You knew how important today was.
“She just goes and leaves me,” he told the face in the ceiling. “Just goes. Just like that. Just… off with some wanker.”
“Bitch,” the ceiling said.
“Yeah,” he agreed.
Max stayed on the floor for a long time. When the carpet got uncomfortable, he staggered into the kitchen and ended up sleeping in the refrigerator. But then, that didn’t last long. The fucking chicken in there wouldn’t shut up, with its fucking cluck cluck cluck all the damn time. So Max climbed back out again and ended up cradled in the sink—a large, sad man in a damp, questionable bassinet.
Today would have been his twenty-ninth birthday.
*
Max woke at the sound of the front door closing. The light hurt the eyes he didn’t have. Some kind of ghost hangover. A hangover’s ghost. Jesus, his head hurt.
Toppling out of the sink, Max felt the back of his head flop loose where the bathroom sink had wrinkle-ripped the skin off in a flappy triangle. Like scalping the frosting off a cake, he thought, and an immediate, irrational ghost nausea had him hanging his head back over the sink, flappy bits and all.
Then, out in the front hall, Charlie said, “Max.”
That was it. That was all it took.
“How is it my name’s always the first thing you say when you walk through the door?” he grumbled into the bowl. “For all that, I think you could at least manage a nice hello. And what the fuck’d you pull that stunt with the salt for, you—”
Face gray, every line in her body a new threat, Charlie crossed the flat in three great strides, picked up the first thing that came to hand and swung. She hit him across the cheek with a blow the Major Leagues would be proud of, so hard the copper bottom teakettle kept on ringing even when he coalesced long enough to rip it out of her hand and fling it across the room.
“Fuck you,” he snarled.
Charlie’s face dropped so far past gray, a person could bleach clothes with it. White. Whiter than a ghost, muscles cording in her jaw with her hands clenched so hard the skin went translucent over steely knuckles.
“Pull. Your shit. Together. You dead-ass fuck,” she growled, perfectly severing each word.
And Max could see the flat. He could. The carpet swam in translucent red; the walls bore giant, human-shaped smear marks down them. Bits of mush and hair clotted up the remote. Her nice heels by the door had puddles in the toes.
A bit of cheese stuck beside the light from where he’d been trying to feed the ceiling.
He saw it, yeah. Only, she deserved every fucking bit of it.
“Look on the bright side, Charlie-love. No one trapped you anywhere last night.”
“It was salt, Max. Salt. That’s what you use when you have a poltergeist haunting every fucking thing you do.”
“So, what, I don’t even matter? It hurt. Worse than the pipes or the goddamn frying pan. You can’t just throw condiments around and sally off. I live here, too!”
“You died here,” she shouted and the words hit him like a stubbed toe. “You’re gone already, so leave. Yeah, it sucks. It’s not fair and it’s not right, but it’s over. Take your final bow and get off the goddamn stage!”
Max laughed, not pretty. Parts of him flashed off and filled the room with shadow. “Over, am I? Well, look a-fucking-round, Charlie-girl. Obviously it isn’t over. I’m still here, trapped in my goddamn flat and you think I want to be here? You think this shit hole is my idea of an afterlife? That I’d willingly latch myself on you given half a goddamn choice?”
Baring her teeth, Charlie glowered, a little rock of death in a killer black dress. “Yeah, I do, because I look around, and hey! There you still are. If you didn’t want to be here, you wouldn’t be.”
“Oh, it’s that easy?”
“It’s that easy. You’re that kind of guy.”
“Well then, get me out, Charlie. If you want me gone so bad, then you do it. I can’t get out of the stain in the carpet most mornings, where exactly am I meant to look for these great shiny lights of lore?”
Something broke. Max didn’t know what it was, but standing there in the kitchen, glowering at each other over the half-real muck and evenly spaced canisters of sugar and flour and tea, Charlie stopped. She just stopped.
A second ago she’d been ready to try and claw his eyes out, and then she wasn’t. She stood there, looking at him like she’d never even seen him before, and it was somehow a whole lot worse than fighting.
