There are plenty of houses out there with ghosts, but I don’t think there’s many with the ghost of a storm. My ghost’s named Isabel, and she’s not much younger than I am — she’s a hurricane that hit the Maryland Eastern Shore back in 2003. She brought an eight foot storm surge with her, and she poured in through the walls and windows of the old house and never quite left again.
I only found the house because I happened to stop in a hole in the wall coffee shop on the drive back to my parent’s. I’d just quit my job in Hampton Roads. While I was waiting for my cappuccino, I was glancing over the local bulletin board, and then I saw it: a sheet of printer paper with some photos of the house and dock above a price, a phone number, and the words “HAS GHOST.” I don’t know if it was the price or the warning that made me call the number.
“You’ll want to stay in the house before you buy it,” the man who answered told me as soon as I asked about the house. I’d find out later that his name was Dan. “I can tell you that the wind will start screaming bloody murder and then the house is gonna fill with two feet of water, but you won’t understand it. Not until you see it.”
“You think I could stay there tonight?”
“No reason why not. I can come by around 6 o’clock to let you in.” He read me the address, and that was that.
I drove through a dense stand of pine trees, parked beside Dan’s Ford pickup, and there it was. One and a half stories, clad in grey siding and perched on stilts over an adoring crowd of golden reeds. It had looked pretty in the photos, but photos didn’t smell of pine and brackish bay air, and they didn’t rustle with the reeds.
Perhaps I would have stayed in my car for hours and just looked, but Dan must have heard me arrive, because he opened the front door and waved. He was an older Black man, his bald head wrinkled with sun exposure, and as I shook his hand I smelled tobacco on his breath.
“Call me when you leave, and I’ll come by to lock up,” he said. “And you can call me if you start losing your head about the water. No guarantees I’ll come by, or that I’ll pick up. But remember that it won’t get any higher than the kitchen table. And as long as you don’t open one of the doors, all the water and mud and damage should all disappear within a few hours.”
“A few hours?”
“Frank told me he was stuck up in the attic for seven hours once. And once the winds were howling scarce a minute before they went quiet again. But usually it should be done in three; maybe two, maybe four.”
He gestured to the interior of the house behind him, then stepped aside. “You can take a look around. It’s all Frank’s old furniture. And the dock is out through that door in the kitchen.”
I stepped inside. It was one large room, blending from living room to dining room to kitchen, its furniture all function over form. I picked up a lone knicknack, an old oyster shell, from the kitchen table. “Frank was the old owner?”
“He passed a little over a month ago. Lived here til the very end. He thought about moving after Isabel blew through and he lost Sylvia, but then the ghost started kicking and he felt he had to stay.”
“Was he your…”
“Family? Oh, no. He didn’t have any family. Just Sylvia — his boat. Sylvia Rose. A thirty foot skipjack, one of those historic sailboats that’s used for oyster dredging. I was one of the crew he hired for the oyster runs back when I was younger. Stayed on, and even when Isabel dragged Sylvia upriver and broke her on the Choptank bridge, I stuck around.”
He crossed to the far wall and opened the back door. “Come on, you should see the dock. It’s where he used to keep Sylvia.”
Just beyond the back door, calm brown water of some nameless creek swirled by, on its way to spill into the Choptank just a few dozen yards to our right. A wooden walkway led from the back door out over the water, where a ramp dropped to a square floating dock. A chair and a small table were lashed down to the mooring cleats.
My eyes caught on a large tree branch slowly floating downstream. A few old autumn sycamore leaves clung to one end. My gaze tracked its slow but inexorable progress past the dock and down to the Choptank, and for once there was not a thought in my mind. Then I turned and saw Dan staring at the water slipping by the dock with unseeing eyes. He started and managed a smile.
“Call me if you need anything,” he said.
I slept in a dead man’s bed that night, in the loft on the second floor. The ghost kept quiet. So did the whole Choptank. I threw the windows open and fell asleep to nothing but the whisper of reeds, a thousand miles removed from the perpetual traffic noise of my apartment in Hampton Roads. Even in my parents’ house on Kent Island, you could always hear the echo of road noise coming off the Bay Bridge. I found myself staring at the ceiling and trying to recall if I’d ever listened to a silence like this one before. And of course, I was wondering whether or not the ghost was real.
As I made myself a cup of coffee from a dead man’s machine the next morning, I mostly decided that Dan had exaggerated about the ghost. A leaky roof and some resonant winds could be scary, I imagined, but nothing to hide in the attic about. I poured the cup and got out my phone to call Dan. Then I heard the wind.
