Ascending Apparition

Chapter 1

Dammit, I thought, placing my fist over my, once again, scarily racing heart, dammit to effing hell. Is this never going to stop?

Angie died almost two years ago, and I still suffered the same haunting, wrenching, heart-breaking dream.

In it, Angie appeared from the back, alone in her rose-petal pink dress from Senior Prom, chiffon wafting in the warm breeze of that night—she’d been breathtakingly beautiful—ascending a darkened, shimmery staircase, her blonde curls in a come-hither up-do, aglow around her head like a halo. A multi-armed, silver candelabrum, beeswax candles lit and dripping, perched on the plinth of the decorative newel post. The flames bent parallel to the floor in the breeze.

Not a place I recognized.

It woke me close to every night.

To sweaty sheets.

To pounding heart.

To seized mind.

To my body aching for her.

I’d been reassured by shrinks galore who consult for all sorts of purposes, nefarious and otherwise, for the Newton P.D., uh, police department, that time would make the apparition fade.

It hadn’t.

There’d been no indication that time was gonna help at all.

Which wasn’t that big a deal except ... for sleep.

Oh, and Gillian.

Gillian Helene Gordon is the twin sister of my number one lieutenant, right-hand man, best queer-mo bud I’d met as an adult, Geoffrey Horatio Gordon. Geoff and I had worked together for a long time. He was a hand-picked, personally-trained assistant, and I could trust him with my life. Hell, I had trusted him with my life. Repeatedly.

Geoff and I worked together like I’d never worked with anyone, not even Ang. We clicked, a singularly good thing given our profession, namely, police detective. Angie’d made detective a year and a week before she’d been killed in the line. I missed her, the woman I’d been convinced was the love of my life, like a phantom limb.

I’d done everything I could possibly conceive of to get over her, too.

I’d invited Gilly on more than a few successful dates, but no, this damn dream would not leave me, nor would it leave me alone.

I would not chance bringing Gilly home from a lovely evening, fixing her an after-dinner drink, seducing her hot femme self, and then startling awake in the middle of the night to a clanging heart over an old lover. It didn’t read as romantic. Or desirable. Or kind. Or feasible.

My heart restored to a relatively normal pace, I glared at the digital clock that had been by my bedside since high school. It had a red read-out. 4:44 in the morning. I sighed, knowing I’d never return to sleep, and tossed off the covers.

Then I recalled that this particular morning dawned the eve of Halloween, one of the least favorite police department holidays.

The crazies came out at Halloween.

Even more than they usually did.

Not only that, but this Halloween was a Full Moon.

I had an app on my phone that traced moon phases, and I always knew when Full Moons were on their way calendar-wise. The Moon messes with policework like no other influence. Seriously.

Let to my own devices, I wouldn’t have given it a first thought except that one of my best buds, Dr. Raven Lange, Angie’s bestie, was engaged to a wicked intuitive named Verity Spencer, and over the past two years, she had gotten me tuned to the moon.

I am the precinct’s local moon expert. Not kidding.

I sound like one of those crazies.

Never mind.

All, all, all will be revealed—eventually.

It has to be.

I swung my legs out from under the covers with a serious shiver as my feet hit the walnut-hued hardwood floor. Once again a reminder to call the electric company and brush up on their special deals on insulating houses that were made without it.

Late fall in Boston meant the cold of winter would soon be upon us. And weather-y. Could be rain, sleet, snow, hell, might be hail at that time of year. We have to, no, get to roll with it.

Boston is herself a Boston Brahmin, and she only discloses her weather patterns when she’s damn good and ready. If at all.

Boxers and a t-shirt were my normal sleepwear, but I’d seriously considered asking Santa for flannel pajamas this year. The weather was extra cold. Climate change. You know it, and I know it, and God help us as we deal with the deniers of everything science.

Angie’d climbed into the climate change thing long before anyone else we knew. In high school. Talk about early adopters. She had seriously considered a calling as a climate scientist until we went to Career Day our sophomore year, and she met someone from the Police Academy. That was all she wrote.

From that day, Angie wanted to be a police detective. Nothing else would do. She never looked back.

I washed my face, and stared dispassionately at the big black rings under my eyes. If only the people from the Old Country that were some of my ancestors hadn’t had olive skin, maybe I wouldn’t have these shopping bags under my deep-set eyes. At this point, they get darker or darkest ratings. It’s been years since they were regular dark. As for absent, uh, no. Never.

My apartment is one of four in a mid-century modern house in Newton that has been converted into condos. I bought it with the life insurance money Angie’s death gifted me. That had been bittersweet, despite the fact that she deep-down desired it, which was why she’d bought the policy in the first place, so I could be her beneficiary.

I wasn’t the only one.

Lucy was, and Raven, too, but that’s getting ahead of this story which I’m figuring I ought to tell in an effort to purge it from my head once and for all. Maybe I ought to start with  Prom, and go from there?

