Hugo wiggled his fingers. “I’m Hugo Freeman. It’s nice to meet you. I think we should be friends.”
“I can’t—” He shook his head. “You know I can’t shake your hand.”
“I know. But hold out your hand anyway.”
Wallace did.
And so, under the field of stars, Wallace stood before Hugo, their hands extended toward each other. Inches separated their palms, and though it still felt like an endless gulf between them, Wallace was sure, for a moment, he felt something. It wasn’t quite the heat of Hugo’s skin, though it felt close. He mirrored Hugo, raising his hand up and down, up and down in the approximation of a handshake. The cable between them flashed brightly.
For the first time since he’d stood above himself in his office, his breath forever gone, Wallace felt relief, wild and vast.
It was a start.
And it terrified the hell out of him.
CHAPTER
10
A few nights later, Wallace was determined. Irritated, but determined.
He stopped in front of a chair. Nelson had taken it off one of the tables, setting it in the center of the room. Around them, the house creaked and groaned as it settled. He could hear Mei snoring in her room. Hugo was probably doing the same somewhere above, a place Wallace hadn’t dared go to yet for reasons he couldn’t quite explain. He knew it had to do with the door, but he thought Hugo was part of it too.
The only people up were the dead, and Wallace wasn’t a fan right now of two-thirds of them. Nelson was watching him calmly and Apollo had that goofy grin on his face as he lay next to Nelson’s chair.
“Good,” Nelson said. “Now, what did I tell you?”
He ground his teeth together. “It’s a chair.”
“What else?”
“I have to unexpect it.”
“And?”
“And I can’t force it.”
“Exactly,” Nelson said, as if that explained everything.
“That’s not how any of this works.”
“Really,” Nelson said dryly. “Because you have such a good idea about how this works. What was I thinking.”
Wallace grunted in frustration. He wasn’t used to failing, especially not so spectacularly. When Nelson had told him he was going to start teaching Wallace the fine art of being a ghost, Wallace had assumed he’d take to it like he’d taken to everything else: with grand success and little care for whatever got in the way.
That had been the first hour.
And now here they were in the fifth, and the chair was just sitting there, mocking him.
“Maybe it’s broken,” Wallace said. “We should try another chair.”
“Okay,” Nelson said. “Then take another one off a table.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to cross?” Wallace asked. “Because I can go get Hugo right now and he can walk you to the door.”
“You’d miss me too much.”
“Keep telling yourself that.” He took a deep breath, letting it out slow. “Unexpect. Unexpect. Unexpect.”
He reached for the chair.
His hand went right through it.
And oh, did that piss him off. He growled at it, swinging for it again and again, his hand always passing through the wood as if it （or he） weren’t there at all. With a yell, he kicked at it, which, of course, led to his foot going through the chair as well. The momentum carried his leg up and he teetered back before crashing onto the floor. He blinked up at the ceiling.
“That certainly went well,” Nelson said. “Feel better?”
He started to say no but stopped himself. Because strangely, he did feel better.
He said, “This is so stupid.”
“Right?” Nelson said. “It really is.”
Wallace turned his head toward him. “How long did it take you to figure all of this out?”
Nelson shrugged. “I don’t know that I’ve figured all of it out. But it did take me longer than a week, I’ll give you that.”
Wallace pushed himself up. “Then why do you think I’m going to be any different?”
“Because you have me, of course.” Nelson smiled. “Get up.”
Wallace pushed himself up off the floor.
Nelson nodded toward the chair. “Try again.”
Wallace curled his hands into fists. If Nelson could do it, Wallace could too. Granted, Nelson wasn’t exactly offering specifics on how to do it, but Wallace was determined.
He looked at the chair before closing his eyes. He let his thoughts drift, knowing the more he focused, the worse off he’d be. He tried to think about nothing at all, but there were little flickers of light behind his eyelids, like shooting stars, and a memory rose up around them. It was a trivial thing, something unimportant. He and Naomi had just started dating. He was nervous around her. She was out of his league and sharp as a tack. He didn’t know what the hell she was doing with him, how they’d even gotten here in the first place. He hadn’t had this before, too shy and awkward to ever instigate anything. There’d been furtive attempts at the end of high school and into college, women in his bed where he tried to pretend he knew what he was doing, and a man or two, though it was awkward fumblings in dark corners that carried a strange and exhilarating little thrill. It took him time to admit to himself that he was bisexual, something he’d felt relief over, at finally giving it a name. And when he’d told Naomi, a little nervous but firm, she hadn’t cared either way, telling him that he was allowed to be whoever he wanted.
But that wouldn’t happen for another six months. Now, it was their second—third?—date and they were in an expensive restaurant that he absolutely could not afford but thought she would enjoy. They’d gotten dressed up in fancy clothes （fancy being a relative term: his suit sleeves were too short, the pant legs rising up around his ankles, but she looked like a model, her dress blue, blue, blue） and a valet had taken his shitty car without so much as a raised eyebrow. He held the door open for her, and she’d laughed at him, a low, throaty chuckle. “Why thank you,” she said. “You’re too kind.”
The ma?tre d’ eyed them both warily, his snooty little mustache wiggling as Wallace gave his name for the reservation. He led them to the table in the back of the restaurant, the smell of seafood thick and pungent, causing Wallace’s stomach to twist. Before the ma?tre d’ could act, he hurried around the table, pulling the chair out for Naomi.
She laughed again, blushing and looking away before sitting down.
He thought how beautiful she looked.
Things would fall apart for them. They would hurl accusations like grenades, not caring they were both still in the blast radius. They did love each other, and they had good years, but it wasn’t enough to keep it all from crumbling. For a long time, Wallace refused to accept any blame. She was the one who’d messed around with the gardener. She was the one who knew how important his job was. She was the one who’d pushed him to go all in with their own firm, even as his parents gave him nothing but dire warnings about how he’d be destitute and on the streets with nothing in a year.
Her fault, he told himself as he sat across from her in her lawyer’s conference room, watching as he pulled the chair out for her. She thanked him. Her dress was blue. It wasn’t the same dress, of course, but it could’ve been. It wasn’t the same dress, and they weren’t the same people they’d been on that second or third date when he spilled wine on his shirt and fed her bits of pricey crab cake with his fork.