Underground Spirit

by Foxglove Lee

  She plated the cakes so they could share while sipping their lattes. There was something inexorably romantic about splitting dessert. Splitting two desserts, doubly so.

  “I know I should get it,” Whitney admitted, reflecting on their conversation with Danine. “I just don’t.”

  “What don’t you get?” Bruce asked, taking another forkful of creamy cheesecake topped with fresh berries.

  “Non-binary gender. I guess a lot of people would say the same of me, they don’t get how you can identify with a gender that your parents say isn’t yours. But to me it makes sense, being a woman. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Do I sound old? Behind the times? Locked into a world where there are only two genders?”

  Bruce smiled gently. “Am I right in assuming you respect other people’s right to identify outside male or female?”

  “Of course.”

  “You just can’t imagine feeling that way yourself?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, that’s okay,” Bruce said consolingly. “I don’t know what it feels like to be a woman, but I wouldn’t begrudge anyone the right to identify that way.”

  Whitney’s heart fluttered. Could have been the caffeine. Could have been love. “How are you so good?” she asked. “Do you have a trans sister or something?”

  “I have a transistor radio,” he said with a wink. When she didn’t react, he went on with, “Come on, my corny jokes at least deserve a pity laugh.”

  “It’s not that,” she told him. “I was just thinking about Cal. It bugs me that I don’t understand her. Not her. Gah! See? It bugs me that I keep misgendering this girl. Not girl! This is driving me crazy, Bruce.”

  Silly as it sounds, Whitney’s heartstrings went zing when she spoke his name. They really did. It was a physical sensation. Electric. Excitement. For a moment, she forgot what they were talking about.

  “Give it time,” Bruce said, setting his hand on hers. “Everything takes time.”

  Not falling for this handsome man seated across from her.

  That took no time at all.

  “Does that mean I’m stuck with a ghost following me around? I don’t know what she wants from me—what Cal wants from me. How do I figure it out?”

  Bruce sighed, then scooped up another forkful of cake. “Ghosts usually have unfinished business, right? That’s why they stick around?”

  Whitney shrugged. She wasn’t exactly an expert. But, wow, this delicious chocolate cake was certainly helping soothe her soul.

  “My guess is that Cal’s trying to communicate a message to you.”

  “Why me? Why not Danine? Why not her parents? Not her. For crying out loud, how are you supposed to talk about someone without using pronouns?”

  “Maybe you’re a… sensitive,” Bruce suggested.

  “Sensitive meaning psychic?”

  Bruce lifted his coffee cup to his superb pink lips and simply held it there. He didn’t drink until after he’d said, “Anything’s possible.”

  “But I’ve never seen a ghost before. Why this one? Why now?”

  “Maybe Cal saw you in the crowd and, you know, latched on to you. Out of all those commuters, no one else saw the apparition you did. Could be that Cal thought of you as a comrade-in-arms because you’ve both been on a gender journey.”

  Whitney cocked her brow. “Are you sure you don’t have a trans sister?”

  “Do you want to hear the radio joke again?” Bruce chuckled.

  Whitney tried to wean herself off the chocolate cake by taking a forkful of the cheesecake. God in Heaven, that was glorious. Why didn’t she buy cakes more often? Or was it the company that made them taste that much better?

  “Thing is,” she began. “How do we know if Danine was even telling the truth? She was the only person at that visitation saying Cal was genderqueer. Everyone else took Cal for a run-of-the-mill young woman. Why should we trust one voice over the crowd?”

  “If you were the one who died, God forbid,” Bruce said, “would you want your family writing your obituary?”

  Whitney took that question like a punch to the gut, but she didn’t let on. Just said, “I see your point. The question remains: why me? What’s the message and what am I supposed to do?”

  Bruce moved his chair so close to hers their knees touched. She thought he was reaching for her shoulder, but he touched her neck instead, right behind her ear, traced his finger all the way down to her collarbone. Slowly.

  Her pulse raced. She couldn’t look away. There was such tenderness in his eyes. She couldn’t resist him. She didn’t want to. When he leaned in for a kiss, she leaned in just as desperately.

