Chloe doesn't know what she's doing as she slides the plates on the table. She feels like she's setting up a tea party, complete with tiny napkins and tea cups. She thinks about tossing the whole thing out the window.
Rachel is careful with which way the handles on the cups are facing, rearranging the bowls of food until they suit her taste. She doesn't notice the way Chloe's hands shake as she tries to separate forks and spoons, and why the hell do they need butter knives anyway? This is becoming more and more ridiculous by the second and Chloe dumps the rest of the silverware into a pile on the table.
Rachel looks up, one eyebrow quirked, and goes back to moving apples from the top of the bowl in front of her. Red is on top, now green, now yellow. She glances back at the book to her side, which doesn't have a diagram for apple displays, but she frowns at it as if it does. "Does this look right?" she asks, placing the red apple on top again.
"Does it fucking matter?" Chloe says. They are eating apples and leftover lasagna with Joyce's old china collection and the doll-sized tea cups Rachel has had since she was six. She doubts anyone, ghosts included, care about the position of apples or which way the butter knife is facing.
But Rachel looks up again, irritation obvious in the straight line of her frown. The apple tumbles back into the bowl. "It's all about presentation," she says. "It creates an energy." She points back to the book, the corners dog-eared and curling in on themselves. This part Chloe is certain is actually part of the book, though she hasn't read it all the way through. She'd skimmed it, to see if this would work, to see if it was plausible, the way that setting a plastic Ouija board between them and demanding the answers from the dead was.
She had already tried that route, since she was thirteen. Every year. Every month. The only answer she'd ever received was last week, when the planchette twitched when she sneezed. Rachel had said the ghosts must be telling her she's allergic to bullshit.
She knows they're not doing it right, this dumb supper. There should be an actual meal, something more presentable, and there is probably isn't enough spiritual energy to turn a light bulb on, let alone fill a table seating with ghosts. But she thinks the effort should count for something, and so she goes back to hopelessly moving the silverware around, whatever spot a knife could look at home, and waits for Rachel to stop juggling apples.
"Okay," Rachel says, voice hushed as if the slightest sound could send them tumbling out of the bowl.
"What do we do now?" Chloe doesn't bother to lower her voice.
"We wait," Rachel replies, lighting the candles and eying the book again.
Chloe tries to take the chair next to her but Rachel shoos her away, gesturing to the one across from her. "We have to spread our energy across the table," she insists and Chloe rolls her eyes.
"Do I need to rub my butt over the table or something? Would that give you your damn energy?"
Rachel sighs, fingers steepled in front of her as if Chloe has stolen the last of her patience. "This was your idea. Do you want to do this or not?"
"Fine, yes," Chloe says, sinking into the chair.
They wait, like figures in a painting, still and rigid, and the air filling with seconds between them. Outside, the muffled shouts of trick-or-treaters pass like cars and they flinch at every sound.
"How do we know?" Chloe asks, and this time her voice does sink lower. "When it works?"
It's the same question she asked last week, when they were huddled over the Ouija board, willing something to happen, something to breathe life or death or electricity tingling in her fingertips as he sinks into being.
"We wait," Rachel repeats, like she did last week, though now that there's a table with food and chairs between them, it feels entirely different.
Chloe remembers the last time she'd sat at a table waiting for him, the first time his chair had been empty. No plate. No silverware. Joyce had moved the chair away after the first few days.
The waiting always feels like the anticipation before a car crash, the millisecond before everything erupts in glass and shrieking metal, but forever suspended.
In the past few years, those are the only sounds Chloe has heard at night.
She picks up a fork and scratches at her plate with it, dragging noise into the room just for the sake of it.
The chairs sit still and empty, the only ghosts being past dinners and the kids running past their door.
Thump.
There's a knock at the door, muddled, with the doorknob shuddering, and Chloe sits rigid in her chair.
Rachel grabs her hand, both warm and cold with a sheen of sweat, and squeezes it till Chloe can't feel her own pulse.
