Chapter Eleven
He invited her to the roof that evening.
Lina hesitated, a step below him in the back stairwell.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“It seems dangerous. If she pushes people, then the roof isn’t such a…”
Ren shook his head. “There are places in the house she’s more active.” He turned and led the way up the stairs. “And there are places she hardly ever goes. The roof is the one place I’ve never experienced anything.”
“Strange.”
“Not really. She was afraid of heights.” Ren moved along the third-floor corridor toward the attic ladder. “Otherwise I’m sure she would have chosen that route rather than the garage. Would have been faster, more dramatic.”
Lina climbed after him into the darkness. “You sure know when to pick your topics,” she said, eyeing the shadows.
“Sorry. Here.” His hand closed around hers. “Come on up and forget about it.”
He flung open the rooftop door to reveal a gentle lavender twilight, and began telling her about a book he was reading. He sat down on the sloped shingles, letting gravity plant his back against a chimney. Lina sat close to him for warmth. As they talked, the wind swirled around them, smelling of saltwater and wood smoke. When she shivered during a strong gust, he slipped an arm and leg around her and secured her in front of him, her back against his chest.
Although she had wanted to abandon the topic, she couldn’t keep it out of her mind while perched three stories above the street. “What would happen to you if you jumped?”
“Think I haven’t tried?” he said.
“Sorry. You don’t have to talk about it.”
“It’s all right. Logical question. Well, when I attempt suicide, which I’ve tried three different ways…I die. Kind of.”
“You die,” Lina repeated, waiting for it to make sense.
“You know in video games, when your character gets killed, and disappears, and you get a brand new one, back at the beginning of the maze or the room or wherever you were?”
“Yes.”
“It’s like that. Only I was doing it long before video games.”
“You disappear…”
“And reappear at the boundaries of the property. Any bloodstains I left behind are gone. I never remember anything in between. As far as I can tell it’s an instant circuit. Do not pass Go, do not visit the afterlife, return directly to the house.”
“Wow. That is weird.”
“Yep. Which isn’t to say there’s no way out, but…” He shrugged. She felt it as a lift of one of his encircling arms. “I don’t know how yet.”
Lina huddled tighter into herself, feeling colder after that story. She couldn’t decide which was worse: the idea of not being able to escape even by suicide, or the image of Ren diving from the rooftop and crashing on the pavement below. Breathe , she told herself. She did her best, turning her attention to the sunset-tinted clouds. This was a tranquil and romantic setting. She shouldn’t spoil it by thinking of death.
“Did you look up ‘incubus’?” Ren asked, in her ear. She heard a smile in the words.
“Yes. Let’s see: a lascivious spirit supposed to have sexual intercourse with women in their sleep, if I remember right.”
“There. And you thought it wasn’t possible. It’s common enough they actually had to make up a word for it.”
“Well, if you’ve been doing that, then you must have been discreet, because I sure haven’t noticed.”
“It’s not my preferred method,” he said. “I always wake them up first.”
She laughed, turned her head, and kissed him, and they abandoned the discussion. Entwined on the rooftop, buffeted by cold wind, they kissed for the half-hour it took the stars to emerge, and at least another quarter-hour for good measure. They kissed until they were both breathing fast, until their limbs had fastened around each other in a comfortable clamp, until she couldn’t separate the smell of the night air from the smell of his skin. He nuzzled her cheek with a chilly nose-tip, turning her face aside from time to time, unable to leave her ears alone for long. He nipped at them and burrowed his hands in her hair, making her shiver and laugh.
“Liiii-naaa!” Marla’s voice, jolly and high-pitched, floated up through the open trapdoor. “Re-ennn?”
Ren and Lina moved their faces apart to appraise each other.
“We’re being summoned,” he observed.
“We’re out past curfew,” she said.
“Ah-ha!” Marla sounded closer now. “We’ve found their escape route, Mrs. B.”
“Oh? Where did they go?” Mrs. B’s voice said.
“Up to the roof, I reckon,” Marla said.
Ren disentangled himself from Lina and crawled to the door. He leaned over it and shouted, “Boo!” The sound echoed in the rafters.
Two shrieks from below made Ren and Lina burst into laughter.
“Lord almighty, Ren!” Marla hollered. “Would you two get down here? We’ve been looking all over the house for you. Time to start the movie.”
