The Birthdays

Attended by so many ghost guests

A delivery driver dropped off two packages on my front porch today, and neither one is for me. They correspond to an address that doesn’t appear to exist, at least, as far as my husband could tell when he walked the stack of packages around the blocks near our house. They’re addressed to someone called Lily, which was a name my husband wanted to name our daughter, if we ever had one.

Lily, our ghost daughter, recipient of so many phantom packages.

Last week was my husband and kid’s birthday—the Annual Double Birthday. Fourteen years ago, I went into labor on my husband’s birthday, and they’ve been celebrating together ever since. On my end, it’s a bit like half a Christmas, but bifurcated: I’m responsible for two memorable, special days for two distinct personalities. What they want in a birthday is almost exactly opposite one another, so I try to navigate the day as best I can.

On The Annual Birthday this year, my husband got a phone call as we walked out of the gym together—our first workout together in over a month, after all the busyness of summer. The call was from the water company: you’re losing 300 gallons of water per minute, they said. There’s obviously a leak somewhere. You might want to check it out.

We rushed home, expecting to find a swamp or a shallow pool somewhere in the yard (hopefully not beneath the house—Dear God, hopefully not). We happen to have a kid who loves to dig—so much he has a perpetual pit in the back yard. He probably hit the sprinklers, we thought, and then said nothing to us when the water came rushing out, fearing the inevitable video game grounding that would come.

But when we got home, we found nothing. We had no puddles, no marshy patches in the yard, and we couldn’t hear the sound of water running, even after we pried open the crawl space and put an ear beneath the house.

My husband called the water company back. How could we be losing 300 gallons per minute and not see it anywhere??

Oh no—it’s 300 gallons per hour, they corrected us. Not 300 gallons per minute.

PHEW, we said.

But still, there was somewhere that water was leaking into the ground, a phantom spring that we couldn’t see or detect in any of the normal ways.

Sometimes that happens, they said. The land here is so dry and desiccated that you can lose gallons and gallons into the earth and never know.

We called a technician to come out and check the meter to make sure it wasn’t malfunctioning. When we opened up the meter box, there it was: feet and feet of water, all underground.

And so we found the leak—a weak spot near the meter where the main line was replaced just a few years ago. The plumbers who did the job at the time were truly awful—they nearly blew up the whole family when they hit the gas line while digging. It was no surprise that they’d done a poor job on the actual plumbing as well.

My husband spent the day—his one wild and precious birthday—digging around the pipes near the meter, trying to find the leak. I couldn’t help because I had work that day (I haven’t mentioned it here yet—I have a job! I teach comics and creative writing at the local middle school. I was a bit of a Hail Mary hire, but I actually think it’s a great fit, for me and the students). When I got home from school, he was covered in dirt, knee-deep and caked in it. But he’d found the phantom leak, at last.

We filled buckets and pitchers and jars full of water, all we thought we’d need for the next 24 hours. Then we had the city turn off the water supply so it would stop leaking 300 gallons per hour.

That night, we had a house full of birthday guests and no toilet, no tap water, no running water to wash dishes. We poured water on our hands like pioneers, all of us washing up before eating takeout ramen and ice cream cake from the store.

Our house was built in 1890, decades before indoor plumbing or electricity. I thought of all the washing up that happened the same way over the years, all the phantom washers dipping their hands and feet and bodies into basins and tubs, ladling water over their heads, maybe singing or scolding or wishing the water was warmer.

A better plumber came the next day while I was at school. We had water again a mere 24 hours later. No more washing up in a bucket, no more drinking from filled jars. No more phantom bathers at our elbows. It’s so wonderful, I’ve already taken it for granted again.

After my husband and kid’s birthday, it was Annie’s birthday.

Annie’s birthday always marks the beginning of the season we found out she was sick. In August 2020, we visited her in her back yard and had a bonfire together, socially distanced, of course. We talked and traded snacks and offered to order food from her favorite restaurant, but she didn’t eat a thing that night. She looked thin and worried, and that wasn’t like her at all.

Two weeks later, she found out she wouldn’t be growing old.

Annie would’ve been 40 this year. It’s strange to think how different 40 feels from 36, even though I’m not quite 40 myself. 36 was how old Annie was when she died, and outliving her has been one of the strangest experiences of my life. She’s always felt older and wiser than me—a big sister with more life between her legs, more fur at her neck, her canines sharp and fully grown.

Now I’m nearly three years older than she’ll ever be.

On her birthday, my smart watch woke me up with a little chirp. REMINDER: Annie’s Birthday, it said. I set the reminder years ago, to make sure I never forgot to tell her happy birthday ON THE DAY. We were both forgetful, but Annie taught me to save my life in little reminders on my phone. I almost never miss birthdays these days, and I have Annie to thank.

It was a busy day, Annie’s birthday. I had errands to run, chores to finish, and a teen’s birthday party to execute. I cleaned and prepped and drove to and from the grocery store, the laser tag/arcade, and home. It was a tangle of tasks, and I was caught in the thick of it.

But throughout the chores and busyness, every ten minutes or so, my watch buzzed over and over again with the same text. REMINDER: Annie’s Birthday. REMINDER: Annie’s Birthday. REMINDER.

I tried dismissing the notification on my watch, then on my phone, then on my watch and phone at the same time. Even after all the dismissals, it still buzzed over and over and over again.

REMINDER: Annie’s Birthday.

REMINDER: Annie’s Birthday.

REMINDER: Annie’s Birthday.

I still don’t know why it happened. The day was full of little ghosts buzzing in—a memory, a whiff of recollection. Reminder, reminder, reminder.

Someday you’ll outlive your loved ones.

Someday they’ll outlive you.

Reminder, reminder, reminder.

The next night I dreamed of her. Often when I dream of her, it’s a lifeless version of her. Not dead, but her body only—moving and walking around, with a different personality, or no personality at all. Something in me knows that if Annie still exists somewhere, it’s nowhere I can reach. Once I dreamed she was just a vegetable, kept alive by medical trickery, unable to speak or hold a brush or do anything Annie-like. Another time I dreamed I kept seeing her in a crowd, and when I caught up to her, it was never really her—it was a series of identical doppelgängers with a different names and voices and no attachments to me whatsoever.

But that night, I dreamed of her—how I remember her. She talked about dying and growing older. She talked about how her hair had turned gray—her hair that had taken so long to grow out, until she lost it again in chemotherapy, hair that never grew back while she was alive. Throughout the dream, she was upside-down, hanging from the ceiling like some sort of nocturnal creature. I didn’t question it. That’s just how it is, when you die—you see things from a whole new perspective. From the ceiling, even!

I woke up in a happy fog. I don’t know if I missed Annie more or less after seeing her like this. I stayed in bed for a long time.

Sometimes I get so overwhelmed by it all—from missing Annie, from missing the life I had before she died, from not knowing where to put all these feelings that come up whenever I think of her absence. There’s nowhere to put them—a package with no real address (and me—wandering, my arms overfull.)

There are a lot more birthdays trickling in this month. September is the month of birthdays, of course. Today is also the anniversary of the day we learned about Annie’s cancer. Life-death-life-death-life. Birthdays and life sentences.

If it’s yours, Happy Birthday. May you live long and prosper.

All my love,

👻Becca Lee, Haunted Librarian👻