PART ONE
THE GHOST
1
“So what do you do for a living, hon?”
For a living. Such a curious expression. The woman beside me, driving the car, means what work is it that I do to keep body and soul together, as they say.
I don’t know how to answer that. When you’re dead, you don’t work in the usual way.
My job is to keep always one step ahead of the ghost hunters. Of course, the woman sitting next to me doesn’t know that. She picked me up by the side of this mountain road, where I’d raised my thumb to her, because I look as alive as anyone, as alive as she does in her downy white jacket. If you look a certain way, you’re seen as no threat. She pulled the car over and leaned across to open the door, and by her face I saw she’d even taken pity on me, because this body I wear, with its thin blue coat, makes me look small and weak, under a haircut bobbed blunt and short, like a child’s. She likely thought: I needn’t be afraid of this girl standing at the edge of the woods. I might even help her.
And it’s true that if you, the living, are kind to me, and treat me well, you’ll have no reason to fear me. But if instead you decide a young woman standing pale and cold and all alone and small and needing a lift is someone to take advantage of, well, you’re going to run into a bit of trouble. The last driver who stopped for me—a grubby, grabby man who thought me an easy mark—I left making better acquaintance with the bottom of a lake, his hands pounding against the window glass.
Such beautiful lakes and trees they have here, so high up in the mountains, much like we had on the coast. The leaves and the pine boughs quiver and quake as the sun drops its work for the day. It makes me feel right at home.
“I’m in housekeeping,” I answer the pleasant woman beside me. “I tidy and clean things.”
“Hard work?” she asks, nodding and turning her wheel on the twisting road.
“Sometimes. Sometimes not.”
“I’m an office manager,” she tells me.
“Is that good work?”
“Used to be. Not so much anymore. They’ve got me doing the jobs of two younger assistants who left. Plus my own job. You know, what can you do? Things change.”
They do. I used to be an ordinary ghost—a spirit tied to a place, a haunt. Now I have this body, this flesh to call my own and to travel and touch the world with. Imagine what that’s like. How it might feel, after being invisible, erased, holding on only with your will, for a hundred years and more, to at last find you have a way, again, to fill space. Though, to be sure, when I wear this body I can’t flit or fly as easily as my ghostly self can. I can feel the scrape of this veined armrest beside me. The cloth of the seat at the back of my head. The folded collar of this coat. But I feel the weight of this skin, too, and the pressure of the one who died so that I could take it. She was young and bright and she didn’t deserve to die. No more than I did.
“All you can do is take a break from life now and then,” my new, unknowing friend goes on, “so me and some of my girlfriends, we’re taking off work and meeting in Reno, gonna let off some steam. Do you like to gamble?”
I took a chance and stole a body to escape a hunter. I’d say I do.
“Yes.”
“Come with me the whole way,” she says, nodding certainly. “If you want to. No trouble.”
She’s one of the kind living. Though she seems suddenly tired, clutching the wheel. She sighs and says, after a moment, “Don’t mean to be pushy, though, hon. Everybody’s got their own way they’re going. I know that.”
I thank her and tell her that at the moment I’m looking for something peaceful and out of the way.
“God, I hear that.” She laughs a little. “I need that sometimes, too. Just want to cut myself off from everything, check out, lie low. You’re in the right stretch of the Sierra Nevada for some good downtime. There’re such pretty little towns hidden up here. Just let me know where you want to jump out, Miss . . . I’m sorry, is it okay for me to ask your name?”
I don’t say: I’m Emma Rose Finnis. Irish born and Irish stubborn, raised to be staunch in the face of wounds. I don’t tell her I came into this world in 1896 and died in 1915, drowned unfairly against cold, black-rocked shoals. Nor that I haunted a mansion beside the sea for more than a hundred years, until a hunter came along and thought he was strong enough to put me down. He wasn’t.
“My name is Rose,” I say. “And you’re Sheila.”
“That’s right, how did you know?”
“Your luggage, in the back seat.”
“You read that tiny tag? You must have twenty-twenty vision.”
Yes, these eyes and ears are as keen and quick as mine once were. I might draw no real breath, but this nose, it scents the powder clinging to the soft, sagging cheek beside me, and the weary sweat at the heavy neck. I may have no heartbeat, yet my soul still pounds in furious answer to what’s right and what’s wrong, and knows light and dark; which is how I know this woman laughing beside me is only laughing on the outside, and that under the powder and the hands rubbed with lotion to make them feel softer, she’s hard, she’s worn. She’s a servant in someone else’s mansion, just as I once was. It can make you feel beaten down.
I say, “I noticed your luggage because I like to get away, too.”
“Where’d you come from, Rose?”
“The ocean.”
“Nice. I always wanted to live on the coast. It’s hot down in the valley where I’m from. I could use more rain, fog, mist in my life. You come from the north coast or the south? The north? Did you mind the cold?”
“No. I’m used to it.” Also, it helps disguise me. If the temperature is freezing, and someone living accidentally brushes against my skin and feels how icy I am, then they aren’t startled and I’m not given away. There’s a risk I face, taking on this body so that I can take in the world. Someone might touch me and wonder. Even I wonder at it, how my icy soul lifted and keeps this body fresh. It’s because I willed it, I think, when I saw this flesh fall, remembering all my anger at being felled myself.
My friend Sheila says, “I guess you know, Rose, it gets pretty brisk up here, this time of year. Ever been this high before? There’s no snow yet, but it’ll come. Later than it used to. When I was a kid, we used to drive this pass and by now everything would already be blanketed. But nothing’s like it was, anymore, anywhere. I tell myself it’s still pretty, though.”
It is. The aspen trees, the higher we’ve climbed, have soaked in the distant gold of the setting sun, lighting up the dark places between the towering pines. Stony peaks shrug all around in deep grays and blues, half-skirted with boulders and flounces of deadfall.
When I was a little girl, growing up along the seashore, I imagined such mountains rising from the long valley. At school we studied a map on the wall to learn about the great ranges of California. The Sierras were so high, our teacher excitedly told us, that droves of pioneers died trying to cross them. She was a dramatic one, Miss Camber. The great Sierra Nevada in winter could be so deep in bitter snow, she said, that even the tallest man would be buried by it. She’d paced and shivered and clasped her arms as she moaned: A mountain blizzard, why, it could be so cruel, it could take your hands and feet, and even your eyes.