I picked out the smallest ghost. That wasn’t my plan going in. I didn’t really have a plan.
I’d been up too late at night and caught one of those commercials they play. Normally I wouldn’t let it get to me. I know how they work. Those sad songs they play. The extra time spot they use so they can make you extra sad. So that even if you get up and walk away, they’ll still be playing when you get back. Won’t you call now? they say. Won’t you help? It won’t take very much.
I looked around the room at my small apartment. With all the lights off, it didn’t look half bad. Cozy even. And I guess it was. Most of it had been put together secondhand. I’d found the Turkish carpet rolled up and set out for the trash. It had a few stains and smelled like smoke but otherwise, it looked like an antique. The oversized chair I was sitting in had been given to me by a sort of friend who was moving. I had shelves and shelves of books, too many books. You could say it was cluttered. But I liked being surrounded by the things I loved.
Still, I found myself sitting all alone in the flickering blue of the television set thinking about all the things I didn’t have. How alone I was. Outside my windows were never-ending gray pavement and the gray air that only a city can get. Sometimes I felt like one of a million sardines when I was out moving in the crowds. All of us black-eyed and pressed together, our bodies glistening in the heat of the city. All of us waiting for someone or something to peel off the top. To set us free.
I watched the entire commercial with tears streaming down my face.
Something to love, I’d thought.
Something that needed me.
I didn’t think about how I was the thing that was doing the needing.
I fell asleep in that oversized, overstuffed chair in the blue flickering light.
And when I woke, the feeling hadn’t left.
I went to the local center and picked out the smallest one.
The holding room looked like the gray of the city had seeped in and colored everything. The floors were concrete. The cages were black metal. The wisps inside looked like dirty breath.
And the smell.
It was strange and would’ve been pungent had it been strong enough. It smelled like something old. Like on new spring days when you open your windows and can smell that old attic smell. Of days gone by. Of something used up but not quite discarded. It smelled like insulation and dust. Like damp wood, maybe.
That’s what this place smelled like. Also, like antiseptic and metal.
A woman named Jeannie followed me with a clipboard and her hair scraped back into a messy blob with a plastic tortoiseshell clasp. She looked tired. There were bags under her eyes and her jaw also seemed to be sagging, and she didn’t smile easily. Not even when I tried at a joke.
We walked beside each of the cages. It seemed impolite to peer in and I felt awful for everyone that I passed by. You could almost feel it. The way the energy shifted. The wisps inside seemed to float toward their bars, seemed to puff up slightly as if making themselves appear larger. I hated passing them by, but this wasn’t an easy decision.
“I just figure I’ll know when I see the one,” I said to Jeannie who pressed her lips together in something that was supposed to be a smile but wasn’t. I worried that it was judgment.
I kept moving.
“I just want to take them all,” I said. The nothing she responded with made me realize I was probably reciting the script. The thing we all say when we come to a place like this, ready to change our lives.
For me, it was the first time. For Jeannie, she’d walked this same stretch a thousand times, maybe more. How many people had come in with swollen eyes because they’d been up past midnight thinking about their lives and then that commercial had come on? Then they’d sat in the dark wondering for a long time if this could be the answer.
“Is it hard to work here?” I asked, looking away from the cages for a moment.
Another line in the script.
“You get used to it,” she said.
“I would take them all if I worked here,” I said.
“I bet you wouldn’t,” she said. “One is usually enough for most people.”
But what if I’m not most people, Jeannie? I wanted to ask. You haven’t even seen me with one of them. How do you even know?
I figured Jeannie never cried at commercials.
I wanted her to be the type of person to take me back into her little stuffed office without windows, brew me a cup of tea and hand it to me. Talking to me while the cup warmed my hands and I bobbed the teabag up and down not even drinking it if I didn’t want to. Just letting me warm myself.
“It’s hard,” I wanted her to say. “But you’ve come to the right place. This is the answer you’ve been looking for. This experience, it will heal you.”
But Jeannie wasn’t the type.
