My wife, June, was the first to see it. She called to me from the deck behind the house. “Tim? Come here. Quick.”
“What is it?” I yelled from the kitchen.
“You’d better come see for yourself.”
I made sure the screen door clicked shut and stood next to her under the emerging stars. A four-legged animal of some sort walked slowly across the long grass at the far end of the yard, following the high fence that marked our property boundary. Except it wasn’t like any kind of animal we’d ever seen. The size of a wolf, it gleamed with a hazy sheen. It ambled slowly, seemingly with no particular destination.
“What do you think it is?” she asked.
“How did it get into the yard?” I asked in return. A six-foot high wooden fence enclosed our half-acre of grass and trees. The gate was fastened shut. I should have been troubled, but I wasn’t.
For several seconds we watched the enigmatic animal. It walked leisurely and with confidence, as if it knew the place. A mosquito found me. I squashed it with a slap on my arm and flicked it away.
“I should go get a better look,” I decided.
“Go ahead,” she replied. “I get a feeling it’s not going to bite.”
I descended the stairs, then June joined me. “I’m coming with you.”
She took my hand, our first physical contact in two months. Ever since her second miscarriage, June had been detached, retreating into herself in a disappointment that seemed to permeate her life. I’d responded to her aloofness by becoming colder and more distant myself. Yesterday she wouldn’t have touched me, but this evening something was different.
The waning crescent moon gave enough light to walk without stumbling, but too little to color the grass. We approached within twenty feet of the figure that now we could see had the shape of a dog. Appearing to shimmer from an internal light, it paid no attention to us.
“Doggie,” I called out. “Doggie!”
The dog ignored us.
“It’s not a dog,” June said. “You can almost see right through it. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not a dog.”
As we stood in front of the creature, it continued towards us as if it didn’t know we were there, then walked through us as if we didn’t exist. I gasped. “Impossible!”
Shocked, we gawked as it continued sniffing its way around the perimeter. When we returned to the deck, we continued watching side by side in amazed silence. Inexplicably, a peacefulness settled over me, a serenity I hadn’t felt in a long time.
Back inside, in the cathedral-ceilinged living room with a wall of glass overlooking the deck and yard, we sat on the sofa. “It looks like a ghost,” I said.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” she replied.
“Neither do I.”
“But it’s there,” she said. “And it’s not there. What would you call it?”
“A presence of some sort?”
“As soon as I saw the...presence, it felt reassuring, though something....”
I picked up where she left off. “Something strange is going on.”
We checked the yard again later. A chill had settled upon the night, the mosquitos had gone, and the entity walked slowly and calmly, like a freely moving hologram.
For some reason, the chasm recently separating June and me seemed narrower. We had bought the house at the end of February and moved in around the middle of March. We made a couple of changes – retiling the kitchen and doing a minor remodel of a bedroom for the baby we were expecting. One night in May, June woke me up with a scream. When I turned on the light, blood was soaking the sheet. I rushed her to the hospital. But the baby was gone, and after weeks of examinations and tests, her gynecologist reported she would likely never have a successful pregnancy. Depressed, accusing herself of inadequacies and me of not caring, June refused to let me touch her or comfort her.
“We need to face this together,” I said at the time. “If we can’t have a baby, maybe we can adopt.”
“I want my own baby,” she asserted, “not someone else’s.”
“Then we may never have a child. We’ll have a good life without one. We still have so much. Our careers, friends, travel, our new house.”
June turned away from me and walked to the window overlooking the backyard.
Remote from each other since then, she even mentioned moving out. Living like we were, each of us occupying our own space apart from the other, the idea of going our separate ways had a mordant appeal. But lying next to her in bed that night, I recognized the feeling I’d been having since the apparition showed up – a yearning to find our way back to each other.
In the morning June left for the university, where she taught Elizabethan literature – Spencer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Johnson. I worked remotely from home for a medical software company. Leaving my computer, I walked around the lawn. That desire for closeness hadn’t gone away, and for a few seconds, in the middle of the yard, it became almost unbearably intense. Otherwise nothing. Where the immaterial dog had walked through us, our feet had compressed the grass, vibrant green in the sunshine, but there was no sign that anything else had been there.
