“Even your death can’t stop me. I have a friend who cuts up souls.” I didn’t know where these words were coming from, what piece of me had made them. But they tasted sweet in my mouth. “I’m going to feed you to the cold things in the river. And those little girls in your front yard are going to watch.”
He didn’t answer, so I hung up on him. As I walked away, the pay phone’s fluorescent lights flickered inside their plastic column, the darkness jittering around me. I’d just wanted to scare him, to make him pay a little bit for everything he’d done. At least the bad man knew there was someone looking for him now.
And then almost a minute later, at the edge of my hearing, the phone started to ring.
* * *
Mindy met me in my front yard, arms crossed. “You snuck away! That’s not very nice.”
“I’m sorry.” I hadn’t told her what I was trying to do. I didn’t want her thinking about the bad man, or psychopomps, or any of this. “I had to do something important.”
“Really?” Her expression softened. “You look sad.”
“Just tired.” I hadn’t slept in almost two weeks now. Sleep wasn’t a part of me anymore. When I lay on my bed, the darkness behind my eyelids was full of fluttering shadows, my brain full of undreamt dreams.
Mindy snorted. “Pomps don’t sleep. You should play with me! I’m super bored.”
I smiled down at her. At times when the fear lifted from her, you could see how happy a child she’d been before the bad man took her.
“Okay. What do you want to do?”
“Let’s go to New York. Like you said.”
I stared at her. “You want to go see the Chrysler Building? I thought you were afraid of the river.”
“Well, you want to. And it’s been really nice since you started . . . seeing me.” Her voice went softer. “Like I said, it’s boring around here.”
I couldn’t believe it. Maybe ghosts could change. Maybe Mindy had just needed to escape from her ghostly invisibility, and she could start to grow again. Maybe she’d just needed a friend.
“I won’t be scared with you there,” she added. “My own personal psycho-bodyguard. Just don’t leave me alone.”
“Of course not.” I smiled as her cold little hand closed around mine. “I’ll always bring you home.”
* * *
The River Vaitarna was kind to Mindy on her first voyage. Only a few cold, wet scraps of memory brushed against us, and the trip to New York was swift and calm. Maybe I was getting better at this, or maybe my connection to the Chrysler Building was strong.
Or so I thought, until we left the river.
We were in New York City, but the neighborhood was all wrong. Instead of skyscrapers, we were surrounded by apartment buildings and a big department store. Only one tall, curvaceous tower stood before us, wrapped in reflective glass. It took me a moment to recognize it—my father’s building.
“Whoa,” Mindy said. “You were right. It’s huge!”
“That isn’t the Chrysler. I think I messed up.”
She looked at me. “Are you sure? It’s so big.”
“The Chrysler Building’s, like, five times taller. This is where my dad lives.”
Mindy gave a disbelieving laugh. She’d never been to New York before, or much of anywhere, I supposed. She’d spent most of the last thirty-five years within a stone’s throw of my mother’s closet.
“Where are the houses?” she said, looking around. There were piles of gray snow everywhere. The winter up here was ten times colder than back in San Diego, but the flipside air was its usual indifferent cool.
“They don’t have houses here. New Yorkers live in apartments.” I took her hand. “Come on, I’ll show you one.”
She pulled me to a halt. “That whole building’s full of people? And they live there?”
“Yeah. So?”
“That means they die there.” She planted her feet. “There must be tons of ghosts inside!”
I sighed, wondering if we should just walk up to the Chrysler. But I was curious about why the river had brought us here. Did I have that strong a connection to my father’s apartment? I’d never felt comfortable staying there.
“Don’t worry, Mindy. They built this place a few years ago. My father only likes new and shiny things.” She still didn’t move, and I scented the air. It was rustier than San Diego, but nothing like the bad man’s house. “Do you see any ghosts?”
She peered into the marble lobby, checking out the doorman, then swept her eyes along the streets around us. It was three hours later here in New York, not long before dawn, but there were still a few people strolling past.
“Just livers.” Mindy’s fingers tightened around mine. “But what if that’s because there’s lots of pomps to grab them?”
I sighed. “My dad said he likes New York because he doesn’t have to talk to his neighbors. So ghosts probably fade, right? Or maybe they head back to their hometowns, where someone remembers them.”
“Maybe. But stay close, okay, Lizzie?”
“Of course.” I drew her gently across the street.
Here on the flipside I couldn’t even press an elevator button, so we took the stairs. My dad lived on the fifteenth floor, but I wasn’t breathless when we arrived. Walking around on the flipside didn’t burn any calories, it seemed.
My nerves began to tingle as we stood before my father’s door. I’d been a lot of places on the flipside, but this was the first time I’d used my invisibility to spy on someone I knew. It took a moment’s concentration for me to pass through the solid wood.
Inside, the apartment was as I remembered it from a few weeks ago—chrome and leather furniture, floor-to-ceiling windows full of moonlit skyline. It sparkled like the icicles dangling from the veranda rail outside, as elegant and cold.
