Healing/Redemption15 min read
Living with a Younger Ghost: Three Tasks, One Goodbye
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I was taking off my bra in the bathroom, a little buzzed from wine and a little ashamed of the wine, when I saw him in the mirror.
"Hi," said a face that was too young to be steady in any reflection. He looked like a high-school kid—thin, all sharp angles and bone, hair like he had not seen a barber in a while.
"Who are you?" I managed. My voice came out thin.
He didn't blink. "Luke."
Luke. He was right there, clear as the glass, staring without expression.
"You're—" I stopped. "You're a ghost?"
He raised his chin. "Yes."
"No—no, I'm not drunk enough for this," I said. I tried to step back. My feet felt nailed to the floor.
"You shouldn't have read that pamphlet," he said, like he was reading a shopping list. "The charm on your bathroom door. It says so right there, 'soul invitation.'"
I looked at the little square of yellow paper that had been stuck on the bathroom door since the "expert" I found online promised me a way back to Alonso.
"Jackson sold you that?" Luke asked without looking away from me.
I snapped. "Jackson? Who—"
"The man who sells 'return charms' in the chat. He has a smile like a coin," Luke said. "He writes small print in big promises."
I remembered the message thread: a fancy photo of a red ribbon, a price, a promise of closure. I remembered sending money late on a sad night.
"I didn't mean—" I started.
"Of course you didn't." Luke sounded almost bored. Then he leaned closer to the mirror, and his face changed, like someone remembering something warm. "You looked exactly like a girl I used to love."
Tears sprang out of me before I could stop them.
"Shh," Luke whispered. "Don't scare yourself. Breathe."
He tapped the mirror, and a thin crack crawled out from his fingertip like frost.
"Stop it," I said, and then, because my body refused a higher octave, "Stop it, you little—"
"Careful," he said. "If you yell, I might not be able to help you."
"Help me?" I laughed, too sharp. "You can't even leave the bathroom mirror."
"I'm not supposed to be here long. But since the charm called me, I'm yours until we finish three things."
"I didn't sign anything!" I said.
"You summoned me with intent," he replied. "Intent is enough."
I crossed my arms. "What three things?"
"You do them for me," Luke said. He held out his palm like a cashier. "Find my phone. Visit my grandmother. Tell my girl goodbye, the right way."
"Your phone is in a men's bathhouse?" I said.
"Yes," Luke answered. "You have to go. It's busy. It's loud."
"You expect me to go into a men's bathhouse?" I said. "With my robe? With my—"
"You'll wear a robe," he said. "You'll eat seeds in the waiting area and pretend you are calm."
He grinned then, and the grin felt like sunlight. "And you'll be brave."
I stared at him. "Why would I help you?"
"Because you want Alonso back," Luke said softly. "Because the charm was supposed to work for you. Because two lonely people can bargain."
The word "Alonso" hit like a cold stone.
"I just wanted him to call me," I said. "Not—" My throat closed.
"If you do my three things, I will leave," Luke said. "No more reflections when you're alone. No more small knocking at midnight."
"And if I don't?"
He shrugged. "Then I stay, and we both get used to the other."
I agreed, mostly because I was tired of feeling like grief was settling into my bones. Mostly because Luke's offer sounded humane: a way to trade tasks for peace.
"Fine," I said.
"Good." He clapped once like a child finishing homework. "First: the bathhouse."
*
"This is insane," I told myself as I stood in a group of men with towels and plastic wristbands, feeling every eye like a bright camera.
"Miss? Are you waiting?" an employee asked, polite and suspicious.
"Yes," I lied. "Yes, it's for—just hold my place."
I sat on the lobby couch and cracked sunflower seeds like I used to in other awkward waits of my life. I watched the steam room doors. I watched men walk in and out with towels like small white banners.
And then I saw him: Finley Garza, my old boss.
"Finley?" I said too loud, letting the sentence hang like the wrong scent.
He looked up, surprised. "Kylie?"
"Finley," I said, grinning too wide. "What a coincidence. You here for the steam too?"
He blinked at me. "You always go loud when nervous."
I felt my ears go hot. "Can you help me? My friend's phone—"
He cut me off. "You need help finding a phone? I can—"
He disappeared and came back ten minutes later holding a blue flip phone like an offering. "This was left in locker 33. It was ringing at times but then going dark."
