Kindred Spirits (14 page)

“I know,” Adam says, “but real life isn’t like the
movies. Sometimes the bad guys win.”

I’m in history class
listening to Mrs. Harris talk about the knights in the Middle Ages when an
announcement comes over the intercom: “Miranda Jasper, report to the office,
please.  Miranda Jasper, report to the office.”

When most kids get called
to the office the other kids in class say, “Ooh!” to joke about somebody getting
in trouble. But nobody says anything when I get up to leave the room.

When
I walk up to the desk of Mrs. Wheeler, the old lady who’s the school secretary,
I say, “Uh...hi. You called me on the intercom.”

She looks up over her
half-glasses which she wears on a chain. She is thinking, “It always makes me
nervous to talk to the little witch girl,” but what she says is, “You’ve got a
phone call, honey.”

“A phone call?” Here my
Sight is failing me. I have no idea who could be calling me unless it’s the person
who called Adam’s mother yesterday. Mrs. Wheeler holds out the receiver, and I
take it and say, “Hello?”

“She came to me last
night.”

It’s a man’s voice, but
it’s soft and shaky, and for a second I have a hard time figuring out who it
is. “Mr. Buchanan?”

“Yes. It was Helen. She
came to me. We...talked. I need to see you today, Miranda. What time can you be
here?”

I’m having a hard time
taking in everything he’s saying... that he and Helen somehow talked, that he
wants to talk to me. “I guess three-thirty is the earliest I could get over
there.”

“All
right...three-thirty.  Bring your friend, too.”

Then there’s a click and
a dial tone. I hand the phone back to Mrs. Wheeler, and I must look strange
because she says, “Are you all right, honey?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I start
back to history class, but I know I’m not going to be paying much attention to
my teacher’s talk about knights and chivalry. What’s going on in the present is
far more interesting.

Back in class,
I slip Adam a note. It says:

OK, this is weird. Mr. Buchanan says
Helen came and talked to him last night. He wants to talk to us today at 3:30.
I know you’re in trouble at home, but can you be there?

There’s
no need for Adam to pass a note back. He just makes eye contact with me, and I
read his thoughts:
Are you kidding? Of course I’ll be there.

Adam is waiting in the
hall outside Mr. Buchanan’s room at 3:25. I’m nervous’ nervous about what Mr.
Buchanan is going to say and nervous that Adam is going to get into even more
trouble for being here with me. “Are you sure it’s okay for you to be doing
this?” I ask.

“Sure I’m sure,” he says.
“I checked in with Dad when I got here, and he slipped me a five and told me to
get a snack in the cafeteria and stay out of trouble.” He grins. “Dad doesn’t
keep anywhere near as close an eye on me as Mom thinks he does.”

“Well, I’m not sure what
you’re about to do is exactly staying out of trouble.”

Adam shrugs. “Dad likes
me to keep the patients company when they’re lonely. And Mr. Buchanan did
invite us.”

“That’s true.” I look at
the clock on the wall. “Are you ready?”

“Unless he’s got a gun
hidden under his pillow, I’m ready for him.”

I
smile, but Adam’s words haven’t done much to settle my nerves. I knock lightly
on Mr. Buchanan’s propped-open door.

“Children,” he says.
“Come in.” He is propped up in bed, looking even thinner and paler than the
last time we saw him. “Miranda.” He looks at me, and like always, I feel the
pain he has caused other people rip through me. “Will you get me some water
from that pitcher, please?”

“Yessir.” I pour the
water from the plastic pitcher and hold the cup while he sucks through a straw.

“Thank you,” he says, out
of breath. “I’m glad you two got here on time, children. We have another visitor
who’s coming in about fifteen minutes, but I’ve got a lot to tell you before he
gets here...things that only the two of you would believe.” He lets out a
hollow cough, then says, “Why don’t you pull up some chairs and sit next to my
bed? I don’t have the strength to talk loud, so it’s better if you’re close.”

“Yessir.” Adam and I
scoot chairs up to Mr. Buchanan’s bed and sit down so close we’re almost
touching him. The feeling of death that surrounds him makes me sick and
dizzy’both the deaths he has caused and his own approaching death, which hangs
over his head like a poison black cloud.

