Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day, Page 2

  “Sophie, what are you doing out here?” Now that I’m not on the phones, my accent is strong as moonshine and thick as summer honey. I sound like home. Sometimes I talk just to hear words the way they’re supposed to sound, with their harsh edges sanded off and their tempo slowed to something that’s not in such a damn hurry all the time. I crouch down, trying to catch her eye. “I thought you’d found a place.”

  “I didn’t like it there.”

  “Oh.” I dig a hand into my pocket, pulling out the money I was going to use for pie. I’ve got enough quarters to get myself a cup of coffee, and it’s not like I need the calories. I put the money on the stoop next to Sophie’s hip. She’s younger than she looks, aged by the dirt that cakes her skin and the worries that line her face. I wish I could do more for her, and for all the others like her, but some rescues aren’t mine to make. I don’t touch her. I never touch her, and that hurts too, because she notices. I know that somewhere deep down, she must assume that my distance is born of the same revulsion that she gets from everyone else, the fear-born scorn that doesn’t want to admit that every living human in the city is just one bad break and a few missed showers away from Sophie’s stoop.

  For the most part, touching the living isn’t a problem for me. But when the need is bad enough . . . I can’t risk it. Sophie’s young and old at the same time, ridden hard by a world that’s never been willing to take the time to be kind. She doesn’t need another forty-seven minutes in this place. She needs a miracle, and the brush of my fingers would not be enough to grant it.

  “Get yourself something to eat if you can, okay?” I straighten, leaving the money behind. Everyone homeless is fighting an uphill battle—for respect, for safety, for survival—but not everyone homeless is lost like Sophie. She’s fallen through the cracks, and she doesn’t have the tools to find her way back into the light. It’s so hard for the lost. Even on the rare occasions when they have enough money for a healthy meal or a warm coat, they encounter people who won’t serve them, who say a little dirt and a lot of despair are enough to sever someone from the human race.

  I don’t know if there’s a heaven or a hell or anything beyond an earthbound afterlife full of covered looking-glasses, but if there is, I reckon some people will be getting a bit of a surprise when the time comes for their own moving on.

  “Okay,” mumbles Sophie, and I’ve done all I can do for tonight. I can’t take her home, and I know from past experience that if I try to take her to the diner, she’ll balk, refusing to go through the door. She has a little money, and she has her comforting shell of invisibility, which wraps around her like a cloak and protects her from the ones who might come through this night to do her harm. She’s been out here a long while. It’s arrogant of me to think she hasn’t made her own choices along the way.

  This, too, is a part of life in the city, and while each generation is happy to blame the next for the growing issues of the homeless and the disenfranchised, the fact is it’s been going on since Cain was young, his brother’s blood still dark and drying on his hands. People aren’t so good at being good to one another. We try hard enough, but something essential was left out in the making of us, some hard little patch of stone in the fertile soil that’s supposed to be our hearts. We get hung up on the bad, and we focus on it until it grows, and the whole crop is lost.

  I pull my coat tighter around myself, wondering when the wind turned cold, wondering if it’ll warm again before the sun comes up and the world changes yet again into something new. I walk toward the diner as quickly as I dare, mindful of the drunk tourists and college kids who sometimes stumble out of the bars, vomited into the street like so much spoiled fruit. Most of them turn and stagger back in again, determined to get as hammered as they can before last call comes and spoils all their fun. The ones that stay outside, though . . . those ones are dangerous.

  The people living in this neighborhood know me. They know everyone who volunteers at the hotline. They know the work we do, and how important it is, and that we don’t get paid to do it. None of them would lay a finger on me, much less knock me down and try to take my wallet out of my jacket. The frat boys and the drunks, on the other hand, have no qualms about going for a pretty young thing who doesn’t have the sense not to walk alone.

