Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day, Page 4

  Brenda is still talking. “I ran Sophie down last night after you left. She said the pigeons were crying. She said, and I quote, ‘There’s a cat in the rafters, and no one’s ever going to rest again.’ So I went looking, and the ghost gang that usually hangs out down on Sixth is gone. No one’s seen them in a week.”

  My feet hit the floor with a soft thump as I become too solid for the air to hold me. It takes a few seconds for the color to bleed back into the world, like Dorothy returning to the Technicolor fields of Oz. If I could see myself in this moment, I would look like a piece of black-and-white film flickering into existence, gaining color at the same rate as my vision, still fuzzy around the edges, like a nightmare, like a mistake. Ghosts have to sleep, and it’s sleep that gets us caught, that turns us into monsters in the eyes of the people around us.

  “I’ve been digging, and no one’s seen most of the local ghosts in days. Weeks, in some cases. I’m not talking about the fringe kiddies, like that trucker who does deliveries down in the Fabric District—I mean people like Carl the Statue, and that nice boy who works at Midtown Comics. I don’t know what’s going on yet, but you need to watch yourself. Meet me at the din—”

  The machine beeps and turns itself off, out of room to store any more words on its frayed tape. I’m solid enough now that I can reach out and press the button, triggering the message to begin playing all over again.

  It doesn’t make any more sense the second time. I cock my head, frowning at the speaker like that will somehow make Brenda start speaking more clearly, stop saying things I don’t want to hear. The cats are waking, and a few of the bolder ones come and strop their bodies against my ankles, creaking their ancient meows as they demand breakfast. I leave the message playing and make my way to the kitchen. Brenda has my phone number. Brenda—a witch—knows how to find me if she wants me. That’s bad enough to make me think of moving, even though there’s no way I could afford anything bigger than a bottle on what I make from my day job at the coffee shop.

  Brenda knows how to find me, and what she chose to do was not threaten, was not beguile: she chose to offer me a warning. That should be reassuring. It proves she’s a friend, that she hasn’t spent all those nights in the diner thinking about what it would be like to grab my hands and do the witchy thing, forcing me to pull the unwanted years away from her. Instead, it’s just unnerving.

  I spoon shreds of gravy-covered animal by-products into the dishes that line my counter, setting bowls on the floor two and three at a time, and wonder what could possibly be drawing the ghosts of my city away. Some of them are friends; some are acquaintances; some I know by rumor alone. But I’ve been here long enough that most, if not all, of them know me, and I like to think that if some new danger were on the horizon, at least one of them would have swung by to tell me about it.

  Sophie’s a street witch. That explains so much. Street witches must be common, as such things go; this day and age doesn’t leave much room for farm witches like Brenda, or swamp witches like old lady McGeary who used to live down at the bottom of the Hollow. But magic adapts. Magic finds its way through the cracks in the world, and magic busts things wide open, remakes them in its own image. Pave the fields and the blacktop witches rise. Build high-rise towers to block out the sun and sky and the glass witches will climb your constructs to dance away the morning. Magic always finds a way.

  I’d always assumed that witches took care of their own. They’re solitary sorts, living their isolated lives in their specialized pockets of magic, but that doesn’t mean they can’t get along. Witches teach each other, share knowledge, share spells, and I’ve heard of witches with similar affinities sharing space. So why aren’t the other street witches taking care of her? Why is she dependent on the kindness of strangers and the dead, when we don’t have that much kindness to spare? The world is hard. There’s no need to make it harder.

  The oldest of my current crop of cats is a weather-worn old tortoiseshell whose eyes never open all the way anymore. She doesn’t have the energy for alertness. She leans against my ankles as she eats her breakfast, and she either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care when the bare skin against her fur is covered by denim, when my daytime clothes flow into place and my winding shroud of a nightgown goes to wherever it is when I’m not wearing it. That’s another nice thing about old cats: they’re difficult as hell to startle.

