Darcy’s Ghost
Darcy and I met Dolores the summer we turned nine. It was the hottest July on record for more than twenty years, and Lana was taking us to see our grandparents in Van Nuys. Lana couldn’t stand to be called Mom or Ma. The pseudonym conjured up for her an image of a frumpy gal in a housedress and pink sponge rollers. She didn’t like her real name, either, except Darcy and I couldn’t have called her that anyway because we never knew what it was. Ever since we could remember, she was Lana, like that movie star who got discovered in an ice-cream shop.
Darcy and I liked to pretend we were twins, since we were the same age and we looked just alike. But we had different mamas and different birthdays, mine in June, Darcy’s in August. Lana got pregnant with me back in ’57 when the leaves started to turn. By November that year, our dad, Gil, had left Lana for a new wife and Darcy got her start in the world.
How Lana and I ended up with Darcy is her real mom got cancer and died when she was little, and Gil took off. So now she’s my sister. We never use the word half-sister around our house. Makes it sound like somebody you don’t want to claim all the way as family.
Lana didn’t have a whole lot of money to get us all the way to Van Nuys, so we pulled a little pop-up camper thing behind our Chevy. Darcy and I didn’t know any better; we’d never seen the inside of a Holiday Inn or a Motel Six. Lana, on the other hand, was always talking about moving up in life, how it just wasn’t fair that the rich keep getting richer, and how someday we were going to have us an air-conditioned full-size van and we weren’t even going to mess with the Holiday Inns, no sir! We were going to head straight for the nearest Hilton.
So that July day, about the time we reached southwestern Colorado, it was getting pretty late in the evening. Lana looked like she might nod off at the wheel. She pulled off the road and searched the map for a good place to put up the camper for the night. We’d been traveling through a great slick rock canyon, huge red and brown cliffs on either side of us. It was actually quite pretty before the sun went down, but now we couldn’t see much. Dolores Canyon, the map called it.
“Who’s Dolores?” Darcy and I wanted to know.
“Don’t know, and it don’t matter,” Lana said. “River runs through here’s got the same name, and there’s also a town. Whoever she was, she must’ve been rich or something to get all that named after her.” Lana sniffed, taking a long draw on her cigarette. She took an instant dislike to the wealthy, even though she aspired to that position one day. “This map don’t show much up ahead for miles,” Lana said, “so we may as well put up here for the night.”
“It’s awful dark,” I whispered. “Sure it’s safe?”
Lana made a show of snapping the map back in place along the folds. “People are what causes trouble, Sara, and there ain’t no people ’round here.”
We locked up the car and put up the camper, spreading out our sleeping bags and zipping up the canvas flap to keep out the mosquitoes. The three of us set about tossing and trying to get comfortable in the heat of close quarters, but a long day on the road finally took its toll and we nodded off.
A crunching noise sometime later roused me from my sleep. I turned my head a little to see Lana, eyes shiny wide, wrap her right hand around the tire iron she always kept by her side as we slept. A pale shadow moved around the outside of our tent, and Lana and I lay silent, muscles tense, waiting for whatever might happen next. Darcy slumbered on.
An hour later the shadow was long gone, and I had grown restless waiting for Lana to work up the nerve to sit up and do something. I slid the zipper down slowly, poking my head out of the tent like a turtle peeking out of its shell. Nothing. Lana unzipped the camper the rest of the way, and Darcy, awake now, followed us sleepy-eyed out on to the ground.
Lana’s flashlight scoured the area for clues. “There!” She pointed the beam at large footprints in the gravel around our camper. “Somebody was here!”
“Why didn’t he rob us or something?” Darcy asked.
“Hard telling.”
Lana squatted beside the car and trained her light on the evidence. There on the ground was a second set of smaller footprints, following the first.
Darcy played with the knobs on the radio as we waited in line to order our lunch at the McDonald’s drive-through.
“Shut that off,” Lana snapped, irritable from lack of sleep. “We’re almost at the speaker thing.”
The words “Dolores Canyon” and “Highway 141” sputtered through the radio receiver, and we leaned closer to the dash. A middle-aged couple on vacation had pulled off the road for the night and was robbed. Their bodies were found by a passing motorist that morning. Crime scene investigators were examining the footprints outside the couple’s camper for clues.
