Ghosts can either be temporarily solid or completely ectoplasmic but they can't be both at the same time, not even a poltergeist like Daniel Gregg. He knew this but forgot about paranormal logistics while stuffing his mouth with Martha's last piece of cherry pie. What was left of what Jonathan couldn't finish, anyway. The sometimes-solid spectre rose from the table, meaning to carry his dish magnanimously to the sink, but ran smack into Martha as she removed the soup tureen from the table. The Captain managed to hold onto his plate. The Blue Willow bowl flew out of Martha's hands and fractured into a thousand small pieces on the old wooden floor. Martha's eyes widened like Blue Willow saucers. The kids froze, their eyes glued to the Captain's face. The room was deadly quiet until Carolyn's fork clattered, unbidden, onto her plate. She stared at the Captain with an intensity that was impossible to read. Candy gasped. Jonathan's mouth hung wide open, mashed potatoes in evidence. They remembered Martha's stern admonition to never, ever mention or discuss the Captain's convenient corporality with their woefully clueless mother.
"She'll figure it out or he'll tell her and when he does, everything will change," Martha foretold ominously just a week earlier, after she overheard them discussing plans to play football with the ghost. Candy, whose only experience of her mother and men revolved around her very-dead father, thought such a disclosure would cause great fights between the two. Jonathan hoped the Captain would just bump into her and get it over with so he could play football with the Captain after school, without having to worry that his mother might see a tackle.
For her part, Martha'd had just about enough of both her employer and the ghost. Lately, the two seemed to have developed a penchant for bickering about the most mundane details of the day. Martha knew Captain Gregg could be a pompous, arrogant ass on any particular occasion, but recently Carolyn -- normally logical and reserved -- seemed to sink, like a child, to his level every time he floated another of his perfectly ridiculous opinions about how to run Gull Cottage.
Usually the two retreated to their "cabin" for more major rows, but lately they seemed less-guarded about their emotions and a little freer with the long, meaningful gazes that followed each fight. There was one entirely appropriate playing field to resolve all such matters, and ever-practical Martha fervently wished that Daniel Gregg would get down to business and end his ghostly charade for al their sakes.
Yet now, at this very moment of reckoning, the two of them simply stared at each other. Captain Gregg did not dematerialize in the puerile fashion to which he had recently become accustomed. The ladylike but tempestuous Carolyn Muir did not throw her own pie plate at the Captain.
"Look guilty," Martha silently implored the Captain. Instead, he planted his feet firmly on the floor, raised his chin, furrowed his brow and prepared for battle, hands assertively placed on his hips. Jonathan and Candy, just beginning to grasp the seriousness of the situation, gawked at her mother, whose cool Teutonic features had never looked so forbidding. "Good night, kids," Carolyn began, her voice shaking, her eyes riveted on the Captain. "Go. Now."
"Kids, upstairs for baths. Now," Martha barked, hurriedly ushering them out of the kitchen. The children tread reluctantly up the stairs, desperate to hear any reassuring words that might augur well for the Captain. All they heard was a soft, impersonal command: "Daniel, please do your ghost thing and reassemble that soup tureen before Scruffy tears his tongue up trying to lick food off the fragments."
Then nothing. With Martha's tacit permission, the children even lingered on the landing, hoping to hear something, anything. Silence. "She can't keel-haul him in the kitchen," Jonathan mumbled on his way down the corridor. Candy worried her mother couldn't see the obvious differences between her angry daddy and the wonderful Captain Gregg. Martha, meanwhile, was mentally scripting the excuses she'd be forced to offer up some time in the morning, after Carolyn realized she'd been left out of the six-month party by her own housekeeper and offspring.
Candy hopped into the tub first, scrubbing herself morosely with the pink washcloth. When she was dried and nightgowned-up, Jonathan crawled into the bathtub, held his breath and sank dramatically under the dwindling bubbles, wondering how it would really feel to be dragged under a mighty clipper. Martha ushered each of them to prayers and bed, tucking them in tightly and threatening a cookie-less week if they dared leave the room to eavesdrop or stick up for Captain Gregg. "Let's hope he can handle your mother," they overheard her mutter.
The housekeeper turned out the bedroom light and slunk as unobtrusively as possible down the stairs and into her own bedroom. After three guilt-fueled shots of whiskey, she turned in for the night, hoping to have a job in the morning.