Lina crawled to the opening. “Sorry, Marla. Coming.”
* * *
“If I had any doubts about whether you took my advice,” Mrs. B said after the movie, “they’d all be put to rest now.”
They were in Mrs. B’s room, where Lina was taking bobby pins out of Mrs. B’s hair. “Because we were on the roof? We could have just been stargazing.”
“I don’t mean on the roof. I mean during that movie. Sometimes when I reached over to ask you what was going on, I swear I touched Ren’s leg instead.”
“You have a way of making the most innocent things sound dirty.” Lina grinned, remembering how eight people had squished together into the TV room, requiring Lina and Ren to share a small space on the sofa, and how she had ended up more or less on his lap. Between his legs, actually, but there was no way to express that without sounding even dirtier.
“If you haven’t kissed him by now,” Mrs. B said, “then I’m just going to stop speaking to you until you do.”
Lina put the bobby pins into a drawer. “Well, then I’m relieved to say we can go right on speaking.”
Mrs. B’s exclamation of delight was loud enough that Lina glanced to the door to see if anyone came running. “Tell me!” the old lady crowed. “Is he any good? Does he know what he’s doing?”
Lina sat in an armchair and set about assuring her that Ren did indeed know what he was doing. It was an hour of triumph and sweetness she had seldom known in her life: to be the female who had won the coveted love interest, the heroine of the romance, the holder of the succulent details. She even managed, for that hour, to push aside the fear in her head.
* * *
But of course her triumph had a nasty twist. Unlike most romantic heroines, she ran the risk of being punished by a malicious ghost for winning the hero—or bringing down punishment on someone else. She had never wanted a life of roller-coaster emotions, but that was what she had gotten, with even more up-and-down swing than the early stages of love usually brought.
She and Ren met whenever they could, often talking and cuddling, more often abandoning talk in favor of kisses. When one night he pinned her to the wall in the back stairwell, his mouth so insistent against hers that they seemed to have melted together, every contour of his body tangible, she almost invited him to her room. But before she got up the nerve to ask, he let her go with a smoldering smile, and whispered, “Goodnight.”
And then she had to face her room alone, and as soon as the lights were out, dread draped over her with the shadows. What would happen tonight? Would it be something bizarre but harmless, like the CDs being stacked? Or would it be frightening and messy, like the day she awoke to find her lipstick scribbled and smeared all over the mirror? She had looked for words or images among the graffiti scrawl, but there weren’t any—or, at least, nothing more than any psychiatric patient would see in the average Rorschach test.
Other people felt it too. Every week there was new gossip. Dolly Tidd watched her desk drawers open and close by themselves. Betty on the second floor said all her shoes were hauled out of the closet overnight. George said the ghost must really want his hair to look bad, because his comb kept getting stolen and hidden. Most seniors believed their own stories but said the other residents were just forgetful. Lina said nothing, not even to Ren—not unless he asked, which he only did a couple of times, and then she played it down. Harmless pranks, she said. No need to worry.
But he did worry, and she saw it. As she came down the back stairs one day in the third week of March, she overheard him talking with Marla in the pantry below. “I don’t remember it ever happening this much,” Marla said.
“I don’t either,” Ren said. “It feels like she wants to have it out once and for all.”
“Well, how the heck do you have it out?”
“I don’t know.”
Lina didn’t want to hear any more, and went back up several steps to cough and tread heavily so they would know she was coming.
* * *
That weekend, Lina had Saturday off. Ren had to work, but since the weather was mild, he encouraged Lina to go out and do something fun, then come back and see him in the evening. She agreed and said she would go downtown.
And she did go downtown, but only to catch the Bainbridge Island ferry, and from Bainbridge Island she drove out to Port Townsend.
Sean Reynolds was buried in St. Mary’s Cemetery in his hometown, reported the old articles. On two different nights now, Lina had dreamed of walking into the graveyard (which she had never actually seen) and finding his tombstone. Both times it had been a massive monument, as high as her chest, with scrolls and leaves carved into the corners. Once it was red granite, and his bones were scattered on the ground before it. The other time it was white marble, and a fog had enveloped her so thickly that she couldn’t see her feet or anything else except the words Ren is dead engraved on the stone. Whether seeing the grave in real life would make the dreams stop or not, she didn’t know, but she had to find out.
