A lonely woman just wants a good Valentine’s Day, but when an ex and a car crash run her off the road, she has a great one—with a ghost.
I’d gone into that night wanting a kiss. I got a car crash instead.
After five years, Pete Garland had texted me. Opportunity might knock, but sometimes fate vibrates on your coffee table.
I dove for the phone, fully activated from my previously flopped position on the couch next to my sister, Rose. I had just gotten home from work late—this time, thanks to a parent-teacher conference about chronic crayon eating. The student in question had gotten through most of a box of 64 before ralphing all over the Second Grade Valentine’s Day allergen-free cookie party. I was in the middle of telling Rose about it when Pete’s text came through.
“Pete Garland?” She asked, eyebrows up. “Haven’t heard that name in a while.” Rose’s voice was drier than the Target rosé she had just poured for us. Ever since we became roommates a few years ago, we’d made Valentine’s Day an unspoken girls’ night tradition. Pink wine, pink PJs, and the more make-out forward Austen adaptations. But we both knew that any year, we could forego this option for an actual date. And we both knew Pete was my one who got away. Literally—he moved to California with his yoga teacher. The one he eventually married. And, according to social media, recently divorced.
“Pete Garland is texting you at 6PM on Valentine’s.” Rose said coolly, and sipped her wine. “From an airport bar in Chicago. And you’re—"
“Just going for one drink. To catch up,” I said. I tried to sound calm. Hell, I tried to sound anything but desperate. But it had been a long time since I kissed anyone, let alone someone attached to a soul I once adored. My heart revved like a chainsaw. I grabbed my keys.
“I ordered heart-shaped pizza,” Rose said. My heart twinged. Then it remembered The Great Dating App Disaster of 2018. I kissed her on the cheek.
“Save me some. And stay up for me! I’ll tell you all about it when I get home!” I chirped, my hand on the door. “Love you!’ I shouted over my shoulder.
“Be careful,” she called, but her words got lost in my race down the stairs, into the car, through rain-slicked streets into a magic night, where Pete was waiting to fall in love with me all over again.
We definitely didn’t. What he did do, I didn’t expect.
And I REALLY didn’t expect that hairpin turn.
What a way to go, I thought, as I pitched through the shudder and screech of time and space, over the guardrail I hadn’t seen through my tears—and into the great unknown.
***
“Hey.”
I groaned myself awake. My mouth and nose were packed with dirt. My teeth ached. I spit, trying to get the taste of blood and earth out my mouth.
“You okay?”
That voice again, sweet and low. Somehow, I lifted my pounding head. The more I moved, the more my brain came back to me. I opened my eyes to a heavy metal cemetery gate, looming over me. I wiggled my fingers in the earth. I was splayed, face-down, hands-out, outside a small graveyard, at the bottom of an aggressive slope. A new smell registered. Smoke. I managed to push myself up to a kneeling position, and turned to look up in the direction I must have fallen from.
My car was lodged between a split guardrail and some boulders intended to scare motorists from driving directly off the damn road. Glass glittered in the black grass. The soft shoulder snowed down from the crash site. My car hissed, and the headlights beamed into the empty sky above me.
“Can you move?” The voice had something sing-song to it.
I staggered to my feet. “Yeah,” I called out. “It hurts, but I can stand.”
“Good,” Surfer Boy said.
I furrowed my brow. Then winced. I touched my face—a nasty gash ran down my forehead to my chin.
“They never lock the gates anymore,” The voice called out. “Walk over so I know you’re okay, okay?”
“Okay,” I responded. The voice was coming from inside the gates.
Maybe it was my very recent brush with death, but for some reason I wasn’t afraid of the voice. I took a few tender steps towards the gate. I was able to pull it open wide enough to squeeze in, barely, if I turned sideways and gave up any hope of saving my chiffon.
Once I was through, I took a rough breath.
