by Nancy Kress
“Good night,” the cellist says, and the door slams shut behind Louise and Anna.
Louise inhales. He’s not married, it isn’t that smell. But it reminds her of something.
“What’s your name?” she says, but before he can answer her, she puts her earplugs back in again. They fuck in the closet and then in the bathtub and then he lies down on the bedroom floor and Louise sits on top of him. To exorcise the ghost, she thinks. Hotter in a chilly sprout.
The cellist’s mouth moves when he comes. It looks like he’s saying, “Louise, Louise,” but she gives him the benefit of the doubt. He might be saying her name.
She nods encouragingly. “That’s right,” she says. “Louise.”
The cellist falls asleep on the floor. Louise throws a blanket over him. She watches him breathe. It’s been a while since she’s watched a man sleep. She takes a shower and she does the dishes. She puts the chairs in the living room away. She gets an envelope and she picks up a handful of the ghost’s hair. She puts it in the envelope and she sweeps the rest away. She takes her earplugs out but she doesn’t throw them away.
In the morning, the cellist makes her pancakes. He sits down at the table and she stands up. She walks over and sniffs his neck. She recognizes that smell now. He smells like Louise. Burnt sugar and orange juice and talcum powder. She realizes that she’s made a horrible mistake.
•
Louise is furious. Louise didn’t know Louise knew how to be angry. Louise hangs up when Louise calls. Louise drives over to Louise’s house and no one comes to the door. But Louise can see Anna looking out the window.
Louise writes a letter to Louise. “I’m so sorry,” she writes. “I should have known. Why didn’t you tell me? He doesn’t love me. He was just drunk. Maybe he got confused. Please, please forgive me. You don’t have to forgive me immediately. Tell me what I should do.”
At the bottom she writes, “P.S. I’m not pregnant.”
•
Three weeks later, Louise is walking a group of symphony patrons across the stage. They’ve all just eaten lunch. They drank wine. She is pointing out architectural details, rows of expensive spotlights. She is standing with her back to the theater. She is talking, she points up, she takes a step back into air. She falls off the stage.
A man—a lawyer—calls Louise at work. At first she thinks it must be her mother who has fallen. The lawyer explains. Louise is the one who is dead. She broke her neck.
While Louise is busy understanding this, the lawyer, Mr. Bostick, says something else. Louise is Anna’s guardian now.
“Wait, wait,” Louise says. “What do you mean? Louise is in the hospital? I have to take care of Anna for a while?”
No, Mr. Bostick says. Louise is dead.
“In the event of her death, Louise wanted you to adopt her daughter, Anna Geary. I had assumed that my client Louise Geary had discussed this with you. She has no living family. Louise told me that you were her family.”
“But I slept with her cellist,” Louise said. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t realize which number he was. I didn’t know his name. I still don’t. Louise is so angry with me.”
But Louise isn’t angry with Louise anymore. Or maybe now she will always be angry with Louise.
Louise picks Anna up at school. Anna is sitting on a chair in the school office. She doesn’t look up when Louise opens the door. Louise goes and stands in front of her. She looks down at Anna and thinks, This is all that’s left of Louise. This is all I’ve got now. A little girl who only likes things that are green, who used to be a dog. “Come on, Anna,” Louise says. “You’re going to come live with me.”
•
Louise and Anna live together for a week. At work, Louise avoids her married lover. She doesn’t know how to explain things. First a ghost and now a little girl. That’s the end of the motel rooms.
Louise and Anna go to Louise’s funeral and throw dirt at Louise’s coffin. Anna throws her dirt hard, like she’s aiming for something. Louise holds on to her handful too tightly. When she lets go, there’s dirt under her fingernails. She sticks a finger in her mouth.
All the cellists are there. They look amputated without their cellos, smaller, childlike. Anna, in her funereal green, looks older than they do. She holds Louise’s hand grudgingly. Louise has promised that Anna can have a dog. No more motels for sure. She’ll have to buy a bigger house, Louise thinks, with a yard. She’ll sell her house and Louise’s house and put the money in a trust for Anna. She did this for her mother—this is what you have to do for family.
