by Rae Renzi
Today it was still mine, but for how much longer? The letter said I had two months. If I were prudent, I would sell the house to pay off the debt and knock down my medical school loans, too. I could find a cheap apartment. I could live frugally until I got my license and became established. That was what I should do.
I got out of the car, went into the house, took a deep, comforting breath, and dropped my jacket and bag on the overstuffed sofa. “Craig? Are you here?”
Within seconds he appeared in the doorway. He still wore his favorite sweater and jeans, a combination that highlighted his broad shoulders and long legs. His skin glowed like moonstone, and his hair was onyx-black. It took no imagination at all to cast him as a dark and sensuous angel.
Fortunately, a lopsided smile appeared on his face, saving me from his perfection. “Hi there. You’re late getting home. Rough day?”
I must have been exhausted, because I stepped toward Craig for a hug, longing to lay my head on his shoulder, to feel his arms warm and snug around me, to hear him tell me everything would be fine. He held out his arms helplessly, and I stopped before I walked right through him. We stood there facing each other awkwardly for a long moment.
His face fell. “Joy, I wish…”
But what could he say that hadn’t been said before?
“I think I need something to eat,” I said, and turned to the kitchen.
Craig sat on the edge of the kitchen table while I made an omelet and chopped salad. The kitchen was small but efficient. Almost like a ship’s galley, with a place for everything and everything in its place. Including my boyfriend and a mason jar filled with daisies I’d picked from the garden.
“You look tired,” he said. He never looked tired. He always looked perfect. It wasn’t fair.
“Today was… demanding. But good. Lots of dead bodies, so it was all good.” That didn’t come out quite right. “Which isn’t good, in general, but—”
Craig grinned. “—it is good for business. Maybe Tranquility Park is turning around.”
“I hope so. I’ll have enough trouble saving the house if I keep my job. If Tranquility Park fails, there’s no hope whatsoever.” I chopped down hard on a head of lettuce with a sharp knife. Whack! Cut it right in two.
Craig was silent. Whether from sympathy or from lack of, I didn’t know. I mean, why would a ghost care about a house? He hadn’t lived here when he was alive, but now, this was the only place we were ever alone, the only place we still shared that vital part of our relationship. I still wasn’t sure what he called home, but maybe it was here.
“So, the corpses gave you a hard time today?” Craig finally asked.
“Not the corpses—their evacuees, and certain other not-entirely-helpful Departed persons, whose names I will not mention.”
He flicked his eyebrows and smiled impishly. “Hmmm…”
“Who was that girl, anyway? The one who wasn’t the corpse I was working on.”
“No one special. She was just passing through. I saw her in the Between.”
The Between is a concept difficult for me to grasp. According to Craig, it’s not the Hereafter, but neither is it the mortal world. He describes it as a kind of spiritual airport, with a waiting room that’s both intimate and infinite.
I put my dinner on the table, careful not to put it in Craig.
He stood to give me more room, and the table wobbled. Craig stared at it as if it had bitten him, a frown on his face. “The table moved when I stood up.”
“Not a problem.” Many things about this day had felt beyond my control; a wobbly table leg did not.
“It’s a problem.” He seemed oddly upset—unlike him.
“No, really. I can fix this.” I snagged a piece of junk mail off the counter and crawled under the table.
When I pushed the folded envelope under the errant table leg, the table still rocked, so I pulled it out and folded it again.
“I’ve been thinking a pet might be nice,” I called to him from under the table.
He didn’t answer.
“A cat, for instance. They’re clean and trouble-free. Intelligent.”
Craig still didn’t comment. I poked my head above the table. He was gone.
Puzzled by his odd behavior, I went back to my task and apparent soliloquy. “They purr when stroked and are warm and fuzzy and always around.” A characteristic that seemed especially salient at the moment.
When I tried it again, the folded paper wedged nicely under the table leg. Satisfied, I stood and pressed down on the afflicted corner. It remained stable. I dusted off my hands, pulled up my chair, and resumed eating my dinner. Alone.
Cats were a little short on the tail-wagging, face-licking unconditional love of the average dog, but I could manage that. After all, I managed with a disembodied boyfriend. More than managed, actually. I loved him with all my heart.
It was just… I yearned for someone to touch. Other than a corpse.
Chapter 7
Craig shimmered into the Between to make sure he still could. The silvery gray landscape, free from the buildings and artifacts of mortals, free from anything but the spirits of natural entities, was reassuring—he was still a spirit.
But the table had wobbled.
That shouldn’t have happened. He should have no substance to influence gravity one way or another.
Had it been a little harder this time to breach the dimensions? Had his translation from the mortal world into this spiritual way-station taken longer than usual?
Maybe he had imagined the lag.
He wandered for a moment or two, threading between the deep luminous spirits of trees, the pulsing glow of dogs and cats, the myriad opalescent sparks of insects, and, of course, the changeable radiance of other humans, who varied from densely lustrous to wispy. As he ambled along, he tried to recall other incidents that hinted he was turning Revenant. The idea was repugnant.
