34. Ghosts in the Floorboards
34
Ghosts in the Floorboards
IN THE CORNER of the Days Gone Funeral Home, beneath a loose floorboard, there was a metal box full of my deepest dreams and my smutty fanfic. When you grew up in a family where everyone knew everyone else’s business, you had to find ways to keep your secrets. Carver hid his in the backyard. Alice wrote poetry and stashed it in a tree somewhere on the Ridge. And I hid mine beneath the floorboards.
“I’m gonna fix myself a drink. Do you want anything?” Alice asked, hanging up her coat and heading down the hall to the kitchen. I had excused myself from the gravesite soon after Ben disappeared, and Alice asked if I needed company. I think she sensed something was wrong.
Something beyond burying Dad, anyway.
“Whatever you’re having,” I replied, and headed into the red parlor room. I knew exactly where the loose board was, hidden under an end table, and wedged a fire poker between the planks of wood, and pried it up.
I took out the box and dusted it off.
Then I opened it.
There was a letter on top, written in that familiar loopy hand. Dad’s handwriting. He must’ve found it while cleaning the parlor—stepped on a loose floorboard, and pried it up to see what was underneath.
Or maybe I was never that sneaky.
Maybe he always knew I hid my secrets here.
I’m so proud of you, buttercup.
And stapled to the bottom were receipts. A sob caught in my throat. They were sales from the bookstore in town.
A Rake’s Guide to Getting the Girl
,
The Kiss at the Midnight Matinee
, and
The Probability of Love
. He had bought them. And he knew they were mine.
He knew.
I hugged the note to my chest.
And if he knew, then that meant—when the bar owner interrupted Bruno. The half-finished sentences about my writing. Ann Nichols’s new books in the window . . .
Alice found me in the red parlor room like that. She froze in the entryway, eyes wide, holding two glasses of whiskey on the rocks. “The hell? This is some Goonies shit here.”
“It’s my stash,” I replied with a hiccup. She came over and slid down to the floor beside me, and set down our drinks. She picked up
Midnight Matinee
and flipped it over to the back. “He knew, didn’t he?”
“Knew what?” Alice asked, feigning innocence. I could tell she was lying—what kind of older sister would I be if I
couldn’t
tell? I glared at her and she shrugged, putting the book back into the lockbox. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. He definitely didn’t tell the whole town.”
“Alice!”
“Oh I’m going to
kill
whoever told you.”
“No one did. Well . . . Dad did.” I showed her the letter.
“Good,” Alice declared. “Turns out no one wants to piss off the guy who’ll put them in a casket. Don’t wanna be looking like a clown.”
“Oh my god, he didn’t threaten anyone, did he?”
She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I am sworn to secrecy.” We put the note and the rest of the books back into the box, and I slowly began to shuffle through the rest of it. Journals, concert stubs, little notes filled with smaller stories. She watched, stirring the ice in her glass. “Dad found mine, you know.”
“Your stash?” I asked. “Yeah, it’s in the knot in the tree out near the Ridge.”
She gave me an astonished look. “You
knew
?”
“Carver found it
ages
ago.”
“His is—”
“Under the woodpile in the backyard,” we said together, and laughed.
I took a sip of my drink. It was a lot stronger than the drinks Dana made. It personified Alice—she was there, in your face, unable to be forgotten. I admired that about her. She wouldn’t have let her ex-boyfriend steal her stories and publish them. She would’ve chased him down, and shit in his shoes, and penned an article for the
New Yorker
painstakingly detailing how much of a liar Lee Marlow was. Not just to me—but to his colleagues, to his friends, to journalists, and to colleges and deans asking him to be their guest professor.
She would have annihilated him.
As the sun began to sink across the evening sky, the shadows in the parlor grew longer and darker, but we didn’t get up to cut the lights on. There was a certain kind of softness to the way the golden
light filtered in through the windows and kissed the dark corners. We knew this funeral home with our eyes closed, anyway, and the floor wasn’t that uncomfortable yet.
“So, I’ve something I’ve been meaning to tell you.” Alice shifted to sit cross-legged and downed half of her drink.
