled good-naturedly, and Nell nodded her approval.

Cally jumped and dropped her toast when she heard knocking from the Gallery above her. Looking up quickly, she was relieved to see Katarina, rapping at the door of the room next to the Rose Room, then opening it and going inside.

Celeste grew serious, then, and said, “Poor Bethany. I hate that we won’t be able to say goodbye to her. You’ll give her our best wishes, won’t you, when you see her?”

“I will,” said Cally. “I’m sure I’ll need to talk to her quite a bit, as I’ll be trying to do her job for a while, and I have no idea what I’m doing.”

“You’re doing fine so far,” Foster assured her.

“We can walk you through the checkout process, anyway,” said Mr. Iverson, wiping his mouth and putting his napkin on his plate. “We’ve done it at least a dozen times!”

The Iversons got up and went into the Hall, where Ignacio met them with their bags. Cally left her half-eaten breakfast and took only her coffee cup with her to the desk.

Mrs. Iverson handed Cally her room key and pointed to a drawer in the antique desk. This desk held a modern metal key box, and the slots in the bottom of box were labeled with pictures of botanical prints. Cally dropped the Iverson’s key into the one with a picture of a wisteria vine in its bottom. “There,” Mr. Iverson said. “Now, all you have to do is sign us out in the guest register.”

Cally opened the register and wrote in the date and time, then turned the book around so that Mr. Iverson could sign to verify the couple had departed with all their belongings intact. “Well, that was pretty good, for your first time!” he said. “You’ll be an old pro at this in no time.”

Cally sincerely hoped this would not turn out to be true, but she smiled and thanked them and wished them a safe journey to their next destination.

After they had gone, Foster and Nell went upstairs and Katarina came into the Hall to show Cally how to take the phones off night mode. “Poor Bethany couldn’t eat any breakfast,” she told Cally, “but I’m going to see if she feels like drinking some tea, anyway.”

The Hall grew quiet at last, except for Joan’s voice through the closed oak door. Cally opened her laptop on the desk, arranging her notebooks beside it so she could face the sunny doorway as she worked. She created a new word-processor file, naming it “Research.” At the top of the page she typed, “Plot.” She forced a page break and typed “Characters” at the top of the new page, then scrolled down another page, and typed “Romantic Interests.” She folded her arms on the desk and put her head down on them. For a long time, she focused only on trying to keep taking one breath after another.

She could feel someone had approached the desk and was standing patiently in front of it. Cally tried to ignore the intrusion, but it didn’t go away. And why should it? she thought. She had been waiting for it all morning. She sighed, took a deep breath, and steeled herself to look up.

George smiled when he saw her looking at him, and took his hands out of his pockets to hold them straight at his sides.

“What nerve he has, to smile so sweetly at me,” she thought, but she did not allow her face to show any expression at all. Her heartbeat sounded like a hammer in her ears.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Cally swallowed. “For what?”

“For frightening you last night.”

He was frightening her now, Cally thought, but she refused to show it. “I am talking to a ghost,” she heard herself think. “I am knowingly talking to a ghost, as if that’s what one normally does.” The hammering in her ears grew louder.

“You owe me an explanation,” she said. She hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but it was true.

“I tried very hard to never have to do that,” he said. “I had anticipated that the beginning of our relationship would be awkward, but not this awkward. I meant to take it much more slowly. But the White Lady was coming, and I couldn’t let her see me.”

“You had to hide from another ghost?” Cally’s voice came out much sharper than she had intended, and once the ludicrous words were out of her mouth, the noise in her ears began to sound like wind, and she realized she was about to faint.

But George laughed, and that was so puzzling, Cally was able to focus again. “No, no,” he explained. “Not all of us are ghosts.”

“That doesn’t make any sense!” None of it made any sense.

Footsteps at the top of the stairs caused George to turn his head and look up. “Well?” Cally said with a very dry throat. “Don’t you have to vanish or something now?”

He shook his head. “No, she can’t see me. I’ll wait here.”

