Ghost Downstairs

Chapter Ten

Over the next week, Lina and Ren spent their free hours together in quiet corners of the house and garden. They engaged in no further physical affection except a nudge once in a while during a moment of laughter. But now her heart jolted every time his thick lashes lifted to dart a glance in her direction. What they talked about was usually related to his ghostly existence, but with each passing day she minded less and less that he was a ghost.

Julia noticed, of course. Almost every day—or, worse, every night—she acted up. Lina awoke one morning to find all her CDs taken off the shelves and placed in a single towering stack on the carpet. Two different nights she woke up shivering, for the room was ice-cold and her blankets were six feet away on the floor. Once, in the afternoon, while typing email, she watched in wonder as the cord for the window-blinds bobbed and jerked, though the window was closed and there was no breeze.

But none of this actually harmed her. Lina, though never the possessor of anything resembling a sixth sense, did not feel endangered by Julia’s random pranks. It was simply that Julia was there . Testing her, maybe. Watching.

Lina spoke to her once in a while, told her she understood Julia’s frustration and hoped to help both ghosts by being Ren’s friend and learning more about their past. Julia gave no sign of hearing her.

Lina didn’t tell Ren about any of Julia’s antics. Why worry him? He had already dwelled too much on Julia over the past seventy years. Someday Lina would ask for his theories, but not yet.

One night, two weeks into March, Lina paused in a dark patch of lawn under the maple tree and rested her hand on its trunk. “Will you answer one question?”

Ren put his hand on the trunk too, above hers. “I’ll try.”

“If I were to ask you out again, even knowing what you are, what would you say?”

He looked up through the branches at the purple dusk sky. “I would say roughly the same as I’ve already said.”

“I understood you were saying no, but I didn’t know then…”

“I said no because it wouldn’t have been fair to you. I wanted …” His index finger trailed down the trunk and poked her on the back of the hand. “To say yes. But I still think it’s not fair to you.”

“Don’t worry what’s fair for me. Let me be stupid. Because, if you want it, well, I still do too.”

He bowed his head and puffed out a sigh. Without looking, he found and covered her hand with his own, on the trunk. “You can’t know what you’d be getting into.”

“We’ve spent the last two weeks talking about what I’d be getting into.” Lina emitted a short laugh. “Julia? I can deal with it. Being stuck in the house with you? I hardly go out anyway. You’re older than I thought? I like older guys. It’ll end in tears, maybe? Better to have loved and lost, you said.”

He lifted his head, his fingers curling around hers. “Crazy woman. I’ve told you I’m interested. What I can’t figure out is why you would be interested in me .”

In the night air, among the bushes and shadows, he was a glow of white with dark hollows for features, two sparks of reflected streetlight for eyes. He looked as if he could blow away on a strong gust of wind and dissolve into shreds. But he didn’t frighten her, not anymore.

“You’re fascinating,” she said. “The things you’ve seen—the things you can do—”

“So it’s a freak-show?”

“No! I like you, stupid.”

“All right. I’m sorry.” Was that a laugh in his voice? He drew her closer and ran his fingers down her ear. “Anyone ever tell you you’ve got the cutest ears? I’m a sucker for cute ears. Bet you didn’t know that.”

“No.” She laughed in surprise. “How would I?”

“Maybe if I wrote about it in my journal .” He took advantage of her indignant gasp by hooking an arm around her waist. Next thing she knew, his lips were up beside her head, making her think he was going to whisper something. But instead they captured the outer ridge of her ear and traveled down, leaving slow kisses along the way.

Delicious shivers shot down her spine to her heels. She let her forehead touch his neck and breathed in the warm scent of him.

“Well,” he sighed, “so much for keeping my distance.”

Cold water and warm lips touched her mouth at the same time. As she closed her eyes, rain started tapping on the bushes and the street. She and Ren went on kissing. She feared nothing, not poltergeists, lightning, death, being seen, nor being in love. It seemed the safest thing in the world to nestle here in his arms as the spring sky shook droplets down on them.

When the shower crescendoed in a rush, sending water dripping off the branches and down their faces, Ren broke his mouth away. Lina felt him laugh. She opened her eyes and saw the gleam of his teeth.

“Seems to be raining,” she commented.

