“I don’t—”
“So he left me here alone, and I thought, all right, that’s fine, I’ll start taking more time. I’ll catch up to him lickety-split. But it’s hard, Jenna. You’ll know what I mean when you see your own dying day. We’re not the living, but we’re still human beings, and humans, we don’t let go as easy as we should sometimes. Maybe I’ll get my Paul back once I move on. Maybe I won’t. ‘Maybe’ is a word that keeps me up at night, and it never lets go.”
“Oh.” We’re almost to Sixth and Broadway. We should be seeing signs of the ghost gang by now. The dead know the presence of the dead. Ghosts change the landscape around themselves, not in any way permanent or prominent enough for the living to really notice, but enough that once you know what you’re looking for, it’s just this side of impossible to overlook.
And there’s nothing. The cracks in the sidewalks are normal cracks; the leaves that fall from the hedges and domesticated trees are just leaves, falling where they will, not forming initials or strange glyphs or the abstract faces of long-dead lovers. There’s no out-of-season frost in the corners of the windows, no hidden messages written in the lingering morning dew.
We are on an unhaunted corner, and that is terrifying.
Delia’s face falls as she looks around, confusion giving way to bewilderment, and finally melting into fear. “Where are they?”
“I don’t know,” I say, and I don’t know, and suddenly, the world is a smaller, more frightening place.
5: Don’t Change Your Number
Brenda has my number but I don’t have hers, and I don’t know where she spends her days; I’ve only ever seen her at the diner, hair rimed with neon light, fingers moving on the neck of her guitar. I’ll have to wait until tonight to see her, and that means waiting until after my shift at the helpline. I think, briefly, about calling in and saying I can’t make it, but I can’t even reach for the phone. The people who count on us to get them through the slow hours between sunset and dawn, they’re not dead yet. They still have a chance to hold out until the sun comes up.
I don’t mind being dead. I did, for a while, in the beginning, when I realized my life was over and that nothing I could do was ever going to bring it back, but that was a long time ago. I stopped mourning for myself when my brother was born and my parents stopped mourning for me. That seemed like long enough. That seemed like a good time to let go. But the living . . .
The living have the chance to stay that way, and they should stay that way for as long as possible, because life is amazing. There’s so much the living can do that the dead can’t. If I can keep someone alive by going to my night job, then that’s what I have to do.
My day job is another matter. Delia doesn’t charge her dead tenants as much as she charges her living ones—charges us just this side of nothing, in fact—but I still have to buy cat food and pay my share of the gas bill.
I make it to the coffee shop four minutes before the official start of my shift, already dressed for work, even down to the green apron with the chain logo on the pocket. We’re not supposed to take those home, and technically I never do; my “real” apron is hanging in my locker, where it’s been since the day it was handed to me. But spills during my shift are inevitable, and if I never wear the real thing, I never need to wash it. Ghost clothing doesn’t get stained. We can always re-create it clean when the need arises.
My manager is behind the counter, steaming milk. He barely glances up as I position myself behind the register. “You’re late,” he says.
“Not quite,” I reply.
“Time is money, you know.”
I don’t reply, just plaster a smile across my face and turn to wait for a paying customer. He loves that phrase, “time is money,” and uses it every chance he gets. Sometimes I wish I could make him understand how wrong he is, that time is time and that’s enough, because time is more precious than diamonds, more rare than pearls. Money comes and goes, but time only goes. Time doesn’t come back for anyone, not even for the restless dead, who move it from place to place. Time is finite. Money is not.
A man walks in, tailored suit on his shoulders and caffeine craving in his eyes, and my shift begins.
It’s not so bad, slinging coffee for a living. I don’t mind the minimum wage; unlike my coworkers, I don’t eat or go on vacation or have kids to clothe and feed. I have no college loans to pay. Sometimes I envy them those things. They get to live, and I got to drown while I was still in my teens. No matter how much my existence looks like living, it’s not. The absence of food in my refrigerator and clothes in my closet attests to that. I work to pay the rent and keep the heat on and feed the cats, but I could stop tomorrow, and I wouldn’t suffer for the change.
The customers are a steady stream, never quite overwhelming, never going away for more than a few minutes. It’s soothing. I let myself sink into the rhythm of punching orders and scrawling names on cups, passing them to my manager when he’s behind the counter with me, filling them myself when he’s not. Some of the customers smile and drop their change in the tip jar. Others barely peel their eyes away from their phones, locked in the increasingly fast-paced race of text and response. It looks exhausting. Nothing makes me feel the age that’s on my tombstone like watching people who look older than I do spending their lives staring at a screen.
My dislike of modern technology is a me thing, a lack-of-exposure thing. Danny has a smartphone, prepaid so that it didn’t require a credit check, and he loves it like a child. He spends more time reading comic book news and swearing at strangers than seems strictly healthy to me, but it makes him so happy, who am I to judge?
I pause with a scoop of coffee beans lifted halfway to the grinder. Danny has a smartphone. Danny has a phone number.
This could change everything. I finish the drink I’ve been preparing on autopilot before turning to my manager and saying, “I need to take my break.”
