Chapter Four
Evelyn had to be dreaming.
There was no way Marla Feinberg, her old boss and mentor, was standing in the hallway outside her office.
She waited with her back pressed up to the door for some sign of life.
Or rather—if she were being literal—some sign of death.
But the entire fourth floor had gone quiet.
With her eyes latched upon the threshold, she tiptoed back to her desk.
“This isn’t real,” Evelyn whispered to herself. “You’re just having a nightmare.”
The doorknob began rattling.
Evelyn screamed and quickly ducked behind her desk.
“Evelyn—” Marla’s voice boomed across her office. “It’s time for a leadership meeting with your senior. I’ve got an eight-point agenda we need to cover.”
Evelyn pressed her eyes shut. “No, no, no,” she said, and pinched the skin on the back of one hand.
“This isn’t real. Wake up, brain. Wake up!
” The rattling grew in intensity. Soon, it seemed as though the entire building was shaking.
A CBS7-T Award for Outstanding Leadership inched its way off a shelf and landed with a thud on the carpet beside her.
She pinched the back of her hand harder. “Please, just make it stop!”
Almost as soon as she had said it, the place fell silent.
The rattling stopped. The walls were no longer caving in on her.
Evelyn waited breathlessly beneath her desk and craned one ear toward the door.
Was Marla gone? Had the dream ended? When no sound came, she ever so cautiously opened her eyes and crept up one centimeter at a time to inspect for herself.
The door to her office was still closed and locked, but Marla was now standing in front of her desk, arms crossed against her chest.
Evelyn screamed and ducked again.
“Come now,” Marla said, rather dryly. “I’ve dealt with glass ceilings my whole life. Do you really think a door and a lock can keep me out?”
“But you’re dead,” Evelyn stammered.
“The correct term is breathing impaired.”
“What?”
“It’s a joke!” Marla snapped back. “Jeez, Evelyn. Don’t be such a stiff.” Marla drew closer, swooshing around Evelyn’s desk. “Besides, if there’s anything good to being four years post mortem, it’s that I no longer have to deal with Human Resources.”
Evelyn rose from the spot where she’d been hiding. “You’re still working?”
“Chained to my job,” she said, raising both arms. “Literally.”
“That’s so . . .” Evelyn searched for a word. “Commendable.”
Marla responded by blasting all her cellphones once again.
“You think it’s commendable?” Marla shouted back at her.
“You think this is the afterlife that I, or anyone, would imagine? Attached to technology. No break from the grind! Working hours and hours . . . no end to the emails, the checklists, the schedules.”
“Well, you always said you were never going to retire.” Evelyn was just getting annoyed. “If you’re unhappy now, that’s on you.”
“Oh, please!”
“Besides,” Evelyn said, ready for this nightmare to finish, “what are you even doing back here, anyway? I wrote your obituary. I went to your funeral, Marla.”
“Ah, yes.” Marla sneered. “You and at least three studio executives. I had no idea I was such a devoted pickleball player.”
Marla seemed rather ungrateful about the whole matter.
Since Marla had no living relatives and even fewer friends, Evelyn had found herself responsible for organizing her boss’s send-off.
Despite her busy work schedule, she had even taken the time to write a most complimentary, though somewhat fabricated, eulogy—the pickleball hobby having been David’s idea.
But while the funeral itself was not well attended, Evelyn ensured that Marla’s legacy lived on where it counted, securing her old mentor a half-page obituary in the New York Times.
“Excuse me.” Evelyn said. “I spent three whole hours of my own free time on that obituary for you.”
“And look where it got me!”
As if on cinematic cue, the alarms began again.
Evelyn shrieked at the noise, her head splitting.
On instinct, her hand landed on her temple.
And then Evelyn realized something important.
She wasn’t dreaming. Rather, the specter standing in front of her had a far more logical explanation. She was having a migraine.
“Oh,” Evelyn said, her shoulders relaxing. “I know what this is.”
“You do?”
“I get it.” Evelyn laughed at the ghost, at herself, and the clear synchronicities between real life and imagination.
She waved Marla away dismissively, relaxing down into her seat.