“You coward.”
Just that, and simply spoken. But somehow Charlie managed to land it like a one-two punch to the gut. For a long moment they looked at each other; Max grinding his teeth, trying to think of something cutting to say; Charlie just standing there, looking exhausted and unseeing and fucking gray, like she had any kind of right.
But before he could call up the right amount of insult and hurt, she turned and walked away, back into the bedroom, like this wasn’t anything.
Like he wasn’t even worth it.
Furious, Max strode after her.
“You want a haunt?” he demanded. “Huh? What do you want, Charlie? What the hell do you want from me?”
She didn’t turn, just padded on into the bedroom. She swung the door shut behind her so hard it rattled on its hinges.
“I don’t want you,” she insisted. “I want be normal. I spend all day talking to a dead guy, I can’t bring anybody home and I want you to go.”
He stormed right through the closed door, glowering. “Well, I can’t. You’re a freak and you’re stuck with me.”
She unzipped her dress and shrugged it off. It puddled to the floor like a cheap shot. “Yeah, I know.”
Furious, helpless, Max boiled into a mist for lack of anything better to do. He pressed forward and stopped short. Couldn’t touch her, couldn’t not touch her—wanted to hold her, to shake her. “So, what? You lock me up? Figure if you can just shove me in a corner, you can forget all about me?”
He reached out for her, just wanting to make her see him. But she wouldn’t. Charlie stopped believing in him. Just like that. Just stopped believing in him and his hands went straight through her shoulders. Max tried. He tried. He shouted and put his hands through her face but Charlie clenched her teeth and her eyes stayed blank. Even her voodoo stare was better than this. If she looked straight through him, at least then he’d be in the way.
But Charlie didn’t see him. She stopped looking, and he disappeared as she turned around and fixed her attention on her closet.
“That’s any worse than what you’re doing to me?” she asked.
“The hell am I doing? Existing?”
“You’re haunting me.”
“I’m haunting the flat. My flat. No—do not fucking make that face, Charlie. It is my flat. I was here first and I’m still here.”
She glared over her shoulder, but her eyes never made their way to him. Hiding, he thought. And fucking rich calling me a coward; you go hide every damn night now and—
“Max, you’re dead,” she said and this time, he broke.
“Yeah, all right. I’m dead. Deceased. Rotting in a goddamn jar somewhere, fine. Does that make you feel better? You’re alive and I’m not, neener-fucking-neener!”
Charlie pressed her lips into a thin colorless line, still avoiding his eyes, and grabbed fresh clothes from the closet, “No. I’m not dealing with you right now.”
“You never deal with me! You just go running off with your line of faceless blokes. Each one more fucking awful than the last. You’re running scared!”
Half turned, her eyes locked on his. “Better them than staying here,” she said, “listening to you moan about your lost glory days, bleeding all over the damn place.”
“Yeah, well, I wasn’t exactly thrilled reliving my death eight times, either. Jesus, Charlie. You should have called me, staying out all night! I was fucking worried!”
Silence exploded, all at once and awful—the kind of silence that me
ant he’d gone and said something he didn’t mean to mean. That he’d fucked up big.
Charlie looked really beautiful, her dress from the night before still crumpled under her feet, eyes like she wanted to walk out that door and never stop running.
Dissolving, fleeing—coward, she’d called him—Max retreated.
And she’d hate that, too, probably, but he couldn’t… see her, looking at him like that, like she really did want him to… to just stop. Uncreating him in her mind, looking and seeing something worse than nothing, seeing something awful.
So he hid. A black cloud over the flat, Max hung on the ceilings, lingered in the walls and the curtains and listened. Charlie’s bare footsteps padded back and forth across the bedroom. Salt rattled up the vacuum hose. When it stopped, so did everything else. No telly, no talking. He and Charlie hid in opposite rooms and they neither one said a damn word.
*
Days later, when they still weren’t saying sorry, Charlie dropped down beside him on the couch and startled him stupid.
“I grew up on a ranch,” she said. “Way out in the back, there was this cowboy, Ned. Eighteen-something, his horse got shot by a Comanche. Rolled over on him, crushed him.”
