Chapter 9: Ferryman Nights

I sat up in the dark and typed with my thumbs shaking.

That's a lie.

I know. So does everyone who has met you.

Does Leni believe it?

A pause.

Your stepsister threw a plate of calamari at your mother on Sunday. I am told it was a good throw.

I laughed out loud alone in the dark.

Then I put my face in the pillow until I stopped.

That was the first night.

After that he texted every night.

I never asked him to.

At ten or eleven my time, when the yard went quiet and the coyotes started up, the burner buzzed on the crate beside my bed.

How is the comet.

Filthy, I'd write. Pigeons. Thirty years of pigeons.

Pigeons are a Providence bird. They followed you.

He never used a contraction.

He never wasted a word.

He made me laugh anyway, about every third night, in a dry way that snuck up on me.

I told him about the yard.

I told him about Bunny's chili, which she made every Thursday and which could strip paint.

I told him about my father, who used to sing Sinatra badly with a torch in his hand.

I told him about the first life.

I didn't use the word for it.

Just that I'd been on a table once before, and it was cold, and I'd been sure I wasn't getting off it.

He was quiet a long time after that one.

Then: You got off it.

Bunny taught me the comet.

Every tube had a story.

The third ring had been rewired in 1971 after a storm.

The head had been repainted in 1984 by a man who fell off and lived.

On the night it went dark in 1999, the whole cast had stood on Fremont Street in their feathers and watched it fade.

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