Until I Find You

live with someone, you would have to live a lot differently. You don’t need a new house. You need to find someone you can live with,” Dr. Garcia said.

“Someone like Claudia? She wanted children, Dr. Garcia.”

“I don’t mean someone like Claudia in that respect, but a relationship like that—one that has a chance of lasting, Jack.”

“Claudia is probably very fat now,” he told Dr. Garcia. “She had an epic battle with her weight ahead of her.”

“I don’t necessarily mean someone like Claudia in that respect, either, Jack.”

“Claudia wanted children so badly—she’s probably a grandmother now!” he said to Dr. Garcia.

“You never could count, Jack,” she told him.

Jack didn’t blame Dr. Garcia. He would take full responsibility for what happened. But the very idea of Claudia—the reason she was recently on his mind—surely came from the Claudia conversation in his therapy session with Dr. Garcia. Jack was thinking about her—that’s all he would say in his own defense—when he drove back home to Santa Monica from a dinner party one warm night that summer.

Jack was remembering the first time Claudia let him borrow her Volvo—the incredible feeling of independence that comes from being young and alone and driving a car.

He pulled into his driveway on Entrada—his headlights illuminating the arrestingly beautiful, incontestably Slavic-looking young woman who sat on her battered but familiar suitcase on Jack’s absurdly small lawn. She sat so serenely still, as if she were placidly posing for a photograph beside the FOR SALE sign, that for a moment Jack forgot what was for sale. He thought she was for sale, before he remembered he was selling his house—and that thought would come back to haunt him, because she was more for sale than Jack could possibly have imagined.

He knew who she was—Claudia, or her ghost. It was a wonder he didn’t lose control of the Audi and drive over her—either killing Claudia on the spot, or killing her ghost again. But how can it be Claudia? Jack was thinking. The young woman on his lawn was as young as Claudia had been when he’d known her, or younger. (Besides, Claudia had always looked older than she was, and she had the habit of lying about her age.)

“God damn you, Jack,” Claudia had said. “After I die, I’m going to haunt you—I promise you I will—I might even haunt you before I die.”

Since Claudia had promised that she would haunt him, wasn’t it forgivable that Jack assumed the apparition sitting beside his FOR SALE sign was Claudia’s ghost? A ghost doesn’t usually travel with a suitcase, but maybe Heaven or Hell had kicked her out—or her mission to haunt Jack had required her to have several changes of clothes. After all, Claudia was (or had been) an actress—and she’d loved the theater, more than Jack had. In the case of Claudia’s ghost, the suitcase could have been a prop.

Jack somehow managed to get out of the Audi and walk up to her, although his legs had turned to stone. He knew that driving away, or running away, wasn’t an option—you can’t get away from a ghost. But he left the Audi’s headlights on. When approaching a ghost, you at least want to see her clearly. Who wants to walk up to a ghost in the dark?

“Claudia?” Jack said, his voice trembling.

“Oh, Jack, it’s been too long,” she said. “It’s been forever since I’ve seen you!”

She was the same old Claudia, only younger. The same stage presence, the same projection of her voice—as if, even one-on-one, she was making sure that those poor souls in the worst seats in the uppermost balcony could hear her perfectly.

“But you’re so young,” he said.

“I died young, Jack.”

“How young, Claudia? You look even younger than you were! How is that possible?”

“Death becomes me, I guess,” she said. “Aren’t you going to ask me inside? I’ve been dying to see you, Jack. I’ve been sitting on this freakin’ lawn for an eternity.”

The word freakin’ was new, and not at all like Claudia. But who knew where she’d been—and, among the dead, with whom? She held out her hands and Jack helped her to her feet. He was surprised that he could feel her not-inconsiderable weight. Who would have guessed that ghosts weighed anything at all? But from the look of her—even in Heaven, or that other place—Claudia still had to watch her weight.

She was still self-conscious about her hips, too. She wore the same type of long, full skirt that she’d always liked to wear—even in the summer. She was as heavy-breasted as Jack remembered her; in fact, given what people who believed in ghosts were generally inclined to believe, she was disarmingly full-figured for a spirit.

Jack ran to the car and turned off the Audi’s headlights, half expecting Claudia’s ghost to disappear. But she waited for him, smiling; she let him carry her old leather suitcase inside. She went straight to Jack’s bedroom, as if they were still a couple and she’d been living with him all these years—even though Claudia had never been in that house. He waited in shock while she used his bathroom. (The things ghosts had to do!)

Jack was deeply conflicted. He both believed her and suspected her. She had the same creamy-smooth skin, the same prominent jaw and cheekbones—a face made for close-ups, he’d always said. Claudia should have been in the movies, despite the problem with her weight; she had a face that was wasted in the theater, Jack had always told her.

When Claudia’s ghost emerged from the bathroom, she came up to Jack and nuzzled his neck. “I’ve even missed your smell,” she said.

“Ghosts have a sense of smell?” he asked.

Jack held her by the shoulders, at arm’s length, and looked into her eyes; they were the same yellowish brown they’d always been, like polished wood, like a lioness’s eyes. But there was something about her that wasn’t quite the same; the resemblance was striking but inexact. It wasn’t only that she seemed too young to be the Claudia he’d known—even if she’d died the day after they parted company, even if death (as the ghost had said) did become her.

“A thought occurs to me, Claudia,” he said. Holding her, even at arm’s length, Jack could feel her body’s heat. And all this time, he’d thought that ghosts (if you could feel them at all) would feel cold. “Since my mother died, I’ve been wondering about this,” he told her. “If ghosts get to keep the tattoos they had in life—I mean in the hereafter.”

Again, the smile—but even her smile wasn’t exactly as Jack remembered it. He didn’t think that Claudia’s teeth had ever been quite this white. She slowly lifted the long, full skirt. The seductiveness in her eyes was unchanged, and there, high up on her inner thigh, which was even a little plumper than he remembered it, was the tattoo of the Chinese scepter—the short sword symbolizing everything as you wish.

“It took long enough, but it finally healed,” she told him.

It was a pretty good Chinese scepter, Jack thought, but it was not as perfect as the one his mom had learned from Paul Harper.

“It’s real,” the young woman said. “It won’t rub off on your hand. See for yourself, Jack—go on and touch it.”

The voice, her projection, may have been the same, but the language lacked Claudia’s exactness—her correctness of speech, her good education. The “go on and touch it”—the casual use of the word and—was no more like Claudia than the word freakin’ that had caught Jack’s attention earlier.

He touched the young woman’s tattoo, high up on her inner thigh—her imitation Chinese scepter, as Jack thought of it.

“Who are you?” he asked her.

She took his hand and made him touch her, higher up. She wasn’t wearing any panties, not even a thong. “Doesn’t it feel familiar, Jack? Don’t you want to be back there—to be young again?”

“You’re not Claudia,” Jack told her. “Claudia was never crude.” And ghosts, he could have said, not only don’t have body heat; female ghosts don’t get wet. (Or do they?)