The Caraway Lush
This is the thirteenth story in my collection.
Tucked away from the door I roll my tongue on vowels and wait for her to knock. I mean, open the door. Or come to the window. Anything. I'm the one who knocked. My eyes are burning from the sunlight because her front door is stark white. I repeat what I'm going to say, like some high school kid going on his first date. Hello, you look beautiful, how are you. I only knock once.
There was a fire here a couple of years ago. It only spread through the second story floor, but that's where she was. Asleep in her bed. The smoke combed through her room and she slept right through it. The carbon monoxide killed her. The firefighters put the flames out and found her body unburnt, somehow a dried shade of ivory under blankets. Her parents and brother survived, but they couldn't bear to return to the house and refused to put in the money necessary to have it restored and sold. So they left it. I'm assuming there was some shared guilt among them.
Now there's rumors about her haunting the place. My old girlfriend, a ghost. She's only been gone for two summers and already I have to deal with insensitive people spreading insensitive rumors. She should be just finishing college now, not wandering the scorched hallways of a deserted home.
Local rumors strictly stipulate --- in brochures which can be purchased at nearby gift shops --- that strange phenomenon at the house only occur during daylight, specifically just after dawn, which is when she died and why I am here obnoxiously early on a Saturday morning. Oh my sweet, ironic, creative girl. I've heard that a silhouette can sometimes be seen from her window, often with little gulps of smoke exiting the broken glass. I've also heard that if you knock on her bedroom door it will unlatch and swing open (if only someone had knocked when the fire first started) but I am too afraid to enter the house. I'm hoping my knocking will conjure her lonely spirit from outside these walls.
I walk to the area under her window and stare at the nest of white caraways that have grown in the soil. They supposedly were seen not long after she died and have stayed in full bloom ever since, even through our cold Kamloops winters. I am drawn toward them like a lush to brandy to a bottle's lips. Like a lilac to violet to crayola crayons to coloring books. The caraways seem to stare back at me, each flower with its own peculiar, dumbo eared, squinting little face.
The house is a town fascination, a sort of tourist attraction. People come here from all over British Columbia, sometimes other provinces, sometimes even from America--- just to watch the house, maybe catch a glimpse of Sarah. That is why the town hasn't torn down the house yet; it's bringing in money. Postcards and cheap paperbacks and even DVDs all about her and the fire can be purchased at stores all over town, even some gas stations. They've drawn pictures of her, recreated her ghost in various forms. Pale and lonely and dead. My sweet, ironic, creative girl. A tourist attraction. Her family has since moved, unable to deal with the absurdity of their trivialized tragedy's spotlight. I stayed, but until now have never so much as driven by the house. And tomorrow I am going on a plane to the other side of the country without a return flight, so I figured I should say goodbye if she's still around like everyone else seems so sure of.
And I wonder what would you be, Sarah, with skin only an apricot afterthought turned caraway white. Auburn hair turned gray. Pale blue turned paler silver eyes.
Finally, gathering a little mental fortitude, I climb in the house through a broken window and carefully navigate the creaky stairs. Charcoal hand prints smear the walls. The ceiling is black cobwebs and smoke stains. The higher I climb the darker it gets. Reaching the top, I tip toe around broken floor boards and approach her bedroom door. The room I had to sneak in and out of when we were in high school. The room where she had led me into with nervous hands, undressing me before I could close the door behind us. The room where our virginity came and went. The room that had been wet with sunlight in mornings, quiet in our shushed noises while her parents slept as I climbed out the window. The room where her body colored mine like wallpaper. The room where she picked up the phone when I called from miles away, my unsure voice in her gentle hand. The room where her lamp had made the bed a mess where we had made the bed a mess where our heads were blessed with the romantic gestures of adolescence.
I knock on her door. My hand leaves white knuckled imprints through the dust covering pearl painted wood. I hold my breath, hearing either the faint sound of footsteps or breeze blown debris. I rehearse my lines like a high school kid going on his first date, wondering what I should say.
Hello, you look beautiful?
I knock with more force. The door slowly creaks open, no hand to hold it. I hesitantly step inside the room. A carousel of memories, of her limbs, her bundles of doves of feathered skin, and her eyes in firefly forest green, and the best of every rest assured; her. Her. Her. She comes in a spectrum of projections. In the blues through the I miss yous, forevers of lures in nautical colored heart murmured sorrys and so longs and aches, shipwrecked me; the bronze in the sunlit turned sunburnt, where the hot days were kissed into rosy refrigerated sodas, ice cubes catching her knuckles, dew like honeybees buzzing pollen down her wrist; the countenance of grace in closed eyes, where all we have ever seen is stored, the sugars and their salts and their Sarahs.
But when my eyelids open there is no ghost.
And I notice charred curtains billowing in the wind, over the window. Almost like smoke. And a strange shadow is cast from a thin dresser, stacked with clothing on top. Almost like the silhouette of a human, its shadow long in the horizontal light. And a gust of wind places the door back to its latch, which must have been broken when the firefighters had come in. It all makes sense. Sarah never haunted here.
I sit on the side of her bare bed. Smoky blankets crumpled at my feet. Somewhere in me -- two years too late -- a sob turns my ribs into splinters.
I leave the house. And those flowers under her window, they still shine white blind blushes, watching me cross the lawn. I kneel down and casually uproot them, walk back toward my car. The neighbor's dog starts barking and I notice a tourist gawking in my direction. Carried away in the bundle of caraways, bristling my closed palm like braille, I ignore the dog and the tourist, wondering what words would have bloomed from Sarah's pretty mouth if she had answered the door when I knocked instead of no one, nothing.