“I’m not just confused. I’m.…” I stopped talking because I didn’t know what I was. Surprisingly, though, whatever I might have been, it wasn’t scared. In fact, I felt something in my chest open up that I could honestly call happiness. How strange, I thought.
Lilly was already rooting through the suitcase I’d left by the door. “Where’s your makeup?”
“Home.”
“Okay. Let’s head to your apartment and get you polished up.”
“Lilly, if we can find Ricky we can get him arrested. Do you know where he is?”
Dead Lilly smacked the table in front of us. “Forget him and pay attention to the conference, which is, by the way, coming at you like a freight train. You’ve got to get that last additional clause on the trapeze contract nailed down. I’ve been looking forward to that act for months.”
“You’re not looking forward to anything anymore. You’re dead.” I turned to Boppit. “Why are you wearing that uniform?”
“Everyone else asks me why I’m wearing high heels.”
“What a surprise.”
“You don’t have to be like that. The uniform is what I am. To my mind the shoes don’t contradict the uniform, thematically speaking. The day you found me? I wasn’t looking for garbage those afternoons I spent tipping over trash cans. I was looking for a Qualicraft soft vinyl tortoiseshell upper, preferably with acrylic Art Deco heels. When I was with your family I kept a stash of my favorites in the back of the garage. And I was waiting for you.”
“Tell me, really, what you are,” I asked.
“I am what I am, sweetheart.” His tongue popped between his teeth and his eyes closed into slits like they did when we rubbed his belly or when he was especially pleased with something and he looked very pleased right now.
“Up and at ’em, Neave. I’ve been looking forward to giving away a powder-blue convertible at a blowout sales conference since the day we sat on the floor of the warehouse and split that bottle of beer. That was a perfect little half hour, sitting on the floor talking about diamonds and robin’s-egg-blue cars and everything that was going to happen to us. It did all happen to us. And it’s going to keep happening, only just to you.”
I was responding to my dead sister and my profoundly changed former pet as if they were real, which my mind told me they were not. Boppit stood up and plucked my purse off the side table where I’d left it, turning it upside down and dumping its contents out. “This thing?” he said briskly. “Into the trash.”
“But that’s my everyday purse…”
Lilly stood up. “Time for a new everyday. You can’t carry that ink-stained sack around and be who you have to be now. People will be looking at you to figure out what to wear, looking to you to tell them what to do. You have to be me now as well as you. Your hair? No woman who wasn’t in the middle of a nervous breakdown would let whatever happened to your hair happen. You’re heading a cosmetics company—not a cattle ranch.”
“Nothing’s wrong with the hair. And it’s possible that I am in the middle of a nervous breakdown. I mean, look at you. Look at me, talking to you.”
“Up and at ’em,” Lilly said.
“No. No, I’m not going up and at ’em with you, because you are dead.”
“Dead is not as absolute a condition as you’ve been led to believe.”
“I’ve never set up and run a conference by myself. You’re the face of the company. Not me.”
Dead Lilly snorted. She lit a new cigarette. “Me and the dog are going to get you a new face.” When she flicked the ashes they just pinged into space before they hit the deck. I looked more closely at her. I reached out and tried to take some of the purple silk sleeve between my finger and thumb but it dissolved when my fingers reached it. Lilly was here and not, the shirt a firmly rooted memory and an illusion.
“I loved this blouse,” I said. “It disappeared after you borrowed it for a date with Danny Rominowski. Is that a cigarette burn on the sleeve?”
“Yup. Doesn’t it look terrific on me?” She stood, held her arms out and turned so we could admire the effect. “No wonder I borrowed it.” Lilly lit her next cigarette on the last one, which faded into air when she flicked it away.
“Mommy swore those things would kill you.”
“Well, she was wrong.” Lilly leaned forward. “Ricky beat them to it. The new trapeze contract’s filed under some spare stockings in my top drawer at work. And some stuffed panda bears are shipping tomorrow. I think.”
“What do we need panda bears for?”
“They’re an incentive for the new Christmas gift packages we’re offering. You get a panda with every complete package purchase. We’re attacking those slumping December sales head-on. It’ll be fabulous. We won’t have enough of ’em.”