He’d occasionally seen these melancholy souls moving in the mortal world, spirits who could not relinquish the material, who, little by little, had managed to accrete substance until they were no longer purely spiritual, though not mortal, either. They wore their material form like a clay shell. They were shunned by other spirits and feared—rightfully so—by mortals. Even animals found Revenants repulsive. Most of them went crazy from the need to have contact with other beings and in their craziness, did desperate, sometimes evil, things.
Craig examined his hand, turning it this way and that. Was he collecting molecules of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and all those other trace elements that combined to make matter?
When he died, a few tenacious rogue molecules had stuck with him, giving him the tiniest bit of mass, so that he’d occasionally been able to interact with the material world in a minor way. It was the same for most newly Departed, but it soon faded when the molecules, finally recognizing that their host was no longer of the earthly domain, detached and went about their material business.
But, now—the table had wobbled.
It hadn’t been a passing breeze, and Joy hadn’t touched the table. It hadn’t been the result of an earthquake or the rumble of a large truck passing by. No, it had been him. He had made the table wobble. Was he reverting? Maybe he’d been here so long that he had become part of the solid-matter cycle, where molecules migrated from one object to another endlessly and boundaries were merely differences in density. Had he taken on some marker of the material world, so bits of matter mistook him as belonging to the world of substance and stuck to him, weaving together to create ever more mass until he finally became horribly solid but never alive? Would he wander around miserable and desperate, terrorizing those he loved?
No. Wasn’t going to happen. He needed to talk to Joy and soon. Somehow, he would find a way to move on. Somehow, he had to make Joy feel safe so she could let him go. Because the alternative was unthinkable.
Chapter 8
Marybob’s perky triple rap sounded at the front door. I had just finished washing the dishes (w
ithout the benefit of Craig’s company), after giving in to my genetic imprinting about food and social events and whipping up a batch of cookies to serve to the guests. Guest.
I opened the door. Marybob swept in wearing jeans, high-heeled shoes, and a T-shirt so tight the overstrained clasps on her bra straps showed through. The shirt was emblazoned with the encouragement Spoil Me picked out in rhinestones. She was followed by Luke and Ruby, each of whom I’d invited because they were exactly the point, and Harold Heckenkamp, an older gentleman who’d joined the ranks of the Departed months ago, leaving alone his wife of forty years.
Craig was also invited, of course, and he manifested in the living room as they entered. I wondered where he’d gone earlier but didn’t ask. When he’d died, I’d wanted things to go on just as before, no secrets between us, and so forth. He, however, had a different idea, one I didn’t even now fully grasp, which he summed up as “not making assumptions.”
“We need to get this show on the road. I got a date in an hour. Are those your yummy chocolate-chip-and-hot-pepper cookies?” Marybob sniffed the air and eyed the serving tray. The question was obviously rhetorical. She snatched a cookie and took a bite. “How can something so weird be so good?” she asked around a mouthful as the others settled in. “Hot and sweet—hey, that’s it! It’s like sex.”
Now, I don’t want to give the impression that all Marybob thinks about is sex. She just happens to exude sexuality, which in turn causes people to treat her like a fertility goddess, which in turn causes her to meet their expectations. It’s a vicious cycle.
The living room of my place was relatively large, given the size of the house, with high ceilings and large windows adding to the feeling of roominess. Still, with six bodies—whether they were solid or not, they occupied space—it was crowded.
Of course, Marybob was not affected. At least, not consciously. But I noticed that after she grabbed another cookie, she went directly to the single unoccupied chair, as if she could see the Departed. She couldn’t, obviously, but I did wonder, not for the first time, if her senses picked up a faint signal of some kind from them.
“Thank you all for coming,” I said. “I asked you here to invite you to be a part of a terrific project. I think you’ll like it.”
Marybob surveyed the seemingly empty room. “Oh, jeez. Everyone’s here? Can you, like, slap an X on them or something?”
Luke snickered and, after a moment of fumbling, confirmed my suspicion of his physicality when he managed to pick up a cookie and hold it in front of Marybob, childishly waving it back and forth so it seemed to be floating in front of her face. I’m sure he thought it was tantalizing.
I’m sorry to say that apparently he was correct. Marybob snatched it out of his hand, and, matching his immaturity, stuck her tongue out in his general direction. Which was interesting—how did she know it was Luke? Of course, it was Marybob. She’d stick her tongue out at anyone.
“Shall we get down to business?” Craig suggested, sounding a little edgier than usual.
“Right,” I said. “Marybob, even if the Departed were solid enough to paint an X on, seeing a blob of paint wouldn’t help, since you can’t hear our friends talk. I’ll repeat anything you need to know.”
“At least tell me who’s here.” She narrowed her eyes in Luke’s general direction. “I know Luke’s here, but who else?”
I introduced the others. Marybob attempted to shake their hands with predictable results. Except for Luke. She smacked him on the side of the head—or rather, through the side of the head, more or less.
