Despite the overwhelming smell of brewed coffee that always fills coffeehouses, I briefly caught the hint of a more familiar, sweeter scent – the only scent that had ever had any meaning to me. It was strange. Maybe that’s just how people worked, our bodies, pheromones, or whatever, but no matter what shampoo or deodorant Lottie used, she always smelled like pears and honey to me. When we first met, I thought it was her perfume. She had laughed and told me no, the only perfume she ever wore was Clinique’s Happy, and she hadn’t been wearing any perfume the night we met. The next day, at the mall, I found a Clinique counter and asked for a sample of Happy. Bright, citrusy. A smell that easily fit her bright and cheerful personality. But it wasn’t her smell.
I swallowed. A hard knot had formed in my stomach and I suddenly felt like coffee was a terribly bad idea. I wasn’t sure I could keep anything down. I never cried. I had been sick – quite literally – for weeks after Lottie died. I vacillated between numbness, rage, depression. But that five year old boy who had been abandoned by his drug-addict mother couldn’t cry. Not even for the woman who had rescued him, had given him a purpose and taught him to feel more than hatred and anger. But I could be sick. That’s how my emotions apparently chose to manifest – most people just cried it out. I threw it up. I turned to leave, edging my way out of the growing line, and in my peripheral vision, caught a glimpse of a high messy bun, tendrils of wavy brown hair loosely falling down around a perfectly smooth, pale neck. I knew that hair, that messy bun. I knew that neck. How many times had I kissed it, buried my face against it to breathe in that scent of pears and honey?
She was sitting at one of those high tables, her short legs dangling off the tall chair. At only 5’3”, she was too short to reach the ground from one of those chairs, but always sat in them anyway when she could. I used to tease her about choosing to sit somewhere that must have seemed like it was made for giants. She was absentmindedly stirring her coffee with a wooden stirrer with her right hand, her left hand, ringless but hers, I knew it, clasped loosely over a phone on the table. An old habit. She was a bit clumsy and was convinced that if she spilled her drink, she would have time to get her phone out of the way if she kept her hand on it. That morning, I had gone looking for ghosts and found one.
I was staring now. Frozen. I tried to get my mind to find logic – logic, reason, discovery, it’s what I do – but the more I scrambled to find some thread to begin unraveling what my eyes were telling me I was seeing, the more convinced I became that I wasn’t imagining things. Approach her, I thought. She’ll turn around, you’ll see it isn’t her, it can’t be her. Lottie is dead. Embalmed. Buried. It was physically impossible. It seemed easy enough. An exceptionally easy plan, actually. Just go up to her, say her name, and when she turned around or when I got close enough to her to see it was someone else – it isn’t someone else – I would apologize and get the fuck out of here. If I didn’t move soon, people would start staring at me, like I was some stalker or pervert. Just move, Dietrich. Talking to a ghost isn’t the weirdest thing you’ve ever done.
I moved. I stopped a few feet behind her and she must have sensed me. Her hand that had been stirring the still-too-hot-to-drink coffee stopped and her body tensed, her head lifting and staring straight ahead, her back straightening. She knew me. God, what was happening to me? I had finally lost my mind.
“Lottie?” It was a breath. It was supposed to be louder. How could she even hear me over the noise in here? But she did.
She jerked around, her eyes wide, terrified, “Oh, God,” she breathed back.
I’ve seen some pretty horrific shit in only 27 years – hell, I’ve done some pretty horrific shit - and I’ve never come close to feeling like I was going to pass out. But staring back at my dead fiancée, everything I had ever read about people fainting – the room spinning, the nausea, the body weakness and tingling extremities, the inability to focus – all hit me at once. Don’t pass out, Dietrich. She’ll be gone when you come around and you’ll never find out what the hell is going on.