Maybe I should’ve made a Telehealth appointment and found a therapist.
But that commercial.
I wanted something fragile I could take care of.
Something tiny and sad that needed me as much as I needed them. A thing that hadn’t been able to move on by itself.
I imagined sitting up together late at night instead of alone the next time that commercial came on.
See? I would say. That’s not you anymore, and that’s not me. We have each other.
A larger gray mist started swirling around our ankles.
Jeannie waved her hand. “This is what I warned you about,” she said and marked something on her clipboard.
In her tiny office without any tea in my hand, she had said, “You’ll find the holding room seems mystical. It’s neither here nor there. Even though they are here with us, they bring some of the ‘there-ness’ with them. It’s nothing to be frightened of.”
“But,” I’d asked and swallowed hard not sure how to ask it. “What exactly is it.”
Her lips pressed together. “Isn’t that what we’d all like to know?”
The gray had made our feet disappear and was moving toward our knees. The attic smell had grown stronger. It was insulation but it also smelled like soil. Like deep in an old cellar inside the earth of things. I guess it’s not a bad smell but not exactly reassuring.
“Can it hurt us?” I asked.
“It’s not a thing that is coming for you, so no,” she said.
“But it’s coming for them?”
“Well, it’s coming for all of us at some point. But yes, they go first.”
I almost wanted to work at a place like that. I imagined seeing into the other side of things. Perhaps then I wouldn’t feel lonely or scared. Perhaps then I wouldn’t feel anything at all.
“Listen,” Jeannie said and cleared her throat. The noise held a vaguely amphibian sound, like something you’d find at a pond’s edge with speckled wet skin. “I know this is a big decision. I know it can be a lot to take in.” This was the most personal she’d been so far. “But I have quite a caseload and a waiting room full of other people. It seems everyone saw that commercial last night.”
Suddenly I felt sheepish and not quite as heroic as I’d first felt, pulling open the door and sitting in Jeannie’s office.
“You are free to go home and think about it. You can also come back and ask after any of the ones that you see here. But I do need to get on to my next client.”
Suddenly I felt like one of those sardines again. Just another fish in a tin. No new original thought. We all wanted to save. Be saved.
I crossed my arms and was opening my mouth to tell her I would just come back, knowing I wouldn’t. Knowing I’d go back home and there would be other sleepless nights and other flickering commercials that made me cry.
But then I saw it.
The very bottom cage at the very end of the room.
It hovered there, faceless of course. But just in the way that it wobbled against the bars it looked young. And hopeful. And scared.
Exactly the way I felt.
I could see the grayness of it regarding me. Holding its breath if it still had any. How small it was. The smallest one here. A tiny cloud. It could have been a mirror reflecting back the inside of me, all tangled up and hovering and waiting and hoping.
“What about that one?” I asked.
“I’m sorry,” I found myself saying over and over when I opened the door to my apartment. I straightened a stack of books that had been knocked over. Gathered up the mail I hadn’t opened yet—never opened until it said URGENT. Or FINAL.
I collected tea cups, some half full, and set them into the sink. The same with plates full of crumbs. Now my sink was full of dirty dishes but at least the living room looked a little neater.
Of course, I hadn’t really seen the state of my apartment the night before. Not in the dark. I longed for night sometimes, the coziness of it. I didn’t have to look out my window thinking, I should be out there. No. At night, being inside was right where you should be. With the lights off, I couldn’t see all the things I wasn’t taking care of. All the things I’d neglected during the day.
I was glad the center didn’t require home visits. I couldn’t have been the only person who worried over that because they’d said it right on the commercial: no home visit needed! You can take your new ghost home the same day in many cases!
It wasn’t bad, my apartment. Well, at least not horrible. I wasn’t like those people on TV where you have to wade through boxes and piles. Where something’s died but you don’t know what and you can’t find where. I’m not like that at all.
It’s just that if there was ever a knock at the door, I froze. I was aware of the bills I hadn’t opened, the tea cups I hadn’t taken into the little kitchen. The books and slips of paper where I’d jotted down notes and ideas for someday and scattered them everywhere. Those piles made sense to me, but to anyone else, they were meaningless. They were clutter.