Carolyn's gaze remained fixed on the Captain, whose bluster had begun to fade as he, too began to realize the magnitude of his betrayal. The woman he'd so desperately sought to keep didn't think much of his little white lie. It looked like she didn't think much of anything at the moment. When her eyes finally left his, they focused on the dirty plates and napkins she proceeded to stack in the middle of the table.
"Please don't leave me, I can explain," Daniel Gregg whispered urgently. "I wanted you to feel safe, to buy us both time…" He'd learned to deftly deal with her anger and illogical female mind. Even to tolerate her nuanced indifference to matters that enraged him. But, to be treated as perfunctorily as the aluminum-siding salesman who rang the doorbell yesterday? The Captain was flummoxed. There was nothing nuanced about her sudden focus on the messy kitchen.
"Well," she replied evenly. "Certainly I feel very safe here. I'll leave you to the dishes then." The Captain desperately wiggled a finger and the knives, forks and plates danced merrily from the table to the sink. He hastened to the kitchen door so he could block her exit without appearing panicked. He leaned almost too casually against the doorframe, hoping his cornflower blue eyes could do the job his mouth couldn't.
Her emerald-green eyes flashed back. "Get out of my way, Daniel Gregg," she hissed. "Don't touch me. Now or ever." He reached for her arm but she twisted her way around him and toward the stairs. She took two steps up then spun around so quickly the ghost almost ran into her.
She slapped him resoundingly across his face. "If you think this is the part where you get to sweep me off my feet, carry me kicking upstairs and pinion me romantically to 'our' bed you have another thing coming. Not now, not ever, not even in my afterlife."
Enormous relief flooded over the errant Captain. When a woman slaps a man, it means she really loves him. Wisely, he decided against sharing this insight and merely waited as she sank onto the stair and buried her head in her hands. "I hate you."
She squirmed slightly as he lifted her into his arms and carried her up the stairs. "I really hate you," Carolyn added for emphasis as she wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face in his chest. Captain Daniel Gregg deposited her lightly at their bedroom door, holding her closely until she regained her balance. However, her arms remained entwined at the base of his curls. She nuzzled her face on his jacket. He could feel her begin to dissolve into his arms, and he embraced her tightly.
"Perhaps we could discuss this further, Madame, over a drink in front of the fireplace?" he whispered hopefully, sincerely, into her ear. She pushed him away, recomposing her face into a bland stare.
"I just wanted to see if you're as corporeal as you claim to be." She raised her chin. "I did not mean to lead you on. Don't ever touch me again. It's what you want, isn't it? You, who've slept with every woman in every port along your19th-century sojourns?" She laughed, hollowly. "Compared to those conquests, I'm sure you find me lacking in all regards. Good night, Captain Gregg. I leave you to your far more stimulating … sea charts!"
He didn't even try to keep the door from slamming. On the other side, Carolyn gasped. A fire burned brightly in the hearth. Roses were strewn loosely across the bed, and a brandy sifter breathed delicately on the nightstand. Candles glowed on her desk.
"You come back here right now, Captain Gregg!" Striding right through the door, he faced her squarely as her face reddened and tears formed.
"I never left you Madame –"
"Make all of this go away!"
"My dear Mrs. Muir –"
"Mrs. Muir? You never could call me by my first name, could you?" she laughed, ruefully, and then gazed around the room. "I suppose this is how you intended to tell me some day that you can be semi-solid whenever the mood strikes? Do you really think I'm going to swoon over fake roses and candles, now?" She strode to the telescope and swung it as hard as she could. It was still spinning, hard, when she flounced out to the patio and spun the ship's wheel for added measure.
"Six months, Captain! Six months! Don't stand there like you're just waiting for me to finish venting so you can do whatever it is sea captains do to stowaways in stories I won't let you write! Don't tell me you lied because you think I'm some sort of clueless virgin who needs protection! Like I couldn't bear the thought of a fully loaded ghost-man keeping night watch in my bedroom. You may have slept your way around the world, but I've had my share of men, too!"
Daniel Gregg knew this was a lie by the way she tilted her head backwards and widened her eyes.
"In fact," she said through clenched teeth, "I don't even find you remotely attractive."