I took it with shaking fingers. It wouldn't boot. I thanked him and promised dinner some day, a lie to cover how grateful I was.
Back home that night, I found Luke sprawled on my couch playing a video game with ghost fingers.
"You went," he said without looking.
"I did," I said. "It was ridiculous. Finley helped."
He nodded. "Good. Now the second: visit Marie."
I braced for something I didn't yet understand.
"You need to go to a nursing community and ask for Marie Moreno," Luke said. "Tell the nurse you're a friend. Take something that belonged to her."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because she keeps my past tidy," Luke said. "Because she guards the thing I promised someone."
The address Luke gave me smelled like a story: lakeside path, a glass lobby with polite chairs.
The young nurse at the desk blinked when I said Marie Moreno. "We...we have an elderly resident by that name. Why are you coming now?"
"I—" I stammered. "I was asked to visit."
She led me down quiet halls. A woman in a sweater sat by the window with a shawl and a photo album.
"You've come," Marie said before I had a chance to talk. Her voice was small and bright. "You're the one who promised the boy he'd be remembered."
"I—" I felt suddenly like a tourist in an archive of other people's grief. "He asked me to bring back his bracelet."
Marie smiled like someone who knows a thousand endings. "He loved that bracelet. He used to wind it around his wrist and pretend it was armor."
I sat with her and listened to stories that were not mine: the way Luke had been a child who liked to run down hills, the way he took his grandmother to sit in the sun, the way he sent money from a broken account to cover medicine.
"I can help," I said finally. "I'll take what you have."
Marie held out a small box. Inside was an old camera and a carved bracelet that looked like it had once been gold.
"Keep them," she said. "He trusted you enough to send you. He trusted no one else."
I put them in my bag. The weight felt honest.
When I came home, Luke was waiting with a bowl of popcorn and a look like a child before an exam.
"You did it," he said.
"I did," I answered. "Only one left."
"You will tell her goodbye," Luke said. "But not in any blunt way. You will be the messenger who gives her the most human farewell."
"Her name?" I asked.
He closed his eyes. "She was called 'the girl with crooked smiles.' She loved spice. She laughed loud. She liked to say the world made things happen to her, not for her."
"Where is she?" I asked.
"In the city," Luke said. "Working at a gallery."
I swallowed. "I can do that."
*
The gallery happened by accident for me.
Finley had offered to drive me home that weekend after a long lunch of apologies and small talk; instead, when traffic stalled, he followed me to a block of posters and lights that read: "Alonso Conti — Retrospective."
I couldn't breathe.
"It says 'Alonso Conti—1994–2020,'" Finley read out. "I didn't—Kylie, are you okay?"
"Is Alonso—" I started and stopped.
"He...he was in a crash," Finley said slowly. "I heard. I didn't know you were—"
I ran. I ran because the wall in front of me was the size of a sky and inside of it were all our photos, frames of a life he had been building.
I pushed past people. I pushed past the reception. In the gallery, people moved like candlelight: warm, distant, careful.
"Excuse me!" I blurted. "I need—"
An attendant stopped me cold. "Invitation?"
"He's mine," I heard myself say. "He made art. Please. I—"
They asked questions. I spoke in a staccato of memory: college camera films, our fake dates, the way he once said he'd bring me rabbit heads for our wedding.
They exchanged looks. Then, someone murmured, "We have a letter. It was found with his camera."
They handed me a thin envelope like a tide gift. My hand shook. Inside was a note, in a handwriting I could read without seeing the shapes. "Kylie," it began. "If I can't say it, know I tried to live like the sun for you. I'm sorry."
Everything folded. I sat on the floor of a gallery and laughed and sobbed at once.
Luke found me there, in a body that was not his yet looked like a memory.
"You didn't know?" he asked softly.
"Know what?" I said. "I know nothing."
He knelt and took my hand. "Alonso didn't leave because of you. He left because he stepped in front of a truck the day you two were supposed to take a picture. He saved you."
The world tilted.
"He came back to say goodbye to you," Luke said. "He came as what he was then."
I pressed my forehead to my knees. "So he was here."
"He came," Luke said. "In the way he could."
I thought that if I had one more chance, I would say a thousand small things: thank you, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
"I didn't even know he died," I said, whispering.
"You didn't have to," Luke said. "But you will. For both of us."
*
We went home after that, both of us exhausted and oddly soothed.