Max looked at her. Her eyes were fixed to an old cola stain on the carpet. He wanted to touch her, but he knew better.
“On his bad days, I’d come out there to see him and it’d be happening over and over again. No Comanche, just an arrow whizzing out of the tree line, killing the horse, getting him crushed. Blood all over the dandelions. I remember that. Red dandelions.”
Charlie glanced at him sideways, half smiling. Easy as that, he forgave her everything.
“I loved Ned. First time I saw it happen, I ran for help. Parents took me to a shrink instead. Ned told me not to talk about it. Explained the whole ‘death’ thing to me. Parents still think Ned’s just an old imaginary friend.”
Half sunk into the couch, Max watched her—just looking, staring at this beautiful, crazy girl he’d have never met as long as he lived. And she was trying. Hell, they were both trying. But a great, gaping chasm had cracked open between them and neither one knew where the hell to find a rope.
“What happened to him?” he asked quietly.
Charlie shrugged. “One day I saw him sitting on the fence with this other guy. Looked like a cowboy, too, but different. Different time, maybe. Anyway, they were smoking. Laughing. That was nice. Ned had a nice laugh.” The words caught in her mouth and stuck sideways. Charlie swallowed and her eyes went dark. Eventually, she finished, “I didn’t see him again after that.”
Silence clotted around them, suffocating, but Max waited. The look on her face, he thought she might be seeing red dandelions. “He didn’t say goodbye?” he ventured finally.
She shook her head. The pattern in the couch felt like bars. “He waved.”
“Arsehole.”
“No.” Her head shot around and she looked at him—saw him—but whatever she saw, it didn’t meet up with whatever it was she wanted to see. “He was a good guy. He taught me to ride—let me ride Gunsmoke whenever I wanted. He just didn’t talk much.”
Max didn’t know what to say to that. He opened his mouth, but what could he add?
That he didn’t want to be dead? That waiting for the next thing scared the ever-living fuck out of him? That a year later, he still woke up clotted with blood, a long gone message from his boss screaming in his head and the only thing that made it stop was seeing her sleeping soundly next to where he’d died a lonely, idiot fuckup?
That he spent mornings waiting for something to change and hoping it wouldn’t and watching her like the creeper he would have become if he hadn’t killed himself shaving, and hating every single bloke she ever brought home, just because they could touch her and he never could, not like he wanted, not really, not ever?
What could he tell her that’d mean a damn thing?
Time stretched between them in relative silence. Traffic meandered down the street outside with the occasional beep. Charlie scratched a nail down the thick stitch lines of their striped new sofa. When she got up and disappeared back into the bedroom, Max stayed where he sat. She might as well have been miles away.
*
Next couple of guys, Charlie met elsewhere and never brought home. He never saw them, but he saw her, all dressed up and fucking gorgeous, but never for him. And he hated not seeing these blokes soon to be putting their hands all over his Charlie. What if she got into trouble? What if she didn’t come home?
“Be wide,” he told her once as she left, without thinking. And Charlie just looked back at him like he’d gone crazy, but she’d shut the door before he could say, “Careful. Be careful.”
Then, one day, she came home smiling.
“Oh God, you’ve finally done it, have you?”
Charlie barely glanced at him, hanging up her coat. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Max zoomed over, getting in her way, leaning over her shoulder. “No, you do,” he said. “You’ve gone and killed somebody.”
Swatting him halfheartedly, she kicked off her shoes and headed for the kitchen. “I have not.”
“You’re smiling. It’s a sign of the apocalypse. I’ve seen it happen.”
She shook her head, shoved the kettle under the faucet. “You’ve seen the apocalypse?”
“Yes. I’m one of those ghosts. Past, present, future kind of deal. Chains and make amends, Mr. Scrooge. Jesus, Charlie. Why else you think I’m haunting you?” He grinned, wiggling his fingers through her kettle to make the water boil, easy as practice. “So, did you eat somebody?”
