The Book of Illumination (24 page)

Besides, people sometimes surprise me, often when I least expect it. I’ll psych myself up for the big revelation, and the matter-of-fact response will be, “Oh, yeah? I saw a ghost once.”

“What?” he said, squeezing my hand.

“Um.” Yikes.

“What is it?” he asked kindly.

“Okay, okay.” I took a deep breath. “There’s something I should tell you about myself. You see, I …”

I immediately knew that I shouldn’t have opened my mouth. This was a very bad idea. I shook my head. “Never mind,” I said.

“What?” he pressed. “What is it?”

I sighed. “It’s nothing, really.”

“If it’s nothing, then why won’t you tell me?”

“Because—”

“Because why?” he asked.

“Because … you’ll think I’m crazy.”

“No I won’t.”

“You will. Trust me.”

He smiled. “Let me guess. You … are secretly …a … spy!”

“No.”

“You are not really … a girl.”

I smiled. “Arrgh!” I said, mad at myself for having cracked opened the door. “All right, all right.” I took one more deep breath before I whispered, “I can see ghosts. And talk to them. Always could. Since I was … little.”

There. It was out. He gave me a wry, tilted look, one indicating that he might be waiting for the punch line of this queer little joke.

I shrugged. “That’s it. The woman who lives here isn’t really a friend of mine, she’s a friend of … this ghost I know.”

“This ghost you know,” he said dryly.

I nodded. “He’s—was—a butler. He hasn’t crossed over yet—because he wants to find the deed to a house in Wales. It’s in a book that this woman might have. I’m trying to help find it.”

Not elegant, my explanation, but as simple and clear as I could make it. Those were the facts.

He looked dazed and puzzled, as though he knew he was intellectually capable of filling in the missing piece here, he just couldn’t get the facts to line up.

So I threw some more at him, hoping his frown would begin to loosen up.

“His name was John Grady. He was Irish.”

“Who?” Julian asked.

“The ghost.”

His expression said,
I was afraid of that.

“He and his wife—,” I started.

“This …
ghost’s
wife?”

I nodded, but I could already hear disbelief in his voice. Which is fine, really. It doesn’t offend me. People either believe me or they don’t. I don’t care one way or the other, frankly. I’m not sure
I
would believe me if I were in their shoes. Someone points to a purple elephant in the sky, and you can’t see it? For you, it’s not there—it doesn’t exist. That’s how we’re taught to
make sense of the physical world: playing peekaboo with our mothers, learning that our stuffed bear hasn’t really vanished into thin air. What’s
real
can’t become invisible—it’s just hidden behind Mama’s back. Can’t find your other shoe? Keep looking. It exists. It’s somewhere. What’s actual doesn’t just vanish.

The converse, of course, we also learn: if you can’t see it, or touch it, or hear it yourself, it isn’t real.

I can easily pull a ghost, like a well-loved teddy bear, from behind my back, if someone is open-minded and will give me a chance. But most people close right down: they’re threatened, they’re scared, what I say just flips them out. I understand that, and experience has taught me I have to respect it. When I see that steel door coming down behind someone’s eyes, it’s usually best for me to back off.

But today, I didn’t want to back off. I wanted Julian to find this fascinating. I wanted him to think it was the most interesting thing he’d ever heard, and that I was the most captivating woman he had ever met, so I persisted.

“Come in with me,” I said. ‘There’s no reason to be afraid.”

“I’m not
afraid,”
he scoffed. There was a tone in his voice that I hadn’t heard before. A dismissive edge, as though he were thinking he
should have known
something was wrong with me.

“It’ll make more sense inside. I can show you—”

“No.” He cut me off. His expression had hardened. “I’ll wait here, if it’s all the same to you.” He tried to soften the effect of his words with a smile, but it was a cool, distant smile. “Have a walk around, perhaps.”

For now, anyway, it appeared that the subject was closed.

“Sure; great!” I said, way too cheerfully. “I won’t be long.”

“Suit yourself,” he said.

As Johnny had predicted, Esther had no trouble believing the story I told her. I had not telephoned ahead, both because I hadn’t had time and because I hadn’t wanted to give Esther the chance to blow me off over the phone. Winning her confidence as I stood on her doorstep was going to be the trickiest part, I knew, so I’d asked Johnny for some details I could use to gain Esther’s trust, facts I couldn’t possibly know unless they’d been imparted to me by someone in the household. Or the ghost of someone in the household.

I did a quick tap dance when she answered my knock. She was tall and lanky like her sister, but the skin on her face and hands was roughened by sun and country living. Before she could gather her wits—or slam the door in my face—I launched into the story of how she had broken her mother’s Limoges sugar bowl in the bathtub, where it was sailing Lulu, Esther’s stuffed chick, to China. I identified her favorite flavor of ice cream, at least her childhood favorite—peppermint stick. I reminded her of how she’d broken her wrist at her first riding lesson, after she kicked the chestnut mare into a trot while the instructor’s back was turned. And all through her childhood, I said, she’d had an “imaginary playmate” named Millie.

Imaginary playmates are ghosts. They’re usually the ghosts of children who have died, and who remain connected to the homes in which other children now live.

At the mention of Millie, Esther’s eyes filled up with tears and she swept me quickly into her kitchen.