Days folded into small tasks. Luke watched my old movies on mute. I taught him how to wash film and spool it through the developing tank. He made faces when the chemicals smelled.
We grew used to each other the way people grow used to a new roommate: small routines and shared bowls.
"Do you miss her?" I asked once, because honest questions are cheap and necessary.
He shrugged. "I miss telling her a stupid story so she'd laugh until she cried."
"Do you think she'll remember you?" I asked.
"She will," he said. "But knowing her, she'll keep some of the memory to herself. She will wrap it up like a treasure and take it out later on nights when she can't sleep."
"Do you want to see her now?" I asked.
He looked at me. "I need to say goodbye in a way that doesn't shake open her life. You will help. You will nod at the right times. You will not over-mean anything."
I agreed.
We walked to the gallery again with a plan that I did not fully have words for. Luke would stand behind me like a breath. I would hand over the camera and the bracelet. I would ask the curator to pass it along.
"Don't cry too loud," Luke whispered.
"I can't promise anything," I said.
The curator took the camera and looked at Luke and me like the two of us belonged to a strange story.
"This was left with Alonso's things," I said. I handed the bracelet to the woman in charge.
She read the tag and looked up. "This is meant for someone?"
"It is," I said. "For a woman named...for anyone who knew him."
She took the box aside and later read aloud in the quiet room: "From Alonso's friend. To the girl he loved. Tell her: I was brave for her."
I watched the small circle of people in the gallery lean in. Some smiled. Some dropped their heads.
A woman I didn't know lifted her phone. "Is this being recorded?" she asked.
"No," I said. "Please don't."
But stories move faster than the people who hold them. The curator walked up to a stranger in the crowd and asked for contact. The stranger recorded on their phone. The gallery hummed with whispers, and in those whispers I felt like something I had been carrying getting spelled out.
When the girl with a crooked smile appeared—someone who had not expected a package—she came up the stairs like someone walking into her own pulse. She had spice-stained fingertips. She smelled like hot sauce and sunlight.
"You don't know me," I said. "But you loved someone named Luke."
She blinked. "Luke?"
I handed her the camera and the bracelet. She opened them like a letter.
"He loved you," I said simply. "He wanted to say goodbye properly."
Her hands shook. Her eyes found me and then Luke, who stood small and bright like a page in a book that had been smoothed a thousand times.
She put the camera to her cheek. "I thought I was the only one who kept photographs," she said. "I kept every one of his letters."
I took a step back. The gallery felt like a cathedral of small shocks.
She turned to Luke. "You came back visiting?" she whispered.
Luke's shoulders rose. "You left too early," he said. "I wanted to tell you I loved you properly."
She laughed, brittle. "You idiot."
"You said you wanted the world to see you as yourself," Luke said. "I wanted to give you that."
She reached out and touched his hand—the air where his hand would be—and I watched a girl's face rewrite itself from loss to a kind of grateful ruin.
"Thank you," she said.
Luke's lips trembled. "Thank you."
Then something passed through him like a decisive wind. His outline blurred at the edges, like a photo being washed by rain.
"I promised you I'd be brave," he said to her. "I kept it."
"No," she said. "You kept me."
He smiled with all the smallness of a boy who had been loved. He turned to me.
"Thank you," he whispered. "For doing three things."
"I didn't know I'd have to help him die," I said. My voice broke.
"You helped him finish," she said. Her voice had grown steady. "People who die with their stories told get to go easier."
Luke looked at me. "Then I'm going."
He looked smaller than before, like someone walking back into a photograph.
"Goodbye, Kylie," he said.
I couldn't stop the sob that came out of me. "Goodbye, Luke."
He faded like the last frame of film slipping from my hands, as if someone had gently drawn a curtain.
For a week after, the mirror in my bathroom stayed just a mirror. The nights were quieter. The heavy hollow that followed Alonso's absence remained, but it felt less like an unfillable hole and more like a space with edges I could see.
*
The scraping of a keyboard woke me one morning. A message popped up on my phone from a number I had blocked months ago.
"Live demo tomorrow," it read. "Special price on 'return charms.' Be there."
It was Jackson Sommer, the man who had sold me the paper.
I remembered the sticker on my bathroom door, the small print that had called Luke.
I remembered he had taken my money and then vanished when I tried to question him.
