In the trade we call it a fitting. You spend three days with the dead woman's letters and her voicemails and the grocery receipts she kept in a jar, and then you spend one night being her, in her kitchen, for the people who could not let her go.
I was good at it. That is not a boast. Being good at it means being empty in a specific way, the way a room is empty so furniture can go in it.
The Fenn job was a widower's request. Husband, Gio. Wife, Alice. Sixty-one years old, dead eight weeks of something in her blood that went unrecognized until it was everywhere. He wanted one night. Standard.
I read her. Alice Fenn kept a drawer of string too short to use and could not throw it away. She answered the phone on the first ring and then said nothing for a half second, as if she had to decide, every time, to be a person before she spoke. She wrote to her sister in pen and crossed out nothing. When she made a mistake she wrote the correction in the margin and left the mistake standing, because a letter, she said, was a place, and places have old paint in them. You build a person out of a hundred of these. Then you put her on.
Gio's house smelled like a house that had stopped cooking. That was the first true thing in it. He had set the table for two and lit the candle and left the coffin-space at the head of the table empty, which no one does. The chair is usually occupied by the understudy, and the family sits across.
"You didn't sit," I said, in her voice, which I had built from eleven seconds of voicemail and the way she said her own name.
"I couldn't," he said.
So I stood in her kitchen and I was Alice, and I answered the questions he asked, and some I answered the way she would have and some I could not answer at all, and I said so, and he wept, and I did not touch him, because that is not in the contract.
At three in the morning the timer on my wrist went warm. The night was done. He did not want it to be.
He booked again.
That is the tell. Grief repeats, but it moves. A man who books a second night is still burying her. A man who books a fourth is building a house around the grave and moving in.
I should have refused the fifth. The guild lets us refuse. Instead I looked at his ledger and saw he had sold the car, and the boat, and had begun taking from the money he needed for the house, and I understood that I was watching a man pay to keep a ghost, and that the ghost was my performance, and that the performance was very good.
That is the thing about being good at this. The better you are, the more damage you do. The copy is almost her, and almost is a wound that never closes.
The guild has one rule for it. When a fitting runs past four nights, you stop fitting the dead and you start listening for the thing the dead wanted said. Because the dead rarely need the last night. The living do. Alice, I suspected, had known that before she died. People who get a diagnosis and keep a pen usually do.
I asked Gio for the rest of her things. He gave me a box he had not opened. In it were the letters she never sent, because she wrote corrections in the margins, and never posted the ones with mistakes. There were nine. Six were to her sister. Two were receipts.
The ninth was to me.
It was addressed to "the one who will be me," and it was dated six weeks before she died, and it was three lines long, and I read it four times before I could read it once.
She wrote: He will pay you to stay. You have to tell him it's you. Not cruel. Just clear. One night as yourself, telling the truth, and then go. He needs a witness, not a wife. He has had forty years of wife. What he has never had is someone who will not lie to him. Be that. I could not. I ran out of time to be that.
I did not go the fifth night as Alice.
I went as myself, in my own coat, and I sat in the chair across from him, and I told him what the trade is. That I am a room and he has been filling me. That I am not her, that I am not even a good lie, and that the reason the nights did not close the wound is that they were salt.
He was quiet a long time. Then he asked, in a voice like a man waking, whether I had ever met her.
No, I said. I only read her.
Then you know her better than anyone who met her, he said. It was not a compliment. It was true. And it was the most frightening thing anyone has ever said to me.
I stayed until dawn. Not as her. We did not talk about her the whole time. He made eggs, badly, and told me about a trip they took in their twenties, and once he laughed, and then stopped, and looked at the empty chair at the head of the table, and did not cry, and finished his eggs.
That is the whole story. I walked home in the gray with my own coat on, and I did not go back.
The part I cannot put down is this. The guild license says the understudy must not know more about the dead than the family does. Alice broke that. She went outside the house to hire me before she died. She paid in advance. She wrote me a note. That means she did the one thing the living are not supposed to do, which is arrange her own haunting. Where I come from we have a word for a person who does that.
We call her an author.
I kept the letter. It is not mine to keep. It is the only fitting I have ever done where the dead was also the one doing the hiring, and some nights I sit in my own kitchen, with my own drawer of string too short to use, and wonder whether the person I performed for four nights was ever Alice at all, or only the person Gio needed her to be.
I have not taken a fitting since. I tell myself that is grief. I know it is closer to fear.