The Ghost Collector

by Allison Mills

  Grandma smiles at Estelle. “You take your time,” she says. “Go when you’re ready and let me know if you need help.”

  “Help!” Estelle scoffs and plants her hands on her hips. “I think I can figure out death on my own.”

  “You see?” Grandma says, leading Shelly and John away from Estelle’s grave. “Ghosts in places like this—they know their business most of the time.”

  “Are they always that rude?” Shelly asks, looking up at Grandma. Joseph was more interesting than John, who’s hooked on the ends of Grandma’s hair, and nicer than Estelle. Shelly would rather go back and talk to him more.

  “Not usually,” says Grandma. “She’s a special case.”

  “I’m sorry?” says John. “Ghosts? Did she say she was dead? Did she—” He pauses and raises his hands, peering at the way they’re slightly translucent. Shelly can see the grass and the graves on the other side of him plain as looking through a dirty window. “Oh,” he says. “I suppose she did.”

  Grandma looks at John. “Do you want to stay here?”

  “No,” he says. “No, I don’t think so. I think I want to go. I think I want— They say it’s the next great adventure. It’s a great mystery, isn’t it? That’s exciting. You know, it’s been a long time since I went somewhere new.”

  As they walk toward the cemetery gates, John leaves them—going wherever his next, new place is.

  “See? There are as many different kinds of ghosts as there are people,” says Grandma. “Nobody’s life is the same and nobody’s death is the same. That’s all it boils down to.”

  It feels bigger than that to Shelly. She knows ghosts, has talked and played with the dead, but whatever comes next, whatever’s after ghosts—that looms in her mind whenever someone like John Francis German moves on. Shelly can’t help wondering what it’s like, what’s really there, and why more people don’t stay behind.

  5

  The only cassette player Shelly knows of is the one in her mom’s car. Every time they go shopping at the thrift store, Shelly’s mom makes a point of looking for tapes, searching for something good. It should be easy to convince her mom to play Joseph’s tape, except that Joseph is a ghost and Shelly knows how her mom feels about ghosts.

  The next time they go out, just Shelly and her mother, Shelly takes the tape with her. It’s warm now—looks and feels just like any other tape, not like a gift from a ghost at all, but Shelly still doesn’t work up the courage to ask to play it before they reach the thrift store. Instead she stands there with the tape in her pocket and watches her mother sort through rows of Christmas albums and church music.

  “When I was your age I used to sit with my tape deck and record songs off the radio one by one,” her mother says. “I used to call in and request my favorite songs and hover over the tape deck to catch what I wanted when it got played.” She squints down at a tape with a picture of a lute on the front of the box then puts it back among the Christmas albums.

  “I might have to find a tape deck and start doing that again.” The thrift store keeps the box of tapes tucked away in the back corner of the shop and sells each tape for 25 cents. Cheap, because nobody wants them anymore. “Especially if your grandma keeps borrowing the good tapes and losing them.”

  After meeting Joseph at the graveyard, Shelly knows Grandma isn’t losing the tapes at all, but she doesn’t say so. Grandma and Shelly have ghost secrets, which is only fair, since Mom and Shelly have secrets, too.

  “Do you want to see if there’s any music you like?” Mom asks, stepping back from the box of tapes. “Or should we give up this week and go get lunch instead?”

  Joseph’s tape is a heavy presence against Shelly’s hip. “I’m okay,” she says. “Lunch sounds better.”

  “Thank God,” says her mom. “I’m starving.”

  • • •

  Lunch is Mom and Shelly’s secret because Grandma doesn’t believe in overcharging for ghosts or paying someone to make food for you. Zhou’s Family Restaurant—a Chinese restaurant that does burgers and fries as well as Szechuan American food—is beside the thrift store. When her mom’s having an especially good or an especially bad week, they’ll get milkshakes and split an order of french fries and sweet and sour pork.

  Zhou’s is always loud and busy on the weekends—full of families getting lunch and people placing takeout orders—but Shelly and her mom get a two-person table in the back corner of restaurant.

