Cave Creek, Arizona
At first, the chill was a drowsy nibble at the distant and
ragged edges of my awareness, raising goosebumps on the
parts of my flesh bared to that spring night. The sensation
was vaguely disturbing, but not troublesome enough to stir
me from the fitful shallows of sleep. I remember rolling
onto my side, pulling the comforter up to my right earlobe
and murmuring some insensible protest.
That was when I heard Nick's voice. Or thought I heard it.
Impossible, I told myself, nestling groggily into my
polyester burrow. He's dead.
Just then, a hand came to rest on my hip, and the chill
sprouted teeth and bit right through cotton nightshirt, skin
and tissue to seize the marrow of my bones.
I choked out a hoarse cry, too raw and guttural to qualify
as a scream, and shimmied off the mattress to land hard on
both feet. In the space of an instant, my senses shifted
from dial-up to broadband, and I pressed one hand to my
chest, in case my heart tried to flail its way out of my
chest. My brains pulsed, Cuisinart-style, then scrambled. I
couldn't seem to drag a breath past my esophagus, though
my lungs clawed for air like a pair of miners trapped
beneath tons of rubble.
I felt that way once on a stair-climber at the gym after
sucking in a pack and a half of nicotine in a bar the night
before, and subsequently swore off exercise forever. Hell,
somebody has to serve as the bad example.
But I digress. Get used to it.
My eyes must have bugged out, cartoonlike.
Nick—Nick—lay on top of the covers, dressed in his
snappy gray burial suit, with his hands cupping the back of
his head. Except for a peculiar greenish glimmer emanating
from his skin, he looked pretty much the way he had before
he collided with a semi on the 101 North and was thrown
through the windshield of his BMW. Along with Tiffany,
Nick's lover du jour, who was scarred for life and for
some insane reason blamed me for her Frankenstein face and
deflated implants.
One of the many things I don't like about dead people is
that a lot of them glow in the dark. Not that I'd seen
any before my late ex-husband turned up that momentous
night, a full two years after his funeral. Since then,
unfortunately, I've become something of an authority.
"Hey," Nick said companionably, as though the
situation were entirely normal, and not something out of an
old segment of Unsolved Mysteries.
My stomach quivered. Like my heart, it was threatening to
leap out of my throat and make a run for it. "You're
dead," I pointed out—quite reasonably, I thought,
given the circumstances. I knew he'd croaked, but I
wasn't sure he'd been notified. He looked so calm
and matter-of-fact, as though turning up in his
ex-wife's bed in the middle of the night was a perfectly
ordinary thing to do.
Nick sighed, slipped his hands from behind his head and
hoisted himself as far as his elbows. "Sort of," he
admitted, with a rueful note.
I managed a step backward, ready to hot-foot it out of
there, jerk open the outside door, and dash down the fire
escape?style stairway to Bad-Ass Bert's Biker Saloon.
Normally, I didn't seek out the company of Bert's
clientele, especially when I was naked except for a slip of
cotton jersey that barely covered my thighs, but given the
situation, I was game for just about anything. Trouble was,
once I'd retreated half a stride, I couldn't seem to
move again.
"How can you be 'sort of' dead?" I asked.
"It's complicated," Nick replied. "In some
ways, I'm more alive than you are." With that, he
swung his legs over the side of the mattress and stood up,
turning to face me across the expanse of tangled bedding.
The glow surrounding his lean frame flickered a little, as
if somebody had turned a celestial dimmer switch.
"Relax," he said. "It's okay."
Sure. No problem. Pay no attention to the walking, talking
corpse.
"You're dead," I repeated stubbornly.
"Yeah," he agreed wryly. "I've noticed. So
maybe we could get past that?"
"Don't come near me," I ordered. Pure bravado,
of course. I'd read The Damn Fool's Guide to
Self-Defense for Women and practiced all the moves on Bert,
who was a genuine bad-ass, but if there was a chapter on
phosphorescent assailants, I must have missed it.
Nick tilted his dark head to one side and looked pathetic,
though still damnably handsome. Apparently, being deceased
was neither messy nor strenuous; his suit was wrinkle-free,
if slightly out of fashion, his hair sleek, and there was no
sign of his hallmark five o'clock shadow. No tire marks,
either, thank God, and no blood, guts or jutting bone fragments.
He must have read my mind. With a sad grin, he looked down
at himself, before meeting my gaze again. "Hell of a
patch job, though. You should have seen me before the
mortician did his thing." He shuddered. "You
haven't lived—so to speak—until you've
seen yourself lying in pieces on a slab. Definitely not a
pretty sight."
