Chapter 10
Chapter
Ten
F lip carried the suitcase into his apartment and left it, unopened, in the living room. He puttered around the kitchen, preparing a favorite comfort food: pasta, creamy with shredded asiago and gruyere. Although the boxed stuff had been a mainstay during his youth, it was pleasant to now stand on his gallery and gaze at quiet streets while spooning the adult version into his mouth.
When he fell asleep soon afterward, his dreams were wispy, insubstantial things that melted away immediately.
He hadn’t gone to bed especially late, but he slept until nearly noon and woke up groggy. No headache or other hangover symptoms, however, and his head cleared after he brewed some coffee and reheated the leftover mac and cheese.
Usually he let the first drafts of his writing sit for a while, like seeds tucked into damp soil. That allowed him a fresher eye when he revised them. He could have waited with this one too, since his agent wasn’t expecting it for a couple of weeks, but an inexplicable sense of urgency gnawed at him. He sat down at his laptop and dove directly into the second draft. He was delighted—but not surprised—to discover that the manuscript didn’t really need much tinkering.
“This is really good ,” he kept saying, because there was no reason to be falsely modest if ghosts were his only audience. As was often the case once a book was finished, he had a sense of distance from it, as if it had been written by someone else. Maybe that didn’t make him entirely objective about it, but in this case he was certain that his perception of quality wasn’t skewed.
He stayed up all night reading over the manuscript, fixing typos and tweaking a few minor details, mainlining coffee but barely eating. Dawn had already broken by the time he finished. His muscles were cramped, his eyes gritty, his belly hollow. But it was all worth it for the supreme satisfaction he experienced when he wrote a quick email to his agent, attached the document, and hit Send .
After which he immediately stumbled off to the bedroom and climbed onto the mattress, still fully clothed.
When Flip opened his eyes again, it was nearly five p.m. and his stomach was staging a protest over being ignored. A nice dinner out felt justified, so he showered, dressed, and ventured out of his apartment.
Miss Amelie was just packing up for the day. She glanced up from the cart she used to transport her setup. “Congratulations, boy. Told you that all you had to do was open your Eye.”
“It’s wide open.” He paused a moment. “But, um, I haven’t seen Scratch for a long time.”
“Maybe he don’t want to see you. Or maybe your Eye ain’t as open as you think.”
And maybe the separation was just as well, for Scratch’s sake as well as Flip’s, but it didn’t feel that way. Neither did his self-enforced avoidance of Tony, which Miss Amelie didn’t mention.
“I owe my publisher one more book under my contract. Do you envision me writing it in a timely matter?”
“You’re already writing it, boy.”
She was way off track on that. He didn’t have even the germ of an idea for the next one. However, it was too early to start worrying about that, so he wished Miss Amelie a good evening and continued on.
A couple of hours later he returned to his apartment with his belly full. He’d seen ghosts all evening, including a sad-eyed man bussing invisible dishes at the restaurant, and it had been a little difficult to pretend they weren’t there. Some of them acknowledged him with polite nods or waves, as if he were an acquaintance, but he was afraid to respond because the living people around him would think he was crazy. He hoped the ghosts understood and didn’t assume he was intentionally rude .
It was a bit of a relief to return to the solitude of his place—but also a little bit lonely.
An email from his agent was waiting. In recent months, he’d felt dread and shame every time her name appeared in his inbox, but not today. Especially when he saw the subject line: Holy shit .
He grinned while reading the short message.
I was just going to glance at the first few paragraphs, but then I couldn’t stop and now I’m most of the way through, my wife and my dog hate me, and I’m so excited I might cry. Home run this time, Flip. Worth every minute of anxious waiting.
Yeah, Flip knew it was good, but it was nice to get some external validation.
Of course, his work wasn’t nearly done. There would be several rounds of edits, and although he adored his editor, that was always a grueling process. After that would come all the marketing and promotional stuff that he generally hated, and then the fraught dilemma about whether to read reviews or pretend they didn’t exist. And the deadline for the next book felt as if it was looming already.
But all of that could wait.
What he really wished he could do right now was sit with a couple of friends—or a lover—and celebrate his achievement. Nothing flashy. Just a comfortable spot with chill vibes, some tasty snacks and nonalcoholic drinks, and amiable conversation. But Flip had burned most of his friendship bridges long ago, and Ethan had claimed the last of them .
If the Bergeron-Catanzaro house had been open at this hour, Flip probably would have marched over to see Tony. Which would be selfish of him, really; he was the one who’d pushed Tony away. So maybe it was a good thing the place was closed.
