CUPID PAINTED BLIND

by

Phaedra Weldon

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * *

PUBLISHED BY:

Caldwell Press on Smashwords

Cupid Painted Blind

Copyright © 2010 by Phaedra Weldon

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CUPID PAINTED BLIND

by

Phaedra Weldon

Present…

I leaned forward, reached out and took Hadden's hand in mine. I wanted to slam a clever into her wrist, severing her hand from her arm as she spoke to him.

"I love you Hadden, but I'm not sharing you with a dead woman."

The three of us sat across from one another at the kitchen table.

I watched Hadden. He watched Judy. Judy watched Hadden.

No one watched me. No one could see me. I was long dead twenty-years. But that time hadn't dulled my lonely heart, or the intense attraction I felt for a man thirty years my junior. Nor did it suppress the immediate agony I wished upon this woman who wanted me more than dead and gone.

The early, Saturday-morning sun blared through the window above the stainless-steel sink full of dishes. Oranges rotted in a wooden bowl beside the Olympic pattern of coffee-rings that decorated the wood colored Formica. Dust motes whirled about the air like tiny flickers of metal, reflecting the light.

My dog, a rust colored Bassett hound named Billy, sat on the beige rug in front of the dishwasher. He was my only companion in the after-life. Trapped in the house when an aneurysm took my life in my sleep. Billy had been locked in the basement for being bad that night. Essentially, he'd starved to death.

"Billy," my voice always sounded strange to me, if only because I knew no one else could hear it, though it seemed to echo against the kitchen walls. "Should I do something?"

Billy raised his head from his lounging position, one paw crossed over the other. "Like what?" He had a Texas accent in death. "Say boo? Won't do you any good. Judy's out for blood. Particularly yours."

He had a point. Hadden knew I was there. Judy didn't believe him. She thought he was crazy, obsessing over a dead woman he'd become fascinated with.

"Hadden." Judy's voice matched her face. Soft, feminine, sensual.

I hated her and her platinum blonde hair.

But I did not hate the precious child she carried inside of her. Hadden's child. His dream come true.

I was childless in life. One regret I would forever live with, in whatever life this was.

Hadden sighed and looked at the ceiling. Dark circles hung beneath his hazel eyes, visible behind his glasses. His brown hair hung limply at his shoulders. Dark stubble shadowed his square jaw. "I'm not going to agree to an exorcism, Judy. I'm happy having Babs here. She was in this house before either you or I. She's been a best friend to me, and I'm not going to turn my back on her." He shrugged. "She could watch the baby for us."

I experienced a warm feeling in my stomach, and a frightening sense of satisfaction. Was I more important to Hadden than the woman he married? It gave me a frail thread of power I wasn't comfortable with.

"I see." Judy clicked her red lacquered nails, thumb against index finger. "I can't do it, Hadden. I won't believe in ghosts." She sighed. "You leave me no choice but to leave. I can't live with you and a figment of your imagination. I won't subject our daughter to this nonsense."

His eyebrows arched high on his forehead, nearly disappearing into his bangs. "But you said you didn't believe in her."

"I don't. But you do, and as long as you do, you'll never be able to put everything into our marriage. Or into raising our child."

With that, she gave a dramatic exit, silky maternity business-suit clinging in all the right places. No sounds of nylon hose swishing from thigh-grinding on that body. Then she closed the door to the garage with utter control. No slamming, no whining, no childish displays of flying pottery. Complete calm.

Hadden gave a long, haggard sigh. "What am I going to do, Babs?"

He couldn't hear me answer. Never had. But he knew I was there.

"I love her Babs. I love our unborn child. But I love you too." He crossed his arms on the table and laid his forehead on his forearms. "I don't want to loose either of you. Can't you just let her see you? Let me see you?"

I slumped my shoulders. Yes, there was a way, but to do it, to call upon the ectoplasm and become visible, burned ghosts out too quickly. The shear will of holding a visible form drained vitality away. I had heard of one ghost, not far from my house, whose revenant had become little more than a rosy smell when she continued becoming visible to her son and his wife.

