Chapter 2
I wondered what would happen if I charged her. Would she let me walk through her or maybe vanish? I moved toward her but, lacking courage to keep going, I settled for polite. “Can you please move?”
She did, but toward me, which caused me to step back, and we settled into an awkward dance, me backing, her forwarding, until we’d circled the washers and reached the stairs again. I backed all the way upstairs, with her standing at the bottom, watching me.
Ray had come home by then, and when I’d raced into the apartment, I’d made the mistake of telling him about the encounter.
“Really?” he’d said. “Friend of your grandfather’s?”
He had been standing at the fridge, lettuce and tomato in hand, and moved to the sink as if I’d appreciated the joke. When I didn’t respond, he turned. “What?”
“It really happened,” I declared, knowing as I spoke that it was futile. Still, I kept trying, not so much to convince him of a ghost in the basement as to get him to believe me, believein me.
“Whatever,” he said as he washed lettuce.
“Why can’t you open your mind? Things do happen, things that can’t be explained away.”
“Um-hm.”
“Just because it doesn’t happen to you doesn’t mean it can’t happen to others. Some of us are receptive toward the supernatural and I believe I’m one.”
“Right.”
I’d stormed off at that point, returning half an hour later to find dinner on the table. Nothing more was said and I’d never again told him about ghosts I periodically saw. All went well, except for times like now, when he teased me about them.
“All cleaned up,” he said when he plopped beside me on the couch. I was watching HGTV and said nothing.
“You have to admit it’s weird that two appliances break on the same day,” he offered.
“Yes, it is weird, but that doesn’t mean it’s ghostly. You just want to needle me and I don’t like that.”
“Okay, I’m sorry. No more needling.” He poked my side and kept on until he got me laughing.
* * * *
Later, out of the blue, he said he wanted to get away. “I’m tired of the city, tired of the noise and grit and chaos. How about we escape for a week? I can take vacation now that the merger has passed.”
“Fine with me,” I told him. “Where do we go? Up the coast, Guerneville, Mendocino? Or south, Big Sur, Santa Barbara?”
“East,” he said.
“East? What’s east? All you get east are nothing towns, the valley, then gold country.”
“Exactly. I don’t want to go to some tourist spot. I just want a quiet town where we can enjoy a good hotel, room service, walks, shopping, fine dining.”
I realized then he had something in mind. “What’s the name of the town?”
“Arroyo. It’s on the other side of the Berkeley Hills, a nice little place, upscale, green.”
“How did you pick Arroyo?”
“Well, Bruno at work—you know Bruno, big bear of a guy with that tiny wife?—well, his cousin runs the Heritage Park Hotel in Arroyo and will give us a deal on a room.”
“Ah, I see.” This didn’t surprise me. Ray and I both made good money, but he was inclined to pinch pennies. “Okay, I’m for it.”
* * * *
It came together so easily it felt almost preordained. Ray got in touch with the cousin who set us up with a fine room on an upper floor. We toured the hotel online and were impressed. It was three stories, quietly understated with beige stucco and a red tile roof. Rooms appeared luxurious, and a central courtyard with fountain seemed quite appealing. It also boasted the Hunt Club Restaurant and Foxy’s Bar.
“Everything we need,” said Ray.
“Now the big question. Do we unplug?”
For somebody so efficient, he hadn’t considered this, and it surprised him. “Yes,” he said after a couple seconds. “Absolutely. No phones, iPads, or laptop.”
“No Kindle.”
He loved his Kindle as much as I loved the books it replaced. He glared at me, knowing I was enjoying this. “No Kindle,” he finally said, “but to be fair, no books for you. Nothing from the outside. Just us.”
“We’ve never done that.”
“Then it’s time. Just us. Sounds good to me.”
* * * *
On a sunny April Saturday, we left our devices behind and crossed the bay by the train that ran, not over the water, but under it in a three-mile tube that sat on the bay floor. From this, we emerged above ground in Oakland, then Berkeley, then through another tunnel to find what seemed another world. Suddenly trees were plentiful, hillsides were uninhabited, and vast acres of green stretched between little towns.