Tuesday Mooney Talks To Ghosts

by Kate Racculia

Besides, murder was easy. It was human. It was entirely ordinary. She had always suspected as much.

if only he’d listened, that he didn’t have to solidify. All he had to do was recognize and celebrate the pain and the mystery of life, the mystery of being not what one seemed, and not one thing only, but being, being nonetheless. And what he was meant to be was an artist, and what he was meant to do was to sing, and to move in the spaces surrounding the definite, between the sacred and the profane, the body and the spirit, the silent and the spoken, the living and the dead. That was his gift. That was what he could give to others. The practice of this art was the transmutation of love.

There was still time to be who he’d always been, again. As a kid, dreaming, it had seemed impossible to be satisfied with only one life. As an adult, indebted, afraid that what he loved and whom he loved would one day cost him more than he could afford, it had seemed impossible not to protect himself with money. But he didn’t have to be all one thing or all another. He didn’t have to live only one life at a time. And a living wasn’t something you made but something you did. Again and again, over and over, always, always becoming.

Her parents came. Her brother and sister-in-law came. They brought Olive. It was her niece’s first time in a hospital to visit someone she knew, and her eyes went very large when she saw Tuesday in that bed. “I’m not using you as a teachable moment,” said Ollie, and Tuesday said, with a snort, “Like hell you aren’t.” But it felt good to be useful. It was important to see what could happen to people, to see that people could be put back together. And part of putting people back together was reminding them that they weren’t alone. No matter how much they thought they wanted to be.

“Don’t cheat your friendships. Don’t ask them to mean less to you than they do, or think they only have value if they’re a stop on the way to a real relationship.” Dorry rolled her eyes. “All relationships are real,” said Tuesday. “Friendship can be as deep as the ocean. It’s all a kind of love, and love isn’t any one kind of thing.”

I thought a lot about what you said. That I need attention, that I need the world to love me. You’re right.” “We all need to be seen.” “Some,” he said, “more than others. Anyway, I thought about it and I realized, as I was belting away in Vincent Pryce’s karaoke demolition machine”—Tuesday snickered—“who I was searching for, dating all those creative boys, those ballerinas and singers, even Rabbit’s a musician. It was me. I was looking for who I used to be. For the ghost of myself. What I used to love, what I spent my life doing. So.” He squeezed her hand. “Why don’t I become the person I’m looking for?”

everything that had already happened was always, still, the beginning of what came next. The

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