While the minister is still speaking, number eight lies down on the ground beside the grave. The cellists on either side each take an arm and pull him back up again. Louise sees that his nose is running. He doesn’t look at her, and he doesn’t wipe his nose, either. When the two cellists walk him away, there’s grave dirt on the seat of his pants.
Patrick is there. His eyes are red. He waves his fingers at Anna, but he stays where he is. Loss is contagious—he’s keeping a safe distance.
The woman cellist, number five, comes up to Louise after the funeral. She embraces Louise, Anna. She tells them that a special memorial concert has been arranged. Funds will be raised. One of the smaller concert halls will be named the Louise Geary Memorial Hall. Louise agrees that Louise would have been pleased. She and Anna leave before the other cellists can tell them how sorry they are, how much they will miss Louise.
In the evening Louise calls her mother and tells her that Louise is dead.
“Oh, sweetie,” her mother says. “I’m so sorry. She was such a pretty girl. I always liked to hear her laugh.”
“She was angry with me,” Louise says. “Her daughter Anna is staying with me now.”
“What about Anna’s father?” her mother says. “Did you get rid of that ghost? I’m not sure it’s a good idea having a ghost in the same house as a small girl.”
“The ghost is gone,” Louise says.
There is a click on the line. “Someone’s listening in,” her mother says. “Don’t say anything—they might be recording us. Call me back from a different phone.”
Anna has come into the room. She stands behind Louise. She says, “I want to go live with my father.”
“It’s time to go to sleep,” Louise says. She wants to take off her funeral clothes and go to bed. “We can talk about this in the morning.”
Anna brushes her teeth and puts on her green pajamas. She does not want Louise to read to her. She does not want a glass of water. Louise says, “When I was a dog . . .”
Anna says, “You were never a dog—” and pulls the blanket, which is not green, up over her head and will not say anything else.
•
Mr. Bostick knows who Anna’s father is. “He doesn’t know about Anna,” he tells Louise. “His name is George Candle and he lives in Oregon. He’s married and has two kids. He has his own company—something to do with organic produce, I think, or maybe it was construction.”
“I think it would be better for Anna if she were to live with a real parent,” Louise says. “Easier. Someone who knows something about kids. I’m not cut out for this.”
Mr. Bostick agrees to contact Anna’s father. “He may not even admit he knew Louise,” he says. “He may not be okay about this.”
“Tell him she’s a fantastic kid,” Louise says. “Tell him she looks just like Louise.”
•
In the end George Candle comes and collects Anna. Louise arranges his airline tickets and his hotel room. She books two return tickets out to Portland for Anna and her father and makes sure Anna has a window seat. “You’ll like Oregon,” she tells Anna. “It’s green.”
“You think you’re smarter than me,” Anna says. “You think you know all about me. When I was a dog, I was ten times smarter than you. I knew who my friends were because of how they smelled. I know things you don’t.”
But she doesn’t say what they are. Louise doesn’t ask.
George Candle
cries when he meets his daughter. He’s almost as hairy as the ghost. Louise can smell his marriage. She wonders what Anna smells.
“I loved your mother very much,” George Candle says to Anna. “She was a very special person. She had a beautiful soul.”
They go to see Louise’s gravestone. The grass on her grave is greener than the other grass. You can see where it’s been tipped in, like a bookplate. Louise briefly fantasizes her own funeral, her own gravestone, her own married lover standing beside her gravestone. She knows he would go straight home after the funeral to take a shower. If he went to the funeral.
The house without Anna is emptier than Louise is used to. Louise didn’t expect to miss Anna. Now she has no best friend, no ghost, no adopted former dog. Her lover is home with his wife, sulking, and now George Candle is flying home to his wife. What will she think of Anna? Maybe Anna will miss Louise just a little.
That night Louise dreams of Louise endlessly falling off the stage. She falls and falls and falls. As Louise falls she slowly comes apart. Little bits of her fly away. She is made up of ladybugs.