I staggered, sauntered, stumbled into the kitchen. The coffeemaker was set on an automatic timer that perked itself on at six. Ang had bought it for me more than a decade ago. I was way early. So I had to dismantle the damn thing and only then could I press Start. Still, I left it in place because ... well, because of Angie. Sometimes I think coffee is the only thing that is keeping me going.

And Gilly, but I can’t have what I want with her yet.

Gilly’s in her mid-thirties, writing a book on the architecture of Boston, and working for a small start-up incubator as a day gig to pay the bills while she tries to meet her editor’s impossible deadlines.

I’m in my mid-forties, well, forty-seven, and aware that my guys, known to ourselves as well as all and sundry as The Butch Brigade, are simultaneously getting the urge to settle down, me as well. I’d marry Gilly in a heartbeat except for this damn dream thing.

I do not know, however, whether she feels the same way.

So, Prom.

Well, Raven, Angie, and I went to high school together in Newton. Raven and I were definitely butch. Angie was a femme, and we noticed each other because, well, you know, queer people do. I think we knew of one another before Cord arrived, but we weren’t actual friends till Cord begged us on bended knee, for real, to come to her house for a party our sophomore year.

Cord’s mom, Dr. Jessica Lear, was a noobie Shakespeare professor at Harvard, and Cord was sick and tired of being made to listen to her newly-divorced mom declaim her preferred canon aloud, so she devised a clever way to get out of it, or at least some of it, by inviting us to dinner one night, and impressing us into service to read R & J. That would be Romeo & Juliet, to those not in the Elizabethan know.

Well, the romance of romances. Dr. Lear had a blast. We did, too, though we didn’t like to cop to it, and so once a month we gathered for pizza and what we so cleverly dubbed Billy Wigglesdagger Nights, thinking it some kind of indecipherable code. We weren’t the first, and we most likely wouldn’t be the last.

Angie, as the token femme of our crew, got the ingénue roles. You know, Juliet, Desdemona, Ophelia, Hermia (Cord’s mom, willowy tall girl that she was, played Helena to Ang’s Hermia), Beatrice, Bianca. I could go on, but you’ll get my drift.

We, her butch color guard, played the heroes, the best friends, the villains, and the rude mechanicals.

The night we read R & J was the first time I noticed Angela Andrews in any way, shape, or form as other than one of the guys. She hung with Raven, I guess, since they were small kids. I’m not exact on when. I’ll have to ask Raven when her parents bought their half of the Victorian house that the two of them inhabited, and haunted, growing up.

Ang and her parents lived in the left side; Raven and hers lived in the right. Their dads were best buds from the get-go; they’d been ROTC together, and their moms were good enough friends. Ang and Raven were dark and light twins, well, light and dark twins, only with different parents. Inseparable.

They did everything together, and so did their dads. Except for Angie’s party-girl streak freshman year, but that came later. Their dads were totally cool, and much to my benefit, because, believe me when I tell you, my dad was so completely uncool that he didn’t belong in the same galaxy as their dads.

First off, they were totally enchanted with their girls. The girls were jazzed over their dads as well. Basically, their moms were the disciplinarians because their dads knew without query that their daughters were perfection itself and could do no wrong.

My dad, on the other hand, was a complete asshat of a drunk with a raging alcoholic temper to match. I was the youngest of four; my three brothers are to this day as irresponsible and drunken as my dad remains. The four of them are too ornery to die, cussed fuckers. I got no respect for any of them, nor the time of day by now in my life.

Mama—Sophia was her name, like Loren—is long dead. The four of them killed her, well, the four of them gave her the uterine cancer that killed her. While she was alive she was an utter firecracker. Italian as the day is long. Neapolitana, she’d say. Beautiful. Sexy as the night is long, and she’d tell anyone who’d listen that she herself knew it. She stood for no guff from her sons, or, eventually, her husband.

Alanon is what finally freed her. She’d repeatedly approached the Church for help with her drunken poor excuse for a husband, and gotten nowhere fast, but, by Grace, as she always said, the church secretary was a wicked eavesdropper on the Father’s pastoral agenda, and she overheard what Mama had begged the Father one day.

That was the day that Adele, the church secretary, decided to walk Mama out to her car, and she introduced her to Alanon. She invited Mama to come to their meeting that very night, and that was that at long last. Mama thrived in Alanon because she finally shed the gargantuan burden of misplaced guilt bullshit that the priest had lavishly, and mistakenly, served her when she’d begged him to help her. As if dad’s drinking was her fault. What utter malarkey.

I was in my mid-twenties when Mama died. I still miss her every day, and I’m permanently pissed at my dad and my brothers for their heartless assholery over her death. They were like juvenile, teenage boys, couldn’t, or more likely wouldn’t, deal with the real life, adult things that continued to happen around us. I was the one who consistently was present for Mama, to save her life, as she always said, and to see her out of this life. I had her for twenty-seven years, and oh God, am I grateful.