“In Seattle. Imagine that.”

She leaned her cheek to his chest. “Ren?”

He held her and rocked her back and forth. “Mm?”

“What did you write about me in your journal?”

She felt his low laugh as a rumble against her ear. “First day? ‘Another new nurse. Sweet smile. Great skin. God give me strength.’”

“You did not.”

“Did so. Next few entries—‘So far have saved Lina from a spider and a poltergeist attack. She’s analytical, not just scared. She thinks things over. She likes crosswords and books and toast. Have to stop imagining how compatible we’d be.’”

Lina snuggled closer. “And on Halloween?”

“That was, ‘Watch it, old boy. You almost kissed her in front of the entire house.’ Then Thanksgiving, when you called me…” He bowed his head to nuzzle her temple. “That was the first time I wrote a certain four-letter L-word in regards to you.”

Raindrops seeped through Lina’s shirt, but she closed her eyes in pure happiness. “What did you write?”

“Something like, ‘I almost told her everything. I’m crazy. I’m probably in love again. In a word, I’m screwed.’”

Lina smiled, lifted her head, and demonstrated her appreciation with another kiss.

The front door opened. “Ren?” Alan called. “That you?”

Ren turned. “Yeah, it’s me and Lina.”

“What are you doing in the rain?”

“It just started,” Ren said, laughter bubbling through his voice.

“Well, can you come help me move the tables?” They were transferring dining room tables to the living room tonight for an arts-and-crafts activity.

“I’ll be right there.”

“Thanks!” Alan’s silhouette left the door frame.

“We better go in,” Ren said.

“You go. I promised Mrs. B I’d bring her some hyacinths. I’ll get them and then come in.”

“Okay.” Holding her shoulders, Ren pressed another rain-dampened kiss onto her mouth, then jogged to the house. The door shut behind him.

Lina, who had been laughing every few seconds, now jumped into the air with a squeal. She tilted back her head and opened her arms, thanking the very sky. Half running and half dancing, she darted off into the darkness of the side yard where the hyacinths grew. So that was what kissing a ghost was like: unbelievably exciting. You’d think your lover being dead would put a damper on the thrill, but Lina was here to tell you she pitied everyone who had never known the blessed experience of snogging a ghost in the rain.

She was snapping off wet hyacinths, barely able to see them, when something shattered on the paving stones beside her. She tumbled over in shock. The item sounded heavy, and after peering at it a moment she identified it as one of the rectangular pottery flower-boxes that were attached to the windowsills.

But…Lina stood and looked at the house. The bed of hyacinths was clear over by the fence, thirty feet from the house. The wind tonight was mild, pushing rain in small gusts, nothing like the hurricane force it would take to hurl a heavy clay box full of wet soil and plants all the way over here. It really must have been…thrown.

The fear she had been so cavalier about overcoming flooded back over her. She was alone in the dark, and Julia was jealous.

With her handful of hyacinths, Lina bolted for the back door of the house. Her wet fingers twisted and tugged, but the handle was locked. She beat her fist on the door. “Hello? Ren? Anyone? Please, let me in!”

Everyone must have been away from the back kitchen and pantry, moving tables in the front of the house. No one answered.

Crash! Another flower-box shattered, two inches from her feet. She jumped away with a shriek. As she retreated she looked up at the windows. A few of them were lit, but all of them were shut. Nobody among the living was up there pushing things down.

Even as she watched, a metal pail sitting beside the door, filled with gardening trowels and spades, swung itself up into the air and zoomed toward her. Lina dodged. She felt the pail strike her on the spine as it flew past, and heard the tools smack and scatter against the fence.

She unlocked the back gate, darted out, and sprinted down the alley. Gravel crunched and slid under her shoes. Rain pelted her eyes. Her heart pounded so hard she could barely breathe.

She got around the corner and onto the front sidewalk. The two porch lights flanking the front door, and the row of fairy-lights along the path, beckoned her with their homey warmth. She opened the iron gate and stumbled up the walk, panting.

Something small hit her on the shoulder. She spun around. A pebble clattered to the ground. As she stared at it, another hit her in the ribs. She whimpered and flew up the steps to the porch. This door was locked too, and she nearly burst into tears. She rang the bell and began knocking. “It’s Lina! Let me in!”