Like everyone in our affluent development, we lived in a contemporary ranch style home set on a verdant half-acre. June and I had gotten to know a few neighbors in the four months we’d occupied the house. We had barely talked to any of them since the miscarriage, however, June moody and silent, I retreating into my private world.
Probably my best chance of shedding some light on the mysterious occurrence was the fellow next door. Steve Nichols, self-styled “The Revealer” on social media, made his living delving into the lives of others. He dug into dirt on politicians and secrets of the rich and famous, promoted conspiracy theories or debunked them as it suited him. All with little regard for the truth. Facebook, X, Instagram, you could find him everywhere, and his weekly show on YouTube attracted a wide audience. His list of followers, and apparently his bank account, continued to grow.
I rang his bell during my mid-morning break. Steve’s trophy wife, Janet, opened the door. A few minutes later, we were drinking coffee that Steve made sure to tell me had been mail-ordered from Hawaii. A signed Annie Leibovitz photograph was displayed prominently on the wall and a Chihuly chandelier hung overhead.
I hadn’t spoken to Steve about our difficulties, but of course he knew. When I described what we’d seen, he said, “Are you sure you didn’t imagine it so you and June could finally have something to agree about?”
“We’re doing fine. And we didn’t imagine it. The dog seemed like it knew the place, like it belonged there.”
“And it lit up like a lamp? Get real.”
“Not like that. It had this shimmering silvery color. You couldn’t tell what kind of dog it was. It was the size of a German Shephard, but with floppy ears.”
“Steve, show him a picture of Neige,” Janet urged. She poured more coffee for everyone.
Steve showed me a couple of photographs of a dog on his phone. It was white. “What a beautiful dog! That’s more or less what we saw,” I said. “Except you could sort of see through it.”
“The Mortons, the people you bought the house from, had a golden retriever,” Janet began. “They –”
“Her name was Neige.” Steve cut her off, taking over. “Means snow in French.” He had an opportunity to indulge in his preferred pastime, disclosing other people’s personal lives, which he wasn’t about to pass up. “She got sick in the fall. She was young, too, only five years old. And what a wonderful dog. Everybody loved her. Gentle with kids, mellow with other dogs. The Mortons, the ones you bought the house from, they’re retired. One of their kids lives in Colorado, the other one in Texas. So the dog was their life. If Neige couldn’t join them in a restaurant, they didn’t go. They only took vacations they could drive to with her. They loved that dog as much as their grandchildren.”
“It must have been a terrible loss for them when the dog died,” I said.
“She had terminal cancer. They had to put her down. Their vet came over so she could have her last moments in her favorite place, the backyard. You wouldn’t believe how deeply they grieved for that dog. They cried for days, wouldn’t leave the house.”
I believed it. The story made me think of June’s unremitting heartache.
“About a week after Neige died, a for sale sign appeared on the front lawn. Then a few days later, a moving truck showed up and at the end of the day they were gone. Out to Denver to be near their daughter’s family. The reminders of Neige were everywhere and they couldn’t bear to be anywhere around here without her.”
I called June. If we’d seen Neige, we realized, we had seen an actual ghost. We didn’t know what to think and hoped our minister could help with our bewilderment. We weren’t strong believers, but we attended church semi-regularly. Since our move, the minister had made us feel at home in his congregation and had expressed genuine compassion after the miscarriage.
In his mid-forties with a wife and two children, Reverend Jensen gave traditional sermons that touched upon the importance of earthly goodness for happiness in life while emphasizing the importance of faith for what comes after. As always, he greeted us warmly with a wide smile and sincere handshakes. In the late afternoon, June and I sat with him in the Presbyterian rectory drinking tea. He wore glasses that fit too loosely, which would inevitably slide down his nose.
“What do you make of it?” I asked after I’d told the story.
“Christianity does not accept the existence of ghosts,” he said. “Once the spirit leaves the body, it’s in another realm. We can’t see it or communicate with it.” He opened his Bible, flipped through some pages, and said, “Here we go. Ecclesiastes 12:7. ‘Then man’s dust will go back to the earth, returning to what it was, and the spirit will return to the God who gave it.’ You see? There’s no contact with our world after the spirit leaves the body.”
