Leon's facial expression was open and eager, but his phantom limb was clenching and unclenching its fist, and bright red droplets had appeared all over it as if it was sweating blood. I buried my face in my glass, tilting a final droplet of soda onto my tongue.
"Can you touch 'em?" Clayton asked, his voice dropping down into a reverential whisper.
I swallowed around a hunk of turkey that'd lodged in my esophagus. Jacob slid his glass over to me, and I took it and drank it down. He'd been drinking milk. I just barely kept myself from gagging.
"You don't want to touch ghosts," I said.
The house around us, the very air, went quiet. Everyone strained forward to catch whatever crumbs of information I might care to scatter. Because we're a nation that grew up on Lovecraft and
Sleepy Hollow
and
Friday the Thirteenth
, and people are dying to know if all that shit's really real.
"They're creepy," I added. And I swallowed some more milk.
"Why don't you tell Uncle Jacob and Uncle Leon about the report you did on salamanders?" Barbara suggested to Clayton.
"Creepy how?" Clayton asked.
"Clayton got an A minus," said Barbara.
"Creepy
how
?"
"I don't know," I said. I'd started spreading my food around my plate, mixing my corn and my potatoes, ruining both. "The way they look in scary movies? Pretty much like that."
"How can you say that?" Barbara demanded, suddenly so vehement that I wondered how I'd ever pegged her as a sheepish single mom in her pale yellow cardigan and perfectly creased khaki pants. "When people die, they go to heaven."
Oh. Christian. Or had Jacob said Catholic—or was that the same difference? I didn't remember, must not have been paying close enough attention when Jacob had tried to prepare me.
"Barbara," said Jerry. Her father didn't have a follow up ready. Just her name, sounding like a warning.
"If he says he sees spirits, then he does," Leon said, hopping to my defense despite the fact that he made me squirm in my seat. Or, more accurately, his right arm did.
"They have tests." He looked to me for affirmation. "Don't they have tests?"
"All kinds of tests," I said, burying the last of my corn.
"And being able to see them, you're what, a level three?
Four?"
"Five," I said. Level five was a couple of steps down from good old Marie. But Marie was only a step lower than God. Or maybe Satan.
The table went quiet again.
"Are you a millionaire?" asked Clayton.
"It is not polite to ask people how much money they make," said Barbara. She was the same age as me, thirty-eight. She had Jacob's flashing dark eyes and high cheekbones, but she looked just as worn out as I always felt.
Even more so, now that we were attempting civil dinner conversation.
"It's okay," I said. "No, I'm not a millionaire. I make more money than a regular detective, but not as much as my supervisor."
"And you spend as much money as someone who's lived through the Great Depression," Jacob added, sotto voice.
Clayton scrunched his face up. I saw mashed potatoes lurking behind his teeth. "You should find Al Capone and make him tell you where his vault is."
Jerry and Leon laughed, but the way they kept their eyes trained on me, I could tell they were hoping that maybe I'd think that dredging up Al Capone was a grand idea. And I just so happened to need a couple of assistants over the age of sixty-five.
"He's probably not around," I said. "He'd be a little old by now."
Everyone chuckled, except for Barbara, who evidently thought I was a devil-worshipper. And Grandma, who was possibly giving me the evil eye. And Clayton, who couldn't make sense out of my lack of financial savvy.
Leon smacked the table with his left hand as he laughed.
His spectral right hand followed suit, only it pummeled the table with much greater force than its counterpart. Spectral blood flew, spattering the white tablecloth covered in cross-stitched cornucopia, doe-eyed pilgrims, and smiling Indians.
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine a protective white bubble around Leon's arm.
"Are you warm, honey?" asked Shirley. "You want me to open a window?"
I was about to tell her not to bother, when I realized that I felt the prickle of sweat along the back of my neck. "Yeah, okay," I said, as I shrugged out of my flannel shirt and let it bunch on the seat of my chair. I was glad I'd taken the time to find a T-shirt without any holes or stains on it.
I took a deep breath and looked at Leon's ghost hand. It quivered like it was hooked up to an electrical wire. Like that frog in the biology class whose legs kick when you give it a shock. No, I hadn't been absent that day. And yeah, I'd puked. Me and Janet Neiderman.
