This is a love story.
…
The growl of a motorcycle engine would have woken her, if she hadn't been sitting by the window, waiting for that very sound. It's late, but he's late too, and if she'd tried to go to sleep she would have only lain awake driving herself crazy with thoughts of where he could be, what he could be doing, who he could be doing it with. When she wasn't picturing him dead and bleeding in a ditch, that is.
The engine cuts out, and silence descends again. Mentally, she traces his passage, up the rickety stairs that are bound to collapse under someone one of these days, under the burnt-out light that the landlord still hasn't fixed, past Mrs. Dougherty in Number Five and the crackheads in Number Seven, and hears the rattle of keys in the lock and the creak of the door, the swear as he stubs his toe on the stove, just like every night, and then the click of the switch and the tiny apartment is flooded with slightly dingy yellow light.
"Kitty? What are you doing up?"
She turns to look at him, and wonders if her mascara has run all down her face or just made a splotchy black mess around her eyes. "You're nearly five hours late."
Thank God he doesn't make some stupid excuse. He just looks at her, his mouth slightly open, and then looks past her, out the window she's leaning against. "Yeah. Sorry, kitten."
"What was it this time?" She wants to get good and angry with him, but she cried out all her anger hours ago and now she's just too tired to care. "Or should I ask, who was she?"
"Aww, don't be like that," he says, sitting down beside her on the bed, putting one arm around her shoulders. He's warm and steady and she wants to just melt into him, maybe cry a bit more, maybe pound on his chest and swear at him for a bit, and then everything will be all right again and they can go to bed. But her eyes are dry and there's booze on his breath and nothing is all right. "You know you're the only girl for me."
"You tell me that so often that I almost believe you," she mutters into the fabric of his overcoat. He hasn't taken it off yet? Well, she's still wearing her scarf and her leather jacket over the stupid too-short too-perky uniform she came home from the diner in, she can't really point fingers.
He doesn't answer, just gives her shoulders a squeeze. "I have good news and bad news," he says, a little too brightly, and she shuts her eyes.
"More bad luck?"
"Well, the good news is that I don't work down the docks anymore."
"And the bad news?"
"I don't work down the docks anymore."
She looks up at him, and he's giving her his biggest devil-may-care grin, fuelled by desperation and cheap wine. "Johnny?"
"Got fired today. A couple of the guys spoke up, said it wasn't my fault, but I had too many strikes against me so…" He waves his free hand. "They took me out for some liquid consolation. I swear that was all that happened, kitten."
She pushes his arm off of her shoulders. "What the hell did you not do this time, Johnny?"
He looks so much like a kicked puppy that she nearly forgets why she's angry. But then he opens his mouth and reminds her. "What do you mean, Kitty?"
"It's never your fault. You're always a victim of fate. Everything just goes wrong around you and it's never your fault."
"What?"
"All of those accidents? Your shitheap motorcycle? This goddamn apartment? And now they've finally cottoned that maybe there's a reason things always go wrong around you and you're acting like a victim again!"
He stands up. "Kitty, you're not making any sense."
"I know!"
"And you'll wake the neighbors."
"So they wake up. What do I care?"
"And then we'll get kicked out. Especially if we can't make next month's rent on time -"
"And whose fault would that be, Johnny boy?" She stands up too, hands on hips, challenging. "Oh, right. It wouldn't be yours. Even though you're the one who lost his job. Even though you're the one who came home at three in the morning. Even though you're the one who's always doing this to me! It'd just be more bad luck!" She's screaming now, can hear through the paper-thin walls that the crackheads at Number Seven are stirring, probably about to wake up and come over and bitch her out. Well, fuck them, they have noisy sex at odd hours anyway.
But she's pushed him too far, she can see that. He's glowering at her, and a whiff of stale beer reminds her that maybe now isn't the time to talk about this. They should have gone to bed, should have talked in the morning, when everything looked a little brighter. "Is that how it is, Kitty? Fine then. You obviously don't need me, so why don't you just go find yourself a nice rich boy to fuck and leave me and my bad luck to suffer in peace and quiet."
