Above the car, there are no clouds. It’s a clear winter morning.
I am driving, and my sister is sitting next to me, telling me what she remembers about the last time we went to Bisbee. “You were such a jerk,” she’s saying. “You told me to wear a sundress—and then you came out in pants. And I had to sit on that hard metal seat in a mining hat, into the depths of a freezing cold mine. For an hour.”
I tell her I don’t remember that. She looks at me sideways like sisters do.
We visit the Copper Queen Hotel and learn about the ghosts who live there. There are so many in this strange mining town in southern Arizona, this place of haunted hotels and iron-red hills. At lunch, my six-year-old asks me how a ghost knows what age to come back as. He’s thinking of the bearded man in the top hat, “you know, the accountant,” and Little Billy, who is eight.
“If you could come back as a ghost at any age, what would you pick?” my sister asks.
My nephew perks up and says, “Oh, that’s easy! I’d come back as a fifteen-year-old.”
My son looks up from his book of Bisbee ghost stories. The man who sold us the book told us his father once discovered a triceratops head in North Dakota.
“I’d come back as a magician,” my son says, “so I could make myself be all the ages!”
All the ages.
We are moms with little boys, we are sisters at twenty-two. We are the fifteen years in-between then. We are the flickering lights above us, old lightbulbs in an old saloon, that in this moment are evidence of the afterlife for our boys, and for us, proof that we are never far from ourselves.
