Dark Rain: 15 Short Tales (21 page)

To that end, she started burning things in the back yard, mostly the belongings of her last husband, but also a lot of other stuff that she said was “weighing us down.” Like a photograph album of her mother’s family. Like all my report cards and art work from my first five years at various elementary schools. And Sizzle the Bear. I think I probably hated her for burning him more than for almost anything else she ever did to me. Which is saying something.

But Wiley Fontenot, my handsome dead soldier, I told Dolores, had a happy childhood growing up in a Cajun family in Lafayette, Louisiana. He’d told me all about how they celebrated Christmas on the bayou, eating chicken gumbo and dancing until dawn on Christmas Day after lighting bonfires to guide the sleigh of Father Christmas and his sidekick, a sort of helper named Black Peter. It was when he was off fighting in France that Wiley spent his first holiday season away from his family, and he described to me the packages he’d gotten from them full of handkerchiefs and chocolates and socks and packs of cigarettes.

“Grandma even sent me a fruitcake in a big sealed tin,” he said. “Passed that around to the other boys and we all drank rotgut and sang Christmas songs, you know? Played them a few Cajun carols on my squeezebox. Picked that off a dead German—a Hohner Grand Imperial.”

“Well that’s it then,” said Dolores excitedly. “If your young man’s musical, we should get him something at the Berkeley!”

When we turned the corner onto Grand, I was amazed to find the Berkeley Music Shoppe still existed. It had been on life support back when I was in high school, about the time online MP3s started to decimate the CD racks; now their stock consisted mostly of used guitars, mixers, and amps, along with a few older instruments and a forlorn-looking drum set whose cymbal trap rattled noisily when I came in. Like Goldie’s, the place was filled with ghosts; I was the only living customer.

If you could call me that.

“Help you?” asked the bored kid at the counter. He was too busy swiping his phone screen to even look up at me.

“I’m interested in—” I started to say. There was sheet music stacked everywhere, but I suddenly realized that it was all ghost stuff, probably the result of some long-ago store fire. Not only that, but I didn’t have a clue what songs Wiley might like.

“Excuse me—Richelle?” said Dolores, plucking at my arm. “Didn’t you say your young man played the squeezebox? Well, there’s a real nice one for sale over here.”

She led me over to a table in the dustiest, darkest corner of the store that had a row of antique instruments on it, all arranged like corpses for their eBay photoshoot. One of them was a Hohner Imperial IV 60 bass accordion, according to the raised black letters on its reddish pearlwood casing, the same model Wiley had played a century ago in France. The coincidence seemed too big to ignore; problem was, so was the price. Its tag said $350.

“I can’t afford it,” I hissed at her. “Besides, how do I get it to him?”

“Don’t you have a fireplace? I bet this would burn real nice—these pleat things, what do you call them? The bellows? Well, they look to be made of some kind of cardboard and cheap leather. They’ll go right up. And the rest of it is mainly wood. Look, just go back up to the boy and offer him a hundred dollars for it. Tell him it’s Christmas Eve. Honestly—the prices you folks pay nowadays.”

The kid hemmed and hawed but finally said yes, pretty much maxing out my last usable credit card. So now I felt broke, relieved, and pissed at myself for having stupidly just bought the world’s most expensive firewood. And it wasn’t exactly easy hauling it back to my car, either; not in my “delicate condition”, as Dolores kept calling it.

“You going to be okay, sweetie?” she kept asking me anxiously. I was tottering along, my ankles and lower back on fire and probably looked like death warmed over. Which I literally was. “Let’s stop here.”

“Here” was the Nightbirds Diner, another relic from my childhood; my mom and I had come here whenever she had a big payday. Or managed to steal the price of lunch from one of the men who passed through our lives and her bed like it was a bus station. The joint still smelled exactly the same—they probably hadn’t mopped the floor or changed the grease in the fryer since my last visit, which had been a homicide in the alley behind it. A bunch of miserable-looking businessmen in too-shiny suits mixed with the occasional homeless person lined the booths and stools now. Nobody was talking to each other except the ghosts.

“Looky here, it’s Dolores!” said one the moment we set foot inside. “Long time no see.”