Then the door pushes open, Joyce stumbling inside under a grocery bag topped with candy and an expression that could ward off demons. "Why am I getting candy on Halloween night? Why is it so hard to keep out of the bags until tomorrow? Next year, I'm sending you out to do it, Chloe, or you can tell the kids why you ate it all and..." She runs out of breath before she runs out of words and when she catches sight of the girls' expressions, she stares at them open-mouthed. "What's wrong?"
Chloe sends her chair clattering to the floor as she rushes up the stairs and into her room. She slams the door and slams her back against the wood, hands shaking so much she can't even force them into fists.
"Chloe." Rachel's at the door, pushing lightly, but not trying to barge through. Chloe can feel her weight on the other side and it makes her feel as if she's falling forward.
"We can try next year," Rachel encourages. "Or try the board again. Maybe hunt down a psychic or something. There's gotta be a way."
"There isn't a way," Chloe says and her voice burns as she speaks, low and raspy. "He's gone." She says it the way kids do when the coast is clear at hide-and-seek, or a stain is cleaned up from the floor. Like someone else is dictating her life to her, The Life and Times of Chloe Price. Factual. Cold. Unimportant.
It makes it easier for her to rise back to her feet, for Rachel to open the door and pull her close, muscles tensed like she wants to run away even as she stands still. Chloe's lips capture hers, fumbling to find solace where words can't.
It makes it easier, when they're both stoned and half-asleep in her bed, for everything to float up where she can pluck it away and set it aside.
"Nothing's ever gone," Rachel says, eyes closed, Chloe's fingers in her hair. "Everything's residual."
Bullshit, Chloe wants to shout, but the word weighs too heavily on her chest, just like her breathing does, and she's much too close to sleep to fuel the anger. She lets her eyes slide closed as well.
It's not Halloween the next time Chloe sets the table. She doesn't know if that's how it works, if the spiritual portal or whatever she's supposed to call it is closed tight against her the other 364 days of the year, but she does it anyway—the china plates, the napkins, the silverware. There are no tea cups this time, so she settles for the cheap glasses Joyce uses in the summer. She feels like she's setting up a goddamn picnic now. The bowl is full of leftover tortilla chips instead of apples and there's nothing to rearrange until it's perfect. She places a plate of sandwiches next to the bowl. It feels like such a pitiful offering.
She sits at her chair long after the last street lamp has turned on, long after Joyce has gone to bed, frowning at the full table with empty chairs while Chloe simply stares ahead stoically.
She pretends the chairs are full, not of ghosts, but people, solid and breathing, and bustling the food around between them.
She pretends she's six and tossing chicken bones to the stray dogs at the park, the air thick and smoky from a nearby barbecue.
She pretends she's at the diner with Rachel, a plate of fries between them as they pick through the burnt ones, her fingers tangling with hers before Rachel slaps her away and claims the good fries for herself.
She sits at her chair until she can't keep her eyes open anymore, her face against the table, her hand splayed out next to it. When she moves, she sees the imprint on the wood, the residual hand gleaming until she wipes it away.
There's a part of her that's relieved that it didn't work, not because she's tired of believing in ghosts, but because Rachel could still be out there, energy pulsing just as brightly as she isn't beside her now.
She moves to clean the plates, when there's a clatter behind her. The window is open and the draft billows through warm and humid against the back of her neck. An apple rolls towards her feet, free from the bowl that had toppled over from the counter island. It's old and half-rotten and she carries the bowl to the sink before picking it up.
She sets it on the table and leans over it, hands bracing the table on either side. "How do we know," she whispers, staring down at the apple, "when it works?"
She doesn't know what she expects—something to breathe life or death or electricity tingling in her fingertips, but the warm summer draft feels like breath enough, like lips against her neck, fingers against her shoulders, electricity through her veins.
She doesn't know if it's Rachel or William or some lost Victorian child. She doesn't know if it's nothing, after all. She isn't sure which is better, which hurt is lighter. But she waits, hands splayed on the table, head tilted back towards the breeze, and lets her eyes slide closed.