Tonight You'll Be Visited by Three Ghosts

Reluctantly, he got a Christmas tree from one of those dreaded lots. It was in front of a defunct department store at the mall that was on economic life-support. There were cinder blocks on the corners and every eight feet or so, and in those cinder blocks were wood posts, semi-straight. From post to post there were sagging strings of lights that weren't even turned on. Not that it would matter. It was 55 and sunny. It was never 55 and sunny in December when Ben Bruce was a kid on the snowy slopes of the hills in the old neighborhood. 

The salesman looked like he was on parole and wore a ratty football jersey under a black-leather jacket that every would-be hitman or drug dealer has in a mothballed closet. He looked like Buffalo Bill from that movie – thin hair, ponytail, pale skin. Tattoos on his hands about love and pain. He looked as though he could be selling hams, or used cars, or drugs, or flux capacitors on Mars, anything but Christmas trees. He didn't even notice Ben get out of his truck as he was far too busy thumbing the pad of a cellphone like he was at war with someone or something in it, completely suffused. 

Ben perused the rows of murdered spruces and firs, which were unnaturally propped up like an evergreen army, poorly but capably at attention. The prices weren't marked and anytime prices aren't marked it is because the product is well above market value, he knew. He had been a miser his whole life and a miser is only compounded by age. 

He never got a tree in one of these lots before, but this was a last-minute decision. He veered off into the turning lane at the last possible moment and fatefully into that lot. Black market Christmas trees, he used to call them. They always drove past them and sneered, bundled, and loaded up in the Jeep on their way to the Albert Family Tree Farm where a hayride, hot chocolate, and acres of living trees existed happily until they cut theirs down, one by one taking turns with the saw until the tree timbered. But that was then. It had been a long time since he had been there.

The mall parking lot was pitifully pocked and pitted with potholes and cracks. Fissures over time that widened a little more each year with weeds that were never pulled, that, forlorn, died here. Cracks that widened with the freeze and thaw, and due to deliberate neglect. There's not the business here to maintain it, a pragmatist would argue. Drive at your own risk, a sign forebodingly warns on the perimeters like William Wallace's head once on London Bridge. 

Those trees at the tree farm didn't mind being cut down by a family. It was their purpose, after all. But these trees here have the look of slaughtered animals in one of those old butcher shops with vacant stares and prickly gray tongues between clenched teeth. 

Ben hadn't put up a tree, nor had celebrated Christmas in any way in ten years, but this year he decided to do so because of something that occured the night before. A box of ornaments fell out of the attic mysteriously as though by some sort of augury. And the very night before that, in the middle of night, there was the ghost of a child at the foot of his bed whispering something he could not quite hear, but something he felt that was meant to compel him. When he got up and turned on the light, she was gone and he excused it to the delusions of a dream, as such was not uncommon to him. And the night before that, he swore his wife was in bed with him. He felt her presence, if nothing more. 

There was no reason in the world for that attic door to be open, no plausible explanation, just as there was not for the child or his wife, but it woke him from a dead sleep and a single bulb escaped the closed lid of that box and rolled in a desperate circle at his bare feet as he came to inspect the origin of the clattering. That bulb happened to be the last bulb put on the family tree, ten years before. A beautiful crystal bulb with the sparkling face of a reindeer on it and his daughter's name beneath, written in Sharpie by her own little hand. A hand he could still see blearily in his mind.

She had picked that bulb out at Hallmark in that very mall that was now breathing its last cathartic breaths, hawking Christmas trees for a living. A Hallmark that went out of business four, maybe five years ago. A bulb that his wife said was too expensive, but that his daughter insisted was the ornament she wanted this year because every year the kids chose an ornament of their own. If they didn't find one at Hallmark, there was Elder-Beerman, or JC Penney, or Lazarus. There seemed to be an endless supply and the only matter was the dilemma of choice. 

Where the letters of the store names once hung proudly on those now barren- black and brick walls of the mall, there was only the shapes of a slightly-darker hue which had faded less than where the bright porcelain letters of the name had been, leaving an unintentional ghostly imprint. A reminder for those whose memories didn't serve of stores gone and not to be revived. Not even if Jesus came back and commanded them. The shareholders had their say and it was Chapter 13, or some other such ruin and subsequent closure.

