Christopher Moore - Secondhand Souls

“Wait,” she said.

When darkness fell an hour later they gathered at the storm grate and looked out.

“I remember this place,” said Nemain.

“That tall green one kept running over us here,” said Macha. “Cars suck.”

Babd rose up, spotted a very large Victorian house across the street, a sign in front that she could not read.

“What is it?” asked Nemain.

“The nest,” said Babd.

The director messaged Lily to see him in his office when her shift was finished. She set an alarm on her phone that would go off five minutes into her appearance and would sound like a phone call. The door was open and she could hear Mr. Leonidas and Sage talking. She listened long enough to determine they weren’t talking about her, then knocked.

“Come in,” Leonidas said. He was dark and a little doughy, with eyebrows that Lily found it hard to look away from because they really looked like they might have ideas of their own. Because of her fascination with his eyebrows, Leonidas thought that Lily paid rapt attention to everything he said and consequently showed her favor over the other counselors. Leonidas had a background in psychology and public health, so being a snarky bitch around him was deeply unsatisfying because he would always try to find the root of her discontent, the hurt behind her hostility; getting a rise out of him was like trying to give a handjob to a parking meter: you were going to end up frustrated and exhausted long before a cop came along to haul you away. In spite of herself, she kind of liked Leonidas. Having Sage in the room, the enemy, was presenting a dilemma.

“Mr. Leonidas,” Lily said. “What can I do for you? I can wait until you’re done with Sage if you’d like.”

“No, please have a seat. Sage brought something to my attention and I thought it fair that she be here to see how it was handled.”

“Oh, right,” said Lily. “For her thesis. Sure.” She sat down, looked over the array of a dozen or so family pictures propped across Leonidis’s desk. “How’s the fam? Have any more kids?”

“No, still just the six, same as when you asked me two weeks ago.”

“Well, I know how busy you are,” Lily said. “What’s up?”

“Lily, Sage heard some disturbing dialogue in the call center today, and I thought we would all listen to the recording together so we could understand what happened.”

“I don’t see what she has—”

Leonidis held up his hand to stop her right there. “Let’s just listen.”

He hit a key on his PC keyboard and Lily heard her own voice coming out of the speakers. Sage sat back and nodded, as if she’d just wrapped the big case on Law & Order .

“Crisis Center, this is Lily, what’s your name?”

And there was silence. Nothing.

“Hi, Mike,” Lily’s voice said on the recording. “How are you doing today?”

And there was another gap. And Lily’s voice continued, her entire half of the conversation, and only her half, and as the recording ran, Sage started to squirm in her chair and Lily fought, fought very hard, not to grin, and was really thankful when the alarm on her phone went off so she could make a big deal out of ignoring the imaginary call.

They listened to the entire conversation, Lily’s side only. When it ended, Leonidas looked at Sage and said, “That’s it. That’s the entire call.”

“But she always does—” Sage stopped. “I’ve heard her before, she’s so profane.”

“I think we can see what was going on here,” Leonidas said. He raised his eyebrows at Sage in what he probably thought was an open, understanding manner, but Lily thought they looked like two bristly caterpillars crouching, ready to pounce. He turned to Lily and she pushed back a little from his desk—the eyebrows, they were sizing her up. “Lily, while I don’t approve of high jinks in the call center, I understand the point you were making with this little performance.”

“Uh, thanks, Mr. Leonidas,” Lily said. Point them at Sage. Point them at Sage .

“And, Sage, while you may not immediately see the efficacy of Lily’s method, she does get results, she connects with the clients, and ultimately, that saves lives. Perhaps less focus on her process and more on yours and we’ll be able to connect with more people. Help more people. Don’t you agree?”

Sage nodded, looking into the abyss of one of the buttons on her cargo pants.

It was a Leonidas ass-chewing—as close as he ever got to one. Lily resisted doing a booty dance of triumph against Sage’s stupid sweater because that would be immature, so she did it mentally and said. “Friends?” She stood and held out her arms to force Sage into hugging it out. And as she held Sage a little too long, feeling the slight woman get tenser and tenser as the embrace continued, even as she puffed Sage’s frizzy-ass hair out of her mouth, exhibiting her victory—nay—her domination, Lily also warmed with the satisfaction of her own specialness.

She was the only one who could hear him—the only one who could talk to the ghost of the bridge.

Mike Sullivan hung from one of the vertical suspension cables by one hand. “Look, I’m as light as a feather. There’s hardly even a breeze and I’m standing straight out.”

“You are lighter than a feather, my love. Let go and you will not fall, and the bridge will not let you blow away.”

“Yeah, I think I’m going to wait on the letting-go part.”

“You are beyond fear. And you are bound to the bridge just as you were drawn to it.”

“Just the same, you died of what, diphtheria? What if right after you died I was to offer you a big steaming cup of diphtheria, how would you feel?”

“They can put it in a cup now? It was invisible in my day.”

“A Cleveland steamer was a ship, in your day, my sweet Conchita.”

She reclined on the oceanside railing—the walkway on that side of the bridge was closed most of the time, the foot and bicycle traffic confined to the bay side. Not that it would have mattered. People would have walked right through her and have only felt a chill, which was normal for the Golden Gate.

She said, “There is someone who needs to speak to you, my love.”

“Another one? I don’t understand. Why do they want to talk to me?” There had been scores of them, each telling a different story; a woman who was trapped overnight in a stationery cabinet with a janitor after the earthquake of 1989 and didn’t share the Pepsi she had in her purse, a man who hallucinated he was being pursued by a giant squirrel in John Muir Woods. The only thing the stories had in common was some unresolved element, some lesson unlearned, something sad.

“I don’t know why, my love, any more than I know why I had to wait two hundred years for you, and that you have been on your way here for two hundred years, but I trust there is a reason. I have faith.”

“Faith? But all those years as a nun, didn’t you—I mean, did it prepare you for this?”

“For this? No. True devotion is done not for a reward, but for the devotion itself. All my works, all my prayers, were for forgiveness of my selfishness, my weakness, because I could never love God as much as I loved you. What my time as a nun prepared me for was the damnation of being without you for these centuries, which I deserved. For this, you, here, with me, this joy, for this I was not prepared.”

Mike settled on the walkway beside her and took her in his arms; she embraced him, and in an instant they were a single entity—the only thing the third ghost could see of them was a white gardenia that Concepción wore in her hair, glowing.