Chapter 4
When Dell woke the next morning, something felt . . . off. She initially wondered if it had to do with the celebratory champagne
from the night before but decided it didn’t because the telltale signs of hangover—headache, dry mouth, deeply questioning
her life choices—were missing. The strange sensation felt more like an emptiness than anything else. A curious absence of
all normal bodily reminders she was mortal upon waking: her bladder needing to be emptied; her teeth needing to be brushed;
her neck, back, and elbows needing a good pop from lying motionless all night.
When she rolled over to look at Tommy and perhaps ask him to check her for a fever, a very peculiar thing happened.
A chill shot through her like she’d walked into the freezer at Pergo. She reached for Tommy’s arm, and her hand passed straight
through it.
She sat up with a start as Tommy shivered. Goose bumps erupted on his skin where she’d tried to touch him. He blindly rubbed
it with his other hand as he slowly came into consciousness.
“Dell?” he sleepily said. “Why is it so cold in here?” Never one to wake easily, he reached for the sheet and pulled it up over his shoulder, hunkering down.
Dell stared at her own hand in confusion. It looked like her hand, there was nothing out of place, but the whole thing tingled as if crawling with ants. She decided she’d slept
on it wrong and cut off her circulation. She shook it several times to bring the feeling back and reached for Tommy again.
Once more, she passed right through him.
“Brrr,” he mumbled with another shudder. He crunched into a tighter ball under the blankets. “Did you leave a window open or something?”
Dell glanced across the room to see their curtains hanging limp and perfectly pressed. The temperature hovering over their
bed was colder than anything even San Francisco could muster on its best day; the window was not open. Something else was
going on.
Dell was too confused to respond.
Since he was used to her waking before him every day and normally greeting him with a swat on the butt, when she didn’t say
anything, Tommy sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Dell? Are you awake?”
“Yes,” she said, but Tommy didn’t seem to hear her.
It wasn’t until he turned to her side of the bed that Dell realized something was very, very wrong.
“Dell?” he repeated, and reached for the immobile body—Dell’s body—still lying with her head on the pillow.
Dell gasped and jerked back.
It was her. Asleep? But how could that be if she was sitting up watching her fiancé try to shake her awake?
“Dell? Are you okay?” Tommy’s voice picked up an edge of worry. He rose on his knees and leaned over her. “Dell?”
“Tommy, I’m fine. I’m right here,” she said. She reached for him again, and her hand passed through his bare shoulder. His
skin broke out in goose bumps, and he sucked in a breath.
“Dell, wake up!” he said with more force. When he gripped her sleeping body’s shoulders and shook her, Dell thought she was
having the strangest dream of her life.
“Dell!” he shouted. “Come on, baby. Wake up!” He squeezed her face, pushing out her lips, which were an interesting shade
of grayish blue, Dell realized. “No, no, no! Dell! What is happening?”
She was wondering the same thing. She climbed off the bed to stand beside it—beside her body, apparently—and tried to reassure
him everything was fine. “Tommy! I’m right here.”
He leaned his ear against her lips. “Fuck,” he spat when he sat up. In a panic, he yanked on his hair and scooted to his side
of the bed. He threw back the sheets and reached for his phone off the nightstand, Dell assumed to call 911.
While he paced and waited for someone to answer, she leaned in to look at her body lying in the bed. Her eyes were gently
closed and her lips shut. She thought she was seeing the sheen of her night cream on her skin but realized the waxy pallor
could have been the result of something else. At the same moment she noted her chest was not rising and falling with breath
beneath her ivory nightgown, someone answered Tommy’s call.
“Mom!” he blurted into the still silence. “Something happened to Dell!”
He’d called his mom?
Dell watched him continue to pace in his boxer briefs and yank on his hair in distress.
“I don’t know!” he said on a desperate breath. His words came out frantic and chopped up with sharp inhales. “I just woke up, and she’s not moving. She’s not— Fuck. Mom, I think she’s dead!”
Dell’s head began to spin with a sickening pace.
She was dead?
“Tommy!” she shouted in a panic. “I’m not dead! I’m right here!” She ran around the bed and threw herself at him, only to
pass straight through with a sensation she could describe only as walking through a frozen waterfall made of electric cables.
She stumbled on the other side with a horrified gasp.
Tommy felt it too. He shuddered a full-body shake and wrapped his arm around himself. His teeth chattered.
“Mom, I don’t know what to do!” he desperately wailed.
Dell couldn’t hear Evelyn on the other end of the phone, but she hoped she was instructing her son to call for paramedics.