Ben looked at that ghastly mall as he had not looked at it ever before from that forsaken vacant lot in a makeshift grove of desperate, dying, second-rate trees. The redolent scent of their death only spoiled by that of the pestilent asphalt. A cool wind whipped futilely in the unnatural warmth, and an odd bruised and burnt-orange sky toiled overhead like that of a bad landscape artist with too vibrant a palette for the subject. He could see them there, in that mall that was full of life, decorated with giant red bows and wreaths, the rafters inside wrapped copiously with garland, capped in silver bells and opulent gold angels everywhere you looked. His kids, with their eyes full of the twinkling lights and youth that never seems it will end until it fatefully does. And the scent of his wife's perfume perfumed his nose once more, as though from an unseen censer, swung by the ghostly memory that he alone in his burden bore.

But the salesman finally spoke, as though he waited for the most inopportune moment, awaking Ben from his grief, declaring that the trees were 65 each, which was about what Ben had expected. His voice was gruff, matching his rugged countenance, and he took a minute to put his phone in his pocket to introduce himself. "I'm Gilead Balm" he said extending his hand. 

"Ben Bruce," Ben shook his hand as the feeling of familiarity struck him, but fizzled. "These trees are, well, a little much for what they are." 

"Well, you see, sir," Gilead began, "I would have to disagree. These trees are very special trees. They're not like any other tree you can buy anywhere else, I promise you." He smiled a crooked smile and a gold tooth sparkled in the sunlight. 

"Well, what is so special about them?"

"Oh, I'm afraid I can't say," Gilead answered. "You're going to have to take that on faith. You have kids? Family?"

"They're not here," Ben replied simply. 

"Family and love is important. Especially this time of year. Love is the loveliest thing."

And though to ignore him and balking quietly at the price, Ben hurriedly picked out an adequate blue spruce if only to be done with it and handed the guy a fifty and waited for his change purposefully not tipping, if only to show no satisfaction with the unpleasantness of the transaction, or contempt for this parking lot pirate, utter dissatisfaction for this salesman who brought upon the matter certainly no cheer of the festive yule. 

"Would you like for me to help you load your tree?" Gilead asked stuffing the money into a small bag. 

"No," Ben replied bluntly. "I can manage." Then he dragged that orphaned tree to the truck over that black cindery abyss of decaying asphalt, tossed it in, and gave the mall a final languid look as he started his truck.

"Merry Christmas! Tonight you'll be visited by three ghosts," Gilead shouted cheerfully as Ben put the truck in gear. Then feeling bad about not tipping and being rather coarse with the man, Ben parked it, got out of his truck, and walked back and gave the man twenty for a tip and shook his hand.  

"Merry Christmas," he said. His words were soft and solemn, almost in apology. 

Gilead smiled and held on to Ben's hand for a long moment and said he hoped he enjoyed the tree. Ben nodded, got back in truck and drove home, silence his inartful dirge.

The ghostly box of ornaments awaited him, curiously having moved themselves yet again, this time from beneath the upstairs attic door, where he left them, to the living room floor where they sat near the table, as though whatever, or whoever, was determined not to be ignored, and as though they spoke through the box's conspicuous movements. Ben dragged the tree in and dropped it in the foyer where it lay limp less a few needles, and he stared at that imploring box on the rug of the living room floor. And he blinked and rubbed his eyes as though to attribute it to some logical hallucinatory malfeasance, or a vain attempt to recall moving it himself. But he was unsatisfied in both endeavors, and there the haunted box remained, yet begging to be explored.

He was slave, suddenly, to an ambiguous master, perhaps of they who walked these old wood floors one or two lifetimes before. The flaps of the box were open, and he retrieved the tree stand from his cellar where it had collected a decade of spiders and webs which had been spun and rotted and spun again, carcasses of flies and spiders and indiscernible insects turned to crystal dust in its rusty pit and crevices. This permanent relic of the cellar floor, amongst tricycles and playthings, which had been lost and not touched for better than a decade, long lost like the insects in that web, long before. He cleaned the tree-stand adequately in the sink, scrubbing the grit and ancient sap away and placed it in front of the living room window where it always went. Where it belonged. Then he filled it with lukewarm sugar water, which he tested with his fingertips.

"Not too much, daddy," Zoey begged, forever 6 and his perpetual boss, eldest of the two sisters who came from the box, wrapped in paper, and covered in dust, as though awoken suddenly from eternal sleep by imaginary monsters under their unearthly bed.