I flipped through my notebook to find my notes. “As you all know, there’s a bottleneck in getting you Departed out of the mortal world and into the spiritual plane. It seems like you’re tied here by your love and sense of responsibility to those special people you’ve left behind. If I understand the situation, you want to move on, but you can’t until they get over their grief. Is that about right?”
The Departed in the room indicated agreement in their various ways. Marybob did too, which I interpreted as a remnant of her cheerleading days.
“So. One way to help them recover is to get them to fall in love. Right?” No one disagreed. The look of relief on their faces was answer enough, especially for Luke, who had (female) adolescent passion to contend with coupled with (male) adolescent cluelessness.
I beamed around at everyone. “Well, here is the answer!” I held up the Moroccan leather-bound folio—unused—given to me by Grandma Kit on my last birthday.
I encountered only blank looks. “This is a book of new beginnings, a fountain of hope.” I smiled around the room encouragingly. I was rewarded with a few vague smiles.
“It looks like a photo album to me,” Marybob said. “Uh, do ghosts even show up in pictures?”
“It’s a repurposed photo album, and pictures are not the point. This”—I waggled the album at them—“is the key to our respective problems.”
“Sounds good. Happy to get rid of our problems. Still not clear on how that book’s going to help,” Ruby said.
For all their etherealness, the Departed were, at times, agonizingly concrete. I cleared my throat and tried again.
“I propose we start a dating service for the Bereaved to help them de-attach from you and re-attach to someone else. This will help you Departed move along. We’ll call it the Dearly Departed Dating Service.”
Chapter 9
Craig watched the proceedings quietly and with rising optimism. Joy’s idea was interesting. It had never occurred to him that recovering from the death of a loved one could be hurried along by the replacement of affection. Much better than the withdrawal of the same. Certainly, time alone hadn’t worked well in his and Joy’s case, but he guessed the adage Time heals all wasn’t coined by someone who could interact with the dead. Nope, that would be a different adage.
Joy hated dealing with money. She would rather think about people or ideas or other things, like art or beauty, or love, of course. All of which were vague notions, difficult to get a handle on. But now she was motivated to think practically. Money couldn’t bring back her family, but it could save her home. Could this work in his favor?
He’d made a mistake in not telling her earlier the hazards of lingering in the earthly plane, but he hadn’t realized it himself for a long while—there was no beginner’s guide to being dead, no Charon-like figure waiting to spell it all out. And nothing as simple as a coin for the ferryman would usher him into the next world. No, the Afterlife, or truly gaining it, was just as complex as life itself. No one told you that, though, and by the time he’d figured it out, he’d also realized that Joy, despite her nature, had been hammered by life once too often. Losing him might shatter her altogether.
But if this idea of hers worked… it might give her strength. And insight.
The Departed were talking animatedly about the project, sharing various ideas among themselves.
Marybob, Joy’s interesting choice of a best friend, cleared her throat. “We need to talk about the financial arrangements.”
“Money?” Luke asked. “We don’t really care about money.”
Joy’s cheeks turned pink. “Well, yes, moving the Departed along is our primary goal, but we—I—need money, too. And so does Marybob.” The pink flush on her cheeks crawled up to her hairline.
“Darn straight about that.” Marybob looked around vaguely. “You all might be past all this earthly delight stuff, but we working gals gotta put food on the table and pay the rent, so cowboy up.”
Joy glanced around the room at us. “But don’t worry, we’re mostly here to help the Departed depart.”
More to the point, to help the Bereaved recover, Craig thought. If making money eased that path, then he’d do all he could. Especially for one very special Bereaved.
Marybob dusted her hands together. “Yeah, sure. That’s good. But money’s the real bottom line here. You need it, I need it, and the Departed, well, you say they want to move on? Then this is
the price. Shouldn’t be too hard to get the Bereaved to ante up. Just have to play it right.”
Luke dropped the cookie. “What if the person—the Bereaved—doesn’t have a lot of money?”
“Don’t worry,” Joy said to Luke, although her words did little to erase the concern from his face.
“Not worried,” Marybob said.
Neither was Craig. At least, not about money.
Chapter 10
“A hundred dollars a pop should do it.” Marybob obviously had not needed much convincing about the dating service. She yanked a pen and petite notebook from her purse to jot down notes.
“A hundred dollars? That’s, like, a lot of money,” Luke said.
Marybob, not party to Luke’s distress, plowed on. “How about this: once we set up the match, we send a letter in the Departed’s handwriting telling the Bereaved to make out a check to the Dearly Departed Dating Service.”
“We can’t represent a letter as being written by a Departed if it isn’t,” I reminded her.
“Bosses of corporations do it—it’s called dictation.”
“When the person dictating is dead, it’s called fraud.” Although that did bring up an interesting conundrum: if people (like me) could actually interact with a person and convey their wishes, did it matter if they were dead or alive?
Marybob rolled her eyes. “Picky, picky. Okay, fine. We send a typewritten letter reminding the Bereaved they have benefited from DDDS and a little compensation, one hundred bucks, to be exact, would be appropriate. How’s that?”
