Work Text:
My mom was a pain in the ass while she was alive, so it seemed to stand to reason that she’d be a pain in the ass dead, too.
It started with my cat. Mireille’s usually like a fifteen-pound Golden Retriever: No sooner do I unlock the front door to my apartment than she’s running up to the door in full voice, chastising me for leaving her alone all day, demanding food (never mind that I’ve fed her only in the mornings for the entire six years that I’ve had her), and winding around my ankles. If it takes me a minute to find my keys or juggle everything I’m carrying before I go inside, she starts the meowing preemptively, in case I forget that she might be there and desperately abused, neglected, oppressed, and generally mistreated by the world, or at least by me.
Then one day in mid-February (the second anniversary of my mother's death, though I didn’t put it together at the time), I came home to find Mireille cowering under the couch. I didn’t think much of it: She’s neurotic like all cats, and I figured she must have just heard a loud noise from outside or something. But she couldn't be coaxed out, not even when I went to bed (typically her signal to come and sit on my back), and she didn’t emerge until the next morning, reluctantly, when I put food in her dish. (Certain things are inarguable even to a traumatized cat.) It kept happening for the next week, and I was perplexed and a little concerned, but what was I going to do, take her to a pet shrink?
Then I started seeing the shadow.
It was indistinct at first, about my height (though variable, depending on how strongly it was projecting), vaguely human-shaped. The first time, I saw it briefly out of the corner of my eye, and I resolved to get more sleep at night: My chronic late bedtimes (I usually ran on three or four hours of sleep) were obviously having more drastic effects than I’d guessed.
The shadow became stronger the next day.
It was around ten at night, and I’d just walked in from my weekly volunteer gig. I still had my coat on and my bag slung over my shoulder, and Mireille, of course, was under the sofa. I set my bag down on the chair and made kissing noises at Mireille (which she ignored), and my eye happened to fall on the blank space of wall on the other side of the room.
The shadow was dark, clear, a negative space in the middle of my halogen-lit living room. Its shape was obviously human, even pretty clearly female. It didn’t move, but I felt, strongly, that I was being watched.
I screamed and threw my bag at it, and it disappeared.
My family has a history of mental illness—most acutely and dramatically represented in my mother, who was severely schizophrenic her whole life. Once I hit about twenty-five and wasn’t crazy, I figured I was probably safe. (The rest of the family drew the same conclusion, separately, but of course no one said out loud that they’d been watching for it.) I sat down on my living room floor, still in my coat and my BCBG boots, and buried my head in my hands. Everything I’d done—gotten away from my mom’s illness and abuse, put myself through college, found a job with a fashion magazine, been accepted into Columbia’s MBA program for next fall—all of it was meaningless if I was just going to spend the rest of my life being schizophrenic. Oh, sure, they say it can be done, but let me tell you, I watched someone try, and I’d rather die than live like that.
I have a shrink, but because I get depressed, not because I randomly see things in my living room that aren’t there. I called the next morning and canceled that day’s appointment, because what was I going to say? “I’m fine today, Dr. Shrink, thanks for asking. The humanoid hallucination in my living room says to say hi.”
My best friend, Kat, lives two floors down from me—we used to be roommates, and then she moved to her own apartment down the hall and I got another roommate (Janine); then I moved into my own apartment two stories up, and Kat moved in with Janine. New York works like that a lot of the time. Anyway, if there was anybody I’d tell about seeing bizarre inexplicable shit in my living room, it’d be Kat, but it’s hard to say even to your best friend, "So I think I might be totally losing my shit like my mom did. Which antipsychotic do you think matches my outfit best?”
I kept seeing the shadow around my apartment: against my closet door in the morning, in the corner of the kitchen when I was taking my vitamins (being crazy is no reason to risk osteoporosis or a folic acid deficiency), along the walls in the living room, in front of my bookcases (organized with pride in Library of Congress order), at the side of the hallway when I’d come in or leave. Of course, I was sleeping even less than usual—one or two hours a night instead of three or four—and since I did notice that one place I never saw the shadow was at the office, I started working even more insane hours than usual. (I was caught up for the first time in a year. My boss and our production guy, who yells at me about deadlines and my violation of same on a near-daily basis, were in shock.)