“Really?”
“Really. Call Betty and tell her where it is. She can forge our signatures. She does it all the time.”
I closed my eyes and leaned back. I tried to breathe very slowly. “If you’re not real, and I’m sure you’re not real, go away,” I whispered. “When I open my eyes you’ll be gone.”
I opened my eyes and they were still there. They were staring at me and they didn’t look pleased.
“Gone, gone, gone,” I whispered.
“Real, real, real,” Boppit whispered back.
“The blouse wasn’t enough to convince you we’re here?” Dead Lilly asked. “What about my knowing where my spare stockings and the circus contract are?”
“You must have told me about the contract and the stockings before you disappeared and I forgot but it’s in my head. You’re a memory.”
“I can show you where the shirt ended up,” Boppit broke in. “I know exactly where it was all those months you looked for it.”
“No, you can’t, and if you could I wouldn’t care.”
“Let’s see if that’s true.” Suddenly I wasn’t on the Rubber Duck but moving up a flight of stairs. They were the stairs we’d climbed in our childhood house to get to the unfinished closet in my bedroom, the row of old snowsuits and outgrown clothes hanging like a barricade between my secret reading place and the rest of the world.
“This is just in my head,” I whispered.
“The head is such a large place.” Boppit hummed, skimming along beside me.
We flowed down the hall and into the bedroom we used to share. There was the closet, the row of coats and leggings that our mother had started hanging up here sometime in 1931. Boppit pushed aside a plaid shirt of Snyder’s and a poodle skirt of Jane’s. There it was—a blanket and lamp and crumbs from the cookies I’d stolen right off the baking sheet one rainy afternoon in 1938, The Pirate Lover sitting at the top of the nearest pile of books.
“That damn book.” Boppit sniffed. “How many women have come to grief because they read too many pirate stories at impressionable ages? Why do you think Mrs. Daniels tried to keep it away from you?”
I tried to pick it up but it melted away when I touched it. There were the vinyl shards from Mom’s favorite record, shattered in that spasm of rage sometime in the winter of 1939 and swept into a corner but never removed. She’d kept her records in a cherry cabinet and relied on them when she felt blue. If you found her dancing alone in the living room, you’d know it was a bad day.
Lilly peered down at the record label. “You had a temper. And Mommy had a talent for provoking you.”
I felt bad about “My Sweet Little Headache.” I’d felt bad about it a minute after it was in pieces. I’d felt bad about it while watching my mother look for it. Once again Mom had been right—resentment had been the poison I’d drunk, hoping it would kill the other fellow. I said, “I don’t want to be here, Lilly.”
“I want to show you the blouse.”
“It’s not here.”
“Of course it is. I put it here myself.” Dead Lilly jammed her hand between two storage bags and there it was, a run of purple silk and the hard knobs of pearl buttons. They still looked like there was a tiny lightb
ulb inside each of them; they were still the milky silver blue they’d been when I first touched them in Jordan Marsh’s designer label section in ladies’ on the second floor. Lilly had told me about pearls starting their lives as little bits of irritating sand that refuse to get spit out by their oyster. I thought of that every time I touched those buttons. I looked at the record shards. I looked at the worn stolen book that had been my company all those secret hours.
“What a little firetrap this closet was,” Lilly observed. Thank goodness you never took to smoking. You’d have burned the house down. Remember my handing you your first cigarette?… 1941. We opened our bedroom window.”
True. We’d leaned out the window and blown the smoke away from us so Snyder wouldn’t smell it and rat us out to Daddy. Kents. I’d gotten sick in the bushes in the backyard.
“Lilly, I’m so happy to see you, but you make me very nervous,” I said to my dead sister, who was, improbably, both holding the purple silk blouse and wearing it. “You understand, right? Thank you for visiting but maybe you could just go away now. Mr. Boppit too.”
“Can’t, doll. The conference. The company. Your future. Look at you, missing meetings, ignoring phone calls. Look at your hair, for God’s sake. Nobody knows where you are half the time. He’ll find you. And you’ll be alone.”
I didn’t have to ask her who she meant. “He’ll move on.”
