Chapter 5 #2
Frannie blows out a slow breath and turns to face Bridgette, who’s standing in the doorway to the living room. “Hey,” Frannie says, hoping she sounds calm and collected.
“I’ve got something to show you.”
Frannie hesitates. She really just wants to scream into a pillow for fifteen minutes and go home to wallow in self-inflicted pity.
“You don’t have to,” Bridgette says, her smile dimming, arms curling around her worn teddy bear. The one with the fraying red bowtie.
Frannie shakes her head. She doesn’t want to disappoint another person today.
Actually, Henry can suck it. She doesn’t want to disappoint Bridgette. She doesn’t deserve it.
“Sure,” Frannie says, walking to the rolltop to grab her cell and shove it into her back pocket.
“Yay!” Bridgette says, bouncing on her toes. “Bring your sweater.”
Frannie grabs her oversized black cardigan patterned with daisies and slips it on. “Are we going outside?”
“Yep,” Bridgette says, skipping over to take her hand. “Hurry, we’re losing the light.”
Frannie locks up Henry’s apartment and allows Bridgette to tug her down the hall and up the stairs.
But, instead of turning down the hallway toward her office, Bridgette looks around and then guides Frannie to a small service door she’s never paid much attention to before.
Bridgette unlocks it with her ghost powers and Frannie’s body disappears.
Frannie shakes her head, but follows Bridgette’s tugging hand up the steep and narrow, white-painted staircase all the same.
She squints as they step out onto a flat section of the Dakota’s roof. The building’s pointed Gothic peaks rise up on either side, penning them in with growing shadows.
“Come on,” Bridgette says, dragging Frannie to the edge of the roof, with nothing separating them but the low wrought-iron railing along the rooftop’s edge.
Frannie holds Bridgette back from leaning against it, and the girl looks up at her, laughing. Suddenly Frannie can see her own body again.
“I can’t fall,” Bridgette says.
“Yeah, well, I can,” Frannie replies, a little unsettled by the height, the reappearance of her own body, and the way she can see the entirety of Central Park below them. “Wow.”
“It’s cool, right?” Bridgette asks.
“Yeah, it is,” Frannie admits, squeezing her hand. “Just keep me invisible to other people, if you can, please?”
Bridgette grins and nods. She tugs on Frannie’s hand, bringing them both down to sit on the roof. Frannie lets Bridgette scoot them up close to the railing, looking out at the park.
“Wanna play I Spy?” Bridgette asks.
“Sure,” Frannie says, eyes flitting from the people, to the boathouse, to the surrounding giant apartment buildings. “Do you come up here with Michael a lot?”
Bridgette peers around below them. “Mom too. But she’s busy reading Henry’s book, and Michael’s focused on his schematics. I spy with my little eye, something that is green,” she says, turning to Frannie with the sassiest grin.
“Be vaguer,” Frannie mumbles. Bridgette laughs, delighted. “Is it the boathouse roof?”
“Nope!”
“Okay, well, tell me something while I look; there’s a lot of green,” Frannie says, continuing to scan. Trash cans? Light posts? Any really green children down there?
“Like what?” Bridgette asks.
“What’s your favorite thing to watch in the park?”
“You just want to figure out what’s green,” Bridgette teases.
Frannie laughs. “Is it the ice cream guy’s freezer?”
“Nope! And I like watching the kids meet up with their parents. Mom and I always try and figure out if the parents are married or doing custody handovers.”
Frannie snorts. Why is she not surprised? “What usually gives it away?”
“Anytime there’s a bag exchange. Usually means it’s a week swap.”
That’s a little sad, actually. “Is it that pedicab taking off from the sidewalk?” Frannie asks.
“Yes!” Bridgette says, looking up at Frannie so eagerly. “That was fast.”
“That was lucky. Okay, I spy with my little eye something that is—” She scans the park, wanting to pick something hard. Because, really, “green” was pure evil. “Something that is red.”
“Red,” Bridgette repeats, staring down at the park.
“What else do you like to gossip about with your mom?” Frannie asks, settling in as Bridgette looks.
“Mom really likes to figure out which parents are sleeping with their nannies,” Bridgette says slowly.
Frannie nearly chokes on air. “What?”
“It’s always really obvious, though. I don’t think it’s much of a challenge.”
That’s both hilarious and so incredibly inappropriate. Though, Frannie figures, when you’ve been a ghost for almost 140 years, it’s not super clear where “age-appropriate” fits in.
“What’s a challenge, then?” Frannie asks.
