I would never have dreamed that proof of my husband’s ghost—I couldn’t believe I was even thinking that way—would rest on the presence or absence of those awful pizzas. But I hated them, I would never have bought them.
“There’s another thing,” he said casually, as we rounded the corner of the counter. “You’re going to be so pissed off at me.”
“I couldn’t be,” I said, wondering if somehow this actually was real. Could it be? I didn’t dare to hope.
It couldn’t be. It wasn’t even a matter of hope, it was just reality. This was not reality.
“You know how you always told me not to stick my Cokes in the freezer to cool them off faster?”
I did. “Oh, no…”
“I’m afraid so. I didn’t get a chance to clean it up before…” He pantomimed slicing his throat. “You know.”
I frowned at him and opened the freezer. Sure enough, there were two Martino’s death disks in there, as well as a winter wonderland of iced brown Coke and the broken glass shards of a bottle.
“It had to be in a bottle,” I said.
He looked embarrassed. “You know I like the Mexican ones best. Real cane sugar. Why don’t they use cane sugar here? Everyone prefers those.”
“I don’t know.” I closed the freezer door and turned to him. “If you’re here, if you’re truly here, how did this happen? How are you here now?”
He went to lean on the counter. I followed and hefted myself up on it, like I always used to when we were talking in the kitchen. And we did it a lot, believe it or not. Some of our best heart-to-hearts had taken place here. If that happened then, then why not now?
“You needed me.”
Tears pricked at my eyes and I took a wavering breath. “I need you to not be dead.”
He looked resigned. “But I am.”
“Do you hate that as much as I do?” I was so scared of his answer. If he hated it, I would lose all faith, all belief in everything I had always believed and hoped to be true about the afterlife.
“No,” he said with a smile. “I don’t. What I hate, if I can even use that word, is that you’re suffering. I never, ever wanted that.”
My chest ached. Pulled and pushed and made every objection it could. I was in full crying mode now. “Then why did you go?”
He shook his head ruefully. “I didn’t have any choice. This is not the kind of thing you have control over in life. Those decisions were made long ago.” He paused. “Long ago, in your time. Once you’re here, it’s the blink of an eye.”
I couldn’t comprehend this. He was saying what philosophers had said for centuries, but I didn’t know how to conceive of time in any way other than the way I always had. “What is there like?”
“Good,” he said. “Really good.”
“Details, please.”
“Sorry.” He shook his head. “Not allowed to give those out. I’m barely allowed to be here now. I had to get special dispensation.”
“Special dispensation to see your grieving wife?” That seemed cruel to me. If this was possible—and I still wasn’t sure what was going on—then it didn’t make sense to me why people couldn’t always come and comfort their loved ones in such a time of grief.
“You weren’t moving on and you have great things to do. It’s important that you focus on your work and on living a happy life. You need to move on without me. There’s no choice.”
“How can I be happy without you”—a sob caught in my throat—“when you are gone and I know you can come back but, what, you won’t?”
“I’m only here temporarily.”
“Exactly.”
“It’s how it has to be.”
“And it’s really you?”
He nodded and looked at me so tenderly. “I’m really here. But only for now.”
“How long?”
“I actually don’t know. Until you get it, I guess.”
“Then I’ll never get it!”
He laughed. “Stubborn and bucking the system, as always. I don’t get to stay for you always, Willa. This is a limited-time gig.” He frowned and looked up. “And I need to go.”
“Go? Wait, what? You can’t go! You just got here!”
He shook his head and looked at his hands, which were disappearing. “I have no choice.” He looked at me. “I love you, Willa. I always have and I always will. Someday we’ll be together again, don’t worry. But it’s different. It will be okay, I promise you that.”
And with that, he was gone altogether.
Chapter Eighteen
Jamie
Maybe it was the paint fumes, the excessive carbs, or finally facing the looming threat that the beach house had been for so long. Whatever it was, that night, Jamie slept.
It drifted softly into his mind like a vapor and wrapped silkily around his cranium and made him heavy until he fell.
He slept on the narrow bed in the guest room in an old sleeping bag, which was still sandy from years ago on Assateague Island—the small beach off the main shore, where ponies ambled wild, and where Jamie and his dad had made s’mores and listened to the Beatles and Bob Dylan on the crackling old boom box that had accompanied so many of their father-son adventures.
Maybe that’s what he was thinking about when he fell asleep, or maybe that’s what he dreamed of. Maybe it was the same thing. Details had rushed back to him either way. He remembered the way it was kind of too cold out, but his dad was in a T-shirt, so he didn’t reach for his own sweatshirt.
Now he knew he was about ninety pounds back then, and had a lot less meat on him than his dad did—he really had been a lot colder, not just enduring it poorly.
He also remembered the way the outside of the hot dogs, toasted over a fire, had crunched and how much better they tasted than when they were microwaved at home. (Of course, he knew, this was not at all surprising.)
His feet had been buried in the sand, and he’d noticed that he was unconsciously imitating his dad.
They’d talked about his dad’s childhood. They talked about his friends at school.