  “Keep an eye on the place while I’m gone,” I say, leaning down to stroke her between her ears. The cats are fed, the day is young, and Brenda has my home phone number. It’s time to talk to someone.

  My apartment has two doors: the one that leads out into the hallway connected to the street, and the one at the back of the kitchen which leads to the internal stairway, intended solely for tenant use. There was a time when everyone in this building would have left their “back doors” unlocked, according to my landlady, popping in and out of each other’s kitchens for a slice of cake or to borrow a cup of sugar. It was a different time. I sort of wish I’d been here to see it. It sounds a lot like living back in Mill Hollow, where for years, I didn’t even know if our front door had a lock, much less when it would be appropriate to use it.

  Every door I pass on my way up the stairs is closed and locked. Some of them are even dusty, like they haven’t been opened in years. That sort of community is no longer something we reach for. That sort of community is no longer safe.

  And then I reach the top of the stairs, and the door there is standing open, letting light and warmth and the sound of a radio playing hits from the 1940s into the stairwell. I poke my head inside.

  Delia knocked down all the unnecessary walls years ago, leaving herself with a loft that stretches from one side of the building to the other, ceiling held up by Grecian pillars painted white and draped with artificial vines, like she’s planning to stage a Shakespeare revival in the middle of her unreasonably large living room. The only distinction between kitchen and everything else is whether the floor is hardwood or large, colorful tiles. The radio is on the counter, and a large green parrot sits atop it, rocking gently back and forth in time to the music.

  “Delia?” I take a step inside. Delia never leaves the door open unless she wants company; on some level, for her, this will always be the building she bought with her husband when she was young and breathing and the city was a promise she was certain would be kept. The skeleton of the place is the time, even if time has moved on around her. “You here?”

  The parrot stops bobbing to whistle inquisitively at me.

  “Hi, Avo. Is your owner here?” Avo—short for “Avocado”—was like my cats: a rescue. His owner had been a tenant, already old when he decided to get a “little birdie” to keep him company in his dotage. Nobody told him that parrots lived for decades. When the man had died, the bird had remained, and now lives a rent-free life with a ghost who adores him. Sometimes things work out.

  “Hello, hello, hello,” says Avo. “Hello, little ghostie, hello.”

  “Hello,” I agree.

  “Jenna!” The cry is glad, accompanied by the appearance of a woman who looks no more than ten years older than me. She is plump and lovely with a tangle of blonde curls, dressed in a painter’s smock over blue jeans and a flannel shirt. She doesn’t need the smock to protect her clothes any more than I need the jacket to keep me warm when I go outside, but sometimes the habits of camouflage can be difficult to break. “To what do I owe the pleasure? Don’t tell me you thought I’d be lonely up here.”

  “You’re never lonely, Delia,” I say, submitting to a hug and a quick visual examination.

  When she is done, she steps back and clucks her tongue in disapproval. “You’re too thin. Have you been eating properly?”

  “No.” Lying to Delia has never done me any good. I don’t even bother anymore. “But it wouldn’t make a difference if I was. I’m dead.”

  “Now she tells me!” Delia throws her hands up in the air, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling. “Dead girls don’t need to
eat. My life has been a waste.”

  A smile tugs the corner of my mouth. “You’re dead too.”

  “Which is why I can eat whatever I want without worrying I’ll get too thin and bring my own mother back from the grave to scold me for making her look like a bad parent,” says Delia, matter-of-factly. “Although I tell you, Jenna-girl, if I thought a few skipped latkes might bring my dearly departed by for a visit, I would go on such a hunger strike as the world has never seen. Not a scrap would pass my lips.”

  The smile keeps tugging at my mouth. It’s going to win soon. It always does, when Delia is around. “You know, sometimes you talk like today and sometimes you talk like yesterday. It can be sort of hard to follow.”

