“How did you know she was a ghost?”
“When you see a ghost, you know it. You feel it.”
“Was she see-through? Did you speak to her?”
“She was different. Something about her movements. And she was so sad, the way she walked around the garden, touching petals and branches, as if she could rid some of her sadness on them. It might have been the way her mouth was shaped. I don’t know. It’s difficult to describe how I knew.”
Flo pushes off hard from her mother’s headrest and falls back in her seat. She pops a sourball out of its cellophane wrapper and, after putting it into her mouth, sighs loudly.
A sweet fake-lime smell works its way quickly to the front.
“Have I lost you?” Marie-Claude says, finding Flo’s bulging cheek in the rearview mirror.
“Nothing happens in this story.”
Marie-Claude has an awful impulse （because they are so rude, demanding the story she didn’t want to tell, then snubbing it, Flo so impatient, Tristan already asleep） to remind them of sadness. It would be so easy to do. She waits for the resentment to subside, then continues: “She wasn’t transparent, but her skin was peculiar. I’m sure that’s how I knew she wasn’t human.”
“What do you mean, peculiar?”
“It was like patina almost, that greenish color that gets on certain metals, you know, the way that bracelet of your father’s, the one he wears for his imaginary arthritis, the way that turns when he forgets to make someone polish it. That’s how her skin looked up close.” Instead of the woman Marie-Claude sees the wrist, its hairless skin beneath the bracelet, the puffed vein that travels from his hand to his elbow. She still loves him. If he does not come back she will never feel again what she felt touching that arm.
“I like polishing it. He doesn’t make me.”
“Oh, Flo, you don’t remember. You used to hate it. The polish stung your eyes. Anyway, her skin was like that.” Beside her, Tristan’s head, which has been slipping and jerking back, slipping and jerking back, finally slides all the way over to the armrest on his door. She checks the lock and feels for a moment what he feels: that delicious surrender to sleep in the passenger seat of a car.
“I didn’t hate it. And I still do it, too.” Flo thinks of the chance she had to go with her father and his girlfriend, Abigail, to Manhattan instead. She had to choose between ocean or museums, a big house with other kids or adjoining hotel rooms （clicked shut at bedtime till morning）。 All that seems insignificant now. As always when absent, her father has become mild and soothing. She could call him, take a bus back to DC. He isn’t leaving until tomorrow morning. How much could a bus ride cost?
“I did speak to her.” Marie-Claude turns around to see if Flo will still listen. Flo doesn’t look up from what she is doing: dropping flimsy American coins from one hand into another, then back into a pouch. “I asked her if she was enjoying the ball.” Marie-Claude laughs. “I didn’t know what else to ask!”
“Did you speak French or German?”
“German, I think. But she didn’t reply in a voice. It was more like telepathy. But she didn’t want to chat. She moved right past me, back to her old route around and around the rose garden.”
“This isn’t the same story.”
“I’ve never told this story to you before, so I don’t know what you were expecting.”
When she told it to her husband, there were two ghosts. She had wanted him to see what they’d become. She described everything carefully, their movements, their fingers, the shapes of their mouths. We mustn’t become them, Robert, not yet. But he didn’t understand. He had stopped wanting to understand her.
“Mom, you’re lying. You always do this.”
“What do you mean, I always do this?”
“Change things around. Lie about the truth.”
“I’m not lying, Florence.” And Marie-Claude sees more clearly the scrolled, unbloomed rosebushes, the small pool, more rosebushes, and the woman traveling through. “I have never lied to you.” Each time around the far edge, the woman lifts her skirt so it doesn’t catch on a spigot. “I am not the liar in this family.”
“Yes, you are. You lie all the time.”
“Flo, I do not.” For comfort, she knows she can turn to Tristan, who, still asleep, holds a comic book and her sunglasses in his lap. “Name one lie I’ve ever told you.”
“You said we could take Belle with us. You promised we could.”