Page 3

“Woo-woo”

had been Sadie’s husband Ben’s affectionately derisive catchall for the supernatural phenomena Itzie and Sadie adored.

Ben had died the summer before Itzie pitched Haunted House Home Inspectors.

He’d died the stupidest possible death in the stupidest of all possible worlds: No one had been doing anything particularly wrong, but all the factors had meshed in exactly the wrong way.

It had been a slightly slick morning, the mom behind the wheel had been a little distracted by her fussy baby, her minivan’s tires had just barely started to go bald, Ben had been listening to a podcast on his big chunky Beats, and there was a thin spot in his skull from a childhood fall.

Any two or three of those would have still left him alive, perhaps even totally unscathed.

All five together put him in a casket.

Ben and Sadie had been married six months. Sadie was three weeks pregnant, but had not yet told Ben. She had been saving the news for his birthday. The morning of his funeral she miscarried.

Itzie knew all of this. He’d been at Ben’s burial and sat shiva with Sadie, staying with her through the entire first day and a half, during which she never slept. She’d been struck dumb with grief, and he’d made no effort to cheer her up or get her to “let it all out.”

He answered her phone, he received guests—and their countless kugels and casseroles and coffee cakes—he made her tea, he held her hair as she vomited.

It was that first sleepless night that Sadie told Itzie about the pregnancy and the loss—something she never told anyone else—weeping bitterly at the fact that she never got to share the joy of the possibility of a child with Ben, nor have his help bearing the burden of that loss.

“I never really believed in God until this shit,”

she told Itzie. “Random chance couldn’t conceivably be this capricious and cruel.”

She sniffled hard, sucking in her burgeoning tears and smearing snot with the heel of her hand. “But since there is a God, then there are indestructible souls and all the rest of that woo-woo, and so Ben is still somewhere out there.”

In response Itzie quietly sang, “Beneath the pale moon light…”

It was the “Somewhere Out There”

duet from An American Tail—the one animated movie about Jews like them (albeit ones who were Russian mice). Itzie and Sadie had sung it for the talent show at Jewish sleep-away camp the first year Itzie went, when he was terrified and miserable. As a wedding present, he’d somehow surreptitiously prepped the entire crowd into serenading her and Ben with it when they entered the banquet hall.

* * *

The first thing Sadie noticed when Itzie opened his apartment door that Saturday was an ugly new ?LEI chair. She even knew the name of the design; it was a “N?lmyna.”

Ben had wanted one when they first moved in together. Sadie had thought it looked awful—on top of sounding like something that had crept from an eldritch tomb long lost beneath the deserts’ shifting sands. But she’d humored Ben. They’d driven all the way out to the ?LEI in West Chester, he’d sat in it for fifteen seconds, then grimaced. “Well,”

he’d admitted, “their website’s right: this chair does indeed ‘reimagine comfort’—in much the same way Jeffrey Dahmer reimagined charcuterie. You want some meatballs?”

Despite the unfortunate juxtaposition, she did. The meatballs had been all they bought at ?LEI that day, and it was still kind of one of her favorite memories of their extremely short marriage.

But, of course, none of that would explain why Itzie, of all people, had bought one. Itzie’s tastes in architecture and interior design stopped just shy of 190 and put the “anal”

in “artisanal.”

“Why in the world did you buy a N?lmyna?”

she asked as she walked in.

“I didn’t,”

Itzie said. “It’s an apport.”

“No,”

Sadie said, taking a closer look. “I’m positive that’s a N?lmyna.”

But Itzie’s sudden willingness to entertain the possible charms of cost-conscious Swedish design wasn’t what worried her. It was the state of his apartment as a whole. It wasn’t a disaster, but it wasn’t like Itzie: the trash was a few days overdue, the counters littered with Burger King bags and pizza boxes, the surface of his treasured oak dining room table gritty with crumbs and sticky with orange pop rings from the bottoms of forgotten Big Gulps. It was the apartment of a depressive slump, but Itzie himself was giddy, almost manic, and smelled of BO.

“Watch this,”

he said. “Do not take your eyes off the chair.”

