Dead Lilly smacked the table in front of us. “Forget him and pay attention to the conference, which is, by the way, coming at you like a freight train. You’ve got to get that last additional clause on the trapeze contract nailed down. I’ve been looking forward to that act for months.”
“You’re not looking forward to anything anymore. You’re dead.” I turned to Boppit. “Why are you wearing that uniform?”
“Everyone else asks me why I’m wearing high heels.”
“What a surprise.”
“You don’t have to be like that. The uniform is what I am. To my mind the shoes don’t contradict the uniform, thematically speaking. The day you found me? I wasn’t looking for garbage those afternoons I spent tipping over trash cans. I was looking for a Qualicraft soft vinyl tortoiseshell upper, preferably with acrylic Art Deco heels. When I was with your family I kept a stash of my favorites in the back of the garage. And I was waiting for you.”
“Tell me, really, what you are,” I asked.
“I am what I am, sweetheart.” His tongue popped between his teeth and his eyes closed into slits like they did when we rubbed his belly or when he was especially pleased with something and he looked very pleased right now.
“Up and at ’em, Neave. I’ve been looking forward to giving away a powder-blue convertible at a blowout sales conference since the day we sat on the floor of the warehouse and split that bottle of beer. That was a perfect little half hour, sitting on the floor talking about diamonds and robin’s-egg-blue cars and everything that was going to happen to us. It did all happen to us. And it’s going to keep happening, only just to you.”
I was responding to my dead sister and my profoundly changed former pet as if they were real, which my mind told me they were not. Boppit stood up and plucked my purse off the side table where I’d left it, turning it upside down and dumping its contents out. “This thing?” he said briskly. “Into the trash.”
“But that’s my everyday purse…”
Lilly stood up. “Time for a new everyday. You can’t carry that ink-stained sack around and be who you have to be now. People will be looking at you to figure out what to wear, looking to you to tell them what to do. You have to be me now as well as you. Your hair? No woman who wasn’t in the middle of a nervous breakdown would let whatever happened to your hair happen. You’re heading a cosmetics company—not a cattle ranch.”
“Nothing’s wrong with the hair. And it’s possible that I am in the middle of a nervous breakdown. I mean, look at you. Look at me, talking to you.”
“Up and at ’em,” Lilly said.
“No. No, I’m not going up and at ’em with you, because you are dead.”
“Dead is not as absolute a condition as you’ve been led to believe.”
“I’ve never set up and run a conference by myself. You’re the face of the company. Not me.”
Dead Lilly snorted. She lit a new cigarette. “Me and the dog are going to get you a new face.” When she flicked the ashes they just pinged into space before they hit the deck. I looked more closely at her. I reached out and tried to take some of the purple silk sleeve between my finger and thumb but it dissolved when my fingers reached it. Lilly was here and not, the shirt a firmly rooted memory and an illusion.
“I loved this blouse,” I said. “It disappeared after you borrowed it for a date with Danny Rominowski. Is that a cigarette burn on the sleeve?”
“Yup. Doesn’t it look terrific on me?” She stood, held her arms out and turned so we could admire the effect. “No wonder I borrowed it.” Lilly lit her next cigarette on the last one, which faded into air when she flicked it away.
“Mommy swore those things would kill you.”
“Well, she was wrong.” Lilly leaned forward. “Ricky beat them to it. The new trapeze contract’s filed under some spare stockings in my top drawer at work. And some stuffed panda bears are shipping tomorrow. I think.”
“What do we need panda bears for?”
“They’re an incentive for the new Christmas gift packages we’re offering. You get a panda with every complete package purchase. We’re attacking those slumping December sales head-on. It’ll be fabulous. We won’t have enough of ’em.”
“Really?”
“Really. Call Betty and tell her where it is. She can forge our signatures. She does it all the time.”
I closed my eyes and leaned back. I tried to breathe very slowly. “If you’re not real, and I’m sure you’re not real, go away,” I whispered. “When I open my eyes you’ll be gone.”
I opened my eyes and they were still there. They were staring at me and they didn’t look pleased.
“Gone, gone, gone,” I whispered.
“Real, real, real,” Boppit whispered back.
“The blouse wasn’t enough to convince you we’re here?” Dead Lilly asked. “What about my knowing where my spare stockings and the circus contract are?”
“You must have told me about the contract and the stockings before you disappeared and I forgot but it’s in my head. You’re a memory.”
“I can show you where the shirt ended up,” Boppit broke in. “I know exactly where it was all those months you looked for it.”
“No, you can’t, and if you could I wouldn’t care.”
“Let’s see if that’s true.” Suddenly I wasn’t on the Rubber Duck but moving up a flight of stairs. They were the stairs we’d climbed in our childhood house to get to the unfinished closet in my bedroom, the row of old snowsuits and outgrown clothes hanging like a barricade between my secret reading place and the rest of the world.
“This is just in my head,” I whispered.
“The head is such a large place.” Boppit hummed, skimming along beside me.
We flowed down the hall and into the bedroom we used to share. There was the closet, the row of coats and leggings that our mother had started hanging up here sometime in 1931. Boppit pushed aside a plaid shirt of Snyder’s and a poodle skirt of Jane’s. There it was—a blanket and lamp and crumbs from the cookies I’d stolen right off the baking sheet one rainy afternoon in 1938, The Pirate Lover sitting at the top of the nearest pile of books.
“That damn book.” Boppit sniffed. “How many women have come to grief because they read too many pirate stories at impressionable ages? Why do you think Mrs. Daniels tried to keep it away from you?”
I tried to pick it up but it melted away when I touched it. There were the vinyl shards from Mom’s favorite record, shattered in that spasm of rage sometime in the winter of 1939 and swept into a corner but never removed. She’d kept her records in a cherry cabinet and relied on them when she felt blue. If you found her dancing alone in the living room, you’d know it was a bad day.
Lilly peered down at the record label. “You had a temper. And Mommy had a talent for provoking you.”
I felt bad about “My Sweet Little Headache.” I’d felt bad about it a minute after it was in pieces. I’d felt bad about it while watching my mother look for it. Once again Mom had been right—resentment had been the poison I’d drunk, hoping it would kill the other fellow. I said, “I don’t want to be here, Lilly.”
“I want to show you the blouse.”