Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day(15)
He blinks. I’m infamous among the staff of this store for never taking my legally mandated break unless forced to do so, which happens maybe twice a week, and never when there are customers in the store. I can see him struggling to come up with a reason to say “no,” and so I place my left hand on my lower belly and raise my eyebrows meaningfully. He blanches.
“Go,” he says, and I’m gone, walking as fast as I can toward the door that leads to the back, to the small room with its industrial-strength dishwasher and its underutilized sink. More, with its door to the break room, where a largely disused rotary phone still sits on the counter, a local-calls-only relic of a bygone age.
It’s younger than I am. It will do. I put my hand on the receiver and pause, closing my eyes, to recall Danny’s number.
Ghosts don’t have photographic memories unless we had them while we were alive. There are things that death cannot change. But we have a flexible relationship with past and present; we can move between them to a degree, as long as we don’t try to change things that have already happened. The universe is not willing to put up with that sort of thing, and smart ghosts don’t mess with the universe.
The world shifts around me. I am standing on a corner with Danny, him speaking animatedly about all the features of his new phone. He is a mountain of a man with the enthusiastic heart of a little boy, and I am surprised by the wash of love that rushes over me when I see his face. It’s not romantic, not sexual; it’s filial. He is family, part of the congregation of the dead who treat Manhattan as their cathedral, and I don’t want him to be gone unless it’s because he chose to move on.
He holds up his phone, beaming, showing me the number on the screen. “I know you’ll never call me, but just in case,” he says.
I snap back to the present. I dial the number, and it rings, and it rings, and there is no answer, and I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that something is very wrong; something has been broken, and I don’t know why, or how, or whether or not it can be fixed. I set the phone back into the cradle and stare at the wall, willing it to give me the answers that I need.
It doesn’t. It’s just a wall. Eventually, my manager calls my name and I go, good little ghost, to finish out my shift, to go to the helpline, to make it to the diner. Brenda will know what to do.
She has to know.
6: Fit the Living or Fit the Dead
I only earn twenty-one minutes tonight. I have to let several calls go to my fellow volunteers when I realize I don’t have the focus to take them; right now, I’d risk doing more harm than good, and that’s something we can never do. We have a duty when we’re on the phones, and whatever is going on in our own worlds, we owe our full attention to the people who call us for help. So I take what calls I can, and by the end of the night, I have twenty-one minutes I can honestly say the world of the living owes me.
It doesn’t feel like enough. Everyone I work with has caught my discomfort, my distraction; they know I’m off my game. They don’t say anything as I walk for the door, although I catch some of them watching me, concerned. We’ve never discussed what drives us to volunteer. I know suicide has touched us all, one way or another. We lost a volunteer a few years ago, when she could no longer resist the seemingly predestined relationship between razor and wrist. Her ghost flickered through the halls for weeks, never quite showing herself to the living, never quite daring to come inside. The others never knew they’d been haunted, but they knew something was wrong, and they’re wary now. They watch each other—they watch me—in a way they never did before.
I wish I could reassure them, tell them that yes, I lost someone, but I’m not going to do anything to myself; I couldn’t, even if I had felt the urge. The dead can’t die. We can only move on. But truly reassuring them would require telling them what I am, and even if they believed me, they’d never look at me the same way again. Being dead and dwelling among the living comes with certain inalienable truths. “Few people like to be haunted” is one of them.
I walk quickly toward the diner, not looking for people to interact with, not reaching for connection. Tonight, connection is the last thing on my mind. That’s why I don’t notice Sophie before she looms up out of an alley and steps into my path, eyes wild and hands reaching for me.
“You can’t be here,” she hisses, grabbing my shoulders and clamping down, hard enough that it hurts.
I try to pull away. Her grip is too strong, and she’s a witch, she’s a witch, I can’t have her touching me, I just can’t. She’s also my friend. I keep my voice level and ask, “Sophie. What’s going on?”
“You can’t be here, there are no ghosts here and you’re here, so you can’t be here.” She shakes her head, not letting go. “All the ghosts of Manhattan are gone. You’re alone, sweet specter, you’re alone, and you shouldn’t be. You shouldn’t be anything.”
“Let me go.”
“I can’t do that, can’t do that, they used me, you know, they used me like a pit bull, like a pigeon seeking crumbs, seeking, seeking, Sophie in the city, the city speaks to Sophie, follow her and she’ll find you what you need. I didn’t know. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” She grimaces, releasing my shoulders and stepping back. “There are no ghosts left here but you, Jenna, and you were always kind to me. Let me be kind to you now. Run, and don’t look back. Run. This city has anchor enough without you, but your own doesn’t.”