![]() ![]() He’s the one, Molly knows, who wanted to be a foster parent. ![]() “I know, I know.” Ralph’s voice is weary. “If I’d known she had this many problems, I never would’ve agreed to it.” “This is not what we signed up for,” Dina is saying. Through her bedroom wall Molly can hear her foster parents talking about her in the living room, just beyond her door. The ghosts whispered to me, telling me to go on. I could take solace in their presence or I could fall down in a heap, lamenting what I’d lost. No substitute for the living, perhaps, but I wasn’t given a choice. ![]() Now she is 84 to my 91, and with me still. Eighteen months to my nine years, 13 years to my 20. And my sister Maisie, ever-present, an angel on my shoulder. Maybe I am lucky – that at the age of nine I was given the ghosts of my parents’ best selves, and at 23 the ghost of my true love’s best self. I’ve come to think that’s what heaven is – a place in the memory of others where our best selves live on. The bitterness and alcohol and depression are stripped away from these phantom incarnations, and they console and protect me in death as they never did in life. My Gram, with her kind eyes and talcum-dusted skin. They fill silence with their weight, dense and warm, like bread dough rising under cloth. Sometimes these spirits have been more real to me than people, more real than God. ![]()
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