  I’m not what they want. They aren’t what I want. I have the sense to know it; they don’t. Better for all of us if I keep out of the way and keep them from learning things the hard way. Some lessons can’t be unlearned. Some lessons aren’t fair to any of the parties involved, and punishing them would leave me stranded here for longer. Better to keep walking. Better to keep moving on.

  The diner appears ahead of me, a skeleton of neon and bright paint glowing through the darkness like a promise, or a psalm. I pick up the pace still more, thinking of vinyl and chrome and the sweet, ever-present scent of pie crust hanging in the air, lard and sugar and flour and the memory of Ma’s hands working the dough, broad and strong and weathered as the Hollow itself, with knuckles like the roots of the old elm trees. We never had the money for eating out when I was young, and even if we did, there hadn’t been anyplace for us to go. Mill Hollow didn’t even get a Waffle House until the end of the 1990s, much less someplace fancy like a Cracker Barrel. The diner shouldn’t speak “home” to me the way that it does.

  But time is on its side. Dandy’s was the only thing open the night I rolled into New York City, still young and confused and convinced there’d been a mistake somewhere down the line, that one day I was going to open a door and find my sister on the other side, shaking her head and looking disapprovingly down her nose at my choices. Well, Patty wasn’t waiting when I got off the bus, but Dandy’s was, neon glowing through the dark. It was the first thing I saw in my new world, the lighthouse that called me home, and I’ll always love it for that, no matter how much time stretches between the woman I am now and the girl that I was then.

  The pie doesn’t hurt.

  The bell above the door chimes as I walk in. It’s been making the same sound for the last forty years, fading a bit with the passage of time but always sounding clearly. The diner is only about a third of the way full. Half the people I can see are regulars, people who’ve been eating here for years and have learned not to comment on the things a newer patron might find strange. Like the way David caters dinners of mixed seeds and scraps for the pigeons out back, or Brenda’s tendency to sit in the corner with her guitar, fingering chords and smiling, or the way I never seem to age. I am getting older, of course. Just slow, and steady, and not like a living girl would.

  I haven’t been aging like a living girl for a long, long time. Not since the night I ran out into the rain. Not since the night I died.

  Brenda’s in the corner with her guitar again, a cup of coffee in front of her and her guitar’s neck nestled in her hand. I offer her a nod as I walk by, and she offers one back, and the compact is reaffirmed; this place is still safe. Brenda’s a witch, one of the best I’ve ever known, all bottled magic and unforgiving judgment. She calls her power from the corn, she says, and that’s why she lives in New York, where everything is concrete and glass and the only green comes from the parks and the decorative verge outside the houses. Less temptation to seize the world and do what must be done, if she’s living this far from the corn.

  We get along all right. I don’t bother her and she doesn’t bother me. She doesn’t demand I take her time, and I don’t run. We get by.

  My seat at the counter is empty. I slide onto it, feel the vinyl conform to the curve of my buttocks, the press of my thighs. I relax a little further. Everything is normal. Everything is the way it ought to be, and I have forty-seven minutes to my credit. I lean my elbows on the counter, breathing myself into the room, and watch the ebb and flow of the people moving around me, trying to take the measure of the crowd.

  There are two servers on duty tonight, Carmen and a new girl whose name I can’t recall. Carmen’s in her late twenties and has been working the night shif
t here since she graduated high school. She takes morning classes at a local college and is working her way steadily toward a sociology degree. She’s happy, that’s the thing. Carmen loves her job, loves her regulars, and loves the way it leaves her afternoons free to do whatever she wants to do—even if privately, I think she should spend a few more of those afternoons sleeping. She’s young enough to be able to run for days on black coffee and adrenaline, and old enough to make her choices knowing what the consequences will be.

  The second server is younger, the sort of stretched-thin, wide-eyed teenager that Carmen used to be. She has a baby at home, and a GED with the ink still wet tucked into her purse. She’s produced it twice just to show people, for the sheer joy of being able to say, “See? See, I have a place in the world; you’ve tried to deny me the right to anything like it, but I got it.” She’ll do well here, once she finishes adjusting to the combined strain of the graveyard shift and a growing infant.

