TIME TO LET GO

Adam watched from the attic window as a screaming little girl in a green beret and vest went sprinting off the front porch, pigtails flying behind her. "Now that's just uncalled for," he sighed. "I can't believe Lydia's enjoying all this."

"Well, she's got her new friend," Barbara spat from her perch on the attic step. "And her father's gone…she's got everything that she wanted."

His wife had her arms wrapped around her waist, staring at all of their things boxed up in the corner. She looked back at him and pointed. "And we're stuck up here, like prisoners in our own house."

Adam leaned against the window. "This backfired completely. We agreed to that ghost's plan, and that didn't work. We agreed to help Lydia scare her father, and well, he got scared but it wasn't by us, and we wanted our house back and we're stuck up here." He closed his eyes and tapped his head against the window lightly. "We haven't gotten anything that we wanted. Maybe we should just go. Move on, or, or whatever."

Barbara was wandering the attic, running her fingers over the boxes and sheets of things they'd never unpacked before they'd died, and the Deetzes had never gotten around to throwing out or giving away. "Look at this stuff," she said after a moment. "God, it's depressing."

Adam opened one eye and looked at her, confused. "That came out of nowhere. Y-you don't like this stuff? Barbara…this is our stuff." He pushed himself off the wall and came to stand by her, unconsciously avoiding the spot in the floorboards where they'd fallen through.

"It's a shrine to the feelings we've been repressing," Barbara told him.

Adam saw the corner of the crib he'd been painstakingly restoring poking out from under a white sheet. Mixed emotions filled him. "You sound like Elizabeth," he said aloud.

Raucous laughter filtered through the locked attic door, and the two of them froze, silently praying that Beetlejuice kept his distance.

"It's the stuff of our lives," Barbara said, waving at it all. "And all of it's shit."

Adam's jaw dropped. Barbara never swore. "What? Barbara-"

She was pulling something off the shelf. A dusty desk reference for Windows 95. "None of this stuff matters! Books on computer…" She spied something on the floor, half-buried in a box labeled ATTIC. She pulled it out, snorting, and held it out to Adam. "A 'Spin Your Own Yarn Kit? Did you even try this?"

Adam nodded, running a hand through his hair. "It wasn't as much fun as I thought it would be," he admitted.

"Ohhhhh…." Barbara was laughing even as she pulled something else out of the corner, a heavier box. "Home brewed kombucha!" She wrinkled her nose. "Yeah, that tasted like a-"

Adam interrupted her, "We're not kombucha people, we did find that out," he cut in.

"What are we doing, Adam?" Barbara turned to him, gesturing around the room. "We're trapped in the attic and that….thing is down there with Lydia doing God-knows-what…" She threw her arms up in the air. "We have to do something!"

Adam raised an eyebrow. "Whoa. Where's this all coming from?" He frowned. "Barbara…what can we….I mean, we're not exactly-"

Barbara walked over to him, placing her hands on his shoulders. "All I know is I can't spend the rest of our-our afterlife up here in this attic. I don't want to spend the next 125 years or whatever we have left in this house hiding up here, okay?"

Adam brushed a piece of her hair back from her face and tucked it behind her ear. "So, what do you suggest?" he asked with a grin. His wife smiled and put her arms around him.

"I don't know. Maybe something will come to me. Maybe there's something up here we can use…" Barbara flipped her hair over her shoulder with a wide grin, and pulled Adam over into the corner. "You start over here." He bent down and rummaged through the boxes. Half of them he'd never had the chance to unpack. Inside one of them, he found a modelers kit with glue and several different shades of paint. "I didn't even use this," he said. "And somehow I don't think modeling glue is going to chase off that demon." He frowned, setting the kit back in the box. "Barbara, you're right. I think I was hiding." He glanced back at her. "We kept putting things off when we should've just jumped in and done them." Adam pulled her down to sit with him on the floor. "I'm sorry," he confessed.

"For what?" Barbara asked him, concerned at his change in mood.

"We should've just tried again," he whispered. "I made excuses and we kept putting it off and…now you'll never get to experience that." Adam shook his head, looking at the floor. "After we had….when we lost…we ran away and I hid in the attic and…"

"Adam Maitland, knock it off." Barbara put a finger under his chin and made him look at her. "You stop that. It wasn't just you. It takes two people to have a baby, remember. And I'm just as guilty as you of filling my life with other things because I wasn't mentally prepared to try again. I was so scared I'd be a bad mom, or that something would happen again that I threw myself into pottery and gardening and…and…" She shook her head at the sound of shrill shrieks coming from beneath them. "Lydia needs us, Adam. Maybe this was all mean to be, us dying here, her coming here. We need each other."

"But Barbara, Lydia's not ours," Adam argued. "And it doesn't seem like she wants anybody, anymore, she's perfectly happy with that green-haired creep downstairs." He scuffed the floor with his shoe. "Maybe there isn't a place for us here anymore."

"No. Absolutely not, I don't believe that for a second, and I'm not leaving Lydia here with him." Barbara pointed downstairs. She held Adam's chin her hands, slipped her hands down to his shoulders. "No more hiding. We can't ignore that Lydia needs us. Adam, we need to stay. She needs people who won't run away like her father and that weird self-help guru he's sleeping with did. It's like we said before. She needs a friend. She needs someone to know she's being listened to. Someone who knows what it's like…to be invisible."

A thought occurred to Adam, and he turned to grip Barbara's shoulders. "Is that the reason she sees us?" he wondered. "Nobody else can, but Lydia…..Lydia can. Maybe she recognized….we're like her. I mean, she's obviously younger and way smarter and-"

Barbara laughed and he stood up, pacing the floor. "But we spent our lives being invisible, just like she said she was. But she can see us. And we….we see her."

Adam shook his head, looking at his wife. "No. You're right. We can't go. Not until I know….until we know….that she's going to be all right."

Barbara's eyes sparkled. "I love you, Adam Maitland," she said with a smile. She stood up on her tiptoes and wrapped him in a kiss. When they finally broke apart, she looked at him. "Okay. So what are we gonna do about Beetlejuice?"

Adam rolled his eyes. "Maybe we'll get lucky and Charles and Delia will come back with an exorcist for the bio-exorcist."