by J. R. Rain
I’ve done my best to get in the spirit, honest. Shit, I guess you could say the spirit was already in me―literally. And more than ready to make a jailbreak. In honor of the fact that my baby-to-be used to be a rabbi in her past life, I tried to celebrate Hanukkah, too, you know, by lighting candles and memorizing an appropriate prayer or two in Hebrew to say when I lit them. But that only made me feel even lonelier.
I should be used to that by now. I’ve been stuck here at home on my own long enough, first on suspension with pay while my part in a shootout and multiple murder was being investigated by the Department’s tin collectors, and then on maternity leave when I started showing after having been raped by my ex. You know, the usual trailer park love-story-gone-wrong. Thing is, I’ve actually been missing my job as a police detective. My partner, Malena Ayon, has practically been living with me, true―and is planning to move in after the New Year and rent her condo out―but that’s basically meant I’ve been stuck playing “wifey” while she waltzes off to work, gets to solve interesting cases, and dates hot guys. While I get fat, sit around watching daytime TV, and eat a lot of ice cream out of the container. And then try to keep it down.
Which is no kind of life even for a zombie.
Okay, I’m being dramatic. And totally feeling sorry for myself. I’m not a zombie, exactly. I’m something called a mulo. That means I’m a dead, or technically an undead, person who’s been brought back to life by a magical gypsy spell. I know, I know…I don’t believe in all that occult garbage, either. Except for one little problem. It actually happened to me. And unlike a normal regular everyday zombie, like the kind you see on the Walking Dead, we mulos can get pregnant. And apparently do at the drop of a hat—or in this case, a pair of Ralph Lauren jeans.
His taste in clothes should have warned me. Not to mention his taste in other women…
So he’s out of the picture, knock on wood. Which means I’ve really got no one to help me figure out exactly what’s going on with my body right now. When you’ve got no heartbeat and you’re permanently stuck at room temperature, none of the normal rules of biology―or necrosis―seem to apply inside the womb. It baffles the hell out of my acting ob/gyn, who’s actually an ex-boyfriend named Harper and really a neurosurgeon. But he’s the only medical professional I can trust with my condition. Or my secret. Among the living, only he and my boss, Captain Quirk, know about my undead status, along with my soon-to-be ex-husband Devon who ratted me out to CNN, though nobody believed him. A voodoo mambo knows. A gypsy witch named Gana Kali knows. Heck, she helped cast the original spell. And Val, the father of my child, if he’s still alive and wasn’t burned to death in the shootout. My friend and housemate Tamara knew, but her soul now nestled asleep inside my big belly. I guess I’ll have to tell her again someday, because God knows what kind of problems she’s going to be born with. Even though she’s staying with me, Malena doesn’t know, and neither do my mom or her fifth husband, Dr. Sid. They’re currently off in a rented villa in Tuscany for the holidays, and Malena packed her bags and flew to El Paso to spend Christmas with her very large and loud and nosy and totally nice family. They invited me, too, but I just don’t dare be around that many people who might hug me. Not with my skin as cold as the grave.
Which meant I was all alone on Christmas Eve.
Well, not exactly completely, totally alone. For one thing, I have Kitty—and her constant if barely tolerated companion Sluggo the ghost-dog. And true confession time: I’ve kinda sorta been seeing somebody. Problem is, he isn’t like me, one of the undead. He’s dead, period—a ghost. I can only see him after dark, and I still had a very long grey afternoon to get through until then. Plus, he hadn’t been around much the last few nights, and I didn’t know if he had plans of his own. It’s hard to believe, but the dead party a lot more than us. It’s a cultural thing; they’re pretty old-fashioned. Some of them have been dead a long time and none of them have iPhones.
So I decided to go shopping.
But not for last-minute presents for other people. I’d given Mal hers already, a gift certificate at Victoria’s Secret―what else―and dropped off Mom’s (okay, also a Vicky’s gift certificate) and Sid’s. Not a Victoria’s Secret gift certificate, although that might have been funny. Or not. I didn’t go shopping for presents for the baby, either; I’d suffered through a couple of baby showers, one at work and one at my mother’s house which had been co-hosted by Malena―and which Devon’s current SO and future bride, his ex-wife, had attended. Awkward. Anyway, I was pretty well set for strollers, cribs, bottle sterilizers, a rocking chair, and of course the most important baby gift of all, scary anatomically correct life-like baby dolls.