“This should be good,” I teased.
Alice squirmed. She did that when she was trying to keep a secret that was physically trying to escape her body. “Karen read most of the will before you arrived, so you missed this part of it.” She pursed her lips tightly together and was quiet for a long moment. “You had your ghosts with Dad, and I thought I had nothing. But . . .” She looked around the parlor, as fondly as Dad always did. “I had this place. Well, I
have
this place.”
I realized with a gasp. “Dad gave you the business?”
She gave the smallest nod. “After Mom dies, of course, but—he put it in his will. He said it went to me. And Mom said she’d happily turn it over before she kicks it but I really don’t want it
that
badly and—”
“Oh, Alice, I’m so
happy
for you!”
“Really?”
“Yes,
really
, you idiot! I’m so freaking happy! You’re the only one who understands this place—
really
understands it. I can’t imagine it in better hands.”
Her bottom lip wobbled, and then she threw her arms around me. “Thank you,” she said into my shoulder.
I hugged her tightly. “I know you’ll do a great job, Al.”
She finally let go and sat back on her feet, and wiped her eyes. “I think I met my crying quota for the year.”
“It’s okay to cry sometimes.”
“Not with thirty-dollar mascara on!”
“Well, whose fault is that?”
“Impossible beauty standards and my lack of thick eyelashes?” She sniffed indignantly, and took a drink of her whiskey. “So, what’re you doing with your secret stash? Afraid someone found it?”
“Oh, no. I guess I was just looking . . . for something,” I replied. She cocked her head in question. “An answer, I think. Someone who just left told me that my book was his favorite. He thanked me for it. That—that was why he was here.”
Alice’s eyes widened. “Oh, sis. Ben?”
For some reason, someone else saying his name made me sad all over again. Tears burned at the edges of my eyes, but I dutifully brushed them away. I’d helped dozens of ghosts in the past. Most of the time I just had to listen to them—to a story—before they left.
“I don’t understand why I’m so messed up right now,” I admitted. “I’ve said goodbye to so many people—shouldn’t it be easy now?”
Alice gave me a strange look. “Who told you that lie? It’s never easy. It’s also never really goodbye—and trust me, we’re in the business of goodbyes. The people who pass through here live on in you and me and everyone they touched. There is no happy
ending
, there’s just . . . happily living. As best you can. Or whatever. Metaphor-metaphor-simile shit.”
I bit my cheek to keep from laughing.
“And that goes for the ghosts you help, too. I think you’ll see him again.”
I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. “He’s gone.”
“Tell that to the wind.”
Maybe there was some truth in Alice’s words, though I didn’t really believe them yet. As I took out my fan fiction and leafed through my journals, there was a certainty in that teenage girl’s
words, in what she wanted, in who she was, the parts that I clung to, the parts of my first book Ben loved. She believed in happily ever afters and grand romantic gestures and one true loves that stretched on beyond their canon endings. I wasn’t that girl anymore—or so I always told myself. But maybe I was.
And maybe that wasn’t a bad thing.
Lee Marlow had said that romance was only good because you read it with one hand.
He was wrong. He had stolen my stories and rewrote them into some literary circle jerk with
award potential
, but I had the memories of my parents waltzing in the parlors, of Carver and Nicki kissing in the cemetery, of Alice pinning a wildflower in her hair when she thought no one was looking. He might have had the plot, but he didn’t have the heart.
Ben was gone, but Alice was right. He was still here, and I still had a book to write. And now I finally knew how to write it. I still didn’t know how to write Amelia and Jackson’s ending, but I knew that I could. I knew that I was capable.
I think knowing that would’ve made Ben proud.
“How did I get such a smart sister?” I asked her at last.
Alice grinned and punched me in the shoulder. “About damn time you realized how smart I am! You can call me Saint Alice if you please.”
“That’s going a little far.”
“
Sage
Alice—”
“Really?”
“And name your next book character after me.”
“Absolutely
not
,” I laughed, when there was a knock on the front door and Rose’s voice echoed into the foyer.
