29. When the Dead Sing
29
When the Dead Sing
“PIZZA’S HERE!” ALICE called as she brought a box of Domino’s into the kitchen. We were all sitting around the kitchen table at the house playing spades—Mom, Alice, Carver, Nicki, and me (well, and Ben, but he was sitting on the counter beside the sink, well out of the way of anyone after Nicki accidentally passed through him earlier, shivered, and said, “I think someone rolled over my grave”). Alice took down the plates from the cabinet and set them down beside the pizza box, before grabbing a helping for herself and Mom. “No one looked at my cards, right?” she asked as she sat back down at the table.
“Not a soul,” Carver lied. Nicki pushed his chair back to get plates for them both.
Alice eyed our brother. “Liar.”
“Sister! You hurt me!”
“You’ve never
not
cheated at spades,” I pointed out, leaning back in my chair to grab a slice. My hand was absolutely terrible and I was losing, but I was too stubborn to give up. The loser had
to clean up the kitchen—and it was not gonna be me. I had skirted that responsibility for ten years.
I’d be damned if I was gonna start now.
Carver thanked Nicki for the plate and casually kissed him on the cheek. We were all still technically in our wake clothes, but we’d lost our jackets and shoes and most of our jewelry by then. A half-empty bottle of Maker’s sat on the table, along with everyone’s glasses.
“I am, by no means, a cheater. Nicki, tell them I’m a good and honest man,” Carver went on.
Nicki patted Carver on the shoulder. “You are honestly something.”
“
Babe!
” he cried.
Ben chuckled against his shoulder. I didn’t think he noticed me watching him, not at first, not as he took in my family. Alice and her chipped black nails and Carver and his boyfriend sneaking soft touches to each other and Mom humming “Build Me Up Buttercup” quietly to herself as she rearranged her card hand again and again. It was endearing, the way he pushed his fingers through his hair, and leaned forward to sneak a look at Carver’s hand, and how he laughed whenever Alice mumbled something smart to herself.
And I thought—with a pang of sadness—how much Dad would’ve liked him.
He finally caught me staring, and quirked a thick black eyebrow. I was in the middle of shoving pizza into my mouth, and quickly looked away. “So, where were we?” I asked between a mouthful of cheese, setting the pizza down on the table like the heathen I was. He didn’t catch me looking, I lied to myself.
He didn’t see
anything.
“Nicki and I were about to kick y’all’s asses,” Carver replied.
Mom sat quietly at the head of the table. She took another sip of her drink. “Now, now, sweetie, Xavier and I never raised you to lie.”
“
Mother!
Now I’m getting sniped from
both
sides?”
“Obviously I’m winning,” she added, and with that drew a card from her hand and set it down on the table. A jack of hearts. Which meant, in spades, that if you had a heart, you had to play it, and we had played hearts only once before during this game. If you didn’t have a heart, you could trump with a spade.
I, sadly, had a heart left. Two, actually.
Alice flipped a card out of her hand. She tossed it into the middle. A four of hearts. Excellent. Carver played an eight of clubs. Which meant he either didn’t have hearts
or
spades . . . or he decided to throw a card. Because he knew Nicki would win the hand.
Carver made a ticking sound with his tongue. “Your turn, sis.”
I chewed on my thumbnail.
“Or do you got nothing? If you lose this hand . . . it’s dishes for you,” he added.
“Thank
god
I don’t have to do them for once,” Alice sighed.
Ben eased himself off the counter and came around the kitchen. He leaned over me, his hand anchored on the table, a
hmmmmm
soft in his throat. Where he was near me, my skin tingled with cold. It felt like when your hand goes numb, quite the opposite of if he were alive and leaning so close. I wondered what he had smelled like when he was alive. What cologne he used, what shampoo, what he looked like naked—
“Tough choices,” he mused. “You’re in a real pickle.”
“Shush, I’m trying to figure out what to do,” I said, telling myself that my cheeks were burning because of the whiskey, and drained the rest of the glass. The ice clinked at the bottom.
“You should play that one,” he suggested. “Nicki has a heart left and—”
“I’m not going to
cheat
—”
“What are you whispering?” Carver asked through a mouthful of pizza.
Alice added, tongue in cheek, “Your
ghost
friend helping you out?”
“
No
,” I rebuked.
Carver agreed. “If she had a ghost friend helping, she wouldn’t be losing so badly.”
Nicki slapped him on the arm. “Be nice!”
“I am!”