I took a step closer to her and immediately realized that was a mistake. She jumped up from her chair, shaking her head, crying. Crying? Had she just started crying or had she already been crying? She had grabbed her phone and purse and I knew what was coming. I was prepared to beg her to talk to me, but then she spoke, quickly, quietly, between sobs, choking out, “I’m so sorry. You were never supposed to see me. This was so stupid. Oh God, Dietrich, I’m so sorry.” And she darted past me and ran out of the coffee shop.
I hadn’t woken up this morning planning on chasing ghosts through the crowded sidewalks and streets of the Houston medical district. I still expected at some point to awaken, to discover this was one of those dreams that seemed too real and blurred the lines of what was life and what was imagination. Or maybe I would catch up to her and this time, when she turned around to face me, I would discover I had been chasing a complete stranger and I was about to get arrested for harassing and assaulting some poor woman who was just trying to get away from some lunatic who may or may not even be speaking English. Normally, she wouldn’t have even gotten past me in the coffeehouse. People didn’t get past me. But when my dead fiancée is crying, apologizing for something – what the hell is she apologizing for? Dying? – apparently, my reflexes are slower than normal. She got a pretty good lead on me.
By the time I followed her out onto the busy, noisy sidewalk, the sun was fully risen, bright and blinding, and it took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust. Unlike Lottie, I was not short, and I spotted her light brown bun, falling out now in long, loose waves, hurrying away from the coffeehouse, away from me. We were sandwiched between a parking garage and a hospital, so we were like two salmon swimming upstream as we fought against the swarm of bodies trying to move toward the hospital. Either visiting hours were about to start or it was a shift change. Or maybe both. Or maybe it was always like this. I had never tried chasing anyone down a Houston sidewalk before.
She came to a cross walk, an orange hand forbidding her to cross and indecision played across her face; I stopped breathing. I dared to look away from her to watch the traffic, which had seconds ago been annoying background noise, and now seemed so threatening. Deadly. Could ghosts die? My heart was pounding in my ears, my temples. She looked to her right – construction crews had torn up the sidewalk and yellow tape marked it off. There was a narrow pathway right next to the building, just wide enough for one or two people to walk. She wanted to keep going. Her body language told me she was ready to run, those cars still buzzing past her in the intersection. But she had stopped. And I remembered to breathe.
The light had just changed to a bright white walking man when I reached her. Again, she knew I was right behind her. She didn’t bother trying to cross the street now. Instead, her shoulders sagged, defeated, and even though I couldn’t hear her sighing over the noise of the busy Houston streets around us, I knew she had just done it by her body language: resigned, beaten. I gently took her arm and pulled her away from the intersection toward the corner of the building, out of the path of both pedestrians and cars. She let me.
I expected her to try to pull free, to take off running or at the very least, use her free hand to start slapping the shit out of me. What did I think I was doing anyway? When a person runs away from you, that’s usually a sign they don’t want you around. She wouldn’t look at me, but she didn’t fight me either. She followed me to the side of the building and stood lamely by me, waiting for me to say something. Shit. I had been entirely focused on just catching up to her. I hadn’t actually thought of what I would say to her when I did.
“Lottie, what … ?” Brilliant, Dietrich.
She shifted her weight to her other foot, but still didn’t lift her gaze from the ground. A part of me had been hoping she was going to fill in all of the information I wanted but didn’t even know how to ask for, but that apparently wasn’t going to happen. I took a deep breath. Start basic. “What the hell is going on?” It came
out sounding like an accusation. I hadn’t meant it to. I was tired from having woken up too early, stressed from two years of painful grieving that more often than not was really just me working too hard to try not to really grieve, and then the shock of … of what? What the hell was going on?
It didn’t matter. I regretted saying it as soon as the words were out, as those big, hazel eyes I loved so much started brimming with tears again, and she still wouldn’t look at me. I hadn’t meant to hurt her. Not even her … ghost. Should a ghost have a body, I wondered? I realized I was still holding onto her arm. Her very real arm. Very warm, very alive arm. I could feel the hard bone underneath the thin skin and muscle, see the blue-green veins underneath that porcelain complexion. I turned her arm over and softly traced my thumb over her wrist. Pulsing. Fast. Her heart was still beating fast. Her heart was still beating. She was alive.
