Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Frannie’s work laptop is starting to whir when it gets hot, but at least it holds a charge better than her personal MacBook, which crapped out after only two hours of use. She could go grab the charger, but she’s locked in at her own kitchen table, too deep into a JStor search to bother moving.
She hasn’t found any records of the original wiring for the Dakota ever being dug up, just like Michael said. But she can’t find any evidence to prove its continued existence either. It’s turning into Schrodinger’s Electrical Circuit, and it’s giving her a headache.
She drags her hands through her hair and clicks out of Google Chrome with a groan. Which leaves Henry’s manuscript, with all her edits, on the screen staring back at her. At least she’s ready to face his return.
She minimizes his manuscript and frowns at the blinking cursor in her own.
Charlie and Betty have gotten further than she has with Elsa (than she will with Elsa, because nothing’s going to happen, no matter how much innuendo they throw around).
Charlie and Betty have kissed. Charlie and Betty have …
Frannie scans over the half-open-door love scene she wrote a few days ago, her cheeks flushing, body warm all over again.
It poured out of her, natural and desperate, but she couldn’t write it in full.
Couldn’t let herself imagine, even privately, exactly how that moment would unfold.
She can’t even decide if she thinks ghosts can have sex.
And she’s not about to ask Elsa and disrupt whatever ridiculous balance they’ve found.
So, she left Betty and Charlie in the heat of it, pushing on to the next chapter, to the afterglow, to the conversation she’ll never have with Elsa. About permanence, and please stay, and I love you.
Because there’s no way to do it. No way to promise Elsa her permanence.
The little blinking cursor mocks her. Elsa hasn’t asked her to fix anything, to save them, to get them out.
She hasn’t asked anything of Frannie. She’s just given of herself—of her time, of her laughter, of her affection.
The brush of Elsa’s fingers against Frannie’s jaw still lingers at the back of her mind, tingling and warm.
Frannie can’t save them. But what if Charlie could?
What if she lets herself—lets Charlie—have that fairy tale, if only on paper?
What if Charlie’s book took off? People love a book within a book.
It doesn’t have to be realistic. Why couldn’t Charlie get a major book deal?
Enough money to buy an apartment on Seventy-Third Street?
Enough money for a well-furnished room for the kids, a primary bedroom fit for a 1960s socialite’s taste?
The best immortality they could ask for, all wrapped up neat in a bow.
Frannie’s fingers fly across the keys, plans and hopes and dreams pouring out of her in ten thousand words that come out like nothing at all.
Charlie’s book sells at auction. Charlie’s able to get a realtor and buy a glamorous apartment. Charlie gets to tell Betty and the kids that they can come live with her. Gets to twirl Betty around on the rooftop, kissing beneath the full moon.
Charlie gets to quit her job with her terrible boss.
Charlie gets to go down to the basement on her last day, Betty’s hand in hers.
Charlie sends them into the wall, her hand resting on the breaker box.
All she needs to do is flip one switch, and Betty and the kids will zip across the street. Happily ever afterlife, here they come:
Her fingers shaking, Charlie flips the breaker back upward. The lights flicker on above her. She can hear someone cursing one floor up, but she doesn’t care. Her eyes are glued to the crack in the cement around the aging box. There’s no glow. Everything’s silent and dark behind the wall.
With a shaky breath, she backs away and turns on her heel, marching out of the dim corridor, through the door back into the white basement, and up the two stairs to the service elevator.
She rides up to the first floor and heads out of the staff entrance for the last time, smiling at George as he tips his hat.
She steps out onto the loading bay, her breath rising in a puff in front of her. But she doesn’t feel the cold. There’s nothing but the pounding of her heart and the sunlight at the end of the alleyway now.
She starts toward the end of the driveway, her feet moving faster and faster until she’s jogging, running, sprinting to the edge of the sidewalk in the harsh winter sunlight.
She barely glances both ways before she’s running across Seventy-Third Street, only narrowly avoiding getting hit by a fast-moving cab.
The cabbie yells inaudibly through the windshield, but she doesn’t care. All that matters are the two hops it takes to get up the brownstone steps. All she can feel is the catch of her key as she jams it into the lock, shoving the door open.
Her footsteps slap on the marble entryway, up the stairs, around the two landings, until she’s standing on the third floor. She reaches for the doorknob of Apartment 3A. Her fingers close around cold brass and she pushes inward toward the rest of her life.
