Simple: we take the time we’re missing from the living. A second, a minute, an hour at a time, wiping it off their skins and soaking it into ourselves. We can learn to control it, maybe even reverse it, but we don’t have to learn how to do it. We know, right from the start. We always know.
It’s a pretty good deal, for the living. They feel revitalized when they get even a glimmer of their youth back, the clock running backward just that little amount, making everything seem right again. That’s why I’m willing to do it at all. I took those forty-seven minutes from Marisol, knocking her almost an hour away from her own good death, but she’ll never miss them. She’ll enjoy the rush of having them gone, and if her allotted hour has moved just that much further into the future, she isn’t going to complain. The living never do.
That’s the problem. The dead used to walk a lot more openly among the living, making their amends and taking their allotted time from the open hands of the people who had loved them in life, the ones who would never hang a muslin sheet across the mirror’s face to keep the dead at bay, or sprinkle gravedust on the mirror’s frame to lure the dead inside. It used to be safe. But people are people, whether they’re breathing or not, and no one knows who first figured out that ghosts could be used. Could be turned into a veritable fountain of youth, wicking the years away, keeping death ever further in the future. Maybe it was a wood witch, lurking in her hollow and viewing the grave as a fate she could put aside. Maybe it was a ghost, looking to make a little money for their family before they moved on. Whoever it was, they opened a can of worms that had probably been inevitable but could probably have stood to stay closed a little longer.
These days, it’s not safe to be openly dead. Not because most people believe in ghosts—they don’t—and not because there are a bunch of scientists with proton packs and highly paid scriptwriters stalking the corners—there aren’t. Because witches are rare, but they’re real, and they know that every ghost is a walking, talking pathway to the sort of American dream that’s become the only one over the course of the last thirty years. Eternal youth, and all you have to do is exploit somebody’s dead relatives. Witches can, and witches do, and so we hide from them as best we can, and we pray to be left alone to live our deaths until they’re done.
Another thing no one knows for sure: who first prisoned a ghost in glass and learned that once we’re caught between the silver and the surface, we can’t control how much time we take from the living. The living get to control that. Worse, we can’t move on, not even when we’ve aged past the point where we should have gone on to whatever comes next. Trap one of us and you’ve got yourself an answer to the question “What will I do when I get old?” You’ll dump all the years you don’t want on your captive dead, and they’ll never be able to fight back, and they’ll never be able to get away. Most witches won’t go that far. They want to stay young, sure, but death comes for us all in time, and they know better than to expect the dead to be forgiving to those who’ve abused us.
Witches like Brenda hold on to their preferred age by bartering with ghosts to carry their years away. I’ve known Brenda since I stumbled into New York, and she’s been comfortably settled in her late fifties for all that time, not getting any younger, but not getting any older, either. She’s only asked me to take her time away once, shortly after we met, when she told me she knew what I was.
“Dead is dead, but moved on is better,” she said, face serious and serene under the neon light. “Could do without six months or so, if you want it. Could be convinced to make it worth your while.”
“No, you couldn’t,” I replied, and I told her everything. Everything. It just came pouring out in a great cathartic rush. Patty, and how she died. Me, and how I died, and woke at the back of the church during my own funeral, with Ma weeping on my bier and Pop standing there, his face empty, like a mirror with no one looking in it. How my parents covered every piece of glass in the house where I grew up, from the windows on down, so I couldn’t find any purchase there, couldn’t make it through the doors.
How I went looking for my sister and couldn’t find her in any of the places where her spirit should have been. There wasn’t even an echo. Patty was gone, just gone, moved on to whatever came next. She died when she was supposed to die, and I . . . I didn’t, overeager little sister always following too close, always leaping before I looked. Patty went where and when and how she was supposed to go, the same way she always had. And I was the accident, just like always. Just like always.