“Oh, sweetie.” Boppit sighed. “He won’t, but you have to. Otherwise your feelings are going to rip you up like a vulture working on roadkill. We’re here to save you from yourself. From him. Help us.”
“Saving me from myself?”
“Stop looking for Ricky. Accept that sometimes you don’t get any kind of justice.”
“Tell me what you are,” I begged the two figures that flanked me now. “Tell me what you want from me.”
“We already did,” Mr. Boppit said.
“I think I’m in trouble,” I said.
“You might be, honey.” Dead Lilly nodded. “I’m afraid you really might be.”
THE PIRATE LOVER
Fire Ship
“It’s time,” Basil announced to his crew, a strangely exhilarated and cheerful crew, considering that their captain and possibly all of them faced eternity in the next few hours. Still, an almost festive excitement reigned. Men had spent the last four watches working with Chips the carpenter to cut out the shapes of pirates, complete with hats and cutlasses. These they nailed along the rail of the xebec. Every deck was caulked with tar, every piece of rigging sluiced with oily slush—the frying remains from a hundred dinners. All the powder that Basil Le Cherche felt they could spare without making themselves entirely defenseless had been carried to the xebec and set amid tarry rags. When it was as much a floating bomb as it could be, he stood on the quarterdeck and addressed them.
“I’ve said only volunteers will serve, and each and every one of you volunteered. I can’t take each man jack with me, and you must accept that.” They knew what was what: this fire ship would be aimed at the heart of the enemy’s ships, set alight, and left to blow Judge Henri Le Cherche and his convoy all the way to the judgment of God. But to get the ship close enough before it was lit and abandoned, a small crew would have to risk their lives. Basil Le Cherche would stake his own life on the plan—he himself would lead the group who steered the fire ship into her final moments on Earth.
Electra had risen up against him again in the privacy of the captain’s quarters, once more demanding to accompany him and once more being denied. She drew his hand to her breast, guided his fingers beneath the rough sailcloth to the silk of her own skin. They kissed, both of them knowing that it was perhaps the last time they would touch each other.
When the evening sun held itself just above the horizon, the Cat and its accompanying handmaiden, the xebec, skimmed out of the hidden inlet where the judge’s convoy had not been able to follow and made a direct assault on Henri Le Cherche’s superior forces. The sun lit them in silhouette, making the xebec’s rails look as if they were lined with men eager to make a boarding-party assault.
“Are they mad?” Henri Le Cherche’s first lieutenant laughed. “They give us every advantage. Such a pity that men with such fighting spirit will all be dead so soon.”
The judge himself watched the approach with initial exhilaration. But Henri Le Cherche had not survived among the thieves and criminals with whom he associated as long as he had without a coward’s feral sense of self-protection and a liar’s feel for a lie. Surrounded by men who readied for hand-to-hand combat with the xebec’s crew, he said nothing but ordered his pinnace to splash down and take him to the ship at the farthest edge of the convoy. “Watch for my signals,” he ordered. “I will command from the rear.”
Onward the attackers came, closing at five knots on a stiffening wind from the west. The Cat’s crew shook their reef and dragged a sail behind them beneath the surface of the water to give the appearance of striving for every bit of speed so the slower xebec could pull ahead and do its work without drawing suspicion. And it did. Basil Le Cherche and his small group lit the slow fuse at the bow, slid into a gig that they lowered over the aft starboard side so the xebec itself hid their retreat from the enemy, and began their mad row back to the Cat.
Waiting. Waiting. The xebec closing fast and then inside the very convoy, close enough so the wooden images nailed to the railing were plain at last and the enemy saw they had been deceived, cries of “Fire ship! Fire ship!” all too late and then a massive explosion—spars, rigging, and body parts spread over three square miles of sea.
The Cat’s crew did not cheer, for though they had succeeded and they had the captain and his small crew back aboard, the terrible loss of life was sobering to them. Only the ship at the very edge of the convoy—the ship now carrying Henri Le Cherche—was intact.