It feels like she's just been punched in the stomach. Her mouth opens and closes, but nothing comes out, nothing even comes to mind. Finally, she shakes her head, and turns on her heel, stalking across the room that serves them as both kitchen and bedroom to the door, snatching her purse off the bedpost as she goes.
She's got her hand on the doorknob when he realizes what he's said. "Fuck, kitten, I didn't mean it," he calls, but she's already slamming the door behind her. Not that it keeps her from hearing his shouts. "Kitty? Kitty, I didn't mean it, come back, please," but she's already starting down the stairs and the crackheads from Number Seven are coming out to see what all the fuss is about and they get in his way, letting her make her escape.
The night air is cold on the back of her neck, and she pulls the jacket closer around herself. It was enough for walking home from the diner this afternoon, but now it's not enough protection from the chill in the air. She can see her breath hanging in the air; the leaves will start to turn soon. It'll be beautiful.
She wants to go back inside, apologize and go to bed and then sit down with him and have a serious talk later, when both of them are sober and calm. But she'd have to apologize to him, and she's still too angry to do that, can feel it burning like a red-hot coal right in the pit of her stomach. And it burns hotter when she forces herself to admit she wasn't being fair to him. Oh, yes, he does blame entirely too much on bad luck, but the truth is that not everything he blames on his bad luck is actually his fault.
Bad luck. It seems to follow them wherever they go, snapping at their heels, unshakeable and implacable and always hungry for more misery. But somehow, until now, it's been enough just to have each other, to know that no matter what there was someone there who would catch you, who wouldn't judge you, who would understand you and who would love you no matter what you did.
"Go find yourself a nice rich boy to fuck."
"Kitty!"
He bursts out the door, his greatcoat flapping behind him, and spots her almost immediately. Almost instinctively, she takes a step backwards, off the curb.
"Johnny, don't you dare -"
His eyes go wide, and there's a note of terror in his voice as he shouts her name. She whirls around, and the engine noise registers a moment too late.
The last thing she sees is the blinding white glare of a pair of headlights.
…
This is a ghost story.
…
Hit and run.
It's been nearly two weeks and it still hasn't sunk in. Johnny keeps expecting her to walk in, toss her jacket on the bed, and start bitching about how awful her job is. Just like always.
The bastard didn't even touch the brakes. He just ploughed into her, full speed, and kept going. Dragged her for half a block. The police asked if he'd got the license plate number, and Johnny'd snapped that he hadn't been looking because he'd been too busy watching his girlfriend die in front of him.
They'd stopped asking him questions after that.
He knows that finding the bastard who did it, finding and punishing him, won't bring her back. He knows it, the same way he knows she's dead. But part of him still expects her to walk through that door.
There are nightmares. The ones where it happens all over again are pretty bad, especially when he's sitting beside her mangled body and it sits up and cusses him out for fighting with her, for making her angry enough to storm out. But the worst ones are the ones where nothing's happened at all, where she slips into bed beside him and snuggles up. Then it's not the dream that's awful. It's waking up cold and alone in an empty bed in a shithole apartment, with nothing and no one but the chilly knowledge that she's dead and it's all his fault.
It's one of those nights that he wakes up, gasping for air, and she's sitting on the bed.
He blinks a few times, shaking off the last cobwebs of dream, stares stupidly at her looking down at him. The moonlight makes her seem weirdly luminescent. "Kitty…?"
By the time he rubs the sleep out of his eyes, she's gone.
She starts appearing every night, just sitting on the end of the bed, watching him. She never speaks, doesn't try to touch him. She isn't bloody, or draped in chains, or wearing a sheet. She doesn't scream or throw things. All she does is stare.