Brenda patted my hand, the first and only time she ever touched me, and nothing passed between us but understanding, no stolen seconds, no repurposed age. I didn’t want to give, and she didn’t want to take. “You’ve got things to work through, little girl, and I’m not going to get in the way,” she said. And then she said the words that changed the world: “If you’re not willing to take what you need, have you thought about doing something that would let you earn it?”
I found my first support group not a month later. I started helping people. I started earning the time I take, justifying it with my actions before I pull it into myself. I’m aging slowly, so slowly, but I like to think that when I finally catch up to my time—whatever age that is—and move on to wherever Patty is waiting for me, she’ll be proud. She’ll see I did the best I could.
She’ll see how much I love her.
It’s two o’clock by the time I leave the diner. The frat boys and tourists are gone, and the homeless have gone to their secret places to sleep, leaving the city for the restless and the dead. I walk with my hands in my pockets and the streetlights casting halogen halos through the fog, and I can’t help thinking this is probably what Heaven will be like, warm air and cloudy skies and the feeling of absolute contentment that comes only from coffee and pie and knowing your place in the world.
At least, I hope this is what Heaven will be like. One thing no one told me when I was first trying to adapt to existence as an earthbound spirit is that the longer I spend here, the less I want to go. I’m still working to earn my time, still fighting to get to my sister, but as the years have passed me by relatively unchanged, finding the finish line has become less and less urgent. I never want to stop helping people. The thing I used to do to make myself feel better about being a thief of time has become the thing I do because I want to. I want to make the world a better place. I want to keep people here—but among the living, not because they died too soon. I want to know that somewhere out there, somebody is living and breathing and enjoying their life because I convinced them to hold on long enough to find joy again.
I’ve been dead for forty years, and with every day that passes me by, I’m a little more certain I don’t want to move on. This is the place I’m supposed to be. And yet I keep earning the time I need to move me closer to my dying day, because being a part of the world means letting the world be a part of me, too. I’ve known ghosts who stopped taking time, who decided they’d rather be haunts than people. There’s nothing pretty about what happens to a spirit who decides that’s the way to go. Nothing pretty at all.
New York is an expensive town, and getting more expensive with every year that passes, but the dead get by. My landlady died in 1934, nearly fifty years before her husband. Way she always tells it, she knew he couldn’t take care of himself without her, and so she came back before her family was done sitting shiva, moved right back into her kitchen, and got on with her life. She took time from her husband for years, keeping him with her, up until the day when he was hit by a crosstown bus. It was a freak accident, the sort of thing no ghost could have predicted or prevented. He had already been long past his intended dying day, and he’d had nothing to linger for—he and she had both expected that when he moved on, so would she.
Only, she still had tenants, and there was his funeral to arrange, and it seemed like she blinked and thirty years had gone by, still anchoring the neighborhood with her family-owned, rent-controlled building. “It’s worth millions now,” she confe
ssed to me a few years back, both of us standing on the roof and watching the stars. Being dead means not sleeping much. “Millions! As if one little old lady needs millions more than she needs to know her people are sleeping good under roofs that don’t leak, with electrical sockets that won’t catch fire in the middle of the night. People think too much about money, and not enough about taking care of each other.”
“They’re alive.”
“They won’t be forever.”
She was right about that. No one lives forever. Maybe that’s why the living are so eager for things like million-dollar buildings and abolishing rent control: because they don’t understand that they have more time than they think they do. They’re swimming in the lake and I’m standing on the shore, and it’s hard to understand the water when you’re in it.
My locks haven’t been changed since the early eighties. There hasn’t been any reason to; it’s not like I have anything worth stealing. I dig out my keys and let myself inside, enjoying the simple normalcy of the process. A key, a tumbler, a doorknob, the metal beneath my fingers; these are things that don’t change, no matter how much time flows past me. Like me, locks remain essentially the same, updating slowly when they update at all. There’s something to be said for that, especially in the here and now, where everything changes so fast. So fast. This city is not the one it was when I arrived, new ghost-girl from Kentucky, stumbling and confused. If I reside here another ten years, it will be another hundred cities before I go. That’s the beauty, and the horror, of New York.