  “But when I begin talking like tomorrow, that’s when you’ll know there’s something to be worried about, no?” Delia crosses her arms and looks at me through the tangled fringe of her hair. “What’s wrong, Jenna? You’re a good neighbor and a good tenant, but you don’t come to see this old lady unless something is bothering you. No, don’t bother arguing with me. We both know where the truth sits, and the truth says that something is not well with you.”

  “I don’t think you get to call yourself an old lady,” I protest. “You’re not that much older than I am right now.”

  “Whose fault is that, hmm? Those were bad boys, breaking in here like they did. They deserved to have a few extra years ladled onto them. Let them have my sciatica. I’ll take their nimble fingers and their eyesight, and have a little more time for my art before I catch up to my dying day.”

  Delia has been jumping up and down the calendar since her husband died. One year she’s piling on the days, taking time from people on the street like a public charity. The next, she’s hunting muggers in the park, dealing out her own brand of strange vigilante justice. Because that’s one of the reasons people fear hauntings, even if they’ve long since forgotten the details: we’re not just able to take time away. We can give it back, too.

  Good ghosts don’t do that, unless they’re people like Delia, who find a way to justify their choices under the veil of vigilante justice. She’s like Batman, except instead of a cape and cowl, she has a cheery smile and a quick trip to retirement age. When she gets too old for her liking, that is. Unlike most of the dead I’ve known, Delia has no interest in reaching the end of her allotted span. She has her building and her tenants, and as long as New York endures, I guess so will she. There’s something beautiful in that. Even among the dead, Delia will live forever.

  “Okay, okay,” I say, yielding to her logic before we can get into another argument about the ethics of the way we exist. “I’m here because I’m worried. Have you heard from any other ghosts lately?”

  Delia frowns. “How lately?”

  “I’m not sure. Brenda called me.”

  “That field witch you pal around with? I don’t know if anyone’s told you, baby girl, but it’s not good for our kind to spend too much time with theirs. They have strange ideas sometimes of the way that things should go.” Delia looks briefly disturbed, her expression turning inward. Finally, she says, “They don’t always play it fair.”

  Asking her what she means by that is as likely to trigger her showing me her latest painting as it is to get a useful answer. Treading lightly, I say, “Brenda’s okay. She doesn’t ask me for anything, and she buys me pie sometimes. She says the ghost gang on Sixth is missing. She says Danny from Midtown Comics is gone, too.”

  “Danny?” Delia scoffs. “She’s wrong. Only time that boy stirs out of the city is when there’s a comic book convention for him to haunt, and he always tells me before he goes. He doesn’t rent from me anymore, but he knows how I worry.”

  “He doesn’t rent from you because he’s close enough to his dying day that he wanted to get rid of all his stuff. He haunts the comic book store now.”

  “Like I said, he knows how I worry, and he has a year yet. More than a year, and he takes time at a rate of what? A minute a day, at best. Boy doesn’t want to go. Nobody’s going to make him.”

  “But he’s not there now.” Danny is like me: he’s from away, although he lacks the broad vowels and mild intonations of Kentucky. He’s never told anyone how he died, but he doesn’t like police, and sometimes at night, I’ve caught him looking westward, like he thinks that somewhere out there, past the mountains and the plains and the endless rolling hills, he can find a way to see himself back home. “Have you seen any of the other tenants lately? The dead ones, I mean.” We make up the bulk of the building, but there are living tenants, too. There’s always at least one warm body living here.

  “Not for . . .” Delia pauses before admitting, “Not for at least a week. I thought they were just too busy to visit.”

  “Maybe they are.”

  Her gaze goes distant, and I know she’s doing the same thing I do after work, when I look for Mill Hollow. Only she’s not looking for Mill Hollow. She’s looking for her building, for the shape and the structure of it.

  Her face falls. “They’re gone,” she says, almost wonderingly. “We’re the only ghosts in this building.”

  “I need to go looking for the others,” I say.

  Delia’s expression turns somber. “I’ll get my coat,” she says.

  “Murder party, murder party!” announces Avo, following the statement with a peal of wild, distressingly human laughter.

