“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.”
“Oh.” We’re almost to Sixth and Broadway. We should be seeing signs of the ghost gang by now. The dead know the presence of the dead. Ghosts change the landscape around themselves, not in any way permanent or prominent enough for the living to really notice, but enough that once you know what you’re looking for, it’s just this side of impossible to overlook.
And there’s nothing. The cracks in the sidewalks are normal cracks; the leaves that fall from the hedges and domesticated trees are just leaves, falling where they will, not forming initials or strange glyphs or the abstract faces of long-dead lovers. There’s no out-of-season frost in the corners of the windows, no hidden messages written in the lingering morning dew.
We are on an unhaunted corner, and that is terrifying.
Delia’s face falls as she looks around, confusion giving way to bewilderment, and finally melting into fear. “Where are they?”
“I don’t know,” I say, and I don’t know, and suddenly, the world is a smaller, more frightening place.
5: Don’t Change Your Number
Brenda has my number but I don’t have hers, and I don’t know where she spends her days; I’ve only ever seen her at the diner, hair rimed with neon light, fingers moving on the neck of her guitar. I’ll have to wait until tonight to see her, and that means waiting until after my shift at the helpline. I think, briefly, about calling in and saying I can’t make it, but I can’t even reach for the phone. The people who count on us to get them through the slow hours between sunset and dawn, they’re not dead yet. They still have a chance to hold out until the sun comes up.
I don’t mind being dead. I did, for a while, in the beginning, when I realized my life was over and that nothing I could do was ever going to bring it back, but that was a long time ago. I stopped mourning for myself when my brother was born and my parents stopped mourning for me. That seemed like long enough. That seemed like a good time to let go. But the living . . .
The living have the chance to stay that way, and they should stay that way for as long as possible, because life is amazing. There’s so much the living can do that the dead can’t. If I can keep someone alive by going to my night job, then that’s what I have to do.