After a week, the regulars were really starting to take a liking to her. That convinced me even more that she was really someone special.
I’d served some of those folks for years. I knew and trusted their judgment. When they liked a person, it meant something. They really liked Alice and made her feel welcome and safe.
On my night off, six nights after we met, she took me to her apartment to cook me dinner.
The place was a small, tidy, warm one bedroom, with pictures of parents and one sister on the wall, a white fluff-ball of a cat, and a couch that was so soft, you didn’t want to get up.
A single woman’s perfect apartment.
Dinner was the best chicken I had ever tasted and later she served a perfectly chilled white wine. I didn’t have to come back for breakfast and I didn’t get much sleep.
Thinking back now, it was odd that not once during that week did we talk about the guy she yelled at the first night. I don’t remember, but I suppose I figured it would come up sooner or later and was happy to have it later.
Hell, I had a few things in my past I didn’t much like, including an ex wife I wasn’t real excited about.
It wasn’t until two full weeks from the day I first saw her that the strange guy appeared again. She was sitting on her normal stool, talking to Wilber, the retired truck driver who was one of the old time regulars. They were laughing about something and I was staring at her from the other end of the bar, thinking about how young and healthy she was looking, when I noticed out of the corner of my eye a slight movement.
I glanced around and there was the bald guy, Dave, sitting at the bar across from me.
He hadn’t come in. I knew that. I had been facing that front door and no one had come through it since Wilber. So just how the hell had he gotten in?
I started to ask him, but he held up his hand and put his finger to his lips for me to be quiet.
“Don’t let her know I’m here,” he said. “I wanted to see how things were going. Got tired sitting out front all these nights.”
“Siting out front?”
Little stabs of jealousy cut at my stomach.
He motioned for me to turn my back so Alice and Wilber wouldn’t see me talking. “They can’t see me,” he said. “But they can see you talking.”
“We going to start that shit again?”
But I said it so Alice couldn’t see me. I stood with my back to her and pretended to be working on something in the well. She was far enough down the bar she couldn’t hear me over the jukebox.
“Let me prove I’m a ghost once and for all,” the bald guy said.
He stood up. “I’ll show you. Then, when you believe me, maybe we can talk.” He walked right through the bar, then through the back bar and disappeared into the mirrors behind the call liquors.
“David?” Alice called out as I stared at the mirrors. “Everything all right?”
“Sure is,” I said, scooting quickly along the bar until I was in front of her and Wilber. “Just working on getting ready for the night.”
I straightened her drink, then gave her hand a squeeze, proud of the fact that I kept my hand from shaking.
She smiled at me. I felt almost guilty for not telling her what was going on. But at the same time, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was seeing. And I didn’t want to go losing her, scaring her off by being a nut case.
The bald guy came walking out of the mirrors, back through the bar, and sat down on the end stool.
“Need another drink here?” I asked Alice and Wilber, forcing myself to not stare in the bald guy’s direction.
Both said no, so I gave Alice’s hand another little squeeze and went back to the ghost. He’d made a believer out of me with the walk through the bar routine.
But what the hell did he want?
“Looks like everything is progressing as I remembered it,” he said as I moved back into position by the well with my back to Alice.
“You remembered it?” I asked. “You lost me. In fact, you being here has me damn confused, to say the least. Who the hell are you?”
I had a bunch more questions for him, but figured that would be enough to start.
He laughed. “My name is Dave. I’m Alice’s dead husband. I told you that. Although, from how young she’s starting to look, I doubt if she will remember me. I’ve been staying outside lately, away from her.”
He glanced down the bar at her. She lives forever, you know. So do you, so do I, only in a different sort of way than her.”
I shook my head and laughed. “Hold on one damn minute. Past you name, I didn’t follow a word of that.”
It was his turn to laugh. “I doubt if you’d believe much more. I know I wouldn’t have. Just enjoy while you can.”
“Enjoy what?”
“Alice,” he said, softly. “The next ten years.”
He gazed in her direction and sighed, then glanced back at me. “I only wanted to remind you I was here. You’ll understand when your time comes. Maybe you can break the cycle.”
“Wait—”
He was gone again. Not even a cloud of smoke. I glanced over the bar at the empty stool, then grabbed a glass and filled it with ice.
Time for me to have a drink.
A very large drink.
THREE
That night at my place I almost got up the nerve to ask Alice about the bald guy. But it had been a long night, I was tired, and Alice was in a “playful” mood, so the question never got asked.
The next day it just didn’t seem as important somehow. Not that I forgot about it. I didn’t. It was just never the right moment. And after the ghost didn’t show up for a while, there seemed to be little point in asking.
Alice spent a lot of nights sitting on her end barstool and over the next month I found out a lot about her past. But not one word was ever said about being married. In fact, her history filled in solid all the way from high school to the night she came into the bar the first time. There didn’t seem to be any time that she could have been married. But why would a ghost lie to me? Made no sense.
