“No. It was just now and then the reaching out and the tapping while we talked.”
He wondered how Maddison could have known to do such a thing. Unless Maddison was Emily. “Fascinating. But do ghosts talk?”
Calista found her wineglass but didn’t raise it from the table. “If they exist, why couldn’t they?”
“I don’t know. I’m not a ghostologist or whatever. I guess so.”
“A lot of islanders, neighbors, passed us and called out to me, but none of them spoke to her or mentioned her.”
“What—you think they couldn’t see her?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know what to think. But that’s not all, David. That’s by no means all. I became quite bold. I asked if I could feel her face to know what she looked like.”
He could not fathom Maddison’s intentions for this visit. Unless she was Emily.
“David, she looked like Emily.”
He said, “Felt. Felt like Emily. It’s not the same.”
“Before . . . before we lost her, I felt my daughter’s face countless times. My fingertips learned her face as surely as I learned Braille.”
“But why would she call herself Maddison if she was really Emily?” He hoped Calista would have the answer that eluded him.
“Maybe she thought she would shock me too much, scare me, if she started out right away telling me who she was, what she was. In fact, I’m sure I’d have been angry with her, called her a charlatan, and asked her to leave. She needed to . . . to bring me along slowly to the truth. She was Emily, David. Somehow, she was.”
David didn’t know what to say, though for reasons different from those that Calista no doubt imagined.
After waiting for a cacophony of seagulls to wheel through the sky, Calista said, “You do think I’m losing it, early dementia.”
“No, not at all. Really, I don’t. It’s mystifying, but I’m sure it happened just as you say. So did you mention Emily, did you tell this Maddison about the similarity, that you recognized her?”
She had been turning her glass between thumb and forefinger. Now she lifted it from the table and sipped and sipped again before putting it down. “I was afraid to broach the subject.”
“Afraid . . . ?”
“I thought . . . oh, I don’t know . . . I guess I thought if I mentioned it, the spell would be broken and she would be gone.”
As the westering sun slowly felled long shadows from the tree-tall masts of those sailing yachts moored nearby, Calista recounted things that Maddison had said, and there was no doubt that many if not all of them were observations that Emily would have made and in much the same language.
“When she said the time had come to go,” Calista recalled, “I urged her to stay a little while. That was when she said something that makes no sense coming from a stranger named Maddison, but that makes perfect sense if . . . if somehow she was Emily.”
David brought his glass to his lips and discovered that he had finished the cabernet without realizing he’d been drinking it.
“Maddison took one of my hands in both of hers and said, ‘I’ve come back just for this one visit, so you will know that I’m happy and beyond all pain, and to tell you . . . be not afraid of whatever comes next, because I’ll be with you always.’ And then she raised my hand to her lips and kissed it three times and . . . and she said ‘I love you.’”
For a long moment Calista and David sat in silence. Her silence was necessitated by the depth of her tenderest emotions. His was the result of desperate hope but also of astonishment, bewilderment, and anxiety.
“I was speechless,” Calista said, “and before I could think what to say, she let go of my hand and was gone. Just gone. I don’t know whether . . . whether I was so stunned by what she’d said that my senses failed me, but I didn’t hear her chair scoot back on the deck or her footsteps or the gate creak like it always does. She was there and then just gone.”
A long, sleek racing boat motored by at the harbor speed limit, its big engine throbbing with pent-up power, suggestive of a demonic entity barely restrained from wreaking havoc.
Aware that Calista needed reassurance, he said, “Remarkable. But the word ghost seems inadequate. Too pulp fiction. If she wasn’t real, maybe spirit is a better word. This wasn’t a haunting, after all. It was much more of a manifestation . . . a visitation.”
“But you do believe me?”
“Of course. You’re not delusional and, just like Emily, you’d as soon bite off your tongue as tell a lie.”