Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked

by Christa Carmen

  “You’re on in thirty seconds,” Frank called after her as she sidled from the room. He grinned at Eve. “Now do you believe me? So, when’re you going to let me take you out?”

  The scene dissipated like a reflection in a disturbed pool of water. Eve and Frank stood on Philadelphia’s South 5th Street in a growing layer of snow. More snow fell from the sky, thick, wet flakes that blanketed the brick-sided townhouses and caught in Eve’s eyelashes.

  “How long was it that you made me wait?”

  “It wasn’t that long, and you can’t blame me for being wary. I only got that job after graduation to delay deciding between filling out marketing applications or pursuing my own design company. I was out of my element at a gentlemen’s club.”

  “It was over a month,” Frank reminded her. He looked up at the window of a two-story townhouse. “But after that, we were together nonstop. It wasn’t long before you moved in here with me.”

  Eve stepped over to stand beside Frank and followed his gaze to the window. In an instant, they were transported to the room from which the window looked out.

  The earlier rendition of Frank had a white sheet wrapped around his torso, a scarf cinching it closed, and was serenading the younger Eve with a number from Jesus Christ Superstar.

  Eve looked at Frank’s ghost by her side and smiled sadly. “You always loved your music. All kinds, too. It’s why your deejay company was so successful.”

  “The company was successful because of you.”

  She said nothing in response, remembering how many hours she’d spent designing the logo for Frankie’s Flimflam Fusion Entertainment, and how little time she’d started putting into her own designs. Eve looked back to the couple in the living room, watched as Frank tackled her onto a worn leather couch and kissed her, wrapping the scarf around her neck, pulling her close.

  “We had a lot of fun here,” she admitted.

  The scene before them flickered and the positions of the players changed. Eve sat at a small desk in the corner, completing a task for the corporate marketing giant that had hired her the month before. Frank watched television from the couch, a cigarette in his mouth, a near-overflowing ashtray balanced on his chest. The telephone rang.

  “That was my uncle calling,” ghost-Frank said to her. “Do you remember that day?”

  Tears stung Eve’s eyes. “Of course.”

  As if her words had summoned the vision, Eve stood next to Frank on the outskirts of a funeral sermon. The former Frank was closest to the open grave, leaning against Eve, his eyes red, a pack of cigarettes visible in the breast pocket of his black suit.

  Frank turned to Eve. “This was the end for my father. But it was the beginning of the end for us too.”

  “You say that like it’s my fault,” Eve said. “You were crushed when your father died, but I supported you as much as possible. I couldn’t change your cigarette consumption—up to three packs a day by then—or your father’s death exacerbating your mother’s mental health issues.”

  “No, but you could have reacted differently to the job offer in LA.”

  “I didn’t end up taking it,” Eve protested bitterly.

  “But you interviewed for it. Made me think you were going to abandon me during the worst time of my life.”

  “I asked you to come with me.”

  “Knowing I couldn’t leave my business.”

  They stared at one another, at the same impasse they’d come to ten years earlier.

  “You gave me that awful letter.” Eve gripped Frank’s arm, forced him to look her in the eye. “Are you going to show me that night?”

  Frank shrugged, took her hand, and they were standing on the street again, overlooking a van with Eve’s design for Frankie’s Flimflam Fusion screen-printed across the side. Frank was in the front seat, window down, exhaling large puffs of cigarette smoke. The Eve in the passenger seat had a creased and tear-stained letter in her hands.

  “How could you write this?” Eve asked, gripping the letter so hard her nails tore holes through the page. “Do you really think I’m not ready to run a graphics department? That my work has gotten worse over the past few months, not better?”

  The bygone version of Frank lit a new cigarette with the dying embers of the old one. “I’m sorry if it seemed harsh, but I don’t think the company that hired you knows what they’re doing. It’s stupid to uproot your life for a place willing to hire someone so green. Here, you can focus on the things you’ve been wanting to improve, without having to worry about being in a new city, without friends or family, and, well, without me.”