He blinks. I’m infamous among the staff of this store for never taking my legally mandated break unless forced to do so, which happens maybe twice a week, and never when there are customers in the store. I can see him struggling to come up with a reason to say “no,” and so I place my left hand on my lower belly and raise my eyebrows meaningfully. He blanches.
“Go,” he says, and I’m gone, walking as fast as I can toward the door that leads to the back, to the small room with its industrial-strength dishwasher and its underutilized sink. More, with its door to the break room, where a largely disused rotary phone still sits on the counter, a local-calls-only relic of a bygone age.
It’s younger than I am. It will do. I put my hand on the receiver and pause, closing my eyes, to recall Danny’s number.
Ghosts don’t have photographic memories unless we had them while we were alive. There are things that death cannot change. But we have a flexible relationship with past and present; we can move between them to a degree, as long as we don’t try to change things that have already happened. The universe is not willing to put up with that sort of thing, and smart ghosts don’t mess with the universe.
The world shifts around me. I am standing on a corner with Danny, him speaking animatedly about all the features of his new phone. He is a mountain of a man with the enthusiastic heart of a little boy, and I am surprised by the wash of love that rushes over me when I see his face. It’s not romantic, not sexual; it’s filial. He is family, part of the congregation of the dead who treat Manhattan as their cathedral, and I don’t want him to be gone unless it’s because he chose to move on.
He holds up his phone, beaming, showing me the number on the screen. “I know you’ll never call me, but just in case,” he says.
I snap back to the present. I dial the number, and it rings, and it rings, and there is no answer, and I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that something is very wrong; something has been broken, and I don’t know why, or how, or whether or not it can be fixed. I set the phone back into the cradle and stare at the wall, willing it to give me the an
swers that I need.
It doesn’t. It’s just a wall. Eventually, my manager calls my name and I go, good little ghost, to finish out my shift, to go to the helpline, to make it to the diner. Brenda will know what to do.
She has to know.
6: Fit the Living or Fit the Dead
I only earn twenty-one minutes tonight. I have to let several calls go to my fellow volunteers when I realize I don’t have the focus to take them; right now, I’d risk doing more harm than good, and that’s something we can never do. We have a duty when we’re on the phones, and whatever is going on in our own worlds, we owe our full attention to the people who call us for help. So I take what calls I can, and by the end of the night, I have twenty-one minutes I can honestly say the world of the living owes me.
It doesn’t feel like enough. Everyone I work with has caught my discomfort, my distraction; they know I’m off my game. They don’t say anything as I walk for the door, although I catch some of them watching me, concerned. We’ve never discussed what drives us to volunteer. I know suicide has touched us all, one way or another. We lost a volunteer a few years ago, when she could no longer resist the seemingly predestined relationship between razor and wrist. Her ghost flickered through the halls for weeks, never quite showing herself to the living, never quite daring to come inside. The others never knew they’d been haunted, but they knew something was wrong, and they’re wary now. They watch each other—they watch me—in a way they never did before.
I wish I could reassure them, tell them that yes, I lost someone, but I’m not going to do anything to myself; I couldn’t, even if I had felt the urge. The dead can’t die. We can only move on. But truly reassuring them would require telling them what I am, and even if they believed me, they’d never look at me the same way again. Being dead and dwelling among the living comes with certain inalienable truths. “Few people like to be haunted” is one of them.
I walk quickly toward the diner, not looking for people to interact with, not reaching for connection. Tonight, connection is the last thing on my mind. That’s why I don’t notice Sophie before she looms up out of an alley and steps into my path, eyes wild and hands reaching for me.
“You can’t be here,” she hisses, grabbing my shoulders and clamping down, hard enough that it hurts.
I try to pull away. Her grip is too strong, and she’s a witch, she’s a witch, I can’t have her touching me, I just can’t. She’s also my friend. I keep my voice level and ask, “Sophie. What’s going on?”
“You can’t be here, there are no ghosts here and you’re here, so you can’t be here.” She shakes her head, not letting go. “All the ghosts of Manhattan are gone. You’re alone, sweet specter, you’re alone, and you shouldn’t be. You shouldn’t be anything.”
“Let me go.”
“I can’t do that, can’t do that, they used me, you know, they used me like a pit bull, like a pigeon seeking crumbs, seeking, seeking, Sophie in the city, the city speaks to Sophie, follow her and she’ll find you what you need. I didn’t know. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” She grimaces, releasing my shoulders and stepping back. “There are no ghosts left here but you, Jenna, and you were always kind to me. Let me be kind to you now. Run, and don’t look back. Run. This city has anchor enough without you, but your own doesn’t.”
“Sophie, what do you mean?” If Brenda hadn’t already told me Sophie was a witch, I’d know: she’s touched me without time passing between us. More, I can see it. The city’s in her eyes, sidewalks stretching toward Chelsea, neon lights glittering like she’s Broadway-bound. “Where did the other ghosts go?”