  “I’ll get my coat and my parrot,” amends Delia.

  I sigh.

  Ten minutes later, we’re walking out the front door, two ghosts and a gleeful macaw. Avo rides Delia’s shoulder, flapping his wings and making piratical noises whenever anyone exclaims over his presence. I hang back to keep from getting a face full of feathers, and wonder whether she knows how grateful I am to have her here.

  Delia casts a smile in my direction, making sure I’m still there. She knows.

  New York City by day is very different from New York by night. The city puts on her best face for the tourists, trying to lure them in, to entrap and ensnare them in her web of “everybody wants to live in New York, everybody wants to belong in the city that never sleeps.” My gran used to tell us stories about goblin markets and dangerous fairy men back when Patty and I were small, and sometimes the city reminds me of those old fables. This is where you go to get lost. This is where you go to lose yourself. Maybe that’s why we have the second highest population of the dead in the United States. The highest is in Las Vegas, where everything is twilight and neon and no one notices if your eyes bleed screams and your skin feels like slow murder.

  New York has ghosts. Las Vegas has a haunting shaped like a city, and one day there’s going to be an exorcism. Sometimes I wonder whether there’s anything real under all the shadows cast by the dead.

  Delia walks with purpose, and people wave to her as she strides by. The neighborhood accepts her, the way neighborhoods sometimes do; I’ve heard people explain her as her own daughter, even her own granddaughter, but most seem to know that she’s just Delia. She’s as much a part of this block as the bodega on the corner or the wonky streetlight that the city never seems to care about enough to fix, and if she ever allows herself to reach her dying day and move on, this neighborhood will be infinitely poorer for it.

  “Delia?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Do you . . . do you know when your dying day is?” Of course she does. She’s been up and down the ladder of age, and we can feel our dying days when we get close enough to them. Every ghost has a different range. Danny knew as soon as he came within a year of his—guess he was always going to die young, just not as young as he actually did—but Maria who used to hang out down by the big stone lions didn’t know until she was within a week of hers. I’ve never felt mine calling me. I keep taking time in tiny increments, stealing whatever I think I’ve earned, and death remains stubbornly just outside my reach.

  “Ah, Jenna, it’s a beautiful day, and you’re a beautiful girl, and I’m an old lady with a parrot on her shoulder and no
t a penny in her pocket. When did this city get so expensive? Time was, anyone could afford to come to New York, and that she would open her arms to welcome them in. Now she wants a credit check and a security deposit before she’ll even show you to the subway.” Delia shook her head. “It’s not right. It’s getting to where the living are so eager to eat up the world that they’re not leaving any room for the dead.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “That’s because I was avoiding it. In my day, if a lady wanted to dodge a question, you let her. Especially if it was something that touched on her age or her home life or exactly what it was that went into her prize-winning pies.”

  I say nothing. I just wait. Delia likes to talk. I think that’s why she was so happy to adopt Avo. Once she had him, she was no longer limited to the sound of her own voice.

  Finally, she sighs, and says, “Yes, I’ve seen my dying day. My range seems to be a little more than a month. Scared the dickens out of me the first time I turned around and there it was, staring me in the face. So I bled off about six months, just so it wouldn’t keep popping up and scaring me, and I thought about what I wanted to do.”

  “Didn’t you want to . . .” I make a helpless gesture with my hands. “Didn’t you want to go?”

  “It’s tempting sometimes; I won’t pretend it’s not,” she says. “I could go. Find my Paul, and find out what he’s been doing to keep busy while he waits for me. It’s funny, isn’t it? How we can’t know when the living are supposed to go? He and I, we talked a few times about murder. About me putting a knife against his throat and cutting as gentle as I could, so he’d wake up in the same state I was in and we could be together. But we couldn’t go through with it. For that, we’d have to know it wasn’t his time, and the living don’t see as clearly as we do. It could have been he was always supposed to die at my hand. Only no, he was always supposed to get pasted across an intersection because he didn’t look both ways. Bastard.”