I guess I should explain. I'm not exactly your typical sixteen-year-old girl.
Oh, I seem normal enough, I guess. I don't do drugs, or drink, or smoke – well, okay, except for that one time when Sleepy caught me. I don't have anything pierced, except my ears, and only once on each earlobe. I don't have any tattoos. I've never dyed my hair. Except for my boots and leather jacket, I don't wear an excessive amount of black. I don't even wear dark fingernail polish. All in all, I am a pretty normal, every day, American teenage girl.
Except, of course, for the fact that I can talk to the dead.
I probably shouldn't put it that way. I should probably say that the dead talk to me. I mean, I don't go around initiating these conversations. In fact, I try to avoid the whole thing as much as possible.
It's just that sometimes they won't let me.
The ghosts, I mean.
I don't think I'm crazy. At least, not any crazier than your average sixteen year old. I guess I might seem crazy to some people. Certainly the majority of kids in my old neighborhood thought I was. Nuts, I mean. I've had the school counselors sicced on me more than once. Sometimes I even think it might be simpler just to let them lock me up.
But even on the ninth floor of Bellevue – which is where they lock up the crazy people in New York – I probably wouldn't be safe from the ghosts. They'd find me.
They always do.
I remember my first. I remember it as clearly as any of my other memories of that time, which is to say, not very well, since I was about two years old. I guess I remember it about as well as I remember taking a mouse away from our cat and cradling it in my arms until my horrified mother took it away.
Hey, I was two, okay? I didn't know then that mice were something to be afraid of. Ghosts, either, for that matter. That's why, fourteen years later, neither of them frighten me. Startle me, maybe, sometimes. Annoy me, a lot. But frighten me?
Never.
The ghost, like the mouse, was little, grey and helpless. To this day, I don't know who she was. I spoke to her, some baby gibberish that she didn't understand. Ghosts can't understand two-year-olds any better than anybody else. She just looked at me sadly from the top of the stairs of our apartment building. I guess I felt sorry for her, the way I had for the mouse, and wanted to help her. Only I didn't know how. So I did what any uncertain two-year-old would do. I ran for my mother.
That was when I learned my first lesson concerning ghosts: only I can see them.
Well, obviously, other people can see them. How else would we have haunted houses and ghost stories and Unsolved Mysteries and all of that? But there's a difference. Most people who see ghosts only see one. I see all ghosts.
All of them. Anybody. Anybody who has died and for whatever reason is hanging around on earth instead of going wherever it is he or she is supposed to go, I can see.
And let me tell you, that is a lot of ghosts.
I found out the same day that I saw my first ghost that most people – even my own mother – can't see them at all. Neither can anyone else I have ever met. At least, no one who'll admit it.
Which brings us to the second thing I learned about ghosts that day fourteen years ago: it's really better, in the long run, not to mention that you've seen one. Or, as in my case, any.
I'm not saying my mother figured out that it was a ghost I was pointing to and gibbering about that afternoon when I was two. I doubt she knew it. She probably thought I was trying to tell her something about the mouse, which she had confiscated from me earlier that morning. But she looked gamely up the stairs and nodded and said, "Uh-huh. Listen, Suze. What do you want for lunch today? Grilled cheese? Or tuna fish?"
I hadn't exactly expected a reaction similar to the one the mouse had gotten – my mother, who'd been cradling a neighbor's newborn at the time, had let out a glorious shriek at the sight of the mouse in my arms, and had screamed even harder at my proud announcement, "Look, Mommy. Now I've got a baby, too," which I realize now she couldn't have understood, since she didn't get it about the ghost.
But I had expected at least an acknowledgment of the thing floating at the top of the stairs. I was given explanations for virtually everything else I encountered on a daily basis, from fire hydrants to electrical outlets. Why not the thing at the top of the stairs?
But as I sat munching my grilled cheese a little later, I realized that the reason my mother had offered no explanation for the grey thing was that she hadn't been able to see it. To her, it wasn't there.
At two years old, this didn't seem unreasonable to me. It just seemed, at the time, like another thing that separated children from adults: Children had to eat all their vegetables. Adults did not. Children could ride the merry-go-round in the park. Adults could not. Children could see the grey things. Adults could not.
And even though I was only two years old, I understood that the little grey thing at the top of the stairs was not something to be discussed. Not with anybody. Not ever.
And I never did. I never told anyone about my first ghost, nor did I ever discuss with anyone the hundreds of other ghosts I encountered over the course of the next few years. What was there to discuss, really? I saw them. They spoke to me. For the most part, I didn't understand what they were saying, what they wanted, and they usually went away. End of story.
It probably would have gone on like that indefinitely if my father hadn't suddenly up and died.
Really. Just like that. One minute he was there, cooking and making jokes in the kitchen like he'd always done, and the next day he was gone.
And, people kept assuring me all through the week following his death – which I spent on the stoop in front of our building, waiting for my dad to come home – he was never coming back.
I, of course, didn't believe their assurances. Why should I? My dad, not coming back? Were they nuts? Sure, he might have been dead. I got that part. But he was definitely coming back. Who was going to help me with my math homework? Who was going to wake up early with me on Saturday mornings, and make Belgian waffles and watch cartoons? Who was going to teach me to drive, like he'd promised, when I turned sixteen? My dad might have been dead, but I was definitely going to see him again. I saw lots of dead people on a daily basis. Why shouldn't I see my dad?
It turned out I was right. Oh, my dad was dead. No doubt about that. He'd died of a massive coronary. My mom had his body cremated, and she put his ashes in an antique German beer tankard. You know, that kind with the lid. My dad had always really liked beer. She put the tankard on a shelf, high up, where the cat couldn't knock it over, and sometimes, when she didn't think I was around, I caught her talking to it.
This made me feel really sad. I mean, I guess I couldn't blame her, really. If I didn't know any better, I'd probably have talked to that tankard, too.
But that, you see, was what all those people on my block had been wrong about. My dad was dead, yeah. But I did see him again.
In fact, I probably see him more now than I did when he was alive. When he was alive, he had to go to work most days. Now that he's dead, he doesn't have all that much to do. So I see him a lot. Almost too much, in fact. His favorite thing to do is suddenly materialize when I least expect it. It's kind of annoying.
My dad was the one who finally explained it to me. So I guess, in a way, it's a good thing he did die, since I might never have known, otherwise.
Actually, that isn't true. There was a tarot card reader who said something about it once. It was at a school carnival. I only went because Gina didn't want to go alone. I pretty much thought it was a crock, but I went along because that's what best friends do for one another. The woman – Madame Zara, Psychic Medium – read Gina's cards, telling her exactly what she wanted to hear: Oh, you're going to be very successful, you'll be a brain surgeon, you'll marry at thirty, and have three kids, blah, blah, blah. When she was done, I got up to go, but Gina insisted Madame Zara do a reading for me, too.
You can guess what happened. Madame Zara read the cards once, looked confused, and shuffled them up and read them again. Then she looked at me.
"You," she said, "talk to the dead."
This excited Gina. She went, "Oh my God! Oh my God! Really? Suze, did you hear that? You can talk to the dead! You're a psychic medium, too!"
"Not a medium," Madame Zara said. "A mediator."