Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day(12)
“No.” Lying to Delia has never done me any good. I don’t even bother anymore. “But it wouldn’t make a difference if I was. I’m dead.”
“Now she tells me!” Delia throws her hands up in the air, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling. “Dead girls don’t need to eat. My life has been a waste.”
A smile tugs the corner of my mouth. “You’re dead too.”
“Which is why I can eat whatever I want without worrying I’ll get too thin and bring my own mother back from the grave to scold me for making her look like a bad parent,” says Delia, matter-of-factly. “Although I tell you, Jenna-girl, if I thought a few skipped latkes might bring my dearly departed by for a visit, I would go on such a hunger strike as the world has never seen. Not a scrap would pass my lips.”
The smile keeps tugging at my mouth. It’s going to win soon. It always does, when Delia is around. “You know, sometimes you talk like today and sometimes you talk like yesterday. It can be sort of hard to follow.”
“But when I begin talking like tomorrow, that’s when you’ll know there’s something to be worried about, no?” Delia crosses her arms and looks at me through the tangled fringe of her hair. “What’s wrong, Jenna? You’re a good neighbor and a good tenant, but you don’t come to see this old lady unless something is bothering you. No, don’t bother arguing with me. We both know where the truth sits, and the truth says that something is not well with you.”
“I don’t think you get to call yourself an old lady,” I protest. “You’re not that much older than I am right now.”
“Whose fault is that, hmm? Those were bad boys, breaking in here like they did. They deserved to have a few extra years ladled onto them. Let them have my sciatica. I’ll take their nimble fingers and their eyesight, and have a little more time for my art before I catch up to my dying day.”
Delia has been jumping up and down the calendar since her husband died. One year she’s piling on the days, taking time from people on the street like a public charity. The next, she’s hunting muggers in the park, dealing out her own brand of strange vigilante justice. Because that’s one of the reasons people fear hauntings, even if they’ve long since forgotten the details: we’re not just able to take time away. We can give it back, too.
Good ghosts don’t do that, unless they’re people like Delia, who find a way to justify their choices under the veil of vigilante justice. She’s like Batman, except instead of a cape and cowl, she has a cheery smile and a quick trip to retirement age. When she gets too old for her liking, that is. Unlike most of the dead I’ve known, Delia has no interest in reaching the end of her allotted span. She has her building and her tenants, and as long as New York endures, I guess so will she. There’s something beautiful in that. Even among the dead, Delia will live forever.
“Okay, okay,” I say, yielding to her logic before we can get into another argument about the ethics of the way we exist. “I’m here because I’m worried. Have you heard from any other ghosts lately?”
Delia frowns. “How lately?”
“I’m not sure. Brenda called me.”
“That field witch you pal around with? I don’t know if anyone’s told you, baby girl, but it’s not good for our kind to spend too much time with theirs. They have strange ideas sometimes of the way that things should go.” Delia looks briefly disturbed, her expression turning inward. Finally, she says, “They don’t always play it fair.”
Asking her what she means by that is as likely to trigger her showing me her latest painting as it is to get a useful answer. Treading lightly, I say, “Brenda’s okay. She doesn’t ask me for anything, and she buys me pie sometimes. She says the ghost gang on Sixth is missing. She says Danny from Midtown Comics is gone, too.”
“Danny?” Delia scoffs. “She’s wrong. Only time that boy stirs out of the city is when there’s a comic book convention for him to haunt, and he always tells me before he goes. He doesn’t rent from me anymore, but he knows how I worry.”
“He doesn’t rent from you because he’s close enough to his dying day that he wanted to get rid of all his stuff. He haunts the comic book store now.”
“Like I said, he knows how I worry, and he has a year yet. More than a year, and he takes time at a rate of what? A minute a day, at best. Boy doesn’t want to go. Nobody’s going to make him.”
“But he’s not there now.” Danny is like me: he’s from away, although he lacks the broad vowels and mild intonations of Kentucky. He’s never told anyone how he died, but he doesn’t like police, and sometimes at night, I’ve caught him looking westward, like he thinks that somewhere out there, past the mountains and the plains and the endless rolling hills, he can find a way to see himself back home. “Have you seen any of the other tenants lately? The dead ones, I mean.” We make up the bulk of the building, but there are living tenants, too. There’s always at least one warm body living here.
“Not for . . .” Delia pauses before admitting, “Not for at least a week. I thought they were just too busy to visit.”
“Maybe they are.”
Her gaze goes distant, and I know she’s doing the same thing I do after work, when I look for Mill Hollow. Only she’s not looking for Mill Hollow. She’s looking for her building, for the shape and the structure of it.