  For now, though, she’s dead on her feet, and she moves like every step is a chore. That decides things for me even before she drifts to a halt in front of me, opens her notebook, and asks, in a distinctly non-local drawl, “What can I get you tonight?”

  Carmen would address me by name, ask how things went at the hotline, maybe have shown up with a cup of coffee already poured and piping hot in her hand. This girl could be another Carmen, given time. Or maybe she’ll be something completely new, leave us for a better job and a world of prospects outside these neon-covered walls. Only one way to find out.

  “Coffee,” I say, with a sunny smile. “Cream and sugar, please.”

  She glances up from her notepad, dull surprise in her expression. Oh, she’s exhausted, this one; she’s near to the point of breaking, because there’s never enough time. “No pie?”

  “No pie,” I confirm, with a shake of my head.

  “Be right back,” she says, and she’s gone, bustling down the counter to fetch the coffeepot from the warmer.

  This is the hard part. I lean farther forward, and when she fills my cup, I reach for it a little too fast, so the liquid slops over the side and onto the counter, burning my fingers. I hiss, drawing back, and she jumps in with her dishtowel and a hastily mumbled apology, trying to clean up the spill before she can get in trouble for scalding a customer, much less scalding a regular.

  “I’m sorry, that was my fault,” I say, reaching out as if to help. My fingertips brush the side of her hand, and just like that, I don’t have forty-seven minutes owed to me anymore; I’ve taken them from her.

  She stops cleaning for a bare moment, the clouds in her eyes clearing, replaced by a bright, enthusiastic vigor. There’s no drug in this world like the feeling of a ghost touching living skin. Dead people provide a clean, natural, intensely addictive high, one that doesn’t come with any downsides. We take time from the living. We leave them younger, and there ain’t much humanity won’t do for eternal youth.

  There’s a reason most of us don’t advertise what we are—apart from the fact that the human race isn’t quite ready for the revelation that life and living aren’t one and the same. Once we’re dead, there will always be those who view haunts as something other than human, and be happy to use us for what we are, instead of respecting us for what we were.

  The new waitress blinks, the dazed expression leaving her face, replaced by a dreamy contentment. “I’m sorry about the coffee,” she says. “How about I cut you a slice of pie to make up for it? My treat.”

  I’ve been coming here long enough to know the owners won’t take the cost of that pie out of her paycheck, not when she’s doing it for someone who’s in as often as I am, whose habits are as predictable as mine. So I smile, and say, “That would be swell. Peach, if you’ve got it.”

  “She’ll take it à la mode,” says Brenda, leaning over me and plucking my coffee from the counter before I can object. “I’m paying. We’ll add the price of the pie you were willing to give her to your tip.”

  The new girl is smart enough not to argue with Brenda, who can be a force of nature when she gets going. “Shall I bring it to your booth?” she asks.

  “And the cream and sugar our little hummingbird requested, please,” says Brenda. Then she’s walking away, my coffee in her hand, and there’s nothing I can do but follow.

  Well. That’s not quite true. There are a lot of things I could do, because the dead still have free will; I didn’t give up being cussed stubborn when I died, thank the Lord. Not sure I could have handled being a teenage girl in the middle of a thunderstorm with no body and a whole new personality. There’s only so much shock a person can handle in one day, and I think that would have been a march too far. So I could stay where I am, or I could turn around and leave the diner, or I could go all transparent and start wailing about how much I want to find my beautiful golden arm. I have choices.

  I choose to follow Brenda to her booth, where my coffee is waiting and the guitar is already back in her arms, her fingers etching phantom chords along the neck. “I didn’t ask for your ice cream, and I don’t take any debt with it,” I say, warily.

  “I didn’t offer any debt,” she says. “There: the forms are observed. Now will you relax?”

