Sometime, Somewhere

by Kalyn Fogarty

  Looking back, the signs were there. Wren had been looking a little pale, but I reasoned that maybe the morning sickness had returned. I’ve never been pregnant, so I have no idea what’s normal. This is the first time an ambulance has ever been called. Usually Jimmy loads her into his SUV and takes her himself. Whatever is wrong with her must be bad this time.

  James insists we follow them to the hospital. I’m pretty sure he wants to sneak into the ambulance alongside them, but I have absolutely no intention of subjecting myself to that horror. In fact, I want to stay safe and sound in the nursery and pretend like nothing is wrong. The last few months I’ve been happier than ever. Even happier than when I was alive. This makes me think I was never happy. All the other things—successful, motivated, ambitious—I mistook for happiness.

  Since landing in this limbo, I’ve been in the master bedroom only three times. In my mind, it’s a private place, not appropriate for haunting, which would basically be no better than peeping. I hated people in my personal spaces when I was alive. I doubt Wren and Jimmy would appreciate a ghost—or two—roaming around their most intimate things. But tonight when Wren cries out in her sleep, my James rushes right to that bedroom. Poof, gone. He is in the middle of a sentence when he disappears and gone before I can blink.

  I could be mad. Maybe I’m jealous. I’m trying to be neither. Wren is some version of me, so my envy is convoluted, more complicated than I can conceive. James leaves, and I let him go. I wait on the rocker for him to return, but then he doesn’t. Against my best judgment, I follow him to the bedroom.

  Blood is everywhere. The comforter and sheets are soaked red with bright, hot, angry blood. No way cancer caused this. This is so much worse. I feel sick to my stomach, a strange sensation in my current form, like a dry nausea similar to how I felt after I’d puked for twenty minutes straight and had nothing left inside. Now I don’t have anything inside me, but there’s some chemical reaction responding to the scene before me. In high school, right after the abortion, I had nightmares for weeks and would wake up feeling this specific way. All these sensations come flooding back to me at once. If I were alive, I’d faint. Instead, I fall through time and space. Right onto the couch in the living room.

  James finds me and insists I come with him to the hospital. Now we’re in the waiting room, sitting on an ugly baby-blue sofa that would definitely be uncomfortable if my ass could feel anything. My weightless and invisible head is resting in my weightless and invisible hands, mourning for what I know Wren lost today. I don’t like her, but I feel her pain. Pity her and empathize the way any woman who has carried a baby inside her might. My experience was not the same, but I still remember my heart being ripped in pieces when I terminated my pregnancy, and at the time I could not have a baby and didn’t want one. I can’t imagine having a much-desired pregnancy end so violently. A small part of me feels guilty. It’s a crazy idea, but could this be my fault, some part of our crazy linked fate? My baby’s loss tied to her own, mine taken by me and hers taken from her?

  “Can we go someplace quiet?” I ask James. He hovers back and forth between the waiting room and Wren’s exam room. Her room is in the maternity ward, and I think its cruel they admitted her here. Babies cry from nearby rooms. It’s enough to make any sane woman who lost a baby go crazy.

  James looks down at me as though he’s forgotten I’m here. “Sure, yeah, fine,” he agrees, but he’s distracted. I wonder if he’s in love with her. Again, I’m confused at how this should make me feel. Angry? He loved a girl like me once, so it makes sense he would love her. It means he probably loves me too.

  He casts a quick glance at the closed door before following me down the hall. Finding a quiet place isn’t easy. We pass a nursery filled with pink- and blue-swaddled babies. Nurses are chitchatting at the front desk; one files her nails while another flips through Cosmopolitan. Must be a slow night for babies. Wren was the only big distraction, and now they’re back to the routine tasks.