Beside her, one of the porch lights went out in a shatter of glass, as if someone had thrown a rock at it.

“Let me in!” she screamed.

The door opened. Alan, her savior, looked stunned.

Lina shot inside and slammed the door shut—even though the poltergeist lived in here, too, and not just in the garden. It didn’t matter. She needed to be around other people; she needed to get out of the dark.

“What’s the matter?” Alan asked.

“The…” Lina tried to catch her breath. She saw George and a couple of the elderly ladies hovering near the stairs, staring at her. “The back door was locked, and, um…some flowerpots fell off the walls. And out here just now, the porch light broke and went out.” Her eyes met Alan’s.

His features turned grim, and he nodded. “Come on.” He guided her toward the stairs. “We’ll fix all that tomorrow when it stops raining.” He moved his hand back and forth on her shoulders, like her father used to do when she was a teenager and was upset about something. “Want to change into something dry and come down and help us? Bring Mrs. B, if she’s bored.”

Lina remembered Mrs. B’s flowers, and looked at the purple hyacinths in her hand. They had been reduced to four specimens, all with bruised or broken stems. She emitted a tiny laugh. “Oh, well. They still smell nice.”

“Our ghost chasing you?” George boomed, as Lina put her foot on the first step.

Ren’s figure emerged in the corner of Lina’s eye. She turned. He had darted out of the living room and now lingered beside the polished table in the entry. Uncertainty and worry clouded his eyes.

“Must be,” Lina answered to George. She gave Ren a measured nod, to tell him to stay there. She was not a baby. She would be all right.

“He always goes after the pretty ones!” George added.

Lina sent him a startled glance, then realized George was referring not to Ren but to “the ghost,” and that the two, in George’s understanding, were separate people.

What a mess. She smiled weakly at George and jogged up the stairs.

* * *

After collecting herself and combing her hair, Lina came back downstairs to help set up the room. She was distracted, swinging from blushes and secret smiles with Ren, to panic at the thought of their future. The existence of a mad spirit attempting to maim her did also complicate things.

Okay, so now she had snogged a ghost in the rain, and she wouldn’t mind doing it a few more times. But what was she supposed to do after that? Settle down and live with him in this haunted house for the rest of her days? Raise a couple of half-ghost kids?

It was laughable. She was overthinking it. Life dealt people a strange hand once in a while; couldn’t she just appreciate it and move on? Relationships didn’t have to last forever, nor did they have to involve marriage and childbearing. But that was what she had always assumed she wanted. And she already cared too much about Ren to ensnare him into an attachment she intended to leave if it became inconvenient. She couldn’t envision a happy life that didn’t include seeing him daily. But Ren’s situation—Ren’s existence, really—introduced a whole new set of fears no rational woman ever expected to face.

He knew about her doubts, too. She saw it in the way he watched her. He looked as if he was trying not to get his hopes up. Women had loved him before, then left him when they decided they couldn’t live with this. She smiled and tried to look reassuring. But she didn’t think she fooled him.

Lina found him by chance in the kitchen at nearly ten o’clock that night, when she went down to return a coffee mug.

One light was on, the lamp above the sink. Ren stood beneath it rinsing a tray. A striped dish towel hung over his shoulder. Upon hearing her step he turned and lifted his chin. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

He turned off the water. Silence loomed.

She advanced, holding out the mug.

He dried his hands on the towel and took the mug from her.

“Thanks,” she said. “Exciting day.”

“Quite.”

“Kind of exhausting.”

He nodded.

“So I’ll…” She pointed across herself, toward the stairwell. “Get Mrs. B to bed, then turn in.”

Ren took her hands and looked down at them. “Is this the first time she’s done anything lately?” Lina knew he wasn’t referring to Mrs. B.

“They’ve only been little things,” she hedged.

He lifted his head, dismayed. “I don’t want…”

She waited, but he didn’t finish the sentence; he turned silent instead in frustration. “I know,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

“She…” Ren cleared his throat, and went on in a steadier tone, “She probably won’t do anything else tonight. She has limited energy. When she acts up, it wears her out, and nothing happens for a day or two.”

“Oh. Good.”