When Mama died, Angie and I had been together for ten years. Mama thought of Angie as a second, cherished daughter. Angie and Raven were my pillars. Truth? I don’t think I’d have gotten through her death and grieving her if it hadn’t been for them. Well, I might have, but not without a murder charge or two. My dad and my brothers behaved deplorably about it.

I know now, and knew even then, the reason was because they were emotional imbeciles but it didn’t make it any easier to deal with at the time. I wanted to push each of them, when they were dead drunk, down the narrow stairs of the house we were raised in on the south side of Newton, bordering on Wellesley, in the sincere hope that they’d break their necks.

I didn’t do it, but mostly because of Ang and Raven and Cord. In fact, by then, we’d, plus or minus, assembled The Butch Brigade. Sam and Ollie had been in grade school with Raven. No, that’s not right. Sam and Raven went to grade school together; Ollie and Raven were in middle school together. Dex was a foster kid in high school with us. Raven brought Jamie in from Wellesley where they went to undergrad.

There’re more of us, but I’ll bring them into the story as they appear.

Thank God Almighty the coffee is done. Sitting in the chilly kitchen in an old t-shirt and boxers, bare feet on the icy linoleum, reminiscing without coffee is definitely not a warm proposition. In fact, it’s downright cold, and so am I.

Coffee. Shower. Coffee in the shower. There’s a shelf I cemented in there myself for that express purpose. I might get warm enough to get dressed and go to work.

I spaced out in the shower. It happens. Sometimes the pounding of the water—I have a special fancy showerhead that I can set to jets—can send me on an inner journey. Today I fell into the staircase I see Angie ascending in her prom dress. Sometimes these reveries can take me further into a dream or an idea or a strategy for an operation.

That day, nothin’ doin’. Ang stopped at the top of the stairs, her beautiful dress fluttering in the breeze. I stopped below her, waiting to see what she’d do. We went no further. I shook my head at my own face in the mirror trying to shake off the feeling that came with the ascension of the dream steps.

The last time I mentioned the dream to Verity, Raven’s lady, she got a thoughtful, owlish expression on her face, cocked her head, and said dreamily, “Ter, what if the dream holds a message for you from Angie?”

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I’d never thought of it that way. Not once. Not in near two years of having the damn thing. I’d been dissing it as wishful thinking on my part.

I was winded after Verity asked me that.

Winded.

Me.

“Uh, Verity,” I said, “wow.”

How’s that for articulate?

“Yeah,” she replied. “Be with that for a while.”

“Will do,” I said, shaking my head.

Verity is given to saying these sorts of things; she’s an intuitive and a wicked good shrink. She’s also the head of The Femme Force, the girls’ equivalent of The Butch Brigade. More on that brilliant miracle later. And, no, nothing like the Ladies’ Auxiliary.

I reached over the commode to flip on the overhead light. I do this a couple times a week  to check the status of my facial hair. It can get ... scraggly is the best word. I keep it trimmed, neat. Just to guarantee that the guys at the station don’t get it in their pea brains to tease me over it. That doesn’t work for me.

I injected T for a while in my thirties certain as I ever was that I was a trans man. I liked what it did to the bones in my face, and how it bulked up my muscles. Not the T in itself, but the effects of my workouts came into stark relief when I was on it. I had an easy top surgery experience, with a great doc.

But then I had a health scare. One of my calves swelled into twice its size for no obvious cause.

I couldn’t ignore it if I’d wanted to. Angie wouldn’t have let me. So off I trotted to my primary care who sent me for an emergency MRI since no precipitating event like a fall or a bullet or some other external thing had caused it.

I had blood clots in my calf, big enough that they made my leg swell. The doc was kindness itself with me. But she also made it unmistakable that, to be on the safe side of the clots, which her blood thinner prescription addressed, the T had to go.

I had a kneejerk reaction of woebegone disappointment. Then a long conversation with Angie followed by some good interior insights made me see that I already had what I’d wanted from the T. I didn’t, in point of fact, need anything more.

Angie reflected soon thereafter that I’d sort of stopped talking about feeling I was trans a while ago, and that what I’d wanted, I’d already gotten: no breasts, facial hair, some structural changes to my face, and bigger muscles.

I moped around for a weekend or so and then let it go for once in my thoroughly stubborn life. The facial hair remains, but not so I have to shave daily which is fine by me although it still gives me a thrill. I have every single bit of the right paraphernalia: the mug, the brush, the soap.

I keep the shadow there so it reads to those who don’t know unequivocally that I’m to be approached as a guy. I live that way, people see me that way. Hell, I see me that way.

For the people who matter, those who are in the know, I’m a butch dyke. Period. End of discussion. With some decent facial hair thrown in for good measure. I like it. I don’t miss my breasts, and my health gave me a billboard-sized, chaser-lit message. Good enough.

Besides, though my government name is Theresa Bradford, I’ve been called Terry from the day I was born, and that’s a name that swings either way if you’re into the gender binary.

© 2017 Susan Corso
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