By Karen Zlotnick

My mother’s ghost appeared to me three whole years before my mother left. 

Sitting over a cup of tea, I told my mother about the visit. I wasn’t too shaken, but I was a little concerned it meant something ominous. I was nine, still putting a drop of milk and a cube of sugar in my tea and stirring it with a tiny spoon, the way my mother taught me.

My mother smiled, what was left of her red lipstick bright across the lower half of her face. She asked me if she looked good in ghost form and glanced at her frosted nails. It was obvious she didn’t believe me, so I kept the rest of the visits to myself.

*

My mother’s ghost visited often. 

Sometimes she’d appear in my mid-awake state, just before I’d use the back of my hand to prevent my drool from wetting the pillow. I’d feel her arms wrapped around my shoulders. She never spoke, but one time she lay down facing me and put her breezy hands on my cheeks and looked into my eyes in a knowing way. Other times she’d catch me off guard, when I was coloring or Barbie-ing or trying on my mother’s spike-heeled pumps. She came to me silent and warm. 

My mother asked me why I stopped wearing my cardigans. I said I outgrew the look, but the truth is I was always warm.

*

My mother had patience for me and listened to my relentless storytelling and detailed ramblings about my latest drawings. She took me to the art supply store and indulged me with markers, colored pencils, crayons, and professional-grade sketchbooks. She pretend-introduced me to imaginary museum-goers as The Artist in Residence.

My mother’s ghost often stood over me while I drew, nodding and caressing the back of my hair. It wasn’t distracting at all. 

One time, over a cup of tea, my mother commented that my hair was particularly silky. If you only knew, I thought. Then she told me the marker stains on my fingertips made it look like I’d touched a rainbow.

*

One night, my mother’s ghost made a rainbow appear in my bedroom, only one end of it slithered behind the ceiling fan instead of landing on the floor. With a long, billowy finger, my mother’s ghost pointed to it and smiled so big that her lips touched my closet door. It was the first time I ever spoke out loud to her. 

I said, “I love it.” 

I couldn’t have imagined it, but her smile got even bigger.

*

My mother’s fading was slow at first. She complained of back pain, took pills to relax her muscles, and slept a lot. I visited her in her bed, bringing her new drawings, new stories.

One day, my mother’s ghost stood with me in our bathroom after my mother accidentally left out a bottle with this on the label: Use as needed. We stared at the bottle together.

That night, my mother’s ghost lay down next to me under my covers. She warmed my feet with hers, and before she had to leave, she grabbed socks from my drawer and slipped them over my toes. I wore those socks to school the next day; I didn’t even mind that they were a little stretched out from sleeping and dreaming in them. 

*

My mother made a joke about how thin she’d gotten, how her jeans might fall right to her feet if she didn’t wear a belt. Eleven years old, a fashionista with an artist’s sensibility, I convinced her to let me help her shop for new jeans, but right after she parked the car under the sign for The Cheesecake Factory, she panicked and thrust the car into reverse. My mother didn’t know it, but her ghost’s hands were on the steering wheel along with hers. I fell asleep with my head on the window.

We didn’t talk about it—the panic, the drive home. Instead, I sat on the edge of her bed and told her my newest story in which a young child had to walk a tightrope over a lake. In the lake was a school of child-eating fish, and on the shore was the warm embrace of two of the child’s favorite teachers. Also, the lake was purple. 

When I showed her the drawing for my story, my mother’s bottom lip quivered. I didn’t know how to respond, but my mother’s ghost helped my mother to close her eyes and rest. I slid the drawing out of my mother’s hand, went to my bedroom, and used a black marker to blot out any fish that could eat a child.

*

My mother’s body didn’t give out until I turned thirty, but she’d faded from me by the time I was twelve.

Often with her ghost by my side, I visited my mother in the facility where they kept her clean and calm. I liked that she seemed peaceful, even when I was old enough to understand that “as needed” had become her way of life.

My aunts—Dora and Dolly—stepped in where my mother had left off. Dora, a food chemist, taught me to resist sugar, to drink my tea black, to have one bite of a cookie instead of the whole thing. And Dolly, a successful textbook illustrator, read every single story I wrote, poured over each sketch with loving, instructional eyes.

*

Right before my mother completed her suicide, my mother’s ghost guided my hand in a drawing that would become central in my third children’s book. 

A child walks over a colossal bridge which is in danger of collapse. In the sky, ghostly clouds hover. In the water below, fish form an expansive net in case the child falls. On the other side, two women stand ready.

*   *   *

Born and raised in New York, Karen Zlotnick lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and their Newfoundland dog. 

Some of her work has been featured in Pithead Chapel, Typishly, jmww, Stonecoast Review, and Moon City Review. In addition, one of her stories was nominated for Best Small Fictions.