“Captain!” cried an upper yardsman, pointing toward this sole undamaged ship. “She runs!” Indeed, Henri Le Cherche had ordered the ship carrying him to turn and run, leaving her distressed comrades to fend for themselves. Basil Le Cherche ordered his clearest-eyed lookout up to the mainmast yard with a glass. “Do you see Judge Le Cherche aboard her, Bill?” he called.
“Yes, sir! I see him!”
Basil Le Cherche turned to his first lieutenant, his expression satisfied and disgusted at once. “Set a course to pursue. I hardly needed the confirmation. No other man would order a ship away while his men drowned and burned in the wreckage behind him. Two points to the east,” he bellowed. “Man the pumps and douse the mainstay sail and the foresail!” This old trick caught every whisper of wind and the crew knew their captain well enough to jump to the task. There was blood in the air, every man jack eager to board and take the escaping schooner. “We will have him by sunset if this breeze stays with us!” he cried, and a cheer from the sweating crew answered him.
“This time, my love,” Electra whispered in his ear, for she had come up behind him and stood so close he could smell the salt on her warm skin. “This time I will board with you—for that is the schooner that carries his slaves—the women who have been taken into bondage, and they will trust and follow me before they trust any man. I am necessary to you!”
He looked at her and smiled. “My warrior witch, you are indeed necessary to me, but in this battle you will serve from the decks below. The surgeon needs steady hands and a hard head, and I hereby make you his assistant for you have both. There will be bloody work in his sick bay before we are done.”
“Below the water line in that dank little corner? But I shall see nothing of the battle!”
“You will see it through its most eloquent annotations, my love—the bodies that are carried below. You are not being banished to an insignificant backwater. You may find yourself in the bloodiest corner of the battle before we are done. I remind you that I am your captain, and I command your service there.”
He pulled her to him and pressed his lips to her throat. “Perhaps one day we will face an enemy side by side,
my love. Be patient with me, and remember that I love you more than life itself.”
NEAVE
Mr. Boppit and Lilly Dress Me for Success
They got to work on me, Dead Lilly and Mr. Boppit, and I got used to them. More than used to them. They herded me into a hairdresser’s chair and on to the office and the meetings I’d been missing. When I walked into the offices in my newly polished form I felt the staff come more alive, stiffen like a sail that’s caught a breeze.
Boppit and Dead Lilly hovered over my shoulder, giving me orders, making suggestions, invisible to everybody but me. I stopped muttering to them under my breath because they ordered me to stop it. I discovered that I trusted them. I did what they said. Reassure your employees, they’d insisted. Return those telephone calls. Watch your tone. Smile. Don’t throw things.
Be Your Best was still in good hands: It was in Dead Lilly’s and Mr. Boppit’s hands, and more masterful guidance would be impossible to find. Two hundred and thirty-seven salesgirls were checking in to the hotel in six days. The circus troupe was negotiating with operations at the hotel to get the trapeze rigged in the main conference room. Speakers and trainers were gathering their notes and checking the schedules. Brochures on new products and colors were printed and sitting in bound cubes in the office. I was making meetings on time, answering the telephone, actually—weirdly—beginning once again to care. I did what they told me to do. “You have an empire to defend!” Bop would say, tugging me toward one task or another. I walked around speaking to people and the people I spoke to talked back, which I took to be proof that I didn’t look as deranged as I knew I really was. I got myself a new purse and this simple action seemed to clarify and lighten my entire mind. Boppit picked it out, standing invisibly by my side at Filene’s.
Lilly had always done the opening-night speech. She was the reason why every year salesgirls got in their cars and drove to this conference, often over the objections of the children and husbands left behind to turn all the laundry pink and suffer cold-cereal dinners until their mothers returned. These travelers had come to be reminded that they changed the lives of every woman they touched as a representative of Be Your Best. They wanted to see welcome notes and blue flowers in their hotel rooms. They wanted to hear tinkling crystal at dinner. They wanted to see the advertising layouts for new inky evening-wear eye colors that Lilly had talked me into, darker and sexually bolder than what we had now. She’d sat by my side and told me what to wear at the meeting with the directors when we were planning the new colors. Grapevine chatter said that half the sales directors were talking about the new Neave Terhune to their girls in the field.
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