I remembered, too, the way the charm had not given me Alonso but a debt: three tasks that cost me nights of calm.
I decided to do something dangerous: I would bring him to a public place and show people what a lie looked like.
"Will you help?" I texted Luke like you might text someone you needed for a protest.
His reply was instantaneous. "I'll stand at the edge and tell the truth."
We put together a folder of evidence. I logged our chat with the vendor—images of the product, the receipt, Jackson's customer service messages that dissolved into silence once I pressed for refunds. I kept screenshots of the "guarantee" he posted with glittered language and small print. I printed them and stacked them between two covers like a fake thesis.
On the day of the demonstration, Jackson had rented a small community hall. The advertisement outside promised "healing powers" and "reunions." He stood by a table draped in red cloth, his smile practiced, his hair slick.
"Welcome," he said into the mic. "Tonight I will show you how to call back what you lost."
There were thirty people in the room, mostly women who had come with the same ache I had known; a few skeptical men; one older pastor in the back; a reporter with a notebook.
I walked in with the folder and a face made of a decision.
"Jackson!" I said, and the room turned.
He blinked. "Can I help you?"
"Yes," I said. "You can explain why this"—I slammed the folder on his table—"was sold with claims it could summon the dead."
He smiled carnival-wide. "This is a modern ritual. We—"
"You're a scammer," I said, and someone gasped.
"That's a heavy word," he said, voice smooth. "We offer closure. We provide objects. We don't promise miracles."
"Your packaging says 'guaranteed reunion,' " I said. "You take money, you take people's desperate nights, and in return you give them junk. This ribbon here—" I pulled the tiny folded paper I'd found stuck on my own door and the charred residue of the glue—"this has no power beyond printing ink."
He made a small prissy noise. "Words are interpretation."
I motioned to the crowd. "Who here paid money to you?"
Hands went up, one by one. A woman at the front had her eyes hollow and wet. "Three hundred dollars," she whispered.
"Two fifty," another man said.
Noticing the swell, Jackson tried to steer the talk. "We offer a symbol," he said. "It's an object for the heart."
"I want a refund," someone shouted.
"You will get closure, not money," Jackson said. "Closure isn't financial."
The reporter near the back clicked open a recorder. "Are you licensed?" she asked.
Jackson's smile dropped. "Licensed by what? We are a private practice."
"It sold '招魂' with a trademark in the print," I said. "But there is no license. You don't have the nursing home disclaimers. You don't have refunds."
People started talking over each other.
"How do you sleep at night?" the older pastor asked, righteous heat in his voice.
"By knowing people heal," Jackson said.
"Did any of you get what you paid for?" I asked the crowd. "Did anyone's loved one come back because of his paper?"
Silence then murmurs.
Jackson tried a different tactic: his voice lowered. "These things can be misinterpreted," he said. "Some of you felt better. We are not evil."
Someone laughed, painful and sharp.
"You sold hope as a product!" the woman with three hundred dollars cried. "You sold grief for cash!"
Jackson's cheeks twitched. He looked for an exit. "I have rights," he said. "And you can't just—"
"You sold me a charm that called a child-ghost," I said. "My door had that paper. It called a kid who couldn't leave. You took advantage of a broken person. Do you think that's ethical?"
The room went quiet like a held breath.
He straightened. "You have no proof."
I reached into my bag and pulled out the printouts: screenshots of his posts, the product photo, receipts, and my bank transfer. I spread them across his red table like a defendant's chart.
"Proof?" he said, and his voice cracked for the first time. It was the human crack—frayed and raw.
The crowd shifted. The reporter's pen scribbled like rain.
"Where did you learn to sell lies?" someone yelled.
He blinked and then, slowly, started to deny. "I never said it would summon real spirits. It's symbolic." He smiled a practiced smile, but it trembled.
"That's not what you wrote," a woman said, and her voice was small but steady. "You wrote: 'Guaranteed reunion or refund.'"
He stammered. "The guarantee is metaphorical—"
"Show me your refunds," I said. "Show me your records."
He fumbled for a tablet on the table. His supplier app popped up—calendar bookings, a ledger. The totals were visible. He never had refunds listed.
The pastor stood and moved through the room like someone collecting broken glass. "This is a matter of conscience," he said. "We can involve the authorities."
Faces in the crowd turned. Some had cameras ready. Someone called a local consumer protection hotline. A woman at the back, shaking, said she'd been in counseling for months.
