Being Dead

by Vivian Vande Velde

  "I work here," she told him. She sat down on the nearest chair, to prove to him that she was as substantial as he was. "How did you get here?"

  The boy—John—thought about that for a moment "I don't know," he said vaguely, glancing around the room as though it wasn't at all familiar. Then he looked straight at her and repeated, "I don't know. What is this place?"

  Haunting—and he didn't even know where? "The Ballston Spa Tavern."

  "Ballston Spa..." He pulled around the chair he'd been holding and straddled it, feeing her, close enough to ... to touch. He folded his arms over the back of the chair. "I'm from Watervliet," he said. "Well, not exactly the town. My family has a farm. How did I get to be in Ballston Spa?"

  She shook her head hopelessly. He looked so confused, so vulnerable. "Ballston Spa's not that far from Watervliet," she offered. She didn't have the heart to tell him that the tavern was no longer in Ballston Spa but had been transported by truck and relocated halfway across the state.

  "A day away," he said, and it still would be, if you traveled by horse today. Then, more to himself, "How did I lose a whole day?"

  Distressed, Emily put her hand to her mouth, then saw that John was watching her every move. She folded her hands on the table in front of her.

  Never taking his eyes away from hers, John reached across the table.

  She saw that his hands were clean, even under the nails. The fingers were long and slender, though the palms were somewhat calloused. She could see all those details. And then again she felt the cold, the almost tangible ... something ... as his hand passed through hers.

  John wrapped his arms around the chair back. "I think," he said, without looking directly at her, "that I may have died."

  And what could she answer to that?

  Maybe this was nature's way of telling her to stop feeling sorry for herself. At least she wasn't dead yet. At least she wasn't dead and just finding out about it.

  "What day is today?" he asked.

  "October twenty-four," she answered, and he closed his eyes. She hesitated, then finished: "In the year two thousand."

  His lips moved slightly, as though he might have whispered a prayer or an oath. Or maybe he was doing the math. Not that it would have required math to see that he was at least two centuries away from home. Then he looked at her again, swallowed hard, and said, "Well. I guess the chances were always pretty good that I'd die before two thousand."

  Don't, she mentally begged him. Don't be like that "What..." She had to clear her throat and start again. "What is the last date you ... remember?"

  "April." Again he was the one who looked away. "April thirtieth, seventeen seventy-five."

  That was after the battles of Lexington and Concord. Too bad that by the time she had started working here, she wasn't taking American history anymore. She finally had all the dates and details down cold. Had there been fighting that early at Watervliet? He was probably a soldier, killed in the first days of the American Revolution. Should she tell him? She swallowed hard and asked, "And the last thing you remember, were you in Watervliet? At the form?"

  "Yes. No." He appeared to have suddenly noticed that his breath left no trail of vapor in the chill air as did hers. He held his palm a few inches from his mouth and breathed into it. Seeing her watching him, he got up abruptly, scraping the chair across the slats of the wooden floor. "I don't remember." Absently he rubbed the base of his collarbone, showing above the open neck of his shirt. "It almost seems—"

  The tavern door rattled, then someone banged on it "Yo!" Norm's voice called. "Emily. Still in there?"

  Emily had instinctively turned at the noise, but when she looked back, she was alone in the room. It had gotten quite dark, with only the candles on the mantel, though so gradually that she hadn't noticed. She should confide in Norm, she thought who was her parents' age but more sensible. Instead she said, "In a minute, Norm." She whispered, "John?" and peered into the comers, though she knew that wasn't where he had gone. How sad, she thought. How very, very sad.

  "Emily" Norm called, "no overtime for winter hours."

  Which was a joke because—like most of them—she was a volunteer and didn't get paid at all.

  "Right," she said. She pulled her shawl tight around her shoulders as she fumbled with the door latch, her fingers clumsy with the cold. She hadn't noticed that, either.