  “You were so manipulative,” Eve whispered to ghost-Frank. “You broke me down. You made me think I was nothing without you, and in turn that made me think I was nothing at all.” Eve looked away from the van. Up the road, a street light buzzed off, then on again, before going out.

  “Take me home, Frank. We know what happens next. I stay and things are never the same. We break up. You kill yourself with a cocktail of nicotine and carcinogens, because not only was I not worth quitting for, but neither were you.”

  Frank sighed, beholding the former Frank convincing the former Eve she wasn’t good enough at the very thing she wanted to succeed at most, and took her hand. Eve closed her eyes.

  When she opened them, they were standing on her upstairs balcony once more. A gaggle of costumed girls, including an undead snow queen and dolled-up comic supervillain, sprinted off a neighbor’s porch. Laughter and shouts of trick-or-treat reached her ears from farther down the street.

  Eve watched Frank stamp out a cigarette and kick it over the railing to the leaf-choked gutter below.

  “Why are you really here?” she pressed. “I know it’s not because you can be, or because you wanted to remind me of our past together. So, why?”

  Frank lit another cigarette, the lighter illuminating his face in the dark.

  “It’s All Hallows’ Eve… and my soul needs propitiation.”

  Eve’s skin prickled. “Your soul needs to be propitiated. Right. And how am I supposed to help you with that?”

  “You can spend this All Hallows’ Eve with me,” he gave her a suggestive wink, “like we used to, remember?”

  Eve ignored the wink, and its connotations. “Or?”

  “Or, offer up a portion of your soul on a future Halloween. The first upon your death.”

  “What’s behind door number three?”

  Frank looked surprised. “Option three is you condemn my spirit to roam the earth until the All Hallows’ Eve on which I am propitiated. But Eve,” he said, and she remembered that expectant tone well, “I need you to do this for me.”

  “You do, huh? You want me to either lay with the ghost of my ex-lover the night before my wedding, or make a deal with the Devil and give up a portion of my soul upon my death? Then what? I suppose, if I agree to that, I’m sentenced to the same fate, wandering between the spirit world and the physical one until someone agrees to do the same for me?”

  Frank’s face lit up like a boy offered king-sized candy bars as trick-or-treat loot. “Exactly! You have until midnight to make your decision. Don’t be hasty, Eve. Please.”

  And with that, he disappeared, leaving behind the faint scent of cigarette smoke in the crisp autumn air.

  STAVE THREE

  THE SECOND OF THE THREE SPIRITS

  Eve pulled her robe tighter and turned to go inside.

  What time is it? How long do I have until Frank comes back to hear my decision?

  Eve thought again of the terms. Her relationship with Jack was rocky, but did that mean she’d be willing to have a one-night stand with a ghost? The idea was ridiculous. But what about the second option? Did she care enough about an old boyfriend to spend the first part of her afterlife an aimless wanderer of purgatory?

  “This is crazy.”

  “But you like crazy, don’t you? I mean, you must, otherwise you wouldn’t have spent so much time with me.”

  Eve knew Paul Abello�
�s voice before looking up. He stood in the doorway of the balcony, his sandy-colored hair still thick and long, his eyes indeed as wild as ever.

  “Paul,” she said, and could find no other words.

  “Yes, my love.”

  “Do we have to go back? I’m not sure I can bear to see it all again.”

  “I’m sorry, my love.” He approached her slowly, one hand extended toward hers. “There were things that were difficult, I won’t deny that. But there were good times too. I want to show you those.”

  She felt the surprising warmth of Paul’s hand. A thick mist blew in from the west. It rolled over the balcony and consumed them. When it cleared, she was peering through the window of a coffee shop in South Boston at her and Paul’s first date.

  “I forgot about this day,” Eve said dazedly. “I’d moved to Southie the week before. After everything that happened, I forgot about the lies at the foundation of our relationship.”

  “They weren’t lies.” Paul crossed arms covered in black-ink tattoos. “They just weren’t true at that exact moment.

