Dying on Second

by E. C. Bell

  I cocked an eyebrow. Addicts didn’t normally snap out of that fugue state by themselves. He was one tough guy.

  “And then?”

  “Then, I looked for Sylvia. I had to tell her everything. She had to understand . . .”

  “She had to understand what?”

  “That I didn’t mean to leave her alone,” he said. He put his hands to his face, briefly, then dropped them by his side. “That was never part of the plan. I knew how much she’d sacrificed for me—”

  “Her marriage, you mean,” I said.

  “And losing her kids. Yeah.” He finally looked past me, to Sylvia. “Tell her I’m sorry. Please.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “And tell her to stay the hell away from Ambrose Welch,” he said. “I think she’s digging around—”

  “He’s been arrested,” I said, quickly. “They got him for murder.”

  Rory snorted. “You mean Eddie Hansen?” he scoffed. “Welch won’t do a day for his death. Guaranteed.”

  I felt a shiver down my spine. That was bad. Not just bad for Sylvia, but bad for me.

  “Is there anything that he can be arrested for?” I asked, then shook my head. Forget yourself, I thought. Focus on Rory. “Sorry,” I said. ”You don’t have to worry about any of that, anymore. You do understand that, don’t you?”

  “But Sylvia—” he started. I shook my head.

  “She has to worry about her life now,” I said. “All you have to be concerned with is your death and what you’ll do now.”

  I honestly expected him to argue with me. Tell me that I didn’t understand. That he could help. All he had to do was stick around, and he could make Sylvia all better—

  “I’m doing this to her, aren’t I?” he said. He pointed at Sylvia, still cowering by the coffee maker. “The no sleeping and the high blood pressure. It’s me, isn’t it?”

  “You’re not helping,” I said.

  “But what can I do?” he asked. “I jump between the trail and this apartment. Nowhere else. When she’s here, I get pulled here. When she’s gone—I’m back at the trail.” He shook his head. “I can’t figure out how to make it stop.”

  “You need to let go,” I said. And Sylvia needed to let go, I thought. But first, you. “You’re a helping kind of a guy, I can tell. But this isn’t helping her. Maybe it did at first, but now it isn’t. She has to move on—which means you do, too.”

  “How do I do that?” he asked.

  As I rolled the options out for him, his light dimmed, and then guttered. For a moment, I thought he was going to disappear. I hoped he’d hang on because I really didn’t want to have to go to the running trails in the river valley to try to find him. But he pulled himself together, and his light steadied. He even gained a lumen or two.

  “So, I just have to choose?” he finally asked.

  I realized I could hear Sylvia sobbing, but Rory didn’t respond to her. Was totally concentrating on me. This was going to be easy—

  “Stop!” Sylvia cried. “Just stop! Please!”

  Rory looked at her, devastated. “Look at her,” he said. “God, just look at her. I can’t leave her like—” And then, in mid-sentence, he was gone. Blasted back to the walking trail where he died, no doubt. Just what I needed.

  I whirled and glared at Sylvia but she didn’t notice. She was sobbing hard, with the end of a roll of paper towels pressed to her face. She pulled a bit more of the paper towel to her and the roll tottered toward the edge of the counter, and then fell. I watched as it rolled out across the carpet. When it reached the cardboard tube in the middle, it stopped.

  “What are you doing, Sylvia?” I asked. “I thought this was what you wanted. That you wanted him gone—”

  “I don’t know!” she wailed. “This feels wrong. Like I’m turning my back on him. I don’t think—I don’t think I can do this without him.”

  “Do what?” I asked.

  Please don’t say your life, please don’t say your life.

  “My life,” she whispered.

  Shit.

  I ENDED UP spending the rest of the night with her. First, it was to calm her down, pull her off whatever emotional cliff she was on. Then, I stayed so I could explain the whole situation to her. What Rory was doing to stay here, and what she was doing to keep him here. And how wrong it was for both of them.

