Halloween Is For Lovers (16 page)

She doesn't love me anymore. I have to go back to the Kingdom, I have to go back to being dead.

He deflated. There was so much more he wanted to tell her. To share with her. This was not how he wanted it to end.

"I'm getting ready to turn around now."

He shrunk behind a gravestone. Sitting in the dirt, he pulled his knees into his chest and hugged them tight.

Lily took a deep breath. "I'm turning around, please be gone."

She turned around and he wasn't there. She nodded and felt a little bit lighter, like she had finally unloaded something that had been wearing her down. But then she spotted Hugh's wedding shoe sticking out from behind a gravestone. "I can see your shoe."

He quickly tucked it in. "Oops, sorry."

She stared at the gravestone, wondering what it all meant. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

Please, please, please let me go.

She opened her eyes and saw only the gravestone. She tried to imagine that it was all a dream.

"Are you eff-ing kidding me!" Gilda marched between the headstones, angry. "I've been looking everywhere for you." She grabbed Lily by the elbow and dragged her back toward the church. "Stop being so selfish. This isn't just about you, Lil. I need this. I need to believe that a woman in her early thirties can still find a man who ticks all the boxes. A man without excess baggage." She mumbled and shook her head as she pulled Lily up the church stairs, “Brats from a previous marriage are not bonus kids."

Lily stopped on the top step and looked back out on the graveyard below. She didn't want to, she tried to imagine her eyes were playing tricks on her, but she could still see Hugh's silhouette slumped behind the gravestone.

She sighed with a frown, but before she had a moment to think, Gilda roughly tugged her back into the church. "You're doing this, Lil. There's no turning back now. It's your special eff-ing day, deal with it!"

Reclined in a Graveyard

Hugh slowly walked through the graveyard with his hands in his pockets. With his fingers, he traced the serrated edges of the bottle cap Ana had given him. Things hadn't gone like he'd planned. There was no loving embrace, no magic kiss that brought him back to life. Sprinting through the gate into the Land of the Living, he was so sure that love would save him. The night was passing him by and he sulked between the gravestones, farther from Lily and life than he had ever felt before.

He stopped and looked up at the last few dead leaves that clung to the trees. They'd eventually let go, fall to the ground and slowly rot, looking back up at the branches where they spent their best days fanned out in the sun, swayed by a gentle breeze.

Up ahead, across from Hugh’s grave, Morton reclined on the ground, propped against another tombstone. He took a sip from his bottle of peppermint schnapps. With his free hand he dug around in the dirt, unearthing pebbles and acorns to lob at Hugh's gravestone.

As Hugh walked up, Morton pushed the tombstone back, shifting it to a more comfortable angle.

"You know, they hate that."

"What?" Morton pushed the stone back even farther and wriggled into a comfy recline.

"The dead, they hate it when you disrespect their graves."

"Really? But I sort of knew this guy." Morton turned and looked at the name on the stone he was using for a backrest. "Good ole Lou Fuller." He turned back around and got comfortable. "Good guy, great guy, the best ... If it's the Lou Fuller I'm thinking of."

Hugh stood in front of his gravestone, focusing on the blank space under his name. No wife, no kids, no grandkids. Just his name, the dates of his brief life and nothing else.

"So how did that go?" Morton asked.

"She forgave me. I said I was sorry and she forgave me."

"Well, there you go. Mission accomplished." Morton raised his bottle to Hugh. "Now you can rest in peace."

"I wish."

"What's the problem?"

Hugh lightly kicked his gravestone with the toe of his shoe. "I don't want to go back to being dead."

"Gosh, I don't know if there's anything you can do about that." Morton took a long slug off his bottle.

Hugh took the beer bottle cap out of his pocket and set it on top of his gravestone. Under his breath he mumbled, "Better to let go."

"I wish I could cheer you up, kid. We all gotta die, right? I mean, I'll be down there pretty soon myself. I bet it's all creepy and scary. Sort of like a dungeon with stuff dripping from the ceiling and ..."

"There's no dripping, it's really dry down there."

"Well, that will be good for my allergies. You know, maybe you haven’t got things so bad. You got to come back and see her, she forgave you, maybe things will be better for you now."

"But I still love her."

"Yeah, well, you're dead, she's not. She's got a new guy, long life in front of her, you don't. It's just the way things have to be."

"It's not fair. I really love her. True love is supposed to conquer all. I'm supposed to come back to life." Hugh kicked his gravestone.

Morton watched, studying him. "I'm starting to realize what it is you are. You're not just a ghost, you're a tormented spirit, unable to rest peacefully in your grave. You've come back on Halloween to mess with the living. Don't get me wrong, it's understandable, maybe even justifiable, but it's a real jerk thing to do. Sort of like you're a poor loser."

"Don't you get it? I had to come. I love her."

"Yeah, but you rising up from the dead, slinking around, sliding through tunnels all creepy, trying to see her, that's not love. That's called haunting and you're doing that for you."

"I didn't mean to haunt her, I just wanted to hold her." Hugh reached his arms out slightly and imagined Lily between them. He held her close, not letting go.

"I bet you scared the crap out of her. You know, if you really loved her you would have stayed dead, not come up here and scare her to death on her wedding day. Think about it, you ruin her first wedding by not showing up and dying. Now the night before her second wedding, look who's back to spoil things. Yep, that's an asshole move, buddy."

"It's not like that. I'm doing this because I care about her. I love her."

"You know what you are? You're an evil spirit, plain and simple. But you're so wrapped up in yourself and what you want you can't see it. Yeah, you think you're doing good, but you're really doing bad."

Hugh yelled, eyes wide and angry, "But I love her!"

"Yeah, and you told her that, right? Now it's time for you to go."