I couldn't do that. I couldn't sacrifice what life I had left for Hadden. Not like that. I'd never given up anything in my life for another human being.

The desire to touch him rose high again. To be denied such small comforts as another person's touch, that was hell. He was right here, before me, had been for nearly six months, yet the only sensation I could give him was a deep chill if I passed my hand through his.

So I was content to sit there and watch him.

"Babs," Billy's voice broke through my self-imposed pity-party. "Let's do it. Let's be visible."

I frowned at my canine buddy. His advice over the past twenty years had been invaluable. I hadn't always agreed with it, or adhered to it, but I listened. "No."

"Chicken."

"I can't believe you want to risk our very existence."

"Babs, our lives are over. Hadden's and Judy's could start. I thought his happiness was everything to you. I thought you loved him."

"I don't love him that much."

Billy stared at me. I didn't like the look. It made me feel like I was a two year old who had just messed her pants and didn't want to tell her parents, and yet everyone around me knew my crime. The smell, you know. "Then you haven't learned the reason why we're still here."

I hated it when Billy got all messiah-like. I never understood what he meant and it was embarrassing to be upstaged by your dog.

I looked at Hadden again.

Hadden Frost. Award-winning, free-lance photographer. Our life had been serene until she came along. I had been happier in death than I ever had in life.

Eighteen months ago...

Hadden caught my attention the first day he walked into my home after my neurotic in-laws moved out and off to Florida. He stepped through the door, dressed in a blue and red Atlanta Braves jersey, dusty jeans, and a black camera case slung over his left shoulder. His shoulder-length brown hair bounced golden highlights like sunlight-drenched wheat when he walked through the living room. Even his small, round, wire-framed glasses added character to his interesting face.

The realtor, a tall, statuesque blonde, followed him around like a puppy awaiting a treat from her master. But Hadden had been oblivious to her affections. She tried to tell him about the house as they walked about, but he shushed her with a wave of his hand, pulled out his Nikon, and began snapping photographs.

His laugh was infectious, but only because he used it sparingly, haltingly, as if he hadn't had much practice in spontaneous happiness.

He also had an artist's eye for detail. This came through while he took his camera shots.

"Look at those boards by the door." Snap. "I believe they've been recently replaced." Snap. "And that crown molding; on the left it's different than on the right of the wall." Snap. "Is that a burn scar on the floor boarding near the kitchen door?" Snap.

The last observation was what impressed me. The remarks on the remodeling were a personal blow because I had spent a fortune trying to keep the repaired molding and hard wood slats as close to the originals as possible. Yes, that was a burn mark on the baseboard, put there by my father while he tapped his pipe out one night. An ember had floated there, and smoldered a hole as big as my pinky-nail near the floor.

I had had it repaired.

And he had seen it.

In my youth I had been a painter, an artist of small fame, if only in my family's circles. I understood his gift, his appreciation for the microcosm within the macrocosm. I wished I had had a fragment of that talent. Often I painted what I saw, not what lay beyond it.

Only in death had I gleamed the truth behind the details of the ordinary world. It was those small things that told us about a person, a place, or an object. My understanding had come too late.

He bought the house.

Two weeks later, he discovered I was there.

Not because he saw me, mind you. But because I was careless and forgot this uncanny ability of his.

Fascinated, and so very lonely, I began investigating his things while he was gone. Ghosts can affect the physical world in small spurts by thought. Young ghosts have a harder time at this, as I did when I first died. The difficulty comes from believing you have to physically touch things. The ability comes with practice.

I'd had fifty years of that.