They’d given me a little cardboard box with air holes, the sides folded on the top into handles. Funny because the little gray mist inside wasn’t the kind of thing to breathe anymore. If it wanted to, it could’ve escaped at any time. Pulled itself into a thin line and slipped out the side. They weren’t trapped. They could leave.
They just didn’t.
It was part of the heartbreak. Passing on was supposed to be peaceful. Was supposed to mean rest. But they hadn’t for some reason. Fear mainly, Jeannie had explained. They were attached to something here and were afraid to move on. We could comfort them and in turn, have them as our companions. All of us moving forward together.
All the way home, I kept peering in, making sure it was still there.
It? She? Him?
I’d asked Jeannie, and she’d checked the paperwork. “We don’t know a lot about this one,” she’d said. Some came in and you could ask them. They could tell you. Those were like the ones that you’d see on TV. The ones that looked very much like they had in life. Only grayer and a little transparent.
“We only know that it was young. I’m sure they will tell you what they were in life. But only if they want. Even though you’re providing a home, you do need to remember that this was once a living being just like you. They might not even give you a name. They can have secrets, too.”
I had nodded solemnly and told her I understood. In that moment, I would have done anything for that little gray mist inside the box.
I felt proud carrying it home. Like I was something special. Like for once, I had something everyone else wanted. Maybe they didn’t want one like I had. Of course, they could’ve gone down there to get their own. But I had actually done it.
Fifteen minutes later after folding blankets and piling dishes in the sink and making neat stacks of books and mail, my apartment really did look cozy. I didn’t even need the dark.
I sat down next to the box on the tiny loveseat.
“Are you ready?” I asked. Maybe even more to myself than to the box.
A tiny thump shook the cardboard slightly. Making it look like a trembling. Or maybe it was scared. Jeannie had said they still felt emotions.
“Imagine yourself as a mist,” she’d said in that tiny concrete office. “You’d still be you. Just less of you. Partly here and partly there. A good rule of thumb is to simply treat them as you would want to be treated. As if it were happening to you. Because someday, it might. Someday, you might feel like you can’t move on.”
Then she’d signed the papers and handed them over to me with the pen.
“Ready?” she’d said.
“Ready?” I said now.
And I opened the box.
They warn you what can happen, but you don’t listen. Not really. Not when you were up late watching that commercial. Not when you want so badly for it to work. For this to be the thing that will save you. I hadn’t listened when Jeannie went over the packet of papers with me in her little concrete office.
They warn you, but you’ve already seen part two of the commercial. Part one were those sad and lonely gray mists hovering in cages, trembling. Some of them have been rescued from parlor shows where they’re forced to do séances. Others have been rescued from spooky, old abandoned buildings deep in the city.
You might see the glimpse of an eye, the shadow of toes or an arm. But mostly it was something not human. Not recognizable. You see something shrunken down from what it could be. What it was.
Part two was what it could be.
There were a lot of hands clasping mugs and slow walks in a park bathed in the yellow-orange glow of autumnal leaves. Lots of smiles and laughs. Sitting together. Walking together. Talking and laughing. By then the mists had turned mostly into something recognizable. Shadows of what they were. Gray elegant figures.
Jeannie even went over the risks. I remembered she did.
I just didn’t think it would apply to me. To us.
How could it when I had so much I wanted to give?
So much I wanted to get back?
I had kept part two of the commercial glowing inside of me like my own private fireplace, poking at the wood. Stirring it up.
But the reality was that the gray mist I’d carried home wasn’t turning into anything that looked like a companion.
There were no eyes or fingers. There was no smiling.
It trembled a lot and late at night, a small breathy sound oozed out of it. Like a long falling note. A sorrow.
