There is an arrangement, I think. The dead stay beyond the pale while the living keep to the light. There are places where the division is harder to see, places like hospices and cemeteries where emotion casts itself into the darkness and calls out to the dead, beckoning them. These are the places where the arrangement can sometimes be broken.
However, these are not the only places.
When I was a boy I lived in an apartment. The building had stood since my grandmother was a child. In fact, she was among the first to live there. She was there for the great fire, when 28 souls perished on a dry saturday evening. The fire started on the fifth floor. My grandmother lived on the third and only knew of the fire that evening because of the smoke pouring down the stairs and through the vents into her small space. The people at the very top were not so fortunate. After the first half hour the stairs were useless. Firefighters scrambled to reach the people on the seventeenth floor but the ladders weren’t high enough. If it hadn’t been a saturday–if more people had been home in bed–many more would have died. As it stood eight children perished and twenty adults, some as old as seventy, met their God that evening. They went to see him red and raw with charred flesh and eyes that knew fear. Some did not want to meet God in that way. Some refused to go.
Grandmother was still young then, a lady in her twenties unmarried but looking. She worked for the public schools as a clerk, but all of the kids loved her as if she were their favorite teacher. Many of the kids she worked with lived in the building, including three who died in that fire. Sarah Moore was the smartest girl in school and could have been an inventor had she not fallen to the flames. Mark Black was a tough boy who’d fallen in with gangs. Death came for him and he answered unafraid. Jacob Salley went to the school as well, and he loved grandmother. He hated Mark Black, for Mark bullied Jacob every day. Grandmother kept it in check on the way to and from school, but there were days when Mark would put his smart on and find a way to hurt little Jake. After the fire Mark couldn’t hurt little Jake anymore.
I like to think that is why he stayed. The way grandmother tells it they found Jacob curled up in his bathtub with the water halfway to the top. She supposed he thought being in the water would keep him safe from the flames. He was smart, maybe not like Sarah but smart enough. He just didn’t understand about smoke. Jacob died cold and wet surrounded by his toy boats and favorite towel. He came back that way too.
Mrs. Murphy on the 9th floor was the first to see him. She was in the bathroom brushing her teeth and heard something in the tub. A ‘ploop’ sound like dropping soap into the water, but there wasn’t anyone in the tub, and there wasn’t supposed to be no water in there neither. She pulled back the curtain fast and careless, more curious than worried. Jacob looked up at her, holding his blue sailboat, fully clothed with that ratty yellow towel around his neck. Ms. Murphy screamed until her throat couldn’t make any more sounds.