“Last night,” Mr.
Buchanan says, “I was lying in bed awake, as usual. Since I found out I’m
dying, I’ve had a hard time sleeping. It’s almost as if my body knows it’s
heading toward eternal sleep, so it wants to stay awake for as long as possible
before that happens.”

“Yessir,” I say because
he’s stopped to take a breath.

“So,” Mr. Buchanan continues, “there I was, awake. want to make
it clear I was awake so you’ll know I wasn’t dreaming. And then I heard
somebody come into the room. I figured it was the nurse coming in to check my
blood pressure or some such. It’s a wonder anybody gets any sleep in a
hospital, as many nurses as they send in at night to pester you.” He stares off
in the distance for a second. “But when I turned my head to see who it was, it
wasn’t a nurse at all. It was Helen.” His voice is shaky, and his eyes are wet.
“The smell of her perfume filled the air, and there she was, looking just like
she’d looked in 1934...in that blue dotted dress I’d always liked, her soft
brown curls like a little cap on her head, those pretty blue eyes looking at me
through her glasses...looking at me like she was looking through me, just like
she used to all those years ago. She walked right up to the side of my bed,
said ‘Harold,’ and then she reached out and stroked my hair. It felt...not like
somebody’s hand, but like...like’”

“A
cool breeze blowing through your hair,” I say, thinking of Abigail.

He looks surprised. “Yes.
Yes, exactly like that. She said she’d come to tell me that the letter was
real...that she’d written it herself through you. But you should have known it
was real in the first place,’ she said, ‘unless you’ve forgotten my handwriting
and my perfume?’ I told her I hadn’t forgotten, and she smiled and said she
hadn’t forgotten anything about me either. But the way she said it, I could
tell she was remembering the bad as well as the good. I told her I wished she
could forget some things, and she shook her head and said that she couldn’t
forget, but she could forgive. ‘But,’ she said, ‘I can only forgive you if you
make a full confession.’

Mr. Buchanan closes his
eyes for a second, like he’s lost in a memory. When he starts talking again,
it’s almost like he’s in a trance. “She stroked my hair again, then said, ‘Take
my hand, Harold. I want you to feel something.’ I took her hand, and my hand
was surrounded by coolness. Then a wave of pain washed over me. But pain is too
weak a word to describe it. It hurt more than cancer, more than any pain you
could ever imagine. My body was in agony, but my body and mind felt even worse
like I was alone and betrayed. This is when I die, I thought. I have to die now
because nobody can be in this much pain and live. But then she let go of my
hand, and that second the pain was gone.

“What
was that?” I said, wiping tears from my eyes. She said, ‘Do you remember back
in school, when I taught you about fractions?’ I said I remembered a little
about fractions, yes.

She said, “Well, here’s a
fraction for you: the pain that you just felt was one-one millionth of the pain
you caused the day Mildred and I died. And the worst pain wasn’t even Mildred’s
and mine that was over in seconds. Charlie’s pain went on for years and
years...it’s still going on today.’ She said, ‘Harold, I beg you to make amends
before it’s too late. You’ll only cause more pain to yourself and others if you
don’t.’ Then she told me she loved me and leaned in to kiss me. I closed my
eyes to kiss her back. I felt a cool breeze on my lips, and when I opened my
eyes, she was gone.”

He is quiet for a few
seconds, then he says, “So the letter wasn’t a prank, was it?”

“No, sir,” I say.

“Did you see her when you
wrote it?” Mr. Buchanan asks me.

“No, sir. I didn’t see
her or anything else. It was like I wasn’t even there.”

“I watched her write the
letter,” Adam says. “She wrote the whole thing with her eyes closed. It was
freaky.”

Harold shakes his head.
“I never thought such things were possible.”

“Granny always says
there’s a lot more going on in the world than most people realize,” I tell him.
“People just don’t open up their eyes to see it.”

“Yes,”
Harold says. “I suppose that’s true.” He breathes a tired sigh. “And that’s
what I wanted to tell you before our other guest gets here. I knew that if I
tried to tell him that part of the story, he wouldn’t believe it or anything
else I told him. He’d think I was just a sick old man whose mind had turned to
jelly. Miranda, may I have another drink of water?”

“Of course.” I hold the
cup for him. He drinks a few swallows, then stops when another visitor walks up
to the door. When I see who it is, I almost spill the cup.