Two months after we met, we started talking about getting married. She liked the idea.
I liked the idea.
We’d do it and then she’d help me go back to school, finish the master’s degree and get a real job.
Of course, by the time we started making those kind of plans I was head over heels in love and not questioning anything. The truth of the matter was, I wasn’t thinking about it. I plain didn’t want to.
Six months from the day we first met, we were married in the Methodist church downtown, the big one with the huge colored windows and the ten-step altar. We had to climb all ten of those suckers and I was so nervous, I almost didn’t make it.
Alice held me up.
Before the service, while I was standing in the front of the church waiting for Alice to come flowing down the center aisle, I thought I saw the bald guy in the balcony above the entrance.
He was wearing the same clothes he had on in the bar. He waved, gave me the thumbs up sign, and then disappeared when the music started.
I didn’t understand.
FOUR
Ten years and two days later, I died.
And then I understood.
The doctors told Alice it was a massive coronary arrest.
I was forty-one.
The moment I found myself sitting next to her in the hospital waiting room, listening to the news of my death, wanting to comfort her, hold her, I knew I was the bald guy.
As best I can let me explain what I think happened. If Alice had been the one to have died, I don’t think I could have survived. We shared everything. We were more in love the last day then the day we were married.
Not that we didn’t have our troubles. Turned out that Alice had one hell of a temper. There was no getting in her way when she was mad. I had a drinking problem that almost split us up three years into things. But she helped me though the drinking and I usually laughed at her temper.
>
Until I died, I didn’t really realize how totally dedicated to me Alice was. Obsessed might be a better term. I figured that the first time around, her total dedication was why I got stuck here, couldn’t move on into the next life until her attention was turned to someone else.
And that’s why she went back.
Back into the past, her past, my past, dragging me with her until she again found me and married me. Her love held me near her like a dog on a leash.
And all those years I hadn’t really noticed.
In fact, I’d enjoyed it.
But it isn’t anywhere near as much fun now that I’m dead. And somehow, someway, I have to break the cycle.
After the funeral, she had holed up in our house and wouldn’t go or do anything. She didn’t eat and was losing weight really fast. I figured she was trying to kill herself so that she could join me. Even though I wanted to break the cycle, I couldn’t take the thought of her doing that.
That’s when I let her see me for the first time.
Scared her something awful.
I guess those first few times I still didn’t have the hang of being a ghost. Making yourself visible is no easy task. You’ll discover it takes a lot of real concentration and energy. I suppose I looked sort of watery and not all there.
I couldn’t tell.
Like Vampires, mirrors don’t work for ghosts.
Maybe it was my reappearing that started her returning to the past. At first, she wouldn’t admit that I was even there. If I’d have stopped then, stayed invisible, I might have allowed her to get through her grief and on with her life.
But my showing up, trying to get her to eat kept her in our past. The more I was there, the more she regressed. I could feel the years drifting, coming unstuck.
She didn’t like me only being a ghost. She wanted me to touch her, hold her or even talk to her for longer than a few minutes at a time.
She wanted me back, alive, the way I had been the day she met me.
That’s you. You’re me. Now do you understand why I’ve been telling you all this? Don’t talk to her when she comes back into the bar in two days. I’m not strong enough to break the cycle on this end except by telling you this story.
After years of marriage, you’ll understand.
But you can end it. Don’t let the next cycle start.
At that moment Alice stood up from the table near the jukebox and stormed back over to the bar. “Can you really see him?” she demanded. “I can’t believe he followed me here.”
I glanced over at the old balding guy who claimed to be my ghost and who had told me the wildest bar story I had ever heard, then back into her huge brown eyes.
“See who?”
She looked puzzled for a moment, then smiled.
She took a long drink off her glass and set it empty on the bar. “What did you call that drink?”
“Fuzzy Navel,” I said, sliding the empty over the bar and into the dish rack.
She walked down the bar and pulled out the end stool. “I think I’ll have another. I always heard they were good.”
The old guy sighed and then vanished without so much as a pop or a wisp of smoke. I saw him again sitting in the balcony of the church the day Alice and I were married.
And it was a wonderful ten years.
Each of us face reality in our own ways. Each of us do what we can do.
Elizabeth Beven, in this biting little story, faces her new reality in the only way she can.
This story fits with many of the nursing home stories I wrote.
VARIATIONS OF A SCREAM
THREE A.M.
Elizabeth Beven, eighty-five, sat at a small manual typewriter and picked at the keys with a paced rhythm like a slow drip from a faucet.
Every night she trickled words onto a page in the form of a letter, folded the page with shaking hands, addressed an envelope, and left both letter and envelope together on the top of her typewriter before returning to bed.