The sun streamed down onto the ferry when Lina left Seattle, but the marine layer of clouds increased as she traveled west. The day had turned cold, gray, and windy by the time she drove into Port Townsend two hours later. The town had tidy, quaint, century-old facades along the waterfront, with pedestrians strolling and loitering by the shops. But when Lina drove past these, following the directions she had printed from the internet, and reached the gates of St. Mary’s Cemetery on top of a hill, no one was around, and all she heard when she stepped out of her car was the wind and the cry of seagulls. She entered the graveyard.
Ten minutes later she stood in front of it. Sean Reynolds, beloved son and brother, 1913–1936 . A small plaque of weathered gray stone set flat into the ground. She should have guessed it would be modest, since he had said his family was poor, and on top of that he had died in the middle of the Depression.
Beside him on the right was an older stone, barely legible: Robert Reynolds, Ren’s grandfather, to judge from the dates. On Sean’s other side, in standing polished stones with clear-cut lettering, his parents, William and Clara, who had died in 1964 and 1966, respectively.
She stood looking at the stones a long while, hands in her coat pockets. Her heart had jumped to her throat when she had first seen the names, but after a minute they became nothing more than words. So it’s true , was all her mind concluded. She even felt some relief at finding the story corroborated with facts carved in stone, and couldn’t conjure up much grief over it. Yes, his bones lay beneath this plot of grass, so long buried that the turf spread seamless across it. But what did it matter, since his solid, tangible spirit lived across the water in Seattle?
Still, morbid curiosity did creep into her mind. What would happen if she dug up his coffin? Perhaps his spirit would be ripped out of the house in Seattle and brought here to reanimate his corpse, in zombie-movie fashion. Or perhaps opening his casket would set his ghost free, and she would never see him again. Likelier still, nothing would happen, except she would be horrified with herself and saddled with new nightmares—and she would probably also be arrested.
She turned away. Talk about unhinged. She wouldn’t be strong enough to dig a six-foot-deep hole by herself anyway, and she certainly wasn’t going to ask anyone else to do it. She would let the dead lie.
She walked to a clump of daffodils growing at the base of a tree, picked one, and brought it back to his grave. She kissed its petals before dropping it.
Yes, she would let the dead lie, as long as one of them was still willing to be her boyfriend.
Definitely unhinged. No doubt about it.
* * *
Lina acquired a sleep deficit before long. Nerves and despair robbed her of peace. She stayed up reading later and later, and when the alarm clock rang at seven o’clock she had to fight through exhaustion to get up. Night shifts were especially harrowing. Julia seemed to dance around her, flicking objects onto the floor, making them drift across the room, slamming doors so Lina would jump. The ghost came and went, acting up for five minutes then disappearing for hours; Lina never knew what to expect. Ren, sensing the disturbances, tended to call or come up to her room to check on her, but Lina always masked her anxiety with a smile and told him she was fine, and that she needed to sleep. But when he left, the possibility of sleep departed with him.
She made up the time with daytime naps in the living room before or after her shifts, with a book on her chest so people would think she had fallen asleep while reading.
Ren caught on before long. She woke up one afternoon, blinking in a diffused beam of sunlight, to see him sitting on the arm of the sofa.
His fingers trailed along her hair. “Did you always sleep out here so often?”
Lina sat up and stretched her shoulders. “I guess not.”
“She’s more active at night. Is that it?”
She tried a smile. “I think it’s mostly my imagination. You shouldn’t…”
But before she could tell him not to worry, he moved down to sit beside her, interrupting softly, desperately, “Don’t. Don’t lie to me. Tell me.”
She took his hands and looked down at them, stroking his fingers. “It’s everything. Combined. Some nights it’s all too much, and I can’t…” She turned a shoulder in a shrug. “I can’t close my eyes.”
He nodded. They watched their fingers slide over and between each other. “You’re getting tired of the situation. I’ve seen it before. I kind of expected it.”
“No. No, no.” She squeezed his hands. “I’m not tired of you in the least. That wouldn’t be possible. I just seem to have developed a phobia of being alone at night.”
“Hm.” He looked at her, a new twinkle in his eyes. “Then don’t sleep alone.”