“Was that near where we were, Lana?” Darcy asked.
“Hush! We’re just about ready to order, now.” But we could see the answer in her eyes. It was near where we were, all right.
Van Nuys was not what we expected. Oh, sure, there were plenty of palm trees and stuff, but just regular old houses everywhere, not movie star mansions. Nana and Papa were real nice, and they acted like Darcy and I were the best combination since sprinkles on ice–cream. In general, we were just having a grand time. I forgot all about the footprints and that poor couple that got robbed, until I found Darcy sprawled in a recliner one morning, her nose buried in Volume Three of Nana’s Encyclopedia Britannica.
“Sara,” Darcy said looking up from the book, “remember those little footprints by the camper? The second ones?”
I nodded, scooting her rear over in the chair to make room for mine.
“I got this idea about them,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“If I tell, promise not to make fun?”
I nodded.
“I think they belonged to a ghost. And I think those big footprints belonged to the robber, and he was going to kill us, and that ghost chased him away.”
A giggle bubbled up in my throat, but Darcy shot me a look and I forced it back. “Why would a ghost want to do that for us?”
“That’s the part I don’t know. But it makes sense. Because otherwise that robber would’ve killed us instead of those other people. And those footprints were much too little to have scared anybody off unless they belonged to a ghost. Everybody’s afraid of ghosts, no matter how little they are.”
“Would a ghost leave footprints? I mean, aren’t they like, made of gas or air or something?”
“How would I know? Here, lookit this.”
Darcy held the encyclopedia open for me to see. “There were these two missionary guys.” She pointed to a likeness of Fathers Escalante and Dominguez. “Way back in the 1700s. They traveled right through the same place we were, and they were the ones who named the river—I’m not even going to try and pronounce it.” She slid her finger beneath a phrase in Spanish: Rio de Nuestra Senora de las Dolores. “This means ‘River of Our Lady of Sorrows.’ It says here that some people think that’s because they lost somebody they loved on their trip through the valley.”
“So Dolores was the one they lost.”
“I asked Nana about that, because there is no picture of Dolores―but there is a picture of Mary, Jesus’ mama, right here. Nana knows a lot about Mary, being Catholic and all. She said Mary has a lot of different names in Mexico—Our Lady of this and that. Our Lady of Sorrows stands for Mary when she is watching her son die on the cross.”
“So these two priest guys named the river ‘Dolores’ because they were full of sorrow, just like Mary.” I guessed it kind of made sense.
“I think the person they lost is our ghost,” said Darcy. “Probably one of their wives or girlfriends or something.”
I snorted. “They were priests, stupid. They didn’t have wives or girlfriends.”
“Oh.”
“Well, it could’ve been a sister or aunt. Those footprints were little, like a lady’s. Wonder what her name was.”
Darcy stretched out her legs and let her body slide, snakelike, onto the carpet. “Don’t know, but I’m sticking with Dolores. It fits. And besides, she saved our lives. We gotta call her something besides ‘Hey, you.’”
“You thinking of calling her up or something?”
“In a way,” said Darcy. “Ever hear of a séance?”
I slithered to the floor alongside her. Now we were talking.
The night of the séance was perfect. If there is a book anywhere on how to contact the dead, it would say to do it on a night just like that one. The moon was full, and the air was still and heavy.
Darcy and I sat cross-legged, our sun-kissed shoulders huddled close, knees touching. Between us sat three candles, lit with matches Darcy had swiped from the kitchen drawer.
“Ready?” Darcy reached for the light switch.
I bit the tip off a stubby pink nail. “Are you sure this is not, you know, dangerous?”
“Dangerous how?”
“Well, these girls at school, they had a séance to talk to JFK once.”
“So?”
“Well, they used this Ouija board. They kept asking him questions, and he said some really scary stuff, like ‘Somebody here will die soon.’ Everybody thought somebody else was just pushing the thing on the Ouija board and pretending not to, but then you’ll never believe what happened!”
Our faces drew closer, hovering over the candle flames.