"I'll be right back," I said, knocking my chair into Jacob's as I scrambled to make my way toward the upstairs bathroom. There was a half-bath on the first floor, but I figured that everyone at the dinner table really didn't need to hear me retching if I couldn't bring my gag reflex under control.
Why did I have to go and think of that goddamn frog?
I dodged past Jacob's old bedroom—now Shirley's very own sewing room—and nearly skateboarded down the upstairs hallway on a pink and blue rag rug. Darting into the bathroom, I slammed the door shut behind me. It had a hook and eye lock on it, which might keep Grandma out, or maybe Clayton, if he didn't lean on the door too hard.
I breathed, and I looked around. It was a normal enough bathroom, more colorful than mine, with blue and yellow sunflowers on the shower curtain that kind of matched a border going around the top of the painted walls, but not quite. I pulled open the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet in hopes of finding a nice bottle of cold medicine, or maybe some valium. Neither one would make Leon's nasty ghost arm go away completely, but they'd sure make me care about it a whole lot less.
The right side of the cabinet was filled entirely with old lady perfume, facial cream, nail polish, and hair mousse. The left held cheap plastic razors like I use, aspirin, foot spray, a stick of green deodorant, cotton swabs, and antihistamines.
Of every drug that had ever been invented, Jacob's parents owned the only two types that affected my talent less than antibiotics.
I pawed through their drawers in hopes of finding a stray muscle relaxant or even an expired tube of motion-sickness pills. I found a bunch of washcloths and some sunblock.
Sunblock. In a small rural Wisconsin town on the border of Minnesota that saw the sun maybe two hours each winter if it peered closely enough between the snowflakes.
I looked underneath the sink and found a pair of rubber gloves and a bunch of cleaning supplies. Damn it.
I tore the medicine cabinet doors open again, hoping to find something that I'd missed before. And then my eyes fell on the nail polish remover.
I turned the bottle around and read the back. Acetone was the first ingredient. And the seminar I'd attended fourteen years ago called Inhalants, the Silent Killer was as fresh in my mind as if I'd just taken it yesterday.
And here I thought I hadn't gotten much out of the Police Academy.
I wasn't a habitual huffer, not like the anorexic girl at the Cook County Mental Health Center—the institution that'd housed me from seventeen to twenty-three—who'd shown me how to get the most bang for my buck with a can of cooking spray or a plastic baggie and a jar of rubber cement. No, I didn't enjoy killing my brain cells randomly, but I was a pragmatist. The arm wasn't going to go away all by itself. And I really needed it to stop waving at me if I wanted to make it through dinner.
I could saturate a wad of toilet paper and hold it over my mouth and nose, but acetone's a stinky chemical, and I'd end up reeking of it. Instead, I set the bottle on the rim of the sink and plugged one of my nostrils, sniffing it carefully in hopes of zapping the specific neurons that enabled me to see Leon's damn spastic missing arm without leaving me stinking like a Chinese nail salon.
I felt a little floaty and had developed a sharp headache over the top of my skull by the time anyone came to check on me.
Luckily, it was Jacob.
Since he didn't need to know I was huffing his mother's nail polish remover, I put it away and washed my face before I answered the door.
He leaned in the doorjamb, looking incredibly sexy in a long-sleeved, chocolate brown silk knit that clung to every muscle like it'd been painted on him. He crossed his arms and gave me his most earnest you-can-trust-me face, pouty and a little doe-eyed.
"Everything all right?"
"It's ... um. I dunno."
"You went a little pale at the table."
It wasn't so surprising that Jacob noticed it when I saw something. Maurice Taylor, my first partner, used to tell me sometimes that I'd disappear if I got any whiter, and he hadn't been joking about my ethnicity.
My eyes stung from the acetone I'd just sniffed, and I pressed my fingertips into my tear ducts to try to relieve the itch. If I knuckled my eyes like I really wanted to, they'd get all red and I'd look totally high. "Your uncle Leon seems like a cool guy."
"He is."
"But ... I can see his arm."
Jacob stepped into the bathroom and locked the door behind him. He sat down on the rim of the tub and took one of my hands between both of his, and he waited.
