Table for One

Kari looked around the restaurant. It was a busy Friday night and the serving staff looked exhausted. Kari took out her notebook, something she brought to restaurants because she would rather people thought she was a restaurant reviewer than what she was in actuality.

Kari had started seeing ghosts in the sandbox of her first house when she was three years old; a little boy who couldn’t explain to her why he couldn’t leave the sandbox. Kari visited him every day, and her father had been grateful for her “imaginary friend” because it had allowed him to keep writing his book on an old laptop on a bench while his daughter prattled on to “herself”.

Her father had decided to move them out of the suburbs of Vancouver, British Columbia and to Seattle, Washington when Kari had turned six years old and looking back Kari could see how her insistence that there was a real little boy in their back sandbox might have had something to do with it, that and her mother leaving her father because his writing never panned out.

Kari had said a tearful goodbye to the three year old who had never aged, and her mother. Her father seemed convinced that he’d solved the imaginary friend problem.

He hadn’t. Kari understood that if she wanted to keep her ghost friends she’d have to keep them quiet. There was little she could do about keeping her mother.

When Kari was nine she held hands with her first girlfriend. Kari had met her at a park in the rich, hilly neighborhood of Queen Anne. Kari loved that park. It was shrouded in blackberry brambles, and there were always a ton of kids playing in it from the nearby apartments. Kari always sat under the roofed picnic spot. She never quite knew what to say to the living. One morning, while her father typed away at his ever-unfinished first novel, Kari looked over to find a girl her age eating blackberries out of a small ice cream pail. She’d nodded a greeting and the girl had offered her a ghost-berry. Kari had tried to take it to be polite, and had been delighted to find that she could grasp it. She didn’t say a word to her father, afraid that he’d move her away from her one new friend. His father had decided not to send her to school, and upon retrospect (everything seemed clearer to her now looking back on the past) she suspected it was because he found her “off”. Seeing ghosts is one thing, but being a part of the spirit world is another. The world Kari lived in wasn’t full of vivid colors, it was always grey-adjacent.

Kari asked her father to take her to the park daily, and she’d bring her notebook and suggest her father sit at the bench near the road overlooking the sloped grassland of the park while Kari would head over to the empty picnic table, hoping her friend would arrive. It seemed perpetually grey in Seattle and so the drabness of her ghost world wasn’t so striking there. It fit. That summer she would eat ghostly blackberries and write notes to Caitlyn, the ghost girl. She found out a good deal about the spirit world and Seattle and the sadness that drenched the little park. Occasionally other ghosts would visit and the table became a sort of meeting place for ghostly communications. Kari writing furiously and the ghosts answering her questions joyfully. She spent the summer feeling so utterly not-alone. As the weather began to change, the ghosts seemed to get more and more transparent. Caitlyn explained that Seattle’s rainy season drove them back indoors, and that she wouldn’t be able to come visit Kari anymore, not until the next summer. Kari had written a heartfelt note espousing her love for Caitlyn, and on their last day, Kari had asked if maybe they could hold hands. Kari grasped Caitlyn’s hand tightly, as if she could make her real and living through sheer force of will. It didn’t work, and Caitlin dissipated as her father called her home for lunch.

Kari returned summer after summer to the park, her father finished many novels over the course of the years, Kari’s mother never did come back though and oddly, against all common ghost beliefs around aging, Caitlyn had continued to grow up, just as Kari did.

At around age thirteen, Kari started going to the park late at night, to hold hands and snuggle with her ghostly girlfriend. Her father so consumed by his writing, he never noticed her absence. Kari felt so deeply in love with Caitlyn that she could think of nothing else. Her notes to Caitlyn became more emphatic near the end of her thirteenth summer. Caitlyn tried to explain that she couldn’t stay, that she had to go indoors.

When Kari turned fourteen that fall, her father insisted that she go to high school. Kari had been teaching herself, and happy for it, but her father seemed worried about her exceptional lack of social interaction and the fact that she rarely spoke aloud. He moved them to an apartment far away from the park that Caitlyn haunted, and Kari fell into a deep depression.

Years later, sitting in the restaurant, Kari looked back upon her memories and relished in their surreality. She had learned in teenage hood to communicate with the living and had lived a fairly “normal” life. She had gotten a job, and gone about things the way non-ghost-kin did, often ignoring the spirits around her, until they stopped trying to contact her completely, and her world had become bright colours again.

Until one day, into her mid-twenties, she had received an odd singing telegram. The singer only sang the name of the park she‘d visited as a child over and over until Kari was forced to slam the door on him. Her love for Caitlyn, and all her experiences had come tumbling back in a landslide of complicated feelings. Kari looked up the park and found it was still there, and she quickly found her notebook and hastily drove to her old haunt. It was the last day of summer and when she arrived at the park it had a special grey about it, and sitting at the picnic table was a grown woman, who looked so very familiar. Kari walked up to the table slowly, and when the ghost turned her head, her eyes, full of love, gave her away. Caitlin had been sending ghostly telegrams everywhere for the past decade until she’d found a medium who also did singing telegrams and had begged the man to get in touch with her live girlfriend from ten years past. Kari sat next to Caitlyn in awe that she had been in love with a ghost for most of her life and had pushed it down and away.

Caitlyn alerted Kari that she was about to dissolve, and quickly told her where to find her, indoors, at this very restaurant the following Friday night.

Kari looked around the exquisitely decorated room, lit dimly to spur on the group of first dates murmuring at tables, and waved the server off another time as she waited patiently and alone.

The air around her warmed suddenly and she looked up to see Caitlyn, dressed in a sparkling black dress, her eyes more vibrant than she’d ever seen them, and she stood up, and hugged her girlfriend so tightly and with such joy that all conversations stopped and where there had been no one just a moment before, a figure appeared, and Kari was all of a sudden no longer alone.