Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day(13)
Her face falls. “They’re gone,” she says, almost wonderingly. “We’re the only ghosts in this building.”
“I need to go looking for the others,” I say.
Delia’s expression turns somber. “I’ll get my coat,” she says.
“Murder party, murder party!” announces Avo, following the statement with a peal of wild, distressingly human laughter.
“I’ll get my coat and my parrot,” amends Delia.
I sigh.
Ten minutes later, we’re walking out the front door, two ghosts and a gleeful macaw. Avo rides Delia’s shoulder, flapping his wings and making piratical noises whenever anyone exclaims over his presence. I hang back to keep from getting a face full of feathers, and wonder whether she knows how grateful I am to have her here.
Delia casts a smile in my direction, making sure I’m still there. She knows.
New York City by day is very different from New York by night. The city puts on her best face for the tourists, trying to lure them in, to entrap and ensnare them in her web of “everybody wants to live in New York, everybody wants to belong in the city that never sleeps.” My gran used to tell us stories about goblin markets and dangerous fairy men back when Patty and I were small, and sometimes the city reminds me of those old fables. This is where you go to get lost. This is where you go to lose yourself. Maybe that’s why we have the second highest population of the dead in the United States. The highest is in Las Vegas, where everything is twilight and neon and no one notices if your eyes bleed screams and your skin feels like slow murder.
New York has ghosts. Las Vegas has a haunting shaped like a city, and one day there’s going to be an exorcism. Sometimes I wonder whether there’s anything real under all the shadows cast by the dead.
Delia walks with purpose, and people wave to her as she strides by. The neighborhood accepts her, the way neighborhoods sometimes do; I’ve heard people explain her as her own daughter, even her own granddaughter, but most seem to know that she’s just Delia. She’s as much a part of this block as the bodega on the corner or the wonky streetlight that the city never seems to care about enough to fix, and if she ever allows herself to reach her dying day and move on, this neighborhood will be infinitely poorer for it.
“Delia?”
“Hmm?”
“Do you . . . do you know when your dying day is?” Of course she does. She’s been up and down the ladder of age, and we can feel our dying days when we get close enough to them. Every ghost has a different range. Danny knew as soon as he came within a year of his—guess he was always going to die young, just not as young as he actually did—but Maria who used to hang out down by the big stone lions didn’t know until she was within a week of hers. I’ve never felt mine calling me. I keep taking time in tiny increments, stealing whatever I think I’ve earned, and death remains stubbornly just outside my reach.
“Ah, Jenna, it’s a beautiful day, and you’re a beautiful girl, and I’m an old lady with a parrot on her shoulder and not a penny in her pocket. When did this city get so expensive? Time was, anyone could afford to come to New York, and that she would open her arms to welcome them in. Now she wants a credit check and a security deposit before she’ll even show you to the subway.” Delia shook her head. “It’s not right. It’s getting to where the living are so eager to eat up the world that they’re not leaving any room for the dead.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“That’s because I was avoiding it. In my day, if a lady wanted to dodge a question, you let her. Especially if it was something that touched on her age or her home life or exactly what it was that went into her prize-winning pies.”
I say nothing. I just wait. Delia likes to talk. I think that’s why she was so happy to adopt Avo. Once she had him, she was no longer limited to the sound of her own voice.
Finally, she sighs, and says, “Yes, I’ve seen my dying day. My range seems to be a little more than a month. Scared the dickens out of me the first time I turned around and there it was, staring me in the face. So I bled off about six months, just so it wouldn’t keep popping up and scaring me, and I thought about what I wanted to do.”
“Didn’t you want to . . .” I make a helpless gesture with my hands. “Didn’t you want to go?”
“It’s tempting sometimes; I won’t pretend it’s not,” she says. “I could go. Find my Paul, and find out what he’s been doing to keep busy while he waits for me. It’s funny, isn’t it? How we can’t know when the living are supposed to go? He and I, we talked a few times about murder. About me putting a knife against his throat and cutting as gentle as I could, so he’d wake up in the same state I was in and we could be together. But we couldn’t go through with it. For that, we’d have to know it wasn’t his time, and the living don’t see as clearly as we do. It could have been he was always supposed to die at my hand. Only no, he was always supposed to get pasted across an intersection because he didn’t look both ways. Bastard.”
“I don’t—”
“So he left me here alone, and I thought, all right, that’s fine, I’ll start taking more time. I’ll catch up to him lickety-split. But it’s hard, Jenna. You’ll know what I mean when you see your own dying day. We’re not the living, but we’re still human beings, and humans, we don’t let go as easy as we should sometimes. Maybe I’ll get my Paul back once I move on. Maybe I won’t. ‘Maybe’ is a word that keeps me up at night, and it never lets go.”