Under the Light (11 page)

She crept back into the living room, where Cathy joined her, wearing pajamas under a long sweater and her hair wet around the edges. It was rare to see the woman dressed so informally. And without makeup she looked young and lost.

They watched television, a concert of Christian music that Cathy said Jenny could stay up for if she wanted to; a baritone sang a gospel song older even than I was, a full choir performed an arrangement of “God Bless America,” a boy’s chorus sang “This Little Light of Mine.” Cathy held a cup of tea she never drank—her eyes were focused not on the television screen but at the floor below it. Jenny didn’t seem to be watching the program either, except that one of the advertisements made her sit up straight.

It was a commercial for a credit card that would, it was implied, be accepted anywhere on the planet. A montage of famous places was accompanied by romantic strains of cellos and oboes. The Great Sphynix in Egypt, a white beach and blue lagoon in Greece, the Lincoln Memorial, the Taj Mahal, the Golden Gate Bridge, Big Ben, the Great Wall of China, the Eiffel Tower.

Jenny stood up. “I’m going to bed.” Perhaps on other nights she might have asked permission to go to her room, but this evening she turned without saying good night to her mother and walked out of the room and down the hall. Cathy seemed not to notice.

I followed Jenny into her room, where she closed the door. She walked to her bed, but instead of sitting or lying down, she crouched beside it on the floor and began to cry as if her heart had been shattered. She reached up and took one of the pillows off her bed, holding it to her face.

I sat on the rug beside her and tried to stroke her hair or rub her back, but I was having trouble keeping my spectral body together. I felt nervous and vaporous. With each of Jenny’s sobs I shifted in the air, a little closer, now away, like a cloud of gnats.

“Hush,” I whispered. “Poor thing.”

She cried into the pillow until I thought she might become ill.

“Get into bed now,” I told her.

After a few moments she took a hitching breath and crawled up onto her mattress, still clutching the pillow.

“Rest your head and I’ll sing you a song,” I whispered. I was relieved that she seemed to be sensing my message—by and by she stretched out and put the pillow under her head, wiped her eyes on her sleeves, and gave a heavy sigh.

I sang a folk song I’d sung to my own little girl a hundred times—the one about the rolling river. Soon Jenny’s eyes were closed and her breaths came smooth and far between. Tears had dried on her face in delicate salt lines. Her hair fanned out on one side of the pillow.

“Why are you sad?” I asked her.

I didn’t expect her to answer, but from her throat came the faintest sound of question, as if she hadn’t understood me properly. It gave me a thrill to think she might have actually heard my question in her sleep.

“Why were you crying?” I asked.

Then the faintest sound of regret from deep in her dream. And four words, “I used to fly.”

I wanted so for her to say it again so I could be sure I’d heard correctly—she used to fly, and that was sad.

I sat on the edge of her bed all night long, but she didn’t speak again. After watching her in silence for a time, I decided to slip back to heaven and tell James that I had finally spoken with Jenny. To tell him that from now on I was sure it would be easy to talk to her. I was certain I could visit James and be back before Jenny woke up in the morning.

I thought about the last place I’d seen James, in a shaded wood beside a clover-covered tree trunk. I pictured the quality of light, the scent of damp earth, the piano music, a lilting melody, a folk song I couldn’t place, sweet even in its minor keys.

And in the same way it happened when I neared Jenny, as I closed in on heaven everything in front of me thinned into converging lines. Jenny’s bedroom and the garden outside her window and the hills beyond her neighborhood flattened like a sketch of themselves drawn on a sheet of paper and contracted into black and white, ink on a blank page, but then it stopped. I couldn’t stretch it any further, and try as I might I couldn’t slide into it between the shadow and the light.

I was frightened for a moment, but fear had not helped me find heaven the first time. Then I was angry—how could God deny me entry when I’d had such a charitable motive for leaving? The truth was, I realized, that I had made a promise to come back to Jenny and be her guardian until the troubles I brought her had been calmed. If I broke my word, it seemed I would not be traveling back to James.

I was trapped in the land of the Quick until I fulfilled my promise to Jenny.

Because I had borrowed Jenny’s body for only six days, and since I had claimed her on a Sunday afternoon, I had never been to church with her family. Now I trailed after mother and daughter into a back pew. Cathy didn’t admit to it, but I believe she made sure we arrived a little late to the church service so that she would not be stopped on the way in and have to answer questions about Jenny’s father leaving.

The sanctuary appeared to make Jenny uncomfortable. Her bones seemed to stiffen, her muscles to contract in a subtle way, as if she were preparing to be struck. Tolerantly she adjusted herself to Cathy’s nagging—pulled her skirt down closer to her knee, tucked a lock of hair behind her ear.

There were things about Jenny’s church that I found familiar—the iron chandeliers were so like the ones from my childhood church, only these were fitted with artificial candles and electric bulbs. The dark wooden pews, worn smooth where a thousand hands had rested, seemed familiar, as well. And the carpets and pew cushions, a maroon brocade made murky with years of wear, bothered me most. Even the most mundane memories, if drawn from a deep-enough well, can chill the heart. The baskets of flowers on either side of the altar in Jenny’s church were almost identical to those at my mother’s funeral—lilies in white wicker. And the carvings on the wooden gate leading up to the altar, they were exactly like ones from my youth. I was unprepared for recollections from my girlhood: candlelit Christmas services, sunny Easters, brooding autumn Sundays when thunder could be heard over the groan of the pump organ. The scents and emotions made me ache, but I cherished them too. I could almost taste the metal cup and feel the icy water of the well in the churchyard, smell the mint that grew below the well stones.

I moved closer to Jenny on the pew. I wanted to cover her like a blanket.

