Billy Was Under the House:

Billy was under the house: bundled up in the shag rug that his wife had always hated, and crammed in the basement crawlspace that he’d promised to seal up months ago, but never got around to since he’d been putting in overtime since the market crash. Billy was under the house, uncomfortably Panini-pressed under a newly laid concrete slab, and squished among the colony of cockroaches that had been plaguing their house for months. Billy was under the house, and then he wasn’t. And then Billy was hovering about six inches about the top of the staircase, half-translucent, and wholly bewildered.

            His first instinct was to call for Mauv, to bleat for her with doe-eyed dumbness like when he needed help figuring out how to turn on the dishwasher or pick out the right kind of tie, but somehow he knew that she couldn’t hear him either way. From his suspended vantage point, he could see the bare foyer, and the absence of the usual marketplace of shoes, coats and keys cluttered around the front door told him that he was very much alone. Mauv had probably taken the kids to school. Or was picking them out from school. He had no idea what time it was, or what day it was. Maybe that sort of thing didn’t matter when you were dead. Maybe life was going on as normal for everyone else, and he was doomed to haunt the stairway: the frozen smiles of his family in the photographs hanging besides the stairs his only company in purgatory. One of the frames was crooked. He felt the overwhelming urge to straighten it: a mundane gesture, but it was the least he could do in the face of the unraveling horror- comedy that was now his life.   

            After an eternity, which was probably more like an afternoon judging by how the evening sun was dancing with the shadows of Mauv’s lemon trees on the living room floor, Billy sort of got the hang of the metaphysics of the afterlife. He found that he could feign walking on the floor like a normal, non-spectral human being, but he could also live out his childhood dream of being Superman, and catapult himself into the crystal chandelier that made him and Mauv first fall in love with the house. He floated down with a restored sense of purpose to adjust the slanted picture, before he realized that he didn’t exactly have the corporeal facilities to do so. The lop-sided faces of Mauv and the kids piled around her parents at their last Labor Day barbeque stared up at him. Mauv radiated elegance in her pastel shift dress and pearls; their daughters matching balls of sunshine bouncing on their grandparents’ laps. Mauv, Miriam and Maisy: his girls, his beautiful girls. He couldn’t remember the last time he told them he loved them. An anxious thought raced through his head as he imagined what would happen when they came home and he was gone. Maybe he could try speaking through the radio or rearrange the rainbow alphabet on the fridge; he’d seen ghosts do that on TV.

            Breezing across the threshold into the kitchen, Billy ran through his last living memories. He’d hobbled home from work, and tucked the girls into bed. No—they were already asleep. He tried to peek in their room, but Mauv had shooed him off to bed, the soft way that she did with her lips puckering and her bunny slippers tapping. He’d tried to make love to her, he always tried to, but she just smiled and rolled over, the sharp click of her bedside lamp her only reply. He would be the person whose last night on earth would’ve been spent marinating in inky-black rejection, contemplating masturbating poorly in the bathroom, but never working up the nerve to do it. He’d woken up to sheets crumbled around the space his wife had been, and the smell of breakfast wafting in.

            The kitchen bore the battle scars of Mauv’s culinary endeavors. Walking past their granite counter tops in the mornings was like wading through a post-apocalyptic wasteland with mountains of dirty dishes, trails of multi-colored cereal and explosions of maple syrup, but Mauv normally had the whole place looking like it was ready to be featured in Better Homes and Gardens before the kids got home. Today, the chaos lingered. The smell of burnt toast stifled the room: the girls’ bowls of sickly pinkish cereal milk curdling around deformed fruity pebbles while a half-eaten stack of pancakes wilted forlornly on the counter. The plate of scrambled eggs that he’d scarfed down on the way out of the door in between scalding gulps of coffee, which splashed, as it did every morning, onto his tie, collected flies by the still-open OJ. A shattered mug steeped brown liquid onto the linoleum. That was his favorite mug; Mauv had given it to him on their first anniversary. He would have definitely remembered breaking it, even if he was rushing to work. Come to think of it, he couldn’t remember getting into his car. The tear-off calendar that greeted him with a different funny cat picture everyday said Tuesday, featuring a grossly overweight maine coon stuck in a box, but he couldn’t remember clocking in at the office.

            The stench of the vestiges of coffee on the floor was making his head swirl. A wave of nausea swept over him, and he tried to steady himself against one of the pulled out chairs, but fell through it. If ghosts were capable of bodily functions, he was sure he’d be upchucking his breakfast to join the rest of its rotting counterparts.  He’d felt sick this morning too. It was coming back to him.  He’d inhaled the same wretched coffee, tossed his eggs back to his wife, and then pain. Excruciating agony. His head felt like he was being flushed down a toilet while someone jackhammered into his skull, and his stomach churned like he was being tossed around in a storm. The mug fell from his trembling hands, its broken body breaking his fall as he collapsed. Miriam and Maisie were screaming, but Mauv shooed them away, the soft way she did, her bunny slippers escorting them out. Mauv had watched him convulse, choking on his own froth and blood until he’d shivered still.

            Billy looked wildly around the room, trying to orient himself by gazing anywhere but at the scene of his murder. His eyes steadied over the medley of Technicolor scribbles graffiti-ing the fridge. Maisie had drawn of herself as a fairy princess holding court over a field of sunflowers. Miriam had drawn herself as Batman. They’d both contributed to the zoo of two-legged tigers and giraffes with lollipops for ears. The certificate the Maisie had won for her third grade spelling bee hung in a macaroni picture frame that Miriam had made her first day of kindergarten. At the center, a photo of all of them swimming with dolphins in Hawaii last summer was pinned up by teddy bear magnets. Maisie had thrown a temper tantrum, and refused to get in the water because she thought they ate people like sharks, but she toughed it out after Billy had promised to hold her the whole time. He scanned Mauv’s face, her smile that crinkled the corners of her eyes, searching for even a glimmer of homicidal intent. She looked happy: they all did.