At first, I was patient. “It’s all right,” I cooed. It didn’t want to sit with me in the chair. Or the loveseat. Wherever I was, it wasn’t. It liked corners and cupboards and cobwebs. It tried to stay in my closet. I wondered if I should just let it. I waited for the moment it would start sitting by me. The day we could go to the park. The day it would say its first words to me.
But it didn’t happen.
A week passed.
Then a month.
Then another.
I called Jeannie.
There was a heavy sigh on the phone.
I was following the script again. I told myself I only knew my lines, but that wasn’t true. When Jeannie answered, she said the very things I already knew and was afraid she’d say.
“We went over this, Miss Toccata. It can take a long time for them to feel safe. Death always brings a kind of trauma. These are people who haven’t been able to move on. These are people who, for whatever reason, weren’t ready for death and so need a little bit more time for life. And,” there was a long pause filled with another long sigh, “you picked a very, very small one. They probably don’t even understand what’s happened.”
“How long?” I asked.
“How long until what?” she said.
“How long until it feels safe with me?”
“I can’t answer that. I didn’t know them in life. And everyone experiences their own death a little differently. The small ones can have extra challenges. It’s right there in the packet I sent home with you,” Jeannie said and hung up.
Of course, it was all there in the packet I hadn’t bothered to read. All the type I’d skimmed over while dreaming of how happy I’d be.
Remember there is no guarantee that you and your companion will turn out like the commercials you’ve seen on TV.
There it was in black and white: Individual results will vary.
But I still swept past it, hoping for what I’d seen in the commercial.
For a few weeks, I made my bed and sorted through the mail. I started paying my bills, and I made it a point to carry tea cups back into the kitchen right away. My apartment almost looked normal. I bought a lemon-scented candle from a little shop on the corner that stayed open in the evenings and whose windows always glowed. Inside, it smelled like eucalyptus and rosemary, and you could buy baskets and dried rose petals. I’d always walked past it but never stopped in. I’d always thought I didn’t have the kind of apartment like what you saw in the window.
But maybe now I could.
Behind the counter, as the woman with fringed earrings and red-purple lipstick was wrapping the candle up in bright pink tissue paper and placing it into a kraft paper bag, I wanted to tell her, “I have a home. And there’s someone waiting there for me.” I said it to myself deep inside where I could feel the flicker of part two of that commercial glowing warm in the dark. “I have a home,” I wanted to say. Which was silly. I’d always had one.
The candle brightened the whole place with a cheerful yellow glow and the lemon scent made it feel cleaner than it was, although I had started sweeping the kitchen floor nightly.
Maybe this would help.
“Do you have a favorite treat?” I asked the little mist. Maybe I could buy a candle that smelled like apple pie. I even lingered in the frozen food aisle at the market two blocks away looking at pies. I knew the little mist couldn’t eat anything. But maybe its mother had baked pies. Jeannie had said that they like to smell food and they like cozy places to sleep even though no one is sure if they truly sleep. But giving them the things they loved in life can make them feel like they belong.
I brought the frozen pie home and baked it, but it didn’t change anything.
Maybe it was too young for pies.
What had Jeannie said? Imagine yourself as a mist.
I couldn’t.
I was afraid of death. Afraid every time I caught an illness. I didn’t want to be like the little blob that sat in the corner trembling day after day. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to be swept up by someone lonely, someone like me, and taken into their messy home and their messy life and kept like a pet.
What would I want? What did I want now?
I started calling it Petal. It sounded like something a cozy grandmother would say. Something I’d never heard as a child. A sweet word for something you loved, which is what I felt for the tiny cloud that wouldn’t yet let an eye peer out or even a strand of hair. It remained shapeless and whimpering. But I loved it. Because it would love me.
I grabbed a blanket from the loveseat and draped it over the ottoman and across the couch, making a little fort like I’d loved as a child when the outside world was too much. When even my own home and my own distant mother were too much.
I held one side open like it was a tent flap. I waved it back and forth.
“Come on,” I said in a soft high voice. “See?” I put my hand inside the dark of it. “You can get right in there if you want.”
It didn’t even turn. Just stayed in its blob.
Until I wasn’t looking.
