These days, it’s not safe to be openly dead. Not because most people believe in ghosts—they don’t—and not because there are a bunch of scientists with proton packs and highly paid scriptwriters stalking the corners—there aren’t. Because witches are rare, but they’re real, and they know that every ghost is a walking, talking pathway to the sort of American dream that’s become the only one over the course of the last thirty years. Eternal youth, and all you have to do is exploit somebody’s dead relatives. Witches can, and witches do, and so we hide from them as best we can, and we pray to be left alone to live our deaths until they’re done.
Another thing no one knows for sure: who first prisoned a ghost in glass and learned that once we’re caught between the silver and the surface, we can’t control how much time we take from the living. The living get to control that. Worse, we can’t move on, not even when we’ve aged past the point where we should have gone on to whatever comes next. Trap one of us and you’ve got yourself an answer to the question “What will I do when I get old?” You’ll dump all the years you don’t want on your captive dead, and they’ll never be able to fight back, and they’ll never be able to get away. Most witches won’t go that far. They want to stay young, sure, but death comes for us all in time, and they know better than to expect the dead to be forgiving to those who’ve abused us.
Witches like Brenda hold on to their preferred age by bartering with ghosts to carry their years away. I’ve known Brenda since I stumbled into New York, and she’s been comfortably settled in her late fifties for all that time, not getting any younger, but not getting any older, either. She’s only asked me to take her time away once, shortly after we met, when she told me she knew what I was.
“Dead is dead, but moved on is better,” she said, face serious and serene under the neon light. “Could do without six months or so, if you want it. Could be convinced to make it worth your while.”
“No, you couldn’t,” I replied, and I told her everything. Everything. It just came pouring out in a great cathartic rush. Patty, and how she died. Me, and how I died, and woke at the back of the church during my own funeral, with Ma weeping on my bier and Pop standing there, his face empty, like a mirror with no one looking in it. How my parents covered every piece of glass in the house where I grew up, from the windows on down, so I couldn’t find any purchase there, couldn’t make it through the doors.
How I went looking for my sister and couldn’t find her in any of the places where her spirit should have been. There wasn’t even an echo. Patty was gone, just gone, moved on to whatever came next. She died when she was supposed to die, and I . . . I didn’t, overeager little sister always following too close, always leaping before I looked. Patty went where and when and how she was supposed to go, the same way she always had. And I was the accident, just like always. Just like always.
Brenda patted my hand, the first and only time she ever touched me, and nothing passed between us but understanding, no stolen seconds, no repurposed age. I didn’t want to give, and she didn’t want to take. “You’ve got things to work through, little girl, and I’m not going to get in the way,” she said. And then she said the words that changed the world: “If you’re not willing to take what you need, have you thought about doing something that would let you earn it?”
I found my first support group not a month later. I started helping people. I started earning the time I take, justifying it with my actions before I pull it into myself. I’m aging slowly, so slowly, but I like to think that when I finally catch up to my time—whatever age that is—and move on to wherever Patty is waiting for me, she’ll be proud. She’ll see I did the best I could.
She’ll see how much I love her.
It’s two o’clock by the time I leave the diner. The frat boys and tourists are gone, and the homeless have gone to their secret places to sleep, leaving the city for the restless and the dead. I walk with my hands in my pockets and the streetlights casting halogen halos through the fog, and I can’t help thinking this is probably what Heaven will be like, warm air and cloudy skies and the feeling of absolute contentment that comes only from coffee and pie and knowing your place in the world.