“I’m sorry I bring…” Again he stopped, words seemingly of no use. He shook his head.

Lina ran her thumbs over his knuckles. “Stop worrying.”

He smiled sadly and leaned down to kiss her. It was a chaste kiss compared to the one in the garden, but it was what the situation called for. She appreciated that her boyfriend was a gentleman.

All right. So he was her boyfriend.

* * *

As Ren predicted, the poltergeist was dormant that night. But Lina still did not sleep well, and the next day the conflicting emotions and insomnia rendered her scatterbrained.

“You’re all in a dither,” Mrs. B said, summing it up nicely.

Lina paused in her fourth attempt to get Mrs. B’s braid right, a task that normally took one pass, and met Mrs. B’s squinting eyes in the mirror. “Sorry. I’m a little sleepy.”

“You’ve been in a dither for days. If anything’s bothering you, I do hope you know you can tell me.” The lined face in the mirror now looked kindly, not impish. “I like to think of you as my granddaughter, not my servant. I want to help you if anything’s wrong, even if it’s just to listen.”

As Lina’s last living grandmother had died seven years ago, Mrs. B’s words almost moved her to tears. “Thank you.” She rebrushed Mrs. B’s wispy white hair and smiled. “I don’t feel like a servant. Far from it.”

“Good. Then is anything wrong?”

“I’ve just been…” Lina waved the hairbrush. “Thinking about relationships. Whether I should get into one, whether I really like being alone. I thought I did, but—maybe it’s worth rearranging my life for someone. If they’re the right person. How do you know? How many complications are too many?” She set down the brush and started braiding. “And so on.”

“First of all,” Mrs. B said, “we must dispense with this ‘someone’ nonsense. You’re talking about our Ren, so we might as well call him that.”

Lina spluttered a few sounds of protest.

“Well, aren’t you?” Mrs. B said.

“I only meant, in theory, these issues…”

“Theories don’t work with relationships. Particulars do. And this particular is named Ren.”

Lina sighed and tucked a bobby pin into Mrs. B’s hair. “It’s that obvious, huh?”

“I practically need to take off my sweater every time you two are around, it gets so warm in the room.”

Lina burst into giggles and nudged Mrs. B’s shoulder. “You do have a way with words.”

“I think you’re perfect for each other. I’m delighted for you. I can’t imagine what’s giving you cold feet.”

“Well, there’s…the age difference.”

“Fiddle. What, six years?”

Lina hesitated. “A little more than that.”

“It won’t matter as you get older. I was eight years younger than Robert.” Robert was Mrs. B’s late husband, a former city councilman of Seattle. He had died in 1991.

Since it would only matter more as they got older, Lina skirted that and moved to the next problem. “Also, he has to stay here. It’s complicated, but basically, we couldn’t live anywhere else.”

“I thought you liked Seattle.”

“I love Seattle.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“It would be nice to be able to go someplace else.”

“Circumstances change,” Mrs. B said. “I’m sure someday he’ll be able to leave. You’re thinking too far ahead anyway. Make it work now, and you’ll go right on making it work in the future.”

Lina secured a loose strand of Mrs. B’s hair with another bobby pin. “The trouble with right now is even stranger.”

“Why? Is he seeing someone?”

“No…it’s actually about someone he can’t see.”

“What does that mean?”

She put the finishing touches on Mrs. B’s hair and rested her fingers on the chair’s back. “Would you believe the ghost is jealous?”

Mrs. B looked bewildered. “The ghost? In this house I suppose it’s foolhardy to say I don’t. But—the ghost ? What in the world are you talking about?”

“We’re guessing it’s Jackie’s friend who died here. She was in love with a houseboy. Remember?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Now she’s attached herself to Ren. And she targets anyone who gets close to him. Which means me. And even you, by extension.”

Mrs. B’s features shifted toward exasperation. “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Just because I believe there’s a ghost, and just because I’ve convinced you, doesn’t mean you can use it as a reason to shy away from that boy. Don’t make me slap some sense into you.”

“I know it’s ridiculous. I tell myself that every day. But I keep seeing signs that it’s true, and it’s only going to get worse.” Lina turned away. “I can’t really talk about this. Some of it involves…his private life, and I’m not at liberty…”

“Now, Lina, I trust you to make good decisions. If there’s something more serious than ghosts behind all this, then I know you’ll do what’s right. But if that’s really your only reason, then I can’t imagine what’s come over you.”

