Before I died, I would have thought a person would need a special spell to command ghosts—if it had even come up, which it didn't. But my wife—my widow, I guess—Lou, has always had a way about her. I assumed when she was packing up all her stuff (what used to be our stuff) that she would just leave, and I'd get to see some new people in our house. But then she grated, “Marty, get in the car!” in that way she had, and zip!—in the car I got.

I was annoyed, but also a little bit pleased. Lou telling me to get in the car must mean she could see me, that she knew I was there. And that meant I could have it out with her about the stupid decisions she made about my memorial service—Pastor Tom? Really? And ham-salad sandwiches afterward, when everyone hates ham salad?

But no. She couldn't hear me. After nearly sixty years of marriage, I know Lou, and she doesn't have a poker face worth mentioning. She just … said that because it's what she always says at the beginning of a trip.

So I was stuck riding from Arizona to Colorado with Lou in a bad mood and no way to get through to her. As a ghost, I didn't get motion sick anymore, but I had a curious hollow feeling the whole ride, like I was more a part of the buttes and the scrub than a passenger in the car taking me away from them.

We'd only lived in Arizona four years—it was our retirement place. But I'd died there, and she'd dumped my ashes out in the desert without fanfare, without any poem or prayer, unless you considered, “Jesus, Marty, don't leave me. Why'd you leave me, you old bastard” to be an elegy. Maybe that mattered, maybe that rooted me there. Or maybe ghosts just didn't like to move.

I sure didn't like going up the mountains any better as a ghost than I had in life. We'd been to Denver a couple of times to visit Lou’s sisters' families, but we'd never gone up hiking or anything. We'd just stayed around doing family picnics and playing cards and trying to adjust to the altitude—and then leaving as soon as we had. But once I shook off the hollow feeling, it was nice to get a look at the Rockies without worrying about breathing or feeling sick.

I was a little nervous about exactly how stuck to Lou I might be, but I didn't have to follow her into the truck-stop bathroom, which was a blessing, I suppose. The car was quiet, the backseat full of Lou's monsteras. The moon hung white in the fading blue desert sky.

Why was I still around? I hadn't seen any other ghosts. This was apparently not a popular choice of afterlife. It was … just me. Why? The last days of my life had stretched out too long as it was; I certainly didn't feel any mission now. I'd gotten through my rant about the memorial, and it didn't help me any. Telling Lou off about her damn rock garden and that time at the Gundersons' party just filled space, there wasn't any urgency to it. Staring out the window was at least as good. Better, maybe.

Before we moved to Arizona, I expected there would be big, dramatic cactuses everywhere. But all I found, and all I could see now from that truck stop, were little sagebrush bushes in the twilight, all the way out to the buttes. I started to have that hollow feeling again, looking out at them. Lou came back and turned on talk radio for the rest of the drive.

I hated everything about Lou’s new apartment in Denver, so that kept me busy. I told her and the movers what they were doing wrong, which was everything: The couch didn't go there, they were going to scratch the rocking chair we got from my aunt Agnes, why did she pick an apartment on the third floor, what if the elevator broke down and she had to climb the stairs with her bad knee. What was she going to do without me to think of these things.

One thing you could say for the third floor, though—the view wasn't so bad. The hill opposite was covered with trees, which Lou would not like. She'd rather look into someone else's apartment and have something to watch in the evening. But they were nice trees—sort of rounded peaks, bright yellow-greens and dark greens mingled. No idea what they were. I never had time for looking at trees when we'd visited before. I'd spent the hours listening to my brothers-in-law talk about their new grills and their season tickets, and fighting with Lou about what time we were leaving, not looking at the trees. But they were pretty.

And then I heard Lou say, “Dammit, Marty,” and I was drawn back like the snap of a rubber band.

She was shoveling goulash from a pot on the stove into a Tupperware container, fast and tidy. There was way too much for one person. She hated eating leftovers, and she hated wasting food. Of course she'd blame me. I wondered for a split second if she missed me, if she was going to break down crying. Maybe she did miss me, but no tears to show it, if so.

In the old house, I knew where to be. I had my chair, my spot out on the lanai. But Lou had left my chair in Arizona. Her new apartment had a dinky little balcony with no room for furniture. Well, what did I need furniture for, with no ass? I floated out there, letting the squabbling pundits on the twenty-four-hour news channel fade into the background.

Do ghosts sleep? What I did was something more like drifting. It was like that stage halfway between sleep and wakefulness, where you're not really thinking of anything, but you're not really thinking of nothing, either. You're just there.

Lou didn't sleep either. She dozed in her living room armchair half the night. Got up and stared out at the trees as though she didn't see them. Made herself one of those mug-cake mixes the kids sent her for her birthday. I don't know why they sent them—she was a good cook. At least she was that. She could bake a real cake any time she wanted. What did she want with a stupid mug cake? But what did she want with anything? Lou was always hard to buy presents for. I didn't envy the kids still having to do that.

