QUARANTINED WITH GHOSTS
Originally published in The Wayne Literary Review, Spring 2021
Kelly watched as Boots’s head, tiny compared to the rest of him, flitted back and forth, his yellow eyes wide and round. She turned to meet the space where his eyes wavered, just above their rows of framed photos, and hoped to find a spider crawling on the wall, or a beam of light peeking from their bent blinds, or anything at all really. But there was nothing there. With a sigh, she pulled the cord to the ceiling fan and let it run on high.
“Boots is seeing ghosts again,” Kelly stood at the living room doorway and called to the bedroom. She knew her husband was in there—cramped and stiff on a folding chair and using a snack tray as a desk. She also knew her mother-in-law, Francesca, was in the heart of her afternoon nap and slept like the dead, even in a child’s bed, so she was free to speak without the old woman’s unabashed judgement.
“Good cat,” Marco called back. “Give him a treat.”
“Not funny,” Kelly said and she knew well enough that her husband believed in ghosts just as much as he believed that Santa would be breaking and entering into their apartment with gifts come winter to spare their wallets. “This is the third one today.”
“Yeah, daddy! Three ghosts!” their daughter, Isabella, hollered and waddled toward Kelly with her bare feet slapping against the wooden floors. With her horrid mother-in-law shacking up with them the past few months and the cat getting fat from all of his father’s treats, Bella really was Kelly’s only line of defense most days—a five-year-old girl.
“Just ignore them,” Marco said after a pause, his voice distant, so Kelly knew he was focused on his laptop screen and wouldn’t mind if his family, especially their voices, disappeared into thin air for a little while so he could work.
“Come on,” Kelly ushered Bella back into the living room, “Let’s leave daddy alone.”
Kelly was set to keep folding clothes on the couch, the only space she could find any room to turn towels into soft squares in preparation for the linen closet, but Bella immediately pointed to their hefty orange tabby again. He was near the back wall, staring at it intently. His ears were still and his tail’s gentle swish came to a total and complete stop.
“Really?” Kelly asked to no one in particular. “Another one?”
“Mommy,” her daughter said and her voice warbled. Not like when she wanted an extra snack or a toy from the toy aisle, but in true distress. “I’m scared.”
“Don’t worry, peanut. Ghosts are harmless. Watch—Mommy and Boots will get rid of this one.”
Kelly hurried to the bedroom, despite her previous declaration to limit any disruptions to her husband’s work. He watched her hurry to the bedside table and yank the cord to their small fan out of the wall. Kelly knew he was annoyed at the intrusion, but was fighting with his own expressions so it wouldn’t seem so. She hurried out as quickly and she entered and returned to the living room.
“Alright, Boots,” she said to the cat in a playful show for Bella. “Where’s the ghost?”
It was a bit unnerving to see that their cat hadn’t budged an inch in the past minute or so. He didn’t so much as twitch when Kelly lugged in the fan toward him and set it heavily on the floor. Not even the stark white cord tempted him and he so loved to scratch and claw and bite wires and chargers of all sorts. But she brushed it off as feline silliness and plugged the fan into the nearest surge protector. She let the soft gusts of artificial wind from the fan blow against the wall where their cat had cemented himself. After another moment, Boots folded from his stiff position into an absolute loaf of a pose, one paw meeting his tongue before he brushed it against his ear.
“Alright,” she said again, “Looks like all the ghosts have left the building.”
“Are you sure?” Bella asked and with her mother’s nod and mhmm, her focus quickly shifted. “Can you do the iPad for me?”
Kelly took her iPad, looking far more covered in fingerprints than it used to, and pulled up her daughter’s streaming service of choice. She asked what Bella wanted to watch, uselessly, knowing well enough that she wanted to watch “Frozen II,” just as she did every day and that day was no different. The same movie, every day, for four months. Frozen really was a good word for it.