“Me neither.”

“So your future might be difficult. So a ghost might throw some magazines around. Are you going to give him up over that?”

“I don’t know.”

Mrs. B stared sternly in Lina’s direction in the mirror. “I would give up a whole year of what’s left of my life for one more day with Robert. Life is really too short to be making up reasons why you shouldn’t go down there and throw your arms around that boy like you want to.”

The room sparkled in the sheen of the tears that rose to Lina’s eyes. She leaned over Mrs. B’s chair and kissed her on the cheek. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, now shoo!” Mrs. B fluttered a hand to send her out.

Downstairs, Lina found Ren alone at a dining room table in a slant of afternoon sunlight, leafing through a binder. Cookbooks were stacked beside him, and a pen seesawed between his fingers.

She slid an arm over his shoulders and fell into his lap, capturing him in a hug.

“Hey,” he greeted in surprise. He set the pen down and embraced her.

“Hello.” She slipped aside to the nearest chair.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Mrs. B commanded me to go throw my arms around you.”

“Ah. She knows of our dalliance?”

Lina lowered her eyes to his thumb, which she slid between her fingers. “She guessed a long time ago.”

“Her matchmaking attempts were kind of obvious.” He smiled. “Not that I minded. So. How are you, today?” He asked it quietly, and she understood it wasn’t small talk.

“Fine. I mean, I’m all in a dither, like Mrs. B said, but there hasn’t been any new activity since last night.”

“Good.”

She squared her shoulders. “I want to ask you some things, all the same.”

“Okay.” He set his free hand on the table and rolled his fingers across the cover of a cookbook. “How about I finish organizing these recipes, then meet you at the picnic table?”

A spatter of rain against the window overruled his suggestion.

“Or, the living room,” Ren said, after turning and looking outside.

“I’ll be at the piano.”

She was plinking out a Scott Joplin piece when Ren came in.

He slid onto the piano bench beside her, straddling it, and looked at the sheet music. “I’ve always liked that one. Catchy.”

“Yes. And hard to play.” Making both hands do what they were supposed to was like fighting through blackberry vines.

He scooted closer. His right hand hovered over the keys. “I’ll take treble clef. You take bass. From the top.”

Lina counted to four, and off they went, reeling and fumbling through the tune. They were giggling within eight measures. By the end of the piece, two minutes and several apologies later, they sounded pretty good together. They held the last chord, feet vying for the spot on the sustain pedal. Ren ended up holding it down, with Lina’s foot on top of his. They let their hands fall to their laps.

“You read music,” Lina said.

“We mathematicians tend to.”

“A thousand talents. Quite the Renaissance man.”

“Now, I don’t date back that far.”

She laughed again, tipping her head down. It nearly touched his shoulder. When she looked up, she found he had tilted his face. After a moment or two, they leaned in at the same time. His lips were cool, but the tip of her tongue discovered his mouth was warm inside, as were the hands that curled around her waist. His foot slid off the piano pedal and hooked her calf, pulling her close without breaking the kiss.

“Mm.” She drew away an inch. “You taste like licorice.”

“Black Jack.” He flicked his chewing gum forward to display it between his teeth. “Full of sugar and everything.”

“Must be nice not to worry about cavities.”

“Not having to see a dentist is one of the better things about my condition.”

“I’ve sometimes thought you smelled like mouthwash. I guess that must have been mint gum.”

“Maybe. Or the brandy.”

She frowned. “Brandy? But you don’t…”

“I don’t drink or eat, no. Usually. But I’ve been able to taste that damn brandy, the one she poisoned me with, for the last seventy years.”

The statement wiped out Lina’s warmth. “Oh. Jeez.”

“People sometimes say they smell it on me. That’s the other reason for the gum. To cover it.”

While Lina contemplated the dreadfulness of tasting your cause of death for the greater part of a century, a sound rang out: a thin note on the piano, repeating several times. They stared at the keyboard, but none of the keys moved. It sounded more like someone was reaching into the open piano and plucking at the strings near the hammers. In a few seconds the plucking stopped, and the last note hovered in the quiet room. Lina drew a breath.

