16. Donna
SIXTEEN
Donna
MEMENTO MORI MAIL
“Trick or treat!” a little girl, probably around seven years old, shouts at me, holding a pillowcase open. I guess she’s starting at the top floor of our building and working her way down because there isn’t a lot of candy in that pillowcase yet. Her parents are standing about twenty feet away, down the hall. She’s so excited to be on this free junk food-gathering journey, I could just cry.
Enjoy this special time in your life, little girl. Memento mori. Enjoy the transient nature of these earthly pleasures, for one day we will die!
“Well, hello there! Happy Halloween!” I say to her, perhaps a tad too enthusiastically. I am genuinely excited to be alive and not working on Halloween night and definitely not overcompensating for being dead inside because Billy actually went to the Halloween party that I told him to go to.
Chelsea holds up the big bowl of candy for me to grab a handful and leans in to mutter, “Take it down a notch, champ. You’re scarin’ the kids.” She’s here because her husband is on a business trip and she didn’t want to be at her house alone. And because I sounded so morose when she called me this afternoon that she didn’t want me to be alone. She was wearing a pointy witch hat earlier, but it made her scalp itchy so now she just looks like a woman in a black cardigan.
“Are you supposed to be Ginny Weasley?” the trick-or-treater asks me as I drop three fun-size chocolate bars and a bag of chips into her pillowcase.
I choose not to take offense at the “supposed to be” part of the question, as I am fully aware that I just look like a redhead in a sexy schoolgirl costume that barely fits anymore. This was from five years ago, which was the last time I had Halloween off. I was half hoping that Billy would somehow see me in it on his way out, get such a huge boner he wouldn’t fit out the door, and have to stay to give out candy with me. But without the boner, of course. Because I would have taken care of it for him. But that is not how this night is progressing.
“I sure am! And I’m not even wearing a wig. You are such a pretty Barbie!” I tell the girl.
“I’m Elle Woods,” she informs me. “From an old movie called Legally Blonde that my mom always watches.”
This revelation leads Chelsea to demonstrate the Bend and Snap, and it leads me to want to lock the door, eat the rest of the candy, plus some apple strudels, and then cry myself to sleep because Reese Witherspoon played Elle Woods and that reminds me of Fear , which reminds me of Billy railing me at the house that time and how he’ll probably be railing someone else tonight.
But it’s fine. “We’re all gonna die anyway.”
Chelsea and the little girl and her parents all stare at me.
“Oh shit, did I say that out loud?” I cover my mouth. “Shit. Sorry!” I say to the girl and grimace at her parents, who look a lot cooler than they are, apparently, so maybe they shouldn’t be living in Jamaica Plain because we swear here. “Nobody you know is going to die any time soon,” I assure the little girl. “Have a fun night!”
“Okay, you’re done.” Chelsea pushes me back from the door and shuts it before I explain to the child that it is inevitable that everyone she knows will die eventually, so she shouldn’t get too attached to anyone, especially not a boy who makes her feel really good in lots of different ways. “Why don’t you just call him, huh? You’re the one who told him to go to the party!”
“What’s the point? We’re all gonna?— ”
“If you say we’re gonna die again, I swear to God, you will die by my hand tonight.”
I smack my lips together. “I’m not gonna call him. He deserves to have a girlfriend who doesn’t work twelve-hour shifts or have a haunted house that needs major renovation work.”
“You are out of your friggin’ mind,” she says. “If I bought a haunted house that needed renovation work done, Joel would file for divorce in a heartbeat.”
“That’s not true.”
“No, it’s not, but my point is your guy was willing to help you fix up that house—he did a friggin’ séance with you, okay?”
“Because he thought we were role-playing,” I say, rolling my eyes.
“And he flew your grandparents in from Philly for a Tomcats game.”
“That was really sweet. But he was just trying to impress me because I was his dating coach.”
“Right. And he just offered to hand out candy to trick-or-treaters with you because—what? He wanted to practice being someone else’s husband? Come on. You wanna talk about how short life is? It is way too short for you to act like a dumbass just because you were once engaged to a totally different guy who turned out to be a dumbass. Y’know?”
I groan. That was so harsh. “You’re starting to make sense now, dammit. ”
“Just call Billy and stop being a dum-dum.”
I pull out my phone to call him, but I find a text notification from Piper.
Piper: Hey! It’s Halloween and I just realized I never checked in with you about the ghost! LOL that was the first time I have ever said that to anyone! Did you end up using the Ouija board?! ghost emoji jack-o’-lantern emoji
“OMG,” I say to myself. This is the text I didn’t even know I desperately needed.
Me: Hey! Can U talk RN?
I am mortified that I didn’t just type out the words you and right now , but whatevs. And now I’m remembering that people her age don’t like talking on the phone. And then I remember that people my age don’t like talking on the phone either.
There’s a knock at the door.
“I’ll get it,” Chelsea says.
“Thank you!”
Instead of replying to my text, Piper calls me. She is truly an extraordinary young person.
I answer immediately. “Piper!”
“Hey, what’s up?”
“Nothing, hi, I just wanted to talk to you about the, uh…” I go into my bedroom and shut the door so the trick-or-treaters and their parents can’t hear me talking about a ghost. “I just wanted to chat about the ghost.”
“Did you contact it?!”
“Yes.” I tell her everything I know about the ghost and what happened when we used the Ouija board and what happened yesterday. “It said Tell him on the mirror, Piper. I saw her write it.”
“I totally believe you. Wow, that’s so intense… Hang on one sec, okay?” I can hear her muffled voice talking to someone in the background. “Hey. I have to get back to the party because they’re gonna play a slow-dance song, but it sounds to me like there’s still something the ghost needs from you. They say that Halloween is when the veil between our world and the spirit world is lifted, so if you want to communicate with Lara, now would be a good time. But don’t go without Billy. It sounds like she’s pretty upset.”
I don’t have the heart to tell her that Billy’s at a party without me.
“Yeah, for sure. I’ll be fine.”
“I hope that you and Lara can both get closure soon, Donna,” she says earnestly. And then she gasps. “Oh my God, they’re playing ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’ by Shawn Mendes. Gotta go—bye!”
And she hangs up .
I hope she gets to slow dance with a boy who has an amazing butt.
I open the bedroom door and hear Chelsea calling out to me. “Donna! Babe, you gotta come see these costumes—they’re so good!”
I join Chelsea at the front door and say hi to the mom and little boy in the corridor. The mom is dressed as Harry Potter’s white owl, Hedwig, and her son’s costume is a sealed envelope from Hogwarts. They are, indeed, such good costumes.
But the Hogwarts owl post reminds me of something.
Lars once told me that while his wife was sick and dying there was a point where she couldn’t talk anymore, but there was something she needed to tell him, so she wrote him a letter. He was too sad to read it and then he was too busy arranging the funeral. After the funeral he couldn’t find it, and then later he thought maybe it got taken away with a piece of furniture when he sold a lot of the things that were in the house.
That must be it.
The letter must still be somewhere in the house.
I need to find that letter and take it to Lars’s grave.
“I have to go,” I say to Chelsea.
Hedwig and the Hogwarts mail give me the side-eye as they walk away.
“Your costumes are amazing!” I call out to the mom and her son. “They’re so good they reminded me of something really important! Happy Halloween!”
“Wow, you are really bad at givin’ out candy,” Chelsea tells me.
I am. And I’m bad at no strings. And dating. And being a dating coach to the only person I have actually wanted to date for a very long time. And being honest about how I feel and what I want.
We’re all gonna die someday. I guess I just have to believe that even after we do, it’s not too late to tell the person you love how you feel.