Haunt by Nicole VanderLinden

Fiona’s eyes were moons when she came out of the bathroom. “I spent sixty years in there,” she said, and normally this would be a joke, a ha ha what’d you do in there, get ready for the Oscars? kind of thing, but this bathroom was haunted.

“What did you see?” I said. For me, she’d only been gone a minute. I led her into my room, helped her ease onto the green rug, and sat across from her, my knees to her knees. Fiona was two years older and carried the world’s secrets, or so I thought back then. She was the one who’d said our bathroom was newly haunted, that time and space had begun to bend in certain ways in front of the sink, that you could trip on a seam in the universe if you weren’t careful where you stepped.

Fiona’s moon-eyes fixed on a point behind me—my Hufflepuff poster, maybe, or my ballerina lamp.

“I died,” she said, and I blanched a little there on the floor in my terrycloth dress because this hadn’t occurred to me, that Fiona was a person who could die. “A kidney disease. But before then, I had kids and I married a man and I majored in engineering at Georgetown.” The fine hairs of her knees tickled mine. She’d only just begun to shave.

I was twelve and so many words meant nothing, Georgetown and majored and married. Fiona’s story was a loose constellation of details flung against the sky. “I missed prom because I had the flu. I made spaghetti for your birthday, the one coming up next week.”

I picked at a thread in the rug. What would happen, I wondered, if she didn’t make spaghetti? Would we change the course of history, my visionary sister and me?

“Did we live in our blue houses?” I asked. The air stopped then, dust motes still in the shaft of sun coming from my window, all my stuffed bears and Julie, my hippie American Girl, holding their breath for the answer. This was a thing I’d made her promise me once, that we would do this someday, get houses side by side.

Fiona looked at me, and it was like a light, that look. I blinked. “You were happy, sure. We both were,” she said, but not in a way I believed. The dust motes, freed, began their drifting anew.

Fiona was the only one who could feel the haunt back then, at the way it tore at her expectations of the world. Our parents, fixed within walls and taxes, grocery lists, and paid vacations, couldn’t feel it, Fiona said. They’d brush their teeth and the seam would just fold itself around them, missing them altogether. And I was too young, not enough fixed for me yet.

It did happen, eventually. This was two years later after Fiona had made me the birthday spaghetti and had started sneaking the basement vodka and had begun to laugh whenever I asked if she was still going to Georgetown to study engineering. I was in the bathroom, which Fiona and I shared, shaving my calf in the sink. Our shower curtain was a giraffe blowing a giant pink bubble; the tiles around the tub were a dated shade of green. I checked in the mirror to see what I looked like as a person who shaved, and behind me I saw a canyon full of deep and sudden pockets, shadows moving under the clouds and hawks tracing their paths in the skies. My haunt at last, the sun so high.

I wandered there for years. 

“Fiona,” I said once I’d returned, much older than I’d been, thinking, this is how I’ll get her back, with our stories of our haunts. I missed my sister, had missed her for decades by then. I’d checked for her in canyons; I’d looked behind so much brush. But when I did find her, back in the real world, she was on the basement couch, passed out, her forearm flung across her face. And I knew then as I’d always known that Fiona had lived her years but that they weren’t the years she’d told me, of children and marriage and Georgetown. That story was a lie—for me or for her, I couldn’t say. And before we lost her forever, not all that much later, really, I wanted to ask about our blue houses, the ones that are side by side, and about much beyond that, too. “Sister,” I wanted to say, “whatever did you see?”

Nicole VanderLinden‘s short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review—where Lauren Groff selected her story as the winner of the 2020 NOR Fiction Prize—Shenandoah, New Orleans Review, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She currently serves as associate editor for Colorado Review and as a fiction reader for Ploughshares and The Masters Review. Her book reviews have appeared in various places including The Denver Post, and she can be found at nicolevanderlinden.com and on Twitter @vandanicole.