He gasped in shock and regarded her through wide bloodshot eyes. But the traumatism of her was overtaken by the elation, or hope, of her being, and he grinned at her, assuring her that he wouldn't fill it too much.

"Just enough," he promised.

She shook her head. Then she stood back and watched as he and Ruby, who was still 4, carried the tree to the stand where they placed it carefully, mindful of the TV and the pictures on the wall that never aged. And Ben let Ruby tighten the bolts which was her favorite thing, being that she was "small and swift," as she liked to say repeating it from somewhere, cranking the bolts with her tiny fingers as he leveled the tree. But she turned them the wrong way again this year, so he climbed underneath and there just the two of them were, as though in an iridescent cave, smiling at each other under the canopy of that odoriferous spruce, her missing two teeth like a mousehole and her big root-beer candy eyes glistering in the light of a strand of lights that hadn't yet been placed. He began to cry, and she reached out and held his hand. 

"Daddy, it's okay. We're home now," she whispered. "But you can cry if you want. This is our secret place. Remember. Forever and ever." Ruby squeezed his hand and then scooted out of from under the tree and dashed off into the kitchen where she disappeared with her sister into the laughter and the darkness that stole them with no promise of their return. 

But that box did still implore, so he unpacked it, pardoning her for merely a phantasmagoria of his grief and exhaustion. In each ornament and decoration there was a memory. A beautiful but painful memory. Reindeer they made at Sunday school from popsicle sticks and googly eyes Their paper Santas with the cottonball beards they made in preschool that counted down the days until Christmas. The glue on some of the dates giving up and orphaned balls rolling around in the box. He tried to reattach them, but had to get glue from the junk drawer where there were many more little things like hair barrettes and plastic rings and crayons. And rummaging there, through that drawer, he broke down over all those little things.

"Nepenthe!" he shouted. "Surcease my wicked sorrow with something to drown me til to-morrow where I shall remember nothing more!" An old familiar but futile incantation he muttered ten thousand times thinking of them since that day. Seeing similar apparitions out of the corner of his eye. And he called upon his familiar bottle of liquor, reaching desperately for that cabinet door. But there, in that empty house, needles of that tree's trespass as evident upon the threshold as blood splatter, and that crooked tree in the stand yet bare, he unscrewed the cap, retrieved the glass, but then quickly screwed it back on again as though not to let loose an evil spirit therein, putting the bottle and glass away, otherwise undisturbed. He put the remote control up and silence, a hiatus from which he had long endured, torn and tormented, and sober as a judge, he sat there in the recliner and thought of babies and children that were no more, reality reminding him so wickedly as it had done, so mercilessly before.

Then from the kitchen, footsteps pattered and closer they came as he regarded that ungainly tree that wasn't like one of years' past. And Zoey and Ruby emerged through the doorless door from the foyer, and there they tumbled onto each other, giggling as they had so many times and days before like shadows upon that living room floor, tickling and giggling happily, as though unknowing of their ghostly occuring, as though life had never betrayed them at all, as though they lived once more. 

But that burnt-orange sky had abandoned its bruised absurdity and purpled to night so that there was no logic or reason for such shadows to be there upon that rug on the living room floor. And rugs and walls and boxes of ornaments have no memory, he reasoned. No life. But there they were, perfect as ever and imploring, imploring, one on top of the other, twisting and turning, whilst he in his madness was madly burning, "Daddy, daddy, let me put the first decoration on the tree!"

"We must wait for your mother," he said solemnly. Ben Bruce, who was suddenly again the judicious father by the aberration of a mysterious cardboard box not touched in ten some years by anyone but the God, or ghost, or fiend that had moved it. He wasn't sure of which. 

There she was at the kitchen sink as she was the day from which he knew no respite. As though she had crawled from the drain or been bore of the soapy water. No less beautiful and impossibly no more, as though she had washed ashore from that distant place, that abyss which the living abhor. A spectral with soapsuds on her hands and a careworn smile perfectly creased on a face frozen without flaw. A Seraphim, she was. In knee socks and one of Ben's old white dress shirts. The sleeves rolled up her thin arms. Her legs warm, smooth, and bare. Her hair pulled up. No bra and her small breasts evident though unseen, gently beneath the risen pockets of that oversized shirt. Buttons done and carefully undone.