The nurse always mailed the letter the next morning before Elizabeth was dressed.
For the past two years Elizabeth had written a letter every night.
Her routine was always the same.
She awoke at 2:30, after four hours sleep, took fifteen minutes to get from her bed into her wheelchair, to the toilet, and then to the typewriter. Writing a letter made her tired and then she could sleep until morning.
Tonight, the letter was to her daughter, Mary.
Mary lived in the city below the nursing home with her husband Greg and two children, Matt and Martha. Mary said she enjoyed getting the letters from her mother, even though she stopped by the nursing home twice a week.
Elizabeth also wrote to her son, Bill, who lived out in California. But she only wrote him once a week and saved doing his letter for the nights when she felt exceptionally awake. Sometimes, she would even add to his letter during the day, but she never told her daughter.
Tonight, the letter was to Mary.
Mary,
Today, as most days, there is very little news to relay. This morning, Mrs. Robinson—you remember her, two doors north down the hall—fell and broke her hip. She’s in the hospital downtown now.
My cold I thought was getting never came on. The nurse gave me something for it yesterday, but I didn’t take it because it would have made me too tired to write a letter to Bill last night. You know how I get tired every time they give me a pill.
That’s all the news. Mostly nothing happens. We sit here and wait for someone to die and then, when they do, somebody else takes their place.
Oh, by the way, would you please do me a favor and bring—
An intense flash of white light suddenly filled the room, startling Elizabeth and causing her to jerk backwards.
Her wheelchair rolled slightly away from the desk as the room rumbled and shook.
She pulled her robe tightly across her with one hand and held onto her chair with the other.
The long curtains over the sliding glass door danced and jerked like puppets on strings.
She could hear glass breaking down the hall and people shouting and screaming.
The floor of the room shook her right up through the wheels of her chair as she bit her lip and held on.
The lights flickered once, came on bright, then went out, leaving only the faint light coming though her curtains. But even in the dark, she could see the letter to Mary as it rattled and fluttered.
The typewriter vibrated sideways toward the edge of her small desk. She wanted to reach out and save it, but didn’t dare let go of her chair.
Finally, with almost an audible sigh, the shaking and rumbling stopped. Her typewriter perched on the edge of her desk, threatening to fall at any moment. She quickly moved forward and pushed it back into place.
Noise from the hall replaced the rumbling.
She turned her chair toward the door. Loud running footsteps went past as she reached the handle and held on to it while backing her chair away. Finally, when the door was open far enough for her chair to pass through, she moved forward into the hall.
The hall was empty to the left. A weak, emergency light cast a faint shadow off the tile floor. She could hear a few of the residents calling out for help, but there was no movement.
To the left was a different story.
Emergency lights flooded the nurse’s station like spotlights over a stage. One aide was frantically rummaging through drawers behind the desk.
As Elizabeth watched, the night nurse and another aide came running from the medical supply room, their arms full of packages.
The nurse shouted “Quickly!” and all three of them ran in the direction of the front door.
Elizabeth heard the front door slam.
Again, only the noise of the few residents calling out disturbed the night. The empty, bright light of the nurse’s station made her shiver.
She turned her chair back into the familiar surroundings of her room.
She stopped in front o
f her typewriter and tried to think. Maybe there had been an accident out in the front parking lot and everyone was rushing to help. That would make sense.
She would be able to see that from her patio which overlooked the front lawn, parking lot, and the city in the valley below.
She went to the curtains and pulled them halfway open.
Then she unlatched the lock on the sliding glass door, slid it open, and rolled herself out onto the small patio.
It took a moment to realize what she was seeing.
In the distant valley below, the city was burning. Fire seemed to be everywhere, coloring huge clouds of smoke with orange light.
A few of the houses that lined the street below also burned, the crackling of the flames loud against the hills.
In the distance, Elizabeth could hear a woman screaming. Dozens of people milled in the street, watching, running, shouting.
Elizabeth glanced around at what she could see of the nursing home. It seemed to have survived without much damage. She could see a window broken, but nothing more.
She turned her attention back to the city.
On clear nights, she used to imagine that she could see Mary’s house through the trees that shaded the downtown area. On nice evenings she would sit and stare out over the city, imagining what it was like at Mary’s house that evening with the two grandchildren playing.
She loved to spend time at Mary’s house. But, except for holidays, there never seemed to be much chance. Still, she felt lucky to have raised two such fine children. She had always hoped she would live long enough to see her grandchildren grown.
Now the area around Mary’s house was nothing but fire.
The entire city was fire, smoke, and orange light.
Carefully, she wheeled herself to the edge of her patio, folded her hands in her lap and watched the flames.
Later, the chill from the night air forced her into movement.
She took one last look at the street below the nursing home. People still moved. A few gathered around a body on the street.
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