Ben bent down against my ear and said, the words a low rumble in his throat, “Annihilate them.”
I was thinking the same damn thing. It wasn’t cheating if no one knew. I pulled the queen of hearts from my hand and slammed it down in the middle of the table. And, like Ben said, Nicki had to play his hearts. I won the round.
And the next one. My family would play their hands and then Ben would advise me on what to play next, his voice tickling my ear.
When I took the fifth round in a row, Carver crossed his arms over his chest. “Well, this isn’t very fair.”
“Whatever do you mean?” I ask.
Mom recorded the score. “Florence, you’re only twenty behind.”
He threw his hands up. “That! You’re not this good.”
“What if I am?”
Mom set down her pen and gave me a level look. “Florence, is your ghost friend here?”
Alice rolled her eyes. “Mom, you know she won’t talk about it—”
“He is,” I interrupted my sister. Maybe it was the glass and a half of Maker’s in me, or maybe it was just being in proximity to Ben, feeling like I was safe. In a way I hadn’t felt in a very long time.
“
He?
” Carver enunciated.
Alice narrowed her eyes at me. “You’re cheating. Tell your
ghostie
friend to stop looking at my hand!”
“It’s Ben, preferably,” the ghost said.
“He’d rather be called Ben,” I told Alice.
“Sure, sure,
Ben
,” she said, and—as if sensing Ben moving over behind her—snapped closed her hand and put the cards facedown on the table. “Tell him if he’s going to be sitting here looking at our cards, he can at least play with us and let me kick your ass.”
“Strong words coming from someone whose highest card is a ten of puppy-toes.”
I blinked at him. “You mean clubs?”
“Puppy-toes,” he repeated with a shrug.
Alice eyed me suspiciously. “What about clovers?”
“Clovers? It’s clubs.”
“As I said: clovers.”
I ignored her. “He said you’ve got strong words for someone whose highest card is a ten of
clubs
,” I told her, and her eyes widened. She jabbed a finger at me. “Oh that’s not fair! Automatic dish duty!
Cheater!
”
Carver pressed his cards against his chest. “Has he seen
my
hand, too?”
“Seriously?” I added, baffled. “Not ‘Oh my god, ghosts are real!’ Or ‘Oh my god, this house is
haunted
!’ ”
My family shook their heads—even Nicki.
“Xavier did the same thing, sweetie,” Mom clarified.
Carver agreed. “How else do you think he always won at those poker games?”
“Can your ghost—Ben, sorry—play spades?” Mom asked.
“I haven’t in a while,” Ben mused delightfully.
I nodded. “Yeah, he can.”
“Good! Because you’re terrible, sorry, sweetheart. He can help you—but no more cheating, are we clear?”
“Crystal, Mrs. Day,” Ben replied.
“He said”—and I adopted my best Ben impression—“ ‘Crystal, Mrs. Day.’ ”
“I do
not
sound like that.”
“You definitely do,” I replied.
Mom laughed. “Tell him to call me Bella. I hate
Mrs. Day
. Nicki, dear, it’s your turn.”
And that was that. Ben came back around to stand behind me and point at cards, muttering about the probability of my family members having certain hands, and which were safest to play. I always threw down cards as a chaos agent, but he was meticulous and strategic, much like how he kept his office. Sometimes when he leaned over me to point at a card, muttering low and quickly, a shiver would crawl down my spine because I loved the way he talked softly, pinpoints on the edges of his words—
Loved
.
Oh.
A few rounds later, we all decided to call it a game. Carver had won, which was no surprise to any of us, and Nicki politely thanked “the ghost” for playing. They left the kitchen, laughing about how I was still saddled with the dishes despite having ghostly help. I could hear them in the living room, talking loudly about the visitors from the wake.
As I pulled in all the cards and shoved them back into their box with the jokers, Mom said to me as she cleaned off the table, “He was always torn, you know, about the gift you shared. He wished you could’ve chosen instead of being burdened with something you didn’t want.”
That surprised me. “I never thought about it that way. I always
thought . . . it would’ve been put to better use with someone like Alice or Carver. They’re so much better than I am.”
“I think you all would have had hills to climb. Alice is hotheaded and Carver is fickle. You give too much of your heart. Like your father.” She put the dishes in the sink and turned on the water, waiting for it to warm.
One of my biggest flaws. “What do you think’s in the letter that I have to read?”
Mom gave a think. “I’m not sure, actually.”
“You’ve gotta have
some
idea.”
