After a few drinks at Clementine’s, waiting in the upstairs lounge, I got antsy, deciding to check on Alastair. When I spirited to him, it startled me to find myself surrounded by open sky, dawn blushing pink on the edge of the blue night. We were on the roof of the Haunt.
Alastair sat with his knees folded up. I sank down beside him. It felt like we ought to be drinking a six-pack up here, though this roof loomed much higher than the one-story band house. But not as high as my apartment building.
“Did you tuck Evie in?” I asked.
He tilted his head at me in weary incomprehension.
“Don’t you see her as a daughter?” I asked.
His eyes blew wider than I’d ever seen them, in absolute horror. “I’m not old enough.”
I burst out laughing. “You could be her grandfather, probably great-great-something-grandfather.”
“I died young,” he said. “I may have seen a lot, but I haven’t done much. I don’t feel a day over twenty-seven.”
“You’re my age?”
He simply stared at me, not even having to say it.
“Look what I’ve done with my time,” he said, gesturing at nothing, which represented his afterlife pretty well, the way he told it. “You see me gaining years of wisdom through decades of hard work, supporting a family across generations? I’ve just been dancing.”
“But you’re the head of the Haunt.”
He scoffed. “I’ve got no real authority.”
“So why does everyone answer to you?”
“It’s because I act like I’ve got all the answers. And to some extent, that’s true. I’ve gained knowledge, if not wisdom. It’s better than nothing, for all the souls who arrive on this side with questions. I play the psychopomp, and they follow along, not minding at all that we’re only going in circles.”
I exhaled. “That’s why you pretend to still be in love with death. It’s for the kids.”
“There are times when I’m not pretending,” he said. “But they’re getting fewer and farther between, with every passing decade, and each time is more fleeting.”
“Would you really want to live in my time?”
“I don’t envy a good deal of it, with so many of the problems I thought had been solved popping back up, robber barons and lynching, so many things that have no right coming back from the dead when I can’t. At the same time, you’ve got sushi, and water parks, and not only did you shrink down telephones until you could fit them in your pocket, but on such a tiny and breakable device, you have access to a greater wealth of knowledge than I had my entire life as an educated white man of my time, and I went to Oxford.”
“You went to Oxford?”
“Shit, no, I didn’t,” he said. “Or did I?”
“Take it easy,” I said, with a laugh. “That doesn’t tell me anything about your age.”
He leaned his chin on his hand, staring wistfully. “On that internet of yours, I’ve found the very same books I used to study at school, free to read. I’ve uncovered records of the lives and deaths of my old friends. I’ve even tracked the places we used to frequent, whether or not the buildings still stand, or if there’s a sushi restaurant in their place now.”
“You seem really preoccupied with sushi.”
“I’d kill to know how in the world it tastes. It looks so strange and fantastic!”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I didn’t really like it, myself—or what, in my opinion, he’d really missed out on, depending on when and where pizza and pho and ice cream had been invented. If only I’d had a phone on me, I could’ve looked it up.
“Have I mentioned how much I love planes?” he said. His grin had never looked farther from cool, practically nerdy.
“You’ve flown?”
“Of course! We have to travel like the living, if we want to get someplace we’ve never been. And you ungrateful little shits complain about the food and the waiting. Try haunting a ship full of retching, starving, scared families for ten weeks. Now you can cross the Atlantic, flying through the fucking firmament itself, in just eight hours.”
He sank back, no longer smiling. “I’ve seen the future,” he said. “But I’m stuck in the past.”
His eyes were glistening. It made me start, like his mask had made a sound when it shattered.
“All this time, I didn’t want you to mourn too hard,” he said. “Because if you did, I didn’t know if I could bear to be around you long enough to try pulling you back. I’ve been mourning for years and doing my damnedest not to show it. But… it’s catching up to me.”
I wondered if I’d see into his memory for a change, if he were to go geist. We couldn’t have that. He pulled himself together, righting his fall before having to catch himself.
I could put my hand over his with no risk. Our walls had lowered to fences, less about keeping each other out and more for leaning on while we talked.
He tilted his face down toward mine. I turned my head, letting him catch my cheek.
“So, this is it?” he asked, and for once, rather than put on his affected pout, his mouth curled up, trying to hide it. “That’s what I get for opening up?”
“Come on,” I said, ignoring the ache in my chest. “Don’t get sappy on me.”
“I jest,” he said. “I’d rather not keep hurting her, either, especially when you and I aren’t serious. It’s hard to be, on this side. There’s nothing tethering us together—we can’t share a house, dreams, children.”
