Bargaining
“You know the thing I hate most about intro classes?” Esther keeps her voice low, hunched over her grading pile so her colleagues don’t hear her talking in her office. “Gotta be the students who consider intro classes to be below them.”
With the faded high-pile carpet, and thick blue and gold velvet curtains on all the windows, sound doesn’t travel far in the Castle.
But her colleagues would be able to hear her talking to someone.
They would ask questions, and Esther doesn’t particularly care to share that she’s talking with their dead coworker who, as far as everyone but Gilda and Esther know, is on sabbatical.
“I just know Dylan has a podcast about human nature called ‘The Devil’s Advocate’ or some bullshit.
” Esther chuckles, with a thrill of guilt for gossiping about her students like this.
But she hasn’t had anyone to confide these thoughts with, not since Cash stopped working.
At her core, Esther tries hard to be a good person.
But it’s so nice to have someone she can let out her inner sass around.
She never realized how much she’d missed having a friend to talk to.
“His cohosts are two other guys who will probably drop out due to mental health issues their senior year, and one pick-me he’s in a situationship with, who doesn’t mind that he doesn’t wash properly. ”
While there’s no device to record a response, Esther can still feel Lucy’s laughter in the spot in her chest where Lucy’s ghost has made a home.
“He didn’t even bother to follow the prompt.
” Esther taps the essay with her pen. “Instead, he went on a rant about how temporal paradoxes aren’t truly paradoxes.
Because by going back in time, a time traveler actually splits his timeline into two.
He doesn’t travel into the past. He creates a second present for himself that runs parallel to the present, in which he didn’t go into the past.
“Which, sure, I can see that argument,” Esther mutters; the argument could stand as written.
It just doesn’t answer the fucking question.
“But this is all over the place. This guy was just supposed to write five hundred words defining a temporal paradox and give an example of one in popular media. He did neither of those things. Instead, he gave me five pages of barely coherent, overwrought bullshit about how the past is already set in stone.”
Esther puts her pen down and stretches, smiling as that glow in her chest tells her to fail him.
That might be her own wishful thinking. “At least his conclusion is interesting. Listen to this, ‘Everyone is so focused on not messing up the fixed points in time and causing a butterfly effect in the past, and yet everyone feels powerless to change their future in the present. Are we not butterflies, flapping in the hurricane?’” Esther laughs at Dylan’s dramatic metaphor.
“‘Logic dictates that we should worry more about how the choices we make today impact our future. But since when does the average man consider logic?’ Look, he even wrote ‘fin’ at the end of it!”
Even by Esther’s standards, with her “fire and brimstone” upbringing and doctorate in philosophy, Dylan is a pretentious tool on a good day.
But she must concede that he has a point.
Not any actual points that met the metrics for the assignment, but he’s not entirely wrong.
And he just made Esther reflect on her own life, which is impressive in its own right.
Instead of flapping in the hurricane, Esther has always been a butterfly trembling under a leaf, in hopes of staying dry. She could have done more in her past to make her present better. She should do more in her present to be happier in her future.
Yet she’s done nothing, except the concrete activities of success—finish high school, get into college, go to grad school, and get a job as a professor.
All the things that, on paper, would prove to her parents that she didn’t need them to succeed, driven by stubborn spite.
And yet, academics is the only life Esther has known outside of the church.
Esther has never experienced the soft metrics—being a bridesmaid in a dozen weddings, hosting baby showers for the nieces and nephews her younger sisters were popping out, or adopting a dog with her nonexistent wife.
What if Esther tried harder to fit in better with her now-distant friends? What if she found a way to stay in touch with her siblings? What if she dared to talk to Lucy that first day? Or the next day? Or the last day? Or any day? Perhaps Esther would be happier now.
Perhaps Lucy would still be alive.
“It’s so easy to get lost in the what-ifs, isn’t it?
” She picks up her pen again, wondering how she might justify giving Dylan any partial credit.
Perhaps she should email him and tell him he’d accidentally submitted the wrong essay, and could he please send the correct one, emphasizing the prompt to give him another chance.
“Too easy, trust me.”
Esther jumps at Gilda’s voice from her door. “Dr. Frederick. I didn’t see you there.”
Gilda’s jaded expression turns to one of confusion, and she pokes her head in the door to look around Esther’s office, as if there might be someone else standing in the corner.
Not that there’s room for anyone to stand in the cramped space—just enough to wiggle into the chairs across the desk from her. “You were just talking to yourself?”
With a shrug, Esther puts on her most innocent smile. It’s more socially acceptable to talk to herself, than to the ghost of her dead colleague. “Lingering habit from quarantine. It was already a bad habit from the initial shutdown, and it got worse while I was sick.”
Gilda nods knowingly. “I’m still collecting all of my wine bottles to reuse them.
I thought it would be a great idea to make my own wine when we were shutdown in the first year or so.
Finally tasted it when I caught the Pox a couple years ago.
Thought I deserved a treat after my herald patch was on the bottom of my foot.
” She shakes her head in disgust. “That swill took forever to make, and tasted like shit, but I spent a lot of money on empty wine bottles, so now I can’t stop hoarding them. ”
Esther’s own plague-induced hobby in the early days was writing a memoir that she spent months outlining and storyboarding.
She could never bring herself to put the first words onto the blank document saved as “Memoir-Draft-One.” The possibilities of accomplishment from forced isolation were endless; the reality was limited by her own lack of confidence and crippling self-doubt.
Baking is infinitely less pressure. No one will ever know that Esther burns every single baked good she makes.
Other than Lucy, she supposes. Lucy must see every single scorched cookie Esther has forced herself to eat over the past seven months. Yet another layer of embarrassment to the agonizing heap of humiliation Esther has experienced since discovering Lucy is haunting her.
Being haunted is mortifying.
“Take some advice from me, Dr. Voigt.” Gilda waves the pen in her hand like a cigarette; the fine lines around her mouth deepen into a wry smile. “The what-ifs will paralyze you, if you let them. Just move on and focus on what’s next. It’s too late to go back.”
A pang of empathy for her frustrating and complicated department head strikes Esther out of nowhere, growing deeper as Gilda continues down the hall to her own office. But no, that affinity—that sorrowful fellowship—sits just below her heart.
This rush of sympathy comes from Lucy.
Slowly but surely, their feelings are becoming easier to differentiate now that Esther knows Lucy is really there.
Those feelings in her chest are actually from Lucy, and not her own delusions.
This isn’t just wishful thinking, like Esther’s been telling herself for months.
This empathy is unacknowledged confirmation that Lucy thought Gilda was right.
But where Lucy might agree that it’s too late, Esther trusts it’s never too late for some things.
If she lost her hope in the impossible, well, what would be the point of trying?
Even if she could no longer prevent Lucy’s death—though she’d do anything to go back and change things—they have the present. There’s time now to do something different. Esther can talk to her through virtual meetings. She can feel Lucy’s emotions in her chest. She carries Lucy next to her heart.
The past is set in stone. Esther can accept that.
But she refuses to passively accept the future, not without at least attempting to do something in the present.
If Lucy wants to move on, Esther can help her with that.
That’s the last thing Esther wants, but that’s what ghosts are supposed to do, right? Make peace and find the light?
Hopefully, helping Lucy will be enough to assuage her guilt and regret that Esther intentionally passed by all of her infinite chances with Lucy.
While she might not have the power to change Lucy’s past, Esther can make her present as happy as possible.
Esther can let go of the leaf, just a little bit, and see where the hurricane takes her.
Lucy’s future depends on it.