  They order their food and Shelly’s mom leans back in her chair. Her eyes are tired, but she smiles at Shelly anyway. “One day we’re going to have a nicer car. Then we won’t have to troll the thrift store for new tapes on the weekends. We’ll listen to whatever we want.”

  Shelly sees her opening and pulls Joseph’s tape out of her pocket. “Can we listen to this?” she asks, holding it out to her mother. “It’s new.”

  Her mother takes the tape and turns it over in her hands. “Where did you get it?” she asks. “Why this tape?”

  Shelly hesitates, but even if her mother doesn’t approve of ghosts, there are only so many places Shelly could have gotten a tape. Sometimes it’s easier to tell the truth. “One of Grandma’s friends gave it to me.”

  Mom looks up, eyebrows raised. “A dead friend?”

  Joseph is dead, and technically a dead friend is an accurate description, but it seems rude somehow to focus on the fact that he’s no longer alive. “His name is Joseph.”

  Shelly’s mom laughs and tucks the tape into her purse. “Joseph has a strong commitment to theme,” she says. “We can listen. I used to like The Cure.”

  Their milkshakes and food arrive, and Shelly picks up her chopsticks as her mother serves them both from the larger plate. Shelly’s never heard of The Cure before, but Joseph wears all black and sits in a graveyard—something even ghosts don’t normally do. “You like The Cure?”

  “I used to,” her mom says, picking up a fry. “When I was the age I’m guessing Joseph is—a teenager?” She waits for Shelly to nod then grins. “I thought so. I was like him, I bet. I had a lot of feelings. I listened to a lot of music.” She pauses. “I talked to a lot of ghosts.”

  Shelly doesn’t get to hear her mother talk about ghosts in a way that isn’t disapproving very often. “When?” she asks. “You never work with Grandma.”

  “There’s more to life than ghosts, Shelly,” she says. “They seem interesting, but most of them are broken reflections of who they were when they were alive. Most of them just need a chance to fade on their own. Besides, somebody needs a steady income in this family. There’s no telling what kind of magic people will want to see in a month—or a year. Banishing ghosts could go out of fashion.”

  “People are always going to die,” Shelly says, frowning. “There’ll never be a shortage of ghosts.”

  “True,” says her mom. “But that doesn’t mean we have to be the ones who deal with it. Some people deserve to be haunted—even if it’s by the cat of their house’s last owner. Sometimes the cat was there first.”

  Getting rid of a cat sounds like the kind of job Grandma would take. Shelly takes a sip of her milkshake. “Did you meet a cat ghost?”

  Shelly’s mom laughs. “Shelly, sweetheart, by the time I was your age I’d met so many cat ghosts.”

  In the car on the drive home from the restaurant, her mom slides Joseph’s cassette into the tape deck and fast-forwards through the first song straight to the second.

  The music is all jangly guitar, electric piano, and echoing, sorrowful voices. The singer only has pictures left to remember the person he loved and lost. The song sounds like a sad dance party. It’s hard to imagine her mom listening to this kind of music, but Shelly likes it. It’s . . . haunting.

  Shelly’s mom might not approve of ghosts or Shelly making friends with Joseph, but she turns the music up, singing slightly off-key. When the song finishes, she rewinds
it and starts teaching Shelly the words so she can sing along, too.

  6

  Two cops knock on their door while Shelly’s mom is at work. One of the cops is a stranger—a white guy with close-cropped blond hair—and the other is Jenny, Mrs. Potts’s daughter.

  “We could use your help down by the river, Louisa,” Jenny says. “It’d make this whole thing go a lot faster.” The police come to ask Grandma for help sometimes, off the books. Not often, and always with their hats in hand. Jenny’s partner looks like he can’t quite believe what they’re asking.

  Grandma looks Jenny and her partner over then nods. “Okay,” she says. “Shelly, get my coat and our bus passes.”

  “Should she be coming with us?” the other officer asks, looking uncomfortable as Shelly helps Grandma into her raincoat.

  “She helps me with the ghosts,” Grandma says, which doesn’t seem to reassure him.