No, I was going shopping for myself. And maybe a little for my kinda sorta boyfriend Wiley Fontenot. Problem was, what kind of present do you give a ghost? Especially one who was killed in World War One and has been dead for like a hundred years. I mean, fashions change, even in the Afterlife. Sending him a card was easy enough—I’d just burned it. I guess I could always give him the traditional cop gift of cash in an envelope, but I was burning through mine too fast already as it was, and touching the ghost-loot didn’t seem kosher… speaking of my gestating rabbi.
Which didn’t stop me from heading downtown on Christmas Eve. I pretended it was to look at the lights and the window displays, but I was kidding myself, of course. I was feeling stir-crazy and a little sad. The car radio didn’t help; it kept playing songs like Blue Christmas and Another Lonely Christmas. The weather was wet and unseasonably warm, and the Christmas tree lots empty of everything except brown pine needles and a few stumpy scrubs. Luckily, Mal had set me up with a tree before she took off. I parked and walked down North Main only to discover Macy’s and Nordstroms had barely even bothered with their windows this year. They all looked like Tokyo boutiques, not the North Pole.
There was still a Goldies in the business district downtown, the oldest department store in the city, so that was something. The usual mechanized Santa’s workshop was going on in the side windows facing 2nd Street, and a big electric railway carried the elves around in the front. Inside the store, Santa had a line of crying, jostling kids waiting to sit in his lap.
Goldies was just what everybody had always called the store. Its real name was Goldring & Peartree, and all the doors had five gold rings engraved on their glass. The Goldring family still owned it; if there had ever been a Mr. Peartree, he was long lost in the mists of time. This was the place I’d come every Christmas Eve as a kid to call dibsies on stuff I knew I was never gonna get because there was no way Mom could afford them. These days everything had a shabby look, and one of the escalators wasn’t working. The decorations looked faded and forlorn, like the leftovers from Christmas past. Because of the dankness of the day and the early dusk, more ghosts wandered the aisles of the big store than living, breathing customers. It occurred to me that this might be the last holiday season before Amazon put it out of business for good.
And not just the ghosts of dead customers; decades of dead fashions filled its racks and shelves to bursting. Maybe, I could find something for Wiley here.
“May I help you, ma’am?” one of the ghost salesgirls asked me. She was a slender, kind-looking African American with big round eyeglasses and her hair up in a bun with a pencil stuck through it. Guessing from her clothes, I’d have said she’d died back in the 40s or 50s; I’d read that old man Goldie was a famous civil rights innovator and employed a lot of persons of color in his stores when few did.
In waking life, I see the ghost world kind of like a skeletal greenish photo-negative superimposed over the “real” world. Same holds true of the dead spirits that populate it, though I can see and hear them more clearly. Which is eerie when they walk right through me—which tingles, but not always in a good way. Normally, it doesn’t occur to any of them that I can see them. Dead people aren’t the brightest of bulbs; but occasionally, I run into one who’s sharp enough to notice I inhabit both worlds at once. Like thi
s woman.
“Oh, thanks.” I keep my smartphone earbuds cord at my collar at all times so it looks like I’m talking to someone on it whenever I’m forced to have public conversations with the dead. “I’m looking for something for my boyfriend.”
“What kind of gift did you have in mind?” she asked, drifting closer. Then, “Excuse me, ma’am, but if you don’t mind me asking… what are you, exactly? You look like you’re made of meat—but still sort of dead like us at the same time. You can see me, right? And talk to me?”
“It’s complicated,” I told her. “I’m like a zombie. You know—like in the movies?”
“But the baby?”
I shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out soon enough. I may be alone for Christmas—but I have a premonition I won’t be on New Year’s Eve.”
I was tottering now and feeling kind of woozy, like I was about to pop any minute. I mean, how can any newbie like me know the difference between false contractions and real ones? However, it was beginning to dawn on me that I’d bitten off more than I could chew walking down here so far from my car. I felt a stab of fear and wondered if that was a real contraction. Or just my sciatica flaring up again.
“Oh please God, don’t let her drop that thing in here,” a floor manager said somewhere behind me. One of the living ones.
