This had made our separation when he’d gone away to medical school and me to college—though we’d only been four hours away from each other—extremely challenging. He’d insisted on letters.
“We may no longer have a mediator-ghost connection, Susannah,” Jesse went on, “but I can still tell when you’re feeling something strongly, and earlier, you were afraid. I felt it. I was dealing with a four-year-old with a bee in her ear, or believe me, I’d have driven over there.”
“And what, precisely, would you have driven over here to do?” I lowered my voice so Becca couldn’t overhear me. “Spank my naughty bottom? Please do not get my hopes up.”
I found that joking often worked as a means to distract him when he was being a little too extrasensory perceptive.
“Susannah.” He didn’t sound very amused.
“You know it gets me hot when you’re mad. What are you wearing right now under your stethoscope?”
“You’re not funny.”
“Oh, come on. I’m a little funny.”
“Not as funny as you think you are. Tell me what happened.”
Crap. This was one of the many problems of being in a relationship with a former ghost.
“There was a little incident here at work involving an NCDP,” I said. “Nothing I couldn’t handle. But she did turn out to be a little more aggressive than I expected.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Becca lift her head to glance at me. She was eavesdropping, of course, and thought I was talking about her. She didn’t know what NCDP stood for. She was probably wondering why I’d said she was aggressive.
“At the school?” Jesse sounded surprised. “The one you told me about earlier? A tourist?”
“Student.”
“Father Dominic must be slipping,” he said, sounding concerned. “I would think he’d have taken care of all of those when the semester first started, well before you got there.”
“I’m not sure he’d have noticed this one,” I said, carefully guarding my words, both because I was speaking in front of Becca and because I felt defensive on behalf of Father Dominic. “It seemed harmless at first, and barely perceptible.”
It was getting hard not to notice that one of Jesse’s other prejudices, in addition to cell phones, was against his own kind—well, what used to be his own kind, anyway. The closer he came to acquiring his medical license, the less interested he seemed in helping the dead.
I guess I could understand this. Having spent a century and a half as a deceased person wasn’t listed as one of the official causes of post-traumatic stress disorder in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), the bible of mental health professionals, but I figured it was pretty much a given that Jesse was suffering from it.
I hoped it was this, rather than what Paul was insisting, that there was a part of Jesse that was still haunted . . . and that, if his original grave was destroyed, might be unleashed.
“Are you on call until tomorrow morning?” I asked, figuring it was best to change the subject.
“Fortunately,” he said. Unlike normal people, Jesse preferred the overnight shifts at his rotation in the ER. According to him, that’s when all the really interesting cases came in. People went to their primary physicians during the daytime. Only people in desperate straits—or who didn’t have primary-care physicians—went to the ER in the middle of the night.
That Jesse preferred seeing these people as patients wasn’t at all an indication that the curse was true, I told myself.
You can take the boy out of the darkness. But you can’t the darkness out of the boy.
Shut up, Paul.
“I’ll tell you about it when I see you tomorrow,” I said. “Te amo.”
He laughed as he always did when I attempted to say anything to him in his native tongue, even though I’ve been taking Spanish for more than four years. My accent is hopeless, according to both Jesse and my various language instructors.
“I love you, too, querida,” he said. As always, the word sent warming rays of delight down my spine . . .
Almost enough to cancel out the sense of impending doom that Paul’s phone call had caused to settle there.
“Who was that?” Becca demanded rudely as I hung up. “Your boyfriend?”
“Fiancé,” I said, looking down at my phone. I’d gotten two text messages. The first was from Jesse.
Jesse Estoy contando las horas hasta que nos encontremos, mi amor.
NOV 16 1:37 PM
After all the long hours I’d spent wearing earphones in the language lab, I should have been able to translate it on sight. But I had no idea what it said (except that mi amor meant my love). Later I was going to have to cut and paste it into my Spanish-to-English translation app.
Damn! Why did he have to torture me like this? A part of me suspected he did it on purpose, to keep me on my toes. As if he had to.
The second text—which I’d received earlier from a number with a Los Angeles area code—needed no translation.
Dinner is Friday night @8PM, Mariner’s, the Carmel Inn. Be there or else.
It was only a kiss, for chrissakes, Simon. Stop being such a girl.
NOV 16 1:30 PM