  Shelly knows her mom wouldn’t let her go if she was home, but she keeps her mouth shut. Going to graveyards and fancy apartments is interesting, but sometimes the only reason Shelly goes with Grandma to deal with the ghosts of people’s pets is because it’s better than doing homework. This is a different sort of ghost work—this is exciting in a way that catching other ghosts isn’t. It’s more interesting. It means Grandma trusts Shelly to handle more difficult jobs.

  Shelly’s supposed to go watch a movie at Isabel’s today. This is better.

  “We can give you a ride,” says Jenny. “It’ll take a while to get to the river on the bus.”

  “In the back of your car?”

  Jenny pauses. “Well,” she says. “Yes.”

  “No thank you. We’ll meet you at the water,” Grandma says, her voice so firm that Jenny and her partner have no choice but to leave and drive away as Grandma and Shelly begin walking to the bus.

  “Never get in the back of a car with doors you can’t open,” Grandma tells Shelly, holding her hand as they make their way down the sidewalk. “You be polite to the police, but stay out of that car.”

  It’s a dreary day—gray and damp—and Shelly thinks it would be kind of cool to ride in a police car, even on a day when taking the bus didn’t mean wading through puddles, but she doesn’t say so. Grandma’s got a point about getting in cars with doors you can’t unlock.

  It takes longer to get to the river by bus than it does to get to the cemetery. When they get there, Jenny has a cardboard cup of tea for Grandma and a fancy hot chocolate for Shelly, which makes the long bus ride worth it.

  “We just need help finding him,” Jenny says, gesturing out at the river. It’s wide and deep and its murky water is deceptively sluggish. “It’d save us a lot of time if you can figure out where he ended up.”

  Grandma takes a sip of her tea, scanning the river’s edge. “We’ll see if he’s around,” she says. “I’ll give it a shot.” She hands her tea to Shelly and unbraids her hair, letting it hang loose around her shoulders. When she takes her tea back, Shelly starts to let her hair down, too, but Grandma stops her. “Just watch today,” she says. “Give me your hand, though. The ground’s slippery.”

  They walk up and down the banks of the river, the cops trailing after them. Grandma’s hair blows around her face, ready to pull up any ghosts that cross their path.

  The earth is soft and the mud sucks at Shelly’s feet. The hems of her pant legs get heavy with water and dirt. Shelly’s been to a lot of haunted places and seen a lot of ghosts, but this is more miserable than any haunted house. Her hot chocolate helps a little, but the drizzling rain and gray skies feel sad in a way hauntings don’t usually feel to Shelly. Maybe going to Isabel’s would have been better after all.

  It takes three passes along the river for Grandma to catch the ghost they’re looking for. His clothes are soaked, plastered to his body, and his shivering makes him shift in and out of focus. He doesn’t speak, but he keeps glancing over his shoulder toward a little outcrop of rocks jutting out into the water.

  “Ah,” Grandma says, nodding. She gestures the cops closer and points to the rocks. “He’s caught up in there. A nice young man with a red beard.”

  The cops wait until Shelly and Grandma leave to pull the body from the water, but the ghost comes home with them, wet and shivery even after the bus ride back to the house. He doesn’t seem to notice the change of scenery much, just stares into the middle distance and lets Grandma pull him along.

  “Do you want me to turn on the heater?” Shelly asks, when they get to the house.

  The ghost jumps and looks down at her. “Where did you come from?”

  “Leave him alone, Shelly,” Grandma says, unlocking the door. “We’ll feed him and send him off. He doesn’t need us confusing him even more.”

  “I don’t understand what happened,” the ghost says, bobbing into the kitchen in Grandma’s wake. “I was just standing by the water. I was just thinking.”

  Grandma pours the ghost a mug of milk and warms it in the microwave as he drifts around their kitchen, flickering in and out of focus. Shelly watches, fascinated. A ghost who is still deciding if he wants to stick around or not, a ghost this freshly formed, is new for her.

  “What’s your name?” Shelly asks because the cops hadn’t said.

  The ghost turns to face Shelly and gives her a distressed look. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know what happened. Do you know who I am? Do you know my name?”

  Grandma sets the mug of warm milk down on the kitchen table. “Here you go,” she says. “This will warm you up and then we’ll make sure you get where you’re going. We’ll help you get to where you’re supposed to be. That sounds nice, doesn’t it? Shelly, would you get the scissors from my sewing kit?”

