“And what’s that?”
She turned to him, lips pruned, as she sat down in her office chair. The gray, muted light poured through the window, shadowing Sara’s face . “Uh, weren’t you listening?”
He smiled a small, rueful grin. “I blocked a lot of it out.”
Sara clicked her tongue. “I don’t blame you.” Softer, she said, “Well, she wants me to move back to Portland with Mom and Dad and then check into the hospital. I’m surprised she hasn’t insisted I make a pit stop at her church first.”
Panic curled Patrick’s fists. “Are you going to… move, I mean ?”
“No.” Her firmness calmed his churning guts, but Jules seemed like she could be just as determined, just as stubborn. “I’ll stay in this house for the rest of my life. If you’re here, this is where I’ll be.”
Scenes of all Sara would be giving up flashed in his head – the walks in the park, the snowball fights with their kids, taking drives to catch the leaves changing. It was as if they were stuck between seasons, half in one world and half in another.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but are you sure you want to do that?”
“What? Why wouldn’t I?” Her eyes hardened, chin jutting . “Do you want me to go?”
“That’s not it at all.” He crouched in front of her and put his hand on her knee. “I just… don’t want you to miss out on anything because you’re with me.”
“What am I going to miss out on?”
“We’ll never be able to go out or buy you a present,” he half-teased, trying to avoid what he really wanted to get across. The words formed in his mouth, but they didn’t want to come out. He was jumping the gun, making assumptions. Finally, he just said it.
“What if… what if we can’t have sex? I mean, I want that to be a part of our life together, and I assume you want that from a relationship too. I just don’t know if it can happen.”
She put her hand over his, wrapping her fingers around his palm, and slid it up her thigh, over her hip, across her ribs to her breast, resting it there firmly. “You can touch me. We’ll figure it out.”
She was reassuringly solid under his hand, and the steady thump of her heart beat there. It vibrated through his hand and up his arm.
“Why are you so good to me?” He took a step closer, kissing her forehead.
“How could I not be? I have problems, too, and you’re just as good to me.”
“Sara,” he said with an exasperated laugh, “I’m a ghost. A ghost. It’s not the same as you suffering from a bit of depression or having a crazy sister or something .”
“Maybe, maybe not. I don’t really care, though. I’m not going anywhere.” She moved his hand again, bringing it to her lips to kiss his knuckles. “We, uh, can’t really get more into the… other thing, at least not right now. Jules is probably coming back soon, and it just seems like a discussion that should n’t be interrupted…”
Right. Sex. The other thing. And yeah, should they actually come up with an answer, an interruption would be the last thing he wanted.
Sex was going to be complicated, even when he was dead. Nothing could ever be simple. His friend Andy used to joke he’d take it easy when he was dead, that he’d play hard and leave a pretty corpse. Well, Patrick may have stayed, well, maybe not pretty, but he was still al l right-looking… but his problems only seemed to compound after the stairs incident .
“We have all the time in the world.” He smiled, trying to look like he knew what the Hell he was talking about. Inside, of course, he cursed Jules for being here and fought panic because everything was so screwed up. He still had the feel of her in his hand, her nipple poking against his palm, so that was good at least.
“Good, I’m hungry. Having your sanity questioned really takes it out of you,” she joked.
The toaster popped, and Sara yanked out two piece of bread , dropping them onto a plate. “Hot,” she complained, shaking her hand and wincing.
“Yes, you are.” Patrick grinned, running his hand over the swell of her ass.
Chuckling, she buttered the toast and leaned against the counter alongside him.
“Was that your big pick-up line back in the day?”
“I didn’t need pick-up lines,” he joked. “The girls just came running.”
That hadn’t been entirely untrue. He’d never had problems getting chicks after he’d grown into his looks. Of course, he’d never met anyone quite like Sara before he’d died . He’d liked Ginny a lot but not enough to stay with her. Definitely not enough to marry her, as his dad had once suggested he consider. Sara made him feel alive, in all senses of the word. It was new and amazing, even under screwy circumstances.
“Were you, you know, popular?” she asked between bites.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t unpopular. I dated around.” He tried to keep it vague; he didn’t want to boast. He waggled his eyebrows.
“And you went out with Ginny?”
“Yeah, she was really my only serious girlfriend.”
“How long did you go out?”
“Six months. At the time it seemed like forever… “
She laughed and grabbed his wrist, pulling his arm to curl around her. “I guess everything is relative, huh?”
“Yeah, guess so.” He followed her into the living room. She opened the door and stood for a moment, gazing outside at the gray day.
“I wonder where Jules went… she didn’t take the car.”
Patrick slid down the wall inside the door and balanced his elbows on his knees. “What do you think she’s planning?”
Sara stepped around his feet and sat next to him, bumping him with her shoulder. “I’m sure she’s already been on the phone to my parents. Thank God I never told her the name of my therapist , or she probably would have been bugging the crap out of him too. Not that he can tell her anything.”
“You don’t think she’ll do anything crazy, do you?”
“Define crazy.” Sara chuckled. “I don’t think she’ll abduct me or try to force me to repent or anything.”
