Brother Sun would say. I staggered along, drunk as a lord, wondering why the monks couldn’t see my ghost. On the last day of their visit I broke down on a yoga mat to Brother Sun. I guess confessing to monks is something like confessing to priests. Brother Sun never said anything to Bear about our discussion. I begged for help, but he was a kind wall of brownrobed detachment. “You need to clear your mind of impurities,” he said, solemn faced and serious. “There is energy. There is the spirit. We create personal versions of this.” It was the first and only time I mentioned my ghost to another person. Of course, she heard the whole thing. She was furious. She didn’t speak to me for days afterwards. Silent treatment from a ghost doesn’t sound bad, but it is. It’s nerve-wracking. Quiet haunting is the most unpredictable.
“Go
ahead, Regan, try it,” she
says now. “Spill the beans and see who believes you.” She’s still laughing. She pulls herself up into the tall branches of a maple tree and twirls around. I go back outside just in time. One of the younger kids has figured out how to get a pile of leaves to smolder with a magnifying glass and a shard of sunlight. My ghost especially loves the nature cabin. It’s full of the husks of dead things. Butterflies, beetles, bird nests, old skulls and vertebrae of all sorts of animals from mice, to muskrats, to giant elk. It’s a bone yard of the living, breathing forest outside. I teach the campers about our surroundings by tracing outward from what’s left behind. We never talk about it, but I think she is drawn to the bones because hers were never found. On good days my ghost sits on the splintery counters following along with the lessons with some interest. On the bad days, like today, she torments me and plays pranks on the campers. It leaves me feeling dismal and down.
Even later that afternoon when I’ve got a pretty strong buzz and a group of campers spots a nest with perfect sky-blue robin’s eggs in it, I still have to pretend to be thrilled. I hardly notice the colors or the teacup china quality to the eggs. Instead I’m glaring at my ghost who is tying two campers’ shoelaces together. In life we weren’t like this. In life we were friends.
Ghosts aside, I’m not a very good employee. In between groups of children I swig heartily from a water bottle full of vodka in my backpack, smoke cigarettes behind my cabin, and pop Xanax and breath mints like candy. I give myself regular rubdowns with insect repellent and hand sanitizer to cover the scent. Perfume would be too suspicious around here. I do my best not to sweat. Not an easy task outdoors in the summer. I try to come up with low energy, nature-oriented tasks for the campers. We harvest a lot of butterfly eggs. Once we’ve ravaged the milkweed