I winced. "Thanks for sharing," I said. At least we
were on the same page with the dead-thing. I had a lot of
questions, naturally, but I couldn't seem to articulate
any of them. Shock does that to a person.
Another fetching grin. "You cried at my funeral," he
reminded me, with pleased modesty.
I stiffened. My heartbeat had slowed somewhat, and I was
managing a full breath every few seconds, but my knees felt
about as substantial as foam on a mug of draft beer. When
the last few bubbles popped, I'd be on the floor in a
quivering heap.
"So what?" I asked. "We were married once. You
were only thirty-two, and you didn't deserve to die like
that, even if you were an asshole. Too bad about Tiffany, too.
Did you know her boobs popped and she had to have three
surgeries just to look human?"
He ignored the reference to girlfriend #62. At least she was
post-divorce; the first thirty-seven could probably be
slotted neatly between "I do" and
"Go-to-hell-you-bastard-I'm-taking-back-my-maiden-name."
"Black isn't your color," he observed gently,
starting around the end of the bed, heading in my general
direction.
I backpedaled. "Stay away from me."
He stopped, and once again that slight, familiar grin
hitched up one corner of his mouth. "You looked for all
the world like the classic grieving widow that day," he
reiterated. "Divorce or no divorce, you weren't over
me."
"The hell I wasn't," I shot back, and shoved a
hand through my shoulder-length tangle of curly red hair. I
did a quick mental review of The Damn Fool's Guide to
Lucid Dreaming and wondered if I was experiencing some
random version of the phenomenon. I pinched myself, blinked
a couple of times and sighed.
Nick remained still there, which meant I was awake. The jury
was still out on whether or not I was lucid.
"I'm sorry about the other women," he said sweetly.
"Too little, too late," I answered, stunned by the
sharp, sudden pang of sorrow at the verbal reminder. It was
like a rubber band snapping around my soul. "What are
you doing here?"
He cocked one perfectly shaped eyebrow. In life, Nick had
been a real estate developer, eating up the Arizona desert
with tract houses, convenience stores and strip malls. I
half expected his cell phone to ring. He was one of those
people who go around with an earphone plugged into their
heads, apparently talking to themselves. "I wondered
when you'd get to that question," he said.
"Now you know."
Nick fiddled with his tie again. His mother chose that
tie—red, with tiny silver stripes. I hated it, and I
hated her. More on that later. "It's hard to get
your attention," he said. Then, with a wistful look, he
added, "Some things never change."
"Pul-eeze," I said. "We're not going to play
the poor, misunderstood Nick game, okay?" I was so not
in love with him, dead or alive, and I didn't want him
hanging around. How do you get a restraining order against a
ghost?
He held up a hand, palm out. "All right, all right,"
he said. "Let's not go there."
"Wise choice, Bucko.And you still haven't told me
what you're doing in my bedroom in the middle of the
night."
"It's a long story." He looked around the
bedroom, with its linoleum floor, fading wallpaper and
garage-sale furniture. "Still living over the biker
bar," he observed. "When are you going to get a
decent place?"
Thanks to Nick and his mother, Margery DeLuca, society scion
and barracuda divorce lawyer, I'd gotten F-all in the
settlement, except for a pile of credit card bills I was
still paying off. I couldn't afford anything but what I
had, and sometimes even that much was a stretch, but there
didn't seem to be much point in going down that winding
and treacherous road. "Did you come here to talk real
estate? If so, kindly go haunt somebody else—your
mother, for instance. I'm not in the market."
Nick looked hurt. That was my second cue to feel guilty.
Not.
He sighed once more, philosophically this time, like some
holy martyr, angling for his own prayer card. No sale there,
either. Nick DeLuca was a lot of things, but a saint
wasn't one of them.
"Damn it," he said, looking down at himself again.
"I'm fading."
Sure enough, the glow indicated low batteries, and I could
see through his left shoulder and part of his mid-section.
"Wait," I said. The word scraped my throat.
Nick's brown eyes connected briefly with mine, then he
vanished.
I blinked, hugging myself now, ready to collapse but afraid
to go near the bed, where I could expect to make a soft
landing. "Nick?" I whispered, gripping the dresser
for support.
No answer.
He was really gone, except for a faint reverberation in the air.
If he'd been there in the first place.
I stood still for a long time, staring at the space where
Nick had been standing, then groped my way out of the
bedroom, along the dark hall and into the kitchen, flipping
on the light switch with numb fingers as I passed it. I sank
into a chair at the round oak table, laid my head down on my
folded arms and sat out the rest of the night.
AT DAWN, I made a pot of coffee, and as soon as I heard
Bert's Harley roll up outside, I forced myself to go
back into the haunted bedroom. There, I quickly pulled on a
pair of jeans, stuffed my feet into the Sponge Bob slippers
my foster sister, Greer, had given me for Christmas in one
of her rare moments of whimsy, and finger-combed my hair.