  We find a utility closet tucked between the bathrooms and the elevators. Closets have always been my thing, even before I was a ghost. It started when I was a little girl pretending to be hiding out in a cave, make-believing that our kitchen pantry was a hidey-hole in the wild. I never had many toys and even fewer friends, so my games revolved around the worlds I created from my closet. I suppose I read too many fantasy books, because I secretly hoped that one day I’d find a doorway into another world inside my own wardrobe. As I got older and more aware of the cursing and fighting happening in my house, I hid in the closet among my clothes, comforted by the way the hanging shirts muffled the yelling and cocooned me in relative safety.

  “So, this sucks,” I say, eager to break the silence. James is on edge, ready to bolt. It must be how I look to him most of the time. In Wren’s bedroom I couldn’t smell the blood-soaked comforter, but I can smell James now. It’s a mix of sweat and copper, the bitter smell of fear and blood, an animalistic panic. A waft of this scent hits me hard. When you’ve spent so much time without this sensation, it’s easy to be overwhelmed.

  “Tell me about it,” he agrees. We are surrounded by brooms and mops and various cleaning detergents, but I can’t smell the bleach or the lemon antiseptic, only him.

  “It’s all my fault,” I whisper. He doesn’t respond but lifts his eyebrows, urging me on. “Do you ever think what if?”

  “Sure,” he says. He moves his foot so he’s touching mine. That small gesture makes me feel better.

  “I think about it all the time. I can’t stop thinking about it. After all we’ve witnessed with Jimmy and Wren, I wonder if we could have changed things back when we were alive.” I pause, shaking my head, my thoughts bouncing around wildly without a tether for me to latch on to. “I don’t know where I’m going with this. Do you ever think about it?”

  “Of course. But I don’t think our lives made much difference to theirs,” he says, sadly. “I think we could’ve changed our own, obviously. Not theirs.”

  I know what he says is true, but I want to believe it could have been different for them. I want to believe that in some time, they have a happy ending.

  “I had an abortion,” I say, the first time I’ve admitted this to anyone aside from a medical professional. I never even told my own James, although the words were on the tip of my tongue until I ended it with him. I wonder how it would’ve been different if I’d had the courage to utter this truth. “I got pregnant when I was seventeen. My James was the father.” This has been sitting like a stone in my gut for so long it feels good to finally purge, to share the load.

  I wait for James to say something, anything. He makes a little noise, and the hairs on the back of my neck rise, bristle like a dog’s.

  “What’s that?” I mimic his noise. “What do you mean by that?”

  He shrugs. “I guess it makes sense, that’s all.” He frowns, his hazel eyes full of something I can’t put a name to but don’t like at all. “That’s why you hate her so much.”

  This isn’t the reaction I expected. Definitely not the response I desperately need. Sympathy and compassion would have been appropriate. Not this judgment. I brace myself to run, to wish myself back to my spot in the closet, to lock myself in false solitude and pretend I’d never run into this other ghost in the first place.

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” I hiss, standing above him. “I hate her because she’s ruining Jimmy’s life. Look at him—he’s dying on the inside, and she keeps crying for a baby.”

  “It’s not your fault, Karen,” he says from his seat on the ground. “Your abortion has nothing to do with Wren’s miscarriage. There is no link.”

  I sink back to the floor, the weight of this statement pulling me down. “What if I told Jimmy about the baby? What if I didn’t have the abortion and we stayed together? He’d be a teenager by now, getting his driver’s license and starting to date. All these what ifs and all that was lost drive me crazy. We could’ve been a family of our own. In some ot
her life, there could be this whole happy little family. I ruined it,” I say, precariously close to tears. “I ruined my own happy ending, and I’m worried my choice had some awful ripple effect that ruined all the chances.” I blink back the tears and bite my cheek hard enough to draw blood.

  He reaches his arms around my body and pulls me close, touching his forehead to mine. “None of that’s true. You made the best decision for you at the time. You were a teenager in an impossible position. Don’t punish yourself for what this Wren and Jimmy are going through. It’s a different life they’re living.”

  I know he’s right, but it still stings. I nestle myself closer to him, relishing in his strength and the comfort of just being held. Still, I’m embarrassed by the tears I can’t stop from falling.