Ren murmured, “Which brings us to our main topic.”

“I thought she wouldn’t act up today.”

“Well, she can’t do much. But I guess she’s still going to try.”

“Will she get angry? If we talk about her?”

Ren edged off the piano bench and stood up. “I don’t get an angry feeling today. More like curious.”

Lina got up too. “Then let’s talk.”

Ren led her to a sofa, the very one where she had fallen asleep and dreamed of kissing him, months ago. The memory kicked up a thrill in her stomach as she sat beside him. Dreams came true after all. But before succumbing to the desire to test-drive her dream again, she intended to learn more about Ren and Julia.

“You two must have been close,” she said.

“Not really. That is, I never loved her.”

Lina winced, expecting a vase to come flying at him. But nothing happened. “Did she know?”

He shrugged. “She does now, in any case.”

“But she must have loved you . She killed herself over you.”

“I believe she thought she loved me. I also believe she couldn’t live with herself after what she’d done. I could see her doing it out of despair, a fit of passion.”

“How long were you dating?”

“Just a couple months. It started when she slipped me a note under a saucer at Monday night dinner, inviting me to come out onto the fire escape and have a cigarette with her and Jackie.”

“How unhealthy.”

“Well, back then it was a luxury to have cigarettes at all. It was the middle of the Depression. But of course it wasn’t really about smoking. Pretty soon, Jackie was finding excuses to leave us alone, and it became…” He shrugged. “Something of a fling.”

“So that night, when everyone else went to the dance…”

“Yes, that night.” Ren rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, as if the memory gave him a headache. Little wonder. “I agreed to stay behind and meet her after everyone was gone. She probably thought we were going to lounge around on the sofas, hang out in rooms we normally weren’t allowed to be in together, stuff like that. But my plan was to tell her we should stop seeing each other.”

“Oh.”

“I couldn’t see it going anywhere after I graduated, which was going to be in June—in two months.”

“Did you actually break up with her?”

“Didn’t get to. We met in the parlor, and she’d brought this flask. Said it was brandy—another rare treat. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but I thought I’d take some, since maybe it would help me say what I needed to say.” He shook his head. “Instead I pretty much stopped talking forever.”

“When did you realize that you were…” Lina hesitated over the word.

Sean Reynolds did not. “Dead? Well, I don’t remember anything after passing out. No floating over the room, no tunnel of light. When I woke up it was the next day, and I was with my family in Port Townsend. And they couldn’t see me, and somehow I knew.”

“They had been told?”

He nodded.

“That’s awful,” Lina murmured. She hadn’t wanted to compare it to herself, but the memory of Mr. Ambaum’s weeping but resigned wife and sons stole into her mind. She closed her eyes for a moment and willed it away.

Ren dragged a throw pillow onto his lap and plucked lint off the corners. “The worst was I couldn’t console them. I couldn’t talk to them. It was just… over. Most horrible day of my existence.”

Lina wished their relationship wasn’t so new, wished she had the confidence to wrap her arms around him and cuddle him like a child. Instead she only said, “I’m sorry,” and silently screamed at herself for her inadequacy.

“I often wonder what would have happened if I’d come back to this house earlier,” he said. “Before Julia killed herself.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“It didn’t seem important. I wanted to stay with my family. I was there when the police came back to talk to them, so I heard she was beside herself, was so sorry, et cetera et cetera. I had no particular desire to see her.”

“‘Sorry’ doesn’t quite cut it sometimes,” Lina admitted.

“My folks sure didn’t think so.” Ren turned the pillow over and picked at the lint on the other side. “I was at my own funeral. That was the last time I saw her.”

“She went to Port Townsend for it?”

“Yep. Looking very distressed, but, unfortunately, far too glamorous to gain the sympathies of a small town during the Depression.”

“And the rest is history.”

“Manslaughter charges. An attempt by Julia’s family to buy off my parents. Their refusal. A suicide in the garage.” Ren reeled off the events as if reciting the names of the first four presidents.

“Were you surprised when she killed herself?”

