It was years before I realized Patty was lying all along, that she was a living woman, not a dead girl, and living women need to pay their gas bills and buy food with the money they make at their dead-end, minimum-wage jobs. I could barely afford my rent back then, and I was renting from a ghost who wanted to see me settled in a comfortable haunting, not sweeping the streets like the lost spirits who wandered the alleys and parks. Patty couldn’t have bought crystals by the bucket like she said, not without starving; she couldn’t have made a nest of layered sheets like a fancy French pastry, not without freezing to death. She was spinning me a fairy tale of New York in the process of spinning it for herself, and when that fairy tale collapsed, it took her down with it.
The apartment is warm now. It’s been years since I started paying the gas bill and installed the air conditioner, keeping the place toasty in winter and comfortably cool in summer. The reasons are scattered around the room like lumpy throw pillows, matted black and calico and tortoiseshell fur sticking up in all directions. A few stir enough to open an eye and peer in my direction, confirming my identity, but most are motionless. That’s fine. They don’t have much movement left in them, and there’s no good reason for them to waste it on me.
Six cats, at the moment, the youngest of them fifteen years old, left behind when her owner—a friendly old man who lived down the block his whole life, dying just ahead of the sale of his building—left her for the grave. I snatched her up just before his children could consign her to the local shelter, which does its best but is overcrowded and underfunded, and doesn’t have the space to keep cats that aren’t likely to be adopted. Not many people want the feline senior citizens. Kittens, sure, and healthy young adults with years of purring and playing left in them. Old cats? Cats that are set in their ways and just want to be left to sleep through their twilight years, setting their own schedules, making their own rules? Old cats rarely make it to the adoption floor. People want pets that will live for years, not leave tomorrow and break their hearts on the way out the door.
But I’m already dead. I can’t blame anything else for dying—and old cats aren’t likely to leave ghosts behind. Old cats have already lived past the accidents that put young cats in the ground too early, and are just marking time until their destined dying days. All they need is a place to be until their hearts stop beating, and I can give them that. The local vets think I’m a saint. I think I’m just operating under special circumstances. There have been times when I’ve had upward of a dozen cats wandering around the apartment, meowing like creaking doors, eating their geriatric cat food and complaining about their aching bones. I’ve lost a few recently, which is why I’m down to six. I’ll go to the shelter this weekend, see if they have anybody else in need of a home.
They always do.
One of the cats raises his head and creaks at me as I walk by. I pause to give him a pat, acknowledging that he still has a presence in the world, and he settles back to sleep. It must be nice, to be a cat.
The light from the living room filters into my bedroom, just bright enough to let me see what I’m doing. I don’t need to get undressed; ghosts like stuff as much as the living do, but our clothes are a part of us, and they change when we need them to. The only thing I’m actually wearing is my jacket. I drape it over the table by the door and blink, and I’m in the nightgown I was wearing when I died, winding white cotton like a shroud, feet bare against the hardwood floor. As always, it’s comfortable to put my death-clothes back on, like I’m setting the world a little closer to right. The shape of the skin under the shroud has changed as I’ve stolen my way into adulthood, one minute at a time, from the people around me, but this is one thing that will always fit, no matter how old I get. I was buried in it. It knows me.
This is the ghost of a garment, worn thin by my memory, and as gone as the rest of me. The worms have had my flesh by now. The creeping roots of trees have had the cotton stitching at my hips and the color of my hair. It’s been forty years since I went to the earth, and even my bones will be crumbling by now, going down into the Hollow, like the bones of all the folk who came before me. There’s something comforting in that.
It’s been years since I slept in Patty’s fantasy of sheets, layers surrounding and strangling me like cobwebs, like fog. When I crawl into bed, it’s to settle beneath the comforting weight of my feather quilt stuffed with goose down and stitched by the hands of women I never knew. I bought it twenty years ago, the last time I went home to Mill Hollow, to see the house where I grew up. The people who live there now are strangers to me: a brother born after Patty and I were tucked in our graves, his wife, and their children. They have my family name and my mother’s eyes, and they don’t deserve the haunting I’d be if I got anywhere close to them. So I touched the edge of the property, and I went to visit Patty’s grave, and I came home with a quilt that felt like home beneath my fingers. It wasn’t much. It wasn’t enough. It was everything I deserved.