21. Ghostbusters
Chapter twenty-one
Ghostbusters
She had not intended to invite him.
That was what she told herself on the Tuesday before Halloween when she had returned his jacket. But when he came by the funeral home that afternoon, her resolve waivered and she mentioned trick or treating to him.
He had come by that afternoon with drinks from Hayes Coffee.
He was wearing the jacket she had returned that morning and was sitting in the chair across from her desk with his afternoon coffee.
She mentioned that she always gave out candy on Halloween and that the neighborhood children looked forward to it and that she had been doing it alone for five years since Mark died and it was fine, it was perfectly fine, she enjoyed it.
He had looked at her for a moment and said what time does it start.
She had said five thirty and he had said I'll be there.
And with no reluctance at all, she had said all right and gone back to her paperwork and told herself she had not intended to invite him while being fairly certain she had intended exactly that.
She found the costume in the back of her closet on Thursday evening.
She had bought it two years ago on a whim at the Halloween store in Alexandria and had never worn it, a white sheet shaped into a friendly ghost with a smiling face and eyeholes and little white gloved hands.
She had stood in her closet holding it and thought about what Kali would have said about a funeral director dressing as a friendly ghost for Halloween and heard Kali's laugh so clearly in her head that she had to sit down on the edge of the bed for a moment.
She wore the costume.
Ethan arrived at five twenty-five in a khaki jumpsuit with a proton pack on his back and a logo on his chest and a look on his face that told her he had put actual effort into this and was not going to apologize for it.
She stood in the doorway and looked at him.
"Ghostbusters?" she asked.
"Someone has to keep an eye on you," he said.
She stepped back and let him in and he came into the hallway and looked at her costume and the corner of his mouth pulled up into the real smile, the one that did something inconvenient to her composure and always had.
She turned before it could do too much damage and led him to the kitchen where she had the candy sorted into a large bowl by the front door.
"Nice costume," he said.
"I'm a funeral director dressed as a ghost," she said. "The children might think it's hilarious."
"It is hilarious."
"I know," she said, and surprised herself by meaning it completely.
They took up their positions on the front porch as the first of the trick or treaters began to appear at the end of the street, small figures in costumes moving through the early October dark with parents trailing behind them, and Pine Hollow did what Pine Hollow did on Halloween, which was to take it seriously and with great warmth and considerable candy.
The Peterson children came in a group.
She saw them from the end of the walk, the older ones flanking the younger ones the way they had been flanking them since September, Josiah and Jessica at the edges with the little ones in the middle, and Jake behind them all with Lily on his shoulders wearing a pumpkin costume that Kali had probably bought before she died and which made Julie's throat tighten briefly and then ease.
They came up the walk in a wave of noise and costume and Jake saw Ethan on the porch and his expression moved through something brief and unguarded before it settled into the steady warmth that was Jake Peterson's default.
"Ethan," he said.
"Jake." Ethan stepped forward and the two men shook hands and held it for a moment longer than a handshake, the particular grip of men who had carried something heavy together and understood each other because of it.
Tyler at six was a dinosaur. He regarded Ethan's proton pack with the focused intensity of a six year old confronting something magnificent and said is that real and Ethan said mostly and Tyler accepted this completely.
Wren and Lily were both pumpkins, which Jake said had not been planned and Julie believed him because it was exactly the kind of thing that happened with twins. They held out their bags with the solemn purposefulness of five year olds who understood that this was important work.
Julie reached into the candy bowl.
Ethan reached into the candy bowl.
Their hands met in the middle of it, his fingers finding hers in the candy the way their hands had found each others in a popcorn bucket twenty-one years ago.
She felt it go through her the way it had gone through her at seventeen, that specific warmth that started in her hand and went somewhere considerably more complicated.
She looked up at him and he was already looking at her.
Jake Peterson, standing at the bottom of the porch steps with Lily standing beside him, said nothing. She could see him in her peripheral vision and he was looking at the two of them with an expression she recognized as the particular expression of a man who was thinking about his wife.
She pulled a handful of candy and dropped it in Wren's bag and stepped back and Ethan did the same for Lily and the moment passed the way moments passed, absorbed into the ongoing noise and movement of Halloween on a Pine Hollow street.
But Jake caught her eye before he shepherded his children back down the walk, and what was in his expression was not surprise. It was something quieter than that. Something that looked, she thought, like Kali would have approved of this.
She looked away before she had to respond to it.
The evening went on around them, the children coming in waves and the candy depleting and Ethan talking to every child who came up the walk with the easy warmth of someone who was genuinely good with children, which she had not known about him and which did something to the careful management she had been applying to her feelings about him since August. Sam Peterson came back a second time with a friend, which Julie pretended not to notice, and Harold Jensen walked past on the sidewalk in no costume at all and stopped to tell them they looked ridiculous, which was Harold's version of a compliment.
By eight o'clock the street had quieted and the candy was nearly gone and the October night had gone fully cold. Julie said she thought that was probably it and Ethan held the door and they went inside.
The house was warm after the porch and she set the candy bowl on the kitchen counter and he set the proton pack against the wall and they stood in her kitchen in their costumes in the quiet of a house that had finished its Halloween.
She thought about Jake's expression on the porch steps and Kali's laugh in her head and the way their hands had found each other in a candy bowl and she was so tired of being careful.
She reached into the candy bowl to consolidate what was left.
He reached in at the same time.
Their hands met in the candy again and this time neither of them moved to disengage them.
She looked up at him and he was looking at her and the kitchen was very quiet and there was no porch full of trick or treaters and no Jake Peterson at the bottom of the steps and no reason to pull back except the ones she had been carrying for months and she was so tired of carrying them.
She did not pull back.
He moved toward her slowly, the way he had moved toward her in his kitchen when she returned the jacket, with the same careful deliberateness, and this time she did not step away.
She stood her ground and looked at him and let him come to her and when he was close enough he stopped and looked at her one more time, a question in it, a real one, giving her every opportunity to change her mind, and she answered it by closing the last of the distance herself.
He kissed her.
Or she kissed him. It was both of those things at once, which was perhaps the only way it could have been after twenty-one years and eighteen of them lost and all the careful months between August and now, and it was soft and certain and completely unhurried and it tasted like October and it lasted exactly as long as it needed to last.
When they separated she kept her eyes closed for a moment.
She opened them and he was looking at her with an expression she finally had a name for. It was the expression of a man who was exactly where he had been trying to get back to for a very long time and knew it.
She thought she probably had the same expression.
"Hi," he said quietly.
"Hi," she said.
They stood in her kitchen in their Halloween costumes with their hands still in the candy bowl and Pine Hollow quiet outside the windows and she thought about seventeen and popcorn and lake water and Horseshoe Lake and Kali bringing muffins on Tuesday mornings and Mark holding her hand and Jake's face on the porch steps and all of it, the whole of it, everything that had brought her to this kitchen on this October night, and she thought that Kali had been right.
She had been capable and alone for a long time.
She did not have to be alone.
"I should probably go," Ethan said. He did not move.
"You probably should," she said. She did not move either.
He smiled, the real one, and she felt it go all the way through her and did not try to manage it.
He pulled his hand out of the candy bowl and produced a miniature chocolate bar and held it out to her.
She took it and he took one for himself and they stood in her kitchen eating Halloween candy in their costumes and she thought that this was possibly the best October night she had had in a very long time.
Maybe ever.