Black Wave

by Devon Glenn

  Whether it was the housekeeper coming in for turndown service or someone from the spa wanting him to start his training didn’t really matter. Whatever they saw would likely get back to Emily’s parents.

  “I’d better go,” Emily whispered, and then scampered up the brick staircase, through the trapdoor, and out of the room.

  Elerick opened the door to find his aunt Indra and her gaggle of friends crowding the hallway wearing matching sweatshirts. The three of them had worked with his mother at the FEMA office in New York City, and they were also part of her running group on the weekends. He had known for weeks that they would be staying at the Black Wave to train for a race, but he thought they would call before showing up at his door.

  “I’d have called first, but I think your phone is off. It went straight to voice mail.” Indra’s eyes watered at the sight of her nephew’s irritated face. “How are you holding up?”

  Elerick knew exactly what his aunt was getting at—it was the anniversary of his mother’s death and the first time he had seen Indra since the funeral. He could tell by Indra’s outstretched arms that he was about to be comforted. Resigned to his fate, he allowed her to pull him into an awkward hug while her two friends patted him on the back. This is so, so comforting, he thought. Really comforting. Yep, still comforting.

  “Hey, does anyone want to take a walk outside?” he suggested, extracting himself from his aunt’s embrace. The conversation he was about to have with her required at least three feet of personal space.

  “We just finished a run,” one of the women piped up.

  “And now you can walk it off,” Elerick said. He shut the door behind him and bounded down the hall, leaving his aunt and her friends to scurry after him.

  Elerick and Indra walked side by side, with the other two women trailing behind them as they made their way to the beach.

  “You know, my friend in accounting told me that a new position opened up at In Lieu of Flowers,” Indra said, her voice jumping in time with her steps. “It’s not too late to come back and fight the good fight.”

  Elerick sighed and stopped walking. He crossed his arms and waited for Indra to provide a reason why he should go back to a job that required him to fight disease with hashtags instead of, you know, medicine or something.

  “It’s not a community management position,” she said, throwing her hands up in defense. “Don’t shoot.”

  “Look, I miss my mom and I want to beat cancer. I just feel like I’m better at giving massages than telling people how to use the internet.”

  “Are you sure? They have great benefits at this company.”

  “I like my job,” Elerick said firmly, “and I’m going to like doing it in Cape May even more.” It was true. The days went by in a blur of muscles and freckles and scented oils and contented sighs. He never had to check his phone or sit through meetings. His day ended when the timer went off. The worst thing that had ever happened to him was a bad review on Yelp—“my masseur, Elerick, seemed irritated that I had used a Groupon”—and even that was buried by other reviews within a week.

  Indra either wasn’t listening or she didn’t like what she had just heard, because she dropped her smile and raised her voice. “I just don’t see why you went off to help a bunch of rich ladies get their Eat, Pray, Love moment on a luxury ship rather than staying in your own community and helping poor people with cancer.”

  Elerick bristled. “I didn’t do it for the rich ladies,” he argued. “I’m the one who wanted an Eat, Pray, Love moment. I wanted to travel the world and eat too much pasta and have an epiphany.”

  Indra pressed her lips together. She tipped her head from one side to the other as if she were weighing his arguments against hers in her mind. “Well, did you have an epiphany?”

  Elerick sighed. “It was cool seeing my cousins. But no, not really.”

  “When you get to be my age, you’ll wish you’d given more of yourself to the people who need it most—the people who deserve it most,” Indra said. “Your cousins liked seeing you, too—I have no doubt about that. But these cancer patients still need you. Our health-care system can’t cover all their costs; they have no money and no voice. You’ve already been through what they’re going through now. You can articulate their needs to the people with the resources to do something about it.”

  Elerick opened his mouth to argue once more, but Indra waved him off with her hand. “Just think about it,” she said.

