Ghosted By Love

Alya

The first thing I saw the morning after I buried Thackary Berkley was Thackary Berkley.

He was standing at the foot of our bed, wearing a long dark coat I’d never seen before, high-collared, like something out of a period drama. Not the suit we’d buried him in. My brain didn’t have time to wonder about that. He looked like he had been watching me sleep.

His head was tipped a little to one side, the way he did when he was trying to figure something out. One dark piece of hair had fallen over his eyebrow, like it always did. He looked tired. He looked sad. He looked like he’d been standing there a long time, waiting for me to open my eyes.

I did what any reasonable woman does when her dead fiancé turns up in her bedroom.

I screamed.

It was an ugly scream. It came out raw and cracked, like furniture dragged across a hardwood floor, and it went on for a while. I shoved myself backward into the headboard, knocked my water glass off the nightstand, and got so tangled in the comforter that one of my feet ended up kicking at nothing.

When I ran out of air, he was gone.

The room was just the room. His side of the bed, flat and cold. The mirrored wardrobe across from the foot of the bed, the one I’d spent our first winter here restoring, was reflecting exactly one person: me, wild-haired and white-faced, holding a pillow up like a shield.

I sat there breathing like I’d sprinted up a hill.

“Okay,” I told the empty room. My voice came out scraped. “Okay. That wasn’t in the list.”

The funeral home had sent me home yesterday with a pamphlet called Walking Through Grief: What to Expect. I’d read it at two in the morning because I couldn’t sleep. It covered fatigue, appetite changes, anger, guilt, and something called “searching behavior,” which meant catching yourself looking for the person in a crowd.

It did not cover seeing him at the foot of your bed when you’re waking up, or at any time at all.

I checked the time. 6:14. October eighteenth. Thirteen days until our wedding.

Thirteen days until what would have been our wedding. I kept tripping on the past tense. I’d spent eighteen months telling florists, caterers, and even my dentist, “we’re getting married on Halloween,” always getting the same reaction from people.

“Halloween? Why Halloween?” Like it was the weirdest thing they’d ever heard.

My answer was always the same: “We love Halloween!”

I still couldn’t get over it.

At that moment, I made myself get up, because lying there waiting to see if he’d come back felt worse than anything I could think of.

My black dress from the funeral was still in a heap on the floor where I’d stepped out of it. I walked around it. His hoodie hung on the back of the bedroom door: gray, faded, HARROW’S POINT HARDWARE cracking across the chest, the sleeves stretched out. I’d been avoiding it for eleven days.

I put it on.

It still smelled like him. Cedar shavings and underneath that, his scent that I’d never been able to figure out what it was. It smelled clean and something else I couldn’t name. I pulled the cuffs down over my hands and stood with my face in the collar.

The ring snagged on the cuff.

It was a plain silver band he’d made himself, set with a stone that looked clear until the light hit it. Then you could see a thin, pale thread moving inside, like smoke caught in glass. When I’d asked where the stone came from, he said it was from the old family. When I asked which family, he kissed my knuckles and said, “Ours, now.”

Everyone had been very gentle about the ring. My mother had asked on the phone from Tucson whether I was “planning to take it off and keep it safe somewhere? If you keep wearing it, it might keep reminding you of him, honey.” The funeral director’s eyes had gone to it twice while we picked out a casket. Paris hadn’t said a word, but I noticed her staring at it.

I wasn’t taking it off. That was my decision.

The stone was warm against my finger. It usually was. Thack used to say I ran hot.

Downstairs, the kitchen looked like a potluck had exploded. That’s what happens in a small town when somebody dies: the grief turns into casseroles. There were four lasagnas on the counter, a tuna noodle bake from Mrs. Pruitt next door, two loaves of banana bread, and a lime Jell-O mold shaped like a ring. Somebody had propped a sympathy card against the coffee maker. “He’s watching over you now.”

I turned it face down.

Yeah, you’re right about that; I just hadn’t expected it to be so literal.

I made coffee, and without thinking, I pulled two mugs out of the cupboard before I noticed. I put one back.