"Is this real?" Ben gasped faintly, afraid to approach her for that she might vanish, recalling the salesman who sold him the tree saying the tree was special. Was this all some hallucinatory affect of the tree's scent? Had he been drugged? By this tree? Drunk he felt, though he had not a drop. Insane, though he knew he wasn’t. She dried her hands and embraced him as the ocean calmly and naturally embraces the shore, and moonlight embraces the ocean, and he drowned on her as he always drowned on her. His affection ever-deepening in his bottomless core. So warm and soft, again she felt, maybe warmer and softer than ever in every pit and pore. She was the tenderest person he had ever known, and it was love at first site all those years ago that he saw her in that mall. 

She worked in the bookstore that became Abercrombie and Fitch, and then Hickory Farms, and then something else that is no longer there, but forever it remains in his recalling as that bookstore. In the mall inside of himself where it is pristine and undisturbed. As it was in 1995. Not the mausoleum it is now. He worked folding ties and slacks at Elder-Beerman, his hands sore from the repetition. She was the beautiful smart girl with the seemingly permanent smile in jean overalls and big glasses. And he bought a collection of books on his break. Day after day. Book upon book. But only when she was working. Things that would impress her, he thought subconsciously. Never a magazine or a novelty so dull. Things he didn't understand then that still set upon the shelf waiting to be understood. 

It was Christmas Eve when he finally asked her out. When the shop was busy, but he mustered the courage and she said yes, and they got away from their jobs for about 30 minutes to eat at Subway together when there was food in the food court still. When he fumbled on his words, but it didn't matter. When it didn't seem possible that the mall would ever end, and every space that was occupied would someday be abandoned. When there was an army of maintenance staff and security and shoppers whose faces were too many to see in anything but the brush strokes of a blur, like the people in a Rembrandt painting.

There was that mall Santa, the same guy year after year, who seemed not to get older, but who underneath the frizzy-white beard and red-velvet suit was surreptitiously aging, dying as we are all dying inside out. And year after year, Ben and his wife went back to that mall and had their kids' pictures taken with that Santa as Frank Sinatra sung Christmas carols overhead. 

But slowly it was slipping away. He knew it back then, looking around, though he ignored it when the thought occured for there is a natural inclination to avoid unpleasant thoughts of mortality. When the record shop disappeared. When the women’s plus shop became All About Leather. When the Arab set up a cellphone fix-it business where the pet store used to be, and Radio Shack belonged. When they stopped decorating or selling calendars at Christmas. When Sears sunk. When Gymboree, where they bought all their kids' clothes, bellied up. When the athletic shoe store vanished, followed by the discount shoe store that courageously took up its mantle. When jewelry store after jewelry store died off. Even the one where he bought her the ring. They all went sometime between visits and it was like they just disappeared.

He didn't expect them to disappear the way those shops in the mall did. He didn't expect to get a call from a Highway Patrolman with a steady but inflected voice telling him there was an accident and he needs to come to the hospital. On Christmas Eve, no less. He often wondered had he not answered the phone, would it have been? Could he have ignored it and they would have come home as they always came home? Is such how fate is? You must, in some way, acknowledge, or else it isn’t. They were going to a mall in another city that had yet to die. A mall that was full of people and business and packages and young couples meeting for the first time on their lunch break. But Ben stayed home to watch the game. The game, he balked.

He kissed his wife and held her tight by the arms there in the kitchen. Squeezed her so that she wouldn't yet again disappear. He held her and begged her not to go, crying passionately, wildly like when he drank tequila. She looked at him and smiled and told him not to worry or to be sad. It was all different now. Ben didn't understand. But logic and reason had long-since abandoned him, thus, he owed no debt to it. He lost both somewhere over the past ten some years. Somewhere at the bottom of a bottle, or in the lulls of languid hours that went on and on, the beat him mercilessly with every tick, tock, and toll of the unfriendly clock. 

