After even my own mother calls, “Happy Mother’s Day” from across the street do I finally notice the girl at my side who’s faint as a printed page when the ink is nearly out. Though transparent, she does have my widow’s peak and large ears, like paper Valentine’s Day hearts folded in half. Her hand slips into mine and right through it, and I’m surprised to feel a slight heat. “Have they imagined you into being?” I ask myself aloud. “Half-way,” she whisper, her voice as faint as a radio song turned to its lowest volume.

I walk the block to my house with her floating next to me, because what else am I to do? Once inside, the girl drifts around, looking at the hallway’s framed photos of me alone on safari and solo at the pyramids, at the single umbrella in the stand, the one of everything in the dish drainer. I’m so used to my solitude that I don’t even notice it, until I see it through her set of ghostly eyes.

Not being a mother, I don’t know what to do next, but the girl swooshes through the back door to the old walnut tree with its rope swing left by the last tenants. Floating on the wooden seat, she begins pumping her legs like a normal kid, creating gusts of warm air, but when I automatically go to push her, my hands plunge right through her pale back. Without thinking, I say, “Don’t go too high.” But at that moment she shoots off the swing to float among the tree boughs. Her small shape in T-shirt and jeans is like a Polaroid nearly faded away. “Louise,” I call, because I have to call her something and the name seems to have come from somewhere hidden deep inside of me.

Immediately, she’s next to me again with a whoosh. “Yes, Mom?” Am I a mother? I thought I was, once. I had wanted a baby for years until I wished one into being. The doctor said it was a phantom pregnancy. All the symptoms but no baby, and soon no baby’s father, either—a second ghost. Night is quickly approaching, and as the gloom settles in, Louise brightens, like a regular girl spotlit on stage before a solo. Back inside I make up a bed on the sofa because it seems like the thing you do for any guest, even a ghost and especially a child. As Louise floats above the blankets, she asks if I’ll read from my childhood copy of Charlotte’s Web—the part about death, which is also about living. When Louise cries, her tears hang in the air, like dew on a spider’s web.

In the morning, I find myself dividing my hair into two braids that I then cross and pin over my head, the way my mother wore it when I was a child. Today maybe Louise and I will go to the library. But when I call for her, she doesn’t respond in her soft voice like a radiator hissing. Downstairs it is silent and strangely muggy. I lift the sofa cushions and even run outside to look up into the walnut tree, shouting her name. Finally, I call my own mother. “She’s gone,” I say without preamble. After all, my mother saw Louise right away yesterday. “Look around,” Mom says. “I’m sure you’ll find your baby.” The old pain bites at me and I blink my eyes. “There never was a baby. It was a trick of my body,” I say. She pauses and then says, “The baby was real to you. And that’s what matters.” After we say goodbye, I put the phone down gently in its cradle.

On the anniversary of my imaginary baby’s death—when the doctor told me she would never live—am I the one who summoned her? I wander the house, picking up and putting down objects. In the hallway I pause and then look closely at each one of the framed photos. Near me in each there’s a very light outline. First a faint baby in my arms at the Acropolis, then a toddler hugging my knees on a beach in Thailand, and most recently, in front of Kensington Palace, pale Louise the girl, smiling with her hand superimposed over mine.

It’s more that I feel her than that I see her; that’s how I know that Louise is here now. At the open front door, she is just a light shimmer, her hair braided just like mine across her head. “I’ve stayed too long,” she whispers. “I know you have to go,” I agree, whispering, too. I move forward to hug Louise good-bye. It’s perfectly natural that she slips straight through my arms, and back inside of me where she belongs. Outside it’s warm for May. Down the block a boy is calling for his mother. It seems as though the world is waiting for her to respond. Some jobs once taken are yours for the the rest of your life.