Charlie stopped to better fix him with the one-eyed voodoo stare and Max was delighted to have it back. Though, he had to admit, it wasn’t nearly as daunting, what with her little bluebird copper-bottom teakettle chirping its head off.
“Did I eat somebody how?” she asked.
“As in, baked in the oven, swallowed whole like the dragon we both know you are. Though, actually, if you’ve got other stories you’d like to share—”
“I don’t.”
She poured her mug of hot water and set the kettle down on a cold burner, picking through her well-organized jars of tea. Max watched her plop a bag into the water, thinking how the kitchen looked wonderful with her in it. Tile, counter, cabinets—all of it like it’d been meant to look this good.
“A shame, but all right. And anyway, this is different,” he said, grabbing the honey before she could get to it. “You never come home smiling. So…?”
“So?” She watched him with her hands on her hips, a mug of tea steaming on the counter, still smiling, sort of, an upward hitch way off in the corners. “You going to give me that?”
“Yes.” She held out a hand; he dangled it above her head. “When you tell me about your day.”
“It sucked.”
“Oh, it did? So why’re you smiling?”
“Coming home to your charming face?”
Max grabbed his missing heart. “Oh, Charlie, don’t tease. Still, good answer. Here’s your honey.”
She nodded a thank you, squeezed an unholy dollop into her tea, and set it aside to cool, strolling off to the bathroom with Max following right behind. “Charlie.”
“Are you whining?”
“Is it working?”
“No.”
“Then I’m not whining.”
“That’s good. It wasn’t attractive. I’m going to take a shower. Stay out here.”
“As if I’d peek. Can I peek?”
She padded back into the bedroom to snatch sweatpants off the floor. “What did I just say?”
“You said stay out here.” Max grinned, fitting his face into the curve her shoulder. “I can stay out here and still peek.”
Charlie stopped, gave him the voodoo look again. Max tingled.
“All right, fine. I won’t peek so long as you tell me why you’ve come home grinning like a fool for.”
She shook her
head. “You won’t peek because otherwise I’d scalp you,” she said, but he could see her smiling—really smiling—right before she ducked into the bathroom and locked the door.
“I will never stop asking,” he called, settling down in his place against the door so he could hear her. “I will follow you to the end of your days. An eighty-one year old crone, and I’ll still be asking you—remember that day you came home smiling, back at the old flat?”
She punched the wall to rattle the hot water pipe, “You’ll do that anyway.”
“Yeah, but this way I’ll be less repetitive.”
“Max, you couldn’t give less of a shit about this.”
“Are you using the Force on me, Charlie?”
“No.” The water rumbled up the pipes and hissed out onto the bath tile. “You honestly just won’t give a shit.”
“Try me.”
“All right, look. The university sprang for a stupid fountain. Our tuition at work. They finally started building it today. There you go. That’s it.”
That wasn’t it. Max stared at the bed, at the bedside table, at the memory of an answer phone saying, You knew how important today was.
“What company?”
“What?”
“What company, Charlie? The blokes doing the fountain—where they from?”
“I don’t know. Panache, pan-arch, pan-something. Why?”
The water pressure changed. He heard Charlie grab her razor from its well in the wall, prop her foot on the side of the bath.
“Pan Bridge?” he asked.
“Yeah, that’s it. Billy goats.”
Max couldn’t feel his fingers. Not that he had fingers, but he couldn’t feel the space where he usually pretended to have fingers. Dirty tile pressed against his cheek, grit and dust and the itch of uneven stubble. Max blinked, scrubbed his eyes, and he was still just outside the bathroom door.
“You’re dead, Mulligan. Dead. You knew how important today was and you fucking blew it.”
That could have been him.
Max stared blindly at the wall, hearing his boss snarling, knew the spit would be flecking the corners of his mouth. Knew how genial and pleasant he could be in mixed company—that is, us against them, money against skill.
That could have been him, hauling great big heavy rocks to make a fucking fountain for a school with too much damn money, rippling with sweat and muscles and a charming fucking accent—and that could have been him. A close shave and that could have been him she met. That could be her in his shower after a long, fabulous night.