“Very. And then I sort of expected to see her. Even though I was angry with her, I would have welcomed the company. So I went to her family’s house and hung around for a few days, waiting, sure she would show up. But there was nothing except a lot of weeping and wailing from her relatives. No ghosts.”

“How depressing.”

“Yeah. I decided I’d best get used to being alone, and spent the next year walking around, finding out what I could and couldn’t do, seeing stuff I’d always wanted to see. I got on a boat down at the piers and rode it to Alaska. Walked around Alaska for a few months, caught a boat back. Things like that.”

“And you never came back here until a year later?”

“I thought of it. Lots of times. But the place where you died—well, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I didn’t want to see it again. Not till I started getting desperate for…what is it they say nowadays? Closure?”

“Closure. I guess you didn’t exactly find that.”

“Not exactly.” He tossed the pillow aside and dropped his arm along the back of the sofa, behind her shoulders. “The second worst moment of my existence,” he said, looking at the carpet, “was when I thought for a second that I was alive again, only to find I wasn’t. I thought it had all been a dream. It was the middle of the night and I had walked into the side yard over there, and suddenly I could feel the temperature. I was shivering for the first time in a year. I could smell the grass, and the smoke from people’s chimneys. I could reach down and pick up leaves. And I thought, ‘I must have been sleepwalking, and I’ve finally woken up, and none of it happened.’ I was so happy.

“Then I went around to the back door and found a newspaper they’d thrown out, and it had the date on it—1937. I realized it really had been a year. So then I thought maybe I did die, but had been given another chance and had come back.” He glanced at her, seeming shy to have wished such things. “Didn’t have that right, either.”

“You stepped outside the lines, and realized?”

He nodded. “Went out into the alley to run around to the front door and knock on it—but as soon as I hit the gravel, I was gone. I couldn’t feel the ground. Couldn’t touch anything. Went back and forth a few times, and finally understood. And that…” He let his palm fall to her shoulder. “Was when I suspected, as a descendant of Irish Catholics, that I had arrived in Hell.”

Lina moved closer. Her shifting weight on the cushions tipped her chest against his. “You haven’t.” She leaned up and kissed him on the lips, only with an aim to comfort, not to seduce. At least, it started out that way.

His arm locked around her. She found herself melting back into the cushions. Her hand found its way up his spine and into his hair, which felt like puppy fur. What a travesty—she had known him for five months and hadn’t run her fingers through his hair until now.

He broke free of the kiss, but stayed in their slanted embrace. “Why?” he whispered. “Why would you want to do this?”

“Well…” Her other hand curled against his shirtfront, luxuriating in the feel of ribs under muscle under cotton. “I never meant to fall in love with a ghost. But if the ghost is willing, I won’t kick him out of my bed. Life’s too short.”

His surprised release of breath, and the way his eyebrows lifted and his gaze dropped, knocked a dreadful suspicion into Lina’s head.

“I—I mean, if you can’t ,” she said, “that’s fine too. I didn’t mean right now, anyway. This is—”

“I can,” he cut in, blushing. “I can. And thank God for that, too. I’m just, uh…” A grin sprawled over his lips. “Surprised, I guess.”

“You thought I was a prude, didn’t you.”

“You seemed reserved,” he corrected.

“I’m not. I’m terrible. I have a filthy mind, I just never—really, you can?”

He nodded. “Which I think technically makes me an incubus.”

“Nightmare?” Lina tried, groping through her vocabulary.

“That’s one of the meanings.” His voice had taken on an arch, mischievous tone, and he relaxed against her. “Look up the other when you go back to your room.”

“Tell me.”

“Mm-mm.” He pronounced the two syllables as a negative. The tip of his nose brushed hers. He teased her lips with small licorice-flavored kisses.

“Tell me.”

His tongue flickered into the next kiss. “Look it up.”

Lina lost interest in the English lexicon. They were on an angle headed for horizontal, lips entangled, when the piano rang out again.

Plink plink plink prrrrink! —several notes this time, as if fingernails were being drawn across the strings. Ren and Lina scrambled upright, and Lina wondered if she was insane for being relieved that it was “only” the invisible Julia, and not Marla or anyone else.

“That’s so disturbing,” she said crossly.

His breath skated warm along her neck. “I have the feeling it’s something we’ll have to get used to.”