Emme isn’t the one who’s seeing a ghost.
I am.
VII
The ghost’s face is a little more bronzed than I remember, with a sprinkling of fine lines around his eyes and mouth earned from decades of expression, softened beneath the smoggy LA sun. Under the too-bright lights of the movie theater, I can see that his hair is still thick, still mostly oil-spill black, but a little shorter now, with flecks of salt and pepper along the temples.
Time has been good to this ghost. Maddeningly good. He looks better now, even, than when I knew him first.
And the ghost is looking at me too. Looking like he, too, is seeing some spectral something that can’t possibly be real.
I can’t help what happens next: I take Emme’s hand and walk—no, Idrift—toward where he stands, still magnetized by the pull of him. Somewhere in the distance, I hear my daughter protest-panic.Please don’t make me confront her in public, I think I hear her say. I give her hand a squeeze, trying to reassure her that this is not about to be a teachable moment for her.
It’s only when I’m face-to-face with him that I realize that I have brought myself over here, clutching mydaughter’s hand like a life raft, and that I should probably say something.
And that what I’d known in my gut was true.
It’s Reid.
I might be shocked, but I’m not entirely surprised to see him here. A small part of me hoped that Reid might be at this show. Hoped it despite the fact the occasional furtive, wine-fueled Google searches over the past however-many years confirmed that he still lives in LA, where he’s now a successful screenwriter. I had chastised myself for such a quixotic line of thinking, then remembered what my therapist said about my tendency toward an unkind inner monologue: that I would never talk to my daughter the way I talk to myself. I tried to give myself some grace for imagining a romantic future for myself.
As Blondie says, dreaming is free.
Now the smile that breaks across Reid’s face alleviates any anxiety I’d had about whether he’d be happy to see me. Whether he would even recognize me.
It’s the same smile I once loved: upside-down, like a shrug.
His eyes scan my face, and I don’t even have it in me to feel concerned about what he sees there, to consider all the ways I’ve changed since he saw me last. My hair still falls in long waves, though hints of silver now weave between the dark blond. The remainders of the baby fat that clung to my cheekbones dissolved decades ago. And despite the retinol, the red-light therapy masks, the collagen supplements and medical-grade tinctures, a feathering of finelines fan across the corners of my eyes and sit contentedly between my brows.
But before either one of us can break this increasingly long silence, Emme interjects, “I saw you in the bathroom, right?”
My gaze falters to the girl standing beside Reid. She looks to be a year or two older than Emme. It becomes instantly clear to me that this is Reid’s daughter. They don’t look alike, exactly, but I can see him in the arrangement of her features, like glimpsing the silhouette of a person from behind a silk screen. She is ethereally beautiful, an Instagram filter in real life. Her skin is milky, poreless, luminescent along the bridge of her nose and the corners of her almond-shaped eyes, which are the same almost-black color as her hair.
Her mother must be a showstopper, I think.
Momentarily, I marvel at the fact that Reid has a daughter. And then I lose my mind and think,Isn’t he too young to have a teenager?
Beside me, Emme drops my hand and straightens her posture.
To Reid’s daughter, she’s saying, “Have you ever heard of the concept of a line?”
My eyes briefly catch on Reid’s again, and in that look between us, we have an entire conversation:Yes, this is me, and yes, this is really happening, and how much time has passed? And what are you doing here? And is this your daughter? And are they about to have a fight right now?
We drag our gazes away from each other when Reid’s daughter responds. She looks genuinely confused, a jutof her lip, and then, all at once, clarity breaks across her features like sunshine.
There it is, I think.There’s Reid.
“Oh my god, that was you,” Reid’s daughter says. “I’m sorry. I was distracted by my friend, and I was literally about to pee myself, and I just—”
“Is this your dad?” Emme cuts in.
Quickly, I turn to Emme, unsure whether I want to warn her about her insolence or applaud her for her chutzpah.
Then Reid responds. “I’m her dad, yes,” he says, “but I’m not going to apologize on behalf of my daughter. Gracie has to do that for herself.”
That voice. That goddamn voice. It’s even deeper now, with the barest hint of grit, but it’s still the voice that had my underwear around my ankles in an instant.
“I’m sorry,” Gracie says. “It was a shitty thing to do. I honestly didn’t realize there was a line until I got out of the stall. When you gotta go, you gotta go.”
