Ghost Lover by Lisa Taddeo

Author:Lisa Taddeo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Published: 2022-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—Life doesn’t end till you wannitu, Frances Magorian said to Grace Magorian as the latter held her glossy blue child to her breast.

—People go when they wannu. Same went for your da.

Was it irrational, Grace thought, to have become so incapacitated because someone she didn’t know, never met, had ghosted her?

She sat for a spell in Thing One’s hinoki wood soaking tub. The water was scalding and the eucalyptus oil smelled, pleasingly, of poison. But she had never been able to stand a bath. Just sitting there. It seemed so sloppy. She climbed out, her heart racing from the heat of the water. Her hands still dripping, she reached for her phone. An email from Country Living. 17 Explosive desserts for the Fourth of July. Nothing more.

No, it couldn’t be. Clearly there was a mail-carrying issue with this stupid, hipster site. Like everything created by millennials, Grace thought, it was beautiful but empty.

It took several minutes, but she found a contact number for Venus. A girl answered, who most definitely had cobalt fingernails. Grace explained the situation, the mostly blank email, the soundlessness that followed. The girl, named Jo, asked for Grace’s handle, and for the one belonging to the man she loved. For several minutes there was silence at the other end, and Grace could feel the girl’s eyes on her profile, this Cujo who knew nothing, thinking, Yeah, right, this man wrote to you, you old hag. Looking at both their profiles and thinking, Get real, lady.

When her voice returned to the line, Jo told Grace there had been no outages on their end and there was nothing they could do. If somebody didn’t write you back, it was recommended that you move on as quickly as possible.

—Then whytha fuck did you ask for our frickin handles!

—I’m sorry, ma’am, the girl said. A voice had never sounded farther away.

Within minutes Grace was naked astride the mahogany captain’s chair in Thing Two’s office, furiously toggling between windows on her laptop. She searched DigLitt’s profile for phrases and places she might string together, to figure out his real name. She did not look for him on Facebook, because his World at Large section called social media “an extant place for those who don’t think the bad things will happen to them, who think the good are due to them, and want you to know about every Miami vacation.”

She spent four hours sleuthing. It was feverish. She didn’t realize the time going by. The only time she’d ever felt such a divine slippage of time was at a school dance the year before she became intimate with George. She’d danced most of the night with a boy named Bri’an, who seemed too good for her but did not act it. He wore a plaid blazer, and his skin was attractively acne scarred.

For all her intelligent effort, googling Africa and Brazil and architecture and all the clues in his profile, she could not turn up a LinkedIn or anything. Nothing at all!

She took a pill from Thing One’s medicine cabinet.

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