And Hadden noticed. His socks. His glasses. He'd converted one of the back bedrooms into a his office, complete with multiple large-monitors and a light box. The computer I couldn't go near—apparently ghosts and technology didn't mix. But the light box he used with his printed shots. I'd examined all his photos, in hopes that looking at them would help me see the world as he did. They were all pictures of children at various ages. Playing, laughing, crying, smiling, frowning. Hadden loved children. He wanted a family more than he wanted riches and fame. I knew this by his work, not from anything he'd said.

Hadden noticed things were out of place. He began taking random photographs of the house, and at first, I wasn't sure what he was doing. Until I saw a blurred image of myself appear on the monitor one night as I stood over Hadden's shoulder and watched him work.

"Got you." Hadden hit print and there I was—frozen in print.

Yeah. He'd gotten me, and I liked the thrill he seemed to experience after photographing me. No one had ever been that happy to see me before.

Next, Hadden did research on the house and brought home photographs and clippings from the local paper about my death. It was a gruesome story and I feared it would turn him away from trying to communicate with me. A woman's rotting corpse found in her bed, along with her dead dog in the basement.

He'd been at the kitchen table when he read everything, newsprint and black and white photos spread out on the tabletop before him. A cup of steaming coffee sat on his right among a pattern of circular stains. I watched his eyes track from left to right as he read. His jaw dropped and he looked up, almost directly into my eyes.

"My god," he glanced down at the paper in his hands. "You were dead seven weeks before someone found you? How sad. Didn't you have anyone to check up on you?" I watched him scan the article. "No children, Babs? No family?"

He called me Babs. Only my family had called me Babs. He'd read that in the articles.

I was uncomfortable with his observation. A thought I'd tried hard to avoid. I'd had no friends, all of them dead long before I reached sixty. I lived alone. No real ties to my family. No children. No husband.

He shuddered. "I don't want to die alone that way."

I became depressed then and faded into the house to consider the reality that no one loved me when I was alive.

And I had loved no one.

Present: Four nights later.

Judy didn't come home that night, or the night after that, and the night after that. I watched Hadden call everyone he knew. No one had seen her. No one had spoken with her.

The fourth night was his birthday. Hadden turned thirty-six.

There was no party. No phone calls. No cards. No flowers.

It was much like my birthdays had been in my later years.

If I could have conjured him a cake, I would have. And an entire room of people. But I wasn't a sorceress. Just a ghost.

Hadden sat in the living room, wrapped in a southwestern style blanket as the wind whipped the trees outside against the house. The radio had warned of strong thunder storms and possible hail. A tornado watch was in effect until after midnight.

It was eight p.m.

He rarely blinked, and I sat on the floor beside him. I tried talking to him, but he couldn't hear me. What could I do for him? I really had no intention of being a burden on anyone. I felt his loneliness, an echo of my own, the kind I'd carried all those years of life and never acknowledged.

And I did love him. In what way, I didn't know. It pained me to see him so miserable.

The phone rang.

Hadden tossed the blanket on top of me. It passed through my form and settled on the hard-wood floor, flowing about me like a dust brown and blue lake.

"Hello?" He'd caught it on the third ring.

"It's not her," Billy commented from his position from the fireplace.

"Shhhh," I told him.

"Oh...hi," from the sound in Hadden's voice, I knew Billy was right. "Okay. I'll check on that tomorrow. No, no, we're fine. Yeah…she's due any day now." He hung the receiver back up and returned to the couch. As he picked up the blanket, his hand passed through my mid-section.

He shuddered, grabbed his right hand with his left, and looked around. "Babs? You're there, aren't you?"

I nodded.

"I'm hurting so bad." He sighed and opened his palms. He stared at them. "I'm so confused. What I do know, is I've been lonely for so long. Then I find you, and things are great. I find Judy, and things get better. And now I'm afraid I'll miss the birth of my daughter."

I nodded again.

"I can't miss that, Babs. I just can't."

I sighed, and felt as if this were leading to something. I believed he had something to say, and he was afraid too. My guess was that he had come to a decision to leave the house, or he was going to ask me to stay away from him.