It wasn’t that it suddenly got loud, it had just been building and building and I only just noticed it. Shrieking, howling, wailing — all our descriptions of wind compare it to the human voice, and as I listened to the air roaring around the house, I understood why. There was simply too much emotion, too much distress, in that sound. Its keen drifted from low thrums to high whistles and back again, underpinned by an accelerating patter of rain.
All the while, outside the window, the sun was shining on the Choptank river.
The water started seeping through the floor a few minutes after the wind started. I watched its stain creep across the light blue rug before conceding that I was going to get my feet wet if I stayed put any longer. Cup of coffee in hand, I retreated halfway up the stairs. The water followed me as far as the fourth step before stopping.
I put my coffee cup down and reached out to touch the water’s surface. It was cool, but not cold. I sank my fingers in and pulled my hand through the water, feeling the resistance, watching the ripples trail behind my motion. I removed my hand and studied the film of mud that stained my skin. The silt on my fingers probably came from somewhere on the Bay floor, maybe even the seafloor, I reflected. It had probably slumbered there for decades before the hurricane dredged it up and carried it through currents of not just space but time. And here it was, caught in some swirling eddy, circling me.
I trailed my hand back through the water again. It seemed the level was falling, though with no stain of a high water line, I couldn’t be sure. I placed my hand against my thigh, letting the mud soak into the denim, then got out my phone to call Dan.
“I’m buying it,” I said.
I still wonder whether it was a coincidence that Dan’s asking price happened to be the exact amount I had saved from my Navy job. I suppose I’ve gotten a little more superstitious, living with a ghost.
I had studied as a sonar engineer, originally. I’d wanted to be on one of those teams that maps the ocean floor. I guess there’s a lot of ways to read that, especially since as a child I lived near the water back on Kent Island. A psychiatrist would probably tell you it’s because I watched that one ship ground itself in the channel a few miles up the Bay from us, or because I still fear the unknowns of deep water from that time I went swimming with friends and cut my foot open on a broken bottle. I would tell you it’s simply because I thought it was a cool use for a cool technology.
I wondered — I still wonder — if whales and dolphins swim about the ocean with a sonar map in their heads of the sea floor. I wonder what the sense is like inside their heads, this sense that’s neither sight nor sound nor touch yet somehow all three. I wonder if they have favorite vistas. I wonder if they recognize their home seafloors.
Fresh out of college, though, none of the ocean floor mapping boats were sailing, let alone hiring. I’d managed to find a job at the Coast Guard, though, helping improve the search and rescue sensor systems. But that hadn’t lasted long before they decided the systems were improved enough as is. They’d transfered me to the Navy, then; to the groups that work on torpedo guidance systems.
Later, I’d wished I’d had the courage to quit as soon as they mentioned the Navy. But in the very next breath, they’d told me the pay increase, and so I’d said nothing. For years, I’d directed nearly every cent of those pay checks to savings. It felt wrong to spend blood money, but I wasn’t quite selfless enough to donate it all like I felt I ought to. So it had stacked up until the day a torpedo I helped design blew up a ship in the Gulf of Aden and killed twenty three people.
Then I quit, and the next day I bought the house.
After I wired Dan the money, I was left with seventy three dollars and twenty one cents in my bank account. I had that, and I had a house, a car, a few suitcases in the back, and whatever belongings this Frank had left behind when he kicked the bucket. Including a ghost, I suppose. But Isabel wasn’t about to pay my grocery bill.
So I drove into Cambridge to look for “Help Wanted” signs. Not very fruitfully. Cambridge was the sort of place that felt like it should be a town, but couldn’t quite muster it. It was more a collection of houses and marinas scattered with the occasional business, all of which were likely too small to need an extra hand. There was a cluster of fast food places and a Food Lion at the edge of town, where Route 50 came over the Choptank bridge, but there was one more place I wanted to try before I admitted I was that desperate.
The coffee shop was empty when I walked in, just like when I’d visited the day before. The barista glanced at me, and her eyebrows creased with thought for a fleeting moment before her face returned to a neutral expression. She looked about my age, late twenties, with sleek brown hair tied in a ponytail. Last I was here, I’d noted, absently, that she was pretty.
“You were in here yesterday about now, weren’t you?” she asked. “Cappuccino, wasn’t it?”