My skin flushed in surprise. “Uh, whoa.”
He gave me my favorite pout after all. “Don’t be so horrified.”
“That’s a lot coming from someone who won’t even tell me his real name.”
That answered an unconscious question I’d had for myself before I’d even dared to let it form words in my head—let alone out loud. I’d been wondering why this hadn’t gone further. It couldn’t, as long as he stayed too cool and mysterious to even tell me the basics about himself.
“I will,” he said.
“For real?”
He put his hand to his dead heart. “I swear on my grave. In fact, why don’t I show it to you? So you’ll know it’s true.”
I gaped at him as he stood and held out his palm.
We spirited to a cemetery older than any I’d ever seen. All the grass overgrown, moss overtaking the stones, these long-dead souls truly given back to nature, some even pushing up small white wildflowers. No visitors here. We were the only ones at his grave, standing there hand in hand.
“This is it,” he said. As if I couldn’t tell from the goosebumps, which weren’t mine.
Those dates, birth and death, were a lot later than I would’ve guessed. But I didn’t mention it. I could feel through his fingers that he wanted me to focus on something else.
“Is that really your name?”
I could see why he’d changed it in death. It hadn’t aged well. Not particularly suited for screaming in bed.
I fought a smirk, mustering as much sincerity as I could. “I’ll keep your secret.”
He flashed me a playful sneer. “You fucking will.”
What a shame that he’d opened up to me so late. Though it might’ve been for the best. I couldn’t go falling in love with him now. Even if I might’ve had room in my heart for more than one love at once.
I gazed up at him. “Do you think it would’ve worked between us in life?”
He answered way too quickly. “No.”
We both cracked up.
He must’ve felt my slight affront, because he took my other hand, like we were about to dance. “I’m sorry I didn’t get to be your ex-husband.”
It might’ve already happened in another life. Maybe that’s why he’d annoyed me since we’d met. And it could happen again, another time around.
I squeezed his hands. “Now how do you like me, out of all the foundlings you’ve brought here?”
“You might not be the most dear,” he said, smiling. “But you’ve certainly been the most difficult.”
He said it like a compliment, his voice as warm as his hands. Through his fingers, he slipped me a feeling, like a note under a door. After so many years of being fawned and fought over, it had come as a real shock for me to turn him down, over and over. Like downing a shot, or descending the drop of a roller coaster, that shock had turned to a thrill.
“Thanks for the ride,” he said.
I winked. “Till next time.”
* * *
Evie didn’t sleep, of course. She simply lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling, not unlike the empty body she’d left behind. Through the walls the pulse thumped, and yet, somehow, she resisted its pull, lying there perfectly still. Even when I went to sit on the edge of the bed, she didn’t stir. I wondered how she managed, if she did this every night that she didn’t sing.
No need to mince words. “We broke up.”
She winced, shutting her eyes tight. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“It’s no big deal. We were hardly even dating,” I said. “But I’m not here to talk about boys.”
Her eyes fluttered open. She sat up, hugging her knees as she faced me.
I spoke as gently as I could. “Why not give it another go?”
At first, her face went blank. I worried she’d pull from my bag of tricks and spirit right the fuck off.
“I already tried.” She pulled off her scarf and began to unbraid her hair, her fingers trembling as she combed them through her coils. “After the crash, I found myself outside the car, and my body, so I climbed back in. It worked. I think it kept me from dying. But I couldn’t finish the job. I couldn’t wake up.”
“We could always pull you back out again, if you can’t.”
She shook her head, hair fanning out. “Ally didn’t just pull the plug. He couldn’t, not in a hospital. They’d have caught it even faster with all those alarms and such and just plugged me back in. So… he had to use a pillow.” Her hands twisted in the scarf on her lap.
“That gave us time to leave before they resuscitated me.”
I remembered, now, the pounding dark of empty lungs. But it didn’t seem like she was scared to face it again. It was whether he had it in him to do it, now that he knew her.
“You know he’d do whatever you asked.”
She smiled, almost involuntarily; then she winced again, like a spark failing to become a flame.
“Now my body is back home,” she said. “I don’t think there’d be time to save me again, keep my body running. I’d probably just die for good and cross over.”
“Would that be so bad?”
Her face finally calmed, as she looked away for a moment to think. Then, she glanced back up slightly, enough to bare her bashful self-consciousness. “I know if there is a heaven, it’s supposed to be eternal paradise and all, but, well… do you think they have sex up there?”