My fingers find the light switch and flick it on, illuminating my living room, the shabby furniture rescued from street corners and carted home from thrift shops and dusty secondhand stores, the bookshelves built of brick and unfinished pine. Everything is primary colors and bright patterns, like a Barbie house made large enough for me. It’s the apartment I dreamt of when I was a living teenager, standing at the beginning of the seventies and believing that this, here, this playhouse paradise, this was where Patty was living; that she slept on tie-dyed sheets and opened her eyes in the morning to crystals hung on fishing wire, throwing prism patterns on poster-covered walls. Nothing else could have been good enough for my beloved elder sister. She told me all about it in her letters home, before those letters darkened into quiet complaints about how loud it was, how she never saw the stars.
Before those letters stopped.
It was years before I realized Patty was lying all along, that she was a living woman, not a dead girl, and living women need to pay their gas bills and buy food with the money they make at their dead-end, minimum-wage jobs. I could barely afford my rent back then, and I was renting from a ghost who wanted to see me settled in a comfortable haunting, not sweeping the streets like the lost spirits who wandered the alleys and parks. Patty couldn’t have bought crystals by the bucket like she said, not without starving; she couldn’t have made a nest of layered sheets like a fancy French pastry, not without freezing to death. She was spinning me a fairy tale of New York in the process of spinning it for herself, and when that fairy tale collapsed, it took her down with it.
The apartment is warm now. It’s been years since I started paying the gas bill and installed the air conditioner, keeping the place toasty in winter and comfortably cool in summer. The reasons are scattered around the room like lumpy throw pillows, matted black and calico and tortoiseshell fur sticking up in all directions. A few stir enough to open an eye and peer in my direction, confirming my identity, but most are motionless. That’s fine. They don’t have much movement left in them, and there’s no good reason for them to waste it on me.
Six cats, at the moment, the youngest of them fifteen years old, left behind when her owner—a friendly old man who lived down the block his whole life, dying just ahead of the sale of his building—left her for the grave. I snatched her up just before his children could consign her to the local shelter, which does its best but is overcrowded and underfunded, and doesn’t have the space to keep cats that aren’t likely to be adopted. Not many people want the feline senior citizens. Kittens, sure, and healthy young adults with years of purring and playing left in them. Old cats? Cats that are set in their ways and just want to be left to sleep through their twilight years, setting their own schedules, making their own rules? Old cats rarely make it to the adoption floor. People want pets that will live for years, not leave tomorrow and break their hearts on the way out the door.
But I’m already dead. I can’t blame anything else for dying—and old cats aren’t likely to leave ghosts behind. Old cats have already lived past the accidents that put young cats in the ground too early, and are just marking time until their destined dying days. All they need is a place to be until their hearts stop beating, and I can give them that. The local vets think I’m a saint. I think I’m just operating under special circumstances. There have been times when I’ve had upward of a dozen cats wandering around the apartment, meowing like creaking doors, eating their geriatric cat food and complaining about their aching bones. I’ve lost a few recently, which is why I’m down to six. I’ll go to the shelter this weekend, see if they have anybody else in need of a home.
They always do.
One of the cats raises his head and creaks at me as I walk by. I pause to give him a pat, acknowledging that he still has a presence in the world, and he settles back to sleep. It must be nice, to be a cat.
The light from the living room filters into my bedroom, just bright enough to let me see what I’m doing. I don’t need to get undressed; ghosts like stuff as much as the living do, but our clothes are a part of us, and they change when we need them to. The only thing I’m actually wearing is my jacket. I drape it over the table by the door and blink, and I’m in the nightgown I was wearing when I died, winding white cotton like a shroud, feet bare against the hardwood floor. As always, it’s comfortable to put my death-clothes back on, like I’m setting the world a little closer to right. The shape of the skin under the shroud has changed as I’ve stolen my way into adulthood, one minute at a time, from the people around me, but this is one thing that will always fit, no matter how old I get. I was buried in it. It knows me.