“Never give their clothes away if you want the dead to haunt you,” she whispers, and turns, and runs, vanishing back into the maze of alleys. I could follow her, but I’d never catch her; she’s a street witch on her home ground. The city will hide her from me out of love, and never stop to consider that maybe it should love me, too. Disturbed and distressed, I walk faster, until the diner appears, until I see Brenda through the window, her fingers moving on the neck of her guitar.
This time, I don’t approach the counter, even though Marisol is on duty and smiles at the sight of me. I head straight for Brenda, sliding into the booth across from her, and demand, “What the hell is going on?”
“Hello to you, too, Jenna,” says Brenda. Her fingers etch a silent chord on the strings. “I suppose you got my message.”
“How did you even get my number?”
“I have my ways,” says Brenda. Then she grins, and says, “You work for a chain coffee shop. I called and said I was a district manager and I needed to verify some details of your employment to avoid fining the branch. I’m pretty sure they couldn’t have given me your number faster if they’d been beaming it telepathically into my mind.” Her smile dies. “I know it’s an invasion of your privacy. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been so important.”
“If the other ghosts hadn’t been missing.” It always feels a little odd to say things so baldly in the presence of the living. Never mind that most of them are paying less than no attention to the two of us, the older woman with her guitar and the gawky twentysomething who shows up every night for coffee and pie. We’re just part of the background noise, and all the talk in the world of ghosts and witches and hauntings won’t change that. No one believes in things like us anymore. There’s freedom in that.
There’s also sadness, deep and profound and undeniable. I come from a place where everyone knew everyone else, and where claiming to be a ghost in public would’ve had someone stopping by to have a talk with my Ma inside of the hour. It’s been a long time since I lived in Mill Hollow, but some things go deeper than breath. Some things go all the way to the memory of bone. This world, where most people come and go so quickly that they never realize how slowly I age, or that Brenda doesn’t age at all, this world isn’t mine, and it’s never going to be.
“If the other ghosts hadn’t been missing,” Brenda agrees. Her fingers sketch out one more silent chord on the neck of her guitar, and then, without fanfare, she sets the instrument aside. That’s enough to make me sit up straighter, the hairs on the back of my neck prickling as the skin tenses. Brenda never puts her guitar down. If she hadn’t told me about her connection to the corn, I would’ve thought that she was some sort of song witch. They’re usually fiddlers, but they can bond to any stringed instrument, if they pick it up early enough.
We sit in silence for a moment, me tense and pressed against the wall of the booth, Brenda empty-handed, fingers twitching slightly, like they don’t know what to do when they aren’t holding the guitar. Finally, she bows her head forward, hair falling to frame her face.
“I’m the oldest witch in this city, and I should have been watching more closely,” she says. Her voice is heavy with guilt. “Bill would be disappointed in me right now, and he’d be right to be. He always said I got distracted too easily, and I’d always tell him to mind his own damn business. Guess he’s minding his own business now.”
“Bill?” I ask—but really, I don’t need to. Women Brenda’s age, witches Brenda’s age, have to come from somewhere. Something drove her out of the sweet Indiana corn, where the magic came easy and the land knew her name, all the way to the towers of Manhattan, where the only corn comes in a can, or boiled down to cloying, syrupy sweetness. Brenda’s not a corn syrup woman. She’s a cornhusk crone, a Corn Jenny in jeans and lumpy sweater, and this is not where she belongs.
“Bill went to the corn about a year before I came here,” she says. She smiles, corner of her mouth twisting upward like an old tree root. “It was his time, and he walked in with his head held high. Said it was an easier exit than most get, going to the corn the way he did. He was a good man. We were together a long time.”
First Delia, now Brenda. Everyone mourns for someone. I just died too young to do my mourning for a lover, for a spouse, for a romantic love of my life who had to go while I stayed behind—or the other way around for Delia, I sup
pose. Sometimes I wonder if I didn’t get off light by dying when I did. It’s hard to weep for what you never had.
Brenda shakes her head, smile fading back into shadow. “He was right, though. I do get distracted too easily. I get wrapped up in a single stalk and forget to watch the field. I didn’t realize that the ghosts were going until the ghosts were gone.”
“We’re not all gone,” I protest. Then I frown. “Why did you go looking?” Brenda’s a witch. This could be a trap. Maybe she knows exactly why the ghosts are gone.
“Because Sophie was genuinely upset, and I wanted her to calm down enough to let me get her to a shelter for the night. It didn’t work—she slept under an overpass, but I think she might be safer there. The city won’t let her get hurt, and I had work to do. They’re gone, Jenna. Not just the ones you know. The ones who keep to themselves, the ones like you, they’re gone, too. Some of them have been haunting this city for centuries, and now they’re nowhere to be seen.”
I didn’t know anyone knew all the ghosts of New York. There’s no union, no government, no central authority that tells us what to do. I know there are some support groups Uptown, masquerading as grief counseling, where the dead gather and talk about how hard it is to keep their footing in a world that insists on changing all the time. Some people say there’s a vigilante in Chelsea, creeping down alleys and offloading hours onto muggers and thieves. I’ve always assumed that last was exaggerated, or Delia, or both. The fact remains that New York has a lot of ghosts. For all of them to be gone . . .
Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day Page 5