Even with her love of pop songs, though, I could still tell that half of her liked my alternative stuff.
Eventually, we came to the point in all parties where everyone collapses on couches and chairs, pulls out cigarettes, and turns on the TV because you’re done but you can’t bring yourself to go home.
Ghosts are no different. We draped ourselves on the stairs around the fire, which Randy had told me McGlinn kept stoked because of the preternatural chill the bunch of us brought to the room. And instead of ciggies, the guys from Chinatown and Cassie the ’seventies housewife were nipping at the ends of frayed live wires until Yul, Lee, and Feng—gamblers who’d passed on during a fire in a mid–eighteen hundreds den in downtown San Diego—moseyed out of the house and back to their death spots for the night.
Old Seth was leaning against the wall in the corner near McGlinn, who looked like he was passed out on his lounger, although I wasn’t sure about that since he seemed out of it when he was awake, too. The bearded cowboy was idly manipulating McGlinn’s camera that’d been sitting on an end table, making the flash go off again and again. It gave the firelit room a strobe effect while the rest of us hung out.
Little by little, I’d gotten all their death stories, just as I’d done with Twyla and the Chinatown guys. Carlota, one of the Mexican women in the big skirts, was the only ghost in her group who hadn’t left yet, and she’d told me that she and her friends had been victims of a doomed wagon ride on the way back from a fiesta when a snake-spooked horse had gone crazy. Louis, the black man in the factory uniform, was a contemporary of Randy’s; he’d worked in a bayside aircraft plant during World War II after the pool of local white workers had been exhausted, and he’d died when he was driving home one night, bone-tired, his car veering off the road.
No one here had perished in their sleep or anything peaceful like that.
When I brought that up, Louis said, “If you had a good death, you’d already be in the good place.”
“Heaven?” I asked.
They all thought that was precious. Twyla laughed extra hard from her spot by the wall, where she’d wandered over to suck on a wire next to ’seventies Cassie after the Chinatown gamblers had left. The energy sent subtle waves of color through the electricity-sucking ghosts as Cassie kept mothering Twyla, doing things like telling her how darling her hair looked tonight.
From his place next to me on the fire pit stairs, Randy gave me a tolerant grin. “I already told Jen about heaven, or whatever’s waitin’ for us.”
Carlota yawned, then said, “Qué lastima, is it not?”
I nodded. I had enough high school Spanish to infer that it was a shame we didn’t know for sure.
Scott, the teen from the ’fifties who’d choked on a chicken bone in a diner during a date, said, “I don’t care about what’s waiting for us.”
Randy watched him like he saw through the teenage bravado. “I do, ’cause wherever it is we’re goin’, Magnolia’s there right now.”
Everyone mumbled good-naturedly under their breath, obviously having heard him wax on about Magnolia before.
But I wanted to hear more about her. “How do you know she isn’t still alive? She had to be young when you died. That would make her…” In her nineties? Older?
“I stopped keepin’ track of age a long time ago,” he said. “And when computers started showin’ up all around, I learned to do a search or two on my gal. She’s gone as gone can be.”
Louis floated down to the fireplace, bending down to watch the flames. The light flickered through his factory uniform, giving his gray tones a warmer quality. I’d noticed that he and Randy in particular didn’t interact much, and I wondered if it was because of some kind of segregation they’d had as humans.
Randy added, “All I have to do is find her letter, and…”
“Then you can be with her,” Scott said, clearly by rote. But then his tone gentled. “We can only hope, Rand.”
From the way no one else said anything, I knew that every ghost present realized that Randy’s letter would never be found. No delusions here. So why did Randy continue, day after day?
Boredom, I thought. And a weird kind of optimism that kept ghosts like him going.
From the socket in the corner, Twyla took too much of an electric hit, and she squealed.
Cassie the housewife gave her a chiding glance. “How many times do I have to tell you to slow down, honey?”
As everyone laughed, seconding Cassie’s comment, I looked around at my new friends, seeing in their faces a reminder of my old buds—the people I’d partied with, the ones who’d been like anesthetic to my sorrows when they’d shared beer and smokes with me.
Were we bound to repeat our pasts, even as ghosts? I wasn’t in any time loop, but I told myself that I wouldn’t fall into a useless trap again, wasting my life away and sitting around, new friends or not. I was going to do what I needed to do, no matter how nice it felt being around them.
I rose from my stair. “Well, guys, sorry to run, but I’ve got a full night.”
Louis looked up at me. He had a middle-age-dad vibe about him. I’d also found out that he had a college degree but had considered it his patriotic duty to work for the wartime effort after he’d been turned down for military duty because of a bad heart.
“You going off to do your haunting?” he asked.
Naturally, they’d all been filled in, courtesy of Randy.
“I was planning on it,” I said.
Louis stood, brushing off his uniform pants. “Not to overstep, Miss Jensen, but you could use more thinking time on this.”
Man, I’d asked him not to call me “miss” already. It made me feel uncomfortable, but it seemed to be a habit for him.
I said, “Twyla and Randy already warned me about cleaners and all the things that go bump in the night for a ghost. I’ll be okay.”
“I’m not just talking about cleaners. I mean you’re rushing into haunting. Unless you’re planning to throw some music at this Gavin and hope that does the job.”
Next to me, Randy was stoically watching him, making me wonder where he’d come from—a small Southern town where he would drink at one water fountain while Louis would drink at another?
“It’s okay,” I said to Louis. “I already did some decent tricks to the hauntee. I re-created his possible victim’s perfume, whispered to him…”
Scott used a hand to slick back his hair. “Haunting. I haven’t fiddled with a human in a while.”
Randy grinned, then said, “I favor givin’ a welt or two to the jerks downtown. That and a good hallucinazion”—as always, the word was barely recognizable—“always does the trick.”
“Welts?” I asked.
A human voice from the corner spoke up.
“That’d scare me to death,” McGlinn said, his long, face-obscuring hair moving over his words.
He speaks. But I guess Gramps and Gran, who were sitting on the couch quietly, would’ve chased us out of here by now if their grandson had passed out or fallen asleep.
Twyla got up from her electrical socket, floating Cassie the cord she’d been sucking on. The housewife shrugged, double-fisted, then sucked on them both.
“Pinches, scratches, welts… ,” Twyla said. “Humans tend to shit a glazed donut when you use any of those tricks. All you have to do is—”
Suddenly, she flew at McGlinn, motioning out to pinch him. He jumped in his lounger, then settled back, sticking his middle finger up at her. When she bent down to plant an air-kiss on his head, he shivered. Nearby, Old Seth chuckled and hooked his thumbs in his gun belt as he leaned against the wall.
Did they have a teasing thing going on that I wasn’t a part of yet?