Everything was frozen, really, since the quarantine began. Rinse and repeat. Kelly’s bakery job got tanked relatively early into the quarantine. People were more focused on buying toilet paper rather than pastries and the small shop with its pink walls and chalkboard menus shuttered. Her husband switched to remote employment and their daughter and her mother-in-law were yanked from school and nursing home, respectfully. Kelly spent her days after puttering around a pathetically shrinking apartment doing chores, avoiding her husband and his awful hag of a mother, and entertaining a five-year-old. Oh, and propelling away ghosts with whatever fan she could find. A flapping of her hand made due in a pinch if one of the ghosts was in a particularly crowded space. It was thankful the quarantine fell into the summer months or else they would have all been frozen themselves with the constant spinning of their ceiling and oscillating fans. Round and round they whirred—scattering ghosts into specter crumbs and mimicking the wall clocks, tick-tock-ticking away from and toward nothing of value.
***
Kelly never thought that it would be months between one trip to the grocery store and the next. Her husband had been the one braving crowds of people to scavenge for milk and frozen vegetables and paper towels. But on that day, she donned her rubber gloves and face mask and made the trip herself. When she started to see more ghosts than regular people, she knew it was time to get out of the house. So, she waited, an obligatory 6 feet apart from anything else breathing, to enter the store. By the look of the shelves when she did enter, it was a ghost town. All of the hot ticket items were long gone. No toilet paper, no hand soap, no frozen pizzas. But she enjoyed her trek around the familiar aisles nonetheless. Her husband never bought the fun stuff. She could buy all of the sprinkles and icing and semi-sweet chocolate chips her heart desired.
As she deliberated between a tube of hot pink icing and blue with fine, edible glitter within it, she jolted as a box of chocolate cake mix met the floor beside her. She bent and picked it up to place back on the shelf. They must have overstocked on the chocolate. Not that she often used box mix, but she did prefer classic yellow—it paired beautifully with buttercream icing. Though chocolate was a fan favorite, she knew. Except the box of classic yellow fell next, then the confetti mix, then down the rest of the aisle toward the sugars and flours. They fell into heavy clouds and in the haze of white powder, Kelly noticed someone at the end of the aisle. An employee, perhaps, summoned by the sound of smashing products. She wanted to ask, what gives with these rickety shelves? But when the sweet dust cleared, no one stood before her. She braced her shopping cart with both hands and wheeled madly out of the aisle. As she raced for the checkout counters, she wanted to look behind her toward that cursed baking aisle to get a better scope of the mess, but feared there would be more footprints left behind in the sugar than she made herself.
***
“The ghosts followed me to the grocery store,” Kelly said at the dinner table.
“Ah, maron’! I’d haunt you too if I knew you were going to give me sauce from the jar,” Francesca said, as if she wasn’t a haunt. Thankfully, she was dormant most afternoons, but she was in true form once dinnertime came around and she was both cranky and hungry.
“You don’t have to eat it if you don’t want to, Fran.”
“Don’t get lippy. What’s it take to simmer some tomatoes and garlic? You’ll take four hours to bake one cake. And it’s not like you’re working either.”
It was an argument that seemed to repeat itself endlessly as the months with Francesca dragged on. Kelly prayed for the day that she would return to the musty cave of her nursing home, but Marco insisted that he wouldn’t have his mother festering away in those cesspools during a pandemic, and the death toll on the television, chock full of the elderly more often than not, was in agreement with him.
“Ease up, Ma,” he said, always the peacekeeper, but not a good one.
“You should have married an Italian girl,” Francesca said and it was far from the first time. She faced Bella, who opted for only butter on her pasta, as per usual. “Don’t you worry beautiful, Nonna will teach you how to cook. The Irish don’t know nothing about a good meal.”
Bella gave her grandmother a toothy smile and giggled. Kelly scowled in return. Not even her own daughter was up to defending her, when she could put away her mother’s buttered noodles better than any kid on the planet. Kelly thought to remind them all that Francesca barely got out of bed most days, just as much as Bella barely got off the iPad, so neither of them would be lifting a finger in the kitchen anytime soon. But she kept her mouth shut, on that matter at least.
“Are we just not going to talk about the ghosts at the grocery store?” she asked.
“Come on, babe,” Marco said. “Enough with the ghosts. It was funny at first, but it’s getting old.”
“They were there,” she insisted.
