A Biography of Ghosts

By Natalie Mills · Estimated Reading Time: 10 Minutes

I am a biographer of ghosts, the one who watches what was once here, the amanuensis who sits at the right hand of history and records it, not the sweeping devastation of wars or the firing bellows of industry, but the life giving life giving life, the turning on the surface of things, the touching of hands, and the hope of two figures looking for each other in a dark wood under the brightest winter moon. 

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We moved into the house when I was young, just six or seven, and I would sit on my windowsill late at night looking out at the woods. We lived across from the stretch of trees that became a forest in the summer, lush with leaves and nests, a bonfire in the autumn, eighty shades of red over orange, and stood naked in the winter when I first started watching, trees with bare limbs compensating for our trundling outfits of overcoats and shoes and extra hats and gloves. I would sit on the ledge of the window with my feet toward the warm grate and my shoulder against the glass, slowly absorbing the outdoor cold through my arm, sinking into my body and down to my feet, melting like an ice cube on concrete into the register below. Or sometimes the stream would reverse, heat climbing up my toes and calves, bubbling through my chest, finally touching the glass through my shoulder blade, a thin line of warmth against the cold world, a single stroke of a welder’s torch against the frostbit glass. 

I sat there each night when we moved in, looking out at the empty branches rattling in the wind, spying as the houses on the other side of the woods placed Christmas lights in their windows, dotting white stars in a line, a tall candle, three low-hanging moons of paper lanterns on the coldest nights. It was sitting at that window that I saw them for the first time: at the center of the woods, there were two figures. 

They met upright, not animals but people, young I see now, but old to my child eyes, both clothed in heavy coats and soft hats, hands meeting each other like old friends. They stood at the center, and in the moonlight, I saw them, boldly brandishing their kisses for each other for all the neighborhood to see, straight in the middle of the naked forest on a melancholy December night, the only warmth coming from the register at my feet and the motion of their kiss as they found each other in the dark. 

We lived in that house for eleven years, but that first year was the only year that I saw them—the ghosts. One by one they revealed themselves to me. First, in the dark woods at night, I would watch her meet her secret love, kissing together, an abomination to me then, but I always watched. Then one night I heard her come home. She came clattering through the back door, and my heart jolted, still afraid of being caught out of my room at night, a child. But she was out there smacking around the kitchen, and I was here between red striped flannel sheets with a cold glass of water on the nightstand beside me. The next day, my parents began repainting the kitchen, and there behind the wallpaper were the words. She was here, all of her, with her heart-dotting i’s and her underlined signature. Sometime when she was a teenager, her parents had decided to wallpaper the kitchen. She had signed her name across the wall and papered over it with green climbing vines, getting ten dollars for the two days of work. She was there, she had declared, and now I was standing there before the blood-orange wall that had been hiding underneath the wallpaper ivy, learning her name for the first time. 

There were other ghosts as well. Sometimes the dampness of thunderstorms would bring the smell of her father’s cigars out of the basement walls and we would see him, dealing himself hand after hand in solitaire, waiting for the winning set. He would smell it when the moment came, as much as we smelled his cigars on that white-painted landing, and the stacks of collated hearts and spades and diamonds and clubs would fold themselves up on the table, and he would barely wait before he dealt them out again. 

The brothers were there, around, who knows how many, always depleting the food in our kitchen faster than I could eat it. At their worst, I began keeping my snacks in my room, despite my mom’s threats of ants finding them and ruining the haul. I would keep them close to me at night and wake up with less, unsure if I had eaten a bit of my hoard in my sleep or if the brother ants had carried some off crumb by crumb, to eat in their fortresses downstairs, days spent on the side of their father’s table underneath blankets with a basketball and a stack of paper planes. You could hear the paper hitting the wall, occasionally recognize the thump of a pillow fort coming down, and you would remember that they were in the basement, not you; they were setting up your blankets blue and purple and striped in white, and you were off in the kitchen relieved to see that your snacks from Easter were still intact in their woven basket, blue and green and yellow together a basket that would fall over as you reached for it with a thump, suddenly empty of the chocolate you were looking for. 

But of all of them, I was most alert to her. Her long hairs would sometimes find their way into my toy chest, her eraser mistake-tendrils lining the crevices of my window where I could never quite pull them out, her steps tumbling one over another across the front stoop to make it to the forest to find the person who waited for her there, a person I never came to know. 

I enjoyed sitting at the window, watching her exit, waiting in my room for her entrance again. She breezed through so often that her patterns became the rhythm I slept to, the rhythms I looked for like the familiar pattern of a laundry machine swishing in a nearby room. They were pleasant until they weren’t. They lulled with comfort until the day when your ears recognize that the machine is broken, that something is off, that your laundry is sitting in still water, socks floating like lily pads on a pond, no motion of the current to wash the flies to a new place. Her mother was here. 

The house couldn’t contain all of us. My own mother barely noticed what was going on, so busy repainting the newly stripped kitchen walls to wonder why she had the bad luck of stepping on the paint roller twice, to see that the roller itself moved where it wanted to, slight inconveniences to cover up the permanent-markered name. She didn’t seem to care that my snacks were gone, or that her yogurt went bad, or that all of our apples tasted a bit grainy and off, out of focus pictures of the autumn fruit we expected. The other mother would find her way into everything, sons that adored her, a husband that patted her hand with soft affection, and a daughter that slapped through the door on the way out of the house when it was too late at night for anyone to leave. The wind blew the door open, we all said, but I knew it was the girl. The wind blew it shut again as well. But I knew that was her mother. 

