It's the children I see first, sometimes whole legions of them in high button shoes that fade as they touch the floor.  You think the souls of children depart in an instant, freed from the temporal world?  Think again.  Like those tortured creatures dragging their chains across the floorboards of an attic, children have intentions, too.  Amends and reminders.  Old business.  Sometimes they stay to comfort their mothers, then hang around for generations out of habit.  Or maybe they're bound to the earth by handed-down grief: Some families are like that, sad over they don't know what, possessed of downward-curving mouths and soulful, wide-set eyes, unconscious of that coal of memory, decades or centuries old, lodged in their roiling gut.

          Most often, though (others disagree but this has been my experience) the children stay simply because they're curious; they refuse to vacate the premises in case they might hear something interesting.  About Christmas coming, or a sick grandmother, or the neighbor dog's new puppies.  Generations pass, centuries, and our stories still have the power to thrill them.  Kids.

          Women inhabit these places, too, stripped of their earthly gifts, their features dry and silvery, nearly translucent.  Gone is their precise beauty, no hint of race or station, no flesh or bone or coil of hair, nothing you'd care to call texture.  They're like curtains floating on a breeze, tatters of light.  Sometimes‑-rarely, I've found‑-you can determine the flutter of an eyelid, the general impression of a corpus.

          The men who stay on are your oddballs‑-murdered horse thieves bent on revenge; twin brothers who lost the farm.  Not many, though; one in twenty.  In my experience men leave this earth believing they owe nothing, and the ones who stay are set only on retrieving their possessions.

          Like most people, Andrew shies from my vocation, but then he's wrestling his own ghosts.  I've known him long enough so I remember how he was before his wife and sons died.  We had twelve in the department then; it was like running an orphanage, they were all such babies.  I liked Andrew, though.  I liked his earnest befuddlement; it came from being so enormously loved.  He never had to worry about his little place in this world.  The others stalked my desk with sheaves of paper that made up the dense and tedious articles they placed atop my "In" box, squaring the pages just so.  Andrew, on the other hand, was the day-late-dollar-short type, always apologizing, no hurry, no hurry, his feathery pages landing on my desk like a bird's nest dropped out of a tree.  He was the only one who noticed that I could type a bibliography without looking at a style book.  Who thanked me for it.  I charged his wife with these gifts.  Really, his wife was a doll.

          Nowadays he's sharp and vigilant, his eyes have lost the dreamy look of comfort.  He marks the end of a day with a check on the calendar, as if twenty-four hours safely passed is a little victory.  I suppose it is.

          I came to my vocation right here in the English department.  Actually, we were on the sunny third floor of Martin Hall then, long before the cutbacks and whatnot, before they stashed us in this dungeon and the underside of everybody's personality came slithering out.  This was way back, in the days when the university still ran courses like "Secrets of the Tarot," when the Adult Ed department was anything-goes.  This was before certain alumni and department heads got testy‑-for some reason all these courses were held in Martin, and the English department was afraid of reputation by association.  I miss those courses, miss watching the retired mailmen and middle-aged mothers tripping down the hall toward Sam Collins's lecture hall, brand-new notebooks clutched to their waists.

          It was a spring day, tart and promising, when I took it into my head to sit in on one of those lectures.  Yvette‑-the secretary of the history department, two doors down from us‑-had been going for weeks.  She liked to stop at my door on her way back to the office to give me the blow-by-blow: auras, spoon-bending, spirit-writing.

          I popped into Andrew's office.  "I'm taking lunch early, in case anybody wants me."  He was buried in test papers, his burnished, hairy forearms resting over the exams like outsized paperweights.  He looked stranded there, almost bereft, though it was a familiar enough scene, a professor at his desk.  Dare I say I had a premonition?  I felt a curious empty space, that stopped-moment feeling you get just before the car hits the wall.  This was seven years ago; his wife and sons would be dead within the year, a spectacular car crash with lots of noise and light.  But I'm not telepathic.  I see ghosts, and that's another sensitivity altogether.

          I tapped on Andrew's desk to shake off the feeling.  "I'm going to hear Sam Collins," I told him.

          He looked up.  "You're joking."

          "You teach Irish lit, Andrew, don't you believe in ghosts?"

          "Well," he said.  "No."

          "He's no quack, Andrew.  He's known all over.  Remember that house in the paper last year, the one with the weeping widow?  That was him."