But here they are now. And happily, they hung those decorations, cardboard snowmen and reindeer crafts, chains of paper snowflakes, Santa with a full cottonball beard. And they decorated the tree as they did all those years before, the girls having not aged a day since the last, his wife, too, not a hair on her head was different. They lit their Christmas candles, as usual, drank hot coco and sung Christmas carols long into that wintry night. The girls fell asleep waiting for Santa Claus. And Ben and his wife carried them to bed, mindful of the stairs that groaned in complaint, step after careful step. And they made love that night as the snow fell outside the window in the light of the streetlamps, as a 55-degree Christmas went back to Florida where it belonged, and grays and whites were on the artist's palette once more, and snow fell abundantly and gracefully like goose feathers being dumped from a giant and bottomless pillowcase. 

He stayed up and watched her sleep, afraid that if he went to sleep she would be gone. Half-expecting to blink and she would be gone. He played with her hair and held her close to him. Then he got up for a while and set in the rocking chair in the girls’ room and listened to them breath and watched the Yellow Submarine rotating lamp cast shadows on the wall like dreams in their head.

 "How can this be?" he asked her, back in bed for the night as she opened her sleepy eyes and smiled to greet him. 

"How can it not be? Love is the loveliest thing," his wife whispered back, her face alit by the amber-glow of a dying candle. "You have been alone for ten years, Ben. Ever since we left. You've not been bitter and you've not forsaken God. Most people move on, they lose their faith, but you didn't. While I hoped you moved on so you wouldn't be so lonely and tormented, I secretly wished that you wouldn't. Selfish of me, I know. But here we are. Because of you."

"I don't want to go to sleep," he admitted, caressing her cheek. "I don't want to wake up to an empty house again."

She nodded and smiled then slipped into his arms where she softly cooed and fell asleep, safely and contentedly. Then sometime in the night, hours later, he fell asleep. 

He woke up on Christmas morning alone in bed, in anguish for it was all just a dream. Or, if real, the reality had expired. But it was a gift, nonetheless. To have them back again. Even for only a night. A perfect night. So he thanked God and smiled, crying still, and he got up and dressed and looked out the window. The sky was gray and the ground was covered with snow. And parked on the street by his house was the tree salesman, Gilead Balm, who leaned against his beat-up truck, smoking a cigarette. And Ben smiled and opened his window and shouted, "Merry Christmas, Gilead!" 

Gilead smiled and waved back, and said softly, "Merry Christmas to you, Ben Bruce. You are a true believer." Then he got in his truck and puttered away, satisfied once more that he did good, content in goodness and happy in the mirth of the angelic season.  

As Ben watched Gilead drive away, there was a clattering downstairs. He put on his slippers and robe and slowly walked down thinking it was either an animal or an intruder. But there by the tree was his family. His daughters. His wife. He might have fainted had he not been so elated, so alive in their presence. And Ruby smiled, her missing teeth like a mousehole, and Zoey cried, "Merry Christmas, daddy!" And his wife, quickly embraced him so that there was no chance for him to excuse this all to yet another delusion. 

"We were letting you sleep in, daddy!" Ruby said. "But can we open our presents now?"

"Of course you can!" he cried, his eyes full of tears. His wife gave him a hug.

"Are you okay?" she asked softly. 

"Yes. I am now." 

On Christmas night, they watched the snow through the living room window, sipping hot coco, and singing carols again, softly. His wife curled up to him on the couch and the kids sat on the rug, playing with toys. He expected them to vanish, to fade away, but they never did. Nor had they any memory of ever being gone at all. It was like ten years had been erased and the accident never happened and Ben wondered if it was only a bad dream. Ten years he was without them, yet they came back, just as they were. And family came to visit and no one seemed to think it odd that they were here. No one but him. 

"How can it be?" he whispered to himself about a week later on New Year's Eve, carefully filling that cardboard box with decorations and ornaments he wrapped in newspaper, his daughters napping on the couch. 

"How can it not be?" his wife replied softly from behind him, bringing him a hot cup of coffee. "Love is the loveliest thing." 

She kissed his cheek and winked at him, as though somehow she knew. And he thought to ask or to tell her, to try to convince her, but he didn't want to speak of it and be saddled by the grief, even of the thought. Or to risk that speaking of it would undo the magic that had vanquished it. So not to dwell, he never said a word. But he never forgot Gilead Balm in his prayers. He planted the tree outside after Christmas and his wife asked him why, being that it would not live as it was without roots. He smiled at her and told her it would live. He had faith it would live. And so it did.

Grief is love with nowhere to go. But there is always somewhere. There is always someplace. That much I know.