I might as well have passed into a new world. It was a pretty little cemetery in a forgotten valley between turnpikes. Some way beyond the graves I could see the twinkling lights of a gas station and a couple fast food drive-thrus. But steps from me, a massive weeping willow stood soft guard over a small cluster of gravestones. There was a stone bench at the base of the tree, facing final resting places like it was a couch pointed at a somber entertainment system.
The tree and the first row of graves swam in a small pond of moonlight. But just at the moonlight’s rim was the owner of the voice. I could only make out his face in the dark. He looked like he was somewhere in his mid-twenties. And kind of like Keanu Reeves.
“Gnarly,” he whispered. I assumed in reaction to my blood-spattered heart-print.
“You should see the other guy, “ I said. His eyes widened. I put my hands up, in apology. “It’s just me, and I’m okay.”
I stumbled through the moonlight toward him. A look of concern and anticipation colored his pretty face. Now that I was closer, it looked like he was standing up in the shallow end of a pool. He was visible from the chest up.
He was sticking out of a grave.
And he was just translucent enough for me to make out the name cut into the headstone behind him.
“Nathan Jay,” I read aloud.
“Nate’s good,” he said.
“Hi, Nate. I’m Jenny.” I said.
“Hi, Jenny!” boomed Nathan Jay, September 2 1964—February 14, 1990. I pressed my hand to the non-gashed side of my face. It figured...the first genuine concern I’d generate from a guy, and he was a ghost.
“Am I dead?” I asked.
“No,” he answered, and leaned forward to see me better. His body hovered, half in the grave, half out.
“So…” I said, slowly. “You’re dead?”
“Yes. No. Well...” he considered his words. “Undead.” He patted the grass next to him, long and smooth, by way of invitation. “You should probably sit down.”
“I probably should,” I agreed, and settled down graveside. He smiled at me with so much eager puppy energy, it made me forget my blood loss and Pete Garland for all of ten seconds.
“So…” Nate took an overly dramatic breath. Or whatever ghosts take instead. “It looks like you had a near-death experience. Which way sucks. But I think that’s why you can see me. And it’s the anniversary of my death, so I think that’s why I can see you so well, too.”
He smiled. Then he flickered, looking slightly more solid and slightly more transparent one moment to the next. He was silver at the edges. Grass shifted very subtly as a soft breeze blew over the cemetery, and through his torso. Color pooled in his eyes. In life they might have been brown, but tonight they looked like twin gas puddle rainbows.
Chalk it up to shock, but I was more interested in checking him out than questioning his plane of existence. He was handsome. And a little shimmery. A swimmer’s build, long hair, doofy kind smile. A shirt that probably wasn’t his style, but probably someone’s idea of something nice to be buried in.
He noticed me taking in the shirt. “My mom likes dress shirts,” he said.
“Are you...in the process of crossing over, or something?” I asked, and gestured to his position with my grass-burned hand.
“I wish!” He laughed, then swallowed hard. “Nah, I’m kinda...a stick in the mud.”
“So you’re a ghost and a comedian?” I smirked.
He smiled and ducked his head. “I’m half in. Half out,” he said by way of explanation.
“How?” I asked.
“Sleepover. Little kids. They used their big sister’s Ouija board, and then...”
“Little girls raised you from the dead?” Damn.
“They started to, then they forgot. So...I’m stuck here forever, I guess!” He laughed, but it got sad at the end. He watched me as I heard the change, and tried to put a comforting spin on things. “It happens more than you think.”
“Ouija Board casualties?” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Oh my god.”
“It’s okay. It happened closer to when I died. Everyone who would want to bring me back is probably dead by now. Or else I’m just totally forgotten to them.” He took a breath, and smiled again. It was a sweet smile. A smile that meant it. “But having time to think is good.”
“1990...” I read out loud. “That’s a long time to think.”
“Yeah,” he said. Quietly. “Wish I had done a little more of that, before.”
“How did you die?” I asked, as respectfully as I could.
His smile turned sour. “It was stupid,” he warned.