“It was yesterday,” I said. “But I’ve already had my coffee for the day, actually.”
The crease returned to her eyebrows with a little more staying power. “So what are you here for?”
“Well, I was actually wondering if you’re hiring?”
She raised an eyebrow — she seemed to use those to communicate more than her vocal cords — and gestured at the empty shop, which I took as as sufficient answer. “Did you just move to the area or something?” she asked.
“I bought the house on your bulletin board, actually.”
“No way!” Her previous skepticism and annoyance, and even that universal apathy shared by all service workers, vanished. She leaned across the counter. “Is it really haunted?”
“I’d say so.” I shrugged, not exactly sure how to describe the experience I’d had that morning.
“I tried visiting not long after Dan — you must have met him — put it up a few months back. But nothing happened.” She straightened. “I’m Kathleen, by the way.”
“Juneau. Like the city, not the movie.”
“Well, Juneau, if you’re looking for work, I can offer you a tip for a tip.” She tapped the rim of the jar beside her.
I begrudgingly checked my wallet. A twenty, a five, and two ones brought my grand total to just shy of a hundred bucks. I put a one in the jar, and Kathleen grinned.
“If you’ve got the relevant skills, your best bet here is boat repair. Or oyster farming, I guess — there’s a place down the Choptank, close to your new digs, actually. Otherwise—”
“You think a sonar engineer would have those skills?”
“Fuck if I know. But a degree that impressive just might qualify you to wait on assholes at the yacht club. If you can stand it. And if not, there’s always the Chick-Fil-A on Route 50.”
I exhaled loudly. “I don’t know if that advice was worth giving you one percent of my net worth.”
Kathleen stared at me. “I thought you just bought a house!”
“Well, my liquid net worth. And I never said buying the house was a good idea.”
“No shit, girl. It’s haunted.” She laughed. “That story never ends well.”
I found the address of the oyster farm online, then spent the rest of the day blowing my savings on groceries, gas, and a rope ladder. Wouldn’t be any good getting a job if I couldn’t make shift because my downstairs was full of water. That evening, at least, passed quietly: no flood. And it was still dry when I woke up early the next morning, though outside the window the air was thick with fog.
The man who met me at the farm’s office probably wasn’t older than forty, but his deep tan and weather wrinkles weren’t helping him much there. His name was Jack. When I told him I was looking for a job, he didn’t laugh. At this point, that alone was enough to make me giddy. But he did ask if I had any relevant experience.
“No. But I did minor in marine biology.”
“And major in?”
“Electrical engineering. Specialty in sonar.”
“Sonar.” He hummed. Then he opened the back door of the office and gestured for me to follow.
Jack led me out back to their inlet on the Choptank, where a few hundred floating white rectangle frames crowded like cattle in a feedlot. None were too close in, but I could see the nearest frames enclosed a wire mesh, sunken with — presumably — the weight of oysters. They were all lashed together with ropes like sled dog harnesses, with the ends anchored to a metal frame at my feet. The earthy smell of salt marsh was overwhelming.
“I know you have a degree,” Jack started, “but you’ll have to start with minimum wage. We’ll figure out how much you know, how much you can do. Then we’ll think about raising it.”
“That sounds perfect,” I managed. He hadn’t even asked for my resume. “When do I start?”
“Now,” he said. “Let’s find you some waders.”
“Waders?”
A broad smile crossed Jack’s face. “You’ll be walkin’ in up to your chest to clean the oysters. You afraid of getting wet?”
I smiled right back. “Not at all.”
My first day off was that Saturday. I’d been planning on heading into town, but Isabel had planned otherwise. The water was lapping at the seventh step, and still rising. Roughly shoulder height, I estimated. But there was only one way to know for sure.
The water was cool at first, but grew warmer the longer I spent in it. It wasn’t quite shoulder height, but it was still deep enough to lean backward and let myself float. I closed my eyes, let myself drift around my own living room, the sunlight through the windows warm on my face. Then I remembered that I’d found all of Frank’s drinks in one of the upper kitchen cabinets. I kicked gently to float on over.
There were marks on the inside cabinet shelf I now recognized as damage from opening bottles. Floating as I was, it took me two tries to open my beer. I left a new mark in the wood, too, and I spilled a bit. I thought of it as a toast to Frank.
A week later, Dan called me.
“So how often has Isabel been visiting?” he asked.
“She’s come twice while I’ve been home,” I said. “But I’ve been out a lot. New job at the oyster farm.”
