Stephanie and Tiffany sat at Mom’s dinner table picking over the remains of take-out Asian of the not-so-bad variety. The fortune cookies had been cracked open and the fortunes read aloud. Chop sticks were still stuck in rice smeared with orange stuff. A few strips of Mongolian beef waited to be claimed that Stephanie had her eye on. She had grown up in a home where throwing out vegetables was not a capital crime, but wasting meat was.
They had their phones out and going, providing moment-by-moment coverage of the ghost that is not — but could be. Any minute now, they reported, Tiffany would surely feel those magnetic shivers and hear that roaring train, and Vance would be here, throwing books across the room and bearing messages from another world, and they were on hand to transmit them. Who knows? Maybe they’d even get some goodies out of him. Go Fund Me will not be far behind, and already Mom is trying to figure out how to head off Tiffany’s only-childness, the soft entitlement and awkward cluelessness that often lands her in victimhood and Sandra back in her hero’s cape, which needed to be hung up now or she will be micromanaging Tiffany forever.
Naturally the closer a ghost attack seems, the more hits they get, luring Stephanie into bringing in the drugs to rev things up.
Tiffany is not good with drugs. She often gets in trouble. It is chick drinks for her, and the ready conviviality of the bar scene. That is why they are going to trendy young Williamsburg. They want to get a little more style by osmosis in the halo of Tiffany’s career with the degree from Rutgers. It is beyond what Stephanie could ever have with her certificate in cosmetology and this whole tag-along from Bayonne business was suddenly seeming wrong, with the apartment not coming in.
Tiffany was not superstitious, but she did look for signs, and this was a big one. Were they aiming too high with Williamsburg?
Or was it Stephanie who is only right when she gets hard with her psychics and her whatever else?
There is a price to pay for being catered to, but Tiffany has been catered to her entire life and can’t quite cut the apron strings, so Stephanie it is, and the glamor of her Cuban Goth club.
Mom doesn’t know exactly where this is going, nor does she know how bad things can get with the drugs — though she senses, from how her own body is with quaaludes.
“It’s been a week and a half since Tiffany saw the ghost, and she is still experiencing after-effects.”
“It’s like shivers all over me.”
“Do you go blank?”
“I can feel him. I know what he’s like. I know exactly what he’s like.”
“He’s been dead a hundred years.”
“No. No. He is not dead. He is there.”
“Girls, do we have to do this at three in the morning?” asked Mom.
“I can feel him. Can’t you feel him?”
“I don’t feel him. I never feel him.”
“I think he’s here.”
“He’s not supposed to be here. He can only live at the Club. It’s a registered haunted site.”
Mom got up and went into the spare bedroom, aimlessly. This is not how parenting should be when a child is twenty-three. Mom has smoked too many cigarettes for even her own standards, so many that her persistent sore throat is so, so sore and she senses in the clarity of the latest of nights and the shimmering chirping of summer crickets and the timeless stillness of her holy same house that the smoking will catch up with her in the end.
By this time Mom was clear about Father Jaime’s wisdom on the whole business of Tiffany’s lost dorm year, and wished she could take back the kitchen remodel that happened when Tiffy went ahead and lived at home, graduating community college, and going on to bigger and better things like her major in communications at Rutgers that she had never even liked. This whole ghost thing reeked of classic dorm catastrophe, and it would have been fine as a giant pile of jello shots at eighteen, and far away from the logical and stalwart power of her mother, but now it was teetering on the brink, and Sandra could feel her entire life slipping into crap.
She wanted to rest but the tempest of Twitter was still raging out there, and she knew she needed to keep it real for the sake of her teaching job, if nothing else.
For some reason, Sandra had updated the entire house except for this room, in dusky rose, with her grandparents’ old dresser and vanity alongside a regular plush modern bed. A plaster statuette of the Virgin graced the vanity, with a pink scented votive candle so old the top was covered in a perpetual dust. For some reason, Sandra picked up the book of matches and fired it up, just for old time’s sake.
There was a snap in the air that real Catholics recognize as “on,” at which Sandra popped up and ran into the other room.
“I can hear voices now.”
“Is it him?”
“Sometimes it is, but sometimes it’s these terrible voices telling me how stupid I am and how wrong. I’m just wrong.”
“This is when the books are in the air? The ghost throws books.”
“No. It’s just kind of whispering. This constant murmur.”
“Is it Vance?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think it’s other people. I think it’s the people around me. This whole ghost thing has made me psychic. I didn’t used to be psychic. I’m psychic now.”
Suddenly Tiffany’s head seemed to be going flat, and she adopted the plaintive yowl of the schizophrenic whose diagnosis has been plastered on everyone’s mental billboard in the county and is now bereft of the social funds to be believed for those very real voices for the fiftieth time. Stephanie suddenly dropped her phone, and as she went to pick it up and record this new and fascinating development, Sandra grabbed the phone and threw it across the room. Stephanie reared up dumbfounded.
“Mrs. Stichler!”
“Time to go to bed, girls.” Tiffany checked in with her mother for a second then got up.
“It’s not a school night,” Stephanie challenged.
“I’m tired,” pronounced Tiffany as she left the table and headed for her pretty pink childhood room.
“You’re welcome to the guest room, or you can take an Uber home. I’ll pay for it,” said Sandra, smoothly.
Stephanie got up and circled the room.
“Uber it is,” ordering up the child’s ride.
“I need a smoke,” said Stephanie.
“Your Uber will be here in 4 minutes. It is Sergei from Romania. He is driving a white Honda Accord. If you need the license plate, I’ve got it.”
“It’s all right,” Stephanie said, stepping out the door.
As Sandra lay in bed, unable to sleep for an hour after all the commotion, it dawned on her that her daughter’s best friend was missing something. We usually think of psychopaths as cutting up baby rabbits, but that is not how this was. It was a lack of concern in the face of something that should be very concerning and a lack of comprehension of real consequences. If Tiffany goes insane, Stephanie will not ever really be okay again. Not in a big whole way where the world is smooth and powerful. She will simply be there trying to find something in common with the people she hangs out with while a line goes dead in her soul.
You can’t replace your best friend from second grade if she has been with you your entire life. How Sandra let this friendship go on all this time is now beyond her. That is what Father Jaime meant by Tiffany not going away to college.
They should have broken up at high school graduation.