In the adjoining bathroom, I brushed my teeth and splashed
my face with cold water. Gazing into the mirror over the
cracked pedestal sink, I gave myself a brief lecture.
"Suck it up, Mojo Sheepshanks," I said.
"You're probably not the first woman to wake up and
find her dead husband in bed with her."
Despite the speech, I wasn't consoled. My face was so
pale, my freckles looked three-dimensional, and my eyes,
which vary from blue to green, depending on what I'm
wearing, were colorless. I had the raccoon thing going,
too—an effect that can usually only be achieved by
cheap mascara and a crying jag.
Having made this grim but accurate assessment, I turned from
the mirror, traversed the kitchen again and opened the door.
I stood for a moment on the landing, looking down on the
gravel parking lot. Bert, a brawny guy with a shaved head
and both arms tattooed with road maps, bent over the sidecar
attached to his bike, unbuckling Russell's helmet.
Russell was his basset hound, and the mutt gave a happy yip
when he spotted me.
Bert Wenchal—Bert being short for Bertrand—turned
and favored me with a broad smile. For all that he could
have been an attraction in one of those road-side freak
shows advertised on billboards—See the Amazing
Human Map, 5 Miles Ahead—Bert had perfect teeth, never
mind that they were the size of piano keys, and baby blue eyes.
"Hey, Mojo," he called, setting the dog's head
gear on the seat of the Harley. Russell leaped out of the
sidecar and trundled toward me as I descended the wooden
stairs. Most days Russell sat on a stool at the end of the
bar, and scored too many pepperoni sticks from the customers.
I bent to ruffle the dog's floppy ears. "You're
too fat," I told him affectionately.
He tried to lick my face.
Bert's keys jingled as he shoved one into the lock on
the service door. The bar wouldn't open until ten, but
he liked to come in early, put the coffee on to brew, fire
up the hot dog roaster, rake the peanut shells, cigarette
butts and spit-lumps out of the sawdust on the floor and
balance the till. As landlords went, Bert was
unconventional, but the rent was right and he had a great
dog, so we got along okay.
"You look like hell this morning," he told me
brightly, washing his hands at the sink behind the bar. Bert
was proud of his saloon, especially the bar. It was nothing
but splintery boards, nailed across the top of six huge
wooden barrels, bought at a junk sale in Tombstone, but
according to Bert, the thing was a true historical artifact.
Allegedly, in its heyday, the likes of Wyatt Earp and Doc
Holliday had bel-lied up to it.
"Thanks," I said bleakly. Russell climbed onto the
old mounting block next to his bar stool, then made the leap
to the vinyl seat. I perched on the next one over.
Bert started the coffee. Despite his size and the fact that
Route 66 coursed in a green line up his left arm, presumably
across his chest, and down his right, complete with side
roads, highway numbers and place names beside little red
circles, he was a sensitive guy.
"Something happen to Lillian?" he asked.
My eyes burned, and my throat tightened. I ran a hand down
Russell's broad back for a distraction. Lillian Travers
was the closest thing I had to a mother, and she would have
been my first choice to confide in, but she'd suffered a
devastating stroke six months before. Now, she sat staring
into space in a Phoenix nursing home, and I made the
forty-five-minute trip to visit her three times a week.
Sometimes Lillian seemed to know me, sometimes she
didn't. Except for isolated, garbled words, she never spoke.
Bert paused in his coffee-making, waiting.
I finally shook my head. "She's the same," I got
out.
"Then what?" Bert persisted, but gently. With the
coffeemaker chortling and belching out fragrant steam, he
flipped on the hot dog machine, opened the fridge tucked
behind the bar and took out a package of frankfurters. I
watched as he laid them carefully, one by one, on the
gleaming steel bars rolling behind the glass.
"Something really weird happened last night," I
said, with understandable difficulty and no little
reluctance. Russell laid his muzzle on my left forearm,
mesmerized by the spinning wieners.
Bert arched his eyebrows, tossed the frankfurter package
into the trash and washed his hands again. Time to rake the
sawdust. I took comfort in Bert's unvarying rituals,
maybe because I had so few of my own. Most of the time, I
felt as insubstantial as Nick's ghost; I'd been
living a lie for so long, I couldn't recall the truth,
if I'd ever known it in the first place. "Like
what?" he prompted.
I turned on the bar stool as he reached for the rake leaning
against the weathered board wall. "Like I saw my dead
ex-husband last night," I stumbled. There was no
graceful way to say it.
Bert paused, rake in hand and gave a low whistle.
"Dude," he said.
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