I laughed. Then the words poured out of me before I even knew what I was saying. “I met up with my ex-boyfriend tonight,” I said. “The one who got away. I thought we were going to have some romantic like…do-over first date. Instead…he asked me to marry him. I think to make his ex-wife jealous. It was hard to tell, he was so wasted and sad by the time I got there.” I paused to wipe some tears and blood from my face and into the grass. “Then he threw up on me.”
Nate’s eyes widened, but did not judge. “Holy shit,” he said, so fast it sounded like one word. Then he laughed, a bubbling, honking laugh. It made me crack up, too.
“Yup,” I said. “So what’s your story?”
“Well…” he said, and shifted his gaze from my face to my bloody hand. “I fell off the roof of a van my buddy was driving. I was trying to surf on top of it. But I lost my balance and got hit by a semi.”
My eyes widened. And judged. “That’s… so—”
“Stupid? Yeah...” he cringed. I sucked breath through my teeth. I didn’t need to rub it in. He sighed a sigh that stirred my very soul.
He looked so sad, I reached out instinctively to touch him. My fingers passed through his shoulder. “Hey,” I said. “I’m pretty stupid and I’m alive, so don’t feel too bad. Especially not on your death-a-versary.”
The moon somehow both reflected in his eyes and shone through them, illuminating even older gravestones just beyond us. “You think you’re stupid ‘cause you’re lonely?” He laughed, goofy but delightful. ”Duh. Everyone’s lonely. The quick and the dead.”
I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Thanks for the pep talk, Van Boy.”
“Wait. I mean…we are lonely in some way. But not all ways.” He searched for words while night critters searched the grass for food. “We’re all looking for what happens next, but then like…we don’t pay attention to what is happening. To like…” He struggled to find the words.
“Like the laws of physics,” I cracked.
“Or road signs,” he cracked right back. I laughed. He took a sharp little breath, and continued with his original train of thought. “After I died, I realized before I died, I thought I’d have a lot more time to live.” He trailed off and stared into some past or future I couldn’t see. The only sound in the air was the hum and whir of the night. The hiss and click of my far-off car.
He smiled, then squirmed. I wriggled a little bit closer to him. “I wasn’t a total asshole before the van stunt. But…I was like…a half-asshole. All I focused on was having fun, hanging out, taking it easy. Which was good, but… I didn’t really…invest time in things. Or people. Because I thought I had so much of it. That I’d get to things like…falling in love. Or flying a plane.”
“A lot of people who aren’t assholes have never flown a plane,” I pointed out. “They’re just not rich.”
“Thank you, Jenny! I really don’t know how I survived without you.” He did faux-thankful. I did faux-modest. We laughed again. As strange as it was, it felt good. I hadn’t bantered with anyone who wasn’t my sister or knee-high in way too long. We both quieted at the same time.
“I never let myself really fall in love. Like real love, you know? I had girlfriends and kisses and fun. And I think…” he squirmed in the grass. “I think I broke some hearts that way. And I wish I hadn’t. I wish…”
I shifted my weight, and he adjusted his ethereal essence. Then he took a breath and went on. “Back when I was alive,” he said, “I always thought I’d get around to living the rest of my life when I had the time. And then…”
“You didn’t.” My throat tightened.
“Yeah.” He said, and his adam’s apple bobbed. “Is that kinda what...happened with you tonight? You tried to live some life you thought it was time for?”
“Yep,” I said, and shook my head. “I tried to have a kiss with a guy who...wanted to stop being unhappy.”
“I’m sure you could find other guys to kiss, though—“
“Yeah? Where?” I cut him off, sharper than I meant to sound. Angrier than I usually let myself be. He watched me wipe a tiny hot tear from my eye, with the back of my less-wrecked hand. “Were you...um...in love with the guy? From tonight?”
No, I thought. Honestly. I wasn’t.
“No,” I said, carefully. “But I was when I was about 19. Through 23. And for a little bit when I was 26 and I thought...what if he had been the one?”
We sat, quiet but for the night sounds. I picked at a blade of grass. He reached to put his transparent hand on mine, and the nerves in my fingers sparkled as his passed through them.