The house was ninety years old and talked constantly: pipes knocking, floorboards settling, the wind off the lake working at the window over the sink. I’d loved that about it once. Thack had loved it more. He’d spent three years fixing it one board at a time, and when I asked why he didn’t just hire someone, he said he wanted to “develop a relationship with the house.”

Eleven days ago, he’d gone down to the boathouse after dinner to finish the arbor for the ceremony. We were getting married at the water’s edge, under something he’d built with his own hands. He kissed me at the back door and said, “Don’t wait up, Aly.” I didn’t. I fell asleep on the couch with a seating chart in my lap.

He didn’t come home.

The sheriff’s deputies found him in the lake at dawn, forty feet off the dock. Accidental drowning, the report said. He must have slipped. Hit his head. The lake in October is cold enough to stop a heart.

Here’s what nobody wanted to hear: Thackary Berkley swam in that lake every single morning from May to the end of October. He swam like he’d been born in water. He’d laughed at me for needing a wetsuit in September.

I said that to the deputy. I said it to the coroner, to my mother, to the funeral director, and to anyone else who would listen, and they all gave me the same soft, patient look, the one people use when your grief is making you say things that don’t really matter.

He’d looked like himself at the viewing. That was the worst part. Everyone says the dead don’t look like themselves, and I’d been braced for it, and then there he was: his jaw, his hands, the little white scar on his thumb from a slipped chisel. Just too still. Just waxy and cold under my fingers.

I’d stood by that casket for a long time, waiting to feel like it was him.

I never did.

My phone buzzed on the counter. Fourteen texts, most from people who loved me and didn’t know what to say, so they said, thinking of you in various fonts. The newest was from Paris.

“Are you up? Don’t answer that. You’re up. Bringing bagels at 9. Do NOT go to the shop today.”

I typed, “I saw him.”

I looked at it for a moment, and then I deleted it.

I typed instead: “Bagels sound good. Not going to the shop.”

We both knew I was lying about going to the shop. The only place I’d felt anything close to normal in eleven days was Silver & Sand, bent over some cloudy old mirror with a bottle of silvering solution, bringing a reflection back one careful layer at a time.

Mirrors made sense to me. They lied, sure. They flipped you left to right, and they aged and spotted and warped. But their lies had rules. You could learn the rules. You could fix them.

But grief didn’t have rules. Grief put your dead fiancé at the foot of your bed and then took him away again before you could say his name.

I took my coffee upstairs and ran the shower hot enough to hurt.

I left the bathroom light off, just relying on the morning light coming through the frosted window, and steam rolled up over the mirror above the sink until it was a solid sheet of white.

I stood under the water until it started to go lukewarm, and I did not think about seeing him that morning. I thought about lasagna. I thought about how many lasagnas one woman could reasonably eat before they killed her.

I thought about whether I had to return the dress, and whether a bridal shop would take back a wedding gown when the groom was dead. Would I have to fill out a form for that?

Then I got out, wrapped myself in a towel, and wiped a streak across the mirror with the side of my hand.

I saw my face. Red-eyed, blotchy, a smudge of yesterday’s mascara clinging under my lashes.

And behind my shoulder, in the gap between the fog and the clear glass, I saw his.

He was close. Close enough that if he’d really been there, I’d have felt his breath on my neck. His eyes found mine in the mirror and held, and there was something in them I’d never seen, not once in three years. He looked desperate.

His mouth moved. Two words, maybe three.

No sound came.

I spun around so fast I bruised my hip on the sink.

The bathroom was empty. Just steam and tile and the drip of the showerhead, and my own heartbeat going so hard I could feel it coming out of my chest.

I turned back to the mirror. The steam had already started lifting.

The ring on my finger was hot. Not warm. Hot, like a coin left in the sun.

I stood there dripping on the bath mat until the glass was clear, staring at the place where his face had been, trying to make out what he was trying to say.

I couldn’t figure it out.

But standing in that cold bathroom, in the house he’d spent three years making ours, with his ring burning on my hand, I knew one thing for certain.

He was trying to tell me something.

***

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