Chapter 9
Chapter
Nine
F lip woke up feeling tired, as if he hadn’t slept at all. He felt a double sense of loss—Tony and Scratch—even though he’d never had either of them. Even though he’d only recently met them and one of them was long dead.
Still, words were pushing at his brain, so he brewed coffee, sat at his laptop, and wrote. Wrote a lot, in fact, so that he could almost see the end of the manuscript, the way the first light of dawn peeked over the horizon before the sun truly rose. The entire time he worked, he felt as if he were seeing the events of the story unfold in front of him; all he needed to do was attempt to record them coherently. A Clear Eye might help someone picture scenes, but the words themselves had to be found, and that was still hard work. Hard, but satisfying.
When his stomach loudly insisted that caffeine alone did not a meal make, he saved the file, backed it up, and checked his email. His agent had replied and, judging from the number of exclamation points, was thrilled that he was finally making progress. It was good to have one person on the planet who he wasn’t currently disappointing.
There was also a message from the airline, assuring him that his luggage piece was on the way to New Orleans. He didn’t bother to track the AirTag to confirm.
Although he had some food in the house, he decided it would be a good idea to get out and walk around a little before diving back into work. After a quick shower, he got dressed. Spying the book he’d bought the previous day, he grabbed it before walking out the door. It might be nice to do some reading over lunch.
Miss Amelie was in her usual spot, but she had customers: a middle-aged white couple wearing matching American flag T-shirts. She waved at him, and Flip sent her a series of hand gestures that was supposed to mean You and I will talk later .
At his favorite café—he had one of those now, it seemed—he settled in with a sandwich, more coffee, and the book, which turned out to be really interesting. There was no mention of Scratch specifically, but the author discussed bordello musicians in general. The writing was informative but also engaging enough to make him feel as if he were there, sitting in a whorehouse in Storyville over a hundred years ago. Ever since he was very young, he’d possessed an almost uncanny ability to sink into the world of the books he read. That was likely how he’d been able to survive his miserable childhood; whatever was going on around him, he had an escape. Now he wondered if he had his Clear Eye to thank for that skill.
When he realized that the café was getting ready to close, Flip headed outside and into the sunny, temperate weather. He strolled aimlessly for a time—well, not entirely aimlessly, in that he took care to avoid passing too close to the Bergeron-Catanzaro house.
Eventually he turned onto St. Philip. Miss Amelie gestured him over, as if he needed any urging. He threw himself into the empty chair with more dramatic flair than he usually displayed.
“That’s a good book,” she said, pointing.
“Tony recommended it.”
“That boy is something, ain’t he? Cute as a button and smart as a whip.”
He scowled at her. “I don’t need a matchmaker.”
She widened her eyes in a completely unconvincing charade of innocence.
“Look, Miss Amelie. I’m a mess. I was a mess even before I started believing in psychic powers and ghosts, and?—”
“Ah, so now you accept the obvious.”
Flip crossed his arms. “Ghosts are not obvious.”
“They are to you. It’s funny that you’d rather doubt your own sanity than believe in spirits, even when that spirit is a good one.” She waggled her finger at him. “They’re not all like Scratch, boy. Consider yourself lucky.”
“I don’t— It doesn’t— Stop trying to redirect the conversation. You told Tony that he and I are fated mates.”
“I did no such thing.” When Flip raised his eyebrows, she laughed. “I only told him you were coming, is all. Ain’t nothing wrong with that.”
“You said—or you strongly implied—that we were meant to be together.”
“That’s just stating a fact, now. All people are connected like beads on a string. Some far apart, some real close. You two are next to each other, and if you look, you’ll see that for yourself. Tony can’t see it, though, and all I did was tell him ’cause he was feelin’ down.”
She made it all sound so reasonable.
“Look, Miss Amelie. You’re acting like it’s simple, but it’s not. Tony is—well, he’s pretty much amazing, actually—but I’m a mess. He needs someone like him, someone who has his life together. That’s not me. And God, there’s Scratch, and I’m almost broke, and I’m only here for a few months, and….” Flip flung his arms wide and made a sound intended to convey the hopelessness of the situation.
Miss Amelie was clearly not impressed. “Since when is life supposed to be easy, boy? It is what it is. You make the most of it or you don’t. That’s your choice. But you can’t change facts.”
As if facts were something solid you could hang on to. He was an author—he knew that truth was subjective and reality was what you made of it. And sometimes the whole universe could twist on you overnight. While you dreamed.
“So what am I supposed to do?” He heard the plea in his voice.
She shook her head. “Ain’t my job to tell you. I’m like a good pair of glasses—I help people see more clearly. Glasses don’t tell you what to do with what you see. And you don’t need glasses, boy. You see just fine on your own when you open your Eye.”