Katarina came down the stairs carrying a tray, and George stepped to the side of the desk so she wouldn’t have to walk through him as she came to stand in front of Cally. “She’s sound asleep,” Katarina was saying, shaking her head. “It’s probably the pain medicine.”

“I guess sleep is good for her,” Cally said. She thought her voice sounded creaky and robotic, and her mind was not at all on the conversation at hand. “It will help her heal, I’m sure.”

“You’re probably right. You’re such a dear. I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t here.” She reached across the desk and patted Cally’s shoulder as she turned to go into the dining room, and it was all Cally could do not to grab at her hand and cling to it like a drowning person.

“Maybe you and I can pay her a visit around lunch time,” Katarina called over her shoulder from the dining room.

“Yes,” Cally called back. “I’d like that.”

When Katarina’s footsteps had disappeared into the back hall, Cally turned her head toward the end of the desk where she’d last seen the ghost.

“You’re still there,” she said.

“I said I would wait,” he answered. He resumed his typical languorous slouch and smiled. His hair was different, today; a mane of short locks stood out all around his head.

“Why can I see you?” It was the first sensible thought she’d had since last night.

“Some people can,” he said, shrugging. “You see things all the time that others don’t see. No, you do. You always have. It’s just the way some people are. It’s...” He touched his chest. “Usually it’s very hard for me, to talk to people. A lot of work. It’s easier with you. Also I can use your battery. It helps.” Cally followed his glance to her computer screen, and saw that the “low battery” indicator was lit, even though the computer was plugged in.

“I’m sorry, do you mind?” George asked. “Some get their energy directly from living people, but I don’t think it’s right to do that. It makes them cold.”

“No... no, I don’t mind.” Cally recalled all the tales she had heard, of people claiming to feel “cold chills” in the presence of alleged ghosts. Now, she was surprised to find her hand reaching for her notebook, as if she wanted to jot this new insight down.

“Do you want to interview me?” George laughed. Before Cally could consider her answer, he said, “I would enjoy that. Maybe someday when we have more time. I just wanted to apologize for frightening you last night, and ask you to please not go away.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Cally said without even thinking about it. It was the only thing she could feel certain of, at the moment.

He smiled and nodded, as visibly relieved as a ghost could be. “Little Nellie will come soon,” he added, glancing toward the top of the stairs. “When she does, I must go. I mustn’t let her see me. I apologize in advance if I ... leave suddenly.”

“Nell can see you?”

“Nellie sees many things that others can’t see,” he said. “But they frighten her, because everyone tells her they aren’t there.”

Cally nodded, and tried looking at his shoulder to see if she could see through it to the wall behind him. He jerked his hand up as if something had hurt him. “Please don’t,” he said.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize...”

He laughed again. “Aren’t we a sorry pair!” Then he leaned in conspiratorially, trying to explain. “It’s what I’ve learned. To... what would you call it? The ghost-hunters, they say ‘manifest.’ It’s what I can do: appear to the living eye. Well, for some. When I first found myself here...” He made a wide gesture with both hands that seemed to encompass everywhere. “It’s what I worked to learn. It took a long time, but I got good at it. My appearance has always been very important to me.” He grinned. “Others learn other things: how to touch things in this world, how to move things. Whatever comes naturally to them. I’ll learn those things, too, someday, I suppose. Maybe. It’s a lot of work. But I like to learn.”

Cally’s hands wanted more than ever to take up her notebook and pen, but she stopped them. “But why are you here?” she asked, and she made the same gesture he had just made, indicating everywhere.

“That is a story that will take a long time to tell,” he said. “I promise, I will tell it to you someday. If you will only stay. But Nellie is coming out of her room. I must go and tell the others you are staying. We’ll talk again soon, I promise.”

“Others?”

Cally heard footsteps on the stairs, and George’s pointed look told her she should turn her head away if she didn’t want to see him vanish. She did so, and saw Nell coming down the stairs with a small bag in her hand.

“I’m going to take a little walk down to the pond,” she said cheerfully. “I’ll be back soon. Please don’t tell Foster where I’ve gone!”

“I promise,” Cally said, thinking she was certainly making a lot of promises, and keeping a lot of secrets, all of a sudden.