Night Encounter and Vapor: A Paranormal Duet Read online

  Vapor

  by

  Suzanne Jenkins

  Copyright © 2016 by

  Suzanne Jenkins. All rights reserved.

  Created in digital format in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations in blog posts and articles and in reviews.

  Vapor is a complete and total work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Free stories are delivered periodically to subscribers of the author’s newsletter. Go to http://suzannejenkins.com for more information.

  Chapter 1

  The realization that I was dead didn’t come about until I tried talking to my husband, and he wouldn’t answer me. There was so much to discuss; I needed to hear the complete truth from him, and I wanted to apologize for my role in our problems.

  Sitting at our kitchen table with his laptop in front of him, it’s a pose I’m familiar with, having eaten every meal for the past five years sitting across from him while he stared at the screen.

  Earlier that day, we’d had the same, ancient argument. I wanted him to look at me when I spoke, and although I had raised my voice, he ignored me.

  “Paul! Listen to me for heaven’s sake. Pretend I’m one of your golf buddies,” I hollered.

  Looking up at me, he was annoyed, angry even, with a scowl.

  “I’m listening, Cindy. What is it?” he said, with the same grouchy tone to match his look.

  “I’m lonely,” I said, repeating the same old line that I was getting tired of hearing. “I want to do something together this weekend.”

  I knew what he was going to say before the words were out of his mouth; this was a narrative we had repeated at regular intervals throughout our marriage.

  “How can you be lonely when I’m sitting right across from you?” He shook his head in disgust and returned to the screen. “You just want me to kiss your ass.”

  “No, not exactly,” I said. “I just need your attention. Let’s go to the movies and dinner. There’s a film in town I’ve wanted to see for weeks.”

  I also wanted to surprise him with the news that I’d won three thousand dollars in the lottery, the ticket waiting, hidden in my wallet.

  “Go with your girlfriends,” he replied.

  “I want to see it with you,” I said.

  “I hate the movies,” Paul said. “Look, if you insist, let’s get a movie here. A pizza and a movie. We don’t need to leave the house to be together.”

  Staying home with all of its distractions wasn’t what I wanted, but I would compromise.

  “Okay,” I said, getting up from the table to get coffee, offering him one, too.

  Giving me the thumbs up, because God forbid he’d actually speak, I bit my tongue and poured him a cup. I was naïve enough to think the small effort would make a difference in our relationship.

  As the weekend rolled around, he was edgy and miserable. When it came time to choose a movie, he wasn’t interested. I’d gone out to pick up pizza and had it warming in the oven. We couldn’t agree on one of the pay-for-view movies our TV cable offered, so I said I would go to the video store and pick one up.

  “I’ll get whatever you want to watch,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t suggest a war film.

  Walking back into the kitchen after retrieving my purse and jacket from the closet, he stood up from the table, pacing.

  “Don’t leave yet,” he said as I pulled my coat on. “We need to talk.” I was thinking, oh hell, what now, when he pointed to the chair across from his place at the table. “I need to get something off my chest before you leave.”

  My heart started pounding. We’d been through one calamity after another starting when his business went under. We’d filed for bankruptcy, lost our house a year later, and our marriage was floundering. How much more could we take? Could I take?

  My mind was swirling around, thinking of all the possibilities; unpaid bills, prostate cancer, destroyed credit. The last thing in the world I thought he would throw my way was an affair.

  “I’ve been seeing Beth,” he said, triumphant.

  The minute her name was out of his mouth, his entire countenance changed. My angry, dissatisfied husband had a very faint, almost indiscernible grin on his face. I kept biting my tongue as I savored the feeling his confession had given me.

  Finally, something that wasn’t my fault! I wasn’t the guilty one! He’d been able to foist responsibility off on me for all his failures, and now here was something that he couldn’t blame on me.

  I’d closed my eyes to visualize Beth Perry. We went through school together; kindergarten through twelfth grade. Drifting in and out of my life over the years, usually between marriages or her own catastrophes, she’d find a stretch of freedom, and spend it looking up old friends.

  When she was in a stable relationship, working or otherwise engaged in some meaningful activity, I never heard from her. But let a husband leave her, sick to death of her antics; have unemployment benefits run out, or jail time for a DUI, and she’d be on the phone to me. Because I’d been a pushover for her, I was first on her speed dial.

  Against my will, I thought of Beth’s beautiful body, how she’d stayed thin through all of her excesses, and when Paul and I got married she managed to upstage me with her gorgeous figure, and beautiful dress. I didn’t realize until I saw the photos that I had looked like a gnome standing next to her, a short, chubby, smiling woman with an unfortunate hairdo.

  My sister, Marie was furious with Beth, telling everyone that she purposely showed too much cleavage and a whole lotta leg to try to get at Paul.

  “Look at Paul!” she exclaimed as we went through the proofs. “He can’t keep his friggin’ eyes off Beth. Why in hell would you have someone who looks like Beth Perry stand up for you?”

  Marie was just angry; she was just a bridesmaid and not the maid of honor, a title Beth would take without question.