  Shelly goes and gets the pair of small silver scissors.

  The ghost drinks from his mug of milk. His wet hair drips real water on the floor. He looks like he’ll never be fully dry, like if you tried to wring him out he’d twist and twist and the water would just keep coming. It’s probably why Grandma doesn’t want to keep him around long. Having a damp ghost haunting their house would be troublesome. Mom’s definitely going to notice the river water all over the kitchen.

  Grandma wraps a strand of hair around her ring finger and clips it off. By the time the milk is finished, the ghost is nearly gone, just a faint smudge in the air where once there was a man.

  “Where do they go?” Shelly asks, once he’s faded fully from view. Shelly has a lot of experience with animals and not a lot with people—definitely not with the ghosts of people Grandma pulled up from somewhere other than a graveyard. Seeing the river ghost leave, not knowing what’s next for him or who he was when he was alive, is unsettling. Shelly’s only seen human ghosts leave from graveyards before. What happens to ghosts when they move on isn’t the interesting part of ghosts to her, but now she can’t help wondering. The river ghost didn’t know where he was. How could he know where to go from here? “Where do we send them?”

  Grandma picks up the mug and refills it with milk. She sticks it in the microwave to heat it up for herself. “I think they’re going where they need to be.”

  Shelly frowns. “You don’t know?”

  “I don’t know everything about ghosts,” Grandma says, amused. “We’ll find out what comes next one day, but that day’s far off in the future. There’s no point worrying about it now.”

  Shelly looks at the empty chair and suppresses a shiver. Ghosts aren’t scary. Ghosts, she knows. The future is another thing entirely.

  • • •

  Mom comes home from work tired, her hair pulled up in a high, tight bun. The water from the ghost is gone, but there’s dirt smudged on the floor beneath his chair. Mom takes one look at the dirty linoleum and her exhaustion turns into annoyance.

  “Did you bring a ghost home?” she asks Grandma, like Shelly isn’t in the kitchen with them helping Grandma make spagh
etti for dinner.

  “We fed him some milk and sent him on his way,” Shelly says. “He wasn’t scary. Just confused.”

  “He moved on peacefully,” Grandma agrees. “He just needed some kindness before he left.”

  “You can’t bring the dead home with you,” Mom says. “Isn’t that what you taught me? Don’t let them linger.”

  “You’re misconstruing my lessons.” Grandma turns away from the onion she’s cutting to tear a sheet off the roll of paper towels sitting on the counter. “Shelly, here. Help your mother with the floor.”

  Shelly doesn’t take the sheet. She doesn’t want to be sucked into their argument. If she does, it’ll just lead to Mom lecturing her about ghosts again—about how she’s going to have bad dreams or how everyone at school is going to think she’s weird if she keeps playing with ghosts all the time.

  “It’s not about the floor,” Mom says. “You know it’s not about the floor.”

  “Sometimes people need help. Alive or dead. How do you say no if you can provide it for them?”

  “What people?” Mom asks, throwing her hands in the air. “What ghosts? I’m not saying you can’t help them, Mom. I’m saying don’t bring them into our house and don’t take Shelly with you when you go—don’t drag her along to deal with strange ghosts. You take all the jobs you want. Charge some money or ask for favors—do whatever you want, Mom. You’re an adult. But Shelly doesn’t need to grow up with ghosts in her hair and her head.”

  “I’m teaching Shelly the same things I taught you,” Grandma says. “She knows the rules. I don’t know why you’re so worried. The dead aren’t anything to be concerned about.”

  “I find them concerning!”

  Shelly slinks out of the kitchen to avoid the rest of the argument. She doesn’t want to get caught between her mom and her grandma. She knows her mom is just trying to look after her, but that doesn’t mean Shelly thinks she’s right, and she doesn’t want to say that to her face.

  Shelly knows where she stands with ghosts, even if her mother doesn’t like the work that Shelly and Grandma do. It’s important. Even if Shelly’s a little worried about where they’re sending ghosts to, the dead are just people. It’s like Grandma says—when someone needs your help, you give it.