Millie, she explained as she put on the kettle for tea, was a little girl who’d lived in their house on Commonwealth Avenue and died in the influenza epidemic of
1918.
Esther’s bedroom had once belonged to Millie, who’d just turned eight when she succumbed to the flu. Esther had only pieced this together a few
years ago, when she’d done some research on the previous owners of her former home.

It was Millie who’d taught Esther to tie her shoes, and not Josie, who took the credit. Millie had been central to Esther’s life for as long as Esther could remember; she even remembered looking through the bars of her crib and seeing Millie rocking in the chair.

“I’m sure you did,” I said. “That’s not unusual.”

“No one believed me,” she said.

“That’s not unusual, either, unfortunately,” I responded.

“One day when I was—I think I was seven—she just disappeared. By then I had figured out that she was a … spirit of some kind, because as I got older, she stayed the same age. We began to argue as we got closer and closer in age, the way sisters do. Then one day, when I came home from school, she was gone. Just
gone
. We’d had a silly fight that morning and, well, I never saw her again. I was devastated. It was like having a sister die.” She looked at me appealingly. “Do you know why she left?” she asked. “Do you know where she is?”

I shook my head.

“You can’t …talk to her?”

“I don’t have that gift,” I admitted. “I’m not a medium. Once a spirit crosses over, they’re lost to me, too.”

She nodded sadly. “But you
can
talk to Mr. Grady.”

“Yes, because he’s still here. He says he’s sorry, by the way.”

“For what?” she asked.

“For not believing you. About Millie.”

A fond, faraway look came over her face. “Oh, it’s not his fault. He was always a sweetheart.”

“He still is,” I said.

We quickly combed the shelves and boxes holding Esther’s
books. Fifteen or twenty minutes after I’d left him sitting in the car, I stepped outside to inform Julian that I was nearly finished, but he wasn’t anywhere to be seen. With any luck, he was having a lovely ramble around the spacious grounds, forgetting he’d just decided I had a screw loose.

As we descended the stairs from the attic, where we had just gone through the last of the boxes, Esther said, “I can picture it so clearly. The cover had children playing ring-around-the-rosy under an apple tree. And all around the tree were butterflies.” She smiled at the memory. “Josie must have it. Of the two of us, she was more of a reader. I was the one with Play-Doh and pastels.”

“Why would he think
you
had it?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I did love it.” She paused, lost in thought for a moment. “I think I reminded him of my mother—I have her hair and eyes.”

“That makes sense,” I said.

“And he’s sure the deed is in there?”

“He seems to think so.”

“Funny place to put it. And why in the world would he have bought a cottage in Wales?”

“I’m not sure.” I paused on the front porch, glancing around to see if Julian had returned. I saw him coming over a rise in the distance, slowly making his way toward the house.

“I’ll call Josie,” Esther said.

Better you than me
, I thought, remembering the tantrum I’d witnessed last night.

“That would be great,” I said. “Do you think there’s a chance she has it?”

“Oh, sure. There’s a good chance. Of the three of us, she’s the most sentimental about … certain things.”

I could believe this. I’d seen frightening evidence of her sentimental attachments.

“Can I ask you one thing?” Esther said.

“Sure.”

“If I do find it, can I come with you? When you give it to Mr. Grady. I’d give anything in the world to talk to him again.”

“Oh yeah, sure,” I said. “You won’t to able to … talk to him yourself.”

“Oh I
know
. But I could just—”

“He’ll be able to hear you, and I can tell you what he says.”

Esther’s eyes immediately filled up. “Thank you,” she whispered.

“You’re welcome,” I said, and we embraced. She was shaking with emotion, but she quickly pulled herself together and smiled.

“Tell him it wasn’t me who broke the sugar bowl,” she said. “It was Millie.”

Dinner was …weird. Had Esther and I managed to turn up the deed, I might have been able to show it to Julian as some kind of proof. Not proof, certainly, that I could communicate with earthbound spirits, much less evidence that ghosts exist. But merely as a concrete object to lend veracity to my claim that I’d come here with a simple, specific goal: to pick up something for a friend.

“We couldn’t find it,” I’d explained.

“Ah,” Julian had said, concentrating on his driving. “That’s too bad.”

“Before he died, he tucked it into a book of poems, and, well, the book has disappeared.” I immediately regretted using the world
disappeared
, which edged us uncomfortably close to the language of the supernatural. I’d intended to steer the conversation clear of anything to do with the realm of the mystical, but I tend to jump in to end awkward silences.

“Not
disappeared,”
I went on self-consciously, drawing even more attention to the very territory I had hoped to avoid. “It’s probably at her sister’s. Esther’s sister’s.” Then, because Julian was showing no interest whatsoever in following my narrative, I sputtered on nervously, like a car running out of gas.

“The woman who lives here. The artist.”

“Yes. The egg sculptures. I saw one of them.”

Phew!
I thought, grateful for the prospect of another subject of conversation.

“How were the grounds?” I asked. “They looked beautiful.”

“Very nice.”

It went on like this, in fits and awkward starts, until we were well into a bottle of wine and halfway through our steak Diane (Julian) and striped bass with succotash (me).

“You never really told me why you don’t believe in a Book of Kildare,” I said.

“You never really asked,” he answered, but not with this afternoon’s sarcasm. He poured me another glass of wine, then drained the bottle into his own goblet. He had a sip and sat back.

“Of course I didn’t actually examine it,” he began.