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18.

Lily’s Ghost

She doesn’t know why she’s attracted to him. He’s not bad-looking, he’s just a big guy with small-guy energy. Nervous energy. He’s combustible, she feels it.

The cocktail menu is long, so she orders a glass of wine. She sits in the half-moon of a banquet bench at a faux-marble table and waits for the pig-man—Chris! Christ, Lily, don’t call him a pig to his face—to set up a tab.

“What’d you get?” she asks. He’s carrying a Marie Antoinette coupe.

“A French 75,” he says. “Bartender called it a ‘Freedom 76’ though.”

They talk about Andonia, this odd place in the middle of the country, and he fidgets his fingers, tears his cocktail napkin.

“Actually, Lebanon, Kansas, is the middle of the country,” Chris says. “Contiguous forty-eight at least. I looked it up. We’re about five hundred miles east of dead center. But that’s not that far.”

He asks why Lily is in Andonia, and she explains away her sister and Alistair and Australian brother-in-law in a couple sentences. But why is he here? She recognizes an accent, Northeast?

“I’m from Massachusetts,” he says.

“I knew it. I went to college in Amherst.”

“I’m from North Shore,” he says. “Gloucester.”

Glawstuh, he says. A port town. Not the magical forest she had first envisioned.

“So why didn’t you go to medical school closer to home?”

“This was the only one I got into.” His MCAT score was low, he tells her. He was surprised he got in anywhere. “So I ‘landed in Andonia’ as they say, and now, I dunno…. I guess I’m here.”

She finishes her glass of wine, asks him to get her another one. She watches him closely at the bar. He takes out a bottle of pills, and she worries he is trying to roofie her. Instead he pops a pill himself and swallows it dry.

“Viagra?” she asks when he places the wine down.

“Ha, no,” he says. His face is hopeful but dubious. “Ritalin, actually.”

“Is that why I could feel your heart beating in your fingers earlier?” His hand had been warm and pulsing as he examined her. It was exciting. “Or were you just happy to see me?”

“She’s got jokes,” he says, but his laugh is forced, sad.

Lily is hitting on him, but she can see he doesn’t believe it’s real.

She leans into him, flicks her hair. She wants his energy to change. She wants him to know it’s real, and she wants him to kiss her. She drinks her wine too eagerly. She wants a gin martini. She wants to leave Andonia. She wants to run off to the forest with him, back to the witch’s hut. If there was a witch that could turn Lily into an animal, she would like to be a bird, something soft but strong. A finch. How would a finch and a pig work out?

He leans in now too, puts his face close to hers. If he kisses her, she will get to see him naked. She needs to know if he has a curly tail. Because she wants to know if the world is more than the parts we can see. She wants to prove her mother and sister wrong, but maybe they’re right. She wants to know if she really is losing grip on reality.

“Why did you come here,” he asks again. “You’re too pretty to be here. Too cool. Why did you leave San Francisco?”

“The truth is complicated,” she says conspiratorially. “But here it is. I wasn’t in San Francisco anymore. I was living at my mom’s in Marin. I was working as an after-school dance instructor, getting paid forty dollars a day. The children were brats, and my boss sucked. She was rarely around, but when she was, she would bully me. She would completely embarrass me in front of these kids by calling me an idiot or saying I was messing up my dance moves, or she was outside on her phone talking to someone in French and smoking cigarettes, and I’d be left alone with the kids for the full two-hour program. She always left at five on the dot whether or not the kids had been picked up, and she would expect me, who was not getting compensated for overtime, to wait until the parents came. That is the base of the problem, and it only gets worse because,” she finishes her wine before she finishes her sentence, “then my friend Silvia died.”

Chris smiles in a way to let her know she can continue talking, that he is listening, and he will not interrupt her with his own horrid life tale. But that’s not enough.

“I’m going to need you to get me a gin martini—dry with a twist—if I’m going to finish this story,” she says. He nods and heads to the bar.

She studies the dregs of her wine glass. Why is she trusting him so wholly with her story? There is something magical about him, she is sure.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” he says when he returns with her martini.

“It was a drug overdose,” Lily continues. “Silvia. She’d been depressed. Her girlfriend broke up with her. The girlfriend had moved out, leaving Silvia with the full rent. It was, like, a nice one-bedroom in Bernal Heights. The girlfriend was a trust-fund girl with an art job and good drug dealers. She didn’t like me. It had created a rift in my friendship. So Silvia was going to have to give up her place, and she had nowhere to stay. Her parents had put her in gay conversion therapy when she was seventeen, so she obviously couldn’t go home. And Silvia was kind of a mess before the breakup. She had alienated a lot of friends because, I don’t know, she and her girlfriend had just become party monsters and were doing a lot of drugs and hanging out with like, whatever, not the wrong crowd, just like the people who are your temporary friends, you know? When Silvia texted me it was for the first time in months. She said, haha, long time no talk, anyway, bitch left me and I won’t have a home soon haha. In retrospect, I see she was asking to stay with me and my mom. But I was reading the text while I was at work, and my boss yelled at me like ‘Your generation and phones, engage the children, phone away!’ so I tossed the phone in my bag, and by the end of the class I’d forgotten to respond. A couple days later,” Lily says, “Silvia was found dead on the kitchen floor by a real estate agent who was showing the place.”