  He had to move on, and she had to let him. No matter how much it hurt.

  She finally fell asleep on the couch in the living room. I found a blanket—a kid’s blanket on a small Ikea bed in one of the bedrooms—and covered her. Thought about staying until she woke, but I was starving, and I needed some sleep myself. Besides, the sun was finally coming up. She wouldn’t be in the dark when she woke.

  She’d have to get through the day by herself. Make some hard decisions, and stick to them. She could call me when—if—she was ready for Rory to move on. Until then I was done. I was done.

  Oh, and that thousand dollars I was overcharging her to move Rory on? It wasn’t enough. Not by half.

  Karen:

  Marie Opens Up

  I WATCHED MARIE’S Thursday game from the sidelines even though she was back in right field. She’d let me know that my presence on the diamond was a real distraction—meaning she kept throwing the ball to me, as opposed to the living second base person from her team who stood next to me.

  I didn’t want to be the reason that Marie blew plays, so I complied. It didn’t take me long to see that she was right. She played much better when I wasn’t muddying things up on second base. Her team won, six to three.

  After her game and the never-ending meetings her coach Greg seemed to adore holding, Marie came over and sat beside me. In silence, of course, because there were other living hanging around watching the next game.

  “You had a good game,” I said. She didn’t respond, but I hadn’t expected her to. “We had a game, too,” I said. “You missed it. It was good. Not triple play good, but good.”

  She held up her hand, her eyes glued to the diamond. I realized that Miriam Kendel was pitching, and Marie was watching her. Dissecting every aspect of every pitch.

  “You won’t be able to hit her,” I said.

  “I think I can,” she muttered. “She has a tell when she’s going to throw the rise ball. It’s small, but it happens every time.”

  Then, she looked around at the living like she was embarrassed that she might have been seen talking to herself.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “They’re not paying attention to you. They’re watching the game.”

  All she did was shake her head at me, a warning that I needed to shut my mouth. So I did. What the hell, it was fun watching Miriam take apart the batters, one after the other.

  When the inning was over—and it didn’t take very long—Marie got up and scrambled down the bleachers to the ground. She said hi to Miriam’s parents, who were sitting in their usual spots beside Miriam’s dugout.

  “She’s throwing good today,” Marie said.

  Miriam’s mother, Rosa, nodded and smiled. “You going for coffee?” she asked. A preamble to asking her to pick them up a little something, but Marie shook her head.

  “Just going to go stand by the fence,” she said. “So I can watch her pitch from a different angle.”

  “We’ll talk later, then,” Rosa said, and turned back to the game.

  Marie made good her escape from the living, and I followed her. She meandered around the fence surrounding the diamond, and finally stopped when she was standing between first base and right field. Far enough away for us to carry on a decent conversation.

  “Can I tell you about my game now?” I asked when we were settled.

  “Sure,” she said.

  So, I told her about the game throwing in all the details that make anyone who doesn’t play wish they could die of boredom just to get out of hearing any more of the minutia.

  Marie kept her eye on the game but asked all the right questions to let
me know that she was listening to me. Hearing me.

  I finally got to the happy ending of my story, because we won, then asked Marie how her weekend had been. I thought it was a fairly innocuous question, but she stiffened.

  “It was fine,” she finally said.

  “So, what did you do?” I asked. Normally, I wouldn’t have asked her, but she was acting queer. Like something untoward had happened.

  She didn’t answer. Just stared out at the diamond as centre field drifted in to catch a lazy fly ball. Then the woman ran off the field, the ball still in her glove. She’d made the third out.

  “Did something happen?” I finally asked. “You’re acting like something happened.” I was starting to feel creeped out by her silence. Then afraid. “What happened?”

  Honestly, I thought she was going to tell me she found out that Andy had done something to the little girl who had accompanied her and her boyfriend to her last game.

  She finally glanced over at me. “I met another ghost,” she said.

  I blinked. “Where?” I asked.

