Page 30 of The Most Unusual Haunting of Edgar Lovejoy

In the last few weeks before her breakdown, she’d begun to talk to Edgar and Allie fervently after Poe was asleep, warning them of threats she’d never mentioned before, about shadowy figures and arcane conspiracies and people—no, things—that meant them harm.

Her drinking and drug use, always robust, had intensified since her husband had left.

Whether the substances were the cause of her paranoia or the result, Edgar didn’t know.

His father was gone; his mother was blinking in and out of sanity; Allie had just graduated. So for the next year, before Poe started high school, Edgar would be alone at school for the first time in his life.

He hadn’t said much about any of that to the friends he’d come to the party with.

Charles and Babette had befriended Edgar after winter break, and he’d gratefully let them.

They were the kind of friends who told him where they were going and when to show up and assumed he’d be there.

And he always was. Because he hadn’t had real friends since Cameron and Antoine…

and he didn’t like to think about them anymore. Not after what had happened.

Charles and Babette had hugged him and pulled him inside.

His classmates were gleeful, having cast off the mantle of the academic year with nothing yet to replace it.

They drank, they danced, they celebrated, and Edgar tried to lose himself in all of it.

Caught between carefree Charles and confident Babette, he’d drunk whatever they gave him, the world blurring around the edges.

Was this how his mom felt—floaty and detached and able to forget? Was this freedom from fear or responsibility worth leaving her kids on their own?

He could see how it might feel that way.

The party raged until the wee hours of the night, and when Edgar had stumbled outside, the air had been thick with unspent rain and the streets dark, the streetlamps in Tremé much farther apart than they were in the Bywater.

Babette had made pronouncements to the moon, grin effulgent and curls painted silver.

Charles bubbled with laughter. Edgar felt vaguely ill but optimistic, the latter a feeling he hadn’t had in a long time.

They’d walked, arm in arm, in the neutral ground on Ursulines Avenue and hurried beneath the I-10 where a woman with a sweet smile had collapsed onto a mattress with a needle in her arm and an old man waltzed with no one.

Babette and Charles danced to the music pouring out of the bars as they crossed Frenchman Street, then peeled off at Esplanade, waving their goodbyes and gleefully promising to meet for beignets and coffee the next morning to plan all the things they’d do that summer.

Edgar’s face hurt from smiling so much, but there was a lightness in his bones and looseness in his joints, like gravity was acting on him less than usual.

He could imagine how tomorrow would go: he’d wake late, make his way lazily to the café where he, Babette, and Charles would take their pastries to go, sunglasses firmly in place, then find a spot in the rocks by the river.

They’d sip coffee weedy with chicory and dust the rocks with powdered sugar from every sweet bite.

They’d make plans. They’d dream up adventures. They’d laugh. Friends.

But Edgar never made it to the café. He didn’t leave the house for the next month.

Because as he drifted drunkenly home, his future before him like a bowl of sugar cubes waiting to melt on his tongue, something moved in his periphery.

Edgar cocked his head. The Friday night merriment in the Quarter and along Frenchmen Street drifted downriver some nights, mixing with locals on street corners and outside bars, so Edgar assumed it was a tourist who’d wandered away from his group.

An explosion of hydrangeas made Edgar sneeze, and when his eyes opened, something was right in front of him.

He stepped into the ghost, and the nauseating sensation that had rolled through him was ice and heat and damp and bone-dry and wrong.

Edgar had reeled back, losing his footing and falling, catching himself on his hands.

His palms stung, but all he cared about was the looming, grotesque thing that looked like it could pull him apart and climb inside him, drag him screaming to hell, or obliterate him so entirely that Edgar would cease to exist.

It had been a man once, but now it was a lolling, shredded monstrosity, with eyes that burned into Edgar like twin moons, all reflected light and nothing inside.

Edgar didn’t know how he’d gotten to his feet and run away. But three blocks later, he glanced over his shoulder at a dead run and saw nothing there. He had a stitch in his side and felt utterly, painfully sober.

It was the second one he’d seen. Only he hadn’t been sure the first time. Maybe seeing Antoine Valliere one last time hadn’t been a ghost but a wish.

This time, however, he had no doubt.

Edgar fell to his knees and puked, only noticing that the pavement had grated his palms to blood when he left red smears on the thighs of his pants.

