When Naomi was a girl, she was known for having a feisty temper.
In preschool, they put her in a separate room during one of her infamous temper tantrums. A padded place full of fluffy stuffed animals that she could beat her little fists into and scream her little heart out, as if she already knew the world she was entering was an unfair place but she wouldn’t—couldn’t!—go without a fight.
In middle school, a boy pushed her best friend down while they were playing basketball at recess. Naomi grabbed a fistful of the boy’s jacket and yanked him backwards until his ass hit the pavement. She held him there by the scruff of his neck like the mother cat of a rowdy kitten, and he kicked and screamed but was so well pinned by Naomi that their peers started to gather, laughing, until the boy—shamefaced and hissing mad, but obedient at last—apologized.
So when the pale, shimmering face of a stranger looms suddenly over Naomi in the middle of the night, her brain retreats to a more primitive place and her body takes over, coiling itself like a piston and exploding upwards in a blast of bedsheets, balled fists aiming for the slender jaw of the young woman.
But where her fist should make impact, all she feels is air. Stupidly, Naomi punches her first once more, then swings her arms wildly, but the woman has disappeared. Again.
Spooked, Naomi draws her knees into her chest and presses her back into the headboard so she can survey the room fully.
Empty.
“I know I saw you,” Naomi says, though less to the woman and more to herself. She is scared that the tricks her brain has been playing on her have bloomed into full blown psychosis. She wouldn’t be surprised, all things considering.
But as her eyes rove around the room, they catch on the faintest shimmer of light in the corner. It’s one of those illusions where if she looks directly at it, the shimmer disappears, but when she comes at it sideways, her vision clears, and the faintest outline of a woman takes shape.
“Who are you?” Naomi asks, side-eyeing the light.
“I don’t want to frighten you,” whispers the woman’s voice.
“Too late for that.”
“You’re right,” the woman says. “That’s fair.”
For a moment, the two women survey one another. Naomi keeps her head on a swivel so the light doesn’t dim. When she isn’t immediately attacked and the woman doesn’t try to get any closer, Naomi says, “Is there any way for you to make yourself more visible?”
“I can. Promise you won’t be scared?”
“No,” Naomi snaps. But when the woman doesn’t grow brighter, she amends, “But I’ll be less scared.”
In the handful of meditation classes that Naomi has attended, there’s an exercise where she’s instructed to imagine sunlight pouring into the top of her head and filling her from the toes up. This isn’t exactly what happens as the woman brightens before Naomi, but it’s the closest she can come to describing the way the woman’s form suddenly fills with light then dims into something more solid but still somehow translucent, pale, fragile. Like the thin skin of a baby bird, thinner even—life barely contained. Like, if Naomi reached out a hand, it would go right through. Mist, vapor, smoke. Here then gone.
“Who are you?” Naomi asks again.
“I know the question you really want to ask is what I am.”
Naomi nods. “That, too.”
“To answer the latter, I’ll tell you the former: I’m Deb. Or I used to be.” The woman—Deb—smiles. Her face is even younger than the two other iterations Naomi has seen of her, as if she is aging backwards, rapidly.
“Okay,” Naomi says slowly. Her brain feels sluggish, full of fog or whatever stuff this woman is made of, perhaps from lack of sleep or the shock of this unwelcome visitor. Or as a defense mechanism—she still isn’t convinced that she hasn’t gone completely insane.
“You’re not crazy,” Deb says.
Naomi’s eyes widen. “How did you know—” she starts to say.
“—what you were thinking?” Deb finishes. “Neat trick, isn’t it?”
Naomi’s breath hitches. She can’t tell if she wants to flee or cry. She looks wildly around, as if she’s on a prank show and the cameras are perched on the bookshelf or stuffed in the hamper. “What the hell is going on?”
Deb’s smile falters. “I’m sorry. I’m showing off, and it’s scaring you. It’s just been so long since I’ve spoken to anyone. It feels good, you know?” When Naomi doesn’t say anything, quivering in her bedsheets, Deb sighs. “It’s hard to explain what I am exactly. A spirit. Energy.” She gestures down to herself. “Light. I still don’t know the what or the why, exactly, but I’ve gotten the hang of the mechanics over the years. Young ones have a lot harder time controlling their form. They might appear to you as gusts of wind or creaking sounds or a flicker in the mirror or the corner of your eye.”
“Young ones?” Naomi says. “Young—what?”
“Ghosts, Naomi. You already know what I am. I’m a ghost.”
“Or a figment of my imagination.”
“Sure, if that makes you feel better.”
“It doesn’t,” Naomi replies. But she can feel her analytical brain slowly replacing her reptilian one. Which makes her feel a little better. With Deb still in the corner and making no moves to approach, Naomi relaxes slightly. “For the sake of the conversation, we’ll call you a ghost. Named Deb.”
“Correct. Deborah Abrams.”
The name itches a place in Naomi’s brain.
“Beloved mother, aunt, and grandmother,” Deb continues. “Born August 1919, died the day after Christmas seventy-three years later.”
Naomi squints her eyes. “The tombstone with the cookies.”
Deb nods encouragingly. “Spritz cookies. My specialty. Or it was.” She chuckles. “You really made a mess of it.”
