The Ghost in Love (26 page)

In reexperiencing it with the eyes, heart, and history of an adult, the woman was able to relish the romantic evening as much if not more than the girl did. Adult Danielle knew too well the betrayals, disappointments, bad luck, and mediocrity that later filled her days. So she knew this date was an extraordinary oasis in an otherwise arid life. The girl, on the other hand, saw it as only a sample of all the amazing things that were to come in the future. Dinner with Dexter was just a taste, an hors d'oeuvre, before the grand main course that was sure to be her adulthood.

In high school, Danielle's English class read the play
Our Town
. She never forgot the famous last scene where the dead character Emily is permitted to return to a random morning in her youth to witness her family eating breakfast. Despite its ordinariness, she is overcome by the richness and simple beauty of the mundane event. Eventually, Emily cries out to her family to recognize and treasure this moment and all moments like it in their lives. In vain, of course, because the living cannot hear the dead.

Danielle was not dead, but her night with Dexter Lewis at the Lotus Garden was. Yet, like Emily in the famous play, she was also given the opportunity to revisit that earlier experience. But, unlike
the character, the adult Danielle was soon entirely part of the event, not just outside looking in. The more she listened to the girl, the less it was memory and the more it was now. Gradually she began to taste the warm spring rolls and smell Dexter's English Leather cologne. The more things were described, the more real the experience became for her. And as that happened, the life she had been living half a day ago faded.

Our “now” is so boring and forgettable most of the time: Sit at your desk. Walk to the kitchen. Take a pee. Take a walk. Take a nap. Take your time, because it's so uninteresting that nobody else wants to take it. We remember few things about what we did with our days, since most of them are like air with no fragrance. What did you do in the afternoon two days ago? When was the last time you laughed out loud? Or ate something that made you close your eyes and groan with pleasure? Naturally we remember the perfume times because there are so few of them.

Given the chance to experience again a past occurrence when everything was so perfect that we never wanted it to end, who would say no? And what if reliving it could somehow go on forever? Dinner with Dexter indefinitely. Would we choose to remain inside that past paradise as long as possible, or opt to return to our daily ho-hum now, when typically the only thing to look forward to is the weekend, a favorite TV show, so-so sex now and then, or going to bed at night? Like those incomparable dreams in which we meet the people we have longed for all our lives. They are perfect. Everything is perfect, and to our surprise the dream keeps getting better as it continues. But then we wake up, and immediately think, No, no, not yet, a few minutes more, please! Let me finish the meal, the kiss, that walk on the beach at sunrise with them. We fight to go back to sleep to try and recapture the moment, the person, and perhaps,
most important, the exquisite feeling of being swept up in life rather than swept aside by it.

Almost everyone has come close to actually living dreams like those once or twice in their lives. Maybe it was that perfect date when you were twenty, or one magic afternoon in Istanbul, an hour, a meal, a dance, a walk by a lake in the rain you wouldn't trade for anything. How tempting if it were somehow possible to go back to those experiences and live them forever.

“What are you thinking about, Dani? You look so far away.”

For the first time since falling into this memory, she actually heard Dexter Lewis's voice rather than imagining it. She was no longer an adult listening to the girl. She and the girl had literally become one, having that once-in-a-lifetime dinner again at the Lotus Garden.

She inhaled deeply, blinked, and looked across the table at eighteen-year-old Dexter Lewis. He had bad skin but not too bad. She had forgotten that. She did remember he liked black shirts. She remembered the black one he wore now. He'd unbuttoned many of the buttons to make it look cool. But Dexter was too skinny to show that much neck and chest. She felt a burst of love for him for trying to be something for her that he wasn't.

Without thinking, she answered, “I was thinking about my accident. It just flew across my mind. I don't know where the thought came from.”

Dexter looked confused. “
What
accident?”

Part of her, the girl, asked the same thing inside her head. “What accident?”