I couldn’t help but smirk. “Believe me, I’ve sure wondered myself.”
Her voice strummed on the edge of a sob. “There’s so much else I’ve never done that I might not get a chance to do, up there. At least down here, I could still try.”
Trying might be all she could do. She lacked the memories needed to feel certain sensations. There weren’t any firsts to be had on this side.
Instead of pointing that out, I said, “You could do it all if you were alive again.”
That only made her shake her head, too tired to keep protesting. As much as I hated to push, she needed it. She looked uncomfortably like my sister, with the brave face she tried to put on, as I struck. “Didn’t you want to go to school?”
“I don’t think they’re still saving that scholarship for me,” she said. “Not to mention, my folks have gone broke paying to keep me alive.”
“What about your music, getting to perform for a live audience?”
“It’s a tough business. I’d probably never get in. I don’t know if I’d ever even get dexterity back in my fingers, when it would take years learning to walk again.”
“How about dating?” I asked.
“I haven’t had the chance. I’d be so behind, I don’t know if I’d ever catch up—and that’s without being an invalid living with her parents.”
I hadn’t thought about all her counterpoints. They were hard to ignore. And yet.
“Who cares?” I asked. “I’d do anything to live again.”
She squeezed her eyes shut against the tears. “Me, too,” she said, voice trembling, like the last breath before a sob. “But I’m so scared.”
Nothing I could say would compare to how it felt. I put my arms around her. It made her cry out even louder, but she needed it. She had to feel it. I buried my head hard in her shoulder as I let it all pour out: everything I’d begun to want for myself, now that I could never have it. I’d never get to hug my sister, get breakfast with friends drunk at three in the morning, wake up to the same beloved face every day.
I didn’t even mind the crying, but I could hardly stand her guilt coiling in my stomach.
“We don’t have to try yet,” I said, choking up myself. “You could take your time, say all your goodbyes. I’ll be right there with you once you’re ready.”
At last, I had to pull away, aching too much for my touch to soothe. I stayed with her while she finished up her cry, ready in case it hurt hard enough to go geist. Finally, her sobs turned to deep breaths, and her tears began to dry on her face.
“What about you?” she asked.
“I’m dead, for real.” I wanted to shrug, smile, shoot finger guns—anything to show it didn’t matter, no big deal—but instead, I said it with a straight face. “I’m never, ever coming back.”
“You’re still here,” she said. “That’s not nothing. If I try to live again, you have to promise me you’ll do the same.”
“I’ll try,” I promised.
I stood up and out of the bed, holding out my palm. “Come and dance.”
She stared at my hand, slightly wary.
“It’s about time,” I said.
I wondered if this was how it felt for Alastair. She looked away, second thoughts fleeting across her downturned eyes, even as her hands trembled in restraint against the pull of the pulse.
“I’ve been putting it off so long,” she said.
“If you wait any longer, it’s only going to make it harder.”
“What if I’m not good at it?”
I leaned in closer. “You’ll get better with practice.”
At last, she took my hand. Her stomach gave a little roller-coaster thrill as I swept her up onto her feet. We practiced right there in her room first. My fingers told her how to move, our hands twined for a silly push and pull, warming up our feet.
But she ached to move faster and wider than she could in my arms. I let her go, watching her whirl away on quick feet, her arms flourishing and hips rolling. She’d caught on fast, eyes hazy with my memories. I had some moves, and so did everyone I’d danced with here. We shimmied around each other, our laughter literally breathless.
I caught her hand again. Her heart drummed nearly as hard as the pulse thundering around us as we spirited into the midst of the dancers. Their surprise to see her rippled through the crowd. She rode along too fast for me to keep up as I swung through other arms.
When I finally caught up with her, she’d stilled, standing motionless in the crowd across from Alastair.
I tensed, worrying as they stared that he might refuse her. Up until he held out his arms. Her shyness fell away as she took his hands.
At first, he held her at arm’s length, but as she whirled with ease every way he twisted and turned her, he let her closer. They looked good together. She beckoned with her curves as he teased with his lithe limbs, never too close. But they didn’t match the heat of the other dancers. They gave off a softer warmth. It didn’t pull, or invite, tugging at the limbs. It simply ached with a bittersweet twinge, like a goodbye embrace.
It might not have been what she wanted from him, but she smiled anyway, and so did he, as he dipped his head to touch his forehead to hers. Then he let her go, and she danced away.