"Pearlie came to see me."
He didn't hear me.
"Pop."
"Yeh."
"Your mum came to see me."
"Fuck you."
Got his attention, then, haven't I?
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Tell you what?"
"Pop—Pearlie. She came to me."
"Fuck you."
My Pop wasn't the most eloquent bastard even when he wasn't floating
in a dirty glass, but I cut him some slack since his mother'd been
dead for a week.
"I'm here for the funeral," I said. "You coulda told me, y'know. I
know a thing or two about it."
"What." It wasn't a question.
"Dead mums," I replied.
"Fuck you."
Well, it was below the belt. He took another of the whiskey.
"'Want some, son?'" I offered myself, but I didn't move. I continued
to stand in the doorway of his new apartment on the Fenway with my bag
in my hand; my knuckles were getting colder and white. I waited for
the train to pass outside the window and rattle the old building, and
then I asked him if Emma knew.
"She's in, whattayacallit."
"Tokyo, yeah, I know. Did you call her?" But I didn't even see a
phone on the wall. How the mighty have fallen.
Instead of answering he took another belt of his drink and refilled
the water glass so it was half-full. I put down my bag and walked up
beside him. He flinched a little as my shadow cast from the dim bulb
behind me fell across the small, wooden table and across his broad
back too. I didn't doubt he could feel it.
"Sorry, Pop."
"Yeh."
"It's not a pretty thing." I didn't know what else to say. I held out
a hand palm-down and let it hover over his shoulder a moment; I knew
he could feel it there as he'd felt my shadow casting something cold
over him. This wasn't magic; this was family.
"I'm gonna put my stuff in the old room," I said. When he didn't
respond I wondered for a moment if he'd fallen asleep; wouldn't be the
first time the bastard conked out over his toxic dulcinea. I picked up
my bag and took a few steps back to the doorway, headed for my old
room when Pop said, "How was she?"
"What's that?"
"Pearlie? She came to see you."
"Yeah."
"How was she?"
"Not so good, Pop."
"No. Sure. No."
"She wouldn't be, though."
She'd been dead three days when she came.
He didn't laugh. I didn't either. It wasn't funny.
"But was she—y'know. Like she was?"
"Oh. That."
He wanted to know if she was boggy with disease, if the acetylcholine
in her brain was still wasted away, if the nerve endings in her cortex
were dead and decaying, if all she had instead of that marvelous,
expressive, inventive pulsing mind was a deadened lump of amyloids; he
wanted to know if, even in death, his mother was hostile, depressed,
wandering, anxious. He wanted to know if she would know him.
She wouldn't. Dead she was the same as she was alive in the last
years, slogging through a swampy aphasia.
The shit thing was that she didn't have to be. I knew folks who'd
died at eighty but looked, to me, like they did in their primes. But
they knew better. Dying and hanging around about it is all ego. If
your ego tells you you're a virile man of twenty, and that young buck
wants to linger and take care of some imagined unfinished business,
then that's how you're gonna look and feel.
Poor Pearlie didn't know any better. Her rotten brain didn't know
she'd ever been anything but this, but the woman's confused ego
wouldn't let her move on.
She found me like a moth to a false flame, all the hell in DC, and
she brought me back here because she was stuck and she was scared
shitless. I don't blame her.
No one wants to be a ghost.
Except for those who do.
"She was okay, Pop," I lied. I also didn't turn back to face his back.
He wasn't buying it. He could read my mind. It wasn't magic; it was family.

In my room she was on the periphery of my vision, like something
caught in your eye only in this case it was someone. I dropped my bag
and it landed heavily when I caught a halfway glimpse of the
indistinct, reaching shade. When I turned she was gone, but I heard
her say my name. It rang in my head like the bottom of a symphony.
"Frank," she said.
Pearlie, I thought.
But I was wrong. It wasn't Pearlie. I'd take care of Pearlie later.
This was another sort of haunting.
Goddamn Boston. Goddamn Fenway.

I called my sister but Emma said she wasn't about to take a jet back
from Tokyo just to rebury an old fossil.
"She's wandering around, Em," I said. Emma knew what I meant. "She
doesn't know where she is."
Emma asked, "Did she leave me anything?"

I walked around a few days, trying to figure out when she'd show
herself again.