Upset that she'd been careless enough to blab this, the woman sat up straight. Thinking fast, she muddied her statement as best she could. “The accident.
This
accident: the fact we met the way we did.
That's an accident. It was such a coincidence, you know? What were the chances of it happening like that?”

Dexter still looked perplexed. “We met in American history class, Dani. What's so accidental about sitting next to each other in class?”

While Danielle sculpted
her words and thoughts to fit that teenage world she now inhabited, Ben Gould walked slowly down the hall toward her apartment. After the initial shock of seeing the dancing old woman, he stepped forward and gently pulled the door to her apartment closed. He had no idea why she was doing it but assumed that, whatever her reasons, the old bird would not like strangers to see her dancing in her birthday suit. But he was wrong. The woman would not have cared because she was no longer part of the present by then. She inhabited a world and a time far removed from this one.

If Ben had been able to see behind the doors of every apartment in that building and understood what was going on in them, he would have been astounded. Because every single occupant of 182 Underhill Avenue who happened to be home at that time was somewhere else in his or her life. Like Danielle at the Lotus Garden and the old woman dancing naked for her boyfriend, the only part of the tenants that was physically present in the building was their bodies. Every other element was living somewhere in their pasts.

As soon as Danielle chose to move completely into the evening at the Lotus Garden restaurant, the allure of the past she freed from within became so overpowering that it moved out of her apartment, into the hall, and then throughout the rest of the building like an irresistible aphrodisiac. The few people inside at the time were all doing the same old nothing and therefore were particularly receptive to its magic.

One man sitting in one-hundred-times-washed Bermuda shorts and an undershirt was staring into a cup of coffee. He began thinking again about his time in the Marine Corps at Camp Lejeune—one summer day in particular. He was twenty-seven then and just married. It was hot that day and he loved the heat. He loved his new wife and felt her love for him whenever they were together. How had he lived so long without her? He liked his job and was good at it. He knew what he was doing with his life. His profession was important and meaningful. Unless things went very wrong, he would remain in the Corps until retirement and then join a small-town police force somewhere.

He remembered the smell in the air all that summer: the ripe lush smell of North Carolina in August. He remembered the sleeveless gray-and-purple dress his wife wore that morning when he left their apartment. He remembered the color of the bottle of her nail polish on the pine kitchen table. All of the windows were open and breezes were blowing through them, lifting the curtains.

His red-and-white Chevrolet Impala SS convertible was almost new. Soon, when he had time off, they would drive it to the ocean at the Outer Banks: drive right up to the water at night with the top down and sit there together, watching shooting stars blaze trails just for them. Standing in the military base parking lot, he slid his hands into his pants pockets. Looking into the cornflower-blue sky, he day-dreamed a few moments about going to the ocean for the first time with his new wife. Right then, that moment: that was it—the pinnacle of his life.

Thirty-one years later, staring into a half-empty cup of stale coffee, he moved straight into that memory as soon as he realized he could and never once looked back.

Jumping on a trampoline with a long-dead twin sister, sitting in
a tree house during a snowstorm while sharing a bologna sandwich with a fiancée, learning the intricacies of watchmaking from a Belgian master in Brugge . . . throughout that building, one by one the residents unhesitatingly traded their dull nows to return again to the best times of their lives and stay there.

“Help.”

Ben heard it as he was about to touch Danielle's doorknob. Looking to the left, a few feet down the hall he saw Pilot flicker in and out of view. Like a faint signal on the radio, the dog was visible a few seconds, then gone the next. Visible, gone.

“Help!”

“How? What do I do?”

Pilot tried to speak but disappeared. When he shimmered momentarily back into view, all he was able to say to the man was “Make a verz” before disappearing again.

“What? Make a what?” Ben asked no one because no one was around but him. He looked at the space where Pilot had been, waiting and hoping for the dog to reappear, but he didn't.

Make a verz.

The dog creatures with big eyes and no ears. Purple words and doodles on their white bodies. Make a verz.

Me?