  “At Sergeant—at Sylvia Worth’s place.”

  “Who?”

  “She plays for the Chimo Angels. First base.”

  I knew her. Or knew of her, at least. I’d watched her and her team through the years. She’d aged a decade in the past couple. Having a ghost might explain that.

  “Who’s the ghost?” I asked.

  “Her boyfriend,” Marie said shortly. Then she shook her head. “Never mind. Doesn’t matter.”

  “It seems to be upsetting you, so I’d say that matters.” I smiled at her. “Come on. Tell me about him. Maybe it’ll help.”

  She shrugged. “All right,” she said.

  Then, she explained her process to me. Her process for moving on ghosts. I don’t think she realized that’s what she was doing, but she was.

  “So, you can’t move a ghost on unless they want to,” I said.

  “That’s right,” she said. “I thought I told you that, before.”

  “And he wants to go,” I continued. “Move on. Isn’t that what you call it?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s Sylvia who’s having the problem.”

  I frowned. “But I thought you said she was the one who asked you to help get him out of her place.”

  Marie shrugged. “There’s the issue,” she said. “She got upset, which set Rory—the ghost’s name is Rory, did I tell you that?—off. He disappeared, probably back to the place where he died. I have no idea where that is, so now I have to wait for Sylvia to invite me back, and hope he shows up again.” She clicked her tongue and shook her head. “I don’t know why I bothered going there in the first place.”

  “If you didn’t want to, then why did you?” I asked. Her face flushed an angry red, and I wished I could have taken my words back.

  “Sorry,” I said. “None of my business.”

  She took a deep breath in and let it out slowly. “No,” she said. “It’s a fair question. I went there because she’s a cop, you see, and she knows about my—abilities. I guess I was afraid she’d make life hard for me, if I didn’t.”

  “Oh, so you don’t tell everyone about being able to see us?” I asked.

  “I don’t tell anyone,” she said. “But she found out anyhow.”

  “Why don’t you?” I asked. “Tell everyone, I mean?”

  “Because people look at me like I’m crazy when they know,” she growled. More anger, but I pushed anyhow.

  “So, nobody but Sylvia knows about your abilities? No one?”

  “Well, James figured it out. And my family knows, of course. Some of the people in my home town.” She scowled. “But that’s about it.”

  “Oh.”

  We were both silent as we watched the game and thought about things.

  Personally, she’d given me lots to think about. Maybe I’d suspected some of what she’d told me. Maybe that’s why I’d taken a chance with her.

  She wouldn’t tell anyone—except probably her boyfriend—about us. She was trying to protect herself, which meant we were protected.

  “How did he disappear?” I asked.

  “What do you mean, how did he disappear?” she asked. “It was just ‘Poof!’ and then he was gone, probably back to where he died. Come on, you can’t tell me that you didn’t know ghosts can do that.”

  “No,” I said quickly. “Of course I knew they could do that. Otherwise, I’d be here by myself. I just thought—”

  Then I stopped. I hadn’t really thought about the fact that ghosts could disappear. That when they disappeared, they went somewhere else. For me, it was always the diamond. I hadn’t thought—really thought—about the rest of them. Where they went. What they did when they weren’t at the diamond. We didn’t talk about that. We just talked about ball.

  “Well, I don’t care about that,” I said, a tad defensively. “What makes ghosts move?”

  “Compulsion, I suppose,” she said. “If they really feel the need to attempt contact with someone, they can move. Temporarily, at least.” She shrugged, then turned and stared at me. “You mean to tell me you’ve never moved?”

  “Not once,” I said. I tried for a light tone, but didn’t think I’d pulled it off. “I guess I never felt compelled to contact anyone.”

  “Well, all ghosts are different,” she said. “Some do, some don’t.”

  “So I’m not unusual?”

  She laughed. “Not really. For a ghost, you’re pretty normal.”

  “Good,” I said, though I wasn’t sure how I felt about what she’d said. “Glad to hear it.”