* * *
“You’re going to watch me sleep.” Lina said it aloud in the hopes that it would sound less weird. It was 10:00 p.m. and she stood in her room, holding her toothbrush, nightgown, and bathrobe.
Ren sprawled in her desk chair, fully dressed and grinning at her. “I’ll be here while you sleep,” he corrected.
“Just sitting there.”
“I’ll move to the floor if I get cramped.”
“You could lie beside me, you know.”
The sparkle flashed again. “I don’t quite trust myself.”
“God, Ren. What if I snore?”
“I’ll turn you on your side.”
“I don’t look my best in the morning. My eyes are puffy, my hair’s a mess…”
“You looked adorable that morning in the snow. Stop fussing.”
Lina smiled, but had to voice her one major concern. “What if you being here makes her even more angry?”
“Then at least I’ll be here, and you won’t have to face it alone.”
“If it’s really bad…”
“I’ll sense it. Let’s give it a try. Of course, if you want, I’ll leave…” He planted his feet on the floor and leaned forward.
“No,” she said, and saw the satisfaction settle into his smile. “No. I want you here. Damn it.”
She went down the hall, brushed her teeth, and changed into her nightshirt. When she returned, she kissed him goodnight and climbed into bed, and let him turn off the light and settle down with a book. (“I can read by the nightlight,” he said. “I’ve always had good night vision.”)
But she only lay there, uncomfortable no matter how she arranged her limbs, too aware of him breathing and turning pages a few feet away. Finally she looked at her clock. Almost an hour had passed since she had first tried to fall asleep. She grunted in dissatisfaction.
He looked up. “Still can’t sleep?”
“No. Sit over here.”
He pulled the chair closer.
“No, here .” She thumped the bed with her palm. “You can put a pillow behind your back.”
When he hesitated, she hauled over a spare pillow and plumped it against the headboard. “Come on. I’ll feel better if you’re within reach.”
“Okay.” He transferred himself to the bed.
She draped her arm along his knee. The fabric of his shirt tickled her nose. “That’s better,” she murmured, sleepier already from his warmth and scent.
His hand alighted on her head and stroked her hair, hypnotically slow. She curled up closer. Her limbs became easier to arrange. Everything, in fact, improved a great deal.
* * *
The alarm clock’s ring jarred her awake. She leaned across Ren to tap it off and fell back on him with a grunt. She yawned, blinked to clear her vision, then rolled onto her back to look at him.
He smiled in the light of dawn. The book he held had only a few pages left on the unread side. “Hi.”
“Hi. Anything happen?”
“Not really.”
She pushed herself up. “Not really ? Was there anything?”
“Honestly, I don’t think so. The radiator did some banging and clanging, but it’s old and steam-powered, and it just does that.”
“I’ve noticed. Used to wake me up, but now I sleep through it.” She dropped her forehead to his shoulder, shy about how she must look, and hugged him. “Well, thank you for being here. I slept very well.”
“Good.” He folded his arms around her, rumpling the warm folds of her nightgown. “We’ll have to make a habit of it.”
* * *
Each night that week, he finished his work and came up to her room by ten o’clock. He always leaned over her and dodged past her hair-combing or face-moisturizing in order to plant a kiss on her ear. Then he kicked off his shoes and stretched out beside her, sitting up to read while she lay down. Whether or not she was on call, she always slept well, and he always reported in the morning that Julia hadn’t done anything serious. One night, he said, the blanket got pulled away, but since he was there and awake, he grabbed it and pulled it back, and won the tug-of-war. Julia apparently fled the room after that and spent her wrath elsewhere. Dolly Tidd groused the next morning that a whole bunch of her books had fallen off the shelves overnight.
On the fifth morning, Lina awoke with the dawn before her alarm clock rang and found Ren lying beside her. His book was on the bedside table. His pillow had slid down to the level of hers, and a corner of the blanket was pulled over his chest. He was asleep. Lina raised herself on one elbow, careful not to disturb him. His head was turned toward her, dark hair in a tousle against the sheets, eyelids quivering in a dream. Her hand drifted up to touch his face, and met warm skin and an emerging prickle of whiskers.
