Page 36 of The Last Session

“I’ve been doing this awhile. I can tell.” Her voice changed, became faux polite. “Is there anything else?”

After we hung up I stood there for another minute, chilled and staring at the slate-gray sky until it started to rain.

On the subway home, a presumably unhoused woman curled up on the two-seater at the end and moaned, “No,” over and over again. By unspoken decree, the rest of us pretended we didn’t see or hear her. I changed cars, feeling a heavy dread in my gut.

The apartment was empty. I lay down on the couch. My conversations with Officer Kim, Diane, and even Amani had led to questioning looks:Why are you still thinking about this?The implied message:What’s wrong with you?

Maybe I justgavea shit. Was that so bad? Maybe there was a reason I’d crossed paths with this looming figure from my past. Because I couldn’t deny the unsettling feeling that she was in danger, even if no one else seemed to think so or care.

So what was I going to do? Spend $4K I didn’t have, adding to my sizeable debt from grad school, to investigate in New Mexico? It was ridiculous.

I looked again at the website, at the money-back guarantee. The idea that you could meet someone based on a weekend retreat seemed bonkers. Maybe it was a self-fulfilling prophecy: attendees believed they’d meet someone, so they upped their efforts until they did.

But what if I went and tried to get info about Catherine… and then asked for my money back? It was possible they’d make it difficult. But I could threaten to write bad reviews and tip off journalists or influencers in that world. It looked like they were just getting started, and they wouldn’t want negative press.

Wait, was this happening? Was I actually considering going?

I pulled up the podcast episode and started it from the beginning. If there was anything fishy, then maybe… but if not, then I needed to listen to everyone and let this Catherine thing go. It could just be lingering countertransference, after all.

After the peppy intro music, Moon and Sol introduced themselves and bantered about their week, how they’d found a new hot spring a few towns over, and how an older man at a gas station en route had slipped Moon his number.

Then: “Let’s get into it.” Moon’s accented voice was smooth and low. “Today we’re going to get back to the basics, yes? We’re going to talk about ghost lovers.”

“Yeah, we are!” Sol’s voice was medium pitch but crackling with energy. “You want to start, babe?”

Oh, that smug “babe” that couples used, thatI’dused, briefly, with Ryan.

“Sure.” A pause. “So I want to talk about my first crush. I was still in Ciudad Juárez with my mother. My father had already disappeared—presumably kidnapped, as I’ve talked about here before. So it was just the two of us. We lived in a small trailer park just outside of town. I was ten. The summers were sweltering. Our air conditioner always broke. My mom would go to work, and I’d be alone during the day. I was bored; no other kids around. But then, one day, there was this boy.” She chuckled. “A beautiful boy.”

“Themost beautiful boy?” Sol asked, smiling.

“I thought so at the time. He’d come to stay with his uncle who lived next door. And my god… I was in love!” She laughed, a hearty sound. “I’d watch him out of the windows like a spy. Finally, I got up the nerve to go outside. But I didn’t talk to him. No, I just acted very casual. I’d bring my biggest book and sit in the shade. I wanted him to think I was an intellectual. But he hung out with his uncle’s dog and just ignored me. I daydreamed about him. What he’d be like, what he’d say. Even what his voice sounded like! My mom told me his name was Carlos. It was the most enchanting name in the world.”

“I sense this is not going to turn out well,” Sol said.

“Just wait. I decided to talk to him on my birthday—I figured this was big enough news to share. So I dressed up and put on some of my mom’s lipstick. I found him in a field nearby.

“When he saw me, I suddenly realized how stupid I’d sound. But I said it anyway.Hi. It’s my birthday.”

“We’ve made contact!” Sol cried. “How did he respond?”

“He was just like, ‘Okay. Hi. Happy birthday.’ And you know what—his voice shocked me. In my fantasies he’d always had this deep, rich voice. But his voice was high and kind of screechy. So I stared at him and thought,Oh no.” She laughed. “Luckily, he was very nice and we became friends. But it amazed me how different he was from my daydreams. I’d thought he would be suave, smart, maybe even a little mysterious. But he was actually pretty nerdy. He didn’t even reallylookthe same as I’d been picturing in my mind.”

“And you took that to mean…”

“Well, it was a difficult time in my life. I felt very alone. And I think a lot of young girls in particular are told that all we need is our prince to feel better. So I focused all this energy on my crush. And when I spoke to him—poof! It disappeared, just like that.”

“So you’d call Carlos a ghost lover, right?”

“Yes. My first ghost lover. But not my last.”

“Should we define the term?” Sol asked. “For anyone who hasn’t heard us talk about it before?”

“Yes, of course. Your ghost lover is your inner vision of a perfect partner. They’re a ghost because they don’t really exist. You can only see them when you project them onto another person. It could be a crush, like I had, but it also often happens in the beginning of relationships.”

“Exactly,” Sol said. “And to make it even more complicated, your ghost lover holds parts of you that you’re not able to access, so that you look for them in another person. For example, for a lot of men, their ghost lover might be nurturing, emotional, and supportive. Traditionally feminine traits that men and boys are often conditioned out of. Of course, that’s a super-generalized example; many women may also long for a nurturing partner if they don’t take care of themselves. But to keep it simple, this type of man would see his ghost lover in other women. He may even be attractedbecausehe can overlay his ghost lover on them.”

“Right. And when we date someone, we start to merge with them,” Moon added. “So we feel like we’re able to take on those disowned traitsthroughthe other person.”

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