Dec. 6

"Did you really call him a son-of-a-bitch?"

Martha snorted, disgustingly so. I waited, but when coffee failed to dribble from her nostrils as I surely thought it would, I lowered my own cup as calmly as I could onto the kitchen table. Had I? Damn him. The Captain felt compelled to share that, too. Was there anything at all private left between us?

"England can keep Charles Dickens." The magazine laid splayed open, in front of me. "Here in Schooner Bay, we have (a) real Christmas spirit, not allegorical warnings of the past, present and future for a meagerly man.

"No transformation, no sudden epiphanies needed. The ghost of Captain Daniel Gregg is much more than last century's living sea captain, once deemed New England's strongest man. 'Nay,' as he would say, were he to materialize to be interviewed for this article, 'wasn't it you, Mrs. Muir, who once described me as a magnificent man?'

"But getting back to Christmas in our quaint Currier and Ives…"

Martha nodded in my direction but hastily stood, flipping a dishtowel over her shoulder. "Think I'd better answer the phone, Mrs. Muir. It's been ringing all morning."

Somebody had materialized right behind me. So did the wrath I'd felt last night. Right within me. I hurled my coffee cup at the kitchen sink. It failed to shatter.

"You son of a bitch!" I sputtered, furious. "You would deprive me of even the satisfaction of breaking your mother's everyday china!"

I spun on my heels, last night's fury still proverbially unspent, and raised my hand to slap his face. He caught my wrist with supernatural speed.

"Ah, Madame. Try to keep things in perspective. As John Burroughs, one of my contemporaries, so elegantly wrote in my favorite essay: One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: To rise above the little things."

"Little things? Have you lost your incorporeal mind? You've single-handedly destroyed everything we've worked so hard to build, all of the privacy and intimacy we've craved, for what? To make you look good, to make me look like some sort of zany necromancer? This makes that ghost-lover playground drivel look like nothing!"

How had I been so wrong, a second time? The way he was acting made me even more afraid. At that instant I felt like an idiot for even worrying about falling into gothic tropedom. He didn't love me at all. Worse, how could I love someone who could betray me like this?

"Mom! Captain! All of the kids think it's really neat about the Captain and everything!" Usually Candy has more common sense and intuition. Not this time. She rushed into the kitchen, giddy with glee, riding on the same rising tide of uneasy excitement as the rest of Schooner Bay. Irrationally, I wished she'd seen me raise a hand to her new father.

"Yeah, everyone's saying they knew about Captain Gregg all along, but didn't want to scare us," Jonathan chimed in, slamming his lunch box on the floor. "Captain Gregg, we can do stuff together at Cub Scouts and everything! No more secrets!"

Without warning, and I know of no other way to describe this, time stopped. Jonathan and Candy froze where they were. In the hall, Martha stood motionless, the receiver at her ear. Tears spilled over my eyelashes. I was so angry I was sad. And mad that I was sad. Trapped, too, in this little pocket of time Daniel had carved out in this tempest of his own making.

"Don't touch me," I hissed as he reached for me. "I don't even want to know why. I will never rise above this little thing."