  “Well, of course I’m your maid of honor!” Beth shouted when I told her I was engaged. If she wanted to stand up for me so badly, let her I decided, glad the decision was out of my hands now.

  “You’ll be sorry, letting her have so much freedom around Paul,” Marie said once.

  Beth felt welcome to come to us whenever she needed a haven, and Paul was happy to give it to her. It made me happy that my husband was so generous with my friends. He never complained when they came to visit, weekends or holidays at our place in the mountains. If he noticed they rarely reciprocated, especially after we lost the house, he never mentioned it.

  In this frame of mind when my husband admitted to me that he was seeing Beth, I looked for a rational that was acceptable for a married man to spend time with his wife’s best friend. Instead, I was rewarded with a fleeting glimpse of Paul and Beth having sex in my imagination, becoming nauseous thinking of it.

  “What does seeing mean?” I asked, not really wanting to know.

  “Just what it sounds like,” he said, smirking.

  “Are you having an affair?” I asked, hoping my trembling lip wasn’t visible.

  The minute the words were out of my mouth, I knew they were ridiculous. Of course they were having an affair! A man wouldn’t risk his peace if they were simply having coffee.

  He began to laugh; a knife to my heart. Paul rarely if ever laughed. “You could call it that,” he said sarcastically.

  By laughing, I thought he might be trying to intimidate me so I would be the one to leave; walk away from what little security we had left.

  My next impu
lse was to fly at him like a maniac and claw his eyes out. Paul always knew how to bring out the very worst in me. A dirty fighter knowing my Achilles heel, I allowed him to provoke me into embarrassing behavior. Fish wife is an appropriate phrase to describe me when Paul and I got into a fight, which often escalated beyond reason.

  For years, I’d fantasized about leaving him, but I was unable to fathom living without him. We were habitual partners, not loving, and certainly not loyal, as I had just discovered, engrained in each other until one of us acted out. I was glad it was Paul who did it first, that my conscience was clear, but I was also shocked.

  Not that I didn’t have the opportunities to be unfaithful. There is a man at my job right now who has professed to love me, but he’s married, too. I would never betray another woman, let alone a lifetime partner. The shock started to subside, and numbness seeped in behind the void left.

  The impulse to attack Paul faded away, and calm blanketed me as I took my jacket off and hung it over the back of the chair, sitting down. We made eye contact for the first time since his confession. The poor man looked haggard, and my concern for him bumped up a notch, but only for a second. The years of struggle since our personal economic collapse had taken a toll on my husband. Always the best-looking man in our crowd, once, a casual acquaintance asked me how I got such a great looking guy, and she said it in front of Paul. Now, his eyes were sunken and ringed with shadows, and his luxurious black, curling hair had turned gray and was slowly showing more of his forehead.

  My heart went out to him. Beth was overbearing, and I could just imagine how their relationship got its start. She would have initiated it. Paul didn’t have the energy to go after anything that wasn’t thrown in his lap. Beth must have gotten in touch with him behind my back, and in a moment of weakness, he succumbed to her advances.

  “Why?” I asked, taking him by surprise.

  Watching his face, I’m sure he wasn’t prepared to make excuses and that perhaps I didn’t deserve an explanation.

  “What’d you mean why? We haven’t exactly had the best relationship lately,” he said.

  I laughed out loud, shaking my head in disgust.

  “Oh, I guess I thought it was for better or for worse,” I said. “For richer for poorer. God knows we’ve been there.”

  I thought of the days and hours I spent encouraging him in the past as any good wife would have done, trying to help him climb out of the financial hole he’d gotten us into. Working double shifts whenever they were offered to me, I did my best trying to help us stay afloat. All the money I poured into our house I lost because he made the decision to let it go into foreclosure. He wouldn’t listen to me when I begged him to reconsider; in his hopelessness, he’d given up.

  As we sat at our kitchen table in the shabby apartment, our failures were palpable. In my lame attempt to make him feel guilty about the infidelity, I’d only succeeded in both of us feeling terrible about our marriage. I wondered why I would do that to someone I’d devoted my life to, accepting my role in its demise.

  I backpedaled trying to make amends. “It doesn’t make any difference,” I said quickly. “So, are you in love with her?”

  Looking away from me, stalling for time, I could almost hear the wheels turning in his head. If he said yes, he was admitting that he’d fallen for a reprobate like Beth. If he said no, he might be giving me hope he didn’t think I should have.

  “It’s not like that,” he said. “I needed someone who wasn’t waiting for me to save the day, and she was there.”

  Save the day? Where the hell did he get that idea? If anything, Paul was looking to me to do it. Biting my tongue, I kept the smirk off my face. I wasn’t getting into a pissing match with Paul over Beth. In fact, I didn’t even want him to think I cared. I was so sure that he’d tell her that I was brokenhearted, or some inane garbage, and my pride was not going to allow it.

  Slipping the jacket back on, I picked up my purse, watching him watch me, like strangers.

  “I’m getting a movie tonight,” I said. “Pizza’s in the oven, probably dry as a bone.”

