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Back Phantoms
Chapters (16)
  1. Title
  2. Chapter 1
  3. Chapter 2
  4. Chapter 3
  5. Chapter 4
  6. Chapter 5
  7. Chapter 6
  8. Chapter 7
  9. Chapter 8
  10. Chapter 9
  11. Chapter 10
  12. Chapter 11
  13. Chapter 12
  14. Chapter 13
  15. Acknowledgments
  16. Also by Christian Kiefer

Mrs. Wilson said nothing now and for a long while neither she nor I moved, the room around us choking down until it felt as if all the oxygen had fled, leaving us with our mouths agape as if fish flung up from the sea. Then Mrs. Wilson came to her feet, her mouth closing and her lips forming a thin hard line, her entire body rigid. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. And then, before I could even stand, she was out the door, the broad white shape of it closing hard behind her.

I set my delicate cup upon the coffee table and stood, still not quite knowing how to behave. “Thank you for the tea,” I mumbled, nodding and then half bowing, embarrassed by that latter action but not knowing what else to do or how to excuse myself, but if Mrs. Takahashi noticed me at all she made no indication of it until I was at the door, my hand upon the knob.

“Boy or girl?” she said then.

“What do you mean?”

“Was the baby a boy or a girl?” She sat forward in the chair, her hands upon her lap, unmoving, not looking at me, not looking at anything.

“I don’t know,” I said simply. Then I opened the door and passed into the bright clear summer sunlight.

Chapter 6

6

WE DID NOT SPEAK ON THE DRIVE BACK FROM SAN JOSE and I was left to wonder just what I had overheard, the story of that birth in Seattle, Mrs. Wilson and her sister, Dottie, and the baby and Mrs. Wilson’s daughter, Helen. And Ray Takahashi of course, whose name I had not heard before that afternoon.

Something of the story stayed with me that night, after we had returned to my grandmother’s home and Mrs. Wilson had driven away into the early evening, the sun low and the oaks casting long shadows across the golden summer grasses. My grandmother could hardly understand my questions, although she confirmed that Helen Wilson was, indeed, Evelyn Wilson’s daughter.

“I didn’t even know she had children,” I told her.

“A daughter and a son,” my grandmother told me. “Helen married someone from out of town. Maybe Chicago. Or ­Minneapolis? Sales, I think. Must have been twenty years ago now.”