A Cry for Hire

A Cry for Hire part 6

She tried not to panic, but was unsuccessful. The door to the room was locked from the outside. Her chest tightened as she imagined the worst. She could remain locked inside some wall in the house with no one but Will to get her out, or she could roam around in the walls until she found her way to rooms she actually did recognize. It did not help matters that the room gave off an eerie feeling. And yet, she wanted Will to believe in her. 

She took a deep dusty breath and tried to un-jam the door.  How long she did this, she was not sure but the room became darker and darker as the sun in Will’s world set.   At last, the happy thought struck her that another exit might lay within the room. Tapping section after section on the walls and examining the carousel, dark though the room was, she finally found another, more, secret passage out. Nervous, praying, she hunkered down and crawled through until she found her way inside a small room Liam had decided would be a daycare for the men’s retreat camp.  (Liam always thought of all contingencies.) Glad she had not encountered a ghost, she raced, heart-racing, eyes closed, through the roadhouse until she landed safely in her own lighted bedroom. 

She spent much of the next day cleaning the room and waving to Will and his mother across the way. 

Three days later, Yasuko died. The death of a great enemy often brings a muted joy. In the case of Yasuko’s death, muted joy had to be even more muted. Novella was an Episcopalian priest's wife and Liam, her husband, was inconsolable. Or perhaps he was somewhat consolable but not immediately so. He would laugh and talk one minute then waves of grief would waft over him causing him to grow silent and stare off into space. Worse, two days after Yasuko’s death, Novella awakened to the touch of Liam’s penis against her buttocks and his right hand cupped over her breast. This had happened before when his father died, sex seemingly being his immediate appropriate response to any death.  

Not Novella’s, however. The truth of the matter was: in the days immediately after any death, Novella was never quite convinced the spirit of the deceased had entirely left, and between her fear of actually seeing a lingering ghost and her shyness at the thought of a spirit seeing her engaged in sex. . . well, it was beyond her mind’s ability to accept Liam’s voiceless but disrespectful proposal. She pushed his hand away.

He spoke to her in the darkness. (She had closed her eyes in case Yasuko’s spirit should appear.) “I just can’t sleep. I need__”

“No!” she said firmly. “First of all, she just died. Secondly, her spirit, her essence is still around and I really just don’t want to deal with that right now.”

“You see her spirit?” he asked looking around hopefully in the darkness. Heights and closed spaces terrified him but the idea of ghosts or demon left him unperturbed. “Is she here? Do you see her? Really? Where?”

Novella fluffed her pillow. “No, I don’t see her. But I know she's here. As much a presence in our bed in her death as in her life. A frickin priest for heaven’s sakes!” She fluffed her pillow again. “I’ve got to go to sleep, okay.” 

“I am allowed to grieve for her,” Liam said. “She was my. . . my. . .”

“Girlfriend.”

Liam rose from the bed, his face in a frown that patiently screamed: affronted. “There really is no talking to you.”

He walked to the door, but turned the light on before he left the room. She smiled at his kindness. He knew she thought ghosts did not show themselves in the light. Annoying though he was, somewhere beneath all that asshole behavior, he apparently still knew and loved her.

Alone in the house, fears of portals and ghosts, looming in her mind, Novella set about renting films or streaming them from the internet. She chose “hang-out” films, the kinds where she could imagine herself hanging out with the characters and being part of their friends and families. She loved movies like that, portals that pulled her away from her own life – a life which now not only consisted of calls from collection agencies but now which included taking messages from parishioners about Yasuko's funeral.