  “I also got a call from one of Sylvia’s friends from Calgary,” Marie said. “Asked me to be a pickup for their team. There’s a tournament down there in June. Sylvia told them I’d be perfect. That I have all the skills they need to win.” She frowned. “Do you think she’s trying to pull something?”

  “Sylvia?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Marie said. “For one thing, I am no good at ball. Not really. I play right field, for God’s sake. And how many at bats have I had, really? A dozen? Maybe two? So, I got lucky and hit the ball a few times. What does that prove?”

  “Are you kidding?” I asked. “You have a ton of natural ability, from what I’ve seen. You track the ball well, you figure out what the play is before the ball is hit—”

  “Everybody does that. Don’t they?”

  “No. Most don’t have a clue where to throw the ball once they catch it. If they did, the scores would be much, much lower.” I glanced at her. “Are you telling me that you think the rest of the players on your team actually give a crap about figuring out the right play?”

  “Well, yeah,” she said. She looked confused. “Don’t they?”

  “No,” I said again, more emphatically. “They don’t. Which is why Sylvia probably told her friend about you. You have a better head for the game than most even if you haven’t played much lately. Anyone with eyes can see that.”

  “Huh.” She stared out at the grass of the outfield. In the glare of the lights, it almost glowed.

  “All right,” I said. “So maybe you don’t have the best skills yet. Practice will fix that. How many times a week do you practice?”

  She looked embarrassed. “Well,” she finally said. “The team hasn’t gotten together for a practice yet, so the answer is zero.”

  “Oh, good grief,” I replied and felt a twinge of something close to anger. “Just because they don’t, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t. Talk to Greg.”

  “Greg? You mean the coach?”

  “Yeah. All you have to do is show even an iota of interest, and he’ll help you as much as you can stand.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” I looked past the diamond at the bleachers and saw Greg chatting with someone—looked like the coach of the team they’d just beaten.

  I also saw Andy sitting at his usual spot, two rows down from the top of the middle bleachers, behind the backstop, so he could watch th
e whole diamond. Felt my whole essence tighten, and dragged my eyes away from him and back to Greg.

  “He’s here,” I said to Marie. ”You could talk to him now.”

  “About helping me practice?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just me?” She looked around, like she was trying to find a way to get out of the conversation. “I don’t think he’d go for that. I wouldn’t want to waste his time.”

  “He won’t think it was a waste of time. Trust me. I’ve watched him, over the years. The man will do anything for his players. Anything.” I pointed. “See? He’s sitting right there. Go talk to him. And then call back that woman from Calgary and say yes to being a pickup for that tournament.”

  She grinned at me. “Did anybody tell you you’re kind of pushy, for a ghost?”

  “I’m not pushy,” I said. “You’re just very easy to push around. So, go.”

  She stepped away from the fence, then stopped. “I wanted to ask you something.”

  “So ask,” I said.

  “It’s about that guy—”

  It was Andrew. She was going to talk about Andrew.

  “You know the one I mean. You told me to warn James about him.”

  “Andrew,” I breathed. I suddenly felt cold.

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s the guy. So, what’s your deal with him?”

  “Deal?” I asked. I could not believe how cold I was. How afraid.

  “Yeah.” She glanced at me. “You okay? You look—sick.”

  “I’m fine,” I said and tried to smile. “I just don’t understand why you want to know about him.”

  “I want to know about him because you warned me to be careful around him,” Marie said. She smiled at me, but her eyes were cold. “In fact, I Googled him.”

  “You what?” I asked, confused.

  She laughed. “Oh yeah,” she said. “Dead over forty years. Guess you wouldn’t know about Google. I researched him. To find out what he’s been up to.”

  “And what did you find?” I asked. The fear felt sharper now, like a small razor-sharp knife cutting through my skin. Maybe she found something bad that didn’t involve me. Maybe she’d tell the cops and he’d be gone. Finally gone—