When I looked back at her face, I realized she had been watching me. Those tears had spilled over her cheeks but she didn’t try to wipe them away. She just watched me. Concern, sorrow, love, regret. “No,” my voice was hoarse, just a whisper. I’m not sure it mattered. I must have lost my mind, right? None of this was real. “I buried you.”
Lottie never looked away. “I’m not her,” she whispered back.
I know she must have seen the confusion that was suddenly written all over me, but she didn’t offer anything else. She just stood there, watching me, not moving, not looking away, crying silently. So much emotion behind those eyes, and I understood them all, because they were her eyes, her emotions. Of course she was Lottie. I had lost my fucking mind but she was Lottie. Of the seven billion people on this planet, I would have known this face, this hair, this body, this smell, the feel of her skin against mine. I had known her in that coffeehouse, even when my brain kept echoing this is impossible.
“Lottie,” I started, my voice finding itself again, and I reached up to wipe a tear from her cheek. She blinked in surprise but didn’t move away from me. “I would know you in a room of imposters; you know I could find you anywhere on this Earth.”
She finally looked away then out toward the busy street, shaking her head at me but as silent as before. Occasionally, people passing by us would stare, some would even slow down, but I wasn’t really paying attention to them. If Lottie even noticed them, she didn’t let on.
My hand had slipped down her wrist and was loosely holding her fingers, those delicate thin fingers. I was holding her left hand. Her ring finger no longer bore the tan line from her engagement ring, and I caressed it, wanting to ask but not wanting to know what had happened to her ring, to her promise to marry me, to become my wife. Even her ghost in this Hell of an afterlife would still wear that ring; I was more secure in that certainty, in the strength of our commitment to each other, than anything else in my life. I’m not her.
“Lottie, your ring …” I started.
She stopped me. “It’s not mine.”
This was maddening. “Lottie,” I was exasperated. But something was clicking within me. Some spark of truth, an element of this isn’t quite right. Still holding her hand, I asked her, even though I felt ridiculous doing it, “Who are you then?”
She cast her gaze back toward the invisible phantom on the street. “I’m so sorry, Dietrich. I swear I never wanted to hurt you. You never should have seen me. It was so incredibly stupid of me to even come here.”
What the fuck was that supposed to mean? I was about to ask her, but then remembered the hurt in her eyes, the pain I had caused her by speaking too quickly before. Tact wasn’t my strong suit. “Then why did you?”
She glanced up at me again and a half-smile played at her pale link lips. God, I missed those lips. She shrugged and looked away again. “Goddamn it, Lottie.” I never cursed at her like that. I really must have lost my mind. She flinched but didn’t reprimand me, didn’t curse back at me. Other than a second of recognition of knowing I had said something reprehensible, she didn’t even respond as if anything unusual had happened.
Christ, I hated myself sometimes.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and pulled her just a little closer to me. “Lottie, really, I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”
She gave me a sad smile, an effort, “It’s ok. You have every right to be angry.”
“I’m not angry, I’m just confused. Frustrated. And you won’t talk to me.” She shook her head again to indicate she still didn’t plan on talking to me, so I kept talking. “And I’m tired. I got like three hours of sleep last night. I keep having these dreams about you. Last night, we were on the beach in Galveston, that time I took the picture of you that’s set as my phone’s background …”
She had started to smile at that phantom in the street as she recalled the memory. I wanted her to hold onto it. “What was that shell you found?” I asked. Lottie would have known I remembered of course. And she didn’t hesitate to call me on it now.
“Dietrich, you could recite the entire Wikipedia page.”
I just smiled back at her. “Hm, I think it was some kind of whelk.”
“Lightning whelk.”
“Right. Turns out it’s our state shell too. Who knew we had a state shell?” I probably shouldn’t have used those first person pronouns. It made her uncomfortable.
