“But you said this house wasn’t haunted,” Greta said.
“It’s not,” Sabine said. “He just wants to hang out and watch movies. He doesn’t know he’s dead. To get rid of him, I’m supposed to say, ‘Dave, go away,’ three times.”
Ryan laughed.
“Is anyone under your bed, Greta?” Nicole asked.
“Only the smell of honey,” Greta said. “Which is its own sort of ghost, I guess.”
“Anyway, you guys want edibles?” said Sabine. “I have peppermint patties, peanut butter balls, pixie sticks, gummy worms, and mints.”
They wanted a tin of mints and a package of gummies. Sabine made the mistake of asking what Ryan did for work. Well, he was grain-scholar-in-residence at blah blah. His recipe for poppy seed coffee cake was blah blah unheard-of, because something something croissant dough plus frosting, and some hot-shit food critic said his peasant bread had an old, tortured soul, and so basically Ryan was a really big deal.
“You remind me a little of Jason Bateman,” Greta blurted to Nicole.
Exhilaration. Immediate, totally unexpected, joyful. Like she’d broken something you weren’t supposed to break—a TV screen, a windshield, a geode, the fourth wall.
The confidentiality agreement. Fuck.
“Forget I said that,” Greta said quickly.
“Are you high?” Sabine asked. “She looks nothing like Jason Bateman.”
“I know,” Greta said. “Sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”
A cloud seemed to pass over Nicole’s face. Then she smiled.
“It’s okay,” Nicole said. “I’m not offended.”
“I love Jason Bateman,” Sabine said.
“Yeah, me too,” Greta said.
“We should probably get going,” Ryan said. “Ready, Mami?”
It was only then that Nicole blushed. Even her ears turned red.
“Thanks for the goodies,” Ryan said.
“Any time,” Sabine said.
“Great meeting you, Greta,” Ryan said.
“Likewise,” Greta said.
Nicole hesitated at the door and looked at Greta. “Maybe I’ll run into you at the dog park?”
“Sure,” Greta said. “Yeah.”
Sabine waited until they were pulling out of the driveway to comment on Ryan’s orange teeth. A shame, she said, as he was otherwise handsome, though not her type, of course. Nicole, on the other hand, seemed entirely good, and like “one of us.” Then she asked what was up with that Jason Bateman business.
Greta shrugged. “Something in the way she blinked.”
“You should befriend her.”
“I can’t have more than one friend at a time.”
“I hope you don’t mean me,” Sabine said.
They’d gone to several bars when Greta first arrived, three months ago. After two sips of tequila, Sabine had a habit of suddenly looking around, realizing she was the oldest person there, and leaving.
Sabine counted the cash and pocketed it. “I guess I’ll pay my phone bill before they shut it off,” she said. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to get a j-j-j—dammit. I’m going to need a j-j-j—hold on, I almost had it—a juhhh—”
“Juicer?” Greta said.
“Job,” Sabine said.
One of Sabine’s favorite gags was to stammer over the word “job,” Greta remembered now. Sabine’s eyes drooped shut, as they did every day at dusk, and wouldn’t open again until the moon had risen. The rest of the evening was easy to predict. For dinner, they would make popcorn with nutritional yeast. For dessert, a Dutch baby with butter, lemon, and sugar. At ten o’clock sharp, they’d say good night and retreat to their separate quarters until morning.
* * *
EXCEPT, WELL, it was raining in Greta’s quarters. Real, actual rain had been coming in through one of the windows for about an hour, pooling on the wood floor not far from Greta’s bed. Pi?on danced in the puddle, ecstatic. Greta stared at the window. Most of the water seemed to be coming in through the missing pane in the middle, the one Big Swiss’s voice had dislodged the previous evening. The window’s other missing panes were on the sides and in the corners. Greta recalled that thing Big Swiss had said about her voice, how it loosened the teeth in people’s heads. Now Greta felt like she’d lost a tooth. An important tooth, not one of the throwaways in the back. You lose one, the others shift around, and before you know it, your smile is full of black holes. Greta knew it was only a matter of time before they all fell out, before rain turned to snow, her bed into a sled, her head into a block of ice. Sadly, she couldn’t afford to have all （or any） of the windows reglazed, and neither could Sabine, who’d run out of money months ago. What Greta could afford was heavy-duty electrical tape. Tomorrow she would try taping the panes back in place. If that didn’t work, she’d replace the panes with thick pieces of cardboard, after which she’d cover the windows in sheets of plastic, and then nail heavy drapes over everything, and— The fire alarm went off and wailed for two minutes. The alarm belonged to their neighbor, Becraft Pumper Co. 2, and sounded exactly like an air-raid siren from World War II, the sound of slow panic and impending doom. It blared every morning at ten, and then again whenever a barn burned down, which seemed to happen once a day. “That can’t be real,” she’d said to Sabine the first time she’d heard it. “Oh, it’s real all right,” Sabine had said. “Better get used to it.” The siren drowned out everything—despair, desire, logical thought, Sabine’s running monologue—and there was no tuning it out or talking over it.
It occurred to her now that one only lived this way if they were on really good drugs. If Greta had had prescription painkillers, she’d have been willing to wrestle with the woodstove while it rained indoors. But Greta didn’t have any pills. She only had pillows. And a duvet, which she dragged into the little room she called the antechamber. The antechamber was connected to Greta’s room by a crooked door and was larger than a closet but too small to be a proper bedroom. Along one wall stood a substantial oak cabinet with sliding doors. When you slid open the cabinet doors, you expected to find bedding, blankets, boxes filled with curiosities and embarrassing love letters. Instead, the cabinet contained a bed. A bedstede, the Dutch called it. The cabinet doors were painted with pomegranates and quinces—for fertility, supposedly, though it was hard to imagine anyone fucking in there. Greta covered the mattress, slightly narrower than a twin, with several sheepskins. Pi?on curled up in an open suitcase on the floor. The only other furniture in the antechamber was an old cane rocking chair surrounded by short stacks of dreary European novels.
She supposed, if worse came to worst, she could remain in the antechamber for the winter, even though it was windowless, its only light a bare bulb in the ceiling, and nothing on the wooden walls except peeling wallpaper. Someone, not her, had picked at the five layers of wallpaper like a speed freak. Whoever it was had seemed to be making some kind of map, or topography: hills striped in pink and green velvet; forests full of thorny, vaguely Asiatic foliage; valleys made up of flowering English vines; lakes floating with paisleys and lozenges. She wondered whose work it was, and what it meant.