I waited, but he didn't speak again. He only stared out the window. Tears pooled in the corners of his eyes. The surreal dim blue light of twilight glistened on the tears as they rolled down his cheeks. Lightening illuminated his face briefly, and the grief there was intensified in the shadows the lightening created.

I put my hands to my face and brought my knees up to my chin.

It was all my fault. He would die a lonely man, just as I had died a lonely woman.

I knew I should do something, but I was afraid too. I'd never sacrificed anything of myself for another human being during my entire life.

Twelve months ago...

My attachment to Hadden intensified the day he went out to the garage and dug out Billy's old, navy-blue bowl. He cleaned and filled it with dry dog-food, then set it exactly in Billy's old feeding spot by the door to the garage.

Billy was beyond thrilled, though he could no longer eat his food.

I was touched.

During the months that followed, Hadden kept a verbal running commentary going of his life. From the time he came home to the time he went to bed he talked to me. I would sit for hours in the office with him as he told me about each picture he developed, what it meant to him, what was going through his mind when he took it.

He'd never married, having dealt early on with an addiction to alcohol. Hadden had been sober for nearly nine years, and life was a constant struggle to fit in, without the added help of stimulants. He felt he was a social misfit at times, having lived the first half of his life on a hops-induced high.

He'd thrown himself into his work after his first two years of sobriety, traveling the world photographing anything anybody wanted. He'd been published in some of the top magazines in multiple countries, and won seven awards. Only now had he emerged from that self-imposed exile, ready to face life. People. Society.

Relationships.

Family.

The tiny faces of children caught his eye.

I was proud of him. I was fascinated by him.

I fell in love with him the day he brought home a birthday cake on my birthday. It was chocolate, my favorite, with white butter icing and blue pansies on two corners. In powder blue was the inscription, "Happy Birthday, Babs." He lit a single blue and white candle and placed it in the center. When Hadden put on a party-hat of metallic green that set off his beautiful green eyes, I laughed so hard I fell off the table.

He sang happy birthday to me. He blew out my candle. He cut me a slice.

He made me feel wanted and loved.

I couldn't remember the last time I'd had a cake.

Then, as luck would have it, he got an assignment in Savannah. For a week he was gone. No word. No postcard. Nothing.

When he came home, he brought a new room mate. An art student, recently graduated from SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design. She was hoping to find a job in Atlanta and begin a new career.

With Hadden.

My perfect world cracked like the mirrored ball of a renaissance garden kicked by a spoiled prince when he didn't get his way.

I pitched a fit. Broke a few things. Frightened the girl. I made Hadden very angry.

She bought him a cake for their one-month anniversary. He bought her a teddy bear that would fit in her pocket book and asked her to marry him.

Her name was Judy. And I was filled with a nasty green-eyed-monster.

Present: that same night.

Judy was at the door. Hadden was asleep on the couch, a deep sleep induced by pure exhaustion and mental anguish. I knew this state, having experienced it so often in my life.

He couldn't hear the knocking. Why didn't Judy use her key? Had she given it back?

This was my one chance to make Hadden happy.

Judy would have to see me. My only fear was that she'd become frightened and go into labor.

I knew I would never be able to make him as happy as Judy possibly could. And the only way this rift could be mended is if she knew I was real and Hadden wasn't crazy.

I unlocked the door, spending more energy than I'd ever had moving the locking mechanism.

She stood on the landing, her hair plastered to her face, no longer perfect. Mascara streaked her checks in black rivulets. Her face was swollen as if she'd been crying. She had one hand on her right hip, supporting the weight of her distended belly.

At that moment, Judy wasn't the sultry vixen I'd seen her as. She was a woman with a broken heart.

This was something I could handle.

"Hadden?" Her voice quivered, no longer sure, as she swaggered inside. She held a sack in her hand, and I saw it was a package, wrapped in birthday paper.

This strengthened my resolve. If she had gone out and bought him something for this day and braved this weather, all for Hadden, I could show myself to her for him.

