It takes a few minutes for the computers to boot up. Sal stands behind Naomi, peering over her shoulder, smiling apologetically. “Sorry,” he says. “They’re old.”
Naomi tries to hide her impatience, but the way she is click, click, clicking the mouse gives her away pretty easily. She’s used to technology that operates as quickly as her thinking—input a code, tap a button, and bam, a machine is printing humanoid tissue.
When the search engine finally loads, Naomi types Deborah Abrams into it.
To Naomi’s surprise and dismay, page after page populates with Deborah’s face in varying degrees of wrinkled grayness. An elderly woman with hair as white and vague as mountain fog, standing behind a lectern in some book-shrouded collegiate auditorium. A younger version of the woman aiming a tight-lipped smile at the camera while her prodigiously large family with the same pale, wispy hair surrounds her. A very old black-and-white photograph of a young woman in a dark, severe dress standing in front of a sign that says Harvard University.
“This is her,” Naomi mumbles, zooming in on the young woman in black.
“Who?” Sal asks.
“The woman from the cemetery,” Naomi says.
“You saw this woman in the cemetery?” Sal looks puzzled.
Naomi rushes to explain. “I mean, this is probably her great grandmother or something. The woman looked just like this.” He doesn’t know about the haunting, Naomi scolds herself—play it cool!
Sal reads along as Naomi clicks link after link that follows Deb’s life: she grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, the last of eight children. Went to Smith College where she studied Greek and philosophy. Eventually made her way to Harvard to study psychology and medicine but was ultimately denied her doctorate because she was a woman. She married one of her psychology professors and had a huge family—nine children. This is where the information gets fuzzy. For two full decades, it’s as if Deb’s life goes blank. It picks back up when Deb is in graduate school, studying for her doctorate in psychology and philosophy. She quietly publishes paper after paper on memory, the history of female hysteria, dreamwork, and self-psychology. She dies in the late aughts, but her name explodes in the early 2010s when a Ted Talk on pioneering women in psychology goes viral. Naomi vaguely remembers seeing the video years ago—maybe that’s why Deb seemed so familiar at first. Now, there is a biography about Deb and a Wikipedia page.
And while the information is fascinating in itself, it’s the pictures that Naomi can’t stop looking at. She enlarges one after the other, of Deb as a professor at Smith College in her late seventies, a full circle moment from when she attended as a young woman. There’s middle-aged Deb in grainy black-and-white, standing stiffly beside her husband in a column about his research in an old issue of the Harvard Gazette. Then there’s the Deb that Naomi is most familiar with: the young woman, open-faced as a flower, buttoned up and proper in her dark dress with a mischievous slant to her smile.
This is the form that Deb seems to have settled on, when she was flickering in Naomi’s bedroom between crone, mother, maiden. Naomi zooms in on an even younger Deb, standing beside her father in front of their home in Connecticut. She looks up at her dad, smiling. The sun is full in her face. Smooth-skinned. Baby-fat cheeks. She can’t be more than ten.
Naomi’s heart gives a painful squeeze. She exits the browser and shuts down the computer. She’s seen enough.
“You okay?” Sal says, sensing Naomi’s shift in mood.
“Just tired,” she says. Her favorite deflection because it has enough truth to it that Sal will leave her alone.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” Sal asks.
Naomi shrugs. “I want to do some more digging at home.”
“Want some company? I could always come over later and help.”
“No,” Naomi says a little too quickly. “But I’ll call you later.” She pecks him on the cheek, and he walks her to the door.
“You sure you don’t need anything else? You seemed freaked out this morning.”
“I’m fine,” Naomi says. “I just need some time to think.”
He nods, unsmiling, then pulls her suddenly into a rough hug. It takes Naomi by surprise and for a moment, her face against his chest, his scent filling her nose, she relaxes into it.
“You’ll be okay,” Sal says, lips pressed to the top of Naomi’s head.
Naomi can’t tell if this is a statement or a question. She pulls away. “Call you later,” she says and turns before he can hug her again. She doesn’t look back but can sense him standing there in the entrance to the library, watching her drive away.
On her way home, she compiles a list of questions in her head. Who are you, the first thing she will ask Deb. See how much of Deb’s story lines up with the information Naomi just gleaned from the Internet. Then: why are you haunting me? Are you friend or foe? And be specific—none of this cookie recipe nonsense. When Naomi has settled (hopefully) on those most pressing of questions, she will ask the ones her science-brain can’t help but turn over like a sand-smoothed stone: what are you? Where do you dwell? How can you turn invisible? Why can you change appearance? Why do you change appearance?
And perhaps the most important of all, the one that sends Naomi’s heart racing with wild, desperate hope: are there others like you? Is there a chance—oh, Naomi can hardly finish the thought—is there a chance? Could it really be?
Is there a way for Naomi to see her daughter again?
XXX
The first thing Naomi notices when she walks through the front door: Jasper the cat is alive and well. He rubs against Naomi’s legs in greeting. She picks him up and clutches him to her chest as if Jasper’s survival might protect her. “Ghost,” Naomi calls down the hallway. “Show yourself.”
“My god, I have a name,” comes the disembodied voice before Deb materializes slowly twenty feet down the hallway. She wears the black dress from the Internet pictures and appears to be around the age of twenty. Her hair is twisted tightly away from her face, and her eyes are large and dark, like lake water. Despite her fogginess, there’s depth there.
Naomi pets Jasper ferociously. She is the kind of person who must keep her hands busy while she endures strong feelings. It’s why the house was always scrubbed top to bottom when she’d had a fight with Sal. And, lately, why her colleagues find her work ethic a little too intense. Grief, joy, anxiety, anger, all of it jitters in her veins like caffeine, like electricity, until she feels like she’ll explode if she doesn’t do something.