“Probably were,” Francesca said, actually in agreement for once, but only as a preface to another snippy comment. “Marky, your wife brought bad energy into this house. Didn’t I give you the medal of Saint Michael? God forbid you people ever use it.”
As a staunchly devout Catholic, Francesca, too, saw ghosts in their apartment. Though she called them spirits. She often reported seeing her grandmother sitting in the corner of a room muttering in Italian, or her old neighbor who would steal from her garden rustling around in the house plants. Definitely not the ally Kelly would have chosen, but certainly better than her husband’s disapproving glare and shake of his head when he claimed Kelly riled up their daughter with fictitious ghost stories.
“Remember Father Paul?” Francesca asked, “The one who did your wedding? You should call him to bless this place or something.
“He died five years ago, Ma,” Marco said.
“Oh yeah? That’s too bad. I can call the church and see who else they’ve got.”
“I definitely don’t want some old priest coming out here,” Kelly said. “One of us could have the virus and not even know it. Maybe when this all passes.”
Francesca made a noise in the back of her throat, but relented, if only for a moment. Bella jumped in and offered her opinion, “Mommy! You should just suck up the ghosts with your vacuum!”
As things had been going, to Kelly, the idea didn’t sound half-bad.
***
Kelly longed to fall into a dream—even a bad one. At least it would be a dream at all and she could be free from her fatigued body, yet busy brain. But hope wouldn’t bring sleep, not like a melatonin pill or chamomile tea, of which she had neither. Instead, she watched the wall beside her as minutes became hours and felt like years. She kept her eyes open because once they shuttered, her ears filled with horrible, ragged breathing sounds. It was like someone’s head had been held under water and when they were just on the brink of drowning, they wrenched back to the surface, but their nose was plugged and they had to fight to breathe using anything else they could.
The first time she heard it, she quickly turned to her husband, but he was snoring lightly and breathing easily. It sounded far too old to be their daughter, camped out on their floor on an air mattress in the middle of the room, but Kelly checked anyway. She sighed, her shoulders relaxing, when she saw her daughter breathing quietly through her dreams too. Upstairs from the neighbors? she wondered, but brushed that off too. The sound was right beside her.
And boy, did that sound persist, each and every time she so much as blinked. It was ragged enough to conclude that it likely rang from older lungs, and even though it sounded closer than that, she went to check on her mother-in-law. She always kept their daughter’s door cracked and when Kelly passed, she heard her snores carry through the air like a hacksaw to a tree, but that wasn’t a new sound at all. So finally, she went to their medicine cabinet and it struck her as incredibly stupid that she hadn’t considered herself as the source of the sound. She was asthmatic, after all. Her chest didn’t feel heavy, but asthma was funny sometimes. She could feel up to running a marathon, but her breathing counts were terrible, and conversely, on days when she could hardly rise from bed, her doctor brushed it off as a common cold.
But with a suck and blow, her home spirometer seemed to agree that it wasn’t her. Her breath flowed normally, so she went back to bed. It could have been some other, strange noise in the night. In fact, when she tried to recall the sound, she had trouble finding it. Maybe it came from outside—a car skidding on the street or the wind rustling. She found that her short walk around the apartment had actually tuckered her out and sleep crept upon her, like a shadow in the rising run. Her thoughts became clouded and muddled as they prepared to succumb to the control-panel in her head that piloted her dreams. Then someone breathed, harsh and drowning, directly in her ear.
She sat upright and screamed. Her daughter followed her and did the same, bolting into a sitting position on the sunken mattress, her pink, cat head-covered blanket tossed aside. Her shrill scream completely overshadowed Kelly’s, so she rushed to her, Marco too after the sound wrenched him from sleep.
“Bella, bunny, it’s okay,” Kelly said, kneeling beside her, but she had burst into hysterics they had not heard since her terrible twos.
“Hey, honey,” Marco said, laying on the sweet words too. “It was just a bad dream. Don’t worry.”
“I saw an awful ghost lady walking around! She was going to kill us!”
