One Good Ghost
The groom’s ex is back for the wedding. She’s dead. And I’m the only one who can see her.
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I’m standing in what the rental listing generously called a “powder room” but is really a beach house closet with delusions of sandy grandeur, trying to bobby-pin my hair into something that doesn’t look like I’ve been wrestling with the Atlantic wind all morning. Which, for the record, I beat.
“Mara, are you almost done in there?” My brother’s voice carries the particular strain of a groom three hours before his wedding who’s just discovered the caterer forgot the vegetarian option. “Claire needs to get ready!”
Claire. Sweet, soft-spoken Claire, who teaches kindergarten, pronounces all her consonants, and has never said anything remotely cutting about anyone, including my mother, who deserves it. I should like her more than I do.
“Two minutes,” I call back, giving my reflection one last disapproving look. My bridesmaid dress—dusty rose, because apparently that’s a color now—makes me look like I’m cosplaying as someone’s better-adjusted sister.
That’s when I see her in the mirror.
The woman behind me wears a wedding dress that probably cost more than my car, complete with a cathedral train that somehow doesn’t take up the entire closet-bathroom. Her makeup’s flawless except for the mascara tracks down her cheeks, which shouldn’t be possible, since she’s clearly been crying for hours.
I turn. Nothing there.
Back to the mirror: wedding dress, perfect blowout, and someone who I’m starting to suspect is definitely a ghost.
I study her face more carefully. She’s beautiful in that effortless way that makes you check your own reflection for smudged lipstick. There’s just something so familiar about the sharp line of her jaw, the way she holds her shoulders, as if she’s bracing for impact. Clearly she’s not bracing for me.
“You can see me,” she says. Her voice has the hollow timbre of someone speaking from the bottom of a well.
“Uh. Yeah. Apparently.”
“I’m Vanessa.”
Oh. Oh.
Vanessa.
As in Vanessa-the-ex-fiancée.
As in Vanessa-who-broke-my-brother’s-heart-two-years-ago. And also Vanessa-who-he-still-gets-quiet-about-whenever-she-gets-brought-up. And Vanessa-who-my-mother-claimed-was-never-good-enough-for-him—though she’s never met a woman good enough for either of her sons.
That Vanessa.
“Didn’t you f— off to Paris?” I ask.
“I did.” She touches the pearls at her throat. “Turns out you can die of irony. Who knew?”
“Mara?” My brother again, closer now. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah, fine,” I call back unconvincingly, still staring at Vanessa in the mirror. “Just seeing a dead person in my reflection. The usual.”
Vanessa almost smiles. Almost.
I should open the door and help my brother marry his perfectly nice fiancée and pretend I don’t see his dead ex floating around like some kind of designer disaster.
But instead, I hear myself ask, “How long?”
“Since Thursday.” She adjusts her veil. “Car accident. Very dramatic. And sudden. And stupid.”
“Wow. And you came here?”
“I was already coming.” She looks down at her dress. “I was going to—God, this is embarrassing—I was going to stop the wedding. Like some kind of romantic comedy heroine, you know? Except, well, I died first, which really messed up the timing. Classic me.”
Through the thin walls, I hear Claire laugh at something my brother says. It’s a nice, genuine laugh shared by two people unbothered by that old wedding tradition to not see the other person before the ceremony.
“He’s happy,” I tell Vanessa.
“I know.” She’s staring at something I can’t see. “I can hear it in his voice. He sounds…settled. Safe.”
“Is that a bad thing? Your tone could be interpreted either way.”
“No, it’s not bad. It’s just different. We were never safe.”
I remember the fights I used to hear about. The way my brother looked like he was walking on broken glass whenever Vanessa entered a room. When she looked at him like he was a puzzle missing a few crucial pieces.
They were so beautiful together. Terrible for each other, yes, but beautiful, all the same. And everyone saw it except them.
“Can anyone else see you or is it just me?”
“Just you, so far.”
“Why?”
Vanessa pauses to think. “Maybe…because you’re the only one who didn’t pick a side.”
I raise an eyebrow. “I’ll always take my brother’s side.”
Vanessa shrugs. “Not how I remember it.”
I think back to when they broke up, when my mother launched into I-told-you-so mode. My dad disappeared into his garage. My other brother immediately took Claire’s side before Claire was even in the picture. Back then she was just “the girl who will be better for you, anyway.”
But me? I watched my brother cry into his beer and thought, with characteristic sisterly warmth, that he was an idiot. But also, that love makes idiots of us all. And he wasn’t exactly innocent in what happened.
“I should go,” I say. “They need the bathroom.”
“Wait.” Vanessa’s reflection wavers slightly. “Will you tell him something for me?”
“No.”
“You don’t even know what—”
“I’m not delivering messages from beyond the grave or whatever. This isn’t Ghost. You’re not Demi Moore, I’m not Whoopi Goldberg, and my brother is definitely not Patrick Swayze, even if he might think he is after two glasses of wine.”
“Just…please. Please tell him I’m glad. That he’s marrying someone who makes him laugh like that.”
I look at her for tens of seconds.
“Tell him yourself.”
“Mara, he can’t see or hear me.”
“Well maybe he will if you want him to, like badly enough.”