This is the ghost of a garment, worn thin by my memory, and as gone as the rest of me. The worms have had my flesh by now. The creeping roots of trees have had the cotton stitching at my hips and the color of my hair. It’s been forty years since I went to the earth, and even my bones will be crumbling by now, going down into the Hollow, like the bones of all the folk who came before me. There’s something comforting in that.
It’s been years since I slept in Patty’s fantasy of sheets, layers surrounding and strangling me like cobwebs, like fog. When I crawl into bed, it’s to settle beneath the comforting weight of my feather quilt stuffed with goose down and stitched by the hands of women I never knew. I bought it twenty years ago, the last time I went home to Mill Hollow, to see the house where I grew up. The people who live there now are strangers to me: a brother born after Patty and I were tucked in our graves, his wife, and their children. They have my family name and my mother’s eyes, and they don’t deserve the haunting I’d be if I got anywhere close to them. So I touched the edge of the property, and I went to visit Patty’s grave, and I came home with a quilt that felt like home beneath my fingers. It wasn’t much. It wasn’t enough. It was everything I deserved.
I slip under the quilt, letting it weigh me down, until I feel almost like a living girl again and not an afterthought. I can feel the sunrise coming on. Ghosts walk by day same as we walk by night, but sunrise isn’t our time; when the cock crows, the dead go back to their graves. Everything human needs sleep, and ghosts are still human, no matter how much our situations may have changed. We still dream.
There’s no cock to crow for me here, but as the weight of several elderly cats presses the blankets down around me, I close my eyes, and I let the world drop away.
It’s been years since I remembered my dreams clearly. I think I dream of flying; I think I
dream of home. I know I dream of Patty laughing, Patty with butterflies in her hair, Patty before she left me to follow her dreams and her demons into a future that was never to be mine. Just like every night, I reach for her, and just like every night, she slips away.
Patty always slips away.
4: Bar No Ghost
The phone wakes me.
I open my eyes and the world is black and white. Insubstantial eyes can see, but we don’t get color. Color is for the living, and for the dead whose eyes have the capacity to hold on to the light that they receive. I should probably be blind when I’m faded out like this—the laws of physics and all that—but sometimes the laws of the dead are stronger than the laws of the living.
The cats don’t wake when I pass through them, my feet dangling a few inches above the floor as I drift from one room into the next. My head is still muzzy and mazed with sleep, and I don’t feel like taking the effort to be solid just yet.
My answering machine was top-of-the-line when I bought it, a new, miracle invention that would make staying in touch easier than it had ever been before. Now it’s an antique, clinging to life by the skin of its teeth—or the steel in its sprockets, since it’s a machine. It’s going to break soon, and if I can’t track down another one that’s simple enough for me to understand and use, early morning calls are going to get a lot more annoying. Turn solid every time someone wants to sell me insurance, or miss a lot of messages? The choice is mine, and it’s an awful one.
The ringing stops. The machine beeps. And Brenda, sounding aggravated, speaks.
“I know you’re there, Jenna. No way you’ve gone solid before noon without a damn good reason. I don’t need you to answer the phone, but I do need you to listen.”
Brenda has my phone number? Brenda has my phone number. I don’t know how that could have happened—except I do know, because I haven’t changed my number in years. There are dozens of people she could have asked, most of whom have no idea she’s a witch, most of whom have no idea I’m dead, who wouldn’t know what to do with that information if they had it. Any one of them might have thought, “Jenna and Brenda are friends,” or maybe “Brenda’s a sweet old lady and Jenna keeps cats; she probably wants Jenna to pet-sit or something.” They wouldn’t have hesitated. They wouldn’t have warned me.