Pearlie walked beside me, slowly, and I walked slowly too. She was a
little woman, our Pearlie, but built like a Ford truck with big
headlamp eyeballs to match. Her husband was long dead, and I kept
waiting for Pearlie to figure her shit out and go and join him. How do
you help a woman who doesn't know she needs help, who couldn't
understand you even if she did know?
When I called Sadie from a payphone on Beacon Street outside a Howard
Johnson's, Pearlie thought I was talking to her.
"How's our nation's capital?" I asked Sadie.
"A shining star in the crown of democracy," Sadie replied.
"You're mixing your metaphors, love."
"I saw the cherry blossoms once," Pearlie decried. "They were
lovely." She grinned like an imbecile at the payphone.
"Is that your grandmother?" Sadie asked.
"Pearlie. Yeah." I'd always wondered whether we'd be able to hear the
dead over phonelines, those of us who could hear the dead. So that
solved that stumper.
"How is she, darling?" Sadie asked.
"If that's your father, ask him if Thanksgiving will be sufficient."
I had no idea what the old lady was talking about.
"She's been better," I said. "But we're working on it."
"Do you reckon she wants something?" Sadie asked.
"I dunno. I'll ask." I turned to the faintly shimmering old woman
beside me. "Pearlie, do you need anything, love?"
My grandmother smiled at me in a lascivious way.
"I'm sorry I asked."
"Darling, you're certain you don't need me there?" Sadie asked.
"I need you everywhere, doll," I replied. Pearlie showed me her
mini-marshmallow teeth. She touched the tip of her tongue to the upper
row. "Aw, hell." To Sadie, I said, "We'll be fine here. It's family,
you know."
"You're not keeping a woman in Boston are you?"
Sadie could read my mind too. It wasn't magic either, and it sure as
hell wasn't family.

Once I rang off with Sadie, I knew where to go. There weren't too
many options in a haunted old town like this one. Everyone I knew was
dead.
I needed to catch a bus, but I didn't know how the buses worked. I
hadn't been back in years, since before I met Sadie and since all of
that shit with Garvey Senior back in DC. So I hobbled across half of
Comm Ave over to the bus station that sucks in its belly between the
eastbound and westbound traffic and stood in the shelter with the
Russians and old black women and the hoboes who were using the shelter
as a bunker against the October wind. There was rain in it too. I'd
say it was overcast, but there's not a day in this city in this season
that isn't, so it'd be easier just to say it was a day. But only
barely.
I found my bus and cursed my head again.
It wasn't cheating, but I sure as hell wasn't gonna mention it to Sadie.
On the bus, Pearlie decided she needed to take a load off. She hadn't
said much since making eyes with me while I was on the phone, but I
didn't take her taciturnity as a sign of her imminent departure. I
stood, gripping the metal handrail behind a Russian woman's seat,
wondering how soon I could wash my hands of the corrosive microbes
that were figure skating around the thing. Pearlie made her way to the
inside seat. Maybe she couldn't see the babushka through her amyloid
barricade or maybe there's something about the way the dead don't see
some of the living. There's a lot I didn't know. But Pearlie slid
right into the babushka's seat, right into the babushka, and settled
there a moment. She peeked her shimmering visage out from the bulky
immigrant's considerable bosom and gave me that mini marshmallow, shit
eating grin. The babushka shivered and pulled the tatty piece of
Ukraine fur and leather tighter around her. That didn't help the kind
of cold she was, though. I knew.
Fuck.
"Pearlie," I said to no one on the crowded downtown bus. I said it
regular, not a whisper, so no one would notice.
They noticed.
The babushka craned her neck to run her bulging eyes over what I
hoped was a caustic sneer. She ruffled her feathers and furs, shivered
again, and turned back around. I watched carbuncles of sweat take
shape along the back of her neck; they formed and quivered and then
dripped, like a disobedient string of pearls.
"Pearlie, get up," I said. It came out like one of those strict
whispers women who don't spank their toddlers employ.
The babushka bustled around again and barked something throaty and
full of phlegm at me. But Pearlie wasn't in her voice, so the old lady
wasn't in there yet. Good. But then the Bolshevik belle's face fell
and she told me, in a factual and slightly tinny voice, "You're a
right hunk."