“Something’s there, though, in our yard,” June protested.
“You may see what you think is a ghost, but if it’s like you say, it’s a demon.” Reverend Jensen pushed up his glasses. “The Bible is very clear that Satan and his servants take physical form to deceive us.”
“I can’t believe what we saw was a demon,” I maintained adamantly.
“Think of Satan tempting Christ in the wilderness. Evil can take many forms.”
With growing confusion, I repeated what I’d said earlier. “What we saw didn’t even know we were there.”
Reverend Jensen set his glasses in place again. “Are you so sure? You said you’ve been having unusual feelings. How do you know what purpose they have? What if they change into something darker, sinister?”
“The thing seemed to be harmless,” June said.
“Let me read to you from 2 Corinthians. “And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness.”
This new consideration upended my perspective on the events of the night before. “Is it possible?” I asked June.
“I don’t know.”
Reverend Jensen continued. “Let’s say for the sake of argument there is such a thing as ghosts. What are they, then, if not souls that have gone neither to heaven nor hell, but, however improbably, have remained on earth? The point is that human beings have souls. A dog doesn’t have a soul. What you saw could not be the ghost of a soulless animal. Either you were mistaken or it was a demon. Be careful, both of you.”
We drove home in worried silence. After sunset, the vague outline of an animal began to take shape in the yard again. Harmless ghost or malevolent visitation, it countered everything our rational minds accepted. The haunting seemed to be a manifestation of the lingering energy of Neige. Unless Reverend Jensen was right and some infernal force was meddling in our lives...
“You feel it growing stronger? Like you’re wanting something so badly it aches?” June asked.
I nodded and pointed at the shape. “I think it’s what she’s feeling. Neige. Or a power is manipulating us into thinking it’s Neige, harmless. Still, it feels like she wants something and her desire is flowing into everything around us.”
We leaned side by side against the porch railing and gazed out at the yard. The visitor was sitting, nose in the air, like an actual dog picking up the surrounding scents. Were we being tricked? I tried to detect a malicious intent in its presence, but I felt only the pain of the space still separating me from June and then the yearning for it to be different.
June looked at me. “There were lots of times you acted like I didn’t matter to you at all. Before the pregnancy.”
“You’ve always mattered. More than anyone.”
“So many times I wished you’d show it. After we lost the baby I made myself stop caring if I mattered to you or not.”
“You’re more important now than ever,’ I said, and it was true. We both stood up and faced each other.
“I’m starting to feel like it might be okay for us to be together again. It doesn’t make any sense, but I think you’re right and it’s emanating from the –” she hesitated – “ghost. How can it be evil? I’m feeling better than I have in months.”
“He warned us to be careful. It could be deceiving us.”
Yet we would not have had that conversation two days earlier. I took a step towards her and she opened her arms. Our bodies pressed together and we kissed. It felt awkward but good after so long an estrangement. I longed for more of June, but I didn’t have her yet, not fully. An intangible piece – of us? I didn’t know what – was missing.
When the doorbell rang, I knew immediately who the intruders were. Steve and Janet stood on the stoop. “Is it there again? We came to see it.”
Neighborly etiquette demanded I let them in, and after all, Steve had been a willing help. The four of us leaned on the porch railing while Steve rehashed the story of Neige. He encouraged us to describe to each other what we saw in the growing darkness: the figure sharpening slowly with the same silvery luminosity as the night before.
“Oh my God, it’s real!” Steve shouted. “Look at that thing. I didn’t believe you. Neither of us did. It’s there! It’s there! Look at it!”
I caught June’s eye. We commiserated silently with each other.
Steve bolted into the yard, calling, “Neige, Neige,” and waving his arms. “Do you want a stick?” He picked up one from the ground. The phantom took no notice. His hand went through the nonmaterial entity when he tried to pet it. He took out his phone, pointed it at the dog, and clicked.