Then two things happened.
The first was this: One morning, after a luxurious two hours of sleep and no shadow the night before, I walked into the kitchen to see the familiar amorphous dark shape by the fridge—but looking considerably less amorphous today. I couldn’t quite make out features, but I could make out height (some as my own), build (skinnier than me, always), hair (even curlier than mine). There was that knowledge, again, that I was being watched.
There was also the knowledge that I knew not just what but who was watching me.
I didn’t like to look too closely at the shadow—really, does anybody like to examine their hallucinations in detail?—but the feeling of familiarity was too strong not to investigate. I had a sick feeling what this was going to be, but I had to know—as much as I wanted to look away, I couldn’t look away, not now.
Not only was I going crazy like my mother—I was hallucinating her ghost.
There’s a dirty-old-man bar in my neighborhood that opens at 7:30 a.m. In six years of living a block away from it, I’d never been inside, because, hey, not a dirty old man. That morning, however, very calmly, I gathered my things, kissed Mireille on her furry little head, left my apartment, and had two gin-and-tonics for breakfast. The bartender stared. I ignored him.
The shadow faded in and out, like it had been for a while, but now I knew who it was. I stopped going to Dr. Shrink at all, because I couldn’t keep lying about this but I wasn’t about to tell him. I took a pillow and a throw blanket into my office and started sleeping there when I couldn’t find an excuse to stay over with Kat and Janine, or when I’d already nodded off on their couch once that week. I brought changes of clothes with me and showered at the gym. I went to my GP, complained of insomnia, and got an Ambien prescription for the nights when I absolutely had to stay at home—I couldn’t abandon Mireille, after all. The circles under my eyes went from “tired” to “got in a street brawl,” so I went to the samples closet at work and found some MAC cover-up. It was invented as stage makeup, so it covers absolutely everything, and I was able to make myself look kind of like a normal person.
I started talking to the shadow—not very much, just little things like “I wish you would go away” and “I never wanted to be crazy” and “why did you have me in the first place, you knew you were sick.” It never answered. I’m not sure whether or not I wanted it to.
Then the second thing happened, which is probably the only reason I’m not in an institution now.
I’d spent the previous night at work, curled up in my ergonomic chair, and I knew I needed to get home and pay some attention to Mireille. I have an auto-feeder, which previously I’d only used when I went out of town, but which was now I fed her almost all the time. I petted her, changed her litter, refreshed the food and water, and then went to lay out my clothes for the next day and find something to read on the train, if I managed not to fall asleep during my morning commute. I find Sharon Shinn entertaining and comforting, so I went to look for Summers at Castle Auburn for a reread...and it wasn’t there. Neither were Mystic and Rider, or Reader and Raelynx, or even the Angelica series. I went for Harry Potter instead—also not there. What the hell? I stepped back, and it was then that I realized my books had been moved around.
Reorganized.
According to the Dewey Decimal System.
There's “insane,” and then there's just “not fucking happening in this lifetime.” Hallucinations? Fine. Self-destructive behavior? I’ve certainly engaged in it. Recategorizing my books according to an outdated method that’s an abomination against all that is logical and good? Not even if you paid me. Not even if I had a psychotic break. Maybe (and that’s a big maybe) if you held a gun to my head, but only because I could put them back afterwards.
Okay, so, on the plus side, not crazy. On the minus side, ghost of my pain-in-the-ass mother haunting my place.
The shadow wasn’t visible, but I just bet that she was lurking somewhere, pointing a noncorporeal finger and laughing. “I fucking hate Dewey!” I yelled.
The apartment was just as quiet as it had been before, no noise but a siren outside and what sounded like somebody moving a piano upstairs. You know, quiet by New York standards.
“I’m going to move them all back!” I went on.
Still no response.
“You were a crazy bitch!”
Ah, now, a little bit of darkening in that corner of the living room. She never did like being called crazy.
“That’s right, you were fucking nuts! And death didn’t do you any favors, did it?”
Darker, and suddenly the air was cold. It occurred to me that yelling insults at the apparently kinetic ghost of my emotionally disturbed mother was maybe not the best idea. Except that I’d never been good at keeping my temper under control when she was involved.