Outside the building
the two women waited apprehensively, unsure of what to do. Ling knew that without her powers she could do little to help here. She didn't know if it made her angry or exhilarated. In a way, everything was now new to her because she was only human and that was exhilarating.

The front door of the apartment building suddenly banged open and Ben came rushing out toward them. The way he was moving,
both women thought he would go right by and down the street like the animals, but he didn't. Running over to them, he grabbed Ling by the arm and pulled her hard to follow: “Come on. Come on.”

“What? What are you doing?”

“You've got to come with me, Ling. Right now.” He hesitated and then said to German, “But you should stay here. I don't know what's going to happen in there, so please wait here till we come get you.”

“Go to hell, Ben. I'm coming too. Let's go.” She didn't wait for him to respond before she started moving.

Ben had lived with her long enough to recognize both that tone of voice and her don't-mess-with-me body language. German Landis had regularly beaten up both her brother and sister when they were children. She was not a person to challenge when she was angry or sure she was right.

The ex-ghost watched their exchange and fell even more in love with German. What backbone! Even Ling was hesitant about going inside the building now without her powers and some idea of what was going on there, but not German. Boom—full speed ahead, girl.

Inside, the three walked up the stairs to Danielle's floor. On the way, Ben described to them the naked dancing woman and the disappearing dog. It sounded funny but it wasn't. It sounded insane but it was true. Neither woman said anything. They wanted to see for themselves.

Seven steps up the staircase German started thinking about doughnuts. Big fat freshly made golden glazed doughnuts right out of the box. The gloriousness of eating them for breakfast along with a cup of blazing hot coffee.

Why was she thinking about doughnuts
now
? Because Ben walked in front of her. She looked at his back as they climbed the stairs and for no reason it reminded her of an occasion when they were living together. One Sunday morning in the middle of winter, he walked
into the bedroom still wearing his heavy gray overcoat. He was carrying a tray with two smoking cups of coffee and a peach-colored box full of warm fresh doughnuts that he had gone out to buy while she was sleeping. The night before, after making love, German talked about how much she liked doughnuts for breakfast, and now here they were. She could smell the pungent coffee and the just-baked doughnuts from across the room as he approached. Neither of them spoke while he lay the tray down on the bed and shifted things around so that it all looked just right. She was so charmed and touched by his thoughtfulness that she was wordless. Ben opened the box and tipped it up her way to show the treasure inside. She blew him air kisses with both hands and then reached for one. He stopped her, lifted the first one out, and offered it to Pilot, who had come over from his bed in the corner. The dog had never seen a doughnut before and was curious but cautious, as was his nature. To show the dog they were safe, Ben took a small bite out of this one and then offered the rest to Pilot, who took it like a gentleman.

“German?”

She heard the voice but it sounded far away—three rooms away, half a house away. She didn't recognize Ben's voice.

All three had stopped on the stairs because German had stopped and wouldn't move. Ling looked at Ben and shrugged.

He said her name again but this time more tentatively: “German?”

They thought perhaps she was frightened and had stopped to pull herself together before going on. But despite Ben's saying her name twice, German stayed where she was and did not move.

Why should she? She was in a perfect moment: They were all eating doughnuts together on a cold Sunday morning. The food was delicious, their love was new, they were safe in his warm bed, and Pilot was adorable in his seriousness.

Staring at her and trying to figure out what was wrong, Ben saw something strange in her right hand. Looking at it, he squinted to better focus because what he saw there made no sense. German was holding a doughnut, a golden doughnut. He craned his neck forward to make sure that was what it was. Where had she gotten it? Had she had it with her the whole time? A
doughnut
?

“Ben, she's fading!”

He saw it happening to German's hand, but it didn't register in his mind until Ling spoke. Her hand was becoming transparent. The hand, the doughnut it held, and her whole body were fading. She was leaving. Danielle Voyles's nostalgia had reached her now too. German wanted to be back in bed with Ben that cherished winter morning, eating doughnuts forever. Not here.