“Oh hello, Mr. Taylor. I thought you’d be up at the big store.” Mr. Taylor was a huge older black man with gold front teeth wearing a homburg and what I imagined a “zoot suit” might look like.

“Too many memories. Besides, I’m not wanted there anymore. You know how it is—they’ve changed everything around in there since the fire.”

“Say, this is my new friend, Richelle. She’s got one foot in Shadytown and the other in Sunnyside. I never seen anything like it.”

“Me neither!” said Mr. Taylor. “Baxter, Lil, come here a minute. Meet Richelle, she’s a live one, all right. Expecting a baby but dead like us. Doesn’t that beat all?” Baxter and Lil were white—though distinctions like that are meaningless among the shades—and looked a little like Abbot and Costello, if you can imagine Lou Costello in a blonde wig and a dress. And too much lipstick.

We all said hi, and they ordered me a ghostly hot chocolate with “a shot of something” in it. Their talk got loud and boisterous. It was one of those nights of the year when there seemed to be a lot more life among the dearly departed than those left behind in the land of the living. And a lot more drinking. Mr. Taylor, who seemed to have a little thing for Dolores, invited her along “for a toot”, but she said she hated to leave me, since I wasn’t feeling well.

“I want to keep an eye on her,” she told him and his friends. “What with her feeling so funny tonight of all nights. What if she, you know, has to go to the hospital?”

Not that a ghost was going to be much use in that situation, but that didn’t stop them all from crowding into my Toyota and coming home with me. Then, while Dolores and I incinerated the Hohner in the abandoned back yard grill my ex-husband Devon had insisted on buying but had only used once before he became a vegan, Mr. Taylor and his buddies must have gotten busy on the old ghost phone (most houses have them), because by the time we went back inside, there were about a dozen newcomers crammed into my living room, all rapidly getting “boozed up”, as Dolores said. In addition to several cases of champagne and Johnny Walker, somebody had also brought along a portable Victrola, and they were listening to carols played by jazz bands and jitterbugging. Which, noisy and irritating as it was, was still an improvement over my last Christmas Eve, which I’d spent listening to Devon play his Mannheim Steamroller and whale sounds CDs and explain to me for the hundredth time that Jesus didn’t exist and so neither did the holiday we were celebrating.

“
Excellent Solstice
,” he’d said to me at midnight by way of compromise.

But I’d been hoping Wiley would show up and we might at least have some time to be alone together—now what would he think about all these people who’d invaded my home with their racket? Would he even come by? Meanwhile, back in the real world, I hadn’t heard from Malena, either, aside from a text to tell me she’d landed safely.

Also, it was no big deal, but she hadn’t left a present for me, which wasn’t like her and honestly felt a little weird. Maybe she’d forgotten to buy me one—or more likely just felt that moving in with me and helping to ease my financial problems was the best present she could give me, anyway. Which was totally true. Except it sort of hurt my feelings, anyway. Dumb, I know. But it wasn’t like her not to call—usually she bugged the crap out of me.

Mom hadn’t called either. And what a unwelcome surprise it was to me that I’d even noticed—and a sign of just how low I’d sunk. Maybe Harper was right, and I was secreting hormones like crazy in spite of being clinically PDOA (DOA?). But hey, I guess Mom was all the family I had. I’d never had a father. Mom said he’d been an Irishman, half Traveler, half Gypsy—a
didikoi
, as the Romani call anyone of their mixed blood. It was cool that she’d actually made the effort to find out who’d knocked her up, but as far as I was concerned, he was just a rumor. And what looked like a forged last name on a birth certificate: Richard Colum O’Shaughnessy Dadd.

Meanwhile, the minutes ticked by. Wiley, if he was coming at all, was late—it was already past the time normal families were sitting down at the dinner table to eat their Christmas turkey. I’d lit candles everywhere, then turned out the lights so you could really see the colored lights blinking on the tree Mal had sweetly trimmed for me; sewing together strings of popcorn to put around it was about the only use I’d been. I felt even less use now watching the ghosts dance and sing and carry on.