From the bewildered expression on the babushka's doughy mug, I knew
it was Pearlie working the strings. I didn't think it was intentional,
though, and once Pearlie realized where she was there'd likely be
trouble.
There was more than one way to expel Pearlie from the Russian. One
required candles, though a cigarette would do too; I didn't have
either. Another was what was sometimes called the Father Karras
method, but I didn't need to raise havoc on the 134. And in any event,
Pearlie could likely be coaxed out of her own accord. But that would
mean talking.
I leaned down behind the babushka, inhaled the sour, doughy emission
coming off the back of her neck like radiation vibes. She was
muttering to herself, and I could pick out words now and again like a
radio station passing through mountains. Boy, dosser; two of Pearlie's
favorites, one for my father, one for me. But she'd switch stations
just as quick and out would come some garbled, gutteral Russian.
"Pearlie," I whispered. Too soft, because no one looked at me,
including the Pearlie/babushka herself. I wore my old denim jacket; it
didn't make the trip to Chicago with me and lodged dangled in my wee
closet like someone hanged and forgotten, a slave or a relic, which it
was. The jacket was my uniform once, along with the odd button shirt
and work jeans, but those had been turned to rags or sold second-hand
by my pop in his prouder moments. I wore the jacket as a teenager not
least because of its heavy definitiveness—you knew you were wearing
it—but because of the volume of its interior pockets. That morning,
where I'd once slipped plundered cassettes and talismans, I'd stuffed
with items possibly necessary on my trek across the city: watch,
chalk, poison, flask of gin, a magic marker. It was for the last I now
reached.
I said her name again, louder, almost too loud, and this time people
turned. I paid them no mind. I couldn't afford to. Pearlie looked,
which meant the babushka looked too, and as she did they were out of
phase, the way an image would appear on-screen were identical
film-strips laid across each other and played. Nearly synchronized but
not quite.
"Pearlie," I said. "I want you to look straight out ahead of you; can
you do that?"
She mumbled something and the babushka did too, neither of them
comprehensible in their near-overlay. But then the Russian smiled and
I saw Pearlie's corn kernel teeth, and for a moment I couldn't bring
myself to do it. It was the easy way, but even the easy way hurt. And
not just Pearlie and the babushka.
I tilted the babushka's head forward and someone near me shouted
"Hey!" but I ignored him. I could tell Pearlie was getting alarmed,
and I couldn't allow her possession to last much longer because things
could get uglier than this helpful bus rider could potentially make
them.
So I bit the bullet and clamped hard fingers down on the back of the
babushka's head. I whispered Latin words in her ear and ignored the
hostile glares of my fellow passengers. The bus lurched around the
rotary off the VFW Parkway, and I thrust the Russian broad's chin into
the pudding of her neck. A moment later, Pearlie's followed it. I
uncapped the magic marker, black, letting the top pop to the floor and
skitter under someone else's chair.
A good Samaritan barked "Hey!" but that was the last I heard because
after that it was just me and Pearlie and the babushka. Well, us and
the cold whisper of death blowing in my ear like a high school flirt.
As the black crawled in around the recesses of my vision, I scrawled
a sigil I'd just read about on the back of the babushka's neck. I
could wonder what it looked like to the commuters making their ways
across town on the #38, but that ringing feeling was running up and
down my arms like it did, and I couldn't be fucked to consider anyone
but the three of us. The pain wasn't nearly as severe as back in DC
with Garvey Junior; it wasn't even as serious as some other times I'd
tried this trick, but it always hurt. Like the bones in your limbs had
suddenly gone hollow and racketing around in there were a couple of
marbles made of fire or ice, not sure which. But I clamped down my
choppers and muttered Latin that Pearlie never would have understood
even if she'd had all her wits, but they do the job anyway. Like the
sigil. As long as I get it, it does what it needs to do.
So it was. I flicked a couple of flourishes on the symbol with the
tip of the marker and allowed that to drop into the darkness outside
my field of vision as well. I kept spitting out those dumb Latin
phrases until the sigil glowed dimly, and the bus lurched again, and
the lights went out for real. There was blood coming from my
fingertips now where they were clamped into the babushka's head. It
wasn't mine. I didn't worry. People were hollering and those damned
marbles were ricocheting in my bones. I heard my grandmother shriek
and her ghost hurled itself across the bus, turned on me all wrath and
confusion, and then Pearlie imploded into nothing. The bus jolted to a
halt.