  At home Emily started to tell her parents about what had happened—several times she started, then couldn't find the right words. Finally she blurted it out as they sat watching some inane game show on TV. The TV was always on lately. Nobody liked the silence anymore. In the middle of the game's final round, Emily said, "I met a ghost today."

  She saw her mother stiffen, but her father went for playing it light. "Oh, yes?" he asked. "Worked the Octagon House?" The Octagon House was the only building in the museum reported to be haunted—and those reports were seriously frowned upon by the management. Still, those who worked there insisted that tools would disappear only to be located elsewhere the following day. Emily had always found it hard to understand why someone would cross the boundary between life and death just to borrow a carpenter's plumb or to play hide-and-seek with Eunice Goungo's reading glasses.

  "I was at the tavern," she told him. She'd been assigned there regularly since summer.

  "Ah! More and more interesting. Some bold pirate, come to dig up his treasure from under the barroom floor?" He ran his fingers up and down her arm to simulate goose bumps.

  She didn't like being tickled. Hadn't since she'd been about five. Surely after all these years he must have noticed. But in many ways both her parents seemed to be trying to go back to the more carefree time of her early childhood, presenting her with gifts of stuffed animals and talking to her as though she were barely able to reason. She folded her arms across her chest "Pirates in Ballston Spa?" she asked.

  "Hmm. Maybe a more recent ghost. Got it. That old lady who choked on the cider last month. She only seemed to recover but went home and died." Emily's mother looked ready to strangle him, but he was apparently oblivious. He finished, "And now she's come back to haunt you because it's all your fault."

  "Not funny," her mother said from between clenched teeth. Did she think she was a ventriloquist, Emily wondered, and that they wouldn't be able to guess who had spoken even though there were only the three of them in the room?

  "It wasn't a little old lady," Emily said. "It was a young man from seventeen seventy-five."

  "Can't be that young," her father reasoned. "If he's from seventeen seventy-five, he's got to be at least two hundred and twenty-five years old."

  "He only looked about seventeen or eighteen," Emily said.

  Her mother got up and walked out of the room.

  "What?" her father called after his wife.

  "Unresolved issues," Emily said. Unresolved issues was one of the support group's favorite terms. She got up, too, but headed in the opposite direction.

  "What'd I say?" her father called after her.

  On TV the people from the show were waving to the camera as the closing music played.

  "I never know what to say anymore," her father complained to the screen.

  Winter hours—what the staff at Seneca Valley Museum called winter hours—were actually fall and spring hours: 9:30 to 4:30, Saturdays and Sundays only. There were no real winter hours because after the Harvest Festival on the last weekend in October, the museum locked its doors until mid-April.

  Emily had met her ghost the second to the last Sunday in October.

  What difference does that make? she asked herself. But it did make a difference.

  Monday morning, after her parents had left for work and before her school bus came, she tried calling out to John Mellender, but he didn't come. He must somehow be linked with the tavern, she reasoned—even if he hadn't recognized that tavern or known why he was there. She had hoped that someone who could travel freely through time would have no difficulty with the five-mile journey between
the museum and her home. How awful, she thought, to be so young and dead. But she'd met kids who were younger who were going to be dead soon. She was going to be dead soon. How awful, she amended her thought, to be so young and lost and frightened and alone. To be dead and not even know how.

  But there was more to it than that.

  She didn't talk to anybody at school about what had happened at the museum. She hadn't told any of them about her illness, and she no longer talked to them about anything important—if she ever had. And if she'd ever been close to any of them before, she couldn't remember it They were background noise, like the TV. They didn't avoid her; they included her in their conversations, but more and more she found herself losing track of what they were saying. The first many times that this happened, somebody would laughingly catch her up on what she'd missed. But then the laughter stopped. And lately they just talked around her. So, these were not the people to confide in, to tell about seeing a ghost.