She looked pale, as if she’d been bleached into a faded version of herself. The organist was playing a prelude, a chain of old hymns slowed to a merciless dirge meant to stretch until the Judgment Day, it seemed. As the hymn “This Is My Father’s World” changed into “Leaning on the Everlasting Arm,” I began to see glimpses from my childhood acquaintances scattered through the congregation—a head of ash-colored hair to our left, broad shoulders in a black suit a few rows in front of us, a sharp jaw turning halfway toward me. But these were not my people. My people had been gone for decades, even the babies, grown, withered and cold, dead and in the ground fifty years back or more.

But I am still here,
I thought.
And Jenny is here.

The prelude had finally ceased and the pastor was greeting the congregation and making announcements. The pews were set with paper bulletins every few feet—Jenny took one and stared at the cover, a photograph of a field of gold wheat under a blue sky. Across the curved stalks of grain a line of Scripture was printed in slanted cursive:
The fruit of the Spirit is love
—
Galatians 5:22.

As Jenny studied the picture, the pink began to return to her cheeks. Cathy was reading ahead in the order of service and must have expected the same of her daughter. “Jen,” she whispered.

But Jenny was rubbing the picture of a field with her thumb, tilting it toward the light as if she could not decipher its meaning.

CHAPTER 14

M
Y MOTHER REACHED OVER AND FLIPPED
my bulletin open for me. The organ started up again: “Come Thou Font of Every Blessing.”

I had the feeling that someone was standing in the aisle watching and waiting for me to move over and make room for him or her to sit, but when I looked, there was no one there.

I sat frozen, trying to hold the bulletin still, but it was vibrating. The picture of the empty field meant something—I just hadn’t figured out what it was yet. The picture was vibrating to the rhythm of my heart pounding. It was stupid to feel like someone watching me was unusual—I was in church, so of course people would look at me.

Then the page I held stopped shaking as if an invisible hand had gripped it. The tension pulling gently on the paper from the top was unmistakable. When my mother handed me the hymnal, it ruined the moment. Whatever was holding my bulletin let go.

“Wake up,” my mother whispered, and slipped the order of worship out of my fingers, setting it on the pew as the congregation stood up to sing. I got to my feet and sang along, but I was spooked by the sensation of someone’s breath right beside my shoulder where there was no one standing. If it was a draft, why did it come and go? And it couldn’t really be someone singing—the breath would be hot, and this air was cool.

Then came a pressure on my hand, the one that held up the hymnal. I switched the book to my other hand and flexed those fingers. It was as if static electricity were running through my veins instead of blood. And for no good reason, the skin of that hand smelled like flowers, not lotion or perfume, but fresh flowers.

I wasn’t paying attention to the pastor when he invited the congregation to sit. My mother snapped her fingers and I dropped to the pew, the last one in the room to take a seat. She handed me my bulletin again and tapped the page—we were supposed to be reading along with the prayer, but I couldn’t act like everything was normal. Something unnatural was happening here even if I was the only one who recognized it.

I could see, from the corner of my eye, that there was someone sitting beside me just far back enough so that I couldn’t make out the face. I knew if I turned it would be gone.

Whatever it was, it was communicating without making sound. Maybe I was going crazy, but I was in church—people have had impossible things happen to them in churches for centuries. Maybe this was a miracle, an angel.

Or maybe there was something wrong with my brain—I had amnesia. Maybe now I was having hallucinations.

“What’s wrong?” my mother whispered.

I couldn’t say, “I’m delusional.” I glanced at her and smiled.

As I faced the front of the sanctuary, sure enough, I felt the visitor was still there. I took up the hymnal again, slowly, making sure I didn’t move too quickly. I didn’t want to scare it away. I found the song that the organ was playing in my hymnal. I ran my finger along the line of text I’d heard in my head. Then my eyes wandered to the upper corner of the page where the topics were listed.

Ghost,
it said.

Actually the topic was Holy Ghost, but I felt as if someone was running an invisible finger under the second word.

I had the most bizarre sensations fighting in my chest. What if this wasn’t an angel but a ghost? My heart was going crazy and my stomach was cramping with fear. At the same time, I felt special for being chosen and clever to have figured out how to communicate with this whatever-it-was.

I flipped to the back of the hymnal where the topics were listed. If this was how we could talk, I had questions.

There were dozens of key words to choose from:
comfort, praise, advent, forgiveness, heaven, grace,
and (among others)
the Holy Ghost/Holy Spirit.
I felt my gaze pulled to one of the hymns listed and started turning pages.

My mother frowned at me. “What are you doing?”

“Reading hymns,” I told her. How could she find fault in that?

I found the right page and ran my finger along the lines following that odd little static electricity buzz I’d felt before:
Come, Holy Ghost, for moved by thee the prophets wrote and spoke; Unlock the truth, Thyself the key; unseal the sacred book.

Be moved by me,
someone was saying.
I unseal myself for you.

I was so excited, my face prickled, and my pulse was turning into a trill. On the topics page I chose another hymn that felt like it was chosen for me. I found the page and read the lines that buzzed:
Word of God and inward light, wake my spirit, clear my sight . 
.
 . Kindle every high desire;
perish self in thy pure fire.

Wake to me,
it was saying. It almost seemed as if the word
desire
was being lit by a penlight. I could hardly sit still.

“Jennifer,” my mother hissed at me. “Where’s your bulletin?” The congregation read along with a Scripture lesson in the order of service. My mother lifted the hymnal right out of my hands and flipped it shut, setting it on the pew on the other side of her where I could not reach it.

How humiliating to be treated like a five-year-old,
I thought, but as soon as she looked away, I gently slipped the Bible from the back of the pew in front of me and