“You’re an aura,” Evelyn explained. “A visual hallucination brought on by a migraine. Possibly also by a run-in with a piano . . .”
“A what?” Marla seemed confused.
Evelyn leaned forward, her voice unwavering. “You’re . . . not . . . real.”
Twisting back to her computer, Evelyn began typing an email.
It was so obvious what was happening. She was a woman working on the live-action musical of A Christmas Carol.
Clearly, the work wires and the headache wires had gotten crossed in her brain .
. . and now she was seeing ghosts chained to their laptops.
“Not real?” Marla said, annoyed.
“That’s right,” Evelyn insisted, refusing to take her eyes off the email she was working on. “Which is why I’m just going to ignore you until you go away.”
“We might be here a while, then.”
“Sorry,” Evelyn quipped, and finished her email. “I can’t hear you.”
Evelyn settled on her plan. Even if she had to admit it was weird.
While she occasionally got auras before the start of a migraine, she had never had a full-on visual hallucination before.
At most, she saw colors. Got dizzy. Her primary symptoms were pain.
And, thankfully, her medication mainly controlled the worst of it.
This was different. Maybe even . . . problematic.
Despite her best efforts not to think about him, her mind wandered back to David.
How good he looked after all this time, how amazing he smelled—that cologne she had gotten him that he was still wearing—and how annoying it was that she was still mind-blowingly attracted to him after he walked out on her.
As if all those years of great sex—and friendship—between them had created some sort of terrible Pavlovian response inside her.
As soon as David appeared, instead of salivating like some dog at the ring of a bell, her panties dropped to the floor.
Anyway, after she had thought about all that, she returned to her ex-husband’s advice from earlier that day.
What if David was right? What if she had some sort of concussion or TBI?
She should call him, go to the hospital, get checked out .
. . but she didn’t have time for taking care of her health.
She didn’t have time for anything except her production.
She thought back to the scrap of paper he had given her with his number, now crumpled up and sitting in the wastebasket at her side.
Then again, she didn’t need the paper.
She still had his number saved on her phone.
Not that she would have told him that. Not that she would ever admit to missing him, especially considering what he had done to her.
Leaving her. Abandoning her. Absconding from their apartment, without any explanation .
. . No, their relationship, like that scrap of paper, was exactly where it belonged.
There was no chance of any type of reconciliation between them.
She would never stoop so low as to go running to David for help.
Indeed, she would bleed all over the production studios before she would ever deign to ask that man for a tampon.
And she would prefer to hallucinate ghosts—have whole villages of singing, happy carolers following her around in some sort of illusionary Christmas-tinnitus—than ever admit that David was right.
Evelyn hit Send on her email with one finger, and then twisted to the to-do list on her tablet.
She loved that feeling of checking a task off, like breathing clear after being stuffed up.
Like completion, toes curling upward before sinking with your whole body into a mattress.
Like the type of orgasms she would have with David . . .
She really needed to stop thinking about sex with David.
As she returned to her inbox, the delusion in her office decided to get aggressive.
“I will not be ignored,” Marla warned.
Evelyn made it a point to type louder. Marla, annoyed, blasted all the alarms on her tablet and cellphones louder. The noise was piercing, and penetrated through Evelyn’s resolve. Leaving the email, she sought comfort . . . digging fingers into both her ears.
“Do . . . you . . . mind?” Evelyn screamed over the ringing.
“What?” Marla said, cupping one ear. “I can’t hear you.”
“You’re killing me!”
Marla squinted. Shook her head. Mouthed the words, “Can’t . . . hear . . .”
Evelyn stood, removing the fingers from her ears in the process. “Shut up!”
The alarms went silent. Evelyn found herself staring directly at Marla. Whatever she was, whether a creature from the metaphysical realm or a product of Evelyn’s imagination . . . she was a demon that needed to be confronted head-on.
“Fine,” Evelyn said, finally. “I’ll play. Go on with it, then. Tell me how I’m a workaholic who doesn’t know how to balance my life, energy and time—who will wind up in chains full of tablets and desktop monitors, roaming like that for all eternity through the afterlife—unless I change my ways.”
“I mean—” Marla shrugged “—I was going to say all that.”