July
Claire waited until the 4th of July to tell me.
We were sitting on our balcony, watching the fireworks over Lake Michigan. Every year, folks take the boats out a few hundred yards from shore and shoot fireworks from the decks. The radio stations try to synchronize the music with the explosions, but they never get it quite right.
Our apartment was too far inland to see the lake itself. I had been lucky to find anything at all in West Bay for seven hundred a month, especially on such short notice.
Sitting there with my dead wife, I drummed my fingers to the R&B tune playing in the apartment next door. The smell of burgers and kielbasa rose up from the apartment beneath us.
"I'll be right back," Claire signed. She wasn't a ghost, at least not like ghosts I had watched on TV growing up. I could feel her lips as she kissed my cheek, like a feather brushing my skin.
To me, she smelled of smoke, but her sister Jennifer said it was all in my mind.
Claire returned with a stethoscope in her hands, the one she had used in her nursing classes. Her name was stamped onto a metal tag on the left earpiece.
I took it before the weight tore through the delicate membrane of her skin. Looping it around my neck to free my hands, I signed, "What's this for?"
She lifted the earpieces to my head and slipped them into place. With a wink, she pantomimed breathing on the end to warm the chestpiece, just like a doctor. Of course, she had no breath, and I heard nothing at all.
Her eyes danced as she signed the words, "Is this thing on?"
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