“Honey, I’m home.”
Frannie sits back, her fingers stalled over the keyboard. Her heart is hammering in her chest, adrenaline coursing through her veins.
It’s perfect—a happily ever after worthy of a swooning fairy-tale ending. It’s absolutely perfect.
She did it. She wrote the book.
But it’s not right.
Betty told Charlie at the beginning that there wasn’t a happily ever after on offer—that immortality doesn’t end. So how can their love story? How can Frannie give Charlie the perfecting ending when she knows it’s not possible?
Because the real ending, the realistic ending, to the ghostly romance she’s written for her alter ego isn’t a romance at all, is it?
Romance is a pact you make with the reader: Pick up this book, get a happily ever after, or at worst, a happy for now. No ifs, no ands, no equivocations. Happily Ever After, Guaranteed.
But in a ghostly love story, how can there be a happily ever after?
Even if it was mildly plausible that Charlie could get the apartment, could short the power, could send her ghost family across the street—Charlie’s still alive, and the ghosts aren’t.
There’s an inherent tragedy to even the fairy-tale ending.
But the fairy-tale ending isn’t right anyway. The ghosts getting across the street, whole and happy, isn’t right. Charlie opening that door to see Betty and the kids waiting on the couch isn’t right.
Frannie slams the laptop closed, eyes hazy with unshed tears and exhaustion. She can’t do it. She can’t give them a happily ever after. But neither can she write the ending she knows she should. The right ending.
The wrong end.
She wants to fling her work laptop across the kitchen. Wants to throw something, shatter a glass, punch a wall.
The front door opens before she can so much as move. Gretchen stumbles backward into the apartment, dragging Brad along behind her, their mouths fused together, hands everywhere. They clatter through the living room and over to the couch, where Gretchen tugs Brad down on top of her.
An unwitting voyeur, Frannie watches Gretchen push Brad’s vest off his shoulders. She needs to get up, slink back to her room, leave them to their … couch activities. But she can’t. If she gets up, they’ll hear her and know she’s been accidentally watching them.
Frozen by indecision, she sits there, her cheeks hot, a squirming discomfort roving over her body.
How simple it seems. Nice, preppy guy meets nice, spiritual girl.
They go on a ghost hunt or two, make eyes over drinks, and bam, they’re back at her place on the couch, making out in front of her roommate.
No ghost children, no tragic backstory, no laws of physics to be broken.
Gretchen flips them abruptly, and Frannie hears Brad gasp out a laugh. Gretchen rears back, hands at the bottom of her tight black sweater. She glances up and sees Frannie sitting, horrified, at the booth in the kitchen. She shrieks, Brad jerks, and they topple off the couch.
Frannie watches in dismay as the couple squirms around on the floor, untangling to sit up.
“You—I—I was just sitting here,” Frannie manages, a little overloud. “I’m so sorry.”
Gretchen starts to laugh, her hair askew, cheeks pink. Brad giggles after her, and Frannie feels her chest loosen, laughter bubbling up until they’re all cackling. Brad and Gretchen nearly fall twice hauling themselves up from the floor. Frannie scrambles to grab her laptops.
“I’ll go back to my room, sorry, I didn’t mean—” she gets out around her giggles.
“No, no, stay,” Gretchen says, dragging Brad into the kitchen to push him into the other side of the booth. “We can take this somewhere more appropriate later. I should have realized you might actually be home.”
“Yeah, sorry, Frannie,” Brad says, blushing, but sliding in before Gretchen all the same.
Boy meets girl, boy and girl make out, boy and girl aren’t embarrassed to be caught by her roommate. Boy and girl just carry on like normal. How lovely that must be.
“You’re not still doing work for Henry, right? Even if you’re not at the Dakota, it’s wrong to work on Sunday night,” Gretchen says sternly.
Frannie forces herself to shake her head and smile casually. “Nah, my own stuff. I got deep in it. Where are you guys coming from?”
“We were down in the abandoned Eighteenth Street subway station,” Gretchen says. “Brad got an engineer to let us in, and then we were able to walk some of the tunnels.”
“That sounds cool,” Frannie says slowly. “You look pretty clean for being down there.”
“Oh, our overalls are in my backpack,” Brad says. “And we left our boots in the hall. Don’t want anything from down there in here. But it was a good hunt.”
“You were ghost hunting?” Frannie asks.