Jasper grumbles and leaps out of her arms. He walks down the hallway and stops in front of Deb.
“Can he see you?” Naomi asks.
Deb wiggles her fingers at Jasper. He follows the movement then hisses, skirts around her, and runs away. Deb shrugs. “Seems like it.”
For a moment, the two women face off across the hallway from each other. Deb stands utterly still as if Naomi might be spooked back out the front door at any movement. Which allows Naomi to look, really look, at Deb and the effervescence of her form, as if her body is outlined in a force field of light. Like, if Naomi trapped vapor in a glass bottle and shone a flashlight through it. Only not quite that bright. As if the battery is dying. The light, fading.
“Who are you?” Naomi asks.
“Deb,” says Deb. “Abrams. Beloved mother, aunt, grandmother.”
Naomi nods. “Go on.”
To Naomi’s surprise, something in Deb unclenches, as if she had been holding her breath (though that’s not really possible anymore) then suddenly isn’t. “What do you want to know?”
“I want to know everything,” Naomi says matter-of-factly.
“This could take a while. Do you want to go sit down while we talk?” She gestures toward the living room.
Naomi shakes her head, incredulous. She might smile if she wasn’t feeling so skittish. “Are you seriously inviting me to sit in my own home?”
Deb holds up her hands. “Just trying to be polite.”
“Ghosts can be polite. Noted,” she says. She sits on the couch while Deb still stands in the foyer. “Do ghosts get tired of standing?”
“No. But for the sake of appearances.” Deb sinks into an armchair across from Naomi—though that isn’t really right. It’s more like she hovers, knees bent in a perpetual squat, something that would get incredibly uncomfortable for Naomi after just a few seconds, though Deb looks perfectly at ease. Her hands are folded in her lap, and she watches Naomi placidly, as if she has learned to settle the parts of herself that squirm.
Naomi shifts her hips and clasps her hands. Without realizing, she has mirrored Deb’s posture.
“What do you want to know?” Deb repeats.
“It’s clear to me that you are not a human in the—” Naomi searches for the right word. “—traditional sense. Is there any way for me to know if you are what you say you are, a ghost, or if you’re a figment of my imagination? Those are different problems in need of different solutions.”
Deb squints. “You’re a very logical person, Naomi.”
The way Deb says it, Naomi can see what kind of therapist she would have been: warm, inviting, with just a hint of sarcasm. The kind of therapist Naomi might actually get along with, if she believed therapy wasn’t a gigantic trauma-filled whirlpool that went around and around and around. “Are you psychoanalyzing me?”
Deb grins. “You read my Wiki page then.”
“How do you know about Wikipedia? Didn’t you die in the nineties?”
“Yes. But I’ve been wandering since I died. Which means I see what’s on t.v. and the internet. But we’re getting off track. To answer your question, I don’t think there’s a definitive way for you to know if I’m a ghost or your imagination. There are things I can do and information I can give you that help prove my case that I’m a ghost, but this isn’t the kind of situation that you can logic your way out of. What I tell you will require a certain amount of faith, because the science doesn’t exist to explain it. Or at least not yet.”
“Okay,” Naomi says slowly. “Let’s assume you’re a ghost then. The first thing I need to know is whether you’re here to harm me. If that’s even possible. From what I’ve deduced,” she indicates the way Deb seems to hover above the armchair, “you can’t really make contact with physical objects. When you try, like you did with the armchair in the bedroom earlier today, you go right through them. That coupled with the way you look makes me think you’re some sort of raw energy or contained force field. Or something.” She shakes her head. It makes her physically ill, having so few answers—let alone the fuzziest of theories—and for a moment, the room seems to tilt. She burps, and it tastes like the peanut butter toast she’d had at Sal’s house earlier that morning. “Sorry,” she says. “All this to say that even if you wanted to hurt me, I’m not sure you could. Is that right?”
“Too true,” Deb says. “Not that I want to hurt you, to be clear.”
“But even if you wanted to, you couldn’t.”
As if to illustrate Naomi’s point, Deb sticks her hand through the armchair handle and wiggles it around.
No movement, no sound, nothing.
Naomi nods. “Okay,” she says. “So you can’t hurt me. Can I assume other ghosts can’t hurt me? There are other ghosts, right?” Naomi’s heartbeat quickens. She feels herself still, muscles tensed, waiting for Deb’s answer—waiting to see if maybe, just maybe, there might be a possibility, a chance, that Maisie might still be around.
Deb frowns. “There are other ghosts, yes. But—how to explain this. It’s not like we can always see each other. It’s almost like we live on different planes—like, time has stacked on itself and we’re each living in the same place but at different intervals. But sometimes, some ghosts can move through those planes for different reasons. In this case, I was able to move in both time and space because of the connection that you established when you visited my grave and made the recipe. Does that make sense?”
Naomi takes a beat. Her eyes narrow as she considers the information and holds it up against her catalog of scientific knowledge: the dimensionality of time, quantum physics, the theory of relativity, even the multiverse hypotheses that have become popular in science literature recently. But it’s too much—too much information. Too many unanswered questions. And to understand the truth of the matter, for once, is not even the most important thing.
“So what I’m hearing is I was able to call you forth because of some sort of connection I established.”
Deb nods.
“Which means that’s probably replicable, correct? Establishing connections with other ghosts or spirits? So they appear?”
Deb freezes. Alarm paints her features. “Yes,” she says slowly. “Although I would advise against it.”
“Why?”
“Because there are things in this universe that are better left unfound…and unprovoked.”
This is my first reading of any of your chapters/episodes and I'm hooked!