The landlord comes around for the rent about a week after she first appears. Johnny still doesn't have a job. It might be nice to move out of the apartment where her presence is practically stamped on the walls, but there's no way he'd find another apartment with such low rent. Not that he can make it anyway, not without an income.
"I gave you two punks an extension last month."
"And we paid it."
"Can't pay the rent on time, though, can you? And I've been hearing complaints about you causing disturbances." The landlord twiddles his impressively large, thick, and black moustache. Kitty used to say he was more moustache than man.
"We're – I'm the quietest room on this floor! Well, except for Mrs. Dougherty."
The landlord shrugs. "Either you pony up by end of the month, or -" He jabs a thumb over his shoulder.
That night, Johnny wakes up and she's not there. But there's a chilly, heavy feeling in the air.
The next morning, two of the top stairs are gone, rotten wood torn through like tissue paper. Two ambulance medics are carrying a stretcher out the front door. There's a white sheet draped over the figure lying on it.
Mrs. Dougherty exclaims that it's the most exciting thing that has ever happened in the building.
"I do hope the new landlord will do something about those stairs," she continues.
"New landlord?"
"Oh yes. Didn't you know? That was the old one they were carrying out this morning."
Johnny can't seem to get warm for the rest of the afternoon.
There's a short article in the paper the next day, buried under ads and celebrity gossip. Andrew Jackson, 29, was arrested in connection with the city's 32nd hit-and-run accident of the year and released on bail. Kitty's name isn't even mentioned, and Johnny wants to punch whoever put 'accident' behind 'hit-and-run'. There was nothing accidental about her death. If it had been an accident, then the bastard would have tried to hit the brakes.
He throws that section of the newspaper across the room and spends the rest of the day scouring the classifieds for want ads.
For whatever reason, sleep refuses to come that night, and four in the morning finds him sitting up in bed, staring at the wall, not asleep, not really awake.
She doesn't come in, exactly. She's just sort of…there, congealing out of the moonlight until a softly shimmering version of his dead girlfriend is sitting on the end of the bed. He watches the way the moonlight picks out the lines of her face, the gleam in her eyes, lending substance and a soft glow to her tousled hair. For a while, he's content just to sit and drink her in, memorizing every detail of her face. A sudden fear that if he doesn't, she might just disappear forever settles coldly into his chest.
Then she smiles, and he's awake.
"They found him," he tells her, even though somehow he's sure she already knows. "The guy who was driving. When. You know."
Her smile fades, and she looks out the window, touching her head absently, as if she doesn't even know she's doing it. For a moment, he remembers the blood, the unnatural dent where her fingers now rest, the blank look in those beautiful eyes, and he leans forward and tries to pull her hand away.
His fingers slip right through. And their momentum carries them right through her head, and for a horrible moment her face blurs, before resolving itself. She's looking at him again, and before he can move or think she leans forward, closing the distance between them as easily as she used to when she was alive. He shuts his eyes out of reflex, and something cool and soft brushes his lips.
When he opens his eyes, she's gone.
He falls asleep, and doesn't wake up until the morning sun is shining on his face.
For some reason, today it feels like something heavy has been lifted off his shoulders. He actually smiles as his bike roars to life, enjoys the wind on his face as he rides. The tail of his heavy greatcoat flaps out behind him like a cape as he speeds towards the first address.
The receptionist at the mechanic's is a busty blonde. He can't remember the job interview, but he leaves with a black-markered telephone number burning against the back of his hand.
He wakes up alone that night, and before he even sees Kitty he's screaming into the darkened room, "What do you want from me? They've got him, all right? And I'm sorry. Do you really think that every time I see you, I'm not so fucking sorry?"
As ever, there's no reply. She just watches him, an unreadable expression on her softly-glowing, slightly transparent face.
The next day, there's an article in the paper. A single-car crash. One fatality. The driver, Andrew Jackson, 29, was taken to hospital and declared dead on arrival. Paramedics were unable to locate a female passenger. Witnesses are being interviewed and the public enlisted in an attempt to identify her.