Anna comes and sits on Louise’s bed. She is a lot furrier than she was when she lived with Louise. “You’re not a dog,” Louise says.
Anna grins her possum teeth at Louise. She’s holding a piece of okra. “The supernatural world has certain characteristics,” Anna says. “You can recognize it by its color, which is green, and by its texture, which is hirsute. Those are its outside qualities. Inside the supernatural world things get sticky but you never get inside things, Louise. Did you know that George Candle is a werewolf? Look out for hairy men, Louise. Or do I mean married men? The other aspects of the green world include music and smell.”
Anna pulls her pants down and squats. She pees on the bed, a long acrid stream that makes Louise’s eyes water.
Louise wakes up sobbing. “Louise,” Louise whispers. “Please come and lie on my floor. Please come haunt me. I’ll play Patsy Cline for you and comb your hair. Please don’t go away.”
She keeps a vigil for three nights. She plays Patsy Cline. She sits by the phone because maybe Louise could call. Louise has never not called, not for so long. If Louise doesn’t forgive her, then she can come and be an angry ghost. She can make dishes break or make blood come out of the faucets. She can give Louise bad dreams. Louise will be grateful for broken things and blood and bad dreams. All of Louise’s clothes are up on their hangers, hung right-side out. Louise puts little dishes of flowers out, plates with candles and candy. She calls her mother to ask how to make a ghost appear but her mother refuses to tell her. The line may be tapped. Louise will have to come down, she says, and she’ll explain in person.
•
Louise wears the same dress she wore to the funeral. She sits up in the balcony. There are enormous pictures of Louise up on the stage. Influential people go up on the stage and tell funny stories about Louise. Members of the orchestra speak about Louise. Her charm, her beauty, her love of music. Louise looks through her opera glasses at the cellists. There is the young one, number eight, who caused all the trouble. There is the bearded cellist who caught the ghost. She stares through her glasses at his cello. Her ghost runs up and down the neck of his cello, frisky. It coils around the strings, hangs upside-down from a peg.
She examines number five’s face for a long time. Why you? Louise thinks. If she wanted to sleep with a woman, why did she sleep with you? Did you tell her funny jokes? Did you go shopping together for clothes? When you saw her naked, did you see that she was bowlegged? Did you think that she was beautiful?
The cellist next to number five is holding his cello very carefully. He runs his fingers down the strings as if they were tangled and he were combing them. Louise stares through her opera glasses. There is something in his cello. Something small and bleached is looking back at her through the strings. Louise looks at Louise and then she slips back through the f hole, like a fish.
•
They are in the woods. The fire is low. It’s night. All the little girls are in their sleeping bags. They’ve brushed their teeth and spit, they’ve washed their faces with water from the kettle, they’ve zipped up the zippers of their sleeping bags.
A counselor named Charlie is saying, “I am the ghost with the one black eye, I am the ghost with the one black eye.”
Charlie holds her flashlight under her chin. Her eyes are two black holes in her face. Her mouth yawns open, the light shining through her teeth. Her shadow eats up the trunk of the tree she sits under.
During the daytime Charlie teaches horseback riding. She isn’t much older than Louise or Louise. She’s pretty and she lets them ride the horses bareback sometimes. But that’s daytime Charlie. Nighttime Charlie is the one sitting next to the fire. Nighttime Charlie is the one who tells stories.
“Are you afraid?” Louise says.
“No,” Louise says.
They hold hands. They don’t look at each other. They keep their eyes on Charlie.
Louise says, “Are you afraid?”
“No,” Louise says. “Not as long as you’re here.”
JAMES PATRICK KELLY
I have known Jim Kelly my whole life—at least, my whole writing life. We met when he and John Kessel sent me a postcard about a story I had written. At that time Jim, John, and I were SF neophytes, each having published a few stories. I thought he was charming, smart, and handsome. I still do. He is also one of the best workshop critics I have ever seen: Story Doctor Kelly.