This was supremely unhelpful and also not at all comforting. He waited while a flower-bedecked mule slowly pulled a cart of tourists past. He sort of envied the animal. Sure, it had a heavy burden to bear, but at least it didn’t have to agonize about what direction to take. It had someone to care for it and make sure it didn’t wander off somewhere it shouldn’t.
“I make shitty decisions,” he finally announced. “I moved in with someone I shouldn’t have. Ditched the day job because I thought I could make it as an author. Wrote a couple good books and then stalled right after signing a deal. Fled California to a city I barely know. Picked an apartment just because the street and I share a name. Spent the day with a man who’s too good for me. And those are just the latest hits.”
“Huh.” Miss Amelie leaned back in her chair and scrunched up her lips. “Seems to me that if nobody’s in prison or dead, those ain’t so bad. Sometimes you gotta ride over a lotta potholes to get somewhere good.”
That was more of a maxim than good advice, but Flip acknowledged it was all he was going to get. He stood and looked down at her. “I’ll see you around, Miss Amelie.”
She cackled. “You sure will. Oh, and boy? Sometimes it’s a whole lot easier to make a journey if you ain’t dragging all your baggage with you.”
“My baggage is gone.”
“Not yet it ain’t.”
Flip wrote long into the night, until he could no longer see the words before him. If he had any dreams, he didn’t remember them. He wrote the next day too, and went for a walk, and did some laundry, and bought a few groceries. He waved at Miss Amelie every time he saw her but didn’t stop for a chat; she was busy most of the day anyway. Scratch didn’t come to him that night. Or the night after, or the night after that. Flip even caught himself consciously widening his Clear Eye, and although he did catch glimpses of a few spectral figures, none of them were Scratch.
A raw sense of loss tore at Flip’s gut—for both of the Bergerons he’d met and, apparently, lost.
But the writing… ah. The writing flowed like the Mississippi River, powerful and unstoppable. There had been times in the past when words came easily to hi m, but they were nothing compared to the present. As soon as he sat at his keyboard, entire scenes opened as easily as unfolding a kitchen towel, and when he wasn’t in front of his computer, the characters clamored eagerly to be set free again.
Less than two weeks after he’d arrived in New Orleans, his book had grown from thirty thousand to nearly a hundred thousand words, and two days after that, he typed The End. Then he backed up the completed manuscript, walked to a dive bar on Royal Street, and got incredibly drunk.
Well, he tried to anyway. It was a ritual for him, and one of the few exceptions to his usual abstinence: when a first draft was completed, he celebrated with booze. He couldn’t remember why he’d started this tradition, but once he had, it seemed unlucky to change it. So tonight he rapidly downed four Sazeracs—the specific cocktail chosen in honor of his current city—which should have been more than enough to put him under the table. He waited for the fuzziness to descend. He’d always loved that fuzziness, which was another reason why he almost never allowed himself to drink. It would be all too easy to slip into that state permanently. Tonight, however, his head remained stubbornly clear. He ordered a fifth and then a sixth drink, more than he’d ever consumed at once and enough to make the lanky bartender stare at him with concern.
But he stayed sober.
Swearing under his breath, he slid off the bar stool and walked out into the night. The air was warm and still, making him think about mosquitoes and yellow fever, although as far as he could tell, nothing actually bit him. His feet led him out of the Quarter to Frenchmen Street, where music streamed out of open doors, but he didn’t enter any of the buildings. He stood on a street corner, imagining a handsome man playing a piano.
All the way home he saw ghosts, but none were familiar. They weren’t frightening, just ordinary people going about their business despite being dead. A spectral mother and child sat on a front porch peacefully shelling peas; the child smiled and waved at Flip as he passed, and he waved back. An old man leaned against a wall and drank from a brown glass bottle, swaying slightly to a tune that Flip couldn’t hear. A young man walked by with a heavy-looking bag settled on one shoulder. Flip strolled among the ghosts and the living, feeling as if he didn’t entirely fit with either category.
He was nearly back to St. Philip Street when he recognized the emotion that clung to all of the ghosts: melancholy. None of them were truly despairing, at least as far as he could tell, but sadness hung on all of them like a shawl. That made sense, he supposed, given that they were dead.
But Flip was alive, so why did he share this emotion as well? He’d finished the manuscript and had the gut sense that he’d written a damn good book. He had a nice place to stay for now and all the basic things he needed to survive. Nobody was trying to murder him for sleeping with the wrong person.
A realization floated just out of reach. He knew it was there, but he couldn’t grasp it, which was so fucking frustrating that he nearly walked into another bar. Surely a couple more drinks would finally get him wasted.
Instead he turned onto St. Philip, glanced at the empty spot that Miss Amelie would occupy in the morning, and keyed in the code to enter his building.
His suitcase waited at the foot of the stairs.