Sullivan pushed himself up toward the whitewashed ceiling. “Don’t ask for ghost stories if you don’t want them, Portia,” he said.

“I know,” Portia said. “I know! I guess you spooked me. So it must have been a good one, right?”

“Right,” Sullivan said, mollified. “I guess it was.”

“That poor girl,” Aune said. “To relive that moment over and over again. Who would want that, to be a ghost?”

“Maybe it isn’t always bad?” Mei said. “Maybe there are well-adjusted ghosts? Happy ghosts?”

“I never saw the point,” Sullivan said. “I mean, they say ghosts appear as a warning. So what’s the warning in that story I told you? Don’t get caught in the forest during a tornado? Don’t get cut in half? Don’t die?”

“I thought they were more like a memory,” Gwenda said. “Not really there at all. Just an echo recorded somehow and played back, what they did, what happened to them.”

Sisi said, “But Aune’s ghosts—the other Aune—they looked at her. They wanted her to come down and eat with them. What would have happened then?”

“Nothing good,” Aune said.

“Maybe it’s genetic,” Mei said. “Seeing ghosts. That kind of thing.”

“Then Aune and I would be prone,” Sullivan said.

“Not me,” Sisi said. “I’ve never seen a ghost.” She thought for a minute. “Unless I did. You know. No. It wasn’t a ghost. What I saw. How could a ship be a ghost?”

“Don’t think about it now,” Mei said, imploring. “Let’s not tell any more ghost stories. Let’s have a gossip instead. Talk about back when we used to have sex lives.”

“No,” Gwenda said. “Let’s have one more ghost story. Just one, for my birthday. Maureen?”

That breeze licked at her ear. “Yes?”

“Do you know any ghost stories?”

Maureen said, “I have all of the stories of Edith Wharton and M. R. James and many others in my library. Would you like to hear one?”

“No,” Gwenda said. “I want a real story.”

Portia said, “Mei, you must know a ghost story. No old people, though. I want a sexy ghost story.”

“God, no,” Mei said. “No sexy ghosts for me. Thank God.”

Sisi said, “I have a story. It isn’t mine, of course. Like I said, I’ve never seen a ghost.”

“Go on,” Gwenda said.

“Not my ghost story,” Sisi said. “And not really a ghost story. I’m not sure what it was. It was the story of a man that I dated for a while.”

“A boyfriend story!” Sullivan said. “I love your boyfriend stories, Sisi. Which one?”

We could go all the way to Proxima Centauri and back and Sisi still wouldn’t have run out of stories about her boyfriends, Gwenda thought. But here she is, here we are, all of us together. And what are they? Dead and buried. Ghosts! Every last one of them.