“The farm!” It was the first I’d heard him raise his voice. “You buy Frank’s house and you go over to the farm!?”
“I am so sorry, I—”
“I’m messing with you, kid. The skipjacks know the farms aren’t a threat to us. If anything, we need ’em to help reseed the Bay. That’s the real reason there’s so few of us left these days; there aren’t any oysters left, either.”
He paused, but before I could think of a response, he restarted again.
“Skipjacks are actually what I’m calling you about. See, the money you gave me for the house — I’m using it to lay a new skip. Couldn’t happen without you, so, well. I wanted your permission to name it for you. Partially. Juneau Rose, I was thinking.”
“I— I mean, if you want to, but is there really no one else?”
“They’ve gotta be named for a woman. Them’s the rules, I don’t make ’em. It’s either you or my late mother, and she never knew Frank.”
“I didn’t know him, either.”
“Oh, you never met him. But if you’ve met Isabel, well. You know him.”
I visited the Juneau Rose a couple times as it was being built. The first time, there wasn’t much more than the beginnings of its wooden ribcage. But soon enough — a matter of a few dozen visits from Isabel — the centerboard was added, the mast raised, the hull finished and caulked, and then boat was in the water.
She was thirty six feet long, with a thirty two foot mast, and massive black sails to match. Painted white with a red waterline. She had a snake’s nest of ropes on board for controlling the sails and the dredge nets. She didn’t have a motor, at least one that was directly attached to her; instead, there was a tiny rowboat hull attached to her from behind, carrying an engine and fuel tanks. It let her get in and out of harbor just fine, without violating the same Maryland laws against motorboat dredging that protected skipjacks in the first place.
I had gotten a raise at the oyster farm, in the end. Since I wasn’t paying rent, my budget felt like it had some room to burn. So I bought a boat. Not a skipjack; not even a sailboat. Just a little tin can with a motor off the back. I couldn’t dredge oysters, at least not legally. But I could putter up and down the Choptank, and I could putter up and down the little nameless creek. I developed a habit of doing so sometimes when the house started to flood. One glorious August afternoon, I jetted all the way to Cambridge. Tied up at the dock, bought a cappuccino from Kathleen, and then cruised back home to find the water still there.
I knew the last time was different because it was raining. Not just inside the house, but outside it, too. It had always been sunny when Isabel had visited before.
I climbed out the ladder from my upstairs window in a bright yellow rain slicker I’d bought at Jack’s advice. It was fun being out in the boat, at least for the first few minutes. The Choptank was beautiful in the rain, even in the barren winter. Every raindrop kissed the river’s surface with a miniature explosion, its impact rippling outward until the next drop struck. The gentle roar was a distant cousin of the rain sound I would hear inside the house.
Eventually, though, I grew cold enough to start shivering. I turned the boat back around and made it to my stretch of the creek, then paused.
Water was pouring out of the house. From the walls, from the windows, from between the stilts below. Below, the creek had burst its banks, flooding the reed bed up toward the underbelly of the house. The floating dock was partially submerged, straining against its ties to its posts.
As I sat, watching, my phone rang.
“Dan here,” the voice said. “We’ve delayed Juneau‘s first voyage a day because of the rain. Sorry to disappoint.”
“Isabel’s here,” I said.
“In the rain? She’s never done that before.”
“I know.”
I think he heard the tone in my voice. Or maybe just anything out of the normal drew his attention. “Do you want me to come by?”
“I don’t know if you’ll want to. But I’d like you here. Come by boat.”
“By Juneau?”
“If she sails.”
Dan and the Juneau arrived just as the water reached the back steps. I motored up alongside them, and he lowered a fender so I could sit at their side without damaging the hull.
“I didn’t ever tell you how Frank died,” he said after a long silence. He let another one stretch before continuing. “He drowned.”
“But I thought…”
“You thought you couldn’t drown if you live on the water? You always can. He was out back, alone, and I assume he was drunk. There was an empty bottle of champagne but no glasses, so I guess he could have poured it into the water. Anyways, somehow or other he fell in. And drowned. The tide was coming in, and it carried him up river to the bridge. That’s where they found him.”
We watched the water rise a little further around the house. The floating dock went first, breaking away from its ties. We backed the boats away and let it go.
There wasn’t much warning before the house went. Just a sudden screaming of wood, like a blue heron’s strangled shriek. A scream, a crack, and then nothing but the noise of the rain as the whole house slipped under the water.