I walked into the small bathroom but kept the door slightly ajar. As I took Ruth’s clothes off and waited for the hot water to heat up, I hoped that Ruth could see me, could see her body as I saw it, its perfect living beauty.
It was damp and musty in the bathroom, and the tub was stained from years of having anything but water poured down its drain. I stepped up into the old claw-foot tub and stood under the water. Even at the hottest I could make it, I still felt cold. I called Ray’s name. I begged him to step inside the room.
“I can see you through the curtain,” he said, averting his eyes.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I like it. Take your clothes off and join me.”
“Susie,” he said, “you know I’m not like that.”
My heart seized up. “What did you say?” I asked. I focused my eyes on his through the white translucent liner Hal kept for a curtain—he was a dark shape with a hundred small pinpoints of light surrounding him.
“I said I’m not that kind.”
“You called me Susie.”
There was silence, and then a moment later he drew back the curtain, being careful to look only at my face.
“Susie?”
“Join me,” I said, my eyes welling up. “Please, join me.”
I closed my eyes and waited. I put my head under the water and felt the heat of it prickling my cheeks and neck, my breasts and stomach and groin. Then I heard him fumbling, heard his belt buckle hit the cold cement floor and his pockets lose their change.
I had the same sense of anticipation then as I sometimes had as a child when I lay down in the back seat and closed my eyes while my parents drove, sure we would be home when the car stopped, that they would lift me up and carry me inside. It was an anticipation born of trust.
Ray drew back the curtain. I turned to face him and opened my eyes. I felt a marvelous draft on the inside of my thighs.
“It’s okay,” I said.
He stepped slowly into the tub. At first he did not touch me, but then, tentatively, he traced a small scar along my side. We watched together as his finger moved down the ribbony wound.
“Ruth’s volleyball incident, nineteen seventy-five,” I said. I shivered again.
“You’re not Ruth,” he said, his face full of wonder.
I took the hand that had reached the end of the cut and placed it under my left breast.
“I’ve watched you both for years,” I said. “I want you to make love to me.”
His lips parted to speak, but what was on his lips now was too strange to say out loud. He brushed my nipple with his thumb, and I pulled his head toward me. We kissed. The water came down between our bodies and wet the sparse hair along his chest and stomach. I kissed him because I wanted to see Ruth and I wanted to see Holly and I wanted to know if they could see me. In the shower I could cry and Ray could kiss my tears, never knowing exactly why I shed them.
I touched every part of him and held it in my hands. I cupped his elbow in my palm. I dragged his pubic hair out straight between my fingers. I held that part of him that Mr. Harvey had forced inside me. Inside my head I said the word gentle,and then I said the word man.
“Ray?”
“I don’t know what to call you.”
“Susie.”
I put my fingers up to his lips to stop his questioning. “Remember the note you wrote me? Remember how you called yourself the Moor?”
For a moment we both stood there, and I watched the water bead along his shoulders, then slip and fall.
Without saying anything further, he lifted me up and I wrapped my legs around him. He turned out of the path of the water to use the edge of the tub for support. When he was inside of me, I grabbed his face in my hands and kissed him as hard as I could.
After a full minute, he pulled away. “Tell me what it looks like.”
“Sometimes it looks like the high school did,” I said, breathless. “I never got to go there, but in my heaven I can make a bonfire in the classrooms or run up and down the halls yelling as loud as I want. But it doesn’t always look like that. It can look like Nova Scotia, or Tangiers, or Tibet. It looks like anything you’ve ever dreamed.”
“Is Ruth there?”
“Ruth is doing spoken word, but she’ll come back.”
“Can you see yourself there?”
“I’m here right now,” I said.
“But you’ll be gone soon.”
I would not lie. I bowed my head. “I think so, Ray. Yes.”
We made love then. We made love in the shower and in the bedroom and under the lights and fake glow-in-the-dark stars. While he rested, I kissed him across the line of his backbone and blessed each knot of muscle, each mole and blemish.
“Don’t go,” he said, and his eyes, those shining gems, shut and I could feel the shallow breath of sleep from him.
