Ghost in the Rain

The ghost of my boyfriend’s wife is in the room with us, sitting on the couch next to me. He doesn’t know it and he never will; I cannot tell him that Karla and I have an agreement. She allows me to sleep on her bed and spend time with her husband, meanwhile, she hangs out with us in complete anonymity and hidden from him, a kindness done onto him to keep away the very worst of grief. I have been wondering lately how much longer we can do this, as I know from experience that grief always finds us, despite our secret escape passageways and our best hiding spots and our flawed coping mechanisms. 

The sliding door to the balcony is wide open, letting in the song of a late summer rainstorm and the gusts of wind that carry our memories from past lives. Karla stands up and walks outside, her face looking up at the night sky. I can’t see her, but I feel her movements inside my veins, like a secondary pulse, like there’s more than me in this body. This bruised, yet tender body that emerged from the ground after my own devastating loss, a reincarnation that is softer and lovelier than the person I was before. It’s really true, what they say about life and loss; everything is so much more beautiful because of the heartbreaking impermanence of it all. My boyfriend knows this too. Birthed together into this new life, we are slower and calmer. We know the secret that only those of us who have lost what we have lost know, and we hold each other closer for it.

I never knew Karla when she was alive, but I often see her in my mind the way she looked in a picture taken many summers back. She was wearing a tube top sun dress and holding a “free hugs” sign. It's a specter that I remember vividly, like I was there too, even though the memory is not mine. It has fused together, at first just pieces that I picked up from being in this relationship, now made whole like bones solidified, a being that has claimed space in my mind through late night drunken stories and early morning silence of fading dreams and bird song over coffee.

He hands me a glass of white wine and pours himself a shot of liquor. He says he has a problem, but I don’t see it as a deal breaker. You can easily get lost in the woods of vice and darkness when the love of your life dies. I can never judge him. Instead, I always love him. I hope she knows that much is true. 

“Baby shot?” he asks. 

I shake my head and sip my wine, because I know there’s a special balance that I must reach to properly reacquaint myself with Karla. It’s like this every time; I drink my pinot grigio with intention, I trace the olive pattern on the stained glass with my fingertips, I allow my body to fall into the warmth of this old couch. The ritual of acclimation lasts about an hour, and during said hour, I take in the sights of the apartment, the beauty and sadness and chaos of his life after her death. The lighting is a warm peach color, the dishes are clean and drying, the plants need some water. I see traces of her between the details. I see her in the spaces she no longer occupies, like the bathroom, where there is a single toothbrush instead of two, unlike the first time I slept with him years ago, when he still had her toiletries on display, her contacts case on the sink.  I see signs of her when he makes coffee in the morning, so careful and so present in every step of the process, grinding the beans, pushing down on the French press, pouring the coffee into old mugs that have seen better days, mugs she surely held and drank from a long time ago.

When I first met him, he got drunk and fell asleep holding onto me. A couple of hours later he opened his eyes for a moment. I could see he was somewhere between waking life and the Dream Realm, and I wondered if he thought he was with Karla because just as his eyes closed again, he whispered that he loved me. We never spoke of that moment, and eventually we stopped spending time together. 

It has been years since those nights of emotional fog and heart confusion. I think he may genuinely love me now that we have reconnected, and in loving me, he holds Karla closer than before. It’s hard to say why this works. Nothing is clear cut when grief becomes marrow in your bones. Despite the grief, or maybe because of it, he holds me closer too. Tonight, he sits next to me and puts his arm around me while we try to figure out what movie we should watch. Karla is back on the couch with us, I hear her shuffle a bit, crossing her legs, playing with the frills of her dress. I hear her slow breaths, the rising and falling of her chest like endless cycles of the sun that she never got to see. I wonder if she took breaths like this in her hospital bed, melancholy and methodical. Was she hoping to ration the oxygen she had left on those final days? Was she stretching out her life source, to hang around a little longer? 

My boyfriend leans in to kiss me, his demeanor playful and spontaneous. 

Don’t use up all the life you have, I think to myself. Save a little for tomorrow if you can. Savor the good bits, slow down, stay. 

Stay, she says, without speaking.

But I know grief. So, I know he won’t. Not with me, anyway.

#

Hours later and having forgone the movie altogether, we are lost in a haze of conversation and rain. I am my most comfortable, observing my surroundings with curiosity and care. My favorite thing in this apartment is a portrait of her that he painted, oil on canvas leaning on a wall, an entity come to life. He painted her wearing a scarf on her head and smiling despite what her body must have felt during those last months. 

When I look at it, I think I might truly know her. I think it might not all be in my head. He tells me she lost her breasts. What does that feel like? To wake up and notice that pieces of you have gone missing? I wish I could ask her, but we don’t talk. We just understand one another. It’s given. It's taciturn. It's woman making space for woman. Sometimes, I don’t know where she ends and I begin.

“You’re the most empathetic person I know,” he says. Karla stirs, and for a moment I worry I may be overstepping.

“That can’t be right,” I say, because I don’t often see myself clearly when I am with him. Because in this space, I am only decor or pretty wallpaper, I am nondescript, I am temporary.

All of that is fine with me.

“Yes. You know me better than anyone else.”

I notice Karla’s slow breaths once more, calm and neutral. I allow his words to course through me, I accept their invitation.

“I wouldn’t say you know me perfectly, but you know me best.”

I suppose he is right. I have seen a video of him with Karla in the hospital the day before she died. In the video he is sitting on her bed and they talk, holding hands one last time, and I can see in his eyes that his hope is to hold her long enough to keep her from falling into the dark. I have held him the same way, while we listen to songs that remind him of her, his head pressed to my chest, his tears soaking my shirt. In those moments, I feel her dancing and spinning around in her long skirt, her movements like a breeze and his cries like a storm. It’s always raining in this living room, and I am always pacing back and forth between the living and the dead. I am used to it by now, the uncertainty of it all, my hope for this to last, my steadfast love born to witness them both. The beauty of this astral weather, much like that of life and loss, is that it’s always unpredictable, this or that side of the veil.