They were both silent, listening to the sounds of the wind rushing outside. The leaves rustled on the trees, a cooler wind than he’d been used to blowing in through the screen. Everything seemed so dire all of a sudden, and the weather mimic ked the urgency of whatever was going on.
“If I died in this house, do you think I’d stay here too?”
“Who knows?” Patrick answered. “I’m sure I’m not the only ghost in the world, but I don’t have a clue how any of it works. I’ve wondered about that myself, but I just don’t know.”
Nothing Patrick thought was true about dying had been right. Whether he really had just been forgotten , or this was all some big dream on his way to really being dead, he liked to imagine other people who died got their happy ending… their reward for living a good life on Earth. He wanted to believe his parents had gone straight to Heaven and found each other there . He hoped they hadn’t been watching him, though . Seeing him muddle through death was probably even worse than dealing with that header he took down the stairs .
“If she does try to force me home, I’m considering my options.”
“What do you mean?” As far as he knew, there really were no options other than simply refusing to go. He’d read a story once about a man being spirited off to the loony bin in the middle of the night, but it had never seemed realistic to him that shit like that could actually happen. And while Jules was the taller o f the two of them , but he just couldn’t imagine her trying to knock Sara out and drag her off.
“I mean I’m thinking about ways to off myself.”
He turned to her, eyebrows knitted together. “Yeah, that’s not funny.”
“I wasn’t trying to be.”
He rolled onto his hip, staring. She couldn’t possibly be saying this. They’d talked quite a bit about how much dying had screwed Patrick up, how the uncertainty ate at him.
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
She smiled and held up her index finger. “Pills seem to be the easiest thing. Just taking a bunch and falling asleep.” Another finger. “Wrist slitting is out because I’m kind of a big wuss about pain. And I don’t think I’ve got it in me to hang myself.”
He grabbed her fingers, probably too tightly, but he was too pissed off and worried to care. “Uh uh. No. There is no way.”
“Well, I’m not going back to the institution, and I’m not leaving you.”
“You have no idea what you’re saying, Sara. This is serious. Do you think I would have chosen to die?” Hell , he hadn’t even wanted to join the stupid Army because he was sure he’d get his head blown off.
“Well, no, of course not, but that’s not the p–”
“That is the point! And you know what else is the point? There are no guarantees you’d be here with me. I don’t know how any of this works! Not to mention that if you kill yourself, you might go to Purgatory.”
Sara laughed. “I still think it’s funny you buy into that stuff after all these years.”
“What stuff?”
“All the Catholic dogma. God hasn’t done a thing for you, but you still believe in Heaven and Hell and all that.”
“It’s more than dogma,” Patrick said, voice cold and snipped. “And whether I believe it or think God hasn’t had a hand in all of this isn’t the issue. Don’t you dare kill yourself! Your soul could suffer for an eternity before you’re purified enough to be accepted to Heaven .”
He cringed as he thought of those same words coming out of Father Thomas’ mouth. At the time he hadn’t thought much about it, but he’d considered he might be there – in Purgatory –himself a million times. He’d certainly felt tormented over the years but never more than right in th at instant. Whether Sara went to Purgatory or died and was reincarnated into a cricket, he didn’t want that for her. Not yet.
Maybe this was what he’d been denied Heaven for – to keep Sara from making a big mistake. That didn’t make any sense, though. I f not for him, she wouldn’t have been in this predicament in the first place. He discarded the idea as quickly as it had occurred to him.
“Well, what would you rather me do? You don’t understand, Patrick – if Jules tries to have me committed, if she’s successful… I could go away for years. Years ! Do you want to be without me for years? Because I don’t want to be away from you for even a day.”
“I’m begging you.” He grasped her by the arms and pulled her closer. “Don’t. Don’t talk about it, don’t joke about it, don’t even think about it.”
“Okay, okay.” She twisted out of his hands and leaned against the wall. “But I need a plan… just in case.”
Patrick lowered himself to sit, staring at Sara. She avoided his eyes, looking everywhere except his face.
“I’m serious, Sara. I don’t care if I never see you again – I can’t stand the idea of you being in pain or hurting yourself.”
If she died, there was no telling what might happen. He felt selfish about it, but he didn’t want her going to Heaven either. Not without him. It probably made him a terrible person, but he needed her.
Sara nodded, slipping her arm around the crook of Patrick’s elbow and snuggling against him. “I promise that whole suicide thing is off the table. And really, it would be super hard for Jules to have me committed . I t really is next to impossible. It’s just… she’s really good at railroading people into doing what she wants.”
He relaxed, resting his cheek against the side of her head. Jules could be relentless – and it sounded like she probably would be – but his girl would be safe.
The wind roared at that moment, howling across the porch. Drops of rain made heavy pings against the concrete steps and walk, but it seemed appropriate somehow. Cleansing, maybe. Washing away this idea that Sara’d had.
“If we were a normal couple – you know, if you weren’t dead –where would you want to go on vacation?”