Brad nods and digs his cellphone out of his back pocket. “Yep. Got some good footage and added to my map.”
“It was so cool,” Gretchen adds. “We followed the tunnels down to where Brad thinks one of the old electrical hubs was, trying to trace where the circuit would be for any ghosts trapped down there.”
Frannie feels herself leaning in, her curiosity screaming. “You think there are electrified ghosts in the tunnels—poltergeists?”
“Oh yeah,” Brad says, pulling up a diagram on his phone. He puts it on the oak tabletop and turns the phone so she can see.
It’s a digitally drawn map following the 4/5/6 line and branching off into what looks like short or abandoned tunnels all along it.
“I’ve been mapping the original tunnels, trying to figure out the radius for any workers who were electrocuted during construction,” Brad explains.
Frannie peers at the map. It’s at least fifty blocks. “Do you think those ghosts can travel that whole distance?”
“Maybe,” Brad says, but he sounds skeptical. “I haven’t found definitive proof of any ghosts, but the electrical plans show that they could certainly move around. Dunno if they’re hiding from me since they can become invisible, or if they just don’t choose to show themselves.”
“Or if they’re always elsewhere when you go down. It’s a lot of ground to cover, and you said they can manipulate the world around them, so who knows how they spend their days,” Gretchen says.
“Right,” Brad agrees, glancing over at her with a big grin. “She’s got a real knack for this. Steady with the camera, great with the EMF reader. The best producer a guy could ask for.”
Gretchen blushes, her whole face going red, cheeks dimpling. She looks so happy.
“Do you think it’s possible the ghosts can move between electrical systems down there?
” Frannie tries to ask it casually, like it’s just occurring to her.
“Could they have jumped over to the current ones if the old system was close to, or attached to, the new one? Like, if they go to the same breaker box or something, but they’ve just deactivated one set of power lines? ”
She hopes the follow-up questions don’t give away her desperation. It’s not like her novel, and maybe her life, hinge on the answers, or anything …
“Maybe,” Brad says slowly. “There’s no record of anything like that, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. Though, I’d think that’d be a risky proposition.”
“Why?” Frannie asks.
“Since the electricity is what’s tying them to the … mortal plane, for lack of a better phrase, if they stray too far from their power source, I think it’s possible they would fade away,” Brad says thoughtfully.
A pit opens up in Frannie’s stomach, but she pushes it down. “But you don’t know that would happen, right? It’s equally possible they can move to new power circuits?” she presses.
“I think so. There’s not a ton of verified research on any of it,” Brad says with a shrug.
“There’s ghost science?” Frannie asks, and immediately winces. “I don’t mean that there shouldn’t be, I’m just—”
“Surprised,” Brad says. “Most people are. It’s a small field, but it’s growing—very, very slowly.
People are excited about my channel and my focus on finding ghosts and studying them, rather than it being all about exorcising them.
So, we’ll see about funding. Oh, speaking of, were you able to ask about the Dakota? ”
Damn, right. “My boss gets back tomorrow. I’ll try to ask him this week,” Frannie says, like she hadn’t completely forgotten about it.
“Fantastic,” he says, his eyes bright as he exchanges a look with Gretchen. “It would make a perfect pilot episode, wouldn’t it?”
“It would,” Gretchen agrees.
“Pilot?” Frannie asks.
“Gretchen and I are going to shoot a pilot, with her producing and me directing and starring, and see if maybe we can get a basic cable show,” Brad says eagerly.
Frannie looks at Gretchen, whose smile is small, excited, and a little embarrassed. “That’s awesome,” Frannie says.
“We don’t know if we’ll even get in the door, but maybe with Brad’s social following, we’ll get some heat. My network liked the spot we did, at any rate,” Gretchen says, looking at Frannie with a little shrug.
Frannie grins. “I bet they go for it. And that would make you a capital ‘P’ producer, right?”
“Yeah, it would,” Gretchen says, smile widening.
“She deserves it,” Brad says.
“Yeah, she does,” Frannie agrees, laughing when Gretchen blushes more. “I’ll ask Henry as soon as I can.”
“Great!” Brad says.
Maybe if she helps Brad, he can do some digging for her. If he can prove that electrocuted ghosts can jump from one power system to another, maybe that terrible sinking feeling in her gut will go away. Maybe her novel—maybe her life—can avoid that tragic ending.