“I do,” she agreed, “but I’m not sure. Though whatever it is, he wanted you to read it.”
“But why? Alice and Carver are
much
better at speaking in front of people!”
“Because he probably felt like you needed to the most,” Mom replied, and squeezed Dawn soap over the plates in the sink. “Honestly, you think I understood everything that went on in that man’s head? Of course not. He always surprised me. I think he will again. Are you helping this ghost friend of yours?” she added, changing the subject.
“She’s doing a wonderful job,” Ben commented.
“I’m trying to,” I replied, deciding not to dog her about the letter anymore. “He’s leaning beside you. Against the counter. To your right—I mean left.”
Mom turned to her left and said, “You’re welcome here anytime, Ben.”
“It would be a treat,” Ben remarked, and I bit in a smile because I wondered what Mom would really think of him, so tall his head almost brushed against the top of the doorframe, his dark hair floppy and his eyes bright.
“He says thank you,” I translated.
“Good. Now—”
“Dishes!” Carver pointed at me, sticking his head back into the kitchen. “You lost!”
“I did not!” I argued.
“You cheated and you
still
lost! Mom, stop doing the dishes—”
“I got them,” Alice interjected, shouldering past Carver.
“But, Alice—”
“Chill. I don’t mind. You look tired,” my sister added to me, taking the sponge from Mom. “You should probably get some sleep. We’ll see you tomorrow.”
I hesitated. “But I can do them . . .”
She rolled her eyes. “Fine, we can do it together. Mom, I think Carver wants to go set that wooden cage out to see if he can trap those damn birds, and Nicki’s scared shitless of them—”
From the other room, Nicki cried, “I am
not
!” Then, after a moment, he added, “But they
are
terrifying!”
Alice gave Mom a look. “Can you help him so he doesn’t hurt himself?”
Mom sighed. “If I must . . .”
“I don’t need help!” Carver argued, but Mom took him by the shoulder and guided him out the back door.
Alice and I did the dishes in silence. Ben had left the kitchen, but I didn’t know where he’d gone instead. Hopefully to oversee my ridiculous brother, because I had very little faith that Mom would do anything other than nod sagely without really knowing what to do.
I kept
wanting
to say something to Alice—this was the first time we’d really been alone together, not counting Dad’s corpse in the mortuary—but nothing sounded right in my head. I used to be so
good
at talking to Alice. We were best friends, with all the inside jokes of sisters who actually got along.
And then we weren’t. I didn’t really think about how leaving Mairmont would hurt everyone I loved, but especially Alice, and I couldn’t get our last fight out of my head. Well, the last
few
fights.
“I’m sorry,” I began, “that I never came back.”
She almost dropped one of Grammy Day’s favorite dishes. “Oh my
god
, warn me before you do that.”
“I just apologized!”
“Yeah—I know.
Gross
.”
“Fine,” I said, a little hurt because honestly, I
meant
it, and took the plate from her and dried it furiously. “I won’t do it again.”
“Please don’t,” she agreed, scrubbing another plate angrily. Then she sighed, and her shoulders unwound. “You’re apologizing for the wrong thing, anyway. I don’t really blame you for
leaving
.”
I blinked. “You don’t?”
“I’m not a monster. Leaving was the only thing you really
could
do. And I don’t really blame you for not coming to visit, even though I said I did. Dad never asked you to come home. He never asked if we were okay with going to visit you. We just
did
.” She sighed and shook her head. “I just . . . for a long time I was just so mad you didn’t take me with you. Do you know how many fights I got into over you?”
I actually had to think about that one. “Thirteen?”
“Fourteen! I got into one after you left. You know Mark Erie?”
“The football guy Heather married?”
“Bingo. Cracked his jaw. Had to sip out of a straw for a month,” she replied triumphantly. And then she sighed and took a sip of her drink. “And, I guess, after a while I started just being mad
at
you. Because even though you were gone, you were just as tight with Dad as you always were. I was jealous of that. Of you and Dad and y’all’s ghosts.”
I didn’t know what to say—I’d never thought about it that way.
That the one thing that I had run away from was also the one thing I remembered most fondly about Dad—and the one thing that neither Alice nor Carver nor Mom could ever have with him.
“Dad was a good man,” she went on, “but he wasn’t perfect. He saved that part of him for you. I saw him every day. I got into fights with him. I watched him neglect his health because he thought giving other people their goodbyes was more important than sticking around for
us
. I thought he’d forgotten about us.”
“Alice . . .”