“He wasn’t, though? Was he?” he asked.
“No,” I said. My head hurt from thinking about it. And from being thrown from the car. “I think that’s why tonight sucked so bad. Even before the crash.”
“Because he took your hope away?” Nate asked, quiet.
I wiped a tear away, and nodded.
“You don’t sound hopeless,” Nate said, resting his head in his hands, his elbows on grave grass. “Just...lonely. If you were hopeless, you wouldn’t have gotten up out of the dirt, right? And dusted yourself off?”
“Yeah,” I said. A few hot little tears fell through the silvery outline of his hand and into the overgrown grass beneath it. “But sometimes it feels like…even though I mostly love my life…there’s whole parts of it that feel like I’ve just…run out the clock.” The face in my middle distance belonged to Pete Garland. And my last few ex boyfriends. And unrequited crushes. Hell, even some of the requited ones. They all felt so far away and the thought of something—someone—new—felt as impossible as the night I was having right now.
I took a breath and tried to gather myself. “I guess you always want something out of life that you don’t get. And that’s fine.. And sometimes that’s good. Like, this kid I teach. This little kid would never be able to even half-raise anyone from the dead because they’d be too busy eating crayons. It makes them sick, but they keep eating crayons. It’s like, they love the crayons so much, they think if they eat the crayons, they will be powered by the magic of crayons.”
“So…are they?” Neither of us knew where I was going, really, but he followed me anyway.
“No!” I laughed, short and sharp. Scared a night bird from the willow. “They have tummy aches and they cry all the time. I think my point is…sometimes the things we think we need just cause us pain.”
“Yeah,” he said. A mint clean chill shivered the air. He leaned as close to me as his grave would let him. “But I bet that kid has beautiful poops.”
The ghost and I laughed until we cried. After, we looked at each other. Then we watched the willow tree.
“My mom used to say this thing all the time,” he said. “‘Life is for the living.’”
“I like that,” I decided. “But I think it may have helped you get on top of that van.”
I looked at him. He looked at me. Some bird I didn’t know made a sound I’d never heard. And I really, really, liked Nate just then. He smiled. “So what if you don’t have like…boyfriend girlfriend love or whatever. You have people you love, right?”
I watched a memory reel play across his eyes. And a pang hit me in the gut as I thought of Rose, and the wine she’d gotten for us. The movies, ready to play. Heart shaped pizza on the way, and that worry in her voice. Be careful.
“Damn it, Nate,” I said. A sigh shivered through me. “You are exactly right.” He smiled. “And this would be a great pep talk if you hadn’t died in such a reckless way.”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t need to be great advice,” he shrugged. “It can just be good.” He grinned at me. “Hey!” He bellowed, big and goofy—scaring a little mouse that had been watching us with interest. “I died on Valentine’s Day, right? And I never even had one of those big Valentine’s Day dates. Chocolates, flowers, champagne, the whole bit. Romance! Roses! Saxophone solos!”
We giggled until a tear rolled into my face gash. “Romance isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” I said, wincing. Despite flying face-first from my car into a conversation with a ghost, the image of the haunted Pete Garland haunted me. “Champagne can get you drunk. It can’t always get you love.”
“I guess I wouldn’t know,” he said, and sighed over dramatically to make me smile and drop my maudlin look. “I’ve never had it.”
“What?!” I laughed, and pretended to be blown away.
“I know!” He shouted, even bigger and sillier. “I’ve never had the king of all lemonades! Only really cheap beer.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute,” I wheezed, through tears of laughter. “The king of all what?”
“‘Champagne—the king of all lemonades!’” He quoted something I didn’t know, big and regal, holding his hands out to frame it in the night sky. “I had a girlfriend who called it that one New Years. It sounded good but I stuck to beer.”
This sent us both into another peal of laughter, which terrified more mice, which made us laugh harder.
“Did she make that up? Or is it from something?” I asked. I liked the turn of phrase.