But even as I say this, I know she won’t. Vanessa was always too proud to be vulnerable and too scared to need things from people she couldn’t control. Something told me not even death changed that.
I open the door and nearly run into Claire, arms full of bobby pins and nerves.
“Oh good, you’re done!” Claire says. “I was starting to think you’d fallen in.” She peers past me into the bathroom. “Who were you talking to?”
“Myself. Old habit.”
Claire nods like that makes perfect sense, which it does if you’re someone who assumes the best about everyone. “Could you help me with my veil? Stupid thing won’t stay put.”
I follow her to the master bedroom, where her wedding dress hangs on the closet door like a painting. She’s going for simple elegance, the opposite of Vanessa’s cathedral drama.
“Nervous?” I ask, taking the pins.
“Terrified,” she says. “Not about marrying him. Just…you know, everything else. The ceremony…all the people…whether my mascara will hold up.” She hesitates. “Whether I’m enough.”
I stop mid-pin. “Enough for what?”
“For him. He’s had this whole life before me. This complicated history, like sometimes I feel like I’m just the consolation prize or something.”
I think of Vanessa downstairs, still in her dress and crying in the bathroom. Then I think of my brother’s laugh, which for sure has been so much lighter than it’s been in years.
“Claire.” I turn her to face me. “You are not the consolation prize. You’re the prize. The real one.”
She looks skeptical.
“I’m serious, all right? My brother’s lucky you haven’t wised up yet, that’s the truth.”
Claire’s eyes fill. I hand her a tissue before her mascara can betray her. “Thank you,” she says. “I didn’t think…I mean, I wasn’t sure you liked me very much.”
“Really? I like everyone. Well, most people. Fine, I like you, at least.”
She laughs, and I realize it’s the same laugh I heard through the wall. It’s so easy for her, so effortless and uncomplicated.
“There,” I say, stepping back. “Absolutely…perfect.”
And she is.
Downstairs, the string quartet starts. It’s time. Claire takes my arm, and as we move toward the stairs, I catch Vanessa’s reflection in the hallway mirror. She’s watching. And for a moment she somewhat looks…at peace.
“Ready?” I ask.
“Ready,” she says.
I try to believe both of us. The music swells. And somewhere in the back of my mind, I hear the sound of a held breath released, and a door closing softly, and the ocean pulling back before the next wave begins. One good ghost, I think. That’s all we probably get. One good ghost to teach us the difference between haunting and holding on. Between letting go and letting things just happen.
Outside, the Atlantic keeps its natural rhythm, so much of it indifferent yet blissfully eternal. Carrying away what’s finished and bringing in what’s just beginning.
Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His published books include The Pixar Theory (Slimbooks, 2015), a pop culture nonfiction, and his debut novel Killerjoy (5050 Press, 2017). His recent short fiction includes "Men Who Are Strong" (IHRAM Press) and "Upon a Dream," an original fable published in The Fairy Tale Magazine.
Author’s Notes
I wrote One Good Ghost after reading a call for upmarket fiction and asked myself “what even is upmarket anymore?” I dug a little deeper and decided upmarket includes but is not limited to writing that has emotional resonance, strong hooks, and conceptual clarity. So basically, stories with a heart and a pitch. The kind of thing that makes people say, “Wait, did you say the ex-fiancée is dead?” but then keeps them reading for what goes beyond the twist.
The seed of the premise came from one line I adored instantly: “Not even death could stop me from attending my ex-fiancé’s wedding to another woman.” It made me laugh actually out loud (well, fine, chuckle modestly). Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how heartbreak sometimes disguises itself in spite, and it can be so hard to let go of something when you were so sure it was supposed to be yours, even if you were wrong. That can also apply to friendships, not just romantic love, which is more-so what I’m drawing from, here.
Tonally, I wanted the piece to sound conversational, voicey, maybe even a splash of funny, but with emotional layering under every beat. Basically what you would expect from a beach house comedy crashed by a ghost who can’t admit they’re not the main character, etc.
The “voice” came first: Mara, the narrator, is a reluctant bridesmaid with a shield of sarcasm and more empathy than she’s comfortable admitting. She doesn’t believe in ghosts, but she does believe in telling it like it is. Her dynamic with Vanessa (the ghost) was what made the story come alive for me, this sense that they’re more alike than either wants to admit. The living and the dead, trying to decide what counts as closure. If not for how well I found this dynamic to work, I’m not sure I would’ve published this one at the final hour when I had something else sort of in the wings…
Anyway, it’s structured as a single-sitting story with no scene breaks, no flashbacks, just a long breath exhaled over the course of one surreal moment. I was drawn to that claustrophobic feeling of pre-wedding rituals, where everyone is supposed to be calm and beautiful and composed, but everything is emotionally unhinged and blurring in real time. To the point where no one even mentions the groom’s name, which yes was on purpose.
What I hope to leave the reader with is this: quietly moving on is a sign of strength, and absolutely nobody says the perfect thing every time. You can interpret it differently if you want, but Mara never tells her brother about Vanessa, nor does she consider it much. She stands firm. Because the difference between haunting someone and holding on to what you thought love was supposed to look like is thicker line than the one between life and death, if you ask me.
And also, the most meaningful conversations you’ll have aren’t always with the people you love or used to love. Sometimes it’s the would-be sister-in-law you’re pretty sure never liked you.