There has been a lot of printer toner under the bridge since then. Jim has developed astonishing versatility, writing novels, short stories, essays, stage and audioplays, and planetarium shows. His books include Strange but Not a Stranger, Think Like a Dinosaur and Other Stories, Wildlife, and Look into the Sun. He has won two Hugos, for “Think Like a Dinosaur” (1996) and “Ten to the Sixteenth to One” (2000). He writes a column about the Internet for Asimov’s. Jim also serves as a governor-appointed councilor on the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. He bats right, thinks left, has “too many hobbies,” and still finds time to write wonderful stories like “Undone.”
You may have wondered what you would do if you were ever stranded in time. Or not. What Mada does is both shocking and very human.
UNDONE
James Patrick Kelly
panic attack
The ship screamed. Its screens showed Mada that she was surrounded in threespace. A swarm of Utopian asteroids was closing on her, brain clans and mining DIs living in hollowed-out chunks of carbonaceous chondrite, any one of which could have mustered enough votes to abolish Mada in all ten dimensions.
“I’m going to die,” the ship cried, “I’m going to die, I’m going to . . .”
“I’m not.” Mada waved the speaker off impatiently and scanned downwhen. She saw that the Utopians had planted an identity mine five minutes into the past that would boil her memory to vapor if she tried to go back in time to undo this trap. Upwhen, then. The future was clear, at least as far as she could see, which wasn’t much beyond next week. Of course, that was the direction they wanted her to skip. They’d be happiest making her their great-great-great-grandchildren’s problem.
The Utopians fired another spread of panic bolts. The ship tried to absorb them, but its buffers were already overflowing. Mada felt her throat tighten. Suddenly she couldn’t remember how to spell luck, and she believed that she could feel her sanity oozing out of her ears.
“So let’s skip upwhen,” she said.
“You s-sure?” said the ship. “I don’t know if . . . how far?”
“Far enough so that all of these drones will be fossils.”
“I can’t just . . . I need a number, Mada.”
A needle of fear pricked Mada hard enough to make her reflexes kick. “Skip!” Her panic did not allow for the luxury of numbers. “Skip now!” Her voice was tight as a fist. “Do it!”
Time shivered as the ship surged into the empty dimensions. In threespace, Mada went all wav
y. Eons passed in a nanosecond, then she washed back into the strong dimensions and solidified.
She merged briefly with the ship to assess damage. “What have you done?” The gain in entropy was an ache in her bones.
“I-I’m sorry, you said to skip so . . .” The ship was still jittery.
Even though she wanted to kick its sensorium in, she bit down hard on her anger. They had both made enough mistakes that day. “That’s all right,” she said, “we can always go back. We just have to figure out when we are. Run the star charts.”
two-tenths of a spin
The ship took almost three minutes to get its charts to agree with its navigation screens—a bad sign. Reconciling the data showed that it had skipped forward in time about two-tenths of a galactic spin. Almost twenty million years had passed on Mada’s homeworld of Trueborn, time enough for its crust to fold and buckle into new mountain ranges, for the Green Sea to bloom, for the glaciers to march and melt. More than enough time for everything and everyone Mada had ever loved—or hated—to die, turn to dust and blow away.
Whiskers trembling, she checked downwhen. What she saw made her lose her perch and float aimlessly away from the command mod’s screens. There had to be something wrong with the ship’s air. It settled like dead, wet leaves in her lungs. She ordered the ship to check the mix.
The ship’s deck flowed into an enormous plastic hand, warm as blood. It cupped Mada gently in its palm and raised her up so that she could see its screens straight on.
“Nominal, Mada. Everything is as it should be.”
That couldn’t be right. She could breathe ship-nominal atmosphere. “Check it again,” she said.
“Mada, I’m sorry,” said the ship.
The identity mine had skipped with them and was still dogging her, five infuriating minutes into the past. There was no getting around it, no way to undo their leap into the future. She was trapped two-tenths of a spin upwhen. The knowledge was like a sucking hole in her chest, much worse than any wound the Utopian psychological war machine could have inflicted on her.