Patience man, he counseled himself. Carolyn shivered as she felt the sea breeze for the first time. She caught his inadvertent glance at her hardening nipples and wrapped her arms protectively around her shaking body. By now, the Captain could only think of how she would look and feel in his arms once he'd dispatched that silk blouse. Carolyn blushed and fiddled with her pearls. "I know what you're thinking, but it's not going to happen. Ever. You've made a laughingstock out of me in front of my children and my housekeeper. I look pathetic. You led me on with parasols, glasses of Madeira blast you Captain, made me feel loved and wanted for the first time ever! I guess all you really wanted was the idea of a family."
"I mean," she lowered her eyes. "Blast it, I hate you! I mean it! Do you know how many nights I've lain over there, fantasizing about how it would feel if I awakened to your kiss, to the warmth of your hand as it pushed my nightgown high over my breasts?"
Carolyn was not even satisfied by the tears now gathering at edges of the Captain's eyes. She'd never seen him anything other than tender the few times they'd obliquely talked about their relationship. It dawned on her that the very manly Captain Daniel Gregg probably thought denying them a physical relationship was the noble thing to do. No, Carolyn thought. If she was going to succumb to her intense desire to plaster herself shamelessly against him, it wouldn't be until he'd earned that surrender, until his mind was as befuddled as hers, until she had the power back and he fully realized the magnitude of his big mistake.
Daniel Gregg had made her wait six long months, during which they'd shared roughly 180 intimate walks on the beach, countless hours bickering disproportionately over trivial incidents, engaged in hundreds of intimate looks too painful to bear for long.
Even this did not include the lonely night watches when she'd debated whether she could actually survive another 50 or so years without physical love.
"I was afraid, Carolyn, my dear, of losing you prematurely, before you fully recovered from your husband's death. And, if you didn't love or want me, I would be most compelled to leave rather than force my continued presence upon the truest lady I've ever known.
"My love." He lifted her hand to his lips, where she let it linger after he'd kissed it several times. "I may have slept with many women, but never with one I truly loved as I do you."
Carolyn rose on her tiptoes, and pulled his face to hers. She kissed him softly, exploring his mouth with her lips, and then claiming him with her tongue. His beard is so soft, she thought, before she thought nothing at all. The Captain groaned unabashedly as his mouth found her neck and his hands the very breasts he could not even imagine touching just seconds ago.
"Move the blasted roses," she whispered as he lifted her up to carry her inside.
They didn't hear the knock on the door or see it slowly push open as he headed for the bed, his tongue just above her collarbone.
"Mommy?" It was Jonathan and Candy.
"I told you he'd win," the little boy whispered to his older sister, a wide smile on his face. Candy didn't know what to say. "Groovy!" was the only word that came to mind. They turned, and ran giggling from the room.
Carolyn's breath was ragged. "Do you suppose we should go after them?" she asked, pulling her shirt hurriedly down and smoothing her hair. "This could traumatize them –"
"Nay, Madame!" the Captain laughed, not even angry at the interruption to the first lovemaking he'd enjoyed in 100 years. "However, I must leave briefly to blast them all into such deep slumber that they don't wake up in the morning until we wish it!"
He was back almost instantly. "Lock the blasted door," she demanded as she pulled him toward her, down onto the bed.
Carolyn wondered at the sense of oneness and completeness that overwhelmed her again, as she made sounds she'd never heard come out of her mouth. She clung to the Captain, running her hands over the his enormous, sweaty back.
When they finally separated, an hour or so later, she sat awkwardly up, trying to recover her breath. She reached for the brandy, pouring them each a generous glass of amber.
It wasn't until she replaced the sifter on the nightstand that she noticed an elegantly folded piece of heavy bond paper, officially sealed shut with the waxen initials "DG." "Captain, what's this?" She blew a wisp of stubborn hair out of her eyes as she took a big gulp of brandy. "Madame, there's no need to brace yourself with alcohol. That was merely my plan B, in case we ran aground this evening and I was forced to retire to the Wheelhouse, alone for all eternity. Open it."
With hands still trembling from their recent exertion, Carolyn opened the note and read:
If you want what visible reality can give, you're an employee. If you want the unseen world, you're not living your truth. Both wishes are foolish, but you'll be forgiven for forgetting that what you really want is love's confusing joy. - Rumi