“It’s pretty hard to figure out if tenants are sleeping with the staff,” Bridgette mumbles. Frannie gapes at her. “Is it that kid’s backpack?”
Frannie follows her pointing finger and shakes her head. “No. And what?”
“Well, we can’t be everywhere at once, and we’re somehow always somewhere else when it goes down.”
Frannie sits there staring at Bridgette. “Is privacy guaranteed anywhere in the building?”
“Gross! We don’t watch, Frannie.”
Okay, well, now she knows the boundaries. “You just want to catch them sneaking in?”
“Well, yeah! It’s not that big a building. We get bored. Sometimes, if it’s really eg-re-ge-ious, Mom will tip off the spouse.”
Frannie bites her lip at Bridgette’s pronunciation. “Oh yeah?”
“Mom made sure Mr. Wurch’s wife found out he was sleeping with one of the Hugheses’ maids. His wife left him and got half his fortune. And took the dog. Is it the stop sign?”
“The what?” Frannie asks, flabbergasted.
“The something red. Is it the stop sign?”
Frannie glances back at the park. Right. “Nope, not the stop sign.”
Bridgette groans and keeps looking.
“Is Mr. Wurch the man who used to be mean to … Joan?” Frannie asks hesitantly.
“Yeah,” Bridgette says easily. “Mom said it was her magnum opus. But she hasn’t totally won yet.”
God, maybe she doesn’t want Hot Ghost Mom to haunt her. “What does she need to win?”
“He has to die.”
Frannie stares at Bridgette. “Excuse me?”
Bridgette looks up at her. “Mom says you beat everyone with immortality eventually. We wouldn’t kill someone,” she adds, indignant.
Frannie forces herself to laugh. She didn’t mean to insinuate, but—hell, she doesn’t know! They’re ghosts. Seems they could do whatever they wanted.
“What did he do to Joan, back in the day?” she asks.
Bridgette shrugs. “Mom said he was a raging homophone. Is it the ‘Don’t Drink the Water’ signs?”
Frannie bites at her lip. “Yep.”
“That was hard!” Bridgette says with a grin. “Okay, my turn.”
She looks back at the park and Frannie sits for a moment, taking in Bridgette’s adorable gut punch. If Mr. Wurch is a raging homophobe, and he was mean to Joan, then that must mean that Joan was queer, and Hot Ghost Mom …
Frannie clenches down hard on the immediate fluttering in her stomach. There’s nothing exciting about that. Just because they’re both queer doesn’t mean anything could ever happen between them. They can just be friends, if Hot Ghost Mom even wants to be. She’s a ghost.
Who Joan left.
When Melissa decided to stay in Chicago, instead of moving to New York like they’d been planning for all of grad school, it broke something in Frannie’s heart that somehow still hasn’t healed over the last three years.
She’s yet to find … whatever it is you’re supposed to find after you break up with someone important.
It wasn’t being left to a haunted eternity in the Dakota Building. But it still hurt.
No wonder Hot Ghost Mom is wary of Frannie, of anyone.
“Do you talk to a lot of people in the building?” she forces herself to ask, trying to give Bridgette her full attention.
Bridgette’s little hand tightens around hers. “I spy something purple.”
Not a lot of purple to be seen, which will either make this much easier or twice as hard.
“Most people are too scared to talk to me, if they even admit they can see me,” Bridgette says.
Frannie stares down at the park, heart in her throat. “Is it that dad’s baseball cap?” she asks, pointing down toward the green field closest to the Seventy-Second Street entrance.
“That’s blue,” Bridgette says with a giggle.
It really does look purple to Frannie. She searches for a minute, feeling Bridgette’s insubstantial little palm in her own. She can’t imagine what it must be like to spend 140 years being purposefully ignored by the people you try to talk to.
“What made you decide to talk to me?” Frannie wonders.
“You were lonely, for a long time, and Henry kept being mean to you,” Bridgette says simply, her voice soft and clear. “I thought you could use a friend. And you wrote a little Victorian orphan in your book, so I thought you might at least be curious enough to talk to me.”
Frannie laughs, startled, and reaches out to pull Bridgette into a hug, smiling as Bridgette giggles. To show that kind of kindness, after so many years of rejection, takes an incredibly special heart. And she’s chosen to share hers with Frannie, of all people.
“Well, I’m certainly not lonely anymore, and I’m glad to have you as my friend,” Frannie says, her throat tight.
She promises herself that she’ll live up to Bridgette’s bravery for as long as she’s here. She’ll make life in the Dakota as fun as humanly possible. Bridgette deserves that. Maybe they all do.