  CHAPTER 24

  Sons and daughters

  Elerick loved living in the hotel where he worked. His commute was exactly two flights of stairs, and when he came home, he found that his room was already clean. Like, sparkling clean. The bed was made, the trash cans were emptied, the toilet never had the chance to build up a mystery ring of filth like his bowl at home, and when he looked out the window, he could see the ocean. With nothing to straighten, disinfect, or toss into the garbage, Elerick’s to-do list was all checked.

  He opened his mother’s laptop to upload the rest of her photos to her Orbies profile, and he immediately regretted it. Within twenty-four hours of switching out his picture with hers, Katherine’s memorial page had turned into a disco ball of tiny mirrors projecting the desires, fears, and milestones of his mother’s friends and relatives onto a wall of shared emotional turmoil.

  Most recently, Indra had posted a picture of herself handing a ceremonial check to Elerick’s old boss at Orbies. “This one’s for you, Kath!” she wrote. Beneath the photo was a link to Orbies’ charity arm, In Lieu of Flowers, which Indra had used to raise thousands of dollars to erect a memorial gumball machine in the park where Katherine used to run. The gumball machine had its own Orbies profile, and “it” posted updates whenever it was refilled: #pink #getthemwhileyoucan #grateful #runforlife.

  Elerick minimized the window and wished that he could somehow minimize his aunt’s zeal. There was nothing pink or cute or fun about cancer. He knew that Indra meant well, but he was tired of being reminded of his loss.

  Inside his mother’s photo gallery, Elerick discovered that his mom had documented her post-chemo head in various stages of undress as she let her brown locks fall on the floor at the hair salon, slipped a silk stocking over the exposed skin, and then tucked it all under a wig to create the illusion that she was still a healthy woman with a sensible bob.

  The intimacy of the pictures made Elerick squirm—they were too personal for him to post—and he knew he would have to skip the next collection of photos, which was marked mastectomy. He scrolled down to the nearest folder that was dated in one of the comparatively calm years after she went into remission but before her relapse.

  There he found several pictures of Katherine standing at the finish line of the New York City Marathon. She was blurry from the waist down, where she was marching in place to prevent cramps in legs that had just run 26.2 miles. Elerick had taken the same picture multiple times, hoping that he’d be able to get a clear shot with his flimsy camera phone. But Katherine didn’t care; she said that if she wanted to be caught—even on camera—she wouldn’t be running. Elerick selected the thumbnail to upload the image. This was a memory that wouldn’t reanimate Katherine’s corpse to haunt his dreams; this was a warm, living memory that Elerick could share.

  When he returned to Orbies, he found a new message in Katherine’s inbox. He looked at the sender. That couldn’t be right. It was from Katherine herself. Elerick tried to remember whether he had given Indra the password to Katherine’s account. He didn’t think he had, so the account must have been hacked. He opened the message fully expecting a link to a porn site or a solicitation for a money transfer, but what he found was far worse.

  He clicked on the link.

  Want to Live Longer? Have Daughters!

  Mothers who have daughters live longer than those who have sons, researchers in Finland have found, especially when daughters are the primary
caretakers when their mothers are ill.

  “It’s simple. When your daughter walks into your home, she notices the dust bunnies under your couch and offers to clean. She sees that you’re out of breath when you climb the stairs, and she calls your doctor to change your medication. She brings you soup and warm socks,” says Geneva Lockheed, an expert on aging who was not affiliated with the study.

  “When your son comes to visit, he might change a light bulb or take out the trash if you ask nicely, but if you don’t have a home-cooked meal to offer him, he’s on to the next house…”

  Elerick couldn’t bring himself to read the rest of the story. On some basic level, he knew that the article was ridiculous in its reinforcement of gender stereotypes. The expert’s credentials were dubious, he couldn’t find a link to the study she mentioned, and the headline had clearly been engineered to start a war in the comments.