  “I never even told him,” I say, shaking my head. “He was a good guy. He would have done the right thing. I’m sure we’d have gotten married and raised the baby. His parents loved me, never blamed me for ruining his life. But it wouldn’t have been easy. My gymnastics career would have been over, and that’s why I did it. Because I wouldn’t be able to tumble and compete anymore,” I say, all the self-loathing and hatred coloring my cheeks and my words. All the shame in my selfish reasoning finally comes out in the open. “I still never made it to the Olympics anyway. Fate wasn’t on my side. I’ve decided I have cancer in all my lives. I’m pretty sure that’s always in my cards. But I could have survived it. I could’ve had the stupid hysterectomy, and in some life I might have had a happily-ever-after.” The sadness of it all is so heavy it threatens to crush me, even if I’m weightless in this afterlife.

  “Where’s the Jimmy you left behind?” James asks, his fingertips brushing through my hair. My Jimmy did the same thing. He was obsessed with playing with my hair and always hated when it was pulled back, insisting it was too pretty for a ponytail.

  “Last I heard, he had a wife and kids,” I say, closing my eyes against another memory of the boy I used to love but failing. “I called him right before I killed myself.” This is not a pleasant memory. I wish I had blacked out, but I cringe as I remember the sound of his wife’s voice when she answered the phone. “I drunk-dialed him, and his wife picked up. Kids were yelling in the background,” I say, letting out a bitter laugh. “I hadn’t spoken to him in years. We ran into each other after college, but it didn’t go anywhere. He asked me out to dinner, and I said no because I was busy dating some asshole gymnastics coach who promised me the Olympics. I wonder what could have been if I said yes that night.”

  We sit in silence, each reliving the choices we made that have led us to this moment. Someplace nearby, Wren and Jimmy are facing their own challenges, their own choices, but I don’t care anymore. There’s nothing I can do to change it for them.

  “But you didn’t,” James says, lifting his eyes to mine. “You didn’t say yes to Jimmy that night. You said no to the date, to the baby, to a future with him. This is your fate,” he says, gesturing to the room.

  “Talking to a dead guy in a utility closet?” I joke, attempting a smile.

  “You know what I mean. This is your fate. I am your fate,” he says, taking my hand and lifting it to his lips and kissing my knuckles. “Maybe you did find the person you were meant to be with. This is our happily-ever-after.”

  The space in the closet isn’t big enough for both of us. His smell, his touch, it’s too much. I fall.

  ***

  “Karen?” James calls. He must be close, since I can hear him. “Come out, please. Stop running away from me.”

  I didn’t mean to run away. Sometimes I can’t stop it. One second I was in the closet, the next back in the nursery.

  The sun is beginning to rise, casting a beautiful orange light through the big bay window. A new day, a new start.

  “In here,” I yell back to him. I consider what he said before I hurtled through space. Maybe he’s right.

  He floats into the room. The sun shines directly on him and he radiates light. Like a ghost, I think.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, before I can speak. “I didn’t mean to pressure you.”

  “No, I’m sorry.” I look out the window. “I’m sorry I’m so crazy,” I say, laughing a little. “Are you sure you want to risk taking me as your eternal soul mate?”

  His eyes sparkle, the same eyes I’ve looked into hundreds of times in the past and dreamed about for years after. Those hazel eyes are the same as my Jimmy’s were, but the look he gives me now is all James. In a split second I make up my mind to trust him. Maybe he was a jerk in his life, but here and now, he’s different. Better. I believe he’s changed, because I’ve changed too. Now I’m someone who wants to be loved. I can say yes now. For years I said no, both when I was alive and then after. I intend to make up for lost time. I’m finally getting a chance at joy and refuse to acknowledge the irony of how it’s now happening only after I’m dead.

  “Only if you’re willing to risk your eternal soul on me,” he says, pulling me toward him. I stand up on my tiptoes and kiss him, softly at first and then harder. I don’t know if it’s the rising sun or some trick of the light, but the room seems to be on fire.

