The Burnt Girl

If only she hadn't said anything.

"I don't know why they say such things.  My goodness.  No one has ever died like that, here."  She twisted to look over her shoulder, stare at the brick farmhouse.  We stood in the thick shade, the afternoon heavy with summer.  The sun bounced hotspots off the top floor windows.  I watched her jowled loose-neck profile and felt the flood of memories she could actually see as she stared at my house.  "When we lived here, I was just a girl, and the trees were not so tall to block the house from the road. Ooh!  My father'd have a fit if he saw how the trees grew up in the field.  We'd sit on the porch.  Watch the cars.  Bet you can't do that now," she smiled, tenderness soft in the creases, gray hair wispy in the late day heat.
     "Nope.  But...you can hear them."
     The denial reminded her of where she'd left off.
     "So don't believe them, honey."  I still had no idea what she meant but I guessed it was coming in the next breath.  Her pale eyes found the stiff grass as she said, "No one ever fell in the fireplace and burned up.  We was the only kids that ever lived here," the old woman told me, "and no one got burnt and there's no ... no ... you know... dead soul haunting this place.  Just crazy talk.  People get all hyped up about nothing."  She twisted to check the house again as if it had moved an inch to the right while her back was turned or was about to nod in solemn agreement.  "Just an old house."  She turned to me then and found my face if not my eyes.
    "Its ok.  I hadn't heard any ghost stories anyw-"
    "Ghosts, " she grumbled.  "Well certainly not."
     Her husband came up behind her, big-bellied and shrunk in the chest.  "Yut, takes him a good three 'ours just to mow it all himself...." and the conversation drifted to Toros and lesser lawnmowers.  A spider hung by a gossamer thread from high in the boughs coasting on the heat rising and the humidity looking for a catch to spin his web.  Later, the older couple left, rolling down my dusty lane in a crossover SUV, waving like grandparents. 
     A month later she came back with an elderly niece.  They brought a photo album and flipped gluey pages turned yellow of my house before it was my house.  Her mother's garden lined with sugar snap teepees and tall marigolds.  A love seat strangely under the only window in the kitchen.  The breezy wraparound porch a previous owner tore off and left bare.   She stayed in the kitchen, so overwhelmed by memories of her long-gone mother she'd clasp the buttons on her shirt, eyes turned glassy.  When they left she promised to visit in the spring.
    Summer caved to fall, trees dropping colored leaves like skirts.  Fall fell gracefully to winter, when tendrils of smoke sailed out of my chimney top, a wood stove cranking in the fireplace.  I'd feed the hungry flames great mouthfuls of firewood, every time feeling the shallow depth of the hearth with my eyeballs and wondering how a child could fall into the fireplace and not survive.  It wasn't deep.  The mantle slung low.  And I wouldn't revisit the rumored story until I shoved more wood in the iron stove, the thought forgotten even as I swung the door shut with a thick suede glove.
     That winter, I dreamt of smoke.  I woke up with it full in my nose.  Sat up in bed in the dark and would sniff the air like a dog.  I got up sometimes, so convinced something some where was on fire, and after checking the burners and the oven in the kitchen and then for candles left glowing in the dark, I'd swing the creaky metal door to the wood stove wide as my family slept uninterrupted upstairs.  Safe in the iron box, red embers slept in a bed of graying ash.  No fire.  No smoke.  I climbed back into bed, annoyed at my dreams.
     One night, cool with the promise of spring, moths already tapping at the windows at night like fingertips, I woke because I heard a door shut.  Feet moved like a sleepwalker.  I waited for another door, a flush of a toilet, a child of mine making their way back to bed.  I waited.  Awake, I waited.  Warm under the covers in my bed, eyes open to nothing but the outline of the closet door in the darkness, she floated down my stairs.  A girl of no more than 12.  Clothes burnt away revealing raw skin, charred and sooty, especially at her shoulders, leaving trail of scent like smoke.  She floated.  Down my stairs.  
    For days I was jumpy.  I climbed into bed at night  flinching at squirrels racing across the metal roof, squelching goosebumps at the owls calling to each other in the pine trees, squeezing my eyes shut to push the burnt girl's black and red skinned shoulders out of my mind, which only made them more vivid.  If only she hadn't said anything.  It was my imagination spinning the words she had planted there.  The cat made those footsteps.  I mentally discarded the sound of the door, shaking a defiant no against the pillow seams.  I couldn't blame the cat for that, too.
    Several nights of only my mind retrieving the image of her floating down the stairs, one hand, shiny and wet in its rawness, on the rail, careless of my eyes impossibly watching her descend, left my days groggy and hampered by the weight of sleeplessness until eventually I could lie in the dark without clenching the quilts in my fist.  After a few weeks, the thud of the cat leaping to the floor in another room sliced my eyes open but let me drift back to sleep.  A month, and the daffodils nodded at me in the rain as I slept lulled to sleep by the drum of it.
     Their pert little SUV strolled up the muddy lane after churchtime on a Sunday.  As they eased themselves out of the car we spilled out of the house.  I suppressed a smile as she made her way towards me, full of old lady eagerness, determined to step firm on the wet flagstones to get to me.  I barely knew this woman, I lived in her childhood home, she was born in the bedroom I slept in, and she reached out to me, her hands light on my elbow, tipping in to speak to me.
     "Hi -," my space invaded, my nightmare fresh at just the sight of her: the smeary roasted skin, the charred hair matted around her melted ears, the smell of smoke on this day still fresh with passing rain showers.
     In my face, close, her breath yeasty like pancake brunch, she asks, "Did you see her?"  
     I could feel the muscles in my stomach lace up, my breath still.  "See what, who?"
      She studies me, her easy grip on my elbow childlike, tugging until she lets go.  Her husband's protruding stomach comes up behind her first, followed by his man-shy Hello.
      "Welllll," he drawls.  "Survived the damn winter, didn't we all."
      She shakes her head at me, the house behind us.
       "No?"  she says.
       Both of them stare at me, for separate reasons.
       Knowing exactly what she means, "No," I tell her.  Putting to death the image of a young girl supposedly burnt and hallowed in my house, that wafted down my stairs in the middle of the night like smoke and scent and letting it go.  I wished she'd never said anything about the burnt girl, but I let her go.