  After school, despite telling herself several times that she was being foolish, she rode her bicycle to the museum. It was locked, of course, as she had known it would be. But she stood in the deserted parking lot and called John Mellender's name. She waited, her hands jammed into the pockets of her sweater as the wind pushed against her back, whipping her hair—the hair she was fortunate she hadn't lost to chemo—about her face. Bright orange pamphlets from the museum flapped against the fence, along with leaves, which had lost all their gay colors and were now just brown and brittle debris. Dead. Dead leaves.

  When she got cold enough, she got on her bike and pedaled the long way home.

  Saturday morning Emily hoped to get to the museum village early, to give herself extra time before she had to open the tavern. But her mother wanted to talk.

  "Is everything all right, Em?" "Em" was her nickname back from when she'd called herself that as a baby, too little to get her mouth around the syllables of Emily. She'd been asking her parents since fourth grade to call her Emily, and they'd been pretty good about it until recently, when they reverted.

  "Yeah," Emily said. "Fine."

  "You just seem so ... quiet ... lately. Your father and I are worried."

  "I'm fine," Emily repeated.

  "You seem to be taking more of your pain medication."

  Emily shrugged. It was just a headache. But—because of where the tumor was—her mother wouldn't believe it was just a headache.

  Her mother said, "Because any time you want to talk..."

  Emily let the unfinished sentence hang there. What could talking solve?

  "Do you want to talk?" her mother asked.

  "I want to get to work on time," Emily said.

  Then, because her mother looked crushed by the rejection, Emily added, "It's good therapy for me."

  Her mother brightened at that. Support group was all for not feeling sorry for yourself. "Just don't work too hard," she said. "Don't let yourself get worn-out."

  In the end, by the time her mother dropped her off in front of the administration building, she was even slightly later than usual. Emily fairly flew down the path, past the Old-Fashioned Sweet Shoppe, around the gazebo, through the covered toll bridge, past the blacksmith shop and the apothecary, to the Ballston Spa Tavern. She slammed the door behind her and called, "John, are you there?"

  The air shimmered, and she was so relieved she forgot herself: She went to hug him.

  John stepped back, and only her arm passed coldly through his arm. "What's happened?" he asked. "What's wrong?"

  Her arm was numb to the elbow with the cold, and she stood rubbing it, having been brought up short. "I ... was just happy to see you."

  His aloofness dissolved into a smile. "I'm happy to see you too, Emily."

  She said, "I kept thinking about you all week, worrying about you."

  The smile faltered. "All ... week?"

  "Since the last time you were here."

  "It's been a week?"

  Emily nodded. She could see him accept what she said without understanding why it should be so. "John," she asked, and her voice quivered, "where are you when you're not here?"

  He considered, then shook his head.

  "Why did you come here?"

  "You called me," he told her.

  "The first time."

  Again he paused to consider. He repeated, more slowly, "You called me." He sat in one of the chairs and rested his elbows on the table. "I ... heard you crying..."

  "While you were at your farm?" she prompted.

  "Yes. No. I don't know where I was. I heard you crying and..." He looked at her quizzically. "I knew ... somehow ... that you were thinking of taking your life."

  That was a cold draft up Emily's back, colder even than seeing John disappear that first time. It had been a thought. On and off, when the world closed in on her, when she tired of fighting a battle she knew she could never win—it had been a thought. Rarely verbalized, certainly never acted upon, always there as an option: Wouldn't it be easier now rather than later?

  He must have been able to tell from her face that he hadn't been wrong. "And," he continued, "I thought: She can't do that. She doesn't..." He blinked, then finished in a very small voice. "She doesn't know what it's like to be dead."

  Emily sat down at the same table. Heavily. Not yet, she could have said. I don't know yet. Instead, she asked, "You remember now? Being dead? Dying?"

  "No." He rubbed his arms as though cold. "Don't die, Emily," he said.

  "Everybody dies eventually," she said. She ached with die realization that she couldn't take his hand. He could touch his own chest, the furniture, everything but her. "It's just..." She couldn't say it. She was starting to cry again, and she sniffled, angry with herself. "Ifs just so pointless."