Tom Franklin, the sheriff
of Wilder County, waddles through the door. He’s dressed in his tan uniform
(which must be in extra-extra-extra large size), but he holds his hat in his
hands.

Adam looks at the
sheriff’s badge, then looks at me, his mouth hanging open.

“Howdy, Mr. B. You was
wanting to talk to me?” Sheriff Franklin sounds friendly but a little confused
about why he’s been called here.

“Yes, Tom, thank you for
coming,” Mr. Buchanan says. “There’s something I need to tell you...and these
children. Why don’t you have a seat?”

“Well...all right.” The
sheriff sounds puzzled, but sits down like he’s been asked to.

“Adam,” Mr. Buchanan
says, “there’s a tape recorder on the bedside table. Will you hit the record
button, please? I think Tom might like to have a record of this conversation.”

Adam hits the record
button.

“So, Tom,” Mr. Buchanan
says, almost cheerfully, “have you ever heard of what’s called a deathbed
confession?”

“Yessir,”
the sheriff says. “I’ve heard of something like that.”

“Well,” Mr. Buchanan
says, “what you’re about to hear is a deathbed confession. Many years ago...many
years before you were even born, Tom, back when your daddy was still a baby...I
did something very wrong.” He stops to catch his breath for a second, then
says, “I did something very wrong, and I’ve never admitted it until now. But my
time in the world is not long, and I can’t die with this black spot on my
conscience.”

“Well, then, Mr.
Buchanan,” the sheriff says kindly, “you tell me what you want to tell me.”

“The Trojan War was
started because of a woman named Helen,” Mr. Buchanan says. “And the war I’ve
been fighting inside myself for seventy years was also caused by a woman named
Helen.  Helen Jameson.”

Sheriff Bailey scoots to
the edge of his seat. “You mean Helen Jameson like the Jameson sisters?”

“Yes, that Helen Jameson.
She and I”’ He looks at Adam and me “loved each other.”

“Hm,” Sheriff Franklin
says, “wasn’t she a quite a bit older than you?”

“Yes.” Mr. Buchanan is
smiling, but it’s a sad kind of smile. “There were fifteen years between us,
and that was one of our biggest problems. It didn’t bother either of us, but we
knew it would be a problem in town. I had been Helen’s student once upon a
time, although our romance didn’t start until the summer after I graduated from
high school. Even so, Helen knew that if word got out about her seeing a young
man who had once been her student, she’d lose her job. People back then
probably would have accepted a male teacher seeing a young woman who had once
been his student, but a schoolmarm with an eighteenyear-old boy?  It would
have been a scandal.”

Sheriff
Franklin smooths his moustache. “I reckon so. I’ve known lesser things than
that to set jaws to flapping in this town.”

“Exactly,” Mr. Buchanan
says. “And then, too, we had my ambitions to consider. My daddy was on the city
council and wanted me to follow in his footsteps and maybe even move on to a
position in the state or national government. I had graduated at the top of my
high school class and had been awarded a full scholarship to UK. My future was
rolled out in front of me like a red carpet. Miranda, another sip of water,
please.”

He sips, then says, “But
Helen was my secret. From my parents, from my friends. Nobody knew about us
because we would both have too much to lose if anybody found out. And yet our
hearts belonged to each other. After many serious talks we decided that I
should go off to UK and that we would write each other every day. Then after I
graduated from college, I would come back to Wilder, a grown man of twenty-two,
and then Helen and I could start seeing each other publicly. After a few months
of letting the town get used to us as a couple, we would get married. That was
the plan.”

“But something got in the
way of your plan?” the sheriff asks.

“Someone, actually,” Mr.
Buchanan says. “Mildred. Helen’s sister.”

I remember Abigail’s
nickname for Mildred: Mil-dread. And I remember Granny saying Helen was always
sweet, but Mildred was always sour. “I heard,” I say, “that Mildred was kind of
hard to get along with.”

To my surprise, Mr.
Buchanan laughs. “Well, honey, whoever described her to you that way was being
awfully polite. I’ve never seen two family members as opposite as Helen and
Mildred Jameson. It was like Helen was everything I ever loved, and Mildred was
everything I ever—” He stops before he finishes the sentence, then finally
says, “Mildred was hard to get along with.”

“Was
she mean?” Adam asks.