            He squeezed his eyes so tightly that his body started to shake, trying to block out the macabre reality of his end. He wondered if he tried hard enough if he could will himself out of existence. Being dead wasn’t the hard part; he was the kind of the person that took things lying down, and mortality was a pretty easy thing to get over, even for him. He supposed he’d already been ghosting through most of his life anyway, cruising on the surface of mediocrity, skimming by with the barest minimum of a personality, but knowing that his darling wife, the love of his life, mother of his children, was the one that put him in the ground was even harder to swallow than the rat poison.

            He flailed out of the kitchen—the crime scene—distraught. He wanted nothing more than to crawl under the covers with Mauv and fall asleep to her cooing and ruffling his hair, like when both his parents passed away or when they had to take the first mortgage out on the house. He racked his brain for even the slightest inkling of discontent in their marriage, for some horrible wrong that he’d inflicted. Nothing. They never argued because to him whatever she said or wanted had to be right. It would’ve been nice, even common courtesy really, if she’d left a note or a clue or something by way of explanation, but then again she probably didn’t expect him to come back. That was kind of the proverbial given about being dead: you stayed that way.  

            Stumbling through air to his bedroom, Billy wavered by the string of photos adorning the stairs, the daze of happy memories, but now the smiling faces that bore back at him seemed to accuse him with a veiled disdain, blaming him for his outcome, for his own insipidity. There were hardly any actual photos of him up there. He hadn’t been there that Labor Day weekend because he’d stayed at home to work while his wife went back to Virginia. There was a photo of Maisie and Miriam as munchkins in the school play; he’d missed their performance because he had a conference, but bought them ice cream afterwards. Then there was Christmas with his wife’s whole family, and her childhood friend Peter who had his hand on the other side of her waist next to Billy’s. Peter had gotten a huge promotion that year and gave Mauv a Hermes bangle. She hadn’t smiled like that since their wedding day. Billy had bought her socks. 

            The encroaching epiphany of his blind neglect sent him back into a whirl. Even now he wasn’t angry, not with his wife, not even at himself. That’s how pathetic he was. No wonder his wife couldn’t bear to live with his flaccid excuse of a person. A part of him wished he’d just killed himself off, and saved her the trouble. As he drifted into the bedroom, wondering if there was way to make himself even more dead so that he didn’t have to spend eternity with his failures, the faintest thought occurred to him that he might not have been the only man that Mauv had lain there with, but he was probably the only one she pushed away because of a “headache” every night. He didn’t know if spirits could cry, but he began to sob. He couldn’t figure out how to lie down on the bed, so he hung resigned in mid-air, a cocoon of spluttering and dry heaving.

            Days past, weeks even. Mauv must have stopped making the payments, wherever she was, because soon an armada of movers, realtors and prospective buyers swarmed in, ransacking and bartering for all the things that Mauv had never come back for. He watched them throw out the giant bunny he’d won at a county fair for the girls, his proudest moment as a parent, and the bookshelf he’d bought for Mauv that she had to put together because he was hopeless with tools, and the full encyclopedia Britannica that Mauv got him one birthday. And then he was completely alone in the hollowed out husk of his old life. He’d even heard them taking a chainsaw to Mauv’s lemon trees. He’d thought about chasing after them, doing the whole moaning and chain-rattling poltergeist bit, but he didn’t really want to inconvenience them. His family wasn’t coming back anyway. Now he was truly a specter, haunting the shadow of his once happy home.

            The low rumbling of a fleet of U-Hauls winding into the driveway roused him from his lonely perdition. A car door slammed and suddenly there were bubbles of laughter: children’s laughter, a lilting melody he’d almost forgotten.  A pair of identical strawberry blonde pigtails bobbed out of a mini van, harmonized by an excited barking. A young couple, the wife glowing, the husband sheepish, trying to conceal his apprehension at taking this next big step, followed after them, marveling at their new house. Billy felt a dull pang of longing, and he wanted to reach out to the husband and tell him to hold on so tightly to those beautiful girls and never let them go. But seeing them there, beaming all together, moving like a clockwork unit, as the wife teased her husband about how they were going to need a whole other house for all his golf clubs, and he helped her haul an easel up the steps of the front porch, while their kids and terrier orbited around them, something strange began to happen.

Billy pictured Mauv soaking up the Southern sun, Faulkner in hand, maybe even writing again, like she used to but couldn’t because she’d been basically a full time mother to two girls and a woefully incompetent spouse. Maybe she was with Peter, who made enough to serenade her with all the gifts she deserved, but still be home every night to help with dinner, and put the girls to bed. Yes, it was pretty unfortunate that she couldn’t have just gotten a divorce like regular people do, but he still held nothing but love for her, and as clichéd as it was, he wanted her to be truly happy, and he couldn’t give her that. Maybe that was just him being his usual limp doormat self, but the funny thing was that he didn’t care anymore. He was dead, and that was done. Maybe he didn’t deserve to die, but it was what it was. The idyllic picture of his family that he’d clung desperately to, the flimsy construct of bliss that he’d deluded himself with for years, which paled in comparison to the genuine happiness of the family moving in right now, was no more real and alive than he was. As he embraced that nonchalance, not his usual timid passivity, but rather an almost enlightened apathy, his translucent self began to evaporate in the ether as though he’d finally accomplished some secret afterlife task you had to fulfill to go to—where? Beyond? Heaven?  He wasn’t the type to ask questions.

Billy was in the house, and then he wasn’t.