Tuesday tapped the end of her pen against her teeth.
This could be real. It was bonkers, sure, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t also legally plausible.
She minimized the database window and Pryce reappeared before her on the open web tab, smiling out of the photo that accompanied his Mental Floss profile. He was wearing a bowler and peering through Lizzie Borden’s pince-nez at the photographer with a terrific grin. I would have liked you, she thought. I would have liked you a lot, and I only just missed you.
Pryce had been spooky, too. He had been plumbing the world for madness, perversity, and sensation. But also: possibility, strangeness. In searching the darkness, he was chasing the mysteries of life. Now he was passing the search along, handing it off like a baton.
She envied him a little. She’d chased plenty of things in her life – grades, her own phone line, diplomas, sex, the city, jobs, apartments, new jobs, better jobs, better sex, alcohol, different jobs, different apartments – but somewhere around thirty, she had looked around and realized she’d caught the one thing, all her life, she’d been searching for the hardest: a life on her own terms. For the past three years, she hadn’t moved. She was paying her rent and her bills, chipping away at her student loans. She hung out with Dex sometimes, she tutored her neighbor Dorry, she saw her parents and her brother and sister-in-law and her niece every few weeks for dinner. It wasn’t a bad life, not in the least. Tuesday was keenly aware that she had much to be objectively grateful for, and she was. But it was a life without mystery. It was a life without an organizing hunger, and it was slightly surprising – though maybe it shouldn’t have been – that the reward for achieving one’s goals wasn’t total satisfaction. It was a new, vague itch. For something else, something unknown and as yet unnamable.
Tuesday was bored.
And now she—
She wanted to raise her hand.
She wanted that baton.
For Dorry Bones, Thursday nights were Tuesday nights.
Tuesday was her neighbor. Tuesday was the coolest f—ing person Dorry had ever met.
Two years ago, after Dorry’s mother died and her father had to sell the house and they moved into the apartment, Dorry had started seeing a tall, pale woman who wore only black. Black T-shirts. Black sweaters. Black pants and sneakers and jeans that were technically blue but so dark they looked black. Her hair was the color of black coffee. She appeared and disappeared and reappeared again: Turning her key in a mailbox. Holding the front door. Leaving the laundry room. Once, in her pajamas – also black, dotted with tiny skulls – on the front lawn after the building’s smoke alarm went off at two in the morning. The woman in black came and went and smiled a small smile at Dorry but never spoke.
Their apartment building was the kind of place that would be incomplete without a ghost or two. It was old and brick, four floors high, and wrapped like a horseshoe around a small green courtyard with pink and purple impatiens and a black lamppost in the center like in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Some nights Dorry would lie awake thinking about all the other people eating and talking and having sex right next to her, right below her, right beside her and above her, right now, and all the other people who had eaten and talked and had sex in this one giant building for decades. It gave her the same fluttery feeling she got when she stood on the edge of the ocean, like that time (the last time) Mom took her to the wharf in Salem: like she was the tiniest part of something vast and old, something that had been around a long time before her and would keep rolling in and out long after she was gone. It made Dorry feel, for a second, like she was okay, and that the things in her life she couldn’t control – which was basically all of it – weren’t her fault. Because no one ever could control the sea.
They were supposed to have a city apartment for only a little while, to have what Dad called “options” and “flexibility.” That’s why he rented in Somerville instead of someplace out on the commuter rail; he could justify the expense if it was only temporary. Her dad worked in a lab at MIT, and it was super-easy for him to take the bus to work, which Dorry suspected was the real reason they rented in the city – he had never learned to drive, and never would, now, because of the accident. But she’d heard him say on the phone to Gram that it wasn’t any cheaper than the house, thanks to the Gentrifying Hipsters. Her dad had a problem with the Gentrifying Hipsters. They brought a “plague of cocktail and artisanal-olive bars,” restaurants with mac and cheese made from cheeses that sounded like characters from The Hunger Games, stores that sold actual records, and lots of friendly people with small dogs and fun hair. Dorry could see her dad’s point – artisanal donuts were kind of pushing it – but she still liked it. And she especially liked the city’s buses and trains and the subway, because she didn’t want to learn to drive either, or move again, ever.
She wanted to stick around and haunt this place like the woman in black.
She knew the woman wasn’t really a ghost. Ghosts, real ghosts, were a different thing. Dorry was old enough to know she wasn’t supposed to believe in ghosts – and she didn’t believe in them that way, in white sheets and clanking chains, like a kid. Dorry wasn’t a kid. She was in ninth grade. She’d turned fourteen in August. She’d gotten her period a year and a half ago, she’d kissed someone (Wade Spiegel, who maybe would be her boyfriend if he hadn’t moved to Ohio), she’d been wearing a bra since she was eleven, and for God’s sake, the quickest route out of childhood was a dead parent, and she had that locked down. Now she believed in ghosts like a grown-up. Like a scientist. She believed in cold spots and strange lights and electromagnetic anomalies that defied explanation. She couldn’t help it. Ever since the accident, it was the only way to believe she might see her mom again. Without, like, dying herself.
She officially met Tuesday on a lame gray Thursday during her first Somerville March. School had been whatever. She didn’t hate it, but she didn’t love it either. Leaving her old school felt like escaping. Ever since it had happened, they’d all been watching her, like she was a pathetic puppy, maybe with one eye and a limp. It was a relief to be the new kid, the half-Asian girl (her mom was Chinese; her dad was Jewish) who kept to herself and wasn’t even on Facebook. By spring, her new-kid cool had faded to general disinterest. And the disinterest was totally mutual. She’d rather hunt around for every last bite of information she could find about ghosts. Sightings. Famous hauntings. Modern methods of detection. Contact.
But that Thursday she’d been looking forward to delivery from Café Kiraz (they actually delivered frozen yogurt; reason number eight thousand why living in the city was better than stupid old Haverhill) with Dad, and watching his Seinfeld DVDs. If they were watching something, then they didn’t have to talk. About anything, but especially the accident and Mom and the fact that her dad was spending more and more time not at home. At least watching Seinfeld was a way for them to still be together, in the same room, without her father constantly clearing his throat like he was about to announce something. Sometimes Dorry worried that she was the reason her father was staying long hours at work, not that he’d lost track of time or whatever he was working on was so important, his usual excuses. Dorry was always in the apartment when she wasn’t at school; his office at work was the only place her father could be alone. And he wanted to be alone. And the fact that Dorry didn’t want to be alone apparently wasn’t that important to him.
That Thursday, he called from the lab and said he’d be late. Really late.
“There’s a pot pie and some Amy’s enchiladas in the freezer. And maybe a pizza?” He sounded exhausted. She wondered if he’d eaten lunch. He was probably going to drink a lot of coffee and call it dinner. “Does that sound okay, Dor?”
Not really. But