Shapeless

She returned on a Thursday with the ashes of her fling tucked safely under her arm.

Placed upon the mantle, the urn looked like a participation trophy from a little league tournament, not a final resting place for a man she’d only met after his untimely demise.

Placing one hand on the urn before heading to the bedroom to unpack her suitcase, she whispered “Thank you” and then realized how silly it was to whisper.

There was a very good chance she was the only one home.

A very good chance, but not a certainty.

* * * * * *

Mindy Begin was nearly seventy-years-old, and her summer trip to the Cape was her first vacation in fourteen years. When her husband Saint died, she found no urge to go on vacations. It wasn’t that she didn’t need a respite, it was just that the idea of traveling alone terrified her. Saint had also been the one good with planning. He liked finding hotels and seeking out discounts. He loved maps until there weren’t any more maps, and then he begrudgingly grew to love GPS. He packed the snacks. He found the best radio stations. Along the way, he’d come up with surprise stops to see a giant ball of chewing gum in Duluth or The Bob Newhart Museum in Oak Park.

It was her nephew Chickpea who suggested she take a trip to the Cape. He had bought a house there the previous summer, but was unable to visit this year because of a kidney condition that Mindy didn’t believe was real. She loved her nephew, but like his mother (her sister), Chickpea could be a bit of a hypochondriac.

“I swear, Ant Mindy,” he’d say over the phone, “I can see my kidney trying to poke right out of my belly button. It’s like that thing in Alien. It looks like it’s going to jump right out of me.”

As much as she tried to convince him that he was (probably) fine, he carried on and on, and begged her to take the house off his hands for the summer so he didn’t feel as though it was going to waste. After hemming and hawing over it, she agreed to a five-week stay. Truthfully, she could have gone for a year if she wanted to. She’d been retired for over five years. She had no pets. No plants. No children or her own nor grandchildren. The only thing holding her back was the potentially devastating epiphany that there simply was no reason to disappear. That sort of thing could give a person a complex.

Complex or not, she left on a Friday. The last Friday in June. She underpacked and overfretted. When she arrived at the house on the Cape, the front door had a note on it from the next door neighbor that had been taped there some time ago. It was an invitation to a barbecue that never happened, because of a mosquito incident. Mindy removed the note, and moved into the house. It smelled like potpourri and aftershave. She understood the potpourri, but the aftershave didn’t add up until she met the ghost of Jack Stance.

Jack had died on January 19, 1993, the day before Bill Clinton’s inauguration. While he never lived to see the administration, he didn’t have a bad death. He went to sleep, had a heart attack, and never woke up. He was survived by his daughter Faye and a grandson named Hargrove who was three and a half when he lost his grandpa. Jack didn’t mind dying, but he wasn’t exactly through with living either. That was why he decided to hang around his house as a ghost. In life, he had been a carpenter, so he continued to do repairs on his home as new people moved in. He might have been the only ghost who raised the value of the property he was haunting.

The house had seen a few owners in thirty years, but most used it as a vacation spot. That left Jack to spend the rest of the time watching the History Channel and taking long showers. A little known fact about ghosts is that they love a good shower. The water runs through them the way detectives in old movies walk through fog. It’s a soothing sensation.

He was in the shower when Mindy Begin showed up to begin her summer sojourn. She heard the water running and went in to investigate assuming that no burglar would take a shower, which isn’t entirely true, but in this case, she was right. It wasn’t a burglar. It was a dead man who was, nevertheless, not wearing any clothes.

They both screamed. Jack made himself invisible and Mindy covered her eyes. She began to express her remorse at having intruded on him in such a way. He assured her it was fine, but prior to this, he was very careful about not letting the living see him in any kind of vulnerable state. Once the two of them had gotten their bearings, they reconvened in the living room. Jack introduced himself and explained his situation. Mindy informed him that she had never believed in ghosts, but she would try to keep an open mind since apparently they were going to be roommates for the summer.

For the first week, their cohabitation was strictly platonic. Mindy would make herself a bowl of cereal and stand out on the back porch breathing in the ocean air. Jack would walk through walls and fix any leaks that appeared. It wasn’t until Mindy put on A Fish Called Wanda one night that she and Jack spent time together. He couldn’t resist a Kevin Kline comedy and neither could she. They sat next to each other on the couch, and when the film was over, they began to talk. He spoke of his life after death and she spoke of her life that wasn’t really much of a life at all. Part of her wanted to ask him if he could contact her husband, but she decided against it. Before she retired to bed, she leaned over and kissed him where his cheek would be. He smiled. She smiled. He followed her to bed.

Becoming inseparable from a ghost is easier than a living man. Jack was always either by Mindy’s side or directly inside of her. She had been in love with her husband, but she had never carried his spirit with her the way she did with Jack. She took him down to the beach and they sat on the sand while the surfers broke with the waves and dogs chased frisbees and young love seemed like it had nothing to do with being young.

Before they knew it, Labor Day had arrived, and it was time for Mindy to go home. She didn’t want to, but Chickpea had sold the place to a writer who wanted to live in a tourist town off-season so he could write an 800-page novel about a middle-aged man and his regrets. She didn’t want to leave Jack to deal with that, and he didn’t want to be left. He told her where the urn was hidden in the basement. His daughter had known that he wouldn’t want to leave his house, so she tucked his ashes behind a loose stone near the furnace. He still didn’t want to leave his house, but Mindy now felt like home. Given the choice between your house and your home, it isn’t much of a choice at all.

She buckled the urn into the front seat of her Silverado and drove away with the ocean wind at their back and the promise of autumn telling them it was okay to drive a little faster.

* * * * * * * * *

Jack had told her that he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to be as he was in a new setting. When she first arrived home, there was no trace of him. She would whisper hopes to the urn, but never hear anything back. While she could still feel his presence, there was no direct communication. She knew he might have moved on, and if he had, she had to be happy for him. Loneliness had always been a lingering cough in her throat, but now it was a terminal illness. She felt it so profoundly. It rendered her shapeless.

The night she died in her bed, she felt a hand over her hand. There was a pinch--like when the doctor gives you your first shot as a child. Then, she opened her eyes, and there was Jack.

He was a circle now. His hand was there, but it wasn’t attached to him. There was no way to describe it, and no need to. He smiled at her the way he had smiled the night they first connected watching a silly movie they both knew every word to. She went to touch her face, and found that she had also become a circle.

Both of them joined so that the circle expanded and became something that glowed outward--like a sun. Like a summer sun. It was cold outside, but that wouldn’t affect them.

They were July.

They were dunes.

They were ruby birthstones and lemonade.

Mindy Begin began again.

It was a Friday, and it always would be.