  But the contents of the article were already going viral in his mind: Elerick was off to his crazy place, and he wasn’t coming back anytime soon. Never once while his mother was ill did he bring her soup or warm socks. He didn’t talk to her doctor about alternative treatments. He had assumed that she would tell him if she needed something more.

  The only time Elerick had talked to the doctor at all was on the day that Katherine was lying in her hospital bed, woven into her nest of tubes, and the doctor told him that the machines were merely prolonging the inevitable. He should say goodbye now before it was too late. Elerick sat in the plastic chair next to her bed, too numb to speak, and listened to the steady rhythm of the EKG machine. It sounded too steady. His mom was always running, her heartbeat elevating as she scaled a hill and recovering when she stopped, panting and dripping sweat, to stretch her calves with her feet propped against the curb. The woman in the bed with the sunken eyes and the balding, patchy head was not the mother he knew. It wasn’t long before Katherine’s heartbeat fell flat, her face void of expression. Elerick knew her spirit had left the room long before her heart stopped beating, but it didn’t lessen the pain when the doctor and nurses rushed in to pronounce her dead.

  Maybe if he had done all the caretaker things that the article had suggested, she would have lived to retire early and run a marathon in every major city like she planned. Instead, he had taken her at her word when she told him that her doctors were optimistic and that he should stay in New York. He called her once a month or so, out of the blue, to ask if she’d seen some stupid movie, or to tell her that he’d probably be late to Thanksgiving. Elerick called himself a healer, but when the time came to put his skills to the test, he had missed out on the two most basic tenets of caring for other people: being present and paying attention. When his mother’s cancer had come back after years in remission, it had come to take her away, and he’d ignored all the signs.

  His shame spiral complete, Elerick logged out of Orbies. He was going on a technology hiatus. Elerick snapped his laptop shut, turned off his desk lamp, and headed downstairs to the bar.

  CHAPTER 25

  Pillbox, teddy, brooch

  Emily braced herself for her first Happy Hour at the Black Wave Beach Hotel, where Joan had put her in charge of entertaining the guests with quickie channeling sessions with the ghosts of the house. “Haunted Happy Hour” read the pamphlet.

  At the bed-and-breakfast where Emily had spent her childhood, this meant her mother would take a break and drink wine while the ghosts fed Emily lyrics of old drinking songs and liquor prices in the nineteenth century to recite to a room full of mostly elderly couples who were hard of hearing. Emily loved it. Somewhere among the bifocals and gray heads she usually found a kindred spirit who could show her the future if only she asked the right questions.

  At the Black Wave, though, she didn’t know what to expect from her visitors—living or dead. “What brings you to Cape May this holiday season?” Emily asked the first gentleman to flash her a smile.

  “Oh, just got through visiting with my grandchildren and thought I’d sneak out for a drink,” the man replied.

  “You’ve come to the right place. But just to warn you: this happy hour is haunted!” It was a line she’d rehearsed a hundred times, and it came out sounding every bit as cheesy as she’d hoped.

  The old man reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. Emily was surprised to see the Orbies logo lit up on the screen. “I saw that you invited the girls from the Queen’s Hotel,” he said. “Did any of them show up?”

  The other painted ladies of Cape May lived on the third floor of what used to be an apothecary. “They might pay a visit to the Haunted Happy Hour,” Emily said, “but it’ll cost you to talk to them.”

  “Shoot,” the man replied. “Is there a senior discount?”

  In seconds, a heavily rouged woman appeared at his shoulder and reached in his pocket to check the contents of his wallet. He shivered at her touch, unaware that he had just encountered his first ghost. “Nope,” Emily said. She had the goods, and the dead woman at the old man’s side nodded to Emily that he could afford them.

  The old man scrunched up his nose. “I’ll give you a pill from my pillbox.”

  “I don’t think I should be taking your heart medication.”

  “Just because I’m old, doesn’t mean my heart is broken,” he said. She was guessing about the heart medication, and she had guessed wrong. Also, she had offended him. “I would have had a lot of fun with this when I was your age,” he added, jostling the pill in his palm.

