(7)
 We found Rector in the garden beside the building, which is surrounded by a ring of lights embedded in their bunker-concrete surfaces. He was tending his moonflowers with a spade and a bucket of clippings. He was finely dressed, as always, but wore a smock over his suit, and rubber overshoes. Moonflowers look exactly like sunflowers, but they are white instead of yellow. Instead of brown, their edging is gray or black. "Oh hi, kids," he said. "What brings you down here? I'm just weeding around my flowers to give them breathing room." I noticed that they were all turned toward him, instead of the moon. At odd moments, their fish-belly pale faces glittered with reflected stained glass colors.
Rector clapped his hands together to get rid of dust or dirt, and stepped from the garden onto the concrete sidewalk. "You must have a reason for coming," he said. He mopped his brow with a handkerchief, and puffed. "Whoo, not as young as I used to be. I'm going to shower and change clothes. Walk with me while I go home." He stripped off his rubbers and his smock, and left them in a laundry hamper.
So, back up the elevator we went, while Tamsin laid forth her case. I adored her quietly. She is one of those women whose beauty you do not notice right away. But once you get it, you can't let go. I'm in love with her, of course. She has short, dark hair, big eyes, pale skin, and a perfectly symmetrical face with a mouth that is just right. If she were a sculpture, the artist would have spent an inordinate time on the minute curves and planes that make up a quietly perfect face. She's my height, which puts her on the tallish side for a woman, without being noticeably so. She is pleasing to the eyes, with everything just right. The only thing overstated about her are her legs, which verge on long and thin. She explained how upset she was, actually feeling guilty even though she had not betrayed me, and how she wanted us to move to a world exactly like this one, except there was no native Tamsin, no Unfaithful Tamsin.
Rector smiled as we emerged into his living room upstairs. Judith blew him a kiss from the kitchen, and he waved back his love. He told us: "Honey, Tamsin, I have to find another solution for you. I think I have one that will keep you occupied and make you very happy."
"Oh?" Tamsin looked doubtful, but interested.
"And you," he said to me, "I have a few new jobs for you. Grab lunch with Judith while I shower and change, and I'll take you somewhere."
So we joined Judith upstairs in their sunny, airy kitchen. She had made a salad with raspberry vinaigrette, finely shredded chicken breast, and an assortment of slivered nuts, crunchy croutons, and a confetti of finely minced celery, carrots, red cabbage, and peppers. With that, she drank a light spritzer of local wine and imported bubbly water. Ghosts don't eat, but we participate by blending with the living person's aura. Every bite she took, every exquisite flavor that exploded on her palate, Tamsin and I moaned with pleasure, until Judith burst out lauging. She joked around in her lilting Jamaican English while Tamsin and I shrugged ruefully and held hands under the table.
Rector joined us for lunch. He wore a crisp, starchy shirt and perfectly ironed trousers, with immaculate silk socks and shiny oxblood wingtip shoes. He must run one hell of a dry-cleaning tab, I thought. We didn't talk business. He and Judith made light talk about their son and daughter, who were away at colleges up the coast. He asked about Lolo and Henri, and their two children, Louise Jr and Henri Jr.
"They're happy," I told him. Then, remembering Lolo's distinctly Montrealesque English, which made all the customers at the Park Boulevard Café amused and tip her heavily—before a drunken nut named Wallace Fleisch swaggered in with a bottle of beer in one hand and a turkey carving knife in the other, and stabbed her to death—I amended it to "They ar'-'uppee." Rector and the women laughed. Everyone is very fond of Lolo. She has the hardest times with certain combinations of sounds piled dangerously in ways that an English speaker can say, maybe, though many regional dialects drop 'aitches and entire crops of opening and closing consonants, so that it sounds like the speaker is rapidly jumping on a trampoline. Imagine, then, the difficulties of a Francophone speaking anglais. Quebeckers have a much easier time pronouncing the theta (th) sound than European French, and Quebec French has long ago blended elements of English into its pronunciation, so that the two seem to be evolving into different species. Anyway, Lolo and her customers 'ad a lot of fun wit' 'er way of saying things, in her clothespin lilt and demi-accent. On a recent visit, she opened the door with a great, china-white smile amid dark hair and semi-Iroquois skin color and dark, sparkling eyes. "'Ey, Sunny and Tamsin, come in right away." I asked if she was calling me Sonny, and she said "No, you are Ray, non? I call you Sunny because you are the sunshine of my life, hein?" I just love how she has to work extra hard to shape every syllable to make it come out English. In hein, by the way, the aitch is silent. It's French for huh?
We had a good laugh at the table with Rector and Judith. It was clear to me that, in the back of his mind, Rector was considering things. After lunch, we relaxed a bit and he said to Tamsin: "You know, first of all, I need you here. I need every hand on deck. Beyond that, if I could move you—and I'm not saying I can or can't—we have no way of predicting what the characteristics of the other place might be. We can pick a place where there is no Tamsin, maybe, if we got lucky. But what if it's a place where Tamsin died and left unhappy orphan children. You're ghosts and couldn't take care of them. You'd be more miserable seeing them suffer, rather than just staying here and every few years seeing Tamsin and Marcus at a bookstore or something."
Tamsin noded slowly. "That makes sense."
"Come on," he said. He dropped his napkin and rose. "I'm going to take you to your new home."
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