The abrupt question hung between them, the last syllable out of Sara’s mouth seeming to last a little too long. Finally Patrick chuckled, disentangling his arm from her grip so he could wind it behind her neck, squeezing her shoulder. He didn’t know why she wanted to know; it wasn’t as though they would ever be able to go anywhere. Maybe the fantasy was almost as good as the reality, though. In Sara’s case, it was probably true of a lot of aspects of her life. If Jules was right… if Patrick was really just some crazy construct she’d conjured up or a demon that needed to be gotten rid of … maybe the fantasy was better.
He allowed it could be a possibility, that he only existed in Sara’s head – he was still sure he’d know if he was evil . He’d considered the idea of Sara’s insanity before and rejected it . How could he only be a figment of Sara’s imagination when he’d had his own life long before she’d been born? But that could just be part of the elaborateness of the delusion , he supposed . She’d made him up and given him a rich back story. She was a writer, so it only made sense. She could do it, create an entire world for herself and him.
“I always wanted to go to Spain,” he answered, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye. He could create a world for them, too, though. He’d seen photos of Barcelona –urban streets drenched with sunshine, the bright, sandy beaches. It wasn’t hard to conjure up the image of him and Sara walking hand-in-hand, looking in shop windows, laughing as they sat at an outdoor cafe. If he wished for it hard enough, maybe it could come true.
“What would we do there?” She tilted her head, kissing his shoulder.
“I don’t know. We’d just hang out. See the sights.” They’d visit the beach, their toes squishing into the sand. He’d find new pieces of sea glass for her, and they’d stand in the surf while he kissed her until neither of them could catch their breath.
“I think we should go to Paris,” Sara said, seeming as though she were a million miles away.
“Oh yeah? What would we do there?” he asked, mimicking her question with a smile. He knew less about Paris, but the thought of it made Gothic turrets and gargoyles and gray stone come to mind.
“I’ve always wanted to see Sainte-Chapelle.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s this gorgeous chapel with beautiful stained glass.”
“A chapel? Maybe we could… get married there one day.” The words were out of his mouth before he knew it. He looked nervously at the ground, watching Sara’s toes point and then flex.
“That’d be great,” she said, like it wasn’t the craziest thing she’d ever heard. “We could go in the spring.”
He would marry her in a heartbeat if it wasn’t a complete impossibility. To call her his wife, know that she was really his, it was a good thought.
“You’ve never been to Paris?” he asked, not wanting to push his luck by talking any more about marriage. He was lucky she wanted to be with him at all, let alone wanting her to essentially give up any chance of a normal life by marrying him. Or pretending to marry him, as the case may have been –unless they ran into a minister who could see ghosts.
“Nope. Scott and I were supposed to go in the next few years, but it never happened. Not like it’s going to now.” Sara snorted. “Not like I want it to. Not with him.”
“I wish we could go.” A note of wistfulness made it into his voice. “My mother used to have a picture of Notre Dame taped to the ‘fridge.”
“Do you miss them?”
“Who, my parents?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, sure. Sometimes I pretend like they just live in the next state, and they could come and visit any time.” He smiled and touched her knee. “Like they’re just going to show up one day, and my mom will give me a hug. My dad will yell at me for running his garage into the ground or something.”
“Is that what you would have done… you know, if you had lived? Taken over your dad’s garage?”
“Probably.” His face twisted, and he held up his hands, turning them over and inspecting his nails. “My hands we
re always covered in grease. It took forever to get them clean, get the dirt out from under my nails. Could you love a grease monkey?”
“You love a crazy person,” she said, threading her fingers through his and grinning. “It’s the least I can do to love you, even if you picked up dog shit for a living or something like that.”
The screen door whipped opened, and Jules walked through, her face a mask of concern and agitation. Truth be told, she looked slightly constipated. The door didn’t bang shut as Patrick expected –Megan stepped in behind her .
“Oh, wonderful,” Sara intoned.
“She went to Megan?” Patrick asked, eyes wide. “Wow, she narced on you to your neighbor!”
Sara huffed out a quick laugh and climbed to her feet. “Hey, Megan. What’s up?”
Jules answered instead of Megan. “I went over to Megan’s to get some help with this… situation . I don’t know any priests in the area, but you said her husband is a psychiatrist.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What situation?”
Oh, so Sara was going to play it smart now and deny everything. Smooth move , Patrick thought to himself. He stayed where he was on the floor, hoping if he was quiet, Sara wouldn’t give away that she’d been talking to him.
“Uh, yeah,” Megan said, drawing the word out slowly. “Your sister seemed a little agitated, and I know you’ve had some problems in the past. I came over to get your side of it about ten minutes ago and heard you talking.”
“So? I talk to myself all the time? Roger has probably told you a million times that talking to yourself isn’t unhealthy.”
“I heard you say you’re thinking about killing yourself.”
“Shit,” Patrick blurted. Sara very carefully kicked his foot, making it look more like she was just shifting her weight.
“I was just distraught because Jules is being so nuts,” Sara lied, glaring at her sister.
“Look, Sara,” Megan said, taking her arm and guiding her to the couch. “No one’s mad at you here, and no one is accusing you of anything.”
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