Six
Esther’s alarm wakes her from a sleep so deep, I don’t have a chance to ease from desperate madness into baffled confusion.
We groan together as the shrill ring pierces the air, and I float backward through the apartment to rest on the dining room table.
That perch is safer than floating next to her on the bed.
Especially when I’m this emotionally raw.
The burn of touching her would be nothing compared to the aching hollow of my heart in the mornings.
Unmoored as I am, it’s too tempting to feel something other than overwhelming loneliness.
“Good morning!” we mutter, Esther’s significantly more cheery than mine. I can predict exactly how she’ll say it, even if my East normally doesn’t rise before the sun. She fusses for the lamp pull, light slicing through the heavy darkness of the early morning hours.
Normally, she springs from the bed, humming to herself. However today, Esther lies in bed long enough to let out a heavy sigh and a quiet, “I can do this,” to herself.
“I’m sorry, East,” I murmur, curling around myself as I hover above the table. I wish I could hug my knees. “This is my fault.”
How do I know that? I frown. Do I know anything?
What is normal for her, or that her name is Esther, but I call her East?
How do I know nothing, and yet I know exactly what Esther will say, even before she says it?
How do I know what she’s normally like, what her routine is? How do I know I should feel guilty?
“She is Esther Voigt,” I murmur as Esther starts her coffee pot and disappears to the bathroom.
I know that much, somehow. A tug on my heart drags me to the bathroom behind her.
As the shower turns on and her undies hit the floor, I turn to give her some semblance of privacy, though I can still see her even through the opaque shower curtain and the back of my head.
“I’m dead. I’m haunting her. I am…” My brow furrows as I try to remember everything.
“I’m Lucy. We’re professors, colleagues at the same college. ”
She’s teaching my classes now. That’s why her dread is my fault. Because I died, and she got stuck teaching them.
It’s starting to come back to me now, flashes of memories about her.
The hollow ache in my chest eases as Esther sings to herself in the shower.
I can’t stop myself from looking—the shower curtain may as well not be there—but I do my best not to pay attention to the water pouring over her curves, or the suds lathering her rosy skin.
Instead I stare at where I should be in the mirror. There is nothing but steam slowly condensating on the glass. Every memory of her life over the past few days springs to mind, and with it, I can piece together what I did, who I am, from what Esther did.
She spent the weekend cramming the curriculums for the extra courses. The seminar—my seminar, more than the intro classes. I had…observed. Took notes. Because I’m trying to remember all of this.
Why am I trying to remember all of this?
“I’m Lucy,” I say again. As Esther belts out a scratchy, off-key melody, pieces of my life flash into place, of meeting Esther, and Cash—how could I forget Cash?
All of my studies, nights on the couch watching staged ghost hunting shows, and grading essays about theosophists and esoteric rituals.
“Most of them were full of shit, just like the ghost hunters,” I scoff, a tentative smile on my face.
I nod, more confident now in who I am, what my purpose is, and the sharp reminder of just how much I miss my fucking journal.
I’ve been collecting facts, observations to add to the knowledge of what the afterlife is like.
Albeit with nowhere to put them, but I’m doing it anyway.
Because I’m not just Lucy, I’m Dr. Lucy Monae: expert in esotericism, the occult, and philosophical understandings of life and death.
There is no plane of existence where I would sit idly by and simply be a ghost.
No, I need to know everything there is about ghosthood.
The water shuts off, and Esther steps out.
I edge out of the room to give her privacy, but even the closed bathroom door I pass through is transparent as air.
Despite my attempts to look anywhere else, I am forced to watch her admire her body in the mirror.
Esther dances as she moisturizes herself, getting ready for her day.
“‘Forced’,” I scoff at myself. “Such a burden.” In my dreams—I remember those easily, I’d been alive then—I did far more than look. My nights have belonged to Esther since we first met; it’s when I’m at my weakest, my happiest. I’ve caressed, kissed, worshipped every inch of her.
And now she is untouchable.
Esther doesn’t linger in the mirror like she usually does—no leisurely morning for her today.
She dresses in her nice work clothes, and pours her sweet cream and sugar into a to-go cup before adding the steaming hot coffee.
We’re out the door before the sun has begun to kiss the sky, and the guilt gnaws at me.
When we get to campus, the maintenance man is waiting in the Philosophy Department lounge, key ring jingling impatiently.
“So sorry I’m late!” Esther singsongs. I frown, wondering what she could possibly be late for, when the rest of the world is just starting to stir. “I really appreciate you doing this for me!”
The man shrugs, and gestures for her to lead the way.