Silvia’s death deepened Lily’s own depression, she tells Chris. “I was already a drinker, but I began drinking heavily on weeknights. I was guilty, obviously. I kept thinking, if I had responded to the text, she’d have had a fighting chance. And I drank the guilt away. My job started every day at two p.m., so I could sleep off the hangover and go out after work again.”

“It’s not my place to say,” Chris says, “but it’s not your fault.”

“Thank you. Yes. And logically I knew it wasn’t my fault,” Lily says, “but guilt doesn’t need logic to thrive, and logic really stepped out the door about a month after Silvia died.”

Lily drinks her martini down in a gulp because the story she is about to tell Chris is what got her banished to Andonia.

“Almost a month after she died, Silvia came to me. As a ghost,” Lily says. “I was hungover. I went to a movie, a matinee. My mom’s town has an art house theater that shows classic films, and I went to see Antonioni’s L’Avventura. I was sitting in the back of the theater, under the projection room. I could hear the film reel the entire time I was in there, like it was on a loop and clicking, and it had this easy, beautiful rhythm to it. The best way I could put it is I fell into a trance. This is me trying to find logic. I’m in the back of this old, empty theater, listening consciously or not to this rhythmic hum-and-click above my head, and I’m sitting in the dark, alone, with only this sad black-and-white movie. I walked out of the theater without really remembering anything about the movie other than it was sad and it was about a missing girl. I felt I had been hypnotized. So I came out of the theater and I walked along the main road downtown in kind of a daze and I head over to Safeway where I run into my boss.

“‘You look absolutely terrible,’ my boss said to me. I was standing in front of the premade sushi. This awful woman with her caftan and her expensive sculptural jewelry is looking at me, through me, and she clearly sees I’m in a state and she says You look absolutely terrible. Then in the next breath she says, ‘I’m so glad I ran into you you need to come in early to clean up before the students get there I tried calling you but it went straight to your message and your voice mailbox is full you should delete your messages.’

“So she sees I’m in a state and starts demanding things of me, and my only response to her is Okay yes no problem because I don’t know how to stand up to this woman, and then there she was. Silvia was leaning against the fish counter just behind my boss. She was looking at king crab legs and salmon fillets and then she looked up from the counter and said,

“‘You should tell this bitch to shut the fuck up.’”

“And did you?” Chris asks.

“No,” she says. “I broke down crying. I was a wet, soppy mess on the floor of the grocery store, and my boss said, ‘Don’t come in today if that’s how you’re going to act,’ then she walked away. Silvia, her ghost, walked up to me, and she said, ‘You really should have told that bitch to shut the fuck up.’ And I said, ‘You’re not real. You’re dead. This is not real.’ I left Safeway, and Silvia—the ghost of Silvia—followed me. She walked with me back to my mom’s house. She came with me out to the bar. She told me she knows I’m destined for something. She watched me drink myself into an oblivion. I blacked out and she was gone. I came to at home and my mother was standing over me. Two days later my sister calls, tells me she’ll buy me a flight out here. My friend Silvia died and came to me as a ghost, and that’s how I landed in Andonia.”

“I’m sorry,” Chris says. He’s fidgeting with the stem of his glass.

“I’ve been here three months. This is the longest conversation I’ve had with anyone outside of my sister in three months.”

“Now I’m definitely sorry,” he says, laughing. “I’m such a waste of conversation.”

“You have to stop that,” she says. She notices his cocktail napkin is torn into fifty pieces.

“What?”

“Stop with the self-deprecation,” she says. “Stop being so small, big guy.”

“What?”

She wants him to tell her she is unstable, not that she believes in stability anymore. She no longer lives in a world of reason. She knows there is so much more than what we can see. She knows that from his semi-expert medical standpoint, he would say the ghost wasn’t real, that it was a trick of grief, a hallucination of depression. She wants to tell him that he’s wrong, that he’s blind and she has one eye. The ghost was real, and maybe so was the witch who made him. She gets to live in a world where fairy tales and ghost stories are true. She gets to believe what she wants to believe.

“Let’s get out of here,” she says. “I like you, and I want to see you naked.”

 

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PHILIP ANDERSON is a writer of fiction and criticism. His writing has appeared in Story, LIT, Archways, Carla, and other places. He has received fellowships from Lighthouse Works, Millay Arts, Lit Fest, and Columbia University. He lives with his husband and his two cats in Los Angeles, where he is currently at work on a satirical novel about art school. Find him on Instagram @philipxanderson.

 

Featured image by Emelie Mano, courtesy of Discover New Art.