Nebula Awards Showcase 2010 (27 page)

I
was watching a senator give a speech a few years ago: “They say it’s not about money, it’s about money. They say it’s not about politics, it’s about politics. They say it’s not about sex—it’s about sex.”

Then Harry came in and said, “Hey, so the guy plays around a little. What’s the big deal?”

Eleven months ago I kicked Harry out, after six years of being married. He talked me into calling it a trial separation, and agreeing to let him keep his office in our house because he had a year’s supply of letterheads and cards with this address. He even had an ad in the yellow pages with this address and phone number: Computer Consultant, On Site. He hung out here, ate my food, drank my coffee, and was gone by the time I got home from work. Too late I realized that what he gained from our agreement was rent-free office space and freedom.

I left him a note in his pigsty of an office telling him I wanted a divorce. He never got around to answering. I left the divorce papers on his desk; they vanished. He was as elusive as a wet fish when I tried to reach him.

Two weeks ago I buried him.

Now I’m starting to clean up the messes he left behind, especially his office here in my house. There are dirty coffee mugs, glasses, half a sandwich with a thriving mold colony on it, papers everywhere, and three computers. I pick up two mugs and a glass and start to take them to the kitchen when suddenly he’s there.

Harry Thurman, as big as life, if not as solid. I can see a lamp through him. He’s like a full-color transparency.

I cry out and drop the mugs and the glass, and he yelps and disappears.

“And stay out!” I yell at the lamp.

I step over the mess on the floor, run from the office, and close the door behind me. I’m shaking. A hallucination, a figment of my imagination. A visitation? I’ve read that it’s not uncommon to see the newly departed, a fleeting image, sometimes a comfort to the grief-stricken. I’m hardly that, not that I wanted him dead, just out of my life.

I admit I was shaken by the suddenness of the apparition, but I don’t feel afraid. What I feel is anger. How dare he do that, show himself when I’m cleaning up after him again? My fury ignited when I opened his apartment to clean it out and found expensive suits, a huge flat-screen television, DVD system, Chivas Regal . . . He drove a two-year-old BMW. For a year I lived in near poverty, making our mortgage payments, insurance, his and mine, taxes . . . I cashed out my 401(k) to meet payments, since I couldn’t sell the house without his cooperation. A small inheritance from my aunt made the down payment; I would have lost everything if I failed to pay up every month. My fury increased when I found two gift boxes in his bureau, one addressed to My Darling Marsha. That was a bracelet with semiprecious gems and pearls. The other was to Dearest Diane, a heavy gold chain. I also found four credit card bills totaling twenty-seven thousand dollars, for which I am responsible since I’m his widow and my name is on them along with his. And he had the nerve, the effrontery to show himself!

“Let it go,” I tell myself, and head for the kitchen for a glass of water, and decide I really want more than just water. I take a gin and tonic into the living room where I sit and regard the bracelet and gold chain on the coffee table.

“Pretty, aren’t they?” Harry says, and he’s mostly there again, blinking on and off like a Christmas tree light.

Very carefully I put my glass down on the coffee table, then close my eyes hard. “Either come in all the way, or go out, but stop that blinking!”

“I’m doing the best I can.”

When I look again, he’s still there, no longer flickering, and I can still see through him.

“You’re not hallucinating,” he says. “I’m really here, or mostly here.”

I take a long drink. “Why?” My voice is little more than a whisper.

“I don’t know why. I just found myself here. You scared the shit out of me when you suddenly saw me, by the way.”

“What do you mean? How long have you been here?”

“When did that real estate agent come?”

“This morning.”

“I was here then. Two hundred seventy-five thousand for this place! Wow! You’ll make out like a bandit. Didn’t I tell you that mortgage insurance was a good idea? And double indemnity for my insurance, plus the BMW. Beautiful rich young widow. What are you going to do with all that dough?”

“Harry! Stop this. Why are you here? What do you want?”

“Aren’t you scared?”

“No. I don’t believe in ghosts.”

After a moment, looking surprised, he says, “Neither do I.”

“Isn’t there someplace you should be? Report in or something?”

He shrugs expressively. He’s very handsome, even if he is dead. Thick black hair just curly enough, wonderful dark blue eyes with makeup-ad lashes, cleft chin. He’s wearing pale blue sweats, possibly the clothes he had on when a hit-and-run maniac clipped him and ran.

“You never used to drink alone,” he says, eyeing the gin and tonic as if he’s longing for one just like it.

“I never used to sit talking to my dead husband.”

He nods. “There is that,” he says. “You realize it’s a first for me, too.” He reaches for the gold chain. His fingers pass through it. “Ah well,” he says. “Diane ran a credit check on me and said get lost. And Marsha wanted to get married and I said there was a little complication, namely you. She got sore. If you can find the receipts, you probably can return them. Be worth your while.”

I need a therapist. It’s one thing to hallucinate but quite another to hold a conversation with a hallucination. It could even be a serious disorder. I drink the rest of the gin and tonic.

“Did you find the pictures?” he asks.

“What pictures?”

“Oh. Well. What are you going to do with the furniture and things?”

“Garage sale, auction. I don’t know.”

“You might want to look in the desk drawer. Bottom lifts out, and there’s a file folder . . . I’d get them myself, but . . .” He passes his hand through the bracelet and looks at me with what I used to think was an appealing expression, like a boy caught stealing a cookie.

I go back to his office, step over the broken mugs and glass on the floor, and head for his desk. There are pencils, pens, computer disks, miscellaneous office stuff in the drawer. I dump it out and there really is a fake bottom. The folder has Polaroid shots of seven different naked women, including me. Just one among many.

