She had a way of looking at me all the time with what I’d call a “soft” tone, as if she was always thinking sympathetic thoughts or maybe even pitying my fate.
Poor Casper me, right? The eternal houseguest.
“Anything interesting on the World Wide Web on a Sunday?” she asked in a voice that a pool mother would’ve used when she poked her head out to ask kids if they wanted any lemonade.
I hadn’t heard a tone like that in… you guessed it, aeons. But it wasn’t just because I’d been dead awhile. My parents had gone on a fateful sailing trip on their catamaran a year and a half before I’d passed on. In a way, I was relieved that Mom and Dad hadn’t had to go through the pain of my missing-person case. Imagine dealing with their only daughter vanishing off the face of the planet. Ugh.
“I’ve discovered,” I said, since talking was much easier now that I’d had some practice with Amanda Lee, “that I’m still just a stranger in a strange land. One minute, I’m playing Duran Duran’s first album on a turntable. The next I’m looking out the window decades later, seeing thirteen-year-olds walking home from school with… smartphones?”
I was still getting used to all the lingo.
Amanda Lee nodded, looking pleased with me. If I were a dog, my tail would’ve been wagging.
I float-walked away from the computer. “When I was thirteen, I was utterly amazed at how a record needle picked up sound. It was magic. Now kids can hold every piece of music ever created in their palms. Hell, these days, I wouldn’t be surprised if you can get information chips in your brains and the mark of Satan on your foreheads.”
Once, a friend had told me to read The Late Great Planet Earth after we’d gotten into a weed-fueled discussion about how the world was going to end. It was actually the last book I’d picked up before I died. Funny how I could recall that and not the finer details of important stuff in life like… oh, who’d killed me or anything.
“I’ve already had my mark of evil cosmetically removed with a Martian laser,” Amanda Lee said.
I actually believed her until she laughed. But can you blame me for being gullible, even for a sec?
I wasn’t sure I liked this new age. The ’eighties had been much… quainter.
As if tuning in to my thoughts, Amanda Lee said, “Don’t grow old before your time, Jensen.”
“I’m not sure I have a time anymore.”
I smiled, bringing another one out in her, too. Just in the week I’d been here, I’d learned that she was the only person I knew of who could see me smile or, hell, even see my altered appearance well enough to inform me that I looked like a black-and-white TV version of a person and not so real at all.
And you know what’s also a bummer? Being barred from communicating with other humans, like the gardener who trimmed Amanda Lee’s herb and flower garden or the newspaper guy who tossed the newest edition to the porch of her Mediterranean-style house at every crack of dawn. It’s so boring to be invisible to most people. I mean, the best distractions I had going were this Internet thing and the programs and movies on the TV Amanda Lee had also left for sleepless ol’ me.
She sat on a carved-wood, leather sofa, one of many antiques in the casita, then folded her hands in her lap. “I should tell you that I didn’t exactly come here to listen to your existential crisis.”
“But I’ll bet you’re fascinated so far.”
A raised eyebrow paid tribute to my flippancy. Then, “I was wondering if you would like to take a field trip.”
My body went on the fritz, just like a TV did, but it wasn’t from excitement. Not even.
Amanda Lee lowered her voice to an understanding whisper. “It’ll be okay this time, Jensen.”
“Will it?”
“I know the first trip was rough on you. But you wanted to see Suzanne.”
Yes, I had wanted.
See, at first, I had gone a little nuts with this spirit stuff, flying around like a maniac, feeling the wind brush all over me. I’d learned right away that I could travel on electric currents and, I mean, it was totally Star Trek time—one place to another in a space-age minute.
It took me a bit longer to sober up and get to the more serious issues, though, like being invisible.
Like visiting friends who’d gone on to a life without me.
My first visit had been during a field trip to an Irish pub in the Gaslamp Quarter. “It might be healthy to get in touch with the past,” Amanda Lee had said in a gentle drawl that had somewhat been ironed out by years of West Coast living. “Suzanne was with you earlier on the night you died, before you left for Elfin Forest. Maybe seeing her will trigger a useful memory about your killing.”
So she had taken her car to the pub as I caught a current and surfed it into a dark-wooded room, which smelled of hops and cabbage. While Amanda Lee had ordered a sausage roll, I had floated to a corner of the bar, rocked at seeing my best friend for the first time in ages.
Suze was over fifty-three years old now, and she looked every second of it, with gray glinting in the long brown curls of hair, with her blue eyes as washed out as the holey jeans she used to wear. It was near the end of her bartending shift, and afterward, she had gone home to a matchbox of an apartment, eating dinner at the table by herself as she looked out the dark window at the guttering lights of her junky neighborhood.
The sight of her alienation pierced me. Earlier, she’d been surrounded by people, only to go back to a lonely hovel, almost as if she were a ghost herself.
Before I could even ask myself what Suze might’ve known about my last night as a person, I zoomed back to the casita and got lost in the most welcome distraction of the TV. Amanda Lee had left me alone, probably thinking that our field trip had drained me because we’d been so far from my death spot. It hadn’t been all that bad.
“What kind of torture do you have in mind for me this time?” I asked now.
Amanda Lee could obviously tell I was being difficult. “You’ve been wondering about him, haven’t you?”
I bristled, knowing exactly whom she was talking about. “Just because I’ve been wondering doesn’t mean I should pay a visit to him.”
Amanda Lee folded her hands on her lap instead of saying anything to that. As if she’d had to compose herself for some reason, she smiled slightly.
“Seeing him was only an idea,” she said.
Had she wanted to say something else to me?
I couldn’t help myself. I float-walked to her, reaching out to touch her out of pure instinct, just like one person would’ve put her hand on another’s shoulder when she thought something might be wrong and she was encouraging the other person to talk about it.
At the contact, she sucked in a harsh breath, shivering. “Jensen.”
I flinched away.
“You know what touching me does,” she said. “You’re chilly.”
“Sorry.”
But I was confused.
Touching her had done more than make her shiver. I’d actually intuited something from Amanda Lee for the first time ever. I’d made contact with her only once before, but she’d obviously been prepared that time, and I’d only seen a field of gray in her. Understandably, she hadn’t wanted me in her head.
Yet, this go-round, I’d seen a sparkling flash in her mind—a diamond image—before it’d gone gray.