“My name is Susie,” I whispered, “last name Salmon, like the fish.” I leaned my head down to rest on his chest and sleep beside him.
When I opened my eyes, the window across from us was dark red and I could feel that there was not much time left. Outside, the world I had watched for so long was living and breathing on the same earth I now was. But I knew I would not go out. I had taken this time to fall in love instead—in love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt in death—the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human—feeling as you went, groping in corners and opening your arms to light—all of it part of navigating the unknown.
Ruth’s body was weakening. I leaned on one arm and watched Ray sleeping. I knew that I was going soon.
When his eyes opened a short while later, I looked at him and traced the edge of his face with my fingers.
“Do you ever think about the dead, Ray?”
He blinked his eyes and looked at me.
“I’m in med school.”
“I don’t mean cadavers, or diseases, or collapsed organs, I mean what Ruth talks about. I mean us.”
“Sometimes I do,” he said. “I’ve always wondered.”
“We’re here, you know,” I said. “All the time. You can talk to us and think about us. It doesn’t have to be sad or scary.”
“Can I touch you again?” He shook the sheets from his legs to sit up.
It was then that I saw something at the end of Hal’s bed. It was cloudy and still. I tried to convince myself that it was an odd trick of light, a mass of dust motes trapped in the setting sun. But when Ray reached out to touch me, I didn’t feel anything.
Ray leaned close to me and kissed me lightly on the shoulder. I didn’t feel it. I pinched myself under the blanket. Nothing.
The cloudy mass at the end of the bed began to take shape now. As Ray slipped out of the bed and stood, I saw men and women filling the room.
“Ray,” I said, just before he reached the bathroom. I wanted to say “I’ll miss you,” or “don’t go,” or “thank you.”
“Yes.”
“You have to read Ruth’s journals.”
“You couldn’t pay me not to,” he said.
I looked through the shadowy figures of the spirits forming a mass at the end of the bed and saw him smile at me. Saw his lovely fragile body turn and walk through the doorway. A tenuous and sudden memory.
As the steam began to billow out from the bathroom, I made my way, slowly, to the small child’s desk where Hal stacked bills and records. I began to think of Ruth again, how I hadn’t seen any of it coming—the marvelous possibility that Ruth had dreamed of since our meeting in the parking lot. Instead, I saw how hope was what I had traded on in heaven and on Earth. Dreams of being a wildlife photographer, dreams of winning an Oscar in junior year, dreams of kissing Ray Singh once more. Look what happens when you dream.
In front of me I saw a phone and picked it up. Without thinking, I punched in the number to my house, like a lock whose combination you know only when you spin the dial in your hand.
On the third ring, someone picked up.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Buckley,” I said.
“Who is this?”
“It’s me, Susie.”
“Who’s there?”
“Susie, honey, your big sister.”
“I can’t hear you,” he said.
I stared at the phone for a minute, and then I felt them. The room was full now of these silent spirits. Among them were children as well as adults. “Who are you? Where did you all come from?” I asked, but what had been my voice made no noise in the room. It was then that I noticed it. I was sitting up and watching the others, but Ruth was lying sprawled across the desk.
“Can you throw me a towel?” Ray yelled after shutting off the water. When I did not answer he pulled back the curtain. I heard him get out of the tub and come to the doorway. He saw Ruth and ran toward her. He touched her shoulder and, sleepily, she roused. They looked at each other. She did not have to say anything. He knew that I was gone.
I remembered once, with my parents and Lindsey and Buckley, riding backward on a train into a dark tunnel. That was how it felt to leave Earth the second time. The destination somehow inevitable, the sights seen in passing so many times. But this time I was accompanied, not ripped away, and I knew we were taking a long trip to a place very far away.
Leaving Earth again was easier than coming back had been. I got to see two old friends silently holding each other in the back of Hal’s bike shop, neither of them ready to say aloud what had happened to them. Ruth was both more tired and more happy than she had ever been. For Ray, what he had been through and the possibilities this opened up for him were just starting to sink in.