  Eve whipped around to protest, but Paul shook his head and pointed. Eve could hear the conversation as if the glass had been a screen.

  “What do you do, Paul?” Eve asked. Paul sipped an iced coffee and gave her a lazy grin. “I’ve been with Safety Insurance for years. My dad worked there his whole career, so he’s pretty stoked I’m following in his footsteps. I’m getting a few buddies in the door there too. It’s great, number three insurance company in all of Beantown.”

  Eve turned to Paul’s ghost, unable to help herself. “Let’s see if I remember the status of those lies-that-weren’t-true-at-that-exact-moment. Safety fired you months prior, your parents wanted nothing to do with you, and your buddies were the other recovering addicts and alcoholics who lived in the halfway house a few blocks away. Do I have that right?”

  Ghost-Paul’s response was drowned out by laughter from inside the coffee shop, and Eve spun to regard her former self amused by something Paul had said. He returned her question, and she listened to a younger, more naïve Eve discuss her attempts at getting the graphic design company off the ground.

  “How is the company?” ghost-Paul asked.

  Eve inspected the clasp of her bracelet. “It’s fine. Great, really. Was there somewhere else you wanted to show me?”

  Paul took her hand. A red-rock quarry buttressing an expansive apartment complex replaced the coffee shop. They made their way through the lobby and down a well-lit hall to a unit at the back of the building.

  “I remember living here like it was yesterday,” Eve said.

  “It was a great complex.”

  Eve stopped walking, forcing Paul to turn and look at her. “It was also the backdrop for one too many traumatic incidents. The brain translates short-term details into long-term memory when either extreme pleasure or extreme distress is experienced.”

  Paul fixed her with that are you done yet? look she despised so much and then continued down the hallway. The first thing Eve spotted inside the old apartment was the glow of the television across the room. A History Channel documentary on the lore and legend of Halloween played at low volume. Eve leaned against the wall, feeling ill.

  “I remember this night.”

  A gaunt and sickly-looking Paul lay on the blanket-strewn couch, ignoring the documentary for the paraphernalia on the coffee table before him. He stirred a spoonful of dark brown liquid with the plunger rod of a syringe, flipped it, and drew the mixture up until the chamber was completely full.

  Eve’s breath hitched as she watched Paul tie off and injected 100 CCs of china white heroin into a recently-detoxed vein. His face contorted in a mask of euphoria and he fell to his side on the couch. Paul’s breathing slowed, but a wheezing, agitated gasp escaped his lungs; it was this that brought a sleep-disoriented Eve from the bedroom.

  After calling his name and receiving no response, Eve crept toward the couch. She shook Paul’s shoulder. A corner of the blanket came untucked, and the empty syringe fell into view.

  “I still have never been more shocked by anything in my entire life,” the present Eve said. “I mean, I knew you’d relapsed. That’s why you moved in with me far earlier than was healthy for any new relationship. But I believed you when you said it’d been a stupid mistake, that you loved me enough that it wouldn’t happen again.”

  She turned back to the memory, watched a panicked version of herself scream at a 911 operator and perform CPR.

  “You were lucky that night,” Eve said flatly. “But you weren’t lucky after I made you go back into treatment. I’d changed the locks. You overdosed then, like it was my fault.”

  Sirens sounded in the distance. Eve turned away from her attempts to revive Paul. “Can we get out of here?” She grasped the ghost’s hand without waiting for a reply.

  Her own balcony took shape, and she suppressed the desire to drop to her knees and lay her cheek upon the wood, emotionally drained.

  I have a newfound sympathy for Ebenezer Scrooge.

  She turned on Paul, anger clawing at her like a thousand syringe tips at fragile skin. “I blamed myself,” she said. “I never forgave myself for not giving you another chance. I went over the day you died a thousand times in my head. I’d saved you once, what if I’d been able to save you again? What if letting you come home would have kept you from relapsing again?

  “I thought I was giving you a dose of tough love, but all I did was condemn myself to months of agony. I couldn’t sleep. All the work I’d done on my company fell by the wayside. Guilt made grief impossible to get over.”