“Yeah, that’s right—you’re still a crazy bitch! I don’t even know why you’re here, except that I guess you can’t deal with the idea of the rest of us going on without you, or maybe you can’t move on because you were too much of an asshole during your lifetime and so now you have to get your kicks by scaring my cat and rearranging my fantasy novels—”
That was when the kitchen knives, all twelve of them, detached themselves from the block, slid from their places in the wood, and spun point-up. Then they spun again. This time they were pointed at me.
I was too scared to scream. I didn’t wait for them to move any more. I grabbed Mireille and ran out of the apartment. By the time I’d gotten up two flights of stairs, I’d remembered how to scream—I was sobbing and pounding on the door so loudly that Janine had a baseball bat in her hand when she answered. I spent the night huddled in a corner of Kat’s room, shaking, holding onto Mireille even when she squirmed and growled, while Kat and Janine patrolled the hallway with a Bible, the Koran, some choice excerpts from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a rosary, a crucifix, and, of course, the baseball bat.
In the morning, I was still sitting there. Janine had to go to class, but Kat called in sick to work and, for the first time during my entire tenure with Elle, so did I. Kat got Mireille some tuna, then came back in and slumped down next to me against the wall. “I thought it was just press deadlines,” she said, “not your lunatic mother showing up from the afterlife. Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”
“What the hell was I going to say? It makes me sound crazy, too.”
“Dude, the day you do the Dewey is—well, OK, I can’t say ‘the day the Sox win the World Series’ anymore, because that actually happened.”
“The day the Cubs win the World Series,” I suggested.
“Right. Never gonna happen. Seriously, I wouldn’t have thought you were nuts.” I looked at Kat skeptically, and she shrugged. “Wacky shit goes down in this world, but I just don’t see that happening. The real issue is how we get her out of there.”
“Holy water? Or is that just for demons?”
“Your mom was Catholic. She’d just drink it right up.”
We sat there for a while in contemplation. Mireille, breath redolent of tuna fish, sashayed back into the room and stretched across both of our laps.
After a while, Kat said, “Well, if we did go the Catholic route, Arnesto’s pretty involved with his church.” Arnesto lived next door with his bright-eyed seven-year-old, a dead ringer for Dora the Explorer, lacking only a monkey. “He could probably get you a monsignor or five to come layeth the smackdown.”
We didn’t even need to tell him the whole story—just the ghost part, not the insane-dead-mother part—before he said he could do better than a priest: He could get us demon hunters.
I was a little fuzzy on how it all worked, but apparently at some point there had been some kind of exorcism issue involving a member of Arnesto’s congregation. The demon had gotten comfy in its new place and proceeded to kick the asses of the priest, the monsignor, the bishop, and the archbishop who had all tried to send it back where it belonged. So they had called in for reinforcements, and the reinforcements had come, and the demon had split faster than Republican at a gay bar when somebody’s got a camera.
I was raised Catholic, and I watched The Exorcist one Halloween back in high school. I was expecting some kind of badass superpriest.
I got two guys in flannel.
They rang the bell, Kat buzzed them up, and I blurted out, “You’re the demon hunters?”
They were cute. They just sort of looked like they belonged in Seattle circa 1993. Which does happen to tie with the sharp three-piece suits of the 1930s as my favorite era of twentieth-century male dress, don’t get me wrong; I just wasn’t sure what they could do about my undesirable family reunion.
Kat let them in, gave them some beer that she stole from Janine, and installed them on the living room couch. One was tall and the other was taller, like basketball-player height. In anything but a high-ceilinged prewar building, he’d probably have had to duck his head in the doorways. They introduced themselves as Dean (tall) and Sam (taller), and we introduced ourselves as Kat and me, and we got the story underway.
“Best thing to do sounds like a straight salt-and-burn,” Dean said.
“A straight what?” I said.
Sam, clearly the diplomat in that relationship, took over. “When spirits can’t or don’t want to move on, covering the remains in salt and then burning them is the best way we’ve found to break the link.” I must have blanched, because he continued, gently, “I’m sorry; I know it’s a shock to hear. But it’s the one way that truly works.”
“Can you tell us where the grave is?” Dean asked.