“It’s just me! And I
so
need to piss—oh my god, is that a
secret stash
?” Rose asked when she saw us sitting on the parlor floor with my box of secrets, but then she quickly hurried to the bathroom. Alice and I were still drinking on the ground when she came back out. “Wow, look at all this smut
.
Maybe your editor’ll take one of these for your next book,” Rose joked, glancing over an
X-Files
fanfic. “Ben doesn’t seem the Mulder-Scully type, though.”
I gave her a strange look. “Who?”
Rose said, “Your editor—I mean,” she said, and glanced at Alice, “
Ann
’s editor.”
Alice waved her hand. “I already know.”
“Rose, that isn’t funny.” Ben being gone hit me again, right in the stomach, and it made me want to puke.
My best friend took her phone out of her bra. “Erin texted me when I was coming back from the cemetery. He just woke up.”
“He’s dead,” I said.
“
What?
No—I could’ve sworn I told you he got hit by a car.”
“Yeah and that he died!”
Rose shook her head slowly, about three types of confusion crossing her face. “I . . . did
not
say that.”
Didn’t she? I mean—it didn’t matter, Ben was right
there.
He haunted me. He was dead, he
had
to be. But the more I thought back to our conversation the less I became sure about it because . . . I wasn’t sure if she
had
said he died, or if I inferred it. She said that he was hit by oncoming traffic, and I inferred the rest.
I mean, he was a fucking ghost.
And now he was gone. I watched him fade into the wind, but—
What if . . .
What if that wasn’t because he moved on?
“And—and he woke up?” I asked, my voice brittle. I got to my feet and faced Rose, my chest tight with anxiety and disbelief and—and hope.
It was
hope
.
Rose showed me the text message from Erin.
HOTTIE MCHOTCAKES HAS RISEN! He’s awake!!
“Hottie McHotcakes?” I echoed, reading the text over and over. It was so outlandishly funny. Because I’d just said goodbye to him. I’d watched him pass on and here someone was talking about him as if he was—
As if he
was
—
“He’s alive.”
The times he disappeared without warning. The voices he heard. The sounds. The pain—I’d ignored most of it because it didn’t matter. He was dead because my stubborn ass said he was. But he
wasn’t
, and while he existed here, some part of him was still being pulled back to his body, wrenched back, even though he kept trying to stay
here
, thinking that wherever he was going was worse.
If I’d been more perceptive. If I hadn’t written off his weird experiences. If I’d just
thought
a little, that things weren’t always the same, not always certain.
I pressed my hand over my mouth to muffle a sob.
Rose took me by the shoulders. “Florence? Babe? Are you okay?”
I shook my head. The world blurred with my tears. “H-He’s alive,” I said between sobs. “B-Ben is alive.”
Alice looked up from her spot on the ground. “Your ghost boyfriend, Ben?”
To that, Rose asked, “A
ghost
?”
And that made me cry even harder, and Rose pulled me close to her and wrapped her arms around me, even though she didn’t understand. He could feed his cat again, and he could go to
bookstores, and read his favorite novels, and he could take all of those vacations he never did before, and meet new people, and find a new family and—
And me. He could find
me
.
I wanted to have memories with Ben. I wanted to see him on the front porch and sit with him and make up silly stories about the people that passed on the sidewalk. I wanted to share a beer with him down at Bar None, and I wanted to dance with him—
really
dance with him, our hands intertwined, my unruly heart beating so loud it gave me away.
I wanted to kiss him, obviously, but it was so much fucking
more
than that.
When I was with Lee, I could see my entire life unfold around him. I knew where I fit in, I knew what part to play and how to play it. I had a place in his life, and I boxed myself into it as best I could, and I tried to be the perfect girlfriend for someone who was looking for a saint.
But when I thought about Ben, about his disheveled hair, his timid smile and soft voice, a heartstring pulled so taut in my chest it almost broke, and it hurt. Because I thought I could—
I thought I could
love
him.
Cautious and organized and stoic as he was.
Just
as he was. He didn’t need to fit into a perfect place in my life. He just . . . needed
to be
.
He existed. And the rest of my world made room.
He was right in the end. Romance wasn’t dead, after all.