  I like Brenda, as much as a ghost can like a witch, as much as it’s safe to drop my guard in the presence of someone like her. Forty years of sharing the same diner will do that. I sink back into the booth, feeling it mold to me same as the seat did, and shrug. “I’m here, I’m relaxed, I’m just waiting for my pie,” I say. “What’d you buy it for?”

  “Why didn’t you have the money?” Her accent is pure Indiana, as Midwestern as the corn she says supplies her power. When she speaks, I can see a sky as endless as my Ma’s knitting, and roads that cut from nowhere to everywhere, running for a horizon they know they’ll never reach.

  I shrug again, awkwardly this time. “Sophie was outside.”

  “Again?” Brenda tsks. “She doesn’t like the shelters. Says they make it harder to hear the city sleeping. She’s right, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s going to wind up dead if she doesn’t get things under control.”

  “Didn’t answer the question.”

  “A question is a perfectly viable answer, if you look at it right,” says Brenda. “I bought your pie because I saw what you did for Marisol. How much time?”

  “Forty-seven minutes.” There’s no point lying to her. She could touch the new girl—Marisol—and know exactly how much time I’d taken. Making her go to the effort would only annoy her.

  Only witches can control how much time a ghost takes. They can also force the issue. Marisol could touch me all day and not get a thing, not if I didn’t want to give it. Brenda could dump a year on me in a second, if she wanted to. That’s part of why they frighten me so much.

  Brenda’s expression softens. “How long did you work for that?”

  “All night.”

  “There are easier ways—”

  “No.” I shake my head, refuting the possibility before she can lay it out in front of me. “Not for me, there aren’t. I pay it back. What I take, I pay back.” I’m not supposed to be here. I’m a dead girl playing at being alive, and everything I claim—whether it’s a volunteer position at the crisis line or a seat on the bus—takes something from the living. I’m the damn fool who let her sister die alone in an unfamiliar city, who ran out into a storm and got herself killed. If I want to see my dying day, I’m going to earn every minute that gets me there.

  “There’s people who’d say the taking alone pays it back, you know,” says Brenda. “You’re the Fountain of Youth. Take as much as you want, they’ll still come panting to you with more.”

  I look at her. Brenda looks back. She can be hard to read sometimes: woman has a poker face like a mountain. As always, I break first.

  “You don’t mean that,” I say.

  “You’re right, I don’t.” She smiles. “That’s why you get pie.”

  Then Marisol comes over wi
th my plate, vanilla ice cream melting in rivulets down the pie crust, and sets it in front of me as ceremoniously as a knight setting the crown jewels before his queen. I reach for my fork, and Brenda smiles, and it’s been a good night. A good, good night.

  If I can have a million more just like it, maybe I’ll have done enough. Maybe Patty will be repaid and I can finally rest.

  3: Time Like a Ribbon

  This is how it goes, with the dead:

  When you die, the clock stops. Whatever age you are, that’s the age you’re set to stay, from now until forever. Not so bad, if you’re one of the lucky few who die in the prime of life, happy and healthy and hale and misfortunate enough to tangle with a train or get bitten by a rattlesnake. For the rest of us, who die as children or senior citizens, when our bodies aren’t equipped to do everything we ask of them, death is a new form of punishment.

  What’s worse, ghosts are almost always people who died too soon, shuffling off the mortal coil before their time has come—although who decides what their time should have been is something I don’t know and may never learn. We know there are rules. We know we’re bound to follow them, not because there are consequences for breaking them, but because they can’t be broken. The world refuses to allow it. So we die too early and then we’re trapped in the world, not among the living but not fully apart from them, either, until such time as we can reach the age we should have been when our hearts stopped beating.

  And this, then, is the true secret of time:

  Time is like water. It flows all around us, and the living can’t help getting older, just like someone who walks in the rain without an umbrella can’t help getting wet. But the dead, we stay dry unless we take steps to change it. Time falls right through us, and we’re stuck. So how can we get older? How can we catch up to the people we should have been when we went and died?