Tenderness stabbed deep inside her. What if the spell broke like a bubble, and he disappeared one day, as he should have done seventy years ago? Even if the spell didn’t break, Lina wouldn’t stay young forever. She might grow old here, looking more and more like a cradle robber to the outside world, and eventually she might give up and flee. Though the day when she would have to sleep without his touch could be years in the future, it made her want to cry just thinking of it.
Then Ren’s breath hitched, and his eyes fluttered open, and he asked her in a confused voice if he had been sleeping. She made herself smile, told him yes, and teased him for being a lousy guardian.
* * *
What was the time-honored distraction from brooding upon death and decay? Sex, of course. It had been on Lina’s mind for weeks, usually as a beautiful daydream but sometimes as a maddening need. She had never been good at initiating physical intimacy, and with Ren the situation was even more confusing. As a ghost, he might possess some quality that would complicate the matter. Even if not, he was such an old-fashioned gentleman that, incubus remarks aside, he never spoke of these things. How experienced was he? How had these customs worked back when he was alive?
Leading questions were the only tactic she thought she might successfully pull off. So that night when he settled down beside her, she rested her head on his chest and said, “I guess you probably did this with some of the others.”
“No, actually.” He sounded surprised at recollecting this fact.
“No? So, does that mean you’ve never…well, when you said you could… do things…”
Ren cleared his throat and lifted innocent eyes to the ceiling. “I submit to the jury that some activities can be performed without spending the night.”
“Oh. Then how many…”
“Three. Three women, in all this time. Only one before I died, and no, it was not her . As for lighter stuff like kissing, not too many more. Ten. I try not to get involved if I can’t be serious about it.” He stroked her hair. “Therefore I’m going to be really jealous when you tell me how many have had the pleasure of being with you .”
“I’m pathetic. Two, ever, all the way. And kissing…” Lina sighed, thinking back. “Unless you count stupid dare games in middle school, there have only been four or five. Not counting you.”
Ren curled his arms around her waist and pulled her on top of him. “Then let’s count me some more.”
They sank into a slant across the pillows, making the best of the tight quarters in Lina’s bed.
“I remember,” Ren said between slow kisses, “you wearing a robe one morning, when I had come up here to look for burglars. You lifted your arms…”
“Oh,” Lina broke in with an ashamed, delighted laugh. “I flashed you, didn’t I. I thought so. It wasn’t intentional.”
“That’s a shame. I thought maybe you were sending me a signal.”
“Maybe I was, subconsciously.”
“Got me thinking, tell you that.” He kissed her deeper, his tongue finding its way past her teeth.
The taste of brandy in his mouth had ceased to bother her, and had even become an aphrodisiac, along with nearly everything else about him. She hooked a leg around him, and her nightgown hitched up. He twined his leg around her in return.
A thumping, scrabbling sound pulled them apart. They sat up and watched a medical textbook heft itself off Lina’s bookcase and flip open four feet above the ground. The pages ripped out in handfuls, faster than any normal person could manage, and sailed all over the floor until the book was completely disemboweled. The cover then dropped to the ground, landing as if exhausted on a heap of pages.
“Well. That takes care of her,” Ren said.
“That drug guide cost forty bucks!” Lina said, leaning over to see the title.
“We’ll get you a new one.” Ren pulled her back on top of him. “Now, I believe I was saying she’s not going to bother us for the rest of the night.”
“Oh.” Lina wriggled herself into place. “You’re right. That’s worth a lot more than forty bucks.”
“Fifty, at least.” He looped his arm around her neck.
As they kissed, they rocked gently against one another as if slow-dancing. Through their clothes she felt him respond, and she pressed into him with her hips. He groaned. His hands gathered up her nightgown until they touched bare flesh on the back of her thighs, and he held her tight against him. Lina felt a blush pound through her whole body and flare into her face. It thawed away the last pockets of ice that had collected in her veins over the winter and sent them swirling down a warm spring flood.
This was the time, she realized, her heartbeat going wild at the notion. He wanted it, she wanted it, Julia was out of the way, they were in bed. All she had to do was continue. And, truthfully, continuing would now be far easier than stopping. It took effort just to interrupt their kisses and ask, “Um, lame question probably, but do I need some kind of supernatural condom?”
Ren laughed and rolled her onto her back, smothering her in a kiss. “You wonderful woman. Well, now…” He rucked up her nightgown and cupped a breast, and bent to take it into his mouth.