  And when their lips met, she knew he’d stay the night.

  Chapter Nine

  When Whitney awoke in the middle of the night, she was too afraid to open her eyes. There was a sense of impending doom all around her. And, more tangibly, the feeling that someone else was in the room.

  Bruce was beside her, sure, but he wasn’t the “someone” she sensed. She could feel his body heat emanating from the other side of the bed. She could hear his gentle breath as he slept.

  The “someone” wasn’t Bruce. The “someone” stood at the foot of her bed. Watching.

  Like a child, Whitney pulled the covers up over her head. She would hide from this terror. She would hide until it went away.

  Or perhaps she wouldn’t. Perhaps the “someone” in the room wouldn’t allow that. Because, tight as she clutched those covers, she could feel them being tugged from the base of the bed.

  Her fingers were too weak with sleep to keep hold of the bedclothes. They slipped from her hands and slid down her body. Even in her nightgown, she felt exposed. More than just her body. Her soul. The being at the end of the bed could see right through her skin, through her skull, beyond her brain and directly into her mind. Through her ribs and straight to her heart. This unearthly creature could see the real Whitney, with all her joys and fears and faults and trepidations.

  She opened her eyes.

  There at the foot of the bed stood Cal.

  Cal in a cap and gown, holding a bouquet of red roses, just like in the photo from on top of the casket. Cal smiling gently, posed by a photographer. Not awkward. Simply static.

  “Cal?” Whitney asked. “What are you doing here?”

  Suddenly, the wind picked up. What wind? They were indoors. But there was a wind, somehow. A very cold wind that whipped Whitney’s cheeks, a cold slap. She looked over at Bruce, but he remained asleep. Asleep on his side, facing away from her. How could he sleep through this tempest? The wind howled in her ears. Her skin was so cold, so brutally cold.

  Whitney reached for the covers yanked down to her feet. She pulled them up and around her body, but they were of no comfort to her. The cold had gotten inside them, too. Inside everything. Inside Whitney.

  A horrifying screech rang through the room, and when Whitney turned her gaze to Cal, she was no longer looking at a peaceful graduate. The matted hair was back. The blood and gore, flesh ripped from the skull, bone exposed. Blue lips. Grey skin. A lifeless corpse, and yet it had life. It was standing right there at the foot of the bed, unaffected by the whip and howl of the frigid winds.

  Whitney screamed at the ghost “What do you want? Just tell me what you want! I can’t hand this, Cal, I really can’t. I’m sorry you died, but you have to stop. You’re scaring the life out of me!”

  Suddenly, she was shaking in her bed. Shaking violently. Cal’s blue lips were moving, but Whitney couldn’t hear a word.

  “I can’t hear you!” Whitney screamed, cutting through the air like a knife. “Whatever it is you want, you need to ask someone else. I can’t hear you. I’m not the one.”

  Her body shook harder. In the distance, a voice spoke. Was it Cal? Was she finally hearing the spirit’s voice? What was the message? What was she supposed to do? She would do anything, at this point, to make the haunting stop.

  “Whitney!” Bruce whispered. “Wake up. You’
re having a nightmare. You’ve got to wake up.”

  Her eyelids fluttered. It took a moment to focus in on Bruce’s face in the moonlight.

  “Oh, thank God,” he said. “You were talking in your sleep, yelling. I thought… I don’t know what I thought.”

  “It was a dream?” she asked.

  How could he answer that? “What was a dream?”

  She wrapped her arms around him, soaking in his warmth. He returned the tender caress. This was just what she needed after the arctic coldness she’d felt in her dream. Bruce was so warm, so consoling. She absorbed the kindness that came off him in waves. This is how she wanted to feel forever: loved and supported, even when he didn’t understand what on earth was going on.

  “What was I saying?” Whitney asked.

  “I’m not sure. It was mumbled.”

  She might as well tell all. “Cal was here. At the base of the bed. Cap and gown, like in the picture. Then there was an icy cold wind. It was freezing in here. And then Cal was back in that state like before, all ripped to shreds. It was terrifying.”