“I need to leave,” she told me, and tried to pull her hand away from mine, but I wouldn’t let her go.
“Lottie, please, can we go somewhere to talk? Please?”
She had started to shake her head again, but I interrupted her. I had expected her to say no. “Lottie, you can’t just show up here, not dead, tell me you aren’t you, it was a mistake, and then not even tell me why. Do you have any idea how badly this is going to fuck with my head?”
I wondered if she had any idea how badly this was already fucking with my head. She was staring at that invisible spot in the street even more intently now, biting her lower lip in that nervous way of hers as she stalled for time. I waited. I would have waited on the street corner all day if I had to.
I needed some argument, some better reason than, “Don’t completely fuck me over,” for when she said no again, but I couldn’t really think of any compelling reason. After all, she didn’t owe me any explanation. At least, I didn’t think she did. I was half-convinced I was still just losing my mind anyway and this was all a delusion. And I was more than half-convinced delusions don’t owe us anything.
Finally, she looked away from the ghost on the street and met my eyes again, and quietly told me, “Something went wrong, Dietrich. I don’t know what to tell you when I don’t even understand everything myself.”
“You can tell me what you do know. That’s a hell of a lot more than I know.” She looked like she was going to protest again, so I kept talking, even though that didn’t usually work well for me. “Lottie, my car is eight blocks from here. We can go back to our … my apartment,” she had started shaking her head again, “ok, wherever you want to go. Or we can just sit in my car. I don’t care. At this point, is it really going to hurt anything to tell me whatever it is you don’t want to tell me? Because I’ve already seen you. You’ve already told me you’re not … you. Is there some cosmic mystery I’m not supposed to know here? Is this about the rosary at your funeral? That was Eric’s idea, I didn’t even know what the fuck the rosary was for, that was not my fault.”
I was rambling now. I had waited for something revelatory to happen during that ritual, after all; maybe if souls did exist, hers was really pissed off about it not being done properly. Or being done at all. It had taken a while. I guess if I were dead – I mean, really dead - and waiting to move on, I would be pretty pissed off about having to wait around while a bunch of people sat chanting around my corpse.
Her laughter had cut me off. Like little bells, it was infectious and I couldn’t help smiling, even though I had no idea why she was laughing. She smiled at me, and it was a genuine smile, Lottie’s smile. That sarcastic, witty, personality of hers always hidden just below th
e surface of that smile. “Dietrich, the rosary was fine. It was nice. It meant a lot to Cathy. Although you didn’t have to look quite so derisive.” Her smile faded.
Derisive? That wasn’t a word I had ever heard Lottie use.
“You were there?” That was going down in my top five list of stupidest questions ever asked.
Lottie pressed her lips together. I knew why. She was trying not to laugh at me. I had seen her do that so many times before, especially when we first met. We were 17, and I had only been in this country for three years. I spoke English well, but it was the English of a non-native speaker – the textbook English I had learned in school. I had finished the gymnasium at 14 and moved to Baton Rouge to go to LSU and was finishing my degrees when I met her; even after three years in this country, I found American idioms, especially south Louisiana idioms, baffling. Granted, my anti-social personality didn’t exactly put me in a lot of situations to learn conversational English. Lottie found my confusion over common expressions endearing and funny. I just found it frustrating. Ten years later, I was still trying to figure out why I should “get down” from the car instead of getting out.
“Yes, Dietrich, I was.”
Well, of course she had been there. But her insistence that she wasn’t Lottie was baffling me. There were few things I could be certain of in this world, and Lottie was one of them. But there was something so right and yet so wrong about her. “And who is that?” I asked cautiously.
She took a deep breath then started chewing on her lower lip again, this nervous habit of hers that never changed whether she was concentrating on studying for finals or picking out flower arrangements for the tables at our reception. “Ok. We can go sit in your car. It’s starting to get hot out here anyway.”
Resurrected (Resurrected Series Book 1) Page 3