His dad had explained the intricacies of a couple mainstream sports that Jamie really felt like he should have known by then. (“What does offsides mean?”)
Not once did his dad laugh at him or look embarrassed to have a boy who didn’t know better. He did get that look, though, that Jamie now understood. The involuntary smile hidden in a concentrated look and complementary action—e.g., stoking the fire with a furrowed brow.
Jamie had asked that night if his dad and mom ever intended to have another kid.
“How would you feel about that?” he’d asked back.
Jamie had shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t feel strongly about it?”
“I guess not. More wondering.”
This wasn’t completely true. But by nine, as he was in this memory, he had started growing out of the idea of badly wanting a sibling. Now he sort of liked being the object of both his parents’ attention. Sometimes it was too much, but were a baby to come around, it would probably wind up being more of a pain than anything else.
“I don’t think your mom and I were meant to have any other kids,” he’d said. “I think we got it right with you. No other kid could have been so right.”
In his years since that conversation, he understood a lot more. Overheard a little here and there, caught a few implications, seen a sad look or two between his parents. Heard his mom on the phone with Kristin, saying, after his father died, “at least it was already too late,” and then watching his own mind allocate that to a specific context.
His parents probably couldn’t have more kids. He didn’t know why, probably didn’t want to. But regardless of what he’d picked up on or gleaned, the fact that his dad said what he said—“No other kid could have been so right”—had so completely ruled out the possibility of a sibling, and his dad was too conscientious to make a statement like that unless he knew.
This blissful, anesthesia-like sleep felt
healing. Restorative. Like a video-game character going back to a home base and recharging. He could almost feel himself going from the red into the green.
Plunging his restoration back into red, like the mercury sinking below zero in a thermometer, he awoke from his sleep to the jarring bell of his phone ringing.
Roxy. Always Roxy.
He muted it without looking. Even if he was going to answer, he needed to mute it. His mom hadn’t stirred; she was still a small bundle in the center of the bed, one leg kicked out of the sheets. Ha, he thought. He did that too. Both legs under too hot, both legs out too cold, one leg out was per—
Buzz. The phone was still on vibrate even though the ringer was off.
He pushed the power button and then jumped up with a deep breath through his nostrils. He went out in the hall, careful that the mirror on the back of the door didn’t clap against the hollow door.
He ignored the call and then saw the Iliad and Odyssey of texts.
He didn’t even—he couldn’t even start at the beginning. Instead he picked up in the middle.
OMFG REALLY THOUGH
Youve gotta be kidding me seriously
Your really just not gonna answer
He cringed at the your/you’re mistake. He’d explained it so many times. There were memes about it. How could you really not understand the difference by now?
JAMIE
I swear to god i feel like your literally not getting it. Im literally on my way to your beach house right now. And yeah i have the right address, its on a magnet at youre house, thanks for lying you fucking psycho seriously what like you cant tell me where your beachhouse is honestly you’re making me into a bitch. i am not a bitch, i never ever EVER have been this is all you. and I’m fucking miserable because of you. Hope that feels good, seriously
Was it cruel that as he read through, he was not only privately correcting all her spelling and grammar, but taking note where autocorrect had clearly taken over?
im literally on may way
my*
you think I’m fucknig going
joking* jesus
Somewhere mixed in there, she’d called a couple times.
Literally getting in my car right now
Okay, so before she hadn’t been “literally” on her way … that was the last text and that was about half an hour ago.
This had to stop. It had to really stop.
Funny enough, it was being in this house that made him truly sure. This house that he’d dreaded seeing again, this place that he thought he could never face again because of the sadness. In actuality, it was a place of happy memories much more than sad.
And it was a place where he’d learned what relationships should be. Family relationships, parental relationships. And from his parents he’d seen what a good partnership should look like. What a marriage should look like.
It didn’t look anything like what he had with Roxy. Not that they were married, thank god, but this was not a relationship he’d look back on in ten years with fond tenderness. It was a nightmare now and he’d always think of it that way. Something he’d taken too long to get out of, maybe, but something he was lucky enough to have quit before it got really bad.
He didn’t know what he’d do from here, but he did know that the hundred and fifty miles between them were important. If she was really planning on trying to come to the beach, he had to stop her.
He called her number. She answered on the first ring.
“I’m on my way—”
“Roxy.” He cut her off. Sighed. “Roxy, I don’t want you to come,” he said, his tone sounding more masculine and Ben-like than it ever had. “This has to stop. We’re not right for each other. I’m going to be up here the rest of the summer anyway helping my mom. I’m sorry I didn’t end it better, but I just can’t keep doing this. I’m really sorry.”
“Wha—Jamie…”
He clearly had been on speakerphone, he heard the switch in the white noise. Obviously she had a friend with her and wasn’t expecting this conversation.
“I’m sorry, Roxy, but I mean it.”
She said nothing. She breathed into the phone for a few seconds, maybe a full minute, but then hung up. He’d chosen the right moment to sound like a grown man—she’d actually believed him, for once. He really didn’t think she’d take that as an invitation to show up now.