“It was from a book she loved,” he said, sobering quick. “She always wanted me to read it, but I—“
“Hey,” I said, and scrambled to my knees. “Don’t go anywhere.” I lifted myself to a standing position.
“Where would I go?” He asked, and new laughter pushed past the old stuff in his throat. I shrugged.
“Be right back,” I said, and took a painful step.
***
The harsh light of the gas station market must not have paired well with my fresh-from-the-edge-of-death look. The poor attendant looked like he’d seen a ghost. Or a monster. His hand trembled and hovered over the phone. Ready to make an emergency call if needed.
I smiled and shopped quick. Heart-shaped box of chocolates. The last bouquet of roses—wilted but good. A teddy bear holding a smaller heart-shaped box of chocolates. And a bottle of cheap (but not the cheapest) champagne.
I watched the attendant’s mind boggle as he rung up my purchase. I was thrilled to have forgotten to take my small purse off when I fled Peter’s hotel. Though the thin strap of my crossbody wallet purse had dug into my shoulder and frayed my dress in the crash, it had held up okay. Nicely done, New Year’s Eve Target Dollar spot bag from a couple years ago.
“Ha...happy Valentimes.” He said, after I had paid.
“You too.” I smiled, brushed some dirt off my knee, and made my way back to the cemetery.
***
The walk back to Nathan Jay was more painful than the walk to the gas station. What if he wasn’t there when I got back? What if he had never been there at all? I couldn’t be dead if I just bought stuff at the Circle K, but I could have knocked something in my head loose in the crash. Maybe he...Maybe I—
“Hey!” Nate’s voice swam up to meet me from the darkness. “My bloody valentine!”
“Got something for you,” I said, and rustled the bag. He smiled as I got closer, and when I started pulling out his prizes, the ghost boy ghost blushed.
“You didn’t have to do all of this,” His voice was so quiet but his smile was so loud. I felt my face flush.
“I wanted to. To celebrate you. But I don’t know how kingly this is,” I said, and waggled the bottle at him. “ I figured we should give it a try. Oh!” The bottle popped faster than I thought it would, and the bubbly burst up and over us like the tail of a shooting star. “Think you can drink champagne?”
“Um...definitely probably not.” He laughed.
“Well...” I took a swig from the bottle myself, and let the bubbles prickle in my mouth and burn pleasantly down my throat. I smacked my lips. “Let us definitely try. Open up.”
He leaned forward, and parted his lips just wide enough for me to pour a sip of champagne into his mouth...and which immediately dropped onto the grass of his grave, splashing me and the teddy bear.
“Damn it!”I wiped off the bit that had splashed up on me from the grass. “Did you taste it, at least?”
He just smiled. “No...” he said. “But I really wanted to.”
“Damn it,” I said again. Some of the spray sparkled in his hair, and I reached up to smooth the bubbles out. His hair slipped through my fingers, silky and cool. His impossible breath warmed my hand.
We looked at each other. A lightning bolt could’ve struck next to us and we wouldn’t have blinked.
“How can I—“
“How—“
“I guess...” I said, touching his shoulder, tracing my fingers down the length of his arm “I had a near-death experience.”
“And I..” he said, taking my hands in his, pressing them to his face, almost listening to them like seashells. “Had a near-life one.”
He took my chin in his hand and tilted my mouth to his. I stretched my neck to reach him, and he drew his finger down the line of it, and out over the curve of my shoulder.
He tasted like apples. He smelled like summer and rain. Time fizzed up and up and up. When we pulled away, the air between us sparkled.
The moon hid. When it shone, Nate was gone.
Almost.
For a moment, his voice hung in my ear. Light and sweet.
“To the king of all lemonades.”
I picked up the fallen bottle of champagne and nestled it into the soft dirt at the base of Nate’s headstone. I stabbed the wilting bouquet in next to it the bottle. I popped the bloom off a rose, and put it in my pocket. I kissed my fingertips and pressed them to Nate’s name in the stone, and took the teddy bear for my sister.
I started to make my way to the car, to see if it would start.
I still had time to watch a movie with Rose if it did.