Then it darted inside.
That night I turned on the TV just like most nights. Kept the sound low and humming and all the lights off.
I felt a kind of peace having it there inside its cocoon while I was inside mine. The whole place was picked up and smelled lemony. I knew if I turned on the lights it would look just as cozy. I didn’t need the dark.
There. That should do it.
Any day now and it would realize how safe it was and come out.
Then the park. Then baking together and dancing. Playing, maybe, since it was so young. I wondered what its laugh would sound like.
I waited. Night after night I waited.
But it stayed inside the little blanket fort, long drawn-out sighs like a faraway train whistle over a dark night field moved the flap back and forth.
After a while, I quit telling it that everything would be all right. That I was here and wouldn’t leave. That it was safe. Because what I said didn’t seem to matter.
“I’ve made it perfect out here,” I said one night. “Won’t you come out?”
I quit turning on the TV at night and instead, I googled. Found myself deep in subreddit forums reading horror stories about what people had experienced with the little ones and the bigger ones. But especially the little ones.
Dude, the little ones will cry the loudest but do not get one. They’re cute and all, but it will be a nightmare. I didn’t sleep for months. It was awful.
Same thing happened to me.
Mine turned into a legit poltergeist. Slammed doors, broke dishes. I was glad when they finally moved on.
Someone needs to raise awareness about this. It’s not what it looks like on TV.
I put my face in my hands and sobbed. It would have been better to have been alone rather than with something that didn’t want you, that you couldn’t help at all. I had never been good with the living, and now it turned out I wasn’t good with the dead either. There seemed no place for me.
I felt something on my shoulder. Something cold and misty. It startled me and I jumped up and brushed my shoulder. Petal darted off.
It’d come to me when I was crying. It had tried to comfort me.
“Come back,” I said through a watery voice. “Come back.”
But it was gone back inside the fort.
I turned off the computer and went and sat in the dark next to it. I sensed that if Petal had any breath to be held, it would have been holding it.
I didn’t want to say the things that I knew to be true. All the reasons I was scared, just like Petal was.
“I didn’t have a mother,” I said. “Well, not one that mattered.” I hadn’t ever said this to anyone else. There had been no one in my life to say it to. I could tell that in the quiet that it was listening. So I went on. “She was there, but I had to do most things all by myself, even though I was little. As little as you are now. There was no bedtime. She never read me stories. Sometimes she was gone at night. Sometimes for more than one day. And I don’t even know where she is now. I don’t even have any friends, not really. There was one once. A co-worker. But he moved away and gave me this chair I’m sitting in. Other than that, you’re it. I know you don’t think you have anyone. But you have me. I’m sorry I can’t be more for you.”
I didn’t like saying it. Most of the time, I’d told myself not to think about it. There had been a tunnel of dark days.
“I wanted someone to tell me everything would be fine. Maybe you want that, too. And the thing is, after all this time, I don’t know if it will be. I live my life not knowing if most days will be fine or not. And I understand it if you don’t want to be here. If I’m not—”
I choked back a sob that was rising in my throat.
“—If I’m not what you wanted. But I will take care of you until it’s time for you to leave. And I don’t think you have to be scared. We’re all scared. But that doesn’t mean you have to stay. I think what comes next is nice—and that’s why the others have already gone. And I think you might really like it there. But you can stay here and you can stay inside that blanket for as long as you want, and I won’t leave you. I’ll be here as long as you need.”
What would you want if you were a mist?
I didn’t know. I hadn’t ever been one.
But I’d been small. I’d been frightened.
And what I said to Petal is what I wished someone had said to me.
It wasn’t like part two of the commercial. It was more like having a cat that haunts the edges of your life, coming out at night or when you’re gone. Occasionally I might find something knocked over. Something spilled. Sometimes there was a patter of feet but no form that I could see.
We never did look like part two of the commercial.
But it was something, and I got used to it.
Until one day, I spotted Petal darting from the kitchen into the blanket fort that remained set up.
It couldn’t be, I thought.
