She saw them the first time she stepped through the door: the ex-girlfriends. They slid down the walls of his home, leaving trails of—what? ectoplasm, was that it?—behind them. They smiled at her with translucent gelatinous smiles. They were not jealous. They welcomed her as a sister. She was not jealous either—that was impossible, frankly, after all, they were dead and she was alive—but it was hard not to lift up her shoes with each step and shake them out, as if there were gummy traces of ex-girlfriend stuck onto the soles.
She let him take off her coat, hang it up, uncork the bottle of white wine she’d brought with her. It was plain she’d made the wrong choice, but he was going to be a good sport about it, even if the ex-girlfriends were not. He likes a nice Merlot, gurgled one of the ex-girlfriends, crawling down the refrigerator. You should remember that.
Really, said another, burbling at her feet, a white wine? Terrible choice.
One thing that was hard to ignore about the ex-girlfriends: they’d been chopped up. Their faces were split down the middle; their heads were barely attached to their necks; their arms would pop off their shoulders. She knew, then, though she would naturally have denied it. Did deny it, later, to the police. I had no idea (she would, did, say). No idea. She could hardly have said to them: I knew when I saw the ghosts.
Or maybe she could have said it. It wasn’t as if they really needed her to be a reliable witness: they’d found all the bodies. So she saw ghosts, so she was crazy—it didn’t make much of a difference when it came to the legalities. But it was bad enough to be a serial killer’s ex-girlfriend, you didn’t need to be a public lunatic, too.
And then, it was bad—it looked bad—if she knew and kept seeing him anyway. She was aware. That first night, in bed, their dead fish eyes watching from the walls, their clammy hands trying to guide her. She was aware. The glug-glug of their voices telling her what he liked, didn’t like. She was aware. She didn’t leave. It wasn’t like they’d be any less dead.
And anyway, they didn’t mind.
He lived in a little house—one floor, two bedrooms—in a part of the county that was isolated without quite feeling rural. Well water, a generator for electricity. He knew how to fix things. (“I’m not a prepper,” he said defensively. “Things just break down out here.”) Poor cell phone reception, questionable internet service. (She supposed that was a professional help.) He had no pets, but he did have six orchids, which he monitored with careful precision.
In the kitchen, there was a door that led to the basement, which he never opened, or even really acknowledged as existing at all. On it hung a whiteboard, always featuring a crisp to-do list. He was meticulously clean; even the whiteboard was pristine, holding no traces of whatever it was he had written on there before. She, too, did not acknowledge the door. It wasn’t her business.
Because they had been dismembered so completely, it was hard to tell how many of ex-girlfriends there had been. Sometimes, as when she’d first arrived, the ex-girlfriends pulled themselves together, but other times it was just a haze of limbs and viscera. Trying to count how many pairs of eyeballs were rolling around on the floor, she felt it could have been just two ex girlfriends or it could have been seventeen. She supposed none of his relationships lasted all that long. There could have been a lot of them. She felt there were enough that he wasn’t pining after some lost Lenore. There was no all-important ex-girlfriend. He just hadn’t found the right person. Well, neither had she.
There was no sounding him out; he was reticent about the past, though in a gentlemanly fashion. He never alluded to having an ex that was crazy, for instance. She liked that about him. She’d always maintained one shouldn’t date a man who badmouthed his exes. How he talks about them is how he talks about you. It was obvious he had been a good boyfriend from how fond the ex-girlfriends were of him. And then, in more traditional ways, he was a desirable catch. He had a good job, he stayed fit. He had long and sensitive fingers, deep brown eyes, a soft gentle voice. She never saw him get angry—not once—not even in court.
His mother was dead, he’d said. She had wondered idly if his mother was dead of natural causes or if he’d killed her (wasn’t that usually the way?) but she didn’t pry. Actually, as she’d discover months later, his mother was alive, well, and doted on by her son—a terrible thing to learn, as she’d never put him down for a liar.
“What’s hard about relationships,” he said in their early evenings together, “is you just need—space. You know?” He looked around his well-appointed room, its dust-free surfaces, its carefully preserved old furniture. Because the internet connection was so unreliable, his life was largely lived on an analog scale: vinyl for music, discs for movies. She teased him once about his lack of a typewriter, but he said he preferred the way a word processor simply made your mistakes disappear—no trash—just gone. “I guess that’s what happens when you’ve been single for a long time” (he went on) “you just get used to your life being a certain way. You don’t like the thought of somebody coming along, looking over your shoulder, fidgeting with things.”