Jackson's face changed through stages: first flush of outrage, then tight smile, then a slow blanching of color.
"This is slander," he snapped. "You can't—"
"We can," said Finley, stepping forward from the doorway. He had seen me at the bathhouse and had come. "I work with legal counsel. These people are clients of mine."
Jackson's mouth opened, then closed. He tried to step around the table but a chorus of voices pressed in.
"Explain the small print," the reporter barked. "Explain the trademark line that claims regional endorsement."
Jackson's eyes darted. He looked like someone spotting rats. "The small print is ornamental. It is not a legal claim—"
"That's false advertising," the pastor said. "At the least."
The phone cameras around the room were like eyes. Fingers hit record. Someone stood and waved a protest sign: "Refund Our Grief."
Jackson's bravado collapsed. He started to babble. "I never meant to hurt anyone," he said, voice thin. "People came to me..."
"Then give it back," the pastor said. "Give their money back."
"I don't have it all on hand," Jackson said. "I spent—" He stopped there, and the room made the sound of a small, collective understanding.
People got louder. "You spent it on what?" asked a woman.
He looked at his hands and finally, after too long a silence, admitted, "On rent. On business costs. I thought if I kept going, more would come."
"And now?" Finley asked quietly.
"Now I'm stuck," he said. "Now I—"
Then his voice broke into a plea no one wanted to hear. "Please, don't ruin me."
"You used people who were hurting," the woman with three hundred dollars said. "You took their hurt like coins."
Jackson tried to grab his tablet, make a show of an emotional collapse. He put his head down. Someone whispered that he should post a refund policy immediately. Another called police to report a possible fraud.
The reporter read his recorded sales promises aloud. People in the room typed furiously. The campaign to shame a small fraudster was a machine that runs on hurt and proof.
Jackson's face shredded. He went from proud to pleading: he offered angry denials, then partial confessions, then sobbing in a way the room had not expected. People around him reacted differently: some pointed and called him a thief; others looked at him with a fragile compassion that still carried anger.
"I will refund," he said suddenly, standing. "I will refund what I can. Please, give me time."
"How long?" the pastor asked.
"Thirty days," he said.
The crowd was not satisfied. "In public," Finley said. "You issue a notice and a refund schedule. We record it."
Jackson nodded like a man facing a sentence. The cameras kept rolling. Someone took his photo. Someone else posted a short clip with the hashtag #refundourgrief, and within hours it had a ripple.
People in the hall filed statements. The reporter made a note to follow the story. A consumer protection officer promised to call.
Across the room, I felt something loosen. Not complete justice—this was not that—but a kind of public unmasking that made it harder for the scam to hide.
Jackson's expression went through one last stage: utter hollowing. He looked out at the room and seemed to see, in flashes, the many faces: the woman with three hundred dollars, the pastor, the reporter, and me, standing with Luke's photo saved in my phone.
"Please," he whispered again, and the room answered him with a chorus of recorded testimonies rather than forgiveness.
He was not thrown into jail that afternoon. He was not forced to kneel in the center of the town square. But the public exposure was sharp: the supply of gullible customers dwindled; the hotline calls multiplied; a pattern of refunds and apologies began in a slow, grinding honesty.
And when he left, he did so under the weight of thirty phones filming him, under the eyes of a town who would, for weeks, remind him of what he had sold.
It was enough.
*
Weeks later, on a night that smelled like toast, I sat by my window with a box of Luke's photos and a camera that did not belong to me alone anymore.
"Will you ever come back?" I asked the dark.
"I belong to the people who remember me," Luke's voice answered from where it had been that day in the gallery—soft and quick. "You belong to your own careful living."
"I miss Alonso," I said.
"Then love him in the small ways you can," Luke said. "Make pictures. Keep the bracelet safe. Forgive yourself."
"I think I'm trying to," I said.
A laugh like a teapot hissed through me. "You will make a mess of it," Luke said, amused. "You'll make beautiful mistakes."
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe."
Outside, the city moved. I kept a tiny memorial on the shelf: a camera, a bracelet, a postcard with a sunflower printed badly on it. The mirror stayed clear.
I slept, and in my sleep I dreamt that Alonso was at my side, older in kindness, and Luke was a small photograph tucked into a book.
When I woke, I smiled in a way that felt like stepping out of a shadow.
The End
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