I left before anyone could catch his breath. Hell. It was my stop anyway.

That chill breath I felt in the midst of the Russian's exorcism
wasn't hyperbole, and it wasn't imagination. It was magic. It said to
me, "I knew you'd return."

Her house was the same when I approached it from the rear, whence I
ducked down an unpaved alleyway and watched the mud crawl over
sneakers. I didn't want to squint into the materializing sunlight to
see the dirty white clapboard two-storey growing larger as I
approached. It loomed big enough already. So I trod the dirt road the
way Pop's cronies must have in Danang. Steady, hesitant, with purpose,
with fear.
I wanted to see Sarah Seton again with a fiery furnace of purpose
that made me alternately nauseated and horny. But when I trod up the
derelict steps onto the shuddering porch and baleful, empty porch
swing, the cupboard, so to speak, was bare.
I'd half-expected it. Half-expected that the whisper in my ear on the
#38 wasn't a ghoul of my imagination but the real thing, returned to
haunt me upon my return. Pearlie may have brought me back to Boston,
but it was Sarah Seton I was here to see.
There was nothing for it. I cupped my hands against the glare of the
dull daylight and peered into Sarah Seton's livingroom window. It was
all gone, as I knew she was. The tatty, Salvation Army sofa where once
we'd sat awkwardly, but only once, and after that it was all reaching,
sweaty hands and moist lips. The record player gaping on the
plankboard bookshelf. The mismatched rug with its rat-tailed tendrils
covering the stain on the hardwood floor. All gone, even the stain.
The landlord, the one who'd given Sarah and her roommates such a hard
time so often until we laid a little of old Lady Lefevre's hexing on
him, must have had it refurbished. Still, a place had never been so
empty.
I stepped off the porch, mindful not to look at the barren swing, and
found an oxidized three feet of piping just laying there in the yard.
No one was going to rent this place; the neighborhood had gone to
hell. But its inhabitants hadn't. I smashed the window, cleared out
the glass, unlocked the door, moved inside.
When Sarah'd first moved in she'd affixed to the wall opposite the
entrance an antique mirror she'd rescued from her own grandmother's
house before she burned it down. She'd hung it where she did to deter
intruders, at least, that's what she'd told me.
"What're you afraid of intruders for?" I'd asked her.
Sarah'd just smiled in that wide-mouthed way she had.
It was in this clouded mirror I caught a glimpse of myself upon
entering now. They were supposed to be more flattering, those misty
looking glasses from days of yore; problem was, no matter how much you
cleaned the mirror, you never got any better looking. I took a
sidelong glance at my hunched figure, clutching my jacket in one hand,
the other held out in front of me as if warding off coming danger. I
had disheveled down to a goddam tee. And you couldn't deflect hell
with an outstretched palm. At least, I couldn't yet.
I should leave. I knew I should leave. But I couldn't. Not yet. Not if
there was a chance of laying eyes on her. Because she was still there,
just as true as she'd been on the bus when she welcomed me back with a
cold breath blown in my ear. So I hunted around for the ghost of my
former girl all the while feeling like a cheat on Sadie. But Sarah
Seton was dead, so it didn't matter. Right?
"What happened, Sarah?" I asked the empty bedroom.
Nothing. If she was hanging around her old digs, she was keeping mum.
I spoke again anyway. "What kind of trouble did you get into, doll?"
A silent rush of air, then I'm alone again. Or, still.
"You could've told me if you were in a corner," I told the empty
house, moving from room to room, silently, so as not to wake anyone. A
baby cried out not far away and I jumped; too jumpy for this now. "You
could've called me."
A crash from the foyer. It's just as well I was on edge; I didn't
jump. "Don't be a pest, Sarah," I said. "We always made fun of
hauntings."
Good idea, Frank. Tease the angry ghost of your peeved ex. That can't end badly.