  Bruce shivered, and so did Whitney, but at least they were shivering together this time.

  “What did Cal want?” Bruce asked.

  “That’s just it—I don’t know. Her lips were moving—Cal’s were—but I couldn’t hear a word. It’s so frustrating. This is all so… so frustrating.”

  Bruce gave her a good squeeze and then rolled out of bed in his boxers. “I know what to do.”

  “Sage the place? Salt the corners? Put crosses over all the doors?”

  He cocked his head. “No, I was thinking…” He grabbed his phone. “Where’s your computer?”

  Whitney reached under her bed and pulled out the laptop she liked to keep out of sight. If anyone broke in during the day when she was at work, she liked the place to look like it wasn’t worth burgling.

  “What do I need a computer for?” she asked.

  “We’re going to look through all the news reports about Cal’s death. TV news, papers, all of it. Reporters usually have an email address or Twitter handle so you can contact them. So we’ll send each of these reporters a note saying they got Cal’s gender identity wrong. They reported on Cal as a young woman. We’ll explain that Cal was genderqueer and didn’t use she pronouns. Maybe they’ll issue a retraction.”

  Whitney’s stomach knotted just a touch. “You really think that’s why I’m being haunted?”

  “I don’t know why you’re being haunted,” Bruce conceded. “But if it was you, if you had died and every reporter in the city was referring to you by the wrong gender, wouldn’t you be upset?”

  Whitney sighed. “I feel guilty for saying this, but I’m too tired to be upset.”

  “What about when you were Cal’s age?”

  With a smirk, Whitney admitted, “At that age, I would have been pissed.”

  Bruce gave her a look that said, “There you go.”

  It was nearly one in the morning, but email never sleeps. Together, Whitney and Bruce wrote up a template to use with every reporter. They got to work, emailing and tweeting.

  “I sure hope we’re doing the right thing,” Whitney said. “It’s not like we ever met my little ghost. Could be that Cal wasn’t genderqueer at all. Maybe Danine was spreading lies.”

  “It’s the reporter’s job to corroborate reports, not ours.”

  “But if we’re unknowingly spreading lies, won’t Cal’s ghost be even more upset?”

  When Bruce sighed, Whitney realized she ought to quit complaining and get on with it. Clearly, Cal wanted to convey some message to the world at large. Maybe Bruce was right. Maybe this was it.

  Once they got going, it really wasn’t hard to contact reporters. It was mostly a matter of copy and paste, hit send. Done.

  “This is weird,” Whitney said after scrolling through an article on a local paper’s website.

  “What’s weird?” Bruce asked without looking up from his phone.

  “This reporter doesn’t have an email address listed. She has a phone number instead.”

  “So call her,” Bruce said with a shrug.

  Whitney wasn’t sure why that idea made her so nervous. She got up and poured herself a glass of orange juice as a distraction.

  Bruce obviously had some psychic sense that she was feeling uncomfortable, so he said, “Nobody’s going to be awake this time of night.”

  “We are,” Whitney said.

  “Yes we are, but this reporter won’t be. You’ll get her voicemail. You can just read the script we’re sending all around. It’s that easy.”

  It did sound easy, when he put it like that. So she picked up the phone, dialled the reporter’s number, and prepared to read the script off her computer.

  “Rachel the Reporter,” a voice said across the line.

  Whitney almost hung up. She couldn’t believe the reporter had picked up.

  “Hello?” Rachel asked. “I’ve got call display. I know where to find you. Might as well say what’s on your mind.”

  Whitney started off reading the script, but the reporter kept interrupting, asking questions Whitney didn’t have answers to. She looked helplessly to Bruce. He sat at the foot of her bed, smiling with encouragement. Whitney said everything she could think of, conveniently leaving out the juicy bits—like the fact that she was being haunted by Cal’s spirit—but the reporter didn’t seem all that interested in making a retraction.

  “I’ll be honest with you,” said Rachel the Reporter. “This story’s a stinker. Nobody’s going to understand what that means, genderqueer, and it isn’t my job to confuse the public.”