“Are you okay, ma’am?” asked the ghost saleslady anxiously.
“Just need some fresh air.” It was weird; I’d started breathing again since Tamara began gestating inside me. And regenerating new tissue; even the bullet wound over my heart had healed, though I’d always have a scar. Something was moving blood through my circulatory system, even though my heart still wasn’t beating.
The ghostly saleslady followed me out through the store’s main front doors. Once back out on the sidewalk, I leaned against a marble pillar under the big marquee. “I’m fine—thanks. But I should head back to my car. I’m thinking maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”
Silver Bells was playing from speakers hidden inside the plastic green wreaths atop the streetlamp posts.
“I’ll walk with you a ways; I can use a break. My name’s Dolores.” She pulled a pack of Kools from her purse and lit one.
“I’m Richelle.”
“Want one?”
I shook my head. “Somebody I used to know smoked that brand. I don’t know―I miss her sometimes. But I’m not supposed to smoke because of the baby.”
“Huh? Are they saying it’s bad for you now? How about that? Dr. Spock didn’t tell us to quit smoking. But things were different in my day, I guess.” We passed the last Barnes & Noble left in town. “How about buying your young man a book? No, maybe not. Books and cigarettes are the two things we got plenty of on this side—probably more of them here than on yours.”
“Good,” I said, “because I’d feel funny burning one.”
“Tell me, Richelle, you two ever talked over your childhood with each other? You know, all the things you really wanted when you were kids and could never have? Or maybe something you really loved but lost?”
I smiled. Wiley and I’d had a few long talks about ourselves. I’d gotten a little weepy one night over wine and told him all about Sizzle, my Beanie Baby bear, who was made of fire engine-red brushed terrycloth and who had been my main source of comfort as a little girl, to the point that one of his ears had been torn off. But Mom was always screwing the pooch with the various jobs and men in her life, and we were always having to pack up and move on, sometimes in the middle of the night. One time, we had a few weeks’ notice from the landlady before having to vacate from a seedy little bungalow on West Linden, and my mother decided we were going to make a completely new start.
To that end, she started burning things in the back yard, mostly the belongings of her last husband, but also a lot of other stuff that she said was “weighing us down.” Like a photograph album of her mother’s family. Like all my report cards and art work from my first five years at various elementary schools. And Sizzle the Bear. I think I probably hated her for burning him more than for almost anything else she ever did to me. Which is saying something.
But Wiley Fontenot, my handsome dead soldier, I told Dolores, had a happy childhood growing up in a Cajun family in Lafayette, Louisiana. He’d told me all about how they celebrated Christmas on the bayou, eating chicken gumbo and dancing until dawn on Christmas Day after lighting bonfires to guide the sleigh of Father Christmas and his sidekick, a sort of helper named Black Peter. It was when he was off fighting in France that Wiley spent his first holiday season away from his family, and he described to me the packages he’d gotten from them full of handkerchiefs and chocolates and socks and packs of cigarettes.
“Grandma even sent me a fruitcake in a big sealed tin,” he said. “Passed that around to the other boys and we all drank rotgut and sang Christmas songs, you know? Played them a few Cajun carols on my squeezebox. Picked that off a dead German—a Hohner Grand Imperial.”
“Well that’s it then,” said Dolores excitedly. “If your young man’s musical, we should get him something at the Berkeley!”
When we turned the corner onto Grand, I was amazed to find the Berkeley Music Shoppe still existed. It had been on life support back when I was in high school, about the time online MP3s started to decimate the CD racks; now their stock consisted mostly of used guitars, mixers, and amps, along with a few older instruments and a forlorn-looking drum set whose cymbal trap rattled noisily when I came in. Like Goldie’s, the place was filled with ghosts; I was the only living customer.
If you could call me that.
“Help you?” asked the bored kid at the counter. He was too busy swiping his phone screen to even look up at me.
“I’m interested in—” I started to say. There was sheet music stacked everywhere, but I suddenly realized that it was all ghost stuff, probably the result of some long-ago store fire. Not only that, but I didn’t have a clue what songs Wiley might like.
“Excuse me—Richelle?” said Dolores, plucking at my arm. “Didn’t you say your young man played the squeezebox? Well, there’s a real nice one for sale over here.”
