Darkness My Old Friend

means.” She looked up at the ceiling. “Do you have any regrets, Eloise?”

Marla’s words echoed Eloise’s recent conversation with Ray. This was another reason Eloise didn’t think the Marla in her living room was a ghost. There were always these subtle links to whatever was going on in her own life.

“Some days I’m not sure I have anything but regrets,” said Eloise.

“So you know what I mean.” Marla tossed the cigarette into the fireplace. A fine line of smoke wafted up toward the ceiling. Of course, there was no scent of tobacco in the air.

“I wasn’t happy,” Marla said. “And in that unhappiness I made mistakes.”

“You had an affair?”

“There were dalliances. I wouldn’t call them affairs. Flirtations?” She pressed her bloodred lips into a tight, thin line.

“He knew I was a flirt,” Marla said. “He liked that about me at first. He was so quiet, reserved. With me he could be that. My personality more than made up for it. And he kept me centered, kept my feet on the ground.”

“I can see that.” Eloise had found that it was better to agree with them, to be encouraging.

“Isn’t it funny, though, that the things we love about each other at first become the things we hate later on? I was flamboyant. He was staid and professorial. I wanted to spend. He wanted to save. We were so different. And in the beginning, that was okay. And then, suddenly, it was oppressive.”

“So what happened? Did he catch you with someone?” Eloise said gently. If she didn’t try to move it along, it could go on forever. And the longer it took, the more exhausted she’d feel afterward.

“That would be easy, wouldn’t it?” Marla said with a mirthless laugh. “Husband catches me in the act, kills me in a jealous rage. Or miserable wife runs off on her husband and two kids, disappears forever.”

“Then what? What happened?”

Marla got up and started walking toward the door. Then she turned to look at Eloise with a pleading expression.

“I was wondering if I could convince you to let this one go,” Marla said.

It was little phrases like that that disturbed Eloise the most, so familiar but off the mark. Let this one go? She’d let them all go if she could. She wasn’t the one who couldn’t let go of the people who had passed. It was everyone else.

“It’s Michael who can’t let you go,” Eloise said.

“I mean, it doesn’t matter anymore,” Marla said, as if Eloise had argued the point. “Mack’s gone. He suffered the most with all of it. If the truth comes out now, it’s only going to cause more pain.”

Eloise lifted her palms. “What can I do?”

But Marla wasn’t listening. They never did.

“You know what my biggest mistake was?” she said. She was crying now. “I let him love me too much. I catered to it. I loved how much he loved me.”

“Mack did love you,” Eloise said. She wasn’t sure what Marla meant. “I always saw love there.”

She shook her head. “No, Eloise. Not Mack. Michael.”

Eloise was lying on the floor then. The vacuum cleaner was still running beside her. She reached over to turn it off and then lay back down in the silence that followed. Her head ached, presumably from the fall, which she did not remember. She’d met a woman, another so-called psychic, who’d taken to wearing a helmet at home, where most of her visions occurred. So many blows to the head cannot be healthy for the living. The dead have no regard for us whatsoever, so we must protect ourselves.

Prior to her accident, Eloise had had little faith and less religion. She didn’t believe in the Catholic God she’d been raised with. The concepts of heaven and hell, a divine system of punishments and rewards, seemed overly simplistic. The world, life, was so complicated. How could the afterlife be any different? She’d been firmly agnostic for most of her remembered life. Her visions and encounters, the sight she had after her accident, did nothing to change her position.

In the industry there were plenty of psychics who claimed to talk to the dead, to know the geography of the world beyond. Some of them were quite convincing-millions bought their books, attended their seminars; some of these people had appointments scheduled for years with the grieving who had unfinished business with the dead. And Eloise couldn’t say for certain that they weren’t doing what they said they were. Maybe souls did linger, to say good-bye, to offer an apology, to seek justice-all those things we don’t always get in life. And the living do cling, unable to face the possibility that after death there is nothing. That sometimes there is no forgiveness, no resolution, no justice. It just ends, it just goes dark.

What Eloise did believe in was energy. Energy cannot be destroyed; it can only change its form. So life, as the ultimate form of energy, must find another shape, another dimension, when the body dies. She believed in a net that connected everyone in the universe to everyone else, living and dead. Something had happened to her during the accident, or in her coma, or maybe in the moments where she’d been closest to death, that altered her biochemically, turned her into a receiver of energies. She still did not necessarily believe in God or the afterlife. People often found that odd. Coming to her for solace, they didn’t get what they expected. They found her cold, left her disappointed. Maybe that’s why she wasn’t a regular talk-show guest.

“Eloise?”

Ray was standing over her. He was accustomed to finding her in odd places-once in the shower with her clothes on, once in the basement closet, often on the kitchen floor. You’re like a cell phone. Sometimes you have to move around to get the best signal, he’d said once. That probably made sense.

“I saw Marla Holt.”

Ray gave her a hand up from the floor. She was wobbly on her legs for a second, so he helped her over to the couch.

“She asked if I’d let this one go.”

“Maybe we should.” This was not like him, a complete reversal from their last conversation. Ray was not one to let things go.

“I’m at a dead end,” he said. “The next-door neighbor, Claudia Miller, was the last person I had to talk to, but she’s not talking.”

Eloise remembered what Marla had said about her “flirtations,” her “dalliances.” She recounted this for Ray.

“What does that mean? Did she have an affair or didn’t she?” He sounded irritated with Eloise’s apparition. Which was irritating to Eloise.

“How should I know?” she asked.

He released a long breath, leaned against the couch, and tilted his head back. “I had one last idea,” he said.

Oliver sauntered into the room and made a graceless leap onto the coffee table, nearly slipping off the other side and then catching himself with a last-minute shift of weight. The magazines on the table-Time, Newsweek, TV Guide-all fell softly to the floor. Eloise let them lie. Oliver regained his composure quickly, began glaring at Ray.

“That cat is fat,” said Ray. Ray was a powerfully built man, big in the shoulders and the middle. No one would accuse him of being svelte. Eloise suppressed a smile.

“Beauty comes in all sizes,” she said. Oliver started to purr, daintily licking his paw. The clock on the mantel chimed the quarter hour.

“Let’s go to the Chapel,” Ray said. He turned to look out the window.

She followed his gaze. “It’s raining.”

“Wear a raincoat,” he said. “When’s the last time you left the house?”

It had been a couple of days since she’d gone to see Jones Cooper. Sometimes this happened; she didn’t leave the house for a while. Then she didn’t want to leave. Then she was almost afraid to leave, couldn’t think of what to wear that would be acceptable to other eyes. Sometimes she was afraid she had forgotten how to talk to people, real people, not ghosts or holograms or whatever they were, or herself.

“Last-ditch effort,” he said. “If you don’t get anything out there, you’re off the hook. I’m going to tell Michael Holt he’s going to have to keep pushing the Hollows PD. I don’t have those files, so I don’t know what other leads