  44

  James

  After

  December 2006

  “My Karen died a few years ago, my time.” We sit in the dark among the stuffed animal. Even though we spend almost all our time here, it hasn’t lost its creepy factor. All these happy woodland creatures eternally hopping along the wall seems at odds with the sadness in the room. The emptiness of the crib is spooky. It’s missing the gigging baby, cooing and reaching toward the ever-still mobile hanging from the side. When I used to come in here alone, I felt nothing. Now that I’m with Karen, I get the chills each time we enter. But she likes it here, so here we are.

  “You told me,” she says, her eyes locked on a lone teddy bear hanging off the edge of the rocking chair. Neither of us can make it right, and we wait for it to finally drop to the rug.

  “I wonder if she is stuck somewhere like us,” I muse. I lay my hand on her shoulder, and she turns to face me. “As a ghost.”

  She frowns, the little lines at the corner of each eye wrinkling. “Maybe. Would you like that?”

  There’s still so much about this life after death that I don’t understand that I’m unsure if I would wish it on anyone else. My ghostness has felt like both a curse and a blessing, depending on the day. I wonder why I’m here, why I exist in this way at all, and I’m not sure I’ll ever have the answer. It’s hard for me to comprehend why I’m haunting this specific life rather than my own. If I were creeping around my old apartment and stalking ex-girlfriends and my parents, it might make a bit more sense. But I’m haunting this me who isn’t me, and just when I think I’ve figured out the why of the situation, I’m hit with more questions.

  Karen, for instance. Now that she’s popped into my realm, I think that perhaps this is a gift I’ve been given as opposed to punishment, which was my initial reaction. She’s my second chance. I can’t change my old life, I can’t change Wren and Jimmy’s life, but I can change this after life.

  “Truthfully? I don’t know.” I lie back on the rug. I can almost imagine the feeling of the soft fibers against my skin. “I guess it depends on the reason why we became ghosts in the first place.”

  “We have unfinished business, obviously,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Isn’t that what we were told when we were alive?”

  Unfinished business. That’s the common mythology surrounding ghosts. I think of my life, all my own unfinished business. My biggest regret is never living up to my potential. Dad used to lecture me on this regularly, and I tended to ignore his remarks, but now I see he was right all along. I was a shitty boyfriend, first to Karen and then to countless young women I pretended to care about and treated like garbage when it mattered most. My parents might argue I was a terrible son. When they were grieving the death of my sister, I up and left, seeing their sadness over June as an affront to their love for me.
Even my job wasn’t fulfilling. I spent my days fighting for the rights of ex-spouses who were hell-bent on screwing over their ex–other half, whether they deserved it or not.

  When I look back at my life, I see a lot of nice things. Lots of money, an apartment with a view, a fast car, and a vacation house in the country. But I didn’t have the things that were truly important. There was no love in my life. My happiness was dependent on material goods, and I kept seeking more, more, more, to fill the hole and never felt satisfied. Overall, there was a whole lot left unfinished in my so-called life.

  “I was a bad person,” I admit. “I could’ve been so much better. But I lived my life selfishly. I only ever lived for me.” I wait, afraid of Karen’s reaction to my honest words. I’m not sure how she hasn’t decided for herself that I’m not a nice guy. I feel compelled to warn her.

  She bites her cheek and shrugs. “Isn’t that true about everyone? I worked my ass off so I could be an Olympic star. I gave up my entire life for this goal—everything. But looking back now, I don’t think I even wanted it all that much. I just wanted something. I wanted to be great.”

  We sit in silence for a moment, both contemplating all the what ifs and could’ve/should’ves that have led us to this moment.

  Suddenly the nursery is stifling, the air too thick with truth. “Let’s go outside,” I suggest. “It’s a beautiful night.”

  “Not that we can tell,” Karen teases. Cold, warm, rain or shine, we can’t feel the difference.

  In an instant, we’re next to each other at the picnic table in the backyard. A light flurry has just started, the first snow of the season. Just in time for Christmas.