Running to the patio, Steve flopped into one of the cushioned seats around the cast iron table. “Let’s see what I got.” The rest of us stood behind him and looked at the screen. There was no dog, no ghost, only a shapeless, misty light.
“I’m going to try again,” Stephen said.
“No.” I grabbed his arm. “You got what you got. Now leave her alone.” Which I knew made no sense, since the dog seemed unaware of us.
I asked his wife and him if they experienced any kind of feeling while in the yard. Janet shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. Steve practically shouted, “Oh yeah. I’m jazzed. There’s never been anything like this. It’s great stuff.”
When they left, June sighed. “If there’s a visitation from hell around here, it’s him. That guy knows how to ruin a nice evening.”
We’d only begun to see how accurate she was.
The hungering for intimacy stayed with me the next day, but still with something lacking, like a not-quite-finished jigsaw puzzle. I kept Reverend Jensen’s words of caution in mind. If he was right, a destructive influence could be at work, and the lack of fulfillment June and I both felt could eventually have an unwholesome ending. But I didn’t know how to protect ourselves from it.
It was Friday, June’s early day after a morning graduate seminar, and for the first time since the miscarriage she called to say she’d be home for lunch. For many weeks, I’d braced myself every time she walked stiffly through the door, but today she brought with her a fresh tranquility and some deli takeout. We kissed.
“We’ve been here four months,” June said over sandwiches and iced tea. “Whatever is happening, why now?”
“Let’s call the Mortons,” I suggested. “If it’s really about Neige, they might be able to shed some light on it.”
The real estate agent had given me their phone number early on when we had some questions about the HVAC system. I pressed the speakerphone and we listened to the recording. I hung up without leaving a message.
Sunset came, and with it another doorbell ring. “I’m not letting him in this time,” I said firmly.
A group of college-age kids stood on the landing. A young woman spoke for the group. “We came to see the ghost dog.”
Stunned, I asked, “Who told you about a ghost dog?”
“Here.” She handed me her phone, and I was watching Steve’s YouTube rendition of the night before. He had secretly recorded the conversation he provoked, had videos of our house and yard, and guaranteed that the unidentifiable glow represented the actual ghost of a dog that died in the yard.
I handed the phone to her. “There’s more,” she said.
“I’m sure.”
“Where’s the ghost?”
“We can’t have a bunch of strangers coming into our house. Our yard isn’t a park. I’m sorry.”
One of the young men took out his wallet. “We can pay you.”
“I need to ask you to leave. Please.”
One of the other young men began to protest but I cut him off. “Look, this is our home, not a performance space. There’s no public exhibition here. Now please get off our property.”
As the group was leaving with the crestfallen faces of children denied their favorite candy, another car pulled up. A thirtyish couple got out. The pair argued with me, adamant they had a right to see the miracle dog after driving two hours. Another car parked in front of the house, then another rolled up behind it.
I locked the door. “Damn that sonofabitch,” I spat out.
June disappeared into the garage and returned with a cardboard box. We cut a large panel from it and with a Sharpie wrote, No Admittance to Anyone. Leave Now. I taped the sign to the door, which didn’t stop would-be spectators from ringing the bell insistently, knocking furiously, blaring their horns, and even trying to open the door. When I peeked out of the front curtains, there were some twenty cars and a throng milling about in the street. A little later, a rock smashed through the window, sending shards of glass across the living room. Frightened the crowd was becoming a mob, I called 911. A patrol car showed up, lights flashing. After June and I explained the situation to the two cops, leaving out the fact that there actually was a four-legged ghost behind our house, they cleared everyone off and turned away cars for the next hour.
In the quiet of the back yard, the specter’s behavior changed. She stopped her leisurely strolling and lay down on her belly, translucent paws in front, looking ahead expectantly. Clouds hid the stars and sliver of moon, and in the greater darkness her luminescence brightened.
“Something’s going to happen,” June said.
“I know.” I saw her tension, felt it myself, too.
The dog got to its feet and raised its head, soundlessly opening and shutting its mouth as if it were barking. Transfixed, we observed a light appear near the dog, which coalesced into the shining, translucent human forms of a man and a woman. The dog jumped about excitedly, as if welcoming home its owners after an absence. The human spirits got on their knees and hugged the dog. No matter that the beings had no material existence, a wave of joy and gratitude bathed me as I witnessed the reunion. Tears filled June’s eyes as well.