Eventually she went to bed, and I drifted some more, and then there was a sunrise. Not over the mountains—wrong way. But still, it was nice. Pretty. Probably meant smog or something. I was never a guy to sit and watch the sunrise. Or the sunset, or the water, or whatever it was people were always on about. But there it was, coming up like every day of my life. Didn't need me at all, I guess. There were little brown birds stirring in nests in some of those trees, all different colors of brown on their feathers, just little round heads in the first bits of sunlight.

“The problem with this shit, Marty,” Lou said, and I was back in the apartment with the twenty-four-hour news on. But I didn't feel the snap. It was more of a slow slide.

When I could focus again, when Lou finished a rant about Congress, I thought about that a little. Maybe I was fading, becoming one with the universe, or moving on to the next thing. But the feathers on those little birds. I couldn't stop thinking about how sharp they looked in the sunlight, how clear.

Nothing in the apartment looked that sharp, even with full sun through the windows.

I thought maybe Lou would get out somewhere, give me a chance to explore with her—the senior center, or the American Legion, or something. She used to like to play bingo, and while I couldn't really imagine haunting a bingo hall, at least it would be something different. But no, she was busy unpacking. Hanging the same pictures: her “bless this mess” cross-stitch—though she'd never let a speck of dust settle—and the portrait of us with the kids—but no photos of them with their own families.

Was the portrait showing the time when we'd been happy? I wasn't sure I remembered it that way. Then again, I wasn't sure I remembered it at all. It was clearly me in the picture. But looking in my own eyes now, I see … not much. Where had I been? Not drifting out on the hillside, thinking of sunrises and birds. Not at the office—I did what I had to do there and came home. Maybe out on the ball field with the kids, if one of them was still playing? Maybe … ?

Was it death that took the feeling of presence and happiness from me? Or had it never been there?

My second day dead in Denver, Lou made herself a bowl of tomato soup and settled into her chair out in the living room for her afternoon programs. I realized it had been weeks since I ate anything—weeks since I needed to. But could I? Could ghosts taste? While the game show contestants on the television pranced around in costumes and made deals, I sank into the skin forming on the soup still in the pot like algae on a pond in summer.

And I was lost in the shock of acidity, the creaminess pushing back against the sharp tomatoes overwhelmed me. I'd never thought about soup before. I didn't know how long I spent savoring it—or with what. Mouth? Fingers? Something?

When I jolted back to myself, Lou had been talking to me for quite some time from the living room. I wasn't in any hurry to join her.

“ … any fool can dress up like a chicken. They get a chicken every week. I swear to God, Marty,” she was saying. Chicken? What? There wasn't any chicken in the center of my universe, which was this soup. It took me far too long to realize she was complaining about Let's Make a Deal again. “If I went on this thing …” But she didn't finish the thought—no grandiose plan to be an elephant, or a pine tree or a can of soup. Just—Not. Not what she was seeing. Not what was in front of her.

This time, I didn't snap back.

I enjoyed the soup.

Huh.

Later, I tried going into other people's apartments. Most people weren't home, off working I guess, and I got bored looking at other people's couches, other people's toothbrushes, other people's messes. I would have thought I'd like snooping, but without Lou to hear about who had dirty laundry—the people in the apartment below her, boy, they never heard of picking up their laundry … I just couldn't make myself focus on it the way I had … the texture of the light on the bird's head, or the skin on the tomato soup. I saw a mote of dust in a beam of sunlight, and that was more to me than the neighbors' supposed flaws in housekeeping ever could be.

When I drifted back, Lou was on the phone with our oldest, telling him everything that was wrong with the parking at the new apartment, which I hadn't noticed, and with the kids across the hall, whom I hadn't seen but who apparently were complete brats. I slipped through the wall to find out if I could see them but got pulled back by Lou saying, “Your father would have been so disappointed.”

Would I? By what?

I couldn't reach disappointed. I was more interested in everything but disappointment. There was a spider on the balcony railing. It wasn't building a web, it was just … out for a walk? Ambling along the railing, anyway … What did spiders do when they weren't building webs? I'd never really thought about it. This one drifted like me. It dropped down on a strand of silk and drifted on the breeze until it was on someone's windshield, which shone so brightly in the late afternoon sun I forgot the spider.

“Dammit, Marty,” said Lou, “I don't know where we went wrong with those kids.”

I could hear her from the parking lot. But I didn't have to go back. Instead of a snap, there was only a gentle tug. The sun off the windshield dazzled me so much, I wondered if this was what people meant when telling dead people to “go into the light.”

But no, it was just the sunset. Just the sun setting like it always had. Only now I was here to see it.

Lou's face waned in the apartment window as I drifted up the hillside, through motes of dust in the sunlight, between the round peaks of the trees, past the brown birds in their nests. Lou wasn't going anywhere. I could come back whenever I wanted.

But at that moment, the last of the sunlight was shining on the fur of baby squirrels I'd never seen before, and it didn't matter what death was for anyone else. For me it was the precision of being here, now, in these mountains as the afternoon slipped by. For me it was knowing that the mountains I could see were enough, were rich enough, were captivating enough for an eternity.

Editor: Austin Dewar

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