He had a wriggly, tremblesome feeling in his knees, and his stomach attempted to flee his body by way of his throat.

His head pounded, and his skin crawled. When he had finally dragged himself upright and made for home, he’d looked over his shoulder every other step, convinced something crept along beside him, hiding in every shadow.

He hadn’t had a drink since.

“Edgar!”

He startled back to awareness. Poe had called his name, and Jamie was squeezing his shoulder, looking concerned. Aunt Alaitheia watched him with narrowed, curious eyes.

“Where’d you go, dude?” Poe demanded.

Edgar blinked, having no intention of answering his question.

Aunt Alaitheia took his glass and downed the absinthe in a few long swallows.

“Now then,” she said. “What brings the Lovejoys back to Le Corbeau?”

It was Jamie who broke the silence. “You know how Edgar, Allie, and Poe see ghosts?”

Aunt Alaitheia was still for a moment, then nodded.

“Well, I guess we—oh, sorry, I’m Edgar’s boyfriend, by the way. I don’t see ghosts.” They grinned.

“Don’t you?” Aunt Alaitheia said softly. And before Edgar could ask what the hell that was supposed to mean, Jamie grinned.

“Nah. I create them though. I mean fake ones. I make haunted houses.”

“I know,” Aunt Alaitheia said.

“For real?” Jamie asked, clearly impressed. “Are you psychic too?”

“Sometimes,” she said. Then she winked at them. “But Allie told me.”

“Jesus, does she send a newsletter around or something?” Poe muttered.

“Edgar has all these theories,” Jamie continued, undaunted. “But he doesn’t know much for sure. Ghostwise, that is. So we were wondering if you had some insight into how it all works. How they work. Ghosts…” They trailed off.

“That’s a big question,” Aunt Alaitheia said.

“Yeah, I guess it is,” Jamie replied.

“What did your mother tell you?” she asked Edgar and Poe.

Poe snorted. “Fuck all.”

“She always said it was different for everyone,” said Edgar. “We tried to ask her, but she said it was like life or god or love—we had to decide what they meant for ourselves.”

“Like I said: fuck all.”

Aunt Alaitheia looked resigned. She poured them all another round of absinthe and, once more, downed Edgar’s herself. Then she leaned toward them, tracing patterns on the table with a wet fingertip.

“All I can tell you is what I believe,” she said.

“Your mother and I did not agree on everything, not by a long shot.” There was a hint of bitterness in her voice, like wormwood.

“But we do agree that the experience is different for everyone. What you think of ghosts depends on how you think of death. And, I suppose, on how you think of life.”

Suddenly Edgar wished they hadn’t come here.

What had he been thinking when he’d allowed Jamie to give him hope his aunt might have answers that his own mother had never given him, answers that he’d never been able to figure out on his own?

There were none here, just more questions: What really happened between you and Mom?

Why did you always come for her but never for us? What do we actually know about you?

“For me,” Aunt Alaitheia said, eyes taking on a faraway look, “death is a liminal state, somewhere between life and nothingness. For some, it feels like an instant; for others, decades, centuries, millennia. Time has no meaning outside of life. Duration is only significant as a concept when there’s an opportunity for something to end.

So a ghost doesn’t know that a piece of it has persisted past the point of physical death.

In its mind, it isn’t lingering , because you’d have to understand time to know that.

It doesn’t sense that passage of minutes or days any more than it can feel temperature without a body.

It’s an echo, a presence that implies absence. ”

Jamie was nodding, rapt. Poe was making a face Edgar recognized best from the times he didn’t get to pick the movie they’d watch as kids.

“What do they want?” Edgar asked, wishing to leave the realm of theory and enter the practical.

“I don’t know,” Aunt Alaitheia said. “Perhaps they have as many different desires as living humans do.”

“Why can we see them?” Poe asked, leaning in.

Aunt Alaitheia shook her head. “I don’t know. The Rondeaus have always had the gift—or the curse, depending on who you ask. We’re different from other people. We see more. Maybe ghosts sense that. Maybe that’s why they’re drawn to us.”

“Well, what can we do to make them back the hell off?” Edgar asked.

His aunt’s expression held more pity than Edgar was expecting, and it made him want to disappear.

“Oh, darling,” she said. “You have had a rough time of it, haven’t you?”

You’d have known that if you ever bothered to ask about us.