“He just forgot about himself. And I couldn’t
do
anything.” She sniffed, and I stared at her with my mouth open because her eyes were wet, and Alice
never
cried. She didn’t cry when she skinned the side of her leg in third grade while trying to skateboard. She didn’t cry when she broke her first finger when Carver accidentally slammed the car door on it. She hadn’t cried at weddings or funerals or graduations—so I didn’t know what to do.
I dropped the towel, torn between hugging her and calling for help. My voice wobbled. “Alice . . .”
Because she was about to make
me
cry, too.
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Maybe if you were here instead—”
“Don’t,” I cut her off. “Don’t finish that.”
“But it’s—”
“
Not true
,” I stressed, mortified that she’d ever think that. “Dad not going to the doctor was Dad’s fault, not yours. It never will be yours.”
She looked at me, and her eyes were rimmed red, and her bottom lip trembled. “I couldn’t protect him,” she sobbed.
“I c-couldn’t either, Al.”
We pulled each other into a tight hug, and cried it out on each other’s shoulders. It was cathartic in a way that nothing else had
been this entire week. I kept holding all of the pain in, and I couldn’t imagine how Alice felt this whole time. I should have asked her. I should have wondered if she was okay because none of us were.
But we would be.
After a moment, she squirmed out of my hug and pushed the remaining tears out of her eyes. “I can finish the dishes alone.”
“You won’t hold the dishes against me?” I asked suspiciously, wiping my own eyes.
“Obviously I will,” she replied with a laugh, telling me that she was going to be okay and needed some space, and shooed me away.
I grabbed my coat from the rack and slipped it on as I caught a glimmer of Ben sitting on the floral couch in the living room. He was relaxed out on it, his eyes closed, one leg crossed over the other, his arms softly folded over his chest, almost as if he was asleep. Over the past few days, he had slowly unwound in front of me, first his hair becoming disheveled, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his trousers cuffed, his tie lost somewhere in the netherworld between Friday night and here, and now—ever so slightly—there was the shadow of a beard crossing the strong angles of his chin. I’d never seen a ghost change before. They were immovable. Stagnant. Then again, I had never paid close attention, either.
He cracked open an eye. “Ready to go?”
My heart twisted. It felt so familiar in the weirdest way. As if in some other universe he was here, real,
alive
, sitting on the couch, waiting for my sister and me to finish the dishes so we could go home.
Perhaps in another life.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
He stood and came over to the foyer as I put on my shoes, and we left together down the front steps to the sidewalk. “Walk you home?” he offered.
“Oh, how gentlemanly of you.”
“I am occasionally.”
It was nice, walking beside him back up the street to the inn. He asked about my sister, and if we were okay, without ever prodding, and I told him about our conversation. I didn’t know Alice had been hurting so terribly, and her hurting made me want to punch whoever made her hurt. But in this case, it was Dad. And me, to some extent. I knew that Alice didn’t
like
me leaving, but I didn’t think . . .
I just didn’t think.
“It’s okay, at least you talked,” he said gently.
“Yeah.”
Lee never escorted me home until we lived together, and even then sometimes I would duck out of his publishing functions early and take the train home alone. I always said to myself it was because I never wanted to
bother
him while he made connections, but the truth was I usually felt like an unwanted purse, standing quietly beside him as he talked to executive editors and poets laureate and god knows who else, feeling like an outsider even in an industry I was very much a part of.
Even if only secretly.
I wrapped my coat around myself tightly. Ben glanced over at me, frowning. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” I muttered. “Just . . . exhausted.”
“This is exhausting,” he agreed softly. “All of it. Pretending to be okay while the world changes around you and leaves you behind to sit with whatever loss you found.”
It did feel exactly like that. “But you got through it, so I think I can, too.”
“I know you can. You’re braver than I could ever be. I couldn’t do what you do. Helping ghosts like me move on. You have to say goodbye so often.”
“It’s different with them—erm, you—because I
get
to say
goodbye. The last thing I said to Dad was . . .” I hesitated, trying to remember my conversation with him. Friday felt like so long ago, and the conversation was already a blur. Had I told him I loved him? I knew I did, but I kept second-guessing it. What if I hadn’t that once?
I couldn’t remember.
I blinked the tears out of my eyes and cleared my throat. “
Anyway
, I appreciate your help during the card game.”
He snorted a laugh. “Well, you do suck at spades.”
“I do
not
!”
“Oh you absolutely do.” He cocked his head, and a curl of black hair fell across his forehead. “But you know, that’s kind of what I like about you.”