“Oh I know,” she said. “I always thought the ideal would be side-by-side houses, like Tim Burton—”
“—and Helena Bonham Carter,” he said, smiling.
Around them, a great croaking chorus of approval. By now, she’d become expert at acting as if they were not there, at continuing to drink the wine when an ear bobbed up, eat the lasagna even when it contained a ghostly finger. When, watching a movie, she felt his hand slide up under the back of her sweater, she could tune out the chorus of advice on the next move.
Later, once their bodies were pieced back together, it turned out there were six ex-girlfriends, one for each orchid, but none of them were quite complete. Had he eaten those pieces? Had some rat borne them away? Buried them in the orchid-pots? (They must have checked.) She never found out. The only thing she was quite sure of, those nights she spent with him, was that he did not know the ex-girlfriends were there. He wouldn’t have been able to stand it for a moment, watching them leave their slime trails, that he could not clean because they were not, on everything he loved. It made her feel protective and loving, the way you feel when you tell somebody there’s spinach in their teeth. He would never know. He would never need to know.
When he went away and asked her to look after the orchids, she knew it meant trouble. It was not just that the orchids were fussy and delicate flowers. She could tell it was a test of some sort. This, she did not appreciate. They were both adults—it was childish. Did “no games,” written on a dating profile, mean nothing? She kept these thoughts to herself, however. He gave her the keys and explained what they opened.
Then he tapped one and said, in a surprisingly high, tight voice: “This opens the basement door. But don’t go down there.”
“OK,” she said.
“Don’t” (he stressed) “go down there. It’s private.”
“OK,” she said.
And she didn’t.
Gurgle gurgle: you should open the door, said the ex-girlfriends. He wants you to open the door.
“I won’t,” she said. Now that he’d gone, she felt they could have a frank conversation.
He’s going to be so disappointed, they burbled and croaked. You don’t understand him.
“I don’t want to open it,” she said.
Well, we warned you.
He came back a day early, surprised her, took the keys, looked at them for a long time. He said, in a strange voice—“You didn’t go in the basement.”
“I thought you didn’t want me to,” she said.
“I didn’t,” he said. “It’s just, well—” He stopped speaking for a moment. A month later, he went on another trip. Once again, his ring of keys; once again, a stern injunction, not to open the basement door.
Now you see (said the ex-girlfriends) you see he really wants you to open the door.
“He can open it for me himself,” she said, “if he cares that much.”
Look (said the ex-girlfriends) it’s like this: he wants you to care about what’s behind the door. If there’s something really important to him that he has locked up, he wants you to care about what it is. You’re really hurting his feelings very badly by not opening the door.
“Isn’t the only thing down there—you?”
Well, they said. Yes. And if you open it of course he’ll kill you and you’ll become one of us. You betrayed his trust by opening the door, after all. But it’s what he wants you to do. You know, for a psychic, you’re really very dense, emotionally speaking.
“I’m not a psychic,” she said, sulkily. “I can just see you. You’re the first ghosts I’ve ever seen.”
Are you afraid? It’s very nice, they said. He comes back and he’s so sweet to you. He feeds you something drugged and you just fall asleep…. You don’t even feel a thing. You’re dead by the time you wake up.
“It’s childish,” she said, “to act like this. Adults just say: this is important to me and I want to share it with you. I thought he was too grown up for these sorts of antics.”
Suit yourself. You’ll see.
After his third trip and unexpected early arrival, he began to show signs of exasperation. After the fourth, he was done.
“I think,” he said, “we should see other people.”
She thought about saying, I already see other people, but she knew he wouldn’t get it. Assembled behind him, the ex-girlfriends smiled their smug goopy smiles; she had proved herself unworthy of joining their number. There would be no commemorative orchid, no careful scrubbing of surfaces. She really would never have been, not simply hidden away. She accepted the break-up with minimal fuss and drove away. Once she got to the part of the road where the cell phone reception improved, she pulled over and looked up the phone number she would need to call in order to leave the police an anonymous tip.