Feeling restless, Flip paced his apartment until his gaze fell on the suitcase, still sitting where he’d left it. He dragged it into the bedroom, but after spending a few moments trying to decide whether to open it on the floor or on the bed, he abruptly chose not to open it at all. He’d go for a walk instead.
He wandered for miles, paying little attention to where he went. In Congo Square, ghostly men and women played instruments and danced. Some were dressed in rags, some in finer clothing from more recent eras. Near the Ninth Ward, ghosts waded blank-eyed through invisible flood waters. Near enormous oak trees in City Park, spectral children splashed at the edges of a lake. Near a tangle of freeways and among a crowd of medical and university buildings, a vast empty building loomed, and ghosts stared mournfully at him through glassless windows.
God, why didn’t these spirits move on? Why hadn’t Scratch? Whatever awaited them beyond this plane, it had to be better than trudging meaninglessly around, unnoticed by almost everyone, untouched and unconnected.
Footsore, Flip was almost home when the answer came to him.
He’d been passing through Jackson Square in front of the cathedral. The fortunetellers, buskers, and artists had long since gone home, the tourists were back in their hotels, and the cathedral itself, shrouded in fog, looked transported straight out of a gothic novel. But a ghost sat on one of the benches. He was an old man with long gray hair, and his shapeless layers of clothing could have come from any decade in the last century. He clutched a can in one hand.
“Good evening,” said Flip since there was nobody near enough to notice.
The ghost raised his can in a salute. “Evenin’.”
“It’s a good night for a stroll. Not too hot or too cold. Not raining.”
“A good night for sittin’ too.”
Flip paused in front of him. “It’s a good place to sit.”
“My daughter was baptized in there.” The ghost gestured at the cathedral. “She always said she’d be married there too. But she got sick….” His shoulders slumped.
How could you comfort a man who held so tightly to grief that it survived even his own death?
And that was when understanding struck Flip so hard that for a moment he thought there had been an earthquake. He staggered slightly, blinking to clear the literal flash of insight from his eyes. But no, dammit. It was his Eye that needed clearing.
Flip braced himself and opened it wider than he’d imagined possible.
He saw the ghost on the bench, yes, and several others besides. But he also saw a pair of policemen watching him warily from a block away, and he knew that one of the cops was in the middle of a nasty divorce but would soon meet the love of his life and remarry, and the other cop was worried about an ache he’d been feeling lately in his left knee, which he was soon going to discover was bursitis. An Uber driver a block away was on her way home, looking forward to the leftovers in her fridge and bingeing a sci-fi series on Netflix. A woman staying in an Airbnb a block off the square was pregnant, and although she didn’t know it yet, she was going to be overjoyed when she found out. The baby?—
No, this was too much. Flip narrowed his vision to the things that were his business.
He saw that the ghost on the bench hadn’t moved on because he clung so tightly to his grief. In fact, the reason why all ghosts remained was that they were unable to let go of something that tied them to life. There wasn’t room in those individuals for the future because the past took up too much space.
Losing things could be terrible—but it could also lead to change. To better things.
What had Miss Amelie said to Tony? He’s gonna think he lost everything, but he ain’t. Boy just needs to make enough room for you.
In a way, Flip was a ghost as well, clutching at lost opportunities, bad decisions, hurtful betrayals, deep-seated fears.
Right then and there, Flip let go of it all, including his skepticism and self-doubt. All fell away from him like plaster peeling off a fa?ade, and for the first time since he was a young child, he felt as if he could fully expand his lungs.
Hot tears ran down his cheeks, but they were due to relief and joy rather than sorrow. Although he’d already walked for miles, he could have run all night. He could almost have fucking flown . A sense of promise filled him. A sense of potential. He was alive, he’d written a damned good book, and he could shape his future however he wished.
Then Flip remembered the rest of what Miss Amelie had said —You two got stories to tell —and he knew precisely what he wanted that future to look like.
Although Flip wanted to shout his exultation, he didn’t particularly want to have a conversation with those cops; he had better ways to spend his time. So he turned back to the ghost on the bench and smiled. “I have to go right now, but if you like, I can come back another night. I’d love to hear about your daughter if you want to tell me about her.”
When the ghost smiled like that, he was almost beautiful. “Really?”
“I want to know about her. I bet she was special.”
“She was. She truly was.”
Maybe talking about her would free this ghost from enough grief that he’d be able to move on. But even if not, it would surely bring some happiness to his gray existence, and Flip could spare the time.
But right now he had more personal matters to attend to. He said good-night to the ghost, waved cheerily at the confused cops, and hurried home.