It was my party, and I think I was actually about to start crying, something I never, ever let myself do—well, hardly ever—when suddenly Wiley Fontenot was there, with a wrapped box and a bottle in his arms, standing just inside the doorway. He had let himself in. My “young man.” After I’d introduced him to everybody, and we’d all drunk a few toasts, I finally got him into my bedroom where we could be alone, if you didn’t count Kitty hiding under the bed.

“Here’s your present,” I said breathlessly after we’d kissed. Kissing a spirit feels a little like the tingling sensation you get when you’re about to stick your finger in a light socket. Making love is even more intense, like merging souls together in a thunderstorm, except that I have to be asleep and outside my physical body to do it—which was kind of a problem lately with baby Tamara on board.

“I brought one for you, too,” said Wiley, handing me mine. “That’s why I ran so late.”

“You first.”

“Oh
, merci le bon Dieu, un tit noirs!”
he said when he’d unwrapped it. “
Mais ceci est rouge, l’accordéon
. And it’s a Hohner Grand Imperial! Richie, where in the world did you find it? How did you know? It looks just like the one I had in the war.”

He played a few licks on it while I opened my present. When I realized what it was, I just sat there stunned. It was Sizzle the Bear, the Beanie Baby my mom had burned up in the back yard almost thirty years ago. I mean, it didn’t just
look
like the same bear—it
was
my Sizzle. Or his ghost, anyway. It even had the same loose right eye and torn-off left ear.

“But how—?”

“Nah, nah,
cherie
,” he said, smiling. “I ain’t telling. You’re not the only detective round here. Took some finding, though.”

Maybe I’ve made being dead sound like too much fun. Believe me, it isn’t. Sure, some things work the same, almost the same, but believe me, nothing beats being alive. For one thing, you can still get a little privacy, something that ghosts seem to have no concept of. No sooner had we started to thank each other properly than Mr. Taylor’s friend, the blowsy Lil, sailed into the room.

“Hey, break it up, you two,” she giggled. “It’s no fair for the rest of us—we’re tryin’ to find some mistletoe and make egg-nog. We need you to offer us some nutmeg, Richelle. Sorry…”

“Offerings” are what the dead call anything you send to the other side, usually by burning it. But rust and decay do the same thing over time. So I ended up staggering splay-footed back to the kitchen while Wiley went back to the living room and played Cajun Christmas tunes for the others, who were getting pretty drunk by now.

The doorbell rang.

Rang back in the real world, I mean. It took me a minute to realize what it was, I was so used to my ghostly companions by now. Besides, it wasn’t as if I was expecting anybody this time of night; by now it was just after midnight. Somehow I dragged myself through the living room and answered the front door.

A man stood outside in the night, lit by my porch light. He was about sixty, though his long straggling grey hair and snaggle-teeth made him look older. He had a cigarette between his lips and wore a dingy, ill-fitting old coat that looked like he’d picked it out of a dumpster. Or more likely, at a homeless shelter.

“Richelle Dadd?” he asked when I answered the door. His voice was hoarse and rasping but with a soft lilting Irish accent.

“Yeah?”

“Thing is… I’m not entirely sure of it, but… I think you might be me daughter. Me name’s Dadd, as well, you see—Dickie Dadd.”

I just stood there, too stunned to move or say anything. The man looked ashamed for a moment, maybe because he was seeing himself through my eyes, and cast his eyes down at the concrete stoop. He was oblivious to all the noise and light the ghosts were making inside the house behind me, Wiley’s
fais do-do
, as he called it; to the living, the place must have looked lonely and deserted. “Sorry to be disturbing you at this hour of the night.”
Distarbin’ yez at this ire of the noight
. “Thing is, the lady said it would be all right. She told me to do it this way, you see.”

“The lady?”

“The lady cop. Pretty young lady cop she was, happened to be passing by the slammer when I was run in for vagrancy last week. Well, not as pretty as you, if I’m allowed to say. Father’s privilege. Anyhow, she asked me a few questions about meself, then busted me loose, gave me a few bills, and made me promise to darken your door at midnight on Christmas—and so I have. Oh, and she said to give you this.”

He handed me a blank warrant card. On the back of it, Malena had scribbled, “
Merry Christmas, partner
!”