  Surprised that I was walking out without begging for details, I had the feeling he was maybe a little too eager to tell me all about it. I was not a voyeur. So the last thing I remember was leaving the house, looking at him, trying to catch his eye. I didn’t kiss him like I normally would have; it was inappropriate. But I did say goodbye.

  Chapter 2

  Unlike stories told about my current status, ghosts don’t read minds, nor do they see the past or the future. We are in the here and now, as living humans are. If anything, I have less intuition than I did when I was alive. I don’t feel actual regret. I don’t feel much at all, except an occasional fleeting sensation that I might have wasted time.

  According to the police, I was driving through town when a dump truck ran a stop sign, and plowed into me. I don’t remember any of it, except that I had finally started to cry over Paul. Evidently, I was killed on impact, for which I’m grateful. I can’t see myself in the mirror, which is very upsetting, but that may be a good thing.

  Afterward, I found myself at the apartment. It wasn’t exactly oppressive inside, the impression was less dramatic. The apartment stirred up an emptiness, perhaps because there was a memory of a comfortable house emanating from the furniture. Struggling to remember something about the house, all I could grasp were waves of peace. Tiny bits of memory zapped me periodically, almost painful, like biting on tinfoil, if I tried to remember the house. Then it dawned on me what it was; like a limb cut off, I’d been torn from the house and that was phantom pain.

  Clouding the suggestion of happiness was the foremost thought that my husband, who’d I loved once, was sleeping with my girlfriend, and I had to resolve that or never rest. I knew this as I know I am a ghost, that my form is called vapor. We don’t refer to ourselves as ghosts. We are vapor.

  The raw emotion of hearing about Beth and Paul did something cataclysmically to me, so that when the truck hit me, instead of going off into the energy mass that all human life eventually becomes, I went to the video store. I should have figured out when the counter help ignored me, no one stopping me when I left with the movie, that they couldn’t see me. I was vapor.

  I’d looked at my smashed car, and saw my body being lifted out by the squad crew, but it still didn’t register. It wasn’t until I appeared in the apartment and took my coat off, placing the movie on the kitchen counter, that I missed my purse. A wave of hot something went through me; where’d I leave my friggin’ purse? I had the winning lottery ticket in my wallet.

  Paul didn’t look up at me when I came in, and his apathy made me angrier than his infidelity. I forgot about my purse.

  “Paul, we have to discuss this. We can’t pretend it doesn’t matter. You being with Beth changes everything for me. It honestly makes me sick to think you would sleep with a skank like Beth! Do you have any idea how many men she’s been with? I lost count when we were seniors in high school.”

  Paul kept his eyes on the screen, typing, moving the mouse around. I walked behind him to peer over his shoulder; I wanted to see what was so important that I was able to call his girlfriend a skank, and he wouldn’t respond. It was work related; a spreadsheet covered with numbers that meant nothing to me. I stood behind him and yelled “Paul!” but he continued typing. I think I had about reached my limit. It wasn’t doing any good fighting with an opponent who wasn’t fighting back.

  I took a slice of cardboard pizza out of the box he’d taken out of the oven, got my movie and went into the living room to relax. Whatever was going on with my husband would have to wait because I was suddenly empty. I sat on the couch and waited for; nothing. I’d gone through the motions, but now that I was confronted with food and entertainment, it didn’t mean anything to me. I wanted my husband with me, to watch the movie or the blank screen, together. I heard the door to our building opening, and heavy footsteps come up the stairs.

  “Someone’s here,”
I yelled to Paul who was still hard at work.

  Ignoring me as usual, he didn’t get up until there was a knock. I watched him walk to the door, looking at his watch. Was he wondering what was taking me so long? Maybe he thought it was me at the door, that I had forgotten my key. I watched curiously as he opened the door. It was the police. I could hear them asking Paul if I lived there, using my full name. Paul hesitated and I could feel the fear in his voice when he finally spoke.

  “I am so sorry to tell you that there was an accident, and that she was killed,” the stranger said.

  Next, the yodel that sounded from Paul’s throat scared the crap out of me.

  “Oh God, no!” he yelled, falling to his knees.

  I was appalled. He didn’t even like me anymore. Why the theatrics?

  “What happened?” he asked, hands in his face, crying.

  I got up, or floated up, because by now I was conscious that something had happened to me and I wasn’t in denial about how I was getting around. I went over to him, aware that no one could see me.

  I’d been killed, the police said. So, I was dead. I got up in his face to see what I could see, and I didn’t see any tears. He was faking. He didn’t care that I was dead. I wished that I could kick his ass while he knelt there, but my leg was gossamer, and he wouldn’t feel it no matter how much oomph I put into it.

  I stood in the doorway next to Paul while the police talked to him, my arms folded across my chest like I always did. They had my purse, and although I knew I no longer needed it, I was relieved to know that it had ended up at home when they handed it over to him. They said their condolences and turned to walk back down the stairs.

  Paul did look sad, I had to hand it to him, and he reluctantly closed the door. Not sure why; maybe having the police there gave him a reprieve of sorts, and I felt sorry for him. Then I felt a sensation coming from him, an odd combination of annoyance and relief. He was going to call my family; the burden to act as though he gave a crap that I was dead would weigh heavily on him.