  John reached to wipe the tears, and the touch felt like an ice cube on her cheek. He snatched his hand back in obvious frustration.

  Someone tapped at the still-closed shutter. "Ssst, Emily," Mary hissed. "Drake's coming. Better get a move on."

  John stood, with that scared look, but didn't disappear.

  Emily got rid of her own tears. "Yes. Almost ready," she lied. How could she have forgotten the Harvest Festival? Hayrides in the meadow, minuteman maneuvers on the green, apple bobbing in the town square. All sorts of extra programs. Lots of visitors before the closedown for the season. Mr. Drake would be semihysterical all weekend and breathing down everybody's neck.

  They could hear Mary's footsteps hurrying down the path as she continued on her way.

  "Right," John said to Emily. "What needs doing?"

  "Mugs out," Emily said, "cider poured, shutters opened ... Oh, damn!" She'd nearly tripped over a box that one of the workers had brought in some time before she arrived.

  John had already gone behind the bar and was getting the mugs. "What?"

  "Snickerdoodles."

  He gave her a blank look.

  "They're these colonial cookies—"

  "I know what they are," he said, sounding exasperated.

  "I'm supposed to make some." She started pulling supplies out of the box: ingredients, bowls, cooking utensils. The cider was provided year-round; the snickerdoodles only for special occasions, like Harvest Festival Weekend.

  "This is an inn," John objected.

  "Yes, but we don't have a license from New York State to serve alcohol, so we serve cider and snickerdoodles instead."

  "'New York State'?" he repeated in amazement.

  She shook her head, indicating there was no time to explain, and started measuring out the sugar.

  John opened the shutters, started the cider heating, and tossed a handful of cinnamon onto the fire, which made the tavern smell as though she'd been baking for an hour. She smiled at him, and he blew her a kiss.

  A moment later, as the first tourist started to push open the door, he was gone.

  "Why are the people who come here dressed so oddly?" John asked.

  Emily, who was just closing the door behind the day's last sightseers
, jumped.

  "I'm sorry," he said, seeing her startle. He went to put his hand on her shoulder, then yanked it away as cold seeped between them. "I'm sorry," he said again. Getting that panicked look in his eyes. Again.

  "It's all right," she assured him, though she imagined this was what advanced frostbite felt like, and she had to work to keep the pain off her face. Doubly so now. Her head had been throbbing all afternoon from the stress of cooking, and answering the same questions over and over, and remembering to smile. "John. It's all right." She had to fight her own inclination to offer a comforting hand. "John, I want to try something." She opened the tavern door. "Can you leave this building?"

  "I don't know." He went out onto the stoop. Then, looking back at her, he stepped onto the gravel.

  Almost giddy with relief, Emily followed; and they started down the walkway, which circled the commons, away from the dark woods whose shadows grew longer daily with the approach of winter.

  John shook his head in amazement. "It's so changed. These buildings weren't here."

  That was encouraging. "I thought you couldn't remember the Ballston Spa Tavern."

  "I"—he realized what he was saying—"can't." He got that faraway look he sometimes did, as though he was listening to internal voices, or was on the verge of remembering something. "No," he said, slowly. "I do. Samuel..."

  "Who?"

  Finally he met her eyes again. "My brother, Samuel, and I. We came to Ballston Spa to deliver a horse my father had sold to a man named Darius Bartlett. Why couldn't I remember that before?"

  "I don't know," Emily said. "Did you deliver the horse?"

  He thought about it "Yes "

  "And then what?"

  Again the hesitation. But this time John shook his head.

  "Did you meet Bardett at the tavern?"

  Just when she was about to give up, he said, "No. At his house."

  Robbery? she wondered. Had Bardett killed him for die horse? She asked, "Did he—"

  "We left the house," John interrupted her, but he was speaking slowly again, as though having trouble reconstructing what had happened.