“Why are you here?”
“Because you messed up my spritz cookies.”
“I don’t give a damn about cookies. Why are you—I don’t know, what do you call it? Haunting me?”
“Correct. That’s the common vernacular anyway.”
Naomi waits, eyebrows raised.
“I already told you—the cookies. I’m here because of the cookies. I wasn’t kidding,” Deb answers. “You visited my grave, seemingly in a state of mental or emotional turmoil. That left you open—vulnerable. When you came home and made the recipe from my tombstone, that established a connection. Which opened a pathway. Which I followed.”
“To here,” Naomi finishes.
Deb nods.
“To my bedroom?”
“I guess. Like I said before, I still don’t really understand the how and why.”
Naomi untangles herself from the blanket and sits at the end of the bed. Fear still leaves her weak-kneed and jelly-armed, but curiosity has replaced the adrenaline. She wishes, desperately, that she had some of her lab tools with her. Grab a sample of Deb’s—what? Ectoplasm? Light matter? Spirit goo?
Assuming, of course, this isn’t all in her head. Which is far and away still the most likely scenario.
“You mentioned a connection,” Naomi says.
“Yes,” Deb says. “A psychic connection.”
Naomi knows very little about psychic connections and believes in them even less. But from what she can extrapolate from pop culture and some of the weirdo science her college roommate used to thrust upon her (did you know pareidolia is when people see faces in common objects like fruit?), she knows this isn’t good. “That explains why you can hear my thoughts.”
Deb cackles. “Okay, I might have embellished a little before. For the record, ghosts aren’t mind readers. But we are very attuned to people’s emotional states. I don’t know what exactly you’re thinking, but I can feel it.”
For a moment, the two women are silent. If Deb can feel what Naomi is feeling, then she must know. Of Maisie. And Sal. Her grief and terror and loneliness. Of that dark little corner of Naomi’s mind, the one that whispers terrible things to her sometimes.
As if Deb can hear Naomi’s thoughts right now, she says, “I’m sorry, by the way.”
“Sorry?”
“For your daughter. I can only assume it’s why you were in the cemetery.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
Deb scrunches her eyebrows and makes a face that has become all too familiar to Naomi these past few months. Something within her buckles itself tight. A ghost—a dead person! A figment of her imagination!—is giving her the pity treatment right now? Seriously? She has enough of that in the rest of her life—her coworkers who seem afraid to meet her gaze and stare at their lab notebooks when she instructs them. Her sister whose bi-monthly texts are thinly veiled check-ins to make sure Naomi is still alive and semi-functional (and not a puddle of grief on top of your daughter’s grave, her sister’s last text message read). Even the barista at the coffeeshop Naomi used to visit each morning who saw Maisie’s death on the news and told Naomi one too many times, voice sweet and heavy as flavored coffee syrup, “On the house, hon,” until Naomi stopped visiting the café, stopped drinking coffee altogether.
“I wouldn’t assume anything. You know nothing about me,” she says to Deb. “Psychic connection or not.”
Deb, to her credit, says nothing despite waves of Naomi’s liquid grief washing over both of them.
Naomi glances at the clock. Six in the morning. Still early. But she might as well give it a shot. She unplugs her cell phone and dials the number. “It’s me,” she says. “I know it’s early, but can I come over? Yes, everything is fine. I just—I think I need to explain in person. Yeah. Yep. Okay. See you in a few.”
When she ends the call, she unfolds herself from the bed, never taking her eyes off Deb. She slowly pulls a sweatshirt over her nightgown, one arm at a time, then tugs the whole thing over her head and shoulders in one fast motion so her head pops out immediately. She backs up and scrapes a palm along the dresser until her fingers rattle against the car keys.
Deb watches impassively. “You can just ask me not to move, you know.”
“Sure. Okay. Please don’t move,” Naomi says. She walks backwards toward the bedroom door. Her ankle bumps painfully into the corner of the bed, but she doesn’t stop watching Deb.
“Naomi, I’m not going to move. It’s fine.”
She’s made it past the dresser. Past the bed. She’s almost to the door.
“I can tell your ankle is hurting,” Deb says.
“Cause of the psychic connection?”
“Because you hit it really hard.” Deb sounds exasperated. “You know you’re not making sense, right? I can appear and disappear when I like. The fact that I’m still sitting here, visible, should let you know you can trust me. Plus I can’t physically hurt you. I’m completely intangible.” She pokes her hand into and out of the armchair to illustrate her point.
Naomi’s back hits the closed door. “I know nothing about you. You could be tricking me.” She reaches behind for the door handle.
“Wait, actually—before you leave, can you do me a favor?”
Naomi’s hand stills.
“Please feed the cat. He’s going to drive me nuts following me around all day. I’d do it myself,” Deb says, holding out her hands, “but my lack of corporeal form makes it difficult.”
Naomi flings the door open and backs out of the bedroom. When she must round the corner of the hallway and finally take her eyes off Deb, she does so quickly, turning and darting as fast as she can for the front door.
But when she passes the laundry room and sees Jasper sitting beside his food bowl, she skids to a stop, swings around, rips open the bag of cat food, spills it across the floor, sprints hard to the front of the house, through the door, into her car, out of her driveway, away.