Her description sounds awfully familiar. As it should – he only sees her sitting on the end of his bed every night.
Johnny wonders what ran through the mind of Andrew Jackson, 29, when he turned around and saw a dead woman sitting in his car. A woman he'd killed.
It would probably be distracting enough to make him drive headlong into a bridge support.
With that sobering thought on his mind, Johnny sets out on his bike for another interview, this one halfway across town.
He wonders how much it would cost to have a priest exorcise his apartment. But that'd just be a waste of money he doesn't have, since she's obviously not bound to any particular place. Maybe he could get himself exorcised, convince her to clear off. Let the dead rest in peace, and the living get on with…well, living.
But he can't quite forget the faintest of butterfly kisses, from lips that are hardly more than mist.
Maybe he needs an exorcism for his brain.
He's just starting across the bridge when the woman steps out in front of him.
He's too lost in thought to notice until it's almost too late, but as soon as he does, he swings the bike hard to the right. It shrieks in protest, nearly drowning out the pounding of his own heart as he fights for control, all but lying down on the road as the bike skids.
The bike slams into the steel railing lining the bridge, flinging him out into the road. He hits the pavement hard and slides, his greatcoat thankfully absorbing the worst of the road burn. He's still got to have broken ribs at least, though.
And he looks up, and Kitty's smiling down at him.
He's on his feet before he even has time to think. "What the hell was that? You could have killed me!"
Her smile drops a few notches. He doesn't pause, knowing she won't answer him. Never does.
"What do you want?" He can feel his anger starting to crumble, threatening to release the floodwaters it's holding back. "Why won't you just leave me alone? Goddamnit, Kitty, you're dead!"
Unexpectedly, her smile returns. And, for the first time since that horrible night, she speaks.
"I know."
"You – what?" Far from defused, though, he feels even more pissed off by this acknowledgement. "Then why are you hanging around me? Why can't you just move on? Let me live?"
She's still smiling, but her eyes are sad. "Together forever, right, Johnny? Just because I'm dead doesn't mean I don't care about you."
"So…what? You thought you were helping me?"
"No," she snaps. "I know I was a royal pain in the ass. But I tried."
"You killed the landlord."
"The landlord killed himself. It was his own fault he never fixed those stairs."
"And the driver."
"You're telling me you didn't want to do the same?"
He meets her eyes, and thoughts well up, daydreams of finding the luckless Andrew Jackson, 29, driving him off the road, meeting him in a darkened alley. Beating seven kinds of snot out of him for daring to hurt a hair on the head of his girl.
But…murder?
Maybe, something whispers darkly inside his head.
"It doesn't matter, anyway," she's saying, shaking her head. "Because you just threw it all away. And I was only trying to help."
"What are you talking about?"
She grabs his hand, and rips off the leather riding glove. Black ink glares back like an accusation. "Your car-shop floozy! I should have known I meant nothing to you."
"Kitty…you were dead."
"And still am," she corrects him. "But it doesn't matter."
"Wh-" He stops short. Wait a minute, did she just touch –
"Together forever, Johnny," she says, lacing her fingers between his.
He can't breathe.
"Kitty?"
"Yes?"
He can't bring himself to ask. Instead, he turns to survey the damage.
The railing isn't even dented, but the chicken wire covering it is torn away where his bike hit. The bike, too, is gone, though he could swear the railing had stopped it from falling right off the bridge.
He pries her hand from his and walks forward, each step feeling like a condemned man's toward the gallows. He can feel her behind him as he stops at the railing, leans over to see the wreckage below.
His beautiful shitheap bike is lying on the rocky riverbed, mangled almost beyond recognition in a spreading puddle of gasoline. But the carnage of the bike, no matter how beloved, can't keep his eyes from the other figure, lying motionless, limbs twisted at odd angles, blood and brains splattered across the rocks.
Wearing his greatcoat.
She takes his hand, gently leads him away from the railing.