          Andrew smiled.  "Rusty's into ghosts these days.  Must be the age."  Rusty was the younger son, the one who survived sixty-two hours.

          Next thing I knew he was sauntering down the hall with me, admiring the auburn glint of sunlight banking through the windows of Martin Hall's east side.  "I don't get out enough," he said, though in truth he got out a lot back then, to watch his sons play ball in grassy pastures, to stroll the spring-blooming campus with his wife.  He rarely wore a jacket and never wore a hat, not even in winter when his ears flamed at the tips.  These days he dresses too warm, his raincoats and fleece-lined jackets and wool caps and kidskin gloves a submission to our climate's capricious changes.  Sometimes I think he's afraid of air itself.

          On this day, however, he was dressed in short sleeves that flapped against his elbows as we headed down the hall.  All of a sudden I felt we were in for a shot of whimsy, something we could take home that night to our respective houses, a bit of glitter we might spread around.  I could imagine the stilled faces of his wife and sons, listening to Andrew's fabulous story.  I felt light and floaty.  That weightless feeling was the first feeble stirring of love, though I only know that now.

          We got there about halfway through the presentation.  Sam Collins wasn't above milking his hype: He wore some sort of woolen cloak and he'd lined his eyes in black, making the blue that much more piercing.  I could never do that.  On the table next to him was a deck of cards, some silver spoons, a tape recorder, some blown-up photographs of spooky-looking mansions.  Dog-and-pony show, I thought, my brief belief in whimsy dried up and gone, just like that.  As I moved to leave he called Andrew to the front of the room.

          Andrew played the amiable professor, which amused the five or six of his own students who dotted the crowd of eccentrics and housewives.  He dawdled up the center aisle, extravagantly calm, trying to avoid the thin blue lasers of Sam's made-up eyes.

          "How do you do," Sam said.  "Have a seat."  Andrew sat.  I watched him flinch as Sam's hand fluttered down to his shoulder and balanced there.

          "We've been talking about color," Sam began.  He was looking out at the students but his hand remained where it was.  He was getting a reading on Andrew, though you wouldn't have known it, his eyes darting everywhere.  "Colors are mirrors," he announced.  "For example, I can tell you something about the past twenty-four hours of this man's life simply by the colors he chose to wear today."

          I shifted in my chair, suddenly more interested than I expected to be.

          "Your name?" Sam said.

          "Andrew."

          "Andrew, you're wearing a lot of hidden red."  Andrew cleared his throat, mortified.  Sam was now moving through the rows, arching his long, thin fingers through the air.  "His tie looks navy from a distance, but up close you can see a pattern of red diamonds.  His socks?  Same thing.  And what's that peering out of his breast pocket?  Four pens, red caps."  Sam halted midway to the back of the room.  He folded his hands.  "Red is anger," he told the class.  "Andrew had a bad day yesterday.  His clothing today tells the tale." 

          Andrew's mouth actually opened, that's how stunned, or something, he was.  I think I might have covered my face, though I remember the look he flashed me.

          Then Sam turned to me.  "Green," he went on, "is serenity.  This woman in the green dress‑-yesterday was a good day for you, yes?"

          "Yes," I said.  "But all my days are good, really.  Green's my favorite color."

          He continued on, touching down on one student after another.  Somehow Andrew got back to his seat unnoticed.  When the class broke up he left swiftly, and before I could go after him I felt Sam's hand on my own shoulder.

          "Wait," he said.  "I'd like to ask you some questions."  My shoulder burned; the man's resting temperature was one hundred degrees.  That was the beginning of my training.

          I didn't get back to the office for another hour.  Andrew was still grading papers.  "I'm sorry," I told him.  "I had no idea he'd be so, um, rude."

          He grimaced and took my hand.  His cool skin was a surprise.  "The man was right," he said.  You work with a guy for years and think you know his every mood.  This one I had never seen: It was trouble of the broken-heart variety.  I could have cried on the spot.

          "Thank you," he said, "for having only good days."

          "They're not all good," I said.  "Just most of them."  I took back my hand and fled to my desk, as if apologizing for being happy.

          They say marriages have highs and lows.  I wouldn't know, but I've always wondered if she had taken a lover, something like that.  In any case, they made up.  Eventually he returned to his old, loved self.  And stayed that way.  Then she died.

