The time clock at WKRL-TV took Tessa Quinn's badge the way it took everything from her: without looking.
She fed the card into the slot at 9:58, two minutes before ten, the way she had done six nights a week for six years. The machine punched, clicked, and gave it back. BADGE 0914. DEPARTMENT: JANITORIAL. In the little window above the slot, her own face looked up at her from the plastic — younger by a few pounds and a few thousand hours.
Evening, ghost, said Mabel, coming the other way with her tote bag over one shoulder. Mabel ran the commissary's coffee station and was the only daytime person who spoke to the night crew as a matter of habit. "They're taping late in A tomorrow. Just so you know. Somebody important."
They're always taping late in A, Tessa said.
The building at night was a different animal from the building on television. By day WKRL-TV was all glass lobby and screens and people walking fast with coffee. By ten o'clock it emptied out into itself. The newsroom went dark except for the overnight desk. The sales floor was a field of dead monitors. In the long corridor behind the studios, the framed photographs of anchors hung in a row under lights nobody bothered to turn off, twenty years of good hair smiling down at nobody.
Tessa worked the building the way water works a riverbed: by route, by habit, by knowing where things collected. She started with the supply closet on the third floor, because the cart lived there and because Craig Palmer, her supervisor, liked to find fault with the cart before he found fault with her. Bottles in their slots. Rags folded. Mop bucket rinsed from the night before — she always rinsed it last thing, because the smell of a bucket left standing was the smell of a write-up.
She was thirty-two years old. She had a route, a cart, a badge, and a bad knee that complained on stairs in the winter. Now she was the ghost.
The daytime staff had given her the name without cruelty, which was almost worse. She came in as they left and left as they came; she cleaned the evidence of their days — the coffee rings, the crumpled rundowns — and because they never saw it happen, some part of them believed it happened by itself. A ghost was convenient. A ghost didn't need to be greeted, or thanked, or wondered about. A ghost was a time slot: 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m., six nights a week.
Tessa had stopped correcting anyone about it around year two. She needed the paycheck too much to need anything else. The arithmetic of her life was fixed: every bill with her name on it, every shift a fixed sum against a fixed hunger of expenses, nothing left over for error. Rent. Light bill. The oxygen company's monthly invoice, which was not small. Inhaler refills. The specialist her mother saw every quarter, whose copay rose every January.
She worked the third floor first — offices, conference rooms, the long executive bathroom with its real towels — then the second: the commissary, the green rooms, the makeup department with its bright bulbs cooling in their sockets. She wiped down the long table where the judges of America's Next Voice ate catered lunches on taping days, and where, tomorrow, somebody important would sit.
Studio A was last on the route, because Studio A was where she slowed down.
She was not supposed to slow down. The route had been timed by somebody in operations, and Studio A had been allotted eleven minutes: trash, floor, seats if needed, out. But there was something about the big room at night — the raked rows of audience seats rising into the dark, the stage washed in the pale spill of the work lights, the set's glitter gone cheap-looking up close — that made eleven minutes feel like a lie somebody else had told. She did the work. She just did it at the speed of a person, not a ghost.
The stage floor was wide and black and sheened with the scuff of a thousand rehearsals. She filled the bucket at the utility sink, added the measure of solution by eye, and pushed the mop out in long strokes, walking backward.
The room had acoustics; empty at night, Studio A carried sound like a church carries a prayer — up, and out, and into every corner at once.
Tessa did not sing. She hadn't sung — really sung, in front of anyone, with the whole of it — in three years. But some nights, on the stage, with the work lights making a little island of the floor, her throat would do what it had done since she was fourteen. A hum, low, under the breath. Not a performance. Not even a decision. The hum of a woman pushing a mop in an empty room at 2:00 in the morning, in the one place in her working life where nobody ever asked her what the noise was.
But Craig Palmer was gone home by six, and the night belonged to the ghost, and the ghost had a route, and the route had a stage. She mopped, and the bucket water grayed, and the seats rose up empty into the dark.
At 5:40 she emptied the bucket, rinsed it clean, set the cart in its slot with the bottles squared away. At 5:55 she was in the locker room changing out of the gray uniform. At 6:00 the time clock took her badge again without looking, and punched it, and gave it back.
Outside, the Atlanta sky was the color of wet newspaper, and the bus was coming, and Tessa Quinn rode toward home through the waking city, one more ghost clocking out of a building that would be bright and loud and full of voices by nine — none of them hers.