  She looked at his handsome face and capable hands, hands that’d drafted thousands of insurance policies, distributed dozens of sobriety medallions to newcomers in AA, caressed her body innumerable times.

  “You broke me, and it took so goddamn long to put myself back together again. Have you really come to ask for something more?”

  If Paul faltered, Eve saw no sign of it. His features maintained their lazy, boyish repose. “You said yourself, what if? What if you’d done things differently? What if you’d been able to save me again? Well, now you can.”

  Paul floated forward and embraced her.

  “At the very least,” he whispered. “We could be together again, if only for the night.”

  Eve pulled away, chastising herself for the re-ignited feelings of guilt that surfaced when she did. “I don’t think so.”

  His face fell as it had when she’d refused him money or a ride to score drugs. She knew what came next and held up her hand before he could begin.

  “Begging won’t work. I haven’t determined how I feel about sharing my soul. My guess would be I have until midnight to make that decision?”

  “Yes.” He lifted a hand to stroke her face.

  Cool air fanned her cheek.

  “I’ve always loved you,” he said, as his form began to flicker.

  “Perhaps,” Eve said as he disappeared, “but love wasn’t enough.”

  STAVE FOUR

  THE LAST OF THE SPIRITS

  Eve came in off the balcony and stood, dreading the moment the clock would strike twelve.

  Scrooge was visited by three spirits, she thought, exhausted. At least I only have two dead ex-boyfriends.

  On the television, the doorbell rang. The station that had played All Hallows’ Eve was showing the film back-to-back, and the hapless babysitter was being menaced by that barbaric clown all over again. The doorbell clanged a second time, and then a third, before Eve realized it was her doorbell that was ringing, and headed for the stairs.

  She snagged the bag of bite-sized chocolate from the counter, figuring the cache on the porch had run dry. The doorbell rang again. “For Samhain’s sake, I’m fucking coming,” she muttered.

  She flung open the door, prepared to teach the Zombie-Elsa and Harley Quinn she’d seen earlier a thing or two about trick-or-treating etiquette.

  Adam Barclay stood beneath her porch light,
skin flickering.

  Adam can’t be dead, Eve thought wildly. He was posting on Facebook this morning.

  “So you haven’t heard,” the ghost said, in response to her shocked expression. “I suppose my family will keep it under wraps a few more days, before the obituary is in the paper.”

  Eve continued to stare.

  “I killed myself early this morning. I did it because I couldn’t have you.”

  Anger mobilized her into speech. “What? Because of me? Are you kidding me?”

  “I’m not kidding.” Adam’s chiseled visage scrunched into a pout. “Why would I joke about something like that?”

  “It’s just that… I pursued you for over a year! I mean, I pursued you even while we were together. Even when you were with me, you weren’t really with me. You cheated and came crawling back, over and over again. You messed with my head for months, got me so I couldn’t succeed at picking off nail polish let alone my work. Eventually, I smartened up, moved on. Three years later, you’re telling me I’m the reason you—?” An exasperated cry escaped Eve’s lips.

  Adam... the red herring in my co-dependency recovery. At least, that’s what my therapist said.

  Adam’s pout became an offended grimace.

  “I saw on social media you were getting married tomorrow. I couldn’t deal. I’ve been so alone since we split.”

  “You mean since I caught you cheating with Mandy, or Candy, or whatever the hell her name was?”

  “You’re not listening! Look, I’m sorry for the shit I did when we were together. I was scared of having such a strong woman like you and—”

  “Save it, Adam.” She turned and started for the stairs. Adam followed. “Let me guess,” she continued, “you’re so scared, you need me to be with you for one more night, or sacrifice my peace in the afterlife to help you?”

  Eve could see that Adam was going to agree with her before he opened his mouth. Why wouldn’t he? Of course that’s what he’s after; it’s what they’re all after.

  As they entered her bedroom, Adam’s reply was lost to a scream emanating from the television. That damn clown was hacking off the girl’s limbs for the fourth time tonight.