I take the folder, pick up a newspaper in the kitchen, and go out to the patio and the grill.

“Hey!” he says. “They’re worth something, you know.”

If he were not already dead, how satisfying it would be to hit him myself with a car, or a train, or a sledgehammer.

My lawyer said that when they find the guy who ran him down, and he seems confident that they will, we’ll sue him for a million for wrongful death. Rightful death, I think, watching the Polaroid shots writhe, blacken, and curl up, emitting clouds of foul-smelling smoke.

He doesn’t walk exactly, just drifts along, near me when I go out to the patio, near me when I go back inside.

“Why are you haunting me?” I demand in the kitchen. “I never did anything to you.”

“I’m not haunting you,” he says a bit indignantly.

“Then get out, go away, and don’t come back.”

“I can’t,” he says. “See, I’m doing my morning run down by the river, the way I always do, and whammo, just nothing. Then I’m here and you’re talking to the real estate agent. And neither of you seems to see me or hear me even though I’m yelling my head off, making a hell of a racket.”

“Who hit you? Do you know?”

“Nope. Came out of nowhere behind me.”

“Have you even tried to find out what you’re supposed to do now? Someone to ask what the rules are or something?”

“What rules?”

“I don’t know. There must be a protocol, something you’re supposed to do, someplace to check in. There are always rules.”

“Maybe,” he says. “I used to think there’d be a rosy-cheeked cherub waiting to take your hand and guide you, or maybe an old guy with a long white beard and a staff, maybe even a beautiful girl in a flowing white gown, something like that. But like I said, nothing, then here.”

“A little guy in a red suit with a white-hot trident,” I mutter. It’s another bureaucratic snarl. I know something about bureaucracy, working for a law firm as I do, or did. I quit a week ago. There are always rules and procedures, routines to follow, and there are always some things that fall through the system and get lost. Like Harry.

“Look,” I say, “I believe you’re supposed to haunt the person or persons who did you in. You know, revenge, something like that. Or are you haunting the house? If I leave, do you stay with the house, like the refrigerator and stove?”

“I believe,” he says, “the people who wrote those rules weren’t the ones who knew much about it.”

“Well, I’m going out now, and you stay here. Okay?” I pick up my purse, fish out the car keys and walk out, with him close enough to touch, if there were anything to touch besides a draft of cool air.

My neighbor Elinor Smallwood comes over to say hello, and it’s apparent that she doesn’t suspect that he is there; neither does her dachshund. “Lori, I hope you’re bearing up. Was that a Realtor I saw leaving this morning? Oh, dear, I hope if a buyer turns up, it will be someone compatible who speaks English. You know what I mean?”

I nod and return to the house. He doesn’t need doors; he flows inside while I’m still working with the key.

“It isn’t fair!” I yell at him. “I don’t deserve this! Get out of here! Let me get on with my life.”

He flickers for a moment, then spreads his hands helplessly. “I’m as stuck as you are,” he says.

I swallow hard as the realization hits me: he really won’t, or can’t, leave. No matter what I do, he’ll be there watching, commenting. I haven’t been to bed with a man in a year; I dated a few times but I never let things get out of hand. After all, I was still married. Now I’m not married; I’m thirty years old, and whatever I do, there will be my audience of one.

“Oh, God, what about Carl?” I say out loud. He’s the attorney from the office who is helping with my legal affairs. He suggested a quiet dinner in a discreet restaurant, and I know he intended to seduce me afterward, and I intended to let him.

“Ah hah!” Harry says gleefully. “You have a boyfriend!”

I head for the telephone to break my date with Carl. Actually he never gave me a second glance until I became a fairly soon-to-be-rich widow.

After the call I sit on the bench by the wall phone, my gaze on Harry, who is trying to pick up a salt shaker on the table. He swoops like a striking snake and his hand goes through it without causing a tremor; then he sneaks up on it stealthily, with the same effect. Over and over. God help me. If he learns to materialize completely, what then?

I start down a list of friends and family, trying to decide if there is anyone I can confide in. There isn’t. Who would believe me? Jo Farrell might, but she would find it exciting and want to hold a séance or something. I can imagine telling Super Iris; she thinks we mean like Superwoman, but it’s really Superior Iris who always knows more than anyone else and is free with opinions and advice. I can hear her voice in my head: “Surely you understand that it isn’t about ghosts . . .” Wherever she starts, it always ends the same: it’s really your own fault.

It isn’t my fault, but it certainly is my problem. I remember a little red phone book in the drawer with the false bottom. Why that when he had a Rolodex?

We go back to the office where I pick up the phone book. He tries to grab it, but the only effect is that of a cool breeze blowing across my hand.

In the kitchen I sit at the table and look over the names in the little red book. Twelve women! I even know one of them, Sheila Wayman.

Maybe, I tell myself, maybe one of those women still cares, maybe she’ll want him back, or maybe I can just dump him on one of them. Transfer him. Turn over custodial care . . . I can feel hysteria mingling with fury now, and I draw in a deep breath. Twelve! I pick up the Portland phone book and look up Sheila and Roger Wayman. Southwest Spruce. A twenty-minute drive. Halfway to the door I stop. What will I say to her? I snatch up a paperback book from an end table, scrawl her name on the inside cover, and leave. He drifts along at my side.

“Where are we going?”

He just oozes between molecules or something and gets in the passenger seat as I get behind the wheel. For the first ten minutes or so he comments on the nice day, a beautiful June day in Portland, or the heavy traffic, or criticizes my driving, whistles in a low tone at a woman walking a dog . . . I ignore him. When I turn onto Spruce he leans forward, looking around, and now there’s a note of uneasiness in his voice when he asks again, “Where are we going?”