Both older women stop, turning to face me. Delia’s mouth works like she’s trying to speak but can’t find the words. That just makes things worse. Brenda can be silent. I’ve seen it, seen her sitting comfortable at the diner counter with a cup of coffee in her hand, letting the world move around her like a promise. But Delia doesn’t hold her peace. “I’m not resting in it, so I don’t see the need to cling to it” was what she told me once, when I asked if talking all the time got as exhausting for her as it was for me. Delia is never silent, and now Delia can’t make a sound.
This is where I should turn and run. This is where I should go see California, catch a plane to Hawaii, anything to get me away from this suddenly unsafe apartment full of ancient cats and silent ghosts, anything to take myself out of the line of fire. I’m Jenna, I’m the girl who runs. I ran from Patty’s death and into the storm that killed me. I ran from Mill Hollow and the slow acidic ache of watching my parents age and die while I stood outside of time, exiled by my own actions. Ghosts are going missing, Danny is calling me from Mill Hollow, and Delia has been struck silent. This is where I leave.
“Well?” I look between the two of them, not moving. “What does ‘unmoored’ mean?”
“Ghosts don’t age unless they choose it,” says Brenda. I already know this, but something about her tone tells me to listen. Her words are careful; she’s choosing them like she’s trying to pick the best shells off a cluttered beach. Delia’s mouth stops moving. I wait.
Brenda continues, still slow: “Most people think this means ghosts aren’t connected to time anymore. That time doesn’t care about the dead, and maybe that’s true, in a sense, but it’s also false, in a much larger one. Time needs the dead, or it gets . . . confused. That’s the best way to say it. Time gets confused. Time doesn’t run right without the dead to tell it which way it’s supposed to go. Ghosts are the nails in the coffin of eternity, and they keep the lid from flying off.”
“If there were no ghosts in Manhattan, maybe Tuesday would come after Wednesday instead of before,” says Delia, finding her voice. “Or maybe Tuesday would come and never end, and nobody would notice, because who really pays attention to such things? Everything would get tangled, and even the people who couldn’t tell you why it hurt to be here would feel the pain of it all. They’d start leaving. That’s the long and the short of it. When a place comes altogether unmoored, life deserts it.”
“How did people ever go anywhere new? That doesn’t make sense. Who was mooring Manhattan before humans got here?”
“Remember the rats,” says Brenda. “Everything that lives can die, and everything that dies can leave a ghost behind.”
Her meaning catches like fire, immolating me as I stand, wide-eyed from the possibilities. Ghosts of stately old trees lining the coast. Ghosts of whales sounding in the deep water. Even ghosts of mosquitoes, landing on human skin, sipping minutes along with blood, disappearing into eternity before they could be slapped away. And before them, the ghosts of bacteria, of protozoa, of the single-celled swimmers in the primordial sea. The world was a haunted house long before people came along to rattle their chains and wear their winding shrouds.
I ask the only question I can think of, under the circumstances: “Are there dinosaur ghosts?”
Brenda laughs. I slant a glance at her, sure that she’s not making fun of me, and she smiles. “I asked the same question, after the corn started talking to me,” she says. “My gran was a cotton witch. She didn’t know the ways of silk and stalk, but she knew what it was when the fields called you home, and she’d been waiting for a while for me to find my calling. She said there were dinosaur ghosts, once, before people got all scientific about it. Started trying to put names and labels on them, instead of just respecting them as the restless dead. So all the dinos pulled in their remaining years a few centuries ago, and left this world for the next one. Pity. I’d have loved to have seen one.”
“Wow,” I say.
“But we’re off the point,” says Brenda, smile fading. “As near as I can tell, you and Delia are the last human ghosts on the island of Manhattan, and that means she needs to stay here, lock the door, and keep herself safe until the city can make itself a few more nails.”
That isn’t as heartless as it sounds. People die in New York every day. Not just people, either. Pigeons and cats and Sophie’s beloved rats. Knowing what I know now, even the cockroaches count. Manhattan would have more nails in short order and be better anchored for having them.
But old ghosts are stronger than new ghosts. They have more practice at moving time from one place to another, channeling the needs of the world through themselves. Delia will still need to stay here. A thousand cockroach ghosts wouldn’t equal one of her. I can tell myself that they would be enough, but I’d just be lying to myself and delaying the inevitable. Delia has to stay.
I’ve always been the one who runs. Maybe it’s time I started running for home.
“It’s a long way to Mill Hollow,” I say.
Brenda nods understanding. “I’ll drive.”
9: Home Again