My father’s giant TV was on, but I kept my gaze averted from the screen. From experiments at home, I knew that televisions looked very strange from the flipside. Turns out that cats, with their ghost-seeing eyes, are staring at TVs in abject horror. Or maybe cats are just weird.
“Who’s that?” Mindy asked.
“Rachel, my father’s girlfriend.” The two were curled up together on the couch, focused on the screen.
“It’s funny that he’s here with someone else. I kind of miss him, even if he was a butthead.”
“Me too,” I said, surprising myself a little.
Mindy had never talked about my father before, though of course she’d known him for longer than I’d been alive. She probably knew more about my parents’ breakup than I did, and yet she stared at the couple on the couch as if puzzled by the concept of divorce.
Sometimes I wondered if my mother also missed my father. She always seemed so tired these days, as if losing him had chopped some vital spark out of her. Or maybe it was just those extra shifts she had to work.
My hand went to my cheek, to my scar that was shaped like a tear. For a moment, I wanted to step from the flipside and show my father how badass it looked, and how I didn’t cover it with makeup. And maybe ask him why he hadn’t flown down to Dallas three weeks ago.
That was when I realized that anger had brought me here. Lately it seemed like I was anger’s puppet, moving where it wanted. I’d lost patience with a lot of my friends, and everyone except Jamie was scared of me. Anger had made me call the bad man, in a feeble attempt to scare him.
I could still hear the pay phone ringing as I’d walked away. He probably knew where that pay phone was by now.
I sighed and turned away from my father to gaze at Rachel. I’d never mentioned to Mom how beautiful she was, and had expunged it from my memory out of loyalty. Her face glowed in the light of the TV, her large eyes drinking in the movie with the intensity of a child.
“He never tells her about that gun,” my father said, pointing at the screen.
“Hush!” Rachel cried. “I told you, no spoilers!”
I rolled my eyes. This was my father’s favorite form of entertainment: watching a movie he’d seen before with someone who hadn’t. Like he was some kind of movie expert, and you were an idiot for not predicting what was going to happen.
“That’s not really a spoiler,” my dad said. “But it’s something you should pay attention to, if you really want to understand his motivation.”
Rachel groaned, and I wondered again why she was with him.
My father had lots of money, of course, and my friends at school used to say he was good-looking, for an old guy. But both of those reasons seemed too shallow for Rachel. She was smart, and fun to be with, and knew everything about art history. Visiting museums with her had been my favorite thing about my trip here. And she’d always known when I needed to get away from my father.
She must have found a side to him that I didn’t know about. But spying on the two of them suddenly didn’t seem like the best way to figure it out.
“Coming here wasn’t such a great idea,” I said.
“At least there aren’t any ghosts.” Mindy was wandering off toward the bedroom. “This place is teeny. I thought your dad was rich.”
“Apartments are small compared to houses.”
“Must make it hard to play hide-and-seek.”
I laughed. “I don’t think my dad’s into hide-and-seek.”
“But there must be kids in New York.” Mindy frowned. “Right?”
“Of course.” We were in my father’s bedroom now, the only real one in the apartment. During my visit I’d slept in his study, on a pleasantly musty leather couch. “There’s a playground near here.”
It had been full of nannies and toddlers and dotted with splotches of chewing gum. I wondered what its history would look like flashing past in a vision.
“But there’s nowhere to hide,” Mindy said.
“You think? Check this out.”
My father’s closet door was closed, but I walked toward it. I didn’t try to imagine the past, just kept walking until I passed through. The wooden door offered no more resistance than a dusty sunbeam.
As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw that Mindy had followed. She stood there in the gray light of the flipside, gazing at the glass-fronted drawers and the gray suits hanging neatly in the darkness.
“Bet you wish my mom had a walk-in like this,” I said. “Pretty luxurious for hiding in.”
“No way,” Mindy whispered. “Someone else could be hiding in here with you and you wouldn’t even know it!”
I laughed, but Mindy was right. The closet was almost another bedroom in itself. Even in broad daylight the flipside was never bright, but in the deep corners of the closet were pools of shadow that could have held anything.
I held out my hand. “If you’re scared, we can go.”
“Course not,” Mindy said, but she was standing close to me. “Still, I wouldn’t want to live with your dad.”
“Me neither.” I remembered my uneasiness staying here. Maybe it hadn’t been the sleek and uncomfortable furniture, or even the fact that I hadn’t forgiven my father for running out on me and Mom. Maybe Mindy had spotted the important missing thing here—a place to hide, to disappear.
I let my fingers drift across the sleeves of my father’s jackets, trying to feel the silks and tweeds and linens. But like colors and scents, textures were muted on the flipside. Money didn’t matter much when you were dead, I guess. Even the best suits wound up gray and plain.
“I’m glad you brought me here,” Mindy said. “My parents didn’t like big cities. I never really saw a skyscraper before.”
I looked down at her. “Let me show you a real one, then. We can walk up to the Chrysler Building in half an hour. It’s five times taller, I swear.”