I was not here to be a participant, just a recorder of the events, an observer to what went on. I may have been more the ghost than they were in that season, an unhappy season of a girl who loved a boy and a mother who refused to believe it. They fought on the stairs, burning out lights and slowly unraveling one side of the carpet, just a single tripping shoe at a time as my mother or father would find the loose loop of carpet caught in their slippers and clip it again, wondering how it got like that. 

I watched the girl through the winter, slipping out when she could, slamming the door when she wasn’t supposed to. Finally there seemed to be a truce: the spring was here. All the things that seemed so evil in winter couldn’t be so evil anymore. Perhaps the mother watched the girl through the dead tree arms, the boy and her daughter the only life in the woods, exposed to any eyes that might look their way. Or perhaps the soft spring reminded the mother of the day that she was also meeting a boy on a tree trunk in the woods, the designated place for love to find a person who has not yet had two decades of life. Or perhaps she was tired, worn down by love that cannot find a home in a person or a place, that only finds love in the restless running from treetop to treetop like the wind before a storm.

Until the mother came along, I loved my perch by the window, a bird in a box looking out at the big world. But her tugs at the vacuum cleaner cord, her splotches reappearing after my mother washed the windows finally became too much for me. My mother worked twice as hard to get the marks to go away, and I knew that they wouldn’t because they were sealed onto our glass bay window with spite and a mother’s protection, a loss of her own life gone by, a clinging to her daughter’s life to slow down, just a titch, just a pace, just an extra chorus or even a bridge or even a measure, to draw out the moment between this verse and the next. My mother watched me take off on my bike up and down our street, from one end to the other, the only places I was allowed in our neighborhood. 

At the very end of the street was a house not quite like ours, with an overgrown garden in front and spheres of glass hiding on small pedestals throughout the bushes. On the driveway, a girl with red hair let her chalk roll away from her as she chose the next color for the tessellation before her. I paused on my bike for longer and longer each time I reached her house, letting the rubber grips of my handlebars leave rolls on my hand like eraser rubbings on papers at school. Finally she looked up.

The next week, when I reached her, I jumped off my bike and let it fall into the grass, a small clank as the gears learned to rest horizontally for a bit. We worked our way across the driveway with the chalk and began on the sidewalk with the green that she never liked. That night, I rode home and my handlebars turned pasty from my hands, pale green and rubber black on my reddened palms as I fell asleep on my spring sheets, just a plain blue these days, not too hot for the new season. 

I saw her every day I could until I lost her in the newest recurrence of school, taking us away from the filamented sidewalk and the sticky tar of the street repair. I was back in school, and she was in her own orbit, and our angry ghost was getting ready to leave the house for the last time when summer arrived.

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He heard the screen door slam, and at first he was mad at her making a racket that might get him into trouble. She always let it bang shut like that, but he sensed that her recklessness meant that she no longer cared. If only they were respectful ghosts, gliding in and out of the house through the walls the way that he expected them to. Instead, his house was cursed with a teenage lover girl, letting the screen door smack shut behind her, rattling the china in the dining room hutch as her footsteps clattered away from the porch light and off into the night. He knew that she was going back to see him again, to continue what they had started in the winter, their hands touching then through stiff gloves and noses itching with cold. Now, they would find each other with freckled arms, sunburnt knees, scrapes on their ankles by the end of the walk through the ever-ripening forest, thick with branches, tired with scuttling animals, reclined with the lazy companionship of two teenagers who floated through the leaves, anticipating the next brush of one finger against another. 

The door never clattered after that. Footsteps never traipsed across the porch at night. He never had to put up with the rose perfume drifting in from the bathroom again. After a season, a year, a verdant summer, she was gone, expelled from their house for all the things he wished to do—breaking curfew, smelling of a new grown-up scent, tracking footprints down the hall and leaving the light on all through the night. The last memory of her romance had been swept away with their wooden bridge over the creek in the highest flood of the summer, the longest night. 

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He rode down the block on a warm morning, wheels spinning through the deep water, tipping his toes into it on the down-pedal, and letting his socks get a little wet through his shoes. When he reached the last house on the road, he wanted to know: would she go with him to walk through the woods? Would she help him find a new log for their old habit of crossing the creek wherever they felt was right, at the highest bank or the lowest hop? Would she want to walk with him over puddles of mud, to end up somewhere in the middle, where he would pick a green aphid out of her hair and tell her it was just a leaf, even though she saw the same bugs on him? Would she be willing to follow him on her bike to another part of the forest, to a place that couldn’t be seen from the front doors of their homes, that was obscured by green leaves and telephone wires and squirrels’ nests and hope? 

She followed him out of the house, her red hair a banner behind her. 

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I am the finder of secret lairs, the discoverer of worlds. I stomp into our puddles of dirt and find endless galaxies of laughter, a constellation of mud across my boots and his shirt, a trail of ants from his eyebrow to his hairline, brown dots that he will wipe with the back of his hand as he chases me toward the next fallen tree, over the next patch of grass, to the place at the center of the woods where we think we are alone, but where I know I will be seen out the window by the children who look, tired of their naps, waiting for their next block of neighborhood, hoping to be allowed a little further out of the yard, into the woods, standing on the tree stump that holds our future. 

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Story by Natalie Mills · Photo by Stephanie Bernotas

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