“Just when it was really quiet and you could barely see anything because the only light they had was the candles, this one girl screamed. She swears she looked up and saw JFK’s white face lookin’ right in the bedroom window!”
Darcy snorted. “She probably just made it up to scare everybody.”
“Well, this girl was shakin’ all over and crying and everything. Like she really did see a ghost. I think it could happen.”
We were silent for a moment, contemplating JFK’s ghost. I looked up at our bedroom window and considered pulling the curtain closed.
“Well,” said Darcy, “if the ghost of Dolores saved our lives, she’s a friendly ghost anyhow. So what if she looks in our window? I hope she does so I can thank her.”
“I guess so,” I said, reaching up to flip off the light switch.
Candlelight flickered around the walls, and it felt a little bit like Halloween in July, which is pretty much fun when you think about it. “Now what do we do?” I whispered.
“We hold hands,” said Darcy. We clasped hands as Darcy closed her eyes and began to sway, humming. She looked like she knew what she was doing, although I was pretty sure she had no idea. I guessed it wouldn’t matter as long as it fooled the ghost.
“Oh, Ghost of Dolores!” Darcy made her voice like a wavy moan. “Dolores, Dolores. Sad, sad, Dolores!”
“Get on with it,” I muttered. Darcy’s eyes snapped open and shot me a nasty look. I closed my eyes.
“Dolores,” she began again, “you saved our lives, Dolores! You saved us from an awful fate! We have come to thank you, oh great ghost of Dolores!”
I peeked through one eye at Darcy who was swaying as she spoke.
“Dolores! Show yourself, Dolores! Send us a sign that you can hear us!”
My eyes flew open in earnest this time, as I heard Darcy gasp. Wisps of smoke rose from all three of the recently burning candlewicks in front of us. “It’s just a breeze from the window,” I offered.
“Sara, there ain’t no breeze,” Darcy said. “It’s so still I can hardly breathe in here.”
We fell silent, stunned by the evidence of our own powers.
“Look,” I said, getting to my feet. “We may as well relight the candles and try again.” I purposely marched to the window and shut it, with a slight slam for emphasis. Darcy picked up the matches from the dresser and sat back down, lighting the wicks. We clasped hands and shut our eyes.
“Sara, why don’t you try? If Dolores thinks you’re a non-believer, she won’t show up. Show her you believe.”
I felt a little silly doing the whole spooky moaning voice thing, but for Darcy, I would try. “Oh, Dolores! I belieeeeeve, Dolores! Speak to us! Give us a sign, Dolores!”
We waited. A light breeze lifted my hair, and I peeked through my eyelashes, very slightly, not at all sure I really wanted to see a ghost. Darcy was still swaying, eyes shut, but it was very hard to see her in the darkness. All three of the candles on the floor in front of me had once again gone out.
Summer was waning, and Darcy and I bemoaned the upcoming school year as our old Chevy rumbled eastward toward home. Lana’s foul mood wasn’t helping. The palms of Van Nuys were several hundred miles behind her now, and the future looked bleak for all of us. The desert landscape seemed to stretch on for miles, as brown and barren as our desolate little lives. By the time we wound our way into Colorado, ghosts and séances were the last things on my mind.
Soon Dolores Canyon loomed large on either side of us, and it was hard to apprehend a thing so stately and grand. It seemed impossible that water—weightless and evasive droplets that run down your body and leak through your fingers—could have pushed its way through dirt and rock to form these walls. The sun was sliding down the sky, piercingly brilliant and difficult to watch, a huge candle flame flickering in the western sky. Squinting, willing my eyes to stay trained on the radiant blaze, I swore I saw the vague blue outline of a beautiful young woman, her arms slightly lifted as if in prayer.
“Darcy.” I reached across the backseat and touched my sister’s arm. “Look.”
Darcy turned her head in the direction of my gaze, and I saw our lady reflected in the dark of her eyes, just before the sun dropped behind the canyon wall like the flame of a candlewick blinking out.
Dianna Graveman is the author of several published stories and articles and the coauthor of five regional histories. A former educator, she holds an MFA from Lindenwood University in Missouri and currently lives in Tampa Bay.