  “Maybe you could do a bit of research,” Whitney suggested. “How can Cal possibly rest in peace when every news station in the city is calling her a young woman—calling Cal a young woman. Cal didn’t identify that way.”

  “Trans would be one thing,” the reporter said. “Like, she used to be she and now she’s a he. That I could work with. The public can at least get their heads around that. But gender-free? Gender neutral? Non-binary? People aren’t ready for that one, not in your standard local paper.”

  Even though the reporter was saying things Whitney had caught herself thinking, once she heard them said out loud, she found them infuriating. There’s no reason the public can’t be made to understand. And isn’t it best when public education comes out of a real life event? A real person who lived and died, who is already in the hearts of the city?

  She tried to convince Rachel, but it didn’t seem to be working. Rachel said “Gotta go” and that was that.

  Whitney threw her phone down on the bed. “Some lawyer I am! I can’t even convince a reporter to honour a dead girl’s—dead person’s—gender identity.”

  Bruce didn’t respond. He was busy with his phone.

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “Huh? Sorry, I just got an email back from this LGBT news site I contacted. They haven’t reported on Cal’s death, but I thought they might be interested in the story if they knew Cal was genderqueer. And it looks like they are. They’re just asking if anyone can corroborate what Danine said.”

  “Well, I can, I guess,” Whitney replied. After that sour experience with Rachel the Reporter, she felt all the more driven to get Cal’s story out into the public sphere.

  Bruce was typing with both thumbs. “Can I put down that you’re a transgender lawyer? I think an LGBT news site would be more inclined to run this story if it’s loaded with LGBT content, you know what I mean?”

  “I know what you mean, but I’m not sure I want my name in lights like that. Just put that I’m a lawyer, leave out the trans.”

  “Okay,” he said, speaking as he typed. “I met Danine at Cal’s visitation with lawyer Whitney… oh this is embarrassing, but I can’t remember how to spell your last name.”

  Whitney spelled it out for him. Didn’t bother her that he had to ask. Better to ask than to get it wrong.

  Once he’d sent that email, Whitney ask
ed, “You think they’ll run the story?”

  “I get the sense that yes.”

  “Good, then we can go back to bed.”

  Bruce seemed reluctant. “Maybe we contact just a few more sites.”

  “It’s so sweet the way you’re standing up for my ghost. You’d think Cal was haunting you, not me.”

  “That’s just it,” Bruce replied. “If Cal is haunting you, Cal is haunting me. I know this relationship is new, very new, but I feel your emotions very deeply. If something is bothering you, it bothers me.” He put his phone down on the bed and moved closer to Whitney, taking hold of her hand. “I don’t think Cal’s ghost means you any harm, but I can see how afraid you are because of this haunting. I would do anything to put an end to it. If that means contacting every reporter on the planet to tell them Cal’s been misgendered by all the news sites, that’s what I’ll do.”

  Whitney could feel herself blushing. “You’re too much, Bruce.”

  “You’re not,” he said. “You’re just enough.”

  They kissed. Deeply. Whitney folded down her laptop and tried to put it back under her bed without breaking their connection, but her arms weren’t that long. He chuckled as she nearly toppled over. He was there to catch her, of course. She could really count on him.

  Bruce grabbed his phone, and hers as well. Looking at the screen, he said, “Oh, Whit, looks like you’re still on a call.”

  “I am?”

  He showed her the phone.

  Rolling her eyes, she said, “Sometimes I hit speaker instead of end call.”

  He hung up for her and set both their phones on the table.

  Then he came back to bed. They’d started a kiss Whitney fully intended to finish.

  Chapter Ten

  After their date on Friday, Whitney spent the night at Bruce’s house. She spent all day Saturday there, too. Same with Sunday. Met his mom when she came over to do some gardening and throw a pork roast in the oven. Meeting your new boyfriend’s mother is always a nerve-wracking experience, but it was good to have so much going on. Kept her mind off the ghost, who always seemed to be around, even at Bruce’s place. Always there. Always watching.