          Andrew and I don't have what you'd call a torrid relationship.  I could see being married to him, though.  I could see waking to his face in the morning across our frumped-up double bed.  Yvette says the man is poison, in love with a ghost, a lost cause.  If you ever want to be happy, Yvette says, you better look around for someone a little more willing to start over.

          I've had two lovers in forty years, counting Andrew.  I've always been self-conscious about my weight and I suppose that's hindered me somewhat in the romantic arena, but truth be told I'm not a very sexual person.  I'm not one of those people who think sex is satin sheets and Bolero on the radio; I guess you could say my energies are channeled elsewhere.  Andrew is fifty-three years old, a fact he reminds me of often.  It's supposed to mean he's too old for something‑-for life, I guess‑-though he's never said exactly what.  In bed he's sweet, he talks to me, we could be playing scrabble or skipping rocks at the beach, it's quiet like that.  Andrew possesses the kind of soul that will linger on the earth for a few years to warm some young couple's house, to turn the iron off if they forget to, to sit up all night in the nursery with the baby they never believed they'd have.

          When I finally fell in love with Andrew I was deep into my vocation, having finished my training and roamed a few houses on my own.  I'd gotten a disgruntled Colonist to vacate the Van Buren place in Standish.  And I had determined that the nocturnal wall-scratching at the Goldings' was nothing more diabolical than a family of squirrels.  I hadn't wanted my extra-curricular activities to get around the office, of course, but with Yvette two doors down you could just forget it.

          I was clearing my desk at the end of the day when Andrew wandered into the office after teaching his Joyce class.  I opened my bottom drawer and handed back his copy of Ulysses, setting it on top of the stack of student papers he had bunched in his arms.

          "You read it?" he asked.

          "Every inch."   He'd given me the book on a dare, trying to break me from my romance-novel habit, which, I'll admit, was a guilty pleasure.

          "And?"

          I flicked my fingers at the book.  "And.  I think I get it."

          He tried to smile.  It had been four years since the accident, and the corners of his mouth were more or less permanently turned down, but there was still something behind his eyes, a spark of life.  "Let's hear it," he said.

          "For your information," I said, "this book wasn't written to be understood. That's why nobody understands it."  I lifted my chin toward the papers.  "Those poor kids."  Andrew began to chuckle, his blue eyes darkening under those wiry eyebrows.  I remember thinking that he was kind of handsome.  "It's a hoax," I continued.  "Joyce's sole intention was to tongue-tie well-meaning scholars like you for generations to come."

          He laughed out loud then‑-such a spangled, foreign sound, a silvery gift.  Al Washington, who was strolling out of his office, stopped to stare.  It had been so long since any of us had heard Andrew laugh.

          Al thumped an unfootnoted, hundred-pound manuscript on my desk.  "Molly's deconstructing Joyce, is she?"

          Andrew nodded, smiling.  "An interesting theory, however unprovable."

          "How's the ghostbusting?" Al asked.

          I crossed my arms and looked at him.  "You won't think it's so funny when your windows start opening themselves."

          "You should make those ding-dongs pay you," Al said.  "This little hobby of yours is a gold mine and you don't even know it."  He laid his hand on the manuscript.  "By next Friday?" he said, then left for a class.

          "They don't pay you?" Andrew said.

          "Who?"

          "Those people.  Who think they have ghosts in their walls."

          "I don't ask them to."  I was driven then, as now, by other desires: connection, mainly.

          "Work is worth money," Andrew said.  "I wouldn't teach for free, much as I love it."

          "They pay my transportation if I need it," I explained.  "They put me up in a hotel if I have to stay a few days."

          "They should pay you for your work, Molly," Andrew said.  "Your vocation is worth something to those people."

          I believe that was our beginning.  "Vocation" is a beautiful word.

          All this is to say that after almost two years of being a couple, or whatever it is we are, Andrew agreed to go on an investigation with me.  I can understand his reluctance; he associates ghosts with death.  Most people do.  It's their life that makes them interesting to me, though.  It's their life that allows me to see them. 

         I was after him all last week, tempting him with bits of information about the Coopers and their two-hundred-year-old farmhouse hours from here, deep in the country.  The man works in a paper mill, the woman stays home with their retarded daughter.  They grow beets and beans and pumpkins.  Finally, last night, Andrew said yes.