To my surprise, she stops at my office. The maintenance man unlocks it for her, and gives her instructions to shut it firmly when she’s done, so it will lock again. Esther assures him she will just be in and out, once she finds the notes she needs.
The maintenance man does not seem to care what she’s doing in my office; he leaves without a goodbye.
I barely notice their conversation, floating over to the dusty bookshelves, greeting the fake raven pinned to the heavy velvet curtains with a stroke of my finger over feathers I cannot feel.
Esther flicks the lamp on. “Sorry, Lucy.”
“Why?” I ask automatically, before I realize she isn’t actually talking to me. She’s talking to the Dr. Monae who is missing, whose desk she is opening without my permission. “It’s okay. Take whatever you want, if you need my consent.”
There’s no point in telling her that; she won’t hear me.
But it’s hard to break the habit of saying everything out loud.
By midmorning, I’ll get quiet again. It’s impressive I already remember that about myself this early in the morning.
How much have I lost since dying? How many voice notes have I announced to myself, only to forget them?
I hover over the chairs in front of the desk, feeling a bit odd to see my office from the other side.
I haven’t sat here since Cash was alive, when I visited him after my interview for the adjunct position, which Esther ended up getting last fall.
Strange how it feels like a lifetime ago I started this job, when I was only here a semester, and Esther a semester before that.
Only a year ago, Cash was alive. He sat at this desk every day, no hint yet of the rash that would bloom on his neck and seal his fate.
Esther digs through the mostly empty drawers. I never bothered unpacking my stuff; this was Cash’s office. I decorated the bare minimum required to have a personality outside of Cash’s friend, and kept everything else in boxes at home. She pauses, “Oh.”
I lean forward to see what she found. In her hand is a framed picture of Cash and me at my defense. One of the rare pictures where I’m smiling. He’d said something goofy to make my composure break as his wife took our picture. The photo is a little blurry; his wife had cracked up too.
“Why are you in a drawer?” Esther sets it on the shelf next to the photo of Cash’s family, in a row with the other photos I hadn’t had the heart to return to his wife yet, of Cash and his many friends.
She puts it right where Cash had kept it, next to the book he coauthored with me when I was still in grad school, with absolutely no academic credibility on my own and an advisor who barely remembered my existence.
Among the many pictures lining the bookshelf with other lives he changed, there’s a photo of him and Gilda drinking wine together, and one of him and his wife at their hooding ceremony when they got their Ph.D.s together a decade ago.
“There, back where you belong!” Esther pats it fondly.
I edge closer to Esther than is probably safe, desperate to look at them all, but especially the one of us. Had I really hidden the picture of us away? Had it been that painful to look at? The heaviness of my grief aches at seeing it again, but there’s happiness with it too.
Giving up on the desk, Esther scans the bookshelves. “Course notes, course notes, where might you be?” she sings.
Guilt digs a little deeper. “They’re in my apartment,” I reply, despite the futility. She can’t hear me. “Sorry, I never kept much here.”
Esther keeps looking for a little while longer, until her alarm goes off. “Well, I tried.” She silences her phone. “Time for class. At least it’s all my own intro classes today. One more day to figure out what the fuck I’m doing with your seminar, Lucy.”
After a heavy sigh and another muttered, “I can do this,” Esther closes the desk drawers.
She taps the photo of Cash and I again with a sad smile, and shuts the door firmly behind her.
I linger as long as I can, to look at the photo of Cash and I laughing together, to remember all the ways he helped me when he had no good reason to bother, other than being a kind person.
But that achy tug pulls me out of the room, and I’m forced to leave my office behind.
Following Esther as she heads upstairs to the classroom, I glide up the handrail ahead of her. For the first time, I speak to her. Not out of desperation or despair or instinct, but by choice.
“If it helps, the first few weeks of Phil of Death are mostly just history lessons about early twentieth century esoterists. You can teach from the slide decks and readings.” I pause, running through the syllabus in my head, still as clear as the day I wrote it.
“It gets a little more complicated later in the semester, because that’s when the independent research gets harder to connect for discussions, but we’ll get you through it, okay? ”
Esther doesn’t answer. She simply hums to herself as she marches up the winding stairs to the lecture hall in the Castle tower.
I may not be much help, but I can try. I owe it to her, to Cash, to myself.
Because Lucy Monae has never been content with just knowing things.
What is the point of everything I’ve worked for, if I won’t even attempt to share my expertise?
I can continue to observe, to record, to memorize, and I can try to help.
I can try to pay forward the kindness Cash showed me.
Right now, Esther doesn’t need to know what it’s like to be dead, or that she’s being haunted, but she does need to know what death means.
And there’s no one—living or dead—better than me to help her.