Free Every Time We Say Goodbye by Jamie Zeppa

dead.
    “Grace, do you have the ticket?”
    “Yes.” The talking dead.
    “You look very nice, Gracie. That suit is very becoming on you.” The dead wore new clothes, a navy skirt and matching jacket cut and sewn by the living.
    “We wait over there,” Frank said. The moving dead. The standing dead. The dead could swallow coffee from a paper cup, but they could not taste it.
    “You have your wallet? Keep your purse in your lap at all times.”
    The dead could nod.
    “Here’s the driver now,” Frank said. “Show him your ticket.”
    “I’m coming back for him as soon as I get set up.”
    “I know. I know you are. Don’t cry now, Grace. You know we’ll look after him like he was our own.”
    The dead could cry. Water droplets fell from their eyes, but they could not feel them.
    On the bus, Grace sat with her purse in her lap, her hands and feet like rocks at the end of stick limbs. The bus rolled forward. Outside the window, Frank waved his hat, and then he was gone.
    Out on the highway, the light was grey. Bare black trees stood in pools of icy water and lifted their aching arms to the swirling, empty sky. The road cut through rock face crusted over with ice. Inside her was a raging thing that swallowed and recreated itself endlessly. Crying was no relief from it. Thinking was no help for it. It would not be talked to, it could not be tricked. She had left her boy. It was unbearable. It had killed her, and yet here she was, sitting on a bus, getting off the bus, dragging a suitcase down a frozen sidewalk. The dead did what they had to do.
    “Now, when you get to Peterborough,” Vera had said, “you’ll be able to walk to your place. Isn’t that convenient?” She had drawn a map. “It’s too bad Bridget May moved to Niagara Falls. The bus terminal is here, and apparently there’s a bank right here, and then you turn here onto Brock Street. That’s your street, where the rooming house is. Mrs. Barr’s. Bridget May recommended it, and I’ve talked to the woman. She has a nice room ready for you.”
    Mrs. Barr’s was a narrow wooden house painted an oily grey and surrounded by a wire fence. The walkway was treacherous with rutted ice. Grace knocked, and then knocked harder, and after a long time, a woman opened the door in a pink bathrobe and frothy pink slippers. “Why didn’t you ring the bell?” she asked. “Jeez, you could have been standing out here all night.” Her impossibly black hair looked like it had been whipped up into a confection of rolls and waxed. She blew out a long streamer of smoke. “I suppose you’re Grace Turner?”
    Grace nodded.
    “Don’t you look like a month of Sundays. What’s the matter, you have a bad trip?”
    I am dead
, Grace thought, but she could only shake her head. Mrs. Barr said to come in already, her heating bill was going to go through the roof.
    She took Grace upstairs to her room, which smelled of cold cream and cigarettes, pointing out that the smallest room was always the cutest. She explained the use of the hot water tank, the rules for making tea, the ban on gentlemen callers, the meal schedule, the bath schedule, the laundry schedule and the ledger in which the schedules were recorded. She watched as Grace hung up her clothes and observed that Grace sure hadn’t brought much, and was she always this quiet? The other girls, Connie and Noreen, were a hoot. Grace would meet them at dinner. Grace said she was tired and if it was okay with Mrs. Barr, she would like to go straight to bed. Mrs. Barr shrugged. “No skin off my nose.”
    When Mrs. Barr was gone, Grace took the photograph out of her purse. She couldn’t look at it. Instead, she lay down in her slip between cold, damp sheets and pressed the frame to her chest with both hands.
    The dead could stay very still. If they thought no thoughts, they could eventually fade into sleep.
    The problem with the dead was that when they woke, they had forgotten everything. They thought they were at home