          If I've neglected to say so, let me say it now: Most of these people are lying.  They take their private rages against each other or themselves and turn it into footsteps in the night.  Nine times out of ten they're on the brink of divorce and don't know it, or else one of the kids abused his sister and hasn't yet fessed up.  Ugly stuff.  It's all very sophisticated, all to do with mysteries of the human heart that I can't begin to measure, but Sam warned me to watch for them, the ones who get mad at you for not hearing what they hear.  Every once in a while I'll call up Sam‑-he's mostly retired now‑-and we nod at either end of the phone, Yes, isn't it the truth, the walls really do have ears, and voices, too.  We call them "echoes," made-up phantoms that mimic your most private fears.  I've seen it a hundred times.  Help us, they say, the whole family, Help us, we can't live here any more, we can't stand it.  Well, they're right, but it has nothing to do with a ghost.

          I've asked Andrew to drive, hoping to distract him.  Even the most diehard of skeptics get nervous around allegedly haunted houses.  Not that Andrew is a diehard, or a skeptic.  He's shrouded, is all.  Shrouded in his own grief, ticking off one minute after the other, marking his distance from loss.  He stays with me because I allow him to come in and out of his stupor, to be near or far whenever he has to be.  I'm patient.  I've been waiting, in one way or another, all my life.  Sam says it's my greatest virtue; he saw it that day I wore green.  When we walked into that first house together and I said, "I see them," he wasn't even surprised.

          This afternoon Andrew keeps looking at me as he drives, the final shadows of daylight silking across his face, or what I can see of it.  Even in the car, which has a good heater, he keeps his hat pulled down, his scarf cinched at the neck.  "I've been counting," he says.  "It's been nearly two years for us, Molly."  He lowers his face, frowning, his chin disappearing into his scarf.  "A lot of women would have expected something by now.  Demanded something."

          "I'm not a lot of women."

          He glances back at the road.  "That's true."

          "Turn here," I tell him.

          "You know I couldn't get married again," he murmurs, swinging the car wide around the border of a frost-crisped field.  "I couldn't have any more children.  You have a right to those things."

          "That's just Yvette, don't listen to her, she thinks she knows everything."

          "Still, I wouldn't blame you, Molly."

          "I'm happy," I tell him.  I reach across the seat and feel under his scarf to knead the back of his neck.

          "But you're a young woman still," he says.  He keeps swallowing dryly, dispensing the words a few at a time.  "You could still have a husband and babies, all those things."

          "I want you, Andrew.  Just like this."

          He sighs.  "Thank you."  We drive on, a mile, two, along acres of snow-dusted fields.

          The Cooper place turns out to be a bit nicer than I imagined.  New paint, a red and stolid barn, a tidy stand of pines separating the house from the field.  All the signs of a sturdy family.  We get out of the car and stand for a moment in the dooryard, watching the daylight disappear on the landscape.  The farthest trees are quivering ominously, and I can hear the faint whining of a far-off winter wind.

          "Damn this weather," Andrew mutters, sounding like an old man.  "Yesterday it could've been spring."

          Mrs. Cooper meets us at the door.  She's a tall, lean woman in a cotton shirt and blue jeans, her hair pulled back from her face except for a few dozen loose strands that define her hairline.  A nice woman, unsentimental, willing to tell the truth.  I believe her already.  Her little daughter stands just behind her, arms twined round her mother's waist, hands clasped in a bow at the center of her mother's belt.  "My husband's not back from work yet," Mrs. Cooper says.  She covers her little girl's hands with her own.  "This is Sheila.  She's been awfully frightened."  She lifts one hand and wipes her hair back from her forehead.  "She's very sensitive to noise, and this‑-this clattering‑-up and down the stairs, sometimes four, five times in a day."

          "May we come in?" I ask.

          "Oh, I'm sorry, of course."  Mrs. Cooper steps aside.  I introduce Andrew, who isn't paying attention; he's watching the little girl.  She might be smiling, though it's hard to tell: Her face is a trifle lopsided, the eyes nearly crossed, all the features askew in some unnameable way.  Andrew reaches into his pocket and withdraws a marble, a blue cat's eye.  I suddenly remember Andrew the way he was a long time ago, joking that his kids only loved him for his pockets.

          Sheila makes a joyful gurgling sound and tears upstairs.  Mrs. Cooper laughs.  "You've got her number already.  She collects everything."  We sit at the dining room table, a big, old-fashioned thing with drawers.  Already I can see them, two children, their features obscured by light, their small bodies undulating like milky water.  They appear to be girls, hovering near the ancient hearth, listening.  "Now," I begin, pulling my tape recorder out of my satchel.  "Does this presence do anything else besides run up and down the stairs?"