Lina bit her lip, trying—without success—to stifle a whimper.
Ren propped himself up on an elbow. “Let’s think about this, nurse lady. I step off the property, and any, ahem, fluids of mine left behind vanish with me. Therefore…”
“There would be nothing left to impregnate me or infect me with any diseases.”
“Which I don’t have, by the way. But yes, that’s the idea.”
“Well. Of all the creative excuses for avoiding birth control, that’s pretty good. Still, as a nurse I’m not sure I’d advise a patient to believe it.”
“All right.” Ren sat up and slowly unbuttoned his shirt, his eyes fixed on hers. “Why don’t you look me over without these clothes in the way and see what you think. Then we’ll follow your final medical decision.”
* * *
Lina’s decision, after investigating with shy touches, then smiling kisses, then fervent strokes, was to toss his shirt onto the floor along with all their other clothes and devote the night to hungry explorations.
As they lay skin to skin afterward, the sheets crumpled around them, she rested her ear on his chest, listening to the thud and slosh of his heartbeat. “Fully biological as far as I can tell,” she said. “Not ectoplasmic in the least.”
He chuckled.
She traced her nail down his shoulder. “So, if you step out into the alley now and recharge, does that mean, um…”
“I was wondering when you’d think of that.” His hand slid down and squeezed her rear. “Yes, it does. But I bet I’m good for at least once more before resorting to that.”
He was good for it. Quite good.
The next morning he slipped out after her alarm clock rang, kissing her and fondling every inch of her skin within reach before he left. But she hadn’t even climbed out of bed herself when someone knocked on the bedroom door a few minutes later. She put on her blue robe, kicked her discarded panties under the bed, and opened her door.
Ren regarded her shyly. He cleared his throat. “Hello. Um, the thing is, I stepped out of the lines to recharge for the day, and then, well, I thought of you, and…”
Lina hooked her fingers into the waist of his trousers and pulled him inside.
When she saw him out again, no more than fifteen minutes later, she paused to kiss him at the open door.
From down the hall George Lambert’s voice thundered, “Our nurse is leaving me for another man!”
Lina gripped the front of her robe to make sure it was closed. George stood in the hall, dressed in a red jogging suit for his morning walk, beaming.
Dolly Tidd, in a long Chinese-patterned silk housecoat, had just come out of her room and was also grinning at them. “Sure looks that way to me, George.”
“What’s all that?” Marla turned the corner, pencil behind her ear and clipboard in her hand. She stopped, taking in Lina’s robe and Ren’s flushed smile. “Oh, yeah. That’s old news. You folks are behind. Ren, get your rear down to the kitchen.”
The seniors laughed, Marla grinned, and Ren bowed respectfully and slipped away. Lina waved to the spectators and withdrew to get dressed, embarrassed but pleased. Compared to her other ambivalence-ridden exercises in intimacy, this one was turning out a winner.
Then, as she put on a clean pair of underwear, the word “necrophilia” surfaced in her mind. She paused a moment, stunned. Had she just added that crime to her record? But after another moment she rejected the word and all its closest cousins. A lawyer might argue she was consort to an incubus, as Ren had said, but nobody could call him a corpse. He was warm, damp, salty, silky, soft, hard, supple, alive , and would have fooled the most practiced lover on the planet. Besides, a person only left behind one corpse, and Ren’s was over in Port Townsend.
The clang of the radiator jarred her out of her thoughts. She frowned at it. It was nearly April now, and mild outside. The radiator shouldn’t have needed to come on. Into her mind darted a fearful image she had been suppressing: the spirit of Julia stretched long and thin like a vapor, sliding into the pipes and pounding icy fists on the coils in each room she passed. Lina’s afterglow retracted. She hurried to get the rest of her clothes on and twisted up her hair in a half-tucked ponytail, no longer caring if she looked like she had just rolled out of a hayloft with the houseboy.
Ren generally didn’t tell her whether he felt Julia was angry on a particular day. Lina had requested to opt out of the information; she hated the paranoia it instilled in her. But she didn’t require a sixth sense to guess that their recent actions may have enraged the mad dead girl.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to the ceiling. “I love him too. I’m sorry.”
Then she flung open her door and rushed out to fetch Mrs. B’s breakfast.