Kelly and Marco continued to murmur reassurances, but the scene had woken Francesca, which meant it was then an ordeal. She pushed into the room in her muumuu, printed with colorful flip-flops, and her feet bare, which were enough to scare anyone themselves. Even Boots woke up, thumping down from his cat tower onto all four paws and rattling the floorboards. He stuck his tiny head into the room.
“What’s wrong?” Francesca asked.
“Nothing, Ma,” Marco said, “Bella just had a nightmare.”
“Because you make the poor kid sleep on the floor. No wonder she’s getting nightmares. Good God, that scream could wake the dead.”
Kelly wanted to snap at her. You know, she’s sleeping on the floor because you took her room. But she knew better than to start when they were all tired and on edge. Francesca would have just countered with the fact that they should have been able to afford a bigger apartment or grown-up and gotten a house by that point. Because money was so easy to come by, they should have been out harvesting it from trees.
Though, as the moments passed, they fell into a familiar routine. It wasn’t the first time or the last that their daughter would get a nightmare. They gave her a glass of water, talked her down, and they each went back to their beds. Kelly opted out of sleep that night. Her noises and rumblings clearly only worked to upset their daughter, who took the sounds and images and turned them into horror-filled dreams. And she had nothing going on the following day, just like every day before since the quarantine started, so she would nap later.
***
Since Kelly knew that during a pandemic, no one would or should be making any house calls for an exorcism, she took matters into her own hands. Thankfully, all of the popular delivery services would bring her sage on-demand and she even got her choice of delivery date. Her cabinet was stocked with salt, so that wasn’t an issue either.
She circled the apartment, sprinkling salt, then lit the sage just as she had seen during her brief, less-than-scholarly research of Google, YouTube, and Pinterest. She carried it through each room, wafting the cool, minty scent of it through the span of the apartment. It was a bit too strong for her liking and the smoke activated her asthma and caused her to cough into her wafting arm. Her coughing grew so furious that she had to crack a window, which may have defeated the purpose entirely, unless the ghosts had flown out with the smoke.
To make matters even worse, Bella followed her every step of the way, shouting in her little, squeaky voice, “Mommy! Mommy! I want to set the flower on fire too!”
She wasn’t the only one who screamed either. Bed-bound Francesca shouted, “Marco! The house is on fire!”
“Ma! It’s not on fire! Kelly’s doing crafts.”
“What?!” she shouted, due to her stuffy ears, yet refusal to lower the volume on the television from where it was cranked to 100. How she could watch the local news list off death counts between useless stories of deer hanging out in people’s gardens or migrating ducks, she never knew.
“There’s no fire, Ma!”
Even Boots had his chubby orange self determined to thwart her ghost-removal attempts. He licked at the salt on the hardwood floors, sneezed at its taste, then licked it again. She scooted both the cat and her daughter away and threw the sage into the sink, letting the water run over it. It was a bad idea and she should have known before she even started.
***
It was another long and sleepless night for Kelly. She was used to long days and too-short nights and still hadn’t grown into the change of schedule. To give herself something to do outside of lying in the dark obsessing over a lack of sleep, she ventured to the kitchen for a glass of water.
To her immediate horror, since the years in that tragically squared-footed apartment gave her intimate knowledge of every inch of it, she knew something was wrong, even in the dark. Someone stood before her cabinets, donned in a teal gown. It was too skinny to be Francesca, too tall to be Bella, and too feminine to be Marco, which left them all accounted for.
“Who are you?” she asked and her heart jumped into her throat when the figure flipped around in a single second.
Her hair was tangled into knots, her eyes lifeless and dead, her skin impossibly pale. But what gave Kelly a chill was her mouth. It was parted and rounded and wet and her chest floundered up and down like an inflating and deflating balloon. Somehow, Kelly knew that she was attached to a ventilator, even if it wasn’t present. She reached out her pallid hand and Kelly caught sight of the ring on her finger—the square cut diamond and multiple bands, it was her wedding ring.
Suddenly, it clicked. Those were her dark twisted curls, her frigid white skin, her failing, sunken lungs. With the stunted breath she had, Kelly opened her mouth and screamed, and the haunted, mirrored image of herself screamed right back.
THE END