She led me over to a table in the dustiest, darkest corner of the store that had a row of antique instruments on it, all arranged like corpses for their eBay photoshoot. One of them was a Hohner Imperial IV 60 bass accordion, according to the raised black letters on its reddish pearlwood casing, the same model Wiley had played a century ago in France. The coincidence seemed too big to ignore; problem was, so was the price. Its tag said $350.
“I can’t afford it,” I hissed at her. “Besides, how do I get it to him?”
“Don’t you have a fireplace? I bet this would burn real nice—these pleat things, what do you call them? The bellows? Well, they look to be made of some kind of cardboard and cheap leather. They’ll go right up. And the rest of it is mainly wood. Look, just go back up to the boy and offer him a hundred dollars for it. Tell him it’s Christmas Eve. Honestly—the prices you folks pay nowadays.”
The kid hemmed and hawed but finally said yes, pretty much maxing out my last usable credit card. So now I felt broke, relieved, and pissed at myself for having stupidly just bought the world’s most expensive firewood. And it wasn’t exactly easy hauling it back to my car, either; not in my “delicate condition”, as Dolores kept calling it.
“You going to be okay, sweetie?” she kept asking me anxiously. I was tottering along, my ankles and lower back on fire and probably looked like death warmed over. Which I literally was. “Let’s stop here.”
“Here” was the Nightbirds Diner, another relic from my childhood; my mom and I had come here whenever she had a big payday. Or managed to steal the price of lunch from one of the men who passed through our lives and her bed like it was a bus station. The joint still smelled exactly the same—they probably hadn’t mopped the floor or changed the grease in the fryer since my last visit, which had been a homicide in the alley behind it. A bunch of miserable-looking businessmen in
too-shiny suits mixed with the occasional homeless person lined the booths and stools now. Nobody was talking to each other except the ghosts.
“Looky here, it’s Dolores!” said one the moment we set foot inside. “Long time no see.”
“Oh hello, Mr. Taylor. I thought you’d be up at the big store.” Mr. Taylor was a huge older black man with gold front teeth wearing a homburg and what I imagined a “zoot suit” might look like.
“Too many memories. Besides, I’m not wanted there anymore. You know how it is—they’ve changed everything around in there since the fire.”
“Say, this is my new friend, Richelle. She’s got one foot in Shadytown and the other in Sunnyside. I never seen anything like it.”
“Me neither!” said Mr. Taylor. “Baxter, Lil, come here a minute. Meet Richelle, she’s a live one, all right. Expecting a baby but dead like us. Doesn’t that beat all?” Baxter and Lil were white—though distinctions like that are meaningless among the shades—and looked a little like Abbot and Costello, if you can imagine Lou Costello in a blonde wig and a dress. And too much lipstick.
We all said hi, and they ordered me a ghostly hot chocolate with “a shot of something” in it. Their talk got loud and boisterous. It was one of those nights of the year when there seemed to be a lot more life among the dearly departed than those left behind in the land of the living. And a lot more drinking. Mr. Taylor, who seemed to have a little thing for Dolores, invited her along “for a toot”, but she said she hated to leave me, since I wasn’t feeling well.
“I want to keep an eye on her,” she told him and his friends. “What with her feeling so funny tonight of all nights. What if she, you know, has to go to the hospital?”
Not that a ghost was going to be much use in that situation, but that didn’t stop them all from crowding into my Toyota and coming home with me. Then, while Dolores and I incinerated the Hohner in the abandoned back yard grill my ex-husband Devon had insisted on buying but had only used once before he became a vegan, Mr. Taylor and his buddies must have gotten busy on the old ghost phone (most houses have them), because by the time we went back inside, there were about a dozen newcomers crammed into my living room, all rapidly getting “boozed up”, as Dolores said. In addition to several cases of champagne and Johnny Walker, somebody had also brought along a portable Victrola, and they were listening to carols played by jazz bands and jitterbugging. Which, noisy and irritating as it was, was still an improvement over my last Christmas Eve, which I’d spent listening to Devon play his Mannheim Steamroller and whale sounds CDs and explain to me for the hundredth time that Jesus didn’t exist and so neither did the holiday we were celebrating.
