When Naomi knocks on the door, she only has a few seconds to pause and consider her appearance: disheveled hair, eye bags, no bra. Her gardening crocs still dirty from last weekend’s weed pulling session, old leggings, a night gown printed with big pink cows and yellow slivers of moon, a ratty college sweatshirt topping it all off. She tries to smooth her hair down, rubs the mascara from beneath her eyes. Her outfit—nothing she can do about that.
The door opens and the shock on the man’s face—oh, that face with its soft jaw and full lips, its constellation of freckles in the corner of an eyebrow and those eyes with the deep-set smile lines, his favorite part of his features he’d told her once—the shock is not entirely unsurprising.
“Hi, Sal,” she greets him.
“What happened?” he asks, leaning over to kiss Naomi’s cheek then stepping back so she can enter. His face remains neutral against Naomi’s sour morning breath.
“Long story,” Naomi says. She takes off her shoes just inside the door and goes to the back of the house where she knows the coffee pot will be percolating.
“We’ve got time,” Sal says, following her, eyebrows knit with concern.
“Coffee first,” she says, pouring them both a cup.
They sit down at the kitchen table where Naomi pulls a half-finished crossword puzzle to her. She glances down at it and scribbles a few letters into empty spaces. “Thank you for letting me come over. I know it’s early.”
“You know you can come anytime,” Sal replies, easing into a chair beside her. “Nice jammies.”
“Ha,” Naomi replies absentmindedly, eyes on the paper.
Sal lets her fill in a few more clues before he gently plucks the pencil from her fingers and sets it down beside her mug. “Naomi.”
She looks at him. Her hands itch to pick up the pencil again. She grasps and ungrasps her coffee cup.
She’s agitated.
“What’s going on?”
“I—I just—” She doesn’t know how far to take this—how much she can risk telling Sal in case he hears ghost and gravestone recipe and tries to check her into a mental ward. He’s already been pushy about Naomi seeing a therapist since Maisie died.
She decides to play it safe. “I’m—seeing someone,” she says.
“Oh.”
When she realizes how that sounds, Naomi rushes to explain. “No, not like that. I mean, I keep seeing someone. A woman.”
“I’m not following. Do you know this woman?”
“Not really.”
“What do you mean you keep seeing her? Is she following you? Are you in trouble?”
Naomi considers for a moment. The ghost woman seemed harmless enough. She didn’t try to hurt Naomi—she’d listened when Naomi asked her to stay seated. Plus—Jesus, she feels ridiculous even thinking it—the ghost seemed, well, nice. A nice ghost. Who cares about cats. “I don’t think I’m in trouble. She just seems…off.”
“When did you start noticing her around?”
Naomi thinks. “I guess yesterday at the cemetery.”
And like that—Naomi has tossed a live grenade casually between them. Sal’s eyes drop. He shifts uncomfortably.
“I’m not here to yell at you about not visiting, Sal,” Naomi says gently. “I just need someone to talk to.” She puts her face into her hands and squeezes her temples. The insides of her eyelids feel like worn sandpaper. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come. I’m exhausted. It’s probably nothing.”
Just the spirit of a dead woman hanging out in her bedroom. Or the beginning of a complete mental breakdown. No big deal.
Sal leans over and squeezes Naomi’s shoulder. “I’m glad you came.” He leaves his hand there until Naomi stiffens and sits up. He sits up, too, a flicker of hurt smoothing quickly away when he says, “You’ve been under a lot of stress. How have you been sleeping?”
Naomi rolls her eyes. “Probably about as well as you.”
“How’s work?”
She waves a hand. “Same old. You?”
“Same.”
They sip coffee for a few moments. The silence should be awkward—her and Sal’s relationship has been more than a little rocky since Maisie died. The loss of their daughter and their grief that followed, as individualized and ingrained as their thumbprints, sharpened the differences between them: Naomi and her efficiency, her task-orientation, her “coldness.” Sal and his looping grief, the way he always wants to talk, talk, talk—but still has yet to visit Maisie’s grave. Still has yet to do anything about it.
The silence should be awkward—but it’s not. Ever since Sal moved to an apartment, they’ve been allowed to carry out their grief in their own ways. Which means they can tolerate the other person again. They can call at any hour and share a cup of coffee in their pajamas, undeodoranted, unbrushed, their most crude and private selves. They can ask about the other’s work, offer sincere sympathy for the exhaustion, the grief, the drain that life has become. They are a source of comfort for the other. The person they turn to in a moment of crisis. The person for whom their arms ache to hold in the night.
But only tentatively, conditionally. Only because they are not together to see the other fall apart over and over again.
After a while, Naomi tugs the crossword to her and reads aloud the next clue. “Become aware of.”
Sal thinks for a moment. “Realize?”
Naomi shakes her head. “Six letters. Starts with n.”
“Notice?”
“Bingo.” She reads the next clue. “Oatmeal Crème Pies are her specialty.”
“Little Debbie,” Sal answers.
Naomi starts to scribble in the answer then pauses. “Wait,” she says. “What if I know a name? I have a picture of the woman’s grave…um, the one she was visiting.”
Sal perks up. He works at the library. Clues like these are like little pearls on a long string. Treasure. People come to him with questions about old columns from newspapers that aren’t in circulation anymore or with the vaguest idea of so-and-so born in such-and-such town who used to teach at the local elementary school. Once, a man had come in searching for the illustrator of a version of Aesop’s fables he’d had as a boy. After scouring the internet high and low, Sal had tracked down not only the illustrator—Milo Winter, whose highly stylized cartoons were equal parts dark and whimsical—but also found a reprint of the 1919 copy at one of the library’s branches. He’d ordered it for the man and had it ready to pick up the next day.
It’s what he does best. Solving riddles. Putting together unlikely clues. Providing answers for even the most difficult of questions.
He sits back, a plan already forming in his head. “We could start by running a search on our digital archives. There might be an old obit floating around. And if that doesn’t pan out, The Daily donated their microfilms a while back. They’d be worth exploring, although that would take some time. If push comes to shove, there’s always City Hall—their records go back a lot longer than ours. They usually take forever with requests, but I know how to get them to talk.” He winks at Naomi.
Naomi smiles. “My hero.”
For a moment, Naomi pictures the morning stretching lazily in front of her. They’ll finish their coffee and the crossword. Naomi will get a shower and borrow one of Sal’s oversized flannels to wear over her leggings. They’ll spend the morning among dusty books and in darkly lit aisles. Their hands might briefly brush the other’s, breath mingling over the small screen of the microfilm reader.
Sal pats her knee before he stands up, and Naomi must stop herself from recoiling.
Except nothing is familiar anymore, is it?
Sal lives in an apartment fifteen minutes away. He drinks out of plain white coffee cups from a box store down the road and uses laundry detergent that smells vaguely metallic.
A ghost woke Naomi in the middle of the night. And now, apparently, won’t leave.
Her daughter is dead. Maisie is dead.
And as if that isn’t horrible enough: the puzzle that Sal has yet to solve, the thing that Naomi carries in her heart like a dark, heavy stone, the truth that is secretly ripping Sal and Naomi apart—Naomi had known her daughter was dying.
But she didn’t do anything to stop it.
This is super great!