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.
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.