A momentary dazzling light enveloped the dog and humans, all the lights in our house went out, and the forms vanished. After a bit, we ventured into the dark and empty yard. A sense of wholeness replaced the longing that had permeated my last three days – the last piece of the jigsaw was finally in place.
Our minister could not have been more wrong.
“It’s over,” I said.
June shook her head. “It’s just beginning.”
After I flipped on the main circuit breaker, we covered the broken window with plastic sheeting and cleaned up the glass. We sat together in the living room, and June spoke with calm certainty. “You weren’t there for me so much of the time I thought if I couldn’t have a baby you wouldn’t want me at all. That’s the message you gave. I tried pleading with you to pay more attention, to show that you loved me.”
“I always loved you,” I replied. “I thought you had everything you wanted.”
“You weren’t listening. You had your conferences, your meetups, your golfing buddies. I was just there.”
“When you pulled away, I felt alone. I missed you. I didn’t know how to get you to come back.” We were on the sofa and I took her hand.
“I was afraid to come back. That you would hurt me with your indifference.”
“I never felt indifferent, but I just always figured you’d be there. Until you weren’t. When the dog came, I realized I needed to do something about the distance between us. It’s like I couldn’t bear it anymore.”
“My heart’s open again.”
“I’m ready, too,” I assured her.
Our lips brushed against each other then met in a slow, soft kiss like that of new lovers. Her warmth as we held each other tightly, the lovemaking that followed, and the promise that our intimacy would go on let me know everything would be all right.
“Do you think those were the people who owned the house?” I asked after a while.
“Only if they’re dead.”
We got online, side by side in bed, and I entered, “Thomas and Pauline Merton death Denver.” An article from the Denver Post came up. An eighteen-wheeler had crossed the median on Interstate 25 when the driver had a heart attack and hit them head on at fifty miles an hour. The driver survived the crash and heart failure. The couple died instantly. It happened the evening Neige first appeared.
June and I looked at social media while eating breakfast the next morning on the deck. Posts on every platform blasted The Revealer as a phony. Vindictive filled his X account and dozens of negative comments appeared on his Facebook page. Two new YouTube videos demonstrated how easy it is to digitally create a formless glow on a photograph, and his own video had garnered over twenty thousand thumbs down. A number of those turned away at our door left comments denouncing the whole thing as a hoax – the only motive to not let people in was that there was nothing to see.
“It serves him right,” June said.
“No, he’ll eat it up,” I countered. “All the bad press means is that people will be curious and he’ll get more hits.”
“No one will ever believe us,” June mused pensively. “Spirits of the dead having a reunion in our yard.”
“We don’t have to tell anyone.”
The clouds from the night before had gone, and the morning sun illuminated the vibrant green of the grass. “The yard,” I said. “It’s nice, the grass, the bushes, the trees, but there’s an emptiness about it.”
Sipping her coffee thoughtfully, June said. “If we can’t have a baby, we should get a dog, don’t you think?”
Fortuna, a mixed breed smaller than Neige, was white with brown, floppy ears and a brown rump. The humane society gave her age as two and said she’d been treated well by her previous owners. As soon as we met her, June and I knew that she was the one, that she would come to love us, that we in turn would love her as we loved each other.
As soon as we got home, we let her into the yard. Fortuna bee-lined for the spot where the ghosts had been before their ecstatic departure. Wildflowers were growing, a profusion of them, where only grass had been the day before: crimson bee balm, blue flag iris, black-eyed Susans, purple Carolina rose.
“How in the world...?” I began. I picked a flower, held it, smelled its fragrance. It was real.
“They left us another gift,” June said.
I would never understand what happened, how the phantom presence brought about our reawakening. Fortuna sat, raised her head skyward, and bayed. June and I looked high overhead as well. I imagined that somewhere above was a place that welcomed those who had forged bonds so deep they outlasted life itself, a heaven that knew it was not only in human souls that great love endured.