Back in the foyer, Grandmother Seton's antique looking glass was
capsized into toothed remains. I bent down to place a small piece back
into its perimeter; naturally, I cut my hand. "Shit," I told the
mirror. My rumpled visage glared back. I couldn't blame Sarah for this
too. I looked for somewhere to wipe the dark ribbon of blood that
crept from the fleshy part of my hand; finding nothing, I mopped it on
my jacket and then wrapped that around my hand. It was time to get rid
of that thing anyway.
"I'm leaving," I told Sarah, or her empty apartment, or myself. "I
have a funeral."
Did I hear laughing as I made my way back to the doorway? Or was it sobbing?

Pop had asked me the morning of Pearlie's funeral if I wouldn't mind
saying a few words, after his highness Father Erickson did his piece.
I knew why. There wouldn't be many of us there for the old girl, after
all, and fewer sober. I agreed.
Like in DC, I did what had to be done because a slew of bastards
couldn't rise to the occasion. Certainly not my pop, never mind it was
his own mother who'd bit. Emma wouldn't return to this city if Tokyo
suddenly started handing out rashes like Halloween candy. Everyone was
dead or dying, and it didn't matter a damn. So I did what I could do
and what I had to do. I tried to tell the bastards about the little
woman I barely knew.
"I never knew Pearlie to say an unkind word," I told the wheezing,
decaying congregation. "I never knew her to hurt a soul." At least,
until the bus yesterday.
"She was a little woman," I said. "She dressed well and couldn't
afford it. She wore hats. Gloves. Nobody does that anymore. It gave
her a dignity the rest of this family never had." I included myself in
that sentiment but it didn't matter anyway; I was the only one
listening.
Or, nearly. Back of the church, behind the last pew and moving closer
with all the hustle of a recalled biplane, waddled Pearlie. I hadn't
seen her since the bus, and part of me thought she had moved on. I
should know better. The fucking ego in my family. Even if it was
dementia that kept Pearlie on this mortal coil, it only fueled the
inherent self-worth embedded in her skidding synapses. Pearlie skating
through decades at a spell, never really sure where she was or was
supposed to be. I could help her, but not now. Now I had to deliver
her eulogy.
I spoke directly to the deceased. "You were a hell of a woman,
Pearlie," I said, and Pop hunched over in the second pew, knocked his
skull on the one in front of him but didn't budge if he even felt the
pain. "But now it's time to go. It's time we let you go." Her lips
arranged themselves around a smattering of consonants and vowel
movements, but no words emitted. Wasted from the previous day's mobile
exorcism, Pearlie wasn't more than a breath in the room. It wouldn't
take a prayer to shut her down, and it was precisely that I was
preparing to do when Sarah Seton blew in and tore through my
grandmother's confused spirit.
I've been in this game longer than I should probably have been;
started young and didn't look back, though not for lack of trying.
I've seen the holy ghostbusters at work and watched when things went
south for amateurs and pros alike. It's never pretty. People always
get hurt. Hell, Sadie and I knew what we were doing back in DC, but
that didn't stop us getting in a mess of trouble with the matchless
combo of spooks and wraiths. But there's something acutely disquieting
about one fleshless soul dispatching another.
Sarah Seton came from nowhere and found the psychosomatic will to
shred her way up the church's aisle to where my grandmother greeted
her with a dumb smile and palms turned heavenward. Sarah didn't pause;
she just rent my grandmother in half, Pearlie's ghostly flesh
dissipating in the stale ecclesiastical air. The sound Pearlie emitted
pierced like shrapnel; her eyes elicited horror, muddle, a second
death.
But Sarah wasn't through. She dug into Pearlie like an animal, and
when she turned to make sure I was receiving her—I was the only one
who could, and was—her mouth was a pocket of jagged incisors and her
eye sockets were a milky white. She roared a primal, inhuman sound.
Was this really Sarah Seton? Had she truly done this to herself?
Pearlie's disapparating arm floated softly across the pews and faded
into a stained-glass window of Saint Ciaran in the river. I chose to
watch it; there was nothing I could do for Pearlie now but hope her
addled amylids didn't let her know the horror of her second death. But
I knew I was hoping for too much. Pearlie was lost. It was my fault. I
should've confronted Sarah Seton back at her place, should have raised
her spirit and punished her for what she hadn't yet wrought. But I
hadn't. Like a coward, I didn't want to defy the past, only escape it
with blinders on.
It was too late for Pearlie, but not for me.