My Ghosts by Mary Swan Page A

how important this business of names can be. My own was for my mother’s young sister and she always said that my eyes were like hers, though I couldn’t know for myself. In the only photograph, now burned and gone, my aunt Isabella was already dead, those eyes fallen shut, and her cheekbones sharp in her face. On her sad days my mother stroked my hair and said how much I reminded her and I hated the thought of it, living out a dead girl’s life. Wished, always, for a name all my own, one not trailing anything behind it. I understand it differently now, though, and if Edie had been a boy I would have given her both my brothers’ names. A little piece of them carrying on, and maybe whenever I opened the back door and called,
Ross Alan, time for supper
, maybe all three would have come running.
    No one buttered my bread for me, in my new home on Pembroke Street, and no one threw strange arms around me, hugging me until I nearly broke. Mostly they left me to find my own way to fit, gave me simple tasks, shaking out a mat or laying the table, until I learned how they did things, knew on my own when to stir up the stove, and where to put the clean dishes. Those first days it seemed that every time a door opened, someone new came through. Even the building was confusing, actually two separate houses, though it looked like one from the front. The right side was for Ben and his family and the other, where I was, for my three aunts and their new lodger, Jack, and sometimes my other uncle, Charlie, when he was having a difficulty.
    The house was built by two brothers who married two sisters, or so Uncle Charlie told me. That part was probably true, but he had so many stories, and he told me that one long before my aunts explained how you could know which ones were real. “Don’t let on,” they said, and they told me he always smoothed his right eyebrow before he told a lie. “Everybody has a sign like that, if you look for it,” my aunt Nan said, and she said Charlie’s was quite obvious and that’s why he was always losing at cards, another thing I hadn’t known. She said that she didn’t have a sign, because she never told lies, but even without Aunt Kez’s snort I would have known that wasn’t true. When I began to practise letters from the telegraph manual Ben gave me, they both said the code was far too complicated for them ever to have wanted to learn. But that time the new minister came to call, Aunt Kez tapped a rude word with the sugar tongs as she dropped three lumps into his cup, and Aunt Nan had to run from the parlour, coughing hard into her hand.
    Uncle Charlie said he’d forgotten the names of the brothers who built the house, and he didn’t remember what business they’d been in together. A successful one, it must have been, and they built their new houses side by side, and carried their sister brides through the gleaming front doors. Together they planted a white lilac bush in the middle of the shared backyard, and each year its soft scent reached farther and farther into the houses, through every open window. The sister brides were always visiting back and forth, and after the first winter, when they complained so much about having to lace up their boots every time, their husbands built a closed-in passage that joined the houses at the front. In time there were children, and first one then the other built extra rooms out the back. But theyleft an open space for the lilac, and when the sisters were busy inside, they could still wave to each other through its blossoms.
    “But nothing lasts forever,” Uncle Charlie said. “Well, you know that as well as anyone.” There was a falling-out, between the brother husbands or the sister wives, and they boarded up the doors at either end of the connecting passageway. “It was just there,” he said, pointing in the front hallway. “Do you see the outline, under the paper?” When I couldn’t, he said that just showed what a good and permanent job they’d