I've known our loft was haunted since kindergarten. My parents divorced before I started grade school and they both lied in haunted apartments. I've had dark circles under my eyes for as long as I can remember.
My dad lived in the Chelsea Hotel on 23rd street. We would play hide and seek in all the stairwells, hallways, and garbage shoots, order take out, and then he would tell me ghost stories and I would go to sleep. The next day my mom, a haggard single mom/student/writer would get grief from my teachers."Why are there always dark circles under V's eyes?" they'd ask her. She bitched at dad and he stopped telling me ghost stories but the dark circles didn't recede.
I couldn't sleep in the loft. It wasn't safe.When I lay face down in bed I could hear Hannibal and his army of elephants marching up my stairs, faster the more scared I became, until I would sit up. Instead I would stay up playing with my stuffed animals in the warm glow of the nightlight until I saw my mother's lamp extinguish and I knew she was asleep.
My mother slept on a full bed that took up most of the alcove at the South end of the loft, behind the elevator, boarding the window Sugar fell from. We had no cat at the time, just a huge, empty, dark apartment filled with odd sounds and phantom glowing red eyes. I would walk the harrowing length of it almost every night with my pink blanket and Bubbles the teddy bear. My mother would always assume I had had a nightmare if I showed up after her light went out (before and she'd try to fix the problem and send me back to my own bed) and let me sleep with her. It was safe there. Only two nightmares ever reached me after I reached the safety of mom's bed.
One night, ten years later and five months before Sugar met her untimely demise, I took a nap before getting ready for a slumber party. When I woke up it was dark outside. I was laying on my stomach facing the window. The lamp behind me was off but if I turned around to get to it surely, I thought, I would see her, the beautiful blue angry woman from The Grudge. Or worse, floating above me the Tooth-Fairy from Darkness Falls, waiting for me to open my eyes so she could kill me. These are just faces and names I put to the fear, but something was not right. It took me 30 minutes to summon the courage to turn on the light. Then I sat for three hours reading children's poetry while the darkness pressed like a tangible force through the door of my room. Finally I had enough courage to advance to the old kitchen, less than ten feet away from my door. I went out with my back against the wall. I had my eyes closed againgst all that I was sure was ghouling around in my apartment. Where was Sugar when you needed her? For starters, I did not want to even begin to imagine how much terror I would feel if I opened my eyes and actually SAW that young girl floating in an old white dress right in front of me. Her long blonde hair and the tattters of her dress danced over the skin of my arms and legs, barely touching me. Would the spell break if I set eyes on her? Would she suddenly be able to touch me? Her hair and tatters reaching out like tentacles to strangle me, bind me, frighten me into cardiac arrest.
Three more sideways shuffles and I could feel the kitchen light switch with the fingers of my right hand. I flipped it. Light spilled into the loft from the doorway and the elevator door opened. Mom came home. Sugar came out of her napping place to say hi. I tore through the loft screaming "MOMMY!!!" even though I was fifteen. With everything better I had to rush to get ready for my party and, of course, was late.
Six months after Sugar died we adopted Dorian Gray. He was as different a cat from Sugar as ever there was. Soft, sweet, terrible at stealth, and monotone gray to her beautiful white and calico. He lived in the loft until I went to college but he was always my cat. He probably passed away in 2009; but we don't really know. My brother let him out in the Catskill mountains and Dorian never came home. I have never had a cat who lived to see its sixth birthday, human years.
In December 2008 Sugar was dead and Dorian was alive; but living at my brother's place in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I was home visiting from college and sleeping on my bed which had been moved from my room (now storage) and placed in the alcove. I drempt one night that my mother was sitting on the couch in the middle of the loft with Dorian Gray licking himself on a table behind her. Suddenly Sugar jumped up and settled herself on the back of the couch, right next to my mother's head.
"Mom!" I excalimed, "Don't you see Sugar?"
"Of course I do," she said."She's always here." Dorian continued licking himself like nothing was wrong when there was a ghost sitting right in front of him!
Sugar looked at me, her bright green eyes meeting mine. I never left, she said without talking, I mean you no harm. I woke up. There was an oval indent on the bottom right side of my bed as if a cat had been curled up there. I heard a small thump and saw a small black shadow walk past my bed and out of my line-of-vision with her nose and fluffy tail held proudly in the air.
We didn't start seeing Sugar regularly around the apartment until this spring, 2011. Now she's everywhere I glance-for-a-minute and then gone.
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