“
That’s
what you like about me? I thought it was my perfect breasts?”
The tips of his ears went pink, and he quickly looked away. “Yes, well, they’re not why I like
you
. They’re a bonus. Like a book sale. Buy two, get one free.”
I chewed on the side of my cheek, trying to hide a smile. “And that’s what I like about you.”
“My broad and very perfect chest?”
“It is very broad,” I agreed, and he laughed. It was soft and throaty, and I really liked it.
The last crisps of winter clung to the chilly evening air as a spring wind blew its way through the budding oaks and dogwood trees, and I felt the itch in my fingers to write this all down. To paint the sky in dark blues and purples and silvers and paint the sidewalk in shards of glittery glass, and wax about how it felt to walk quietly beside someone who enjoyed your company just as much as you did theirs.
I couldn’t believe that I was swooning over the bare minimum—
decency
.
Dana was at the counter when we came into the inn, and they smiled at me over another romance novel. This time Christina Lauren. “Evening, Florence.”
“Good night, Dana!” I greeted.
Ben walked me up the stairs to my room at the end of the hallway, where he stood and waited as I fished for the room key in my purse. “Your family is really cool.”
“Oh, you saw them on a good night.”
“I’ve seen them every day this week while dealing with the worst,” he reminded.
I winced. “True. Imagine us during
weddings
. We’re a riot.”
“I’d love to see that,” he replied with a soft sadness. Because the chances were, he wouldn’t. I’d finish Ann’s book and release him from this weird half-life before any of that happened.
Trying not to think too much about it, I found my key at the bottom of my purse and unlocked the door. “Honestly, it’s not
that
special—Ben?”
He’d gone pale, suddenly, and caught himself against the side of the wall to keep from falling. I dropped my key and reached for him, but my hands passed through his arm.
“Ben—Ben are you okay?”
“Do you hear that?” he asked. His eyes had gone glassy.
“I—I don’t hear anything.”
“It sounds like—like—” But then he winced. The lamp on the table began to rattle.
Dana called from downstairs, “Florence? Is everything okay?”
“Fine,” I called back, hoping they didn’t come up the stairs to see the portraits slowly sliding wonky on the walls. I shoved open my door. “Inside, please,” I whispered, and he nodded and slipped through the wall into my bedroom.
Well, that was one way to do it.
I got inside and closed the door. The lamp outside stopped rattling. “Please, sit. I’m worried.”
He was holding his chest, shaking his head. “I’m fine.”
“You are
not
.”
He pursed his lips, about to rebuke me, but he must have thought better of it and eased himself down on the bed. He swayed gently. Did he look fainter than usual? Paler? I couldn’t decide—though I did know that I was frightened enough that it killed my buzz.
“You’re not fine,” I decided. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he replied, rubbing his face with his hands. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s not
nothing
—”
“I’m dead so why does it matter?” he said, and his voice was gruff and thick. “I’m dead and every time I disappear I come back a little less. I’m dead and I can still hear my heart beating in my ears, fainter and fainter. I’m dead and gone and I’m here and it’s not the book—it can’t be the book, Florence.”
“Of course it is.”
“I don’t want it to be. Because when you finish it . . .”
My heart jumped into my throat. “You’re just tired. You can stay here and rest all you want. I’m going to wash my face, okay? I’ll be back.” And as I left for the bathroom, I thought I felt a chill of cold brush through my wrist, but I ignored it because if I didn’t, I was afraid we would start dancing on a tightrope, and the ground was too far down.
I took a long time in the bathroom. Too long. I didn’t know if I wanted him gone by the time I got out, or if I wanted him to still be there sitting on the side of my bed. No, I did know what I wanted, but I was afraid.
I wanted him to stay.
“Ben—” My voice caught in my throat as I left the bathroom, and found him lying on the bed, turned onto his side. He was so long that his feet almost reached the end. He was still—of course he was, he was dead—but it unnerved me until I crawled gently under the covers on the other side.
His eyes fluttered open. “Mmh, I’ll get up—”
“Stay,” I said.
“You’re very bossy. It’s cute.”
“And you’re stubborn.” Then, quieter: “Please.”
He put his head back on the pillow. “On one condition.”
“What?”
“Tell me to stay again.”
I scooted closer to him, so close that if we were alive, our breaths would mingle and our knees would knock together and I could pull my fingers through his hair. I said softly, a secret and a prayer, “Stay.”