He bit his bottom lip, fighting off all the compulsions to undo what he’d just done, to go back to having a girlfriend who fed him all the ego food he could ever need.
A chill coursed through him. What the hell? His mom was too cheap to put the air-conditioning on until, like, the end of July or August, but he wasn’t expecting it to get so cold.
Was it his own nerves telling him something?
Did I do the right thing? he asked himself as he put his hands to his face and rubbed hard, leaving, he knew, red marks.
In his peripheral vision he could see the light in the kitchen downstairs was on. In fact, it was the harsh glare in his eye that caught his attention.
“I should turn that off,” he said to himself, blinking hard again, trying to shake away the conversation with Roxy.
When he turned around, the lights in the kitchen were off. Nothing was on.
Why had he thought they were?
Chapter Nineteen
Willa
“So I see what you mean,” Kristin said. Her red hair was uncharacteristically smoothed back into a sleek ponytail and she was wearing no makeup. The expression on her face was serious. “Obviously I haven’t been here since Ben died either, but I can absolutely feel his presence!”
She had arrived at nine on Friday night. Ben had not been back since he had actually talked and responded to me, and I was returning to the position that I was losing my mind.
Except the pizza and the Coke in the freezer—which I hadn’t cleaned up yet—that I couldn’t explain. And wouldn’t, because it all seemed too crazy. Yeah, my dead husband told me this stuff was in the freezer, and there it was!
I knew it had been true, I knew there was no other explanation for it, but no one else could reasonably buy in to that because it was like me saying, Look! There are jeans in my closet! Ben told me that! How else could I know?
“I think even the smell of the sea air reminds me of him.”
“I can see that. The house has a distinct smell, like all houses do, so naturally you’d associate it with your times here.” Kristin raised her wineglass, and pinot grigio sloshed up the side. “I do too.”
I nodded, and there was a moment of silence before she said, “I’m starving, what do you have to eat?”
“This and that.” I started to get up. “I’ll put something together.”
“No, you stay put! I can handle it.” She got off the sofa and went into the dim kitchen. “We do need to get some Grotto pizza.”
“Oh, absolutely,” I agreed. There were times in my life when the promise of good pizza was the only thing I looked forward to.
Or, if not the only thing, certainly the best thing.
There was some bumping around in the kitchen, then eventually Kristin said, “Aha!”
I sat up. “What? Did you find something?” Strange and embarrassing as it was, my first thought was that maybe she’d seen Ben too.
“Yes.” She came out of the kitchen holding a bottle. “Champagne.”
“It’s not new.”
She was pulling off the foil wrapper. “Good. It’s supposed to be aged.”
This was it. We were dwindling down to small talk while the enormity of what I’d been going through grew inside of me. “Kristin.”
“Mmm?”
“There is something I have to tell you.”
“Oh, lord, don’t tell me you’re in love with me!”
“Very funny.”
“Okay, what?”
“I’m pretty sure I saw Ben.”
She stopped in the middle of twisting the wire hood off. “You think you saw Ben.” It wasn’t a
question, it was a statement. A question would have allowed too much room for belief and she clearly wasn’t ready to believe anything like this.
“Yes,” I said quietly. This was a risk to say. Right now it was my secret, so whether it was true or not, I was the only one in control of the knowledge. If I let it out, who knew what would happen with it? But I just couldn’t keep it all inside anymore. It was too insane.
Suddenly the cork popped out of the bottle, scaring the shit out of both of us. Kristin dropped the bottle.
Both of us scrambled to pick it up, like it was a baby fallen overboard on a ship.
“Get it! Get it!” I called. “It’s spilling everywhere. What a terrible waste!”
“There won’t be any left!” She reached down, but the bottle rolled away from her hand. “Shit!”
Finally I grabbed it and we both breathed a sigh of relief.
“Is there any left?” Kristin asked, hurrying into the kitchen for cleanup materials.
I took a swig. “Yup. We’re kind of heroes.”
She came out with a handful of paper towels. “Well, you are. Did you see how that thing rolled away from me? I was all thumbs!” She swabbed up the floor, while Dolly came over and tried to join in the cleanup process. The dog loved champagne, I don’t know why, but I’d spilled enough in my lifetime to know that when she heard it, or smelled it, she came running.
“I’m telling you, it was Ben. That’s just the sort of thing he’d do. Proving himself by inexplicable things. Next he’ll be playing the piano.”
“You don’t have a piano.”
“Thank god.” I handed her the bottle and she took a long gulp from it before passing it back.
“So.” She took a breath and put her hands in her lap, her best paying-attention stance. “Why don’t you start over? Tell me what’s going on.”
She was willing to listen. That was a start. But I wasn’t sure I should overwhelm her with the whole story. After all, that was a lot to swallow; more than just one bottle of champagne—elusive or consumed—could allow.
“There’ve just been a few odd incidents,” I said. “I thought I saw him walk through the room once. And I swear I wasn’t thinking about him at that moment, or remembering the past, or anything that would make me imagine him in particular at that moment.”
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