“No! Nothing happened last night. I didn’t—” Tommy said, and stopped to listen more.
Dell took frantic inventory of herself. She looked down and saw that she wore her customary pajamas, a silky off-white nightgown
with a lace trim, which hit her mid-thigh. She was barefoot, braless, her dark hair loose around her shoulders. There were
no visible signs of an injury or wound. As far as she could tell, everything looked normal. She swiped her hand at her other
forearm, half expecting it to pass straight through, but it landed with a smack instead.
Tommy didn’t respond to the sound. Nor did he respond when she loudly clapped her hands and shouted at him.
“Tommy! Thomas Giovanni Moratto!” she hollered, and clapped.
Nothing.
The sound of her voice to her own ears momentarily drowned out something that drew Tommy’s attention to the bedroom’s doorway.
“Shit,” he said into his phone. “Jason and Mariana just got here. They let themselves in every morning like a goddamned raid,”
he told his mother.
Dell’s heart soared. Or, the space in her chest that used to house a beating life source lifted in hope. If anyone could help
figure out what was going on, it would be her best friend and her assistant, the two people she spent most of her time with
and who knew her every secret.
She abandoned Tommy swearing into his phone and ran for the stairs.
“Jason!” she shouted like that time sophomore year in college when she found a mysterious bump on her lip after making out
with a boy from her chemistry class and went running to his dorm room for advice. It had been a pimple, and she hoped he was
about to tell her now that whatever was happening was just as innocuous and she was in fact not dead but hallucinating or perhaps sleepwalking in a nightmare.
She hurtled herself into the living room to find Jason in his best neon jogging gear and Mariana in her biz casual, coffee
in hand.
“Jason, I need your help!” she wailed, and launched herself at him, only to come out the other side of him with the same frigid,
electric chill she’d felt upstairs.
“Whoa!” Jason exclaimed, giving her a moment of hope he’d noticed her. “It’s freezing in here.” He shivered and wrapped his
arms around himself. He rubbed them and looked toward the empty kitchen. “Where’s Dell?”
“Dunno,” Mariana said as she headed for the coffee station.
“I’m right here, you guys!” Dell desperately yelled at them. Her voice shattered off the walls to her own ears but left them
unfazed.
“Maybe they’re still in bed. It is Saturday,” Mariana offered.
Jason made a rude vomiting sound and mimed sticking his finger down his throat.
Dell shot him a glare on reflex. “Nice, Jay.”
But he didn’t hear her.
“Save it for the honeymoon, lovebirds! We’ve got a busy day! Food drives wait for no one!” he shouted in the direction of
the stairs.
Dell watched Jason pull out his phone and start thumbing it while Mariana fixed coffees. They were completely unaware of her
presence. She leaned over Jason’s shoulder to see what had drawn the smile on his lips, and caught a glimpse of an email:
Dear Mr. Marshall, we are happy to accept your application . . .
She didn’t get any further or wonder what he had applied for before Tommy came down the stairs looking ashen and ill. He tried
to wipe the look from his face with little success.
“Uh, hey, guys,” he said. “Dell’s not feeling well this morning.”
Dell flinched. Not feeling well? Despite her confusion about whatever the hell was going on, she was fairly certain that was a serious understatement.
“What? She was fine last night. What’s wrong with her?” Jason said, and started for the stairs. Hell or high water, he’d come
to her aid.
Tommy stepped in front of him and blocked his path. “I don’t know. I think I need to call a doctor.”
“A doctor?” Jason said.
Mariana’s head popped up from her focused work in the kitchen. “Dell never gets sick.”
Jason moved to step around Tommy again, but Tommy held his ground.
“She’s not well, Jason. I can take care of her.”
Jason paused for the briefest moment, perhaps realizing his reign as Dell’s in sickness and health partner had come to an end. The moment passed, and his eyes narrowed. “What did you do to her, you asshole?”
“Jason!” Dell blurted, though no one could hear her.
Tommy puffed out his chest and stood taller despite being a few inches shorter than Jason. “What did you say to me?”
“You heard me,” Jason said with his jaw locked, and Dell thought they might actually get in a fight.
Tommy folded his formidable arms over his chest. He’d pulled on a T-shirt that morning, and the gray fabric straining over
his muscles only made him look bigger. “I think you need to leave.”
Jason didn’t back down. A swell of affection hit the place in Dell’s chest where her heart should have been beating. “I’m
not leaving until you let me see Dell.”
Tommy kept his cool for about ten more seconds. “All right, that’s enough. Everyone out. I know Dell lets you two come and