The Ghost in Love Read Free Page A

and decided it was time to get to the point. “All right, then, here’s the deal. They’ve decided—”
    â€œ
Who’s
decided?”
    If the plate could have made a face it would have pursed its lips inexasperation. “You know very well who I’m talking about—don’t play dumb.
They’ve
decided that because it might take a while to sort out this virus problem and you’re stuck here through no fault of your own, they’re offering you a chance to try something untested just to see if such a thing works: if you can somehow get through to Benjamin Gould and help make him a better person while he’s alive, then you won’t have to come back to earth and haunt things after he dies. We know how much you hate fieldwork, so if you succeed here, you can stay in the office and work there in the future.
    â€œWe don’t know how much longer he’ll live, because he was scheduled to die from the fall that day. Now the matter of his fate is anyone’s guess. That means there’s no telling whether you have a lot of time to work on him or only a little.”
    The ghost was genuinely surprised by this offer and paused to let the intriguing proposal sink in. It was just about to ask, “If I don’t come back here to haunt him, what will I do instead in the office?” But the waitress came to the table, saw the fly in the egg yolk, and whacked it dead with an old newspaper.
    Somewhere in everyone’s inner city
is a cemetery of old loves. For the lucky contented few who like where they are in their lives and who they’re with, it is a mostly forgotten place. The tombstones there are faded and overturned, the grass uncut; brambles and wildflowers grow everywhere.
    For other people, their place is as stately and ordered as a military graveyard. Its many flowers are well watered and tended, the white gravel walks have been carefully raked. All signs indicate that this spot is visited often.
    For most of us, though, our cemetery is a hodgepodge. Some sections are neglected or completely ignored. Who cares about thesestones or the old loves buried beneath them? Even their names are hard to remember. But other gravestones there
are
important, whether we like to admit it or not. We visit them often—sometimes too often, truth be told. And one can never tell how we’ll feel when these visits are over: sometimes lighter, sometimes heavier. It is entirely unpredictable how we’ll feel going back home to today.
    Ben Gould rarely visited his cemetery. Not because he was particularly happy or content with his life, but because the past had never held much importance for him. If he was unhappy today, what difference did it make if he was happy yesterday? Every moment of life was different. How did looking or living in the past genuinely help him to live in this minute, beyond a few basic survival tricks he’d learned along the way?
    In one of the first long discussions they ever had, Ben and German Landis disagreed completely about the significance of the past. She loved it. Loved looking at it from all angles, loved to feel it cross her right now like a thick midday shadow. She loved the past’s weight and stature.
    â€œ
Stature?
What stature?” Ben asked skeptically, thinking she was joking. The memory of the delicious sandwich you ate for lunch is not going to take away your hunger four hours later. On the contrary, it will only make the hunger worse. As far as he was concerned, the past is not our friend.
    They argued and argued, neither convincing the other that he or she was wrong. It became a joke and eventually a stumbling block in their relationship. Much later, when they were breaking up, German tearfully said, “In six months you’ll probably think of me and our relationship about as often as you think of your third-grade teacher.”
    But on that subject she was 100 percent wrong.
    The great irony that held both Ben