Hugh grabbed his head with both hands, his mouth slack. "I didn't. I told her I was sorry but I didn't tell her I loved her." He looked up at the moon, his voice quick and nervous. "How much time do I have?"

Morton shrugged. "I don't wear a watch. I gave up on telling time, I'm letting time tell me."

Hugh gazed out at the eastern sky. "There's still plenty of time, there has to be." He lurched into the night and back toward the church.

Morton watched him go. Crossing his arms and getting comfortable, he wondered if this was a dream or a nightmare, and he wondered when it would end.

Collective Hysteria

Steve's dad, George, hovered around Lily's mom, Patricia, in Frederick's grand ballroom. The room was a cathedral of cherry wood finished in a satin lacquer. Impressive wrought chandeliers cascaded from the vaulted ceiling and gave the room the perfect golden glow. The pumpkins had been pulled from the rehearsal dinner centerpieces and replaced with miniature ears of Indian corn and bright red oak leaves.

Guests were finishing their entrées of Cornish hen served with a parsnip puree and rosemary-infused cranberry glaze. Lily's mom had the vegetarian option, which was pumpkin ravioli in a white sauce that had just a hint of maple syrup. George timed his approach perfectly, knowing that halfway into their conversation he would be called to the microphone to deliver the first of many toasts. Always leave them wanting more, that was George's motto.

"How was your dinner, Patricia?" He peered down the V-neck of her Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress at the bumps on her sternum. Clearly, this was a woman who did a lot of Pilates.

"It was wonderful. The entire evening has been absolutely wonderful." She smiled.

"I wish we had more time to get to know each other, but let me just say your daughter is very, very attractive. I can see where she gets it from."

Patricia laughed, and George crouched down to meet her at eye level. "I'm not sure if you have discussed this with Lily, but your son-in-law-to-be …" He pulled up his sleeve and checked the time on his Patek Philippe. "… to-be in less than eleven hours, well, Steve stands to inherit a company I started from scratch, and while he's successful in his own right, my baby-furniture empire leads the industry in sales volume ..."

Across the room, Lily pushed her plate away. She hadn't touched the hen. Gilda had advised her that nobody wanted to see the bride tearing into a bird carcass with knife and fork on her wedding eve. If she was lucky she'd have a private moment for a bite out of a flax and sunflower seed protein bar she kept tucked in a small slit cut in the lining of her dress. The truth was she wasn't hungry. She gulped wine and pretended to smile while Steve kept the head table rapt with stories of surgically saving lives with his bare hands and setting world speed records with his bare feet. "Jesus walked on water, I glide across it at a hundred fifty-three miles an hour."

Outside, along Frederick's east wall, a creature floated up from the depths of a stagnant pond. Not bothering to dump the muck out of his shoes or wipe the brown stuff off his face, Hugh lurched toward the house.

George’s timing was off. He hadn't been called to the mic and he was now running the risk of boring Patricia. "Now the child labor laws in South America are vastly different. I'm not passing judgment on whether that's right or wrong, it's their country. If they want to put their kids to work right out of third grade, so be it. My big idea was this. Doesn't it just make plain sense to use child labor to build children's furniture? You know, give them some authorship in the products they use? I mean, think about it this way, Patricia, successful companies with brilliant owners push boundaries. And yes, sometimes those boundaries collapse suddenly and trap children underneath them, unable to breathe. But answer me this, unable to breathe or unwilling to breathe?" It was obvious where Steve got his analogy problem from.

Steve interrupted the murmur in the room by clicking on the mic. "Is this on, can you hear me? Can you hear me now?" The room chuckled with polite laughter and Steve made the mistake of tagging the punch line again. "Can you hear me now?" He laughed. "Thank you so much for coming and sharing this wonderful evening with us. Recently I was performing a hand transplant, it's one of the most complicated procedures out there, and I realized hands are how we touch each other and that's how Lily touched me. She put her hands on me and touched me ... She touched me ..." He fumbled for his notes. "Touched my heart ... and tomorrow when she takes my hand in marriage we will have two hands touching each other." He put down his notes. "So with your hand ... one of your hands, please raise your glass in a toast to hands and touching each other and Lily." The guests complied and raised their glasses.

George got up from his crouch and winked at Patricia. "You'll have to excuse me, that's my cue."

Outside, Hugh slid along Frederick's perimeter, trying to open every door and window. The place was locked up tight. Luckily, the caterers had propped open a back door with a five-gallon bucket half full of rosemary-infused cranberry glaze. Hugh snuck in and made his way to the grand ballroom.

George was on the mic. His voice boomed and he waved his free hand in grand gestures, punching up the
I
’s in his speech. "When I was a young man, younger than Steve is now, I had a thought. I wondered to myself, wow, there's a lot of babies out there, what are they going to sleep on? They can't sleep on the floor. Well, I guess they could but they wouldn't be very comfortable. And besides, the floor is dirty. Aha, I thought, baby beds. So through very hard work I grew a small company into one of the top baby and child furniture empires in the United States. I think it's more like the top baby and child furniture company in the world, but that's not important. Accountants and businesspeople like myself have different ways of measuring a company’s phenomenal success. Anyway, back to more about me ..."

While George continued his toast, Hugh made his way down the grand hallway toward the double French doors that opened into Frederick's grand ballroom. He hid in a small alcove that housed a bronze bust of Steve and spied on Lily, waiting for an opportunity to get her alone. But George was taking too long. He was now talking about how he tried skateboarding on his sixty-fifth birthday and then went on to win the senior X Game Vert championship later that year. Hugh couldn't wait any longer. He stood up as straight as he could and propped his head upright. He would march in there and tell Lily he loved her.

He stepped out of hiding and grabbed the handles of both doors.