November 1978

Lily's Ghost
by Cheryl Drake Harris

As a doctor in Vietnam, Lily survived unimaginable terror and loss. Now, safely ensconced in a close-knit Maine town and a seemingly comfortable marriage, she no longer needs to be afraid, but she is: afraid of light, afraid of sudden sounds, afraid of seeing the wide-eyed child of war who haunts her. So Lily is unprepared for the act of betrayal that threatens to take away the one thing she cannot live without: her young son. Plunged into a bitter custody battle, befriended by a man with a heartbreaking secret of his own, Lily must fight - to escape her own memories, to survive an uncertain future, and to protect, above all else, the love between a mother and child.

Chapter 1

Lily. That's my name. It has a certain implication: purity. I'm not sure I was ever pure. In fact, I railed against the tenets of purity: I lived with Ben for five years before I married him, only then because I was three months pregnant.

Marriage hasn't affected the fear. I hid even after Jaime was born. Slid under the bed with him held tightly to my chest. He snuffled, rooted for a breast. And I acquiesced, rolling a nipple between forefinger and thumb, remembering the tightly furled red buds of my mother's flowering quince. He grew frantic, sucking hard. He seemed to feel the rush of my fear, but he would sleep, finally. And I? Well, I felt safe. The wide floorboards against my back. Two-hundred-year-old pumpkin pine. Once the color of jack-o'-lanterns cracked open on wet October earth.

Jaime has just turned four and sometimes I still find solace under that bed. A spool bed. I lie on my side, head resting on my arm, looking out into the hall at the mahogany handrail and finely turned balusters that gleam like polished chestnuts. Through them I see the well of the hall papered in a floral print: thistles and mums, and coneflowers that look dramatically phallic.

It isn't the master bed. That is in the master bedroom on the second floor. Left front corner. Four windows. The old glass distorts the view, a wide lawn bordered on the east by a break of thirty-foot lilac trees and a lone spruce, and on the south and west by meadow.

I am in the third-floor guest bedroom. It is the Friday after Thanksgiving and Ben has left to take my mother back to Durham before heading on to visit his mother in Kittery. Jaime is along for the ride. It is early evening and I cannot tell you the relief I feel as I stand in darkness. I am at a window, one of the two in this most northern room. I slide back the gathers of lace and watch the stars above the trees, the sky as navy as the shadows, moonlight making the back orchard look unearthly. I could live comfortably like this forever, the only light cool and planetary. When Ben's out, I don't bother with the lights. Jaime, like me, has become adept at living in the dark, reaching for a slice of apple, knowing it's there by the sound of the paring knife cleaving the crisp flesh, the burst of apple essence in the air above the sideboard. And I feel him reaching up for a slice even before he asks, the shallow cup of his small palm radiating warmth.

I julienne carrots in the dark. It is all a matter of feel. I can see, through the tips of my fingers, the notch ends of avocado; the grain of sirloin; the width of a mushroom and the fragility of its pleated underside. I make pie dough by touch: pastry smooth and cool, overlaying mounds of apples fragrant with cinnamon; fluting the edges, pinching and turning, pinching and turning, piercing the top, creating miniature leafy branches.

When Ben is home I live with the light, the stark light of noon; the harlequin light of dusk; and at night the ubiquitous fluorescence: the anemic light bleeding from the overhead ring in the kitchen, and the horizontal tubes that pulse beside the bathroom mirror, spreading a funereal pall over the downstairs toilet and tub.

Ben insists on making love with the light on. He is driven by what he sees and I try to imagine what that is, shadow deepening the wedge at my waist; the soft after-baby of my belly; the queer truancy I know invades my eyes. And after, while he sleeps, I close my eyes and see the mist that rises up from the valley, how the flares make it glow pink like clouds of cotton candy, as if it were spun high in the sky over Pleiku, and always with this image comes the smell of blood. It's under my fingernails, and I feel it, dark and arterial, bloodying the skin under the saturated cloth of my fatigues; aware of it only now, after the kid is gone. I watch as he fast turns to stone, blue-white granite, polished and cool.

It is Saturday morning. Ben calls from the New Hampshire toll. "Should I pick anything up?" he asks. "Milk or bread?"

"We have plenty of bread," I say, "but you could pick up milk."

I talk to Jaime. He's chewing jujubes. "I'll save the green ones for you, Mum," he says. "I promise."

I have a couple of hours or more before they pull into the driveway, gravel spinning out from beneath the tires of the twenty-year-old Mercedes that Ben drives, left to him by an elderly aunt who on hot afternoons parked it in the shade of trees so her collie could comfortably nap in the backseat. Though Ben is meticulous about the car, we still find long hairs that work their way up through the seams of the upholstery. I open the drapes. Shafts of sun warm the honeyed tones of the woodwork and floor. When Jaime's home he delights in this event, blinking at late-afternoon light, spinning in motes, the glitter of a billion particles of dust.

I will bundle him up after dinner and we'll walk in the moonlight, over the fields to the cemetery where the family who built this house lies: Jacob Woodman; Sarah Eliza, his wife; and their daughters, Martha, Florence, and Millicent, babies all, hardly out of the womb. Their graves look out over Browns Head. We play tag around the white headstones. I mean no disrespect. I think the dead want the living to cavort while they can.

Copyright © 2006 by Cheryl Drake Harris.

About the Author

Cheryl Drake Harris is a former nurse and teacher who lives with her husband in Maine, where she is at work on her second novel, about a contemporary writer reasearching the life of Elizabeth Siddal, the wife of poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which Dell will publish in 2007.