  Emily looked at the man who stood in front of her more carefully. He wasn’t leaning on a cane or wagging a finger at the kids on his lawn. He was just hanging out, waiting for something interesting to happen. Emily held out her hand and accepted the mystery pill. It felt insignificant in her palm, but taking prescription drugs from a senior citizen was about as much excitement as she could hope for now that her letter of admission had been rescinded and she was sentenced to a whole semester (or more) at home. She would take what she could get. Emily placed the pill in her pocket and turned to the sex worker—who said her name was Goldie—for instructions.

  “I didn’t have access to treatment back then,” Goldie told Emily. “For me, it was a numbers game.” She showed Emily flashes of her life bringing men from a secret entrance to the third floor of her house, which had an apothecary on the first floor. When she eventually got pregnant, she was lucky that the father, who was one of her longtime customers, had come to carry her suitcases down the stairs and take her out of town. “It’ll happen,” she said. “In the meantime, just enjoy.”

  Emily relayed the message to her enraptured client, whose eyes watered at the word enjoy. He held up his glass. “I might get to be a father again.”

  “How old is the mother-to-be?” Emily tried not to second-guess her sources in the middle of the reading—there were some things that didn’t translate well between the Other Side and Earth—but come on, the guy was already a grandfather.

  “She just turned forty,” he said with pride.

  And there it was. Emily, the product of a May-December romance, hadn’t seen her future tonight; she had relived the story of her birth. “My dad’s a lot older than my mom,” she told him. “I survived.”

  He laughed. “But did your dad?”

  “Oh yeah. He’s walking around here somewhere. Definitely not an orb yet.”

  “Well, if I end up with a kid as sassy as you, she’ll keep me smiling in my old age.” He addressed the blank space where he thought Goldie might be standing: “How about a picture?” Goldie leaned in close to him while Emily lifted the camera and pressed the button.

  The man took his phone back eagerly, and he gasped when he saw the picture. Next to his head, a glowing orb had appeared. He clicked on the orb to tag it, and as he entered the first few letters, Goldie’s name popped up, linking her orb to another photo of her at the hotel where she had last been seen. “That’s Goldie?” he asked.
r />   “Yeah,” said Emily. “That’s her.”

  The old man smiled. “How many ghosts did you invite tonight?”

  Emily blinked. “A lot.”

  “This should be quite the party.”

  As the night went on, the lounge swelled with visitors. The patrons tossed their scarves on the coat rack and took their seats at the bar: a single slab of natural wood showing all its knots and jagged bark contrasted with a set of barstools that were made for ample butts. On the other side of the room, even more guests filled the enormous leather armchairs arranged in front of a roaring fireplace. The orbs had taken over the ether: next to the fireplace, a Civil War reenactor who had died of a heart attack was chatting up a Civil War veteran who had been shot in the heart; at the bar, an eighteenth-century farmer was reading over a guest’s shoulder, chuckling at the words farm to table; at the coat rack, a pickpocket was lifting car keys and coin purses from coat pockets and dropping them on the floor. Cape May was never as crowded in the winter as it was in the summer. But thanks to Orbies, summer vacation had come a few months early.

  In the crowd, Emily spotted a pair of thick-rimmed glasses and a head full of youthful dark hair duck in through the main entrance and grab a table alone. Sadie. Thank God. Emily walked over to her table and took the empty seat.

  “Welcome to Haunted Happy Hour,” Emily said as if Sadie were just another tourist. “Can I bring you one of our authentic Victorian ales? Maybe introduce you to a dead person?” She knew she could count on Sadie to act blown away by her powers convincingly enough to dissuade the other bar patrons from interrupting her reading.

  Sadie smiled. “Sure, why not?” she said, playing along for the sake of the blue-haired couple who had looked over at her with interest. “I’ll have ye olde light beer, and then I’d like to talk to whoever was rattling my dresser drawers last night.”