          Mrs. Cooper frowns, thinking.  The children huddle together, covering their mouths.  I think they're laughing.

          "Do you feel you're in any danger?" Andrew asks.  I turn to him, startled.  His face is devoid of motion; it's like looking at a statue of Andrew in a museum.

          "No," Mrs. Cooper stammers.  "No, not really.  It's just that the noise scares Sheila."  She knits her fingers together for a moment, then looks up, embarrassed.  "I think the‑-the spirits or whatever‑-have been leaving me presents."

          I can't help smiling; I've seen this before.  "Can you show me?" I ask, and just then Sheila reappears and opens the dining-table drawer herself, extracting a fistful of leaves.  She makes a thin, guttural sound and gives them to Andrew.

          "Leaves," he says. 

          "And pins," Mrs. Cooper whispers, her eyes large and curious, "and knotted lengths of twine, and buttons from my sewing basket.  Nearly every morning there's something at my place at the table."

          "You're a mother," I tell her gently.  "The spirits are children."

          Mrs. Cooper spreads one hand over her chest.  "I thought they might be," she murmurs.  "How many?"

          I glance at Andrew to see how he's taking this.  He's waxen and still, his head cocked at an angle.  He looks startlingly old, frozen that way.  "Two," I say.  "They're standing right over there."

          Mrs. Cooper looks at the hearth for a long time, then back at me.  She squeezes her hands together in a prayer.  "Are they beautiful?"

          "Yes."

          "I'm so glad," she says, then wraps her imperfect, living daughter in her arms.

          By the time we leave it has gotten dark and gusty; the moonlit, snowed-on fields seem like an endless ripple of broken glass.  "Where did you come up with the marble?" I ask Andrew.

          His face is fixed on the road.  "I keep it for luck."

          We don't speak for miles.  Finally, I begin:  "The next step is usually to ransack the library and town hall for records.  Census, land transfers, things like that.  If I can figure out who the children are I've got a better chance of getting them to leave."

          "Why would she want them to leave?"  Andrew slows the car down and eases it to the side of the road.

          "What are you doing?"

          "I need‑-air," he gasps, then flings the door open and steps onto the road.  Before I know it he's moving alongside the sugary fields like a farmer walking his acreage.

          "Andrew?" I call, getting out.  The windy cold is a bright slap; I stop to catch my breath.  "Andrew?"  He's sitting now, yards away.  Sitting on the side of the road.  His hat is gone, upended in a sudden gust and tumbling across the asphalt.  His hair stands up in silvery tufts.  I hurry to him, my shoes making sparks of sound on the frozen shoulder.

          He looks up at me.  "I saw them," he says.

          "You saw‑-"

          "The children.  By the hearth."  He's crying now, big, muddy, man-sized sobs.

          "Andrew, oh." I crouch down to see him.  "Oh, sweetheart.  It's all right."

          He cannot be consoled.  I remember this feeling‑-wonderment, terror, chagrin.  I cried too, as I recall.  But of course there's more here.

          "They haven't left you, Andrew," I tell him.  "They'll never leave you, no matter what you do."  And that's when I see it, a thin shred of light wound around his trouser leg like the silky arms of a child.

          "I'm fifty-three years old," Andrew whispers.

          "Yes, I know."

          "I've walked this earth fifty-three years."

          "Yes."

          "I've seen things a man shouldn't see."  He's speaking of their bloodless, laid-out bodies festooned with flowers, their hair combed just slightly wrong by a mortician's assistant.  "Still . . . " he begins.  The light around his leg is dissolving now, a starry shimmer, like a fireworks disintegrating against a black sky.  I have to swallow a couple of times, it's so beautiful.

          I clasp his hand.  "Still."

          He nods and looks up at the moon, his face dropping years in the icy light.  "You hear that?" he asks.

          We fall silent and listen.  From far down the crystalled land comes a wild whooshing, a magnificent gust of Canadian air winding across the field.  His arm comes around and I hide in his shelter as the tenor of wind swells, gushing over fences and barns and phone poles and curves of road.  It is a huge, benevolent, rushing sound, a great, earthly straining, and he raises his head to meet it, his pale neck bared above his loosened scarf: a sound like the shedding of trees, like the parting of water, like the opening of a man's hobbled heart.