It couldn’t.
It wasn’t what I saw that bothered me. It was what I didn’t see.
I quickly went to my computer and turned it on. I searched through my history and found the original Reddit thread I’d seen weeks before. There was something there. Something I hadn’t quite wanted to see.
I reread the comments:
Dude, the little ones will cry the loudest but do not get one. They’re cute and all, but it will be a nightmare. I didn’t sleep for months. It was awful.
Same thing happened to me.
Mine turned into a legit poltergeist. Slammed doors, broke dishes. I was glad when they finally moved on.
Someone needs to raise awareness about this. It’s not what it looks like on TV.
I scrolled back until I found the words: I was glad when they finally moved on.
Moved on? When did they move on? How? I’d only had Petal three months.
How had I not seen it before? How had I not thought about it? Petal was little. Surely we had more time.
I went to the little fort.
“Petal?” I said softly. “Could you come to the opening, just for a moment? Just let me see you?”
There was a shy bit of rustling then a quiet.
“Please,” I said.
A pause and then a little flash of gray that disappeared as quickly as it appeared. But it was enough to see.
Petal was fading.
This time I went down to the parking lot and waited outside the building for Jeannie. She wasn’t going to hang up on me. She wasn’t going to get away.
The pavement in the parking lot was as gray and as wet as the sky above. I blinked away the misty droplets that collected in my eyelashes.
I was standing right outside the door when Jeannie came out with a thick leather bag stuffed with file folders and papers hefted over one arm, shoved a key into the lock, and shook the door to make sure it was locked, rattling the glass.
She didn’t look surprised to see me. She didn’t go out of her way to talk to me, but I stepped right in front of her so that she’d have to.
“Look, I don’t have any friends. I don’t have anyone,” I said.
She pursed her lips into a line that was maybe supposed to look like a frown. “You do have someone,” she said. “You’re just disappointed. But its job isn’t to make you feel better, Miss Toccata.”
“That’s not what—” I started to say, but she cut me off.
“These are the ones who have been discarded. They don’t like to tell people that in the commercials. They’ve been adopted for Halloween and then brought back the next week. Or brought back when someone moves or when they get married and their fiancé is jealous. They’re the ones that are too scared to move on. They aren’t here to make you feel better. They’re here because they don’t know how to move on. And they deserve a chance at happiness for however long they decide to stay. You can bring that little one back if you want to. No one’s going to arrest you.” She waved at the gray of the city, at the headlights piercing through the wet gloom as cars sloshed through puddles on the nearby street. “No one will even notice.” She shifted her thick leather bag onto her other arm.
Then she pushed past me to her car, and I didn’t follow.
“It’s not that,” I said to the misty gray air instead of to Jeannie. “It’s not that at all.” I stood there getting wet as she backed out and pulled away. “I don’t want to bring Petal back.”
Again I went back to the packet of papers Jeannie had first given me. Of course, it was all right there. I still hadn’t wanted to see it. How they couldn’t be sure how long your time with them would last. There’s no guarantee, it read. You have as much time as you have. Some adoptions are long and some are short. Some people think that the dead will last forever, but nothing does. At least nothing does on Earth. Eventually, they go on to whatever thing is next.
I remembered the words once I read them. Jeannie could’ve been reciting them. I remembered the sounds, the shapes. But I hadn’t been able to call them back to mind. Hadn’t even made sense of the words that Jeannie had said to me in her cramped concrete office.
There were no guarantees, it said.
I’d only had Petal for three months. It wasn’t fair. It didn’t seem long enough.
I was going to be alone all over again.
I stayed close to home. I barely slept. I tried to do all the things I thought Petal would like. I talked to it in the blanket fort and still it left. There were so many things we didn’t do. So much I didn’t know.
I felt like I was failing all over again.
I let the bills pile up again. My electricity was turned off. But I stayed outside the blanket fort and told Petal it would all be okay even though I didn’t know how.
At the very end, just when Petal wasn’t much more than a blur, I heard a tiny laugh like faraway wind chimes on a front porch. Little and light. Happy and sweet. And I knew that Petal had gone.
