“Florence,” he chided.
“Most of them just want to talk, you know, to have someone listen. It’s not as creepy as it looks in the movies. I wasn’t always able to see them, but it started when I was eight? Nine? Somewhere in there.”
He took off his glasses and turned to me on the couch. “You . . . you’re saying you saw ghosts? Like actual spirits. The”—he wiggled his fingers in the air—“wooooo kind?”
“I see ghosts. Present tense.”
“Like—right now?”
“No. Not now. Sometimes. I don’t talk to them anymore. I haven’t since I left home—”
He was chewing on the inside of his cheek, as if to keep himself from laughing, and I felt my heart sink then. Some things you just couldn’t tell even the people you loved the most. Some things no one would ever understand. Could never understand. And Lee was giving me the look I’d seen every day in high school, that pitying look, verging on curious, wondering if I was crazy.
I grinned then, and kissed him on the mouth. “Ha, what do you think of my story?” I asked, shoving down the part of me that began to fracture. The part I could never—would never—share with anyone again. “It’s a book I’m working on.”
More lies. But close to the truth. Truer than I’d ever been with anyone outside of Mairmont. But somehow, it still made me feel ashamed. And alone. I drained the rest of my glass and started to get off the couch, but he took me by the wrist and pulled me back down onto the cushions again.
“Wait, bunny. It’s really interesting.” And then, very softly, he asked, “Tell me more?”
I paused. “Really?”
“Absolutely. If this story means something to you, I want to listen.”
Always the perfect words at the perfect time. He was good at that. He knew how to make you feel important and cherished.
“But,” he added, “third person, please. The first-person kind of threw me off,” he admitted with a laugh.
So, I took a deep breath and I started. “She knew she would see a ghost when the crows came.”
And that was how I told him about the part of my life I couldn’t.
I told him about the ghosts of my childhood, and how rare they really were—some years without any at all. I’d seen a few in the city, but I never stopped to ask if they wanted anything. I didn’t really have it in me anymore, not after what I went through in Mairmont. I wanted to get away from that life—that part of me. And the best way to do it was to ignore them.
I never should have told him anything. I shouldn’t have even pretended that they were a story.
My younger sister, Alice, always said I was too gullible. Too generous. Too like the tree in that picture book, who kept giving and giving until there was nothing left. She said one day it would come back to bite me in the ass.
Lee Marlow did like to bite, but never my ass, and anyway I loved him, and he loved me, and we had a brownstone in Park Slope and he kissed me with such intensity that any echo of doubt fell silent between our lips. I might have been that weird girl who saw ghosts, but to him I was perfect.
Once he said, while we were out to dinner together and I had just told him about the time I had been woken up by the ghost of the recently deceased mayor, “You should try to publish this story. You might just make millions off it.”
“I tried publishing once. It didn’t work out. And I definitely did not make millions.”
He had barked a laugh. “Well, that’s because you wrote a romance.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Oh, bunny, you know you can do better.”