The parrot stops bobbing to whistle inquisitively at me.
“Hi, Avo. Is your owner here?” Avo—short for “Avocado”—was like my cats: a rescue. His owner had been a tenant, already old when he decided to get a “little birdie” to keep him company in his dotage. Nobody told him that parrots lived for decades. When the man had died, the bird had remained, and now lives a rent-free life with a ghost who adores him. Sometimes things work out.
“Hello, hello, hello,” says Avo. “Hello, little ghostie, hello.”
“Hello,” I agree.
“Jenna!” The cry is glad, accompanied by the appearance of a woman who looks no more than ten years older than me. She is plump and lovely with a tangle of blonde curls, dressed in a painter’s smock over blue jeans and a flannel shirt. She doesn’t need the smock to protect her clothes any more than I need the jacket to keep me warm when I go outside, but sometimes the habits of camouflage can be difficult to break. “To what do I owe the pleasure? Don’t tell me you thought I’d be lonely up here.”
“You’re never lonely, Delia,” I say, submitting to a hug and a quick visual examination.
When she is done, she steps back and clucks her tongue in disapproval. “You’re too thin. Have you been eating properly?”
“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.”