I was glad for that little fairy laugh, I was.
But I was left alone again with a stupid lemon-smelling candle in the dark.
Jeannie says I do best with new clients. She takes care of the return customers, the ones that already have an idea of what’s in store for them when they come to adopt. But I usher the new ones into the little office on the other side of the holding room.
It’s even smaller and darker than Jeannie’s if that’s possible. It used to be a storage closet. But I burn my lemon candle in it to keep it smelling clean and cheerful and a fake succulent in a pretty ceramic dish on the tiny table I have set up. I went back inside that shop and bought a small globe of a lamp that looks like a tiny moon on my desk. It has cut glass decorating it and so it shimmers with broken patterns like a cut-up rainbow. I added a small rug, too, from the same store. It’s like a welcome mat just inside my door. Any larger and it would catch on the metal fold-out chairs. But it looks more inviting that way.
It feels like a tiny blanket fort.
Jeannie just shrugged when I brought all that in. “Whatever works,” she’d said. But she admitted that something I was doing was working. She’d had fewer complaints and fewer returns than ever before. We’d set up a pre-screening that included more than just the paperwork.
I’d gone down there when Petal left and told her that I thought people needed more information about what they were getting into. I was prepared for Jeannie to press her lips into a line and maybe shove a brochure at me, but she didn’t. She asked if I wanted to talk to a new family that was coming in. It almost sounded like a challenge, but I took it. Then she asked if I wanted to talk to another and another.
It turns out, I’m pretty good with the living after all.
I light the candle for only a few minutes before the next clients so that the smell of lemon would only be a hint. So it would smell like the office was clean and cheerful.
Today a new family is coming, a father and son it says in the file. He’s newly divorced and wants a way to connect with his son. Wants something at home when the boy is with his mother.
I haven’t taken one in since Petal. I don’t want that heartbreak again. Besides, I want to give all of myself to the ones that are here. The ones that remain discarded. It’s a way to keep them all. I’ve spent many of my evenings with them. Sometimes I tell them about me and Petal. Sometimes I play music. Sometimes I just sit with them and tell them, “You don’t have to stay here. There’s another place, and I hear it’s nice.” I think of Petal’s final laugh so faint and far away. “I know someone there. Maybe you can go and tell them hello.”
Sometimes they leave before anyone has a chance to adopt them. I smile when that happens because I like to think that I’ve given them comfort.
It’s fear that keeps them here. Fear of change and of the unknown. And what’s more fearful than that final frontier we all must face?
I’ll explain the same thing to the man and his son who are coming in just a little bit.
I’ll tell them that they need to be prepared that we aren’t here to heal ourselves. It’s okay to hope for that. Sometimes providing comfort to something else is what heals us. Sometimes it doesn’t. But the commercial wants you to believe that it will help you. That you are the thing that needs to be fixed.
The discarded ones need an extra step before they do decide to move on. “Your home isn’t their final home, not really,” I’ll say. “But you can enjoy them while they’re here. And you can comfort them.” I’ll tell the man and his son that they may get some small amount of comfort, too, in helping the one they take home. But they shouldn’t look only to themselves like I did.
I’ll tell them they can change their minds if they want.
They will look at each other, eyebrows cocked in a question. Then they’ll nod. They’ll still take one. Of course, they will, because they’d already decided before they got here. I’ll see the fragile hope on their faces. They probably won’t hear a word I’ve said. But I’ll hand them a business card with my name on it. “Call me day or night if you run into a snag. I’d love to help you make this work.”
Many of them do call. Sometimes I go. Sometimes if it’s a little one, we build a blanket fort or make a small nest of pillows or set up a cardboard box in the corner. And I check in on them, reminding them to be patient. Asking them, “What would you want if it were you?”
Because that’s the thing that will heal us, I think. “So many of us are broken,” I will say. “I was broken, too. But this is a way we can all help each other find a home if only for a little while. Both the dead and the living.”