I waited until she'd set the package down on the kitchen table before calling up the ectoplasm. Later Billy said I looked great. This frumpy, thick old white haired woman in a flowered housedress with slippers, standing in a blue-white light in the center of the kitchen.

It sounded great and sweet.

It scared the hell out of Judy. She shrieked and stepped back and almost bolted out the door. So I pushed it closed.

Her right hand worked that knob back and forth as she tried to escape my Aunt Bea apparition.

"Judy, will you please calm down? You're gonna cause that baby to be born before her time." I wasn't sure if she could hear me over her ragged sobs and breathing.

She did. Judy stopped moving, her eyes nearly bugging from her head.

"There. Now, sit down and listen to me. I don't have much time."

To my surprise, she did exactly as I commanded. Though here eyes stayed incredibly large. She reminded me of a rabbit caught in a car's headlight. A very pregnant rabbit.

"Judy, Hadden loves you. He wasn't making me up. I've taken care of him for a year a half, and he's shown a lonely, old woman a good time. Do you love him?"

She nodded.

"Good."

Judy's eyes were abruptly less wide. Her face less tense, the lines fading. She blinked several times, then pointed at me. "Y-you're...Babs?"

"Yes. Barbara Small."

"He's not crazy."

"No." I smiled at her. She was warming to me. I could tell. "He's incredibly gifted. He's incredibly wonderful. I want you to take care of him."

"I..." Judy's face was completely free of lines, of fear. "I...didn't believe you were real. He said he'd never seen you."

"And he hasn't. You've seen me. No one else. Now," I felt something twinge in my mid-section, right around the tummy. It reminded me of a thread snapping. Some tenuous connection breaking. But to what? "You have to keep this a secret, okay? Just accept him, love him, take care of him. Can you make me that promise?"

Judy nodded. Then she really shocked me.

She actually smiled. "I promise." She winced, grabbed her swollen belly.

Another thread popped. Then another, very much like the strings on a violin. What was happening?

"Babs? You're beginning to fade." She winced again.

I looked down at my arms. I was indeed fading, as if someone were turning the knob of an adjustable light. I was also beginning to float upward, and not because I wanted too.

I looked at Judy. She was pale. Lines creased her face. "Judy…is it time?"

"Babs?" Judy looked around the kitchen. "Where are you?" She doubled over then. "Oh boy."

The sound of water hitting the kitchen's tile floor caught my attention. Though I'd never had children, I knew when a pregnant mother's water had broken. It was time to wake Hadden up and bring his little girl into the world.

"Billy?" I said.

"Right here boss."

I looked to my right and saw him, rising with me. "What's happening? We've got to wake Hadden up."

"We're moving on, Babs."

"But Hadden–?"

But Hadden was coming through the kitchen door from the living room, his eyes wide and a smile splitting his haggard face. I watched him take Judy in his arms as she motioned for him to grab the phone.

It was time. The little one was coming, and I was going.

Hadden would be all right.

I had one of those moments then, so rare that they stay with you, in life and in death. An epiphany. All through my life I had held out for something. Was it love? Acceptance? An end to loneliness?

I couldn't put my finger on it. Not as a single thing. I only knew that I had loved completely, totally for the first time. And I was willing to sacrifice myself for that love. Totally, and beyond regrets.

Hadden would be fine. So would Judy.

No. One regret. I wouldn't see the child grow up to become a loving, caring young woman.

They didn't need me.

I was moving on.

Skyward, to the azure horizon, and the stars beyond.

About the Author…

Phaedra Weldon is the author of the Urban Fantasy series, Zoë Martinique Investigation, published by Berkley, available for Kindle. She most recently completed the soon-to-be released Eureka novel, Brain Box Blues. Look for it in stores Winter 2010 under the name Cris Ramsay.

© Copyright 2010, all rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

For more information about the author please her visit website at www.phaedraweldon.com

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Cupid Painted Blind