I avoided his eyes and stared at a tile on the floor that was set a little crooked. "I'm trying really hard to be a decent boyfriend," I said. "But I think I might not be cut out for it."
"Stop it."
"No, it's true. I don't know how to have a family. And evidently, I can't function without having a buzz on."
"What are we talking about?" Jacob asked. "Are you breaking up with me or telling me you want to start going to Narcotics Anonymous?"
My heartbeat, already racing a little from the acetone, did an unpleasant stutter when Jacob said the words "breaking up" aloud.
"I mean, you know. Come on."
"No, I don't. What's going on?"
God damn. I'd started hugging myself without realizing I was doing it. Ugly habit. Ugly, ugly habit. I forced myself to try to stand normally, but I felt like my arms and legs weren't screwed on right. "I just wanted to ... you know ... be with you and your family for the holiday."
Jacob nodded slowly. "Okay. And that's what we're doing. If you need to leave, I'm trusting you to tell me so."
"I don't want to leave in the middle of dinner." I stared up into a painted-on sunflower. "I thought the house was clean," I said.
"And I had no idea that Leon's arm would qualify as a ghost. If you don't want to go, we can move you, say that you need to sit by the window."
"I'd rather sit across from Leon than Barbara, arm or no arm."
Jacob smirked. "Can't say I blame you."
I thought about that damn bloody limb performing acrobatics that were totally out of synch with what Leon's face and body language were telling me. "This is gonna sound stupid," I said. Which I can pretty much use to preface anything that comes out of my mouth. "But I wonder if it knew I could see it and it was showing off."
Stupid or not, Jacob considered the idea. "Maybe it's got a spiritual equivalent to a cellular intelligence. Who knows? But if amputated limbs can be present in the spirit world, it explains why they still cause pain for some people and not others just as much as the idea of a bunch of neurons misfiring."
Could people have their phantom limbs exorcised? It was possible—or at least they could have them scrambled with electrical interference, once the technology of Psych science caught up with the psychology and biology of it.
"If I just had some Auracel, everything would be okay." I take prescription Auracel to block out the visions. Or I used to take it ... until I stopped. Which was fine, inside my apartment. I guess I'd conveniently forgotten about the real world outside it. Only certain pharmacies in big metropolitan areas carried the drug, so even if I could call The Clinic and have them fax a prescription, chances were we'd have to go to Minneapolis to have it filled.
Jacob stood and pulled a little paper cup from a cutesy holder mounted on the wall beside the medicine cabinet, and filled it with tap water. "How many?"
"How many what?"
"How many Auracel?"
I realized he was digging in his pocket, and it was as if the clouds broke open and a beam of sunshine landed right on him.
"You have some?"
He smiled at me. He's got a special grin that's all mine. It somehow manages to be reassuring and to promise that he'll fuck me halfway through the mattress later, all at once. "I've got to tell you: I'm relieved this is only about Auracel." He handed me the paper cup.
"How many do you have?"
"Ten."
"Wow. You're prepared."
"I was a boy scout."
"That's creepy. And hot. At the same time."
Jacob pressed a tablet of Auracel into my mouth, running his thumb back and forth over my lips after he did. I turned away to swallow some water. In fifteen minutes or so, the pill would start kicking in. My relief was greater than my disappointment, but just barely. "I really wanted to do this without the meds."
"Which was your idea, not mine."
That was so not fair. My life was perfectly fine until suddenly I had this live-in boyfriend who wanted to interact with me, and I realized that I was almost always high. Maybe it had been my idea to go cold turkey, but I'd done it because of Jacob.
"Talk to me," Jacob said.
"You're gonna decide I'm too much trouble, someday."
"Uh huh," he said with absolutely zero conviction, flipping my hand over to press a kiss into my clammy palm. His goatee tickled at the base of my thumb.
I felt the first effects of the Auracel kicking in, a little dryness to my tongue, and a tingle in my fingertips that was only intensified by the feeling of Jacob's hot mouth grazing my skin.
"Stop it," I said. "I'm not going back downstairs with a hard-on."
I felt Jacob grinning into my hand, and then his tongue traced my life line.
"I mean it."