She watched the chair intently. Just another N?lmyna. ?LEI’s Chinese suppliers must poop out ten thousand of them every day.

She watched Itzie pick it up, stride past her, then slip around the corner into the spare bedroom he used as his office.

“Am I supposed to follow you or—”

“No,”

he called from the little office. “Turn around.”

She turned around. Then froze.

The N?lmyna was still at the head of Itzie’s table.

Her heart was pounding fast and hard, cramming into her throat, making her want to vomit.

“Itzie-bitsy,”

she said, more a wheeze than a word. “What the fuck?”

“It’s an apport,”

he said in her ear. “Stay put. This time, when I pick up the chair, just keep watching the spot where the chair was.”

Sadie did as she was told. Itzie’s hands grabbed the chair, pulled it out of her frame of reference. She kept her eyes glued to the spot. No chair. She heard Itzie pace away, heard him set his chair down in the little stub of hall between the two bedroom doors. She kept her eyes on the open space at the head of the table, focusing on the little scuffs on the hardwood where the N?lmyna had stood.

Nothing happened.

She glanced up; Itzie was standing between the two bedroom doors, grinning, one hand resting on his chair’s back. She looked behind her, to the head of the dining room table. The N?lmyna had returned. She did a double take: there were now two chairs, one with Itzie, one at the table.

“The craziest part,”

he said, gesturing at the original N?lmyna. “I took out one of the bolts that holds the seat in place, carried it in my pocket all day, all over town. It didn’t reappear on the chair, or duplicate, or anything. It was just like any other ?LEI bolt in the universe. And the chair still couldn’t be moved. Crazy, right?”

Sadie stepped away from the dining room table, her legs moving with no real participation from her brain. She walked over to Itzie and his chair in the hall, touched it. Solid. She looked back. The N?lmyna was still where it had been at the table.

“This one is just a regular chair,”

Itzie said, indicating the chair in the hall with them. “Move it all you like.”

He picked it up and carried it to his little office. It stayed gone. The N?lmyna at the dining room table stayed put. She followed Itzie back.

His tiny home office was crammed with a jackstraw heap of N?lmyna chairs, at least twenty of them.

“They’re all regular. Every one but the one at the table. That one ain’t going nowhere.”

“I. Don’t. Understand.”

“It’s an apport,”

Itzie enthused. “A material object transferred from an unknown source. Classic of séances and poltergeist investigations. Every single apportation ever investigated has been shown to be a fraud, Sadie. Every one but this one. This is fucking proof! Legit, verifiable woo-woo! I’ve been bouncing around haunted woods and paranormal strip mall kitchens for almost ten years looking for proof, and proof showed up on its own. What are the odds?”

Sadie stood in the home office, staring at the heap of chairs without seeing them, thinking about the N?lmyna in the living room. The same stupid, ugly chair Ben had thought he wanted, before actually sitting in one of the uncomfortable bastards. What are the odds?

“Where’d you get this thing,”

Sadie asked, looking at Itzie’s new chair, thinking about the one crouched at the head of his table.

“I didn’t get it anywhere. I flew in three days ago, arrived hella late. No chair. Woke up the next morning, it’s sitting at my table. I couldn’t figure out where it came from, and was sorta freaked out that someone was getting into my place to mess with me. I moved it over by the windows to get a better look in the good light and see if there was anything weird about it. And then I had two chairs. And—”

He gestured at Mount St. N?lmyna crammed in his office. “And, well, you can guess how things went from there. Isn’t this amazing!?”

The front door buzzer brayed.

“My DoorDash!”

Itzie shouted. “Be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

Itzie was out the door and down the stairs.

Alone in the apartment, Sadie wandered back to his oak table and gingerly rested one hand on the primal N?lmyna’s seat back. It seemed normal at first. But as she held it, she realized that it was thrumming, and had been all along, like an airplane hull when you’re at cruising altitude. It dawned on her that she and Ben had never flown in a plane together. The pain of losing him was suddenly fresh and new.

And here she was, a widow quickly cruising toward spinsterhood, one hand resting on the ineffable.

Legit, verifiable woo-woo.

Sadie took a breath and sat down in the N?lmyna.