“Alabama,” I said, still in shock. I was both trying to wrap my head around the idea of salting and burning somebody’s body, and also trying not to picture it, at all.
“Alabama?” Dean said.
“Mobile. It’s where I’m from. She’s buried there.”
“Sweet home Alabama.” He looked at Sam. “You want to head out tomorrow? Or tonight?” He looked back at me. “Can you give us directions?”
“Wait,” I said. “I don’t…Mobile is more than a thousand miles from here. And I’m pretty sure that would count as grave desecration. And that’s my mother you're talking about!”
“We do this for a living,” Sam said. “If we have to go to Mobile, we’ll go to Mobile.”
“Once we’re there, we’ll probably find another job, so it’s not a big thing,” Dean added. “But, yeah, if getting the job done means going to Alabama, that’s what we’ll do. Anyway, Skynyrd’s from there. It’ll be a pilgrimage.”
“I can’t… I can’t ask you to do that. And desecrating a grave is a crime!”
“Really,” Dean said. “It’s what we do. You can’t live with a ghost throwing knives at you, and if you move somewhere else, she’ll either follow you or else do it to the people who move in after you. Either way, it’s gotta be taken care of.”
“It’s my mom,” I said quietly after a few minutes. “We didn’t get along and we were estranged for most of my adult life. But she…she’s still my mom. You can’t…you can’t just burn her like a witch.”
With horror, I realized that I was crying. Kat rubbed my back. Dean looked terrified. Sam handed me a tissue.
“It’ll put her at peace,” Sam tried.
“You’re still digging her up and burning her!”
There was a long, tense silence. Finally Dean said, “I’ll give Bobby and Missouri a call. They’re friends of ours,” he explained. “Colleagues, I guess you could say. Maybe they’ve got another idea. But salting and burning is what breaks the link.”
While he called, I went into the bathroom to wash my face and collect myself. When I came back out, Kat was on her cell phone, and I heard her speaking the magic words, “Dos pollos, por favor, con habichuelas negras y plantanas.” God bless her, she was ordering from the rotisserie chicken place down by the subway. I have no idea what they put in those chickens, but the skin is like crack and, I’m convinced, can cure you of or at least distract you from any ill you may be suffering.
Dean and Sam switched back and forth on the phone a few times and ended the conversation right as the chickens came. “Missouri gave us a ritual that you can perform,” Dean said. “It’s usually used for spirits of soldiers who are lost in battle, but she didn’t want to promise anything—she said that she hadn’t seen it used in situations with the kind of…um, complications that you and your mom had.”
“But I can try it?” I said.
“Yeah, you can try it. She said the best time to do it was dawn.”
“Okay,” I said. “What do I have to do?”
After we ate, I went to the grocery store for sage, rosemary, and extra salt, because apparently I would need all of those. My apartment was going to smell like an Italian restaurant, but there were worse things.
“What’s the nightlife like around here?” Dean asked.
Kat and I both laughed, because we lived in maybe the unhippest neighborhood you can think of: full of families, churches, schools, old men playing dominoes. The most hopping establishments were the rotisserie-chicken place and the doughnut shop. There was a neighborhood bar, though, not of the dirty-old-man variety, and Kat said, “There’s always McNeeley’s.”
“Let’s do it,” Dean said. “Ladies? Sam?”
I shook my head. “Y’all have fun. I have to exorcise my mother at five o’clock tomorrow morning, so I should get some rest.”
Kat argued. Dean argued. Sam rolled his eyes at Dean.
“Seriously,” I said, “I give you my blessing. I can go to McNeeley’s anytime I want to.”
Kat’s eyebrows said, But you can’t go with two hot demon hunters.
That was perhaps a salient argument, but I ignored it. Finally, they did go, and I put on flannel pajama pants and my “Wellesley Football: Always Undefeated” sweatshirt, and tucked myself and Mireille into the couch.
I still couldn’t sleep.
I was awake and reading when the front door opened a couple of hours later. I listened for the three of them, but there was no conversation, and when the door closed and someone poked their head into the living room, I saw that it was Sam by himself.
“Where are Kat and Dean?” I asked.
“I got the feeling I was cramping their style,” he said, and we both rolled our eyes. “You’re still up?”
“Can’t sleep. Habit by now, I guess.”
He turned out to be good company, and he’d actually read Winter’s Tale, which practically no one else has because it’s three miles long. “We spend a lot of time in the car,” Sam explained. “At a certain point, long books are more efficient.”
“Are you really going to go to Alabama if this doesn’t work?”
“Not if you don’t give us permission, no.” After a moment, he said, “We salted and burned our father’s body.”
I stared across the couch at him.
“After he died. Instead of burying him, that was what we did. It’s just…it’s what hunters do. Just to be sure.”
“And it was…it was OK?”
Sam laughed—not a real laugh, though. “In all honesty? It was awful. When a body burns, you can smell it. And it was Dad. But I’m not sorry we did it, if that’s what you're asking.”
“You’d do it again? For somebody you don’t even know?”
“It’s different when it’s not your own family,” he said quietly.
“My mom’s been dead two years,” I said. “It’s going to be— I think it would be really nasty.” I couldn’t believe I was considering this enough to get into the logistics.
“I’m sure we’ve seen worse.” He added after a moment, “I’m sorry. About your mom, I mean.”
I’ve never been sure how to respond to that, but “thank you” seems to be what people say, so that was what I said.
What happened after that, you ask? It just figures that I would wind up alone in a room with a gorgeous billion-foot-tall demon hunter who liked Mark Helprin, and we would wind up staying up talking about families and literature. This is apparently how I roll.
Fuck my life.
The alarm went off at four. The light was still on and there was something warm and flannel-covered pressed up against my face.
I guessed I couldn’t say “FML” all that much, as I’d apparently fallen asleep on the couch with a gorgeous billion-foot-tall demon hunter who liked Mark Helprin and whose arms were solid and heavy around me. And whose head, I saw, was mostly covered by my cat.
“Your cat’s asleep on my head,” he mumbled.
“Yeah,” I said, “sorry. She kind of does that.”
With reluctance, I pushed myself up to get dressed. Mireille, seeing her chance, immediately jumped down and replaced me on Sam’s chest.
Bitch.
Kat’s door was closed, though I hadn’t heard either her or Dean come in. I decided not to pursue that line of inquiry much further, but as I passed her door on my way to the bathroom, it opened a crack and I saw her peek out, looking simultaneously smug, embarrassed, and disheveled.
I pointed, laughed, and stole the shower. Hobag totally deserved it for getting laid when I hadn’t.
I showered and dressed, and passed Dean in the hallway on my way back to the living room. “What’re you dressed up for?” he asked. He was carrying a towel, and I noticed that the door to Kat’s room was slightly ajar.
I wasn’t dressed up, particularly: a Marc Jacobs skirt and Kate Spade pumps, pretty much the standard skirt and heels I wear at my job. “Just work.”
“Dude, you’re going to work after you exorcise your mom? You’re hardcore.”
I shrugged. “It’s as good a way as any to distract myself.”
He looked at me, and I looked back—demon hunter and magazine designer, with lives that might as well have been at opposite ends of the earth. “Yeah,” he said after a moment, “I get that.”
Then he and Kat went to embark on what were no doubt interesting and novel methods of water conservation.
Sam, Dean, and Kat stayed out on the landing when I went back into my apartment to do the ritual. Missouri had apparently been very clear that I had to do this part alone.
I sprinkled the sage, laid the rosemary, and poured the salt per her instructions. Then I took off my shoes and sat down on my kitchen floor to recite the wording Missouri had given us and I had written in ballpoint pen on my hand. Everything was quiet, and I wondered whether she was actually here—she hadn’t been there all the time, just at really inconvenient times.
Except them I felt light pressure on my hair—like fingers stroking over it, like when I’d been little and my mom had been better and she’d do that when I was sitting on the floor playing. She pushed it back from my face, neatening it behind my ears, and then her fingers moved down, across the back of my head to the nape of my neck, and I couldn’t help it—I moved away, shook them off as best I could.
“I wish I knew—” I started, and then put my hand over my mouth, because I wasn’t going to start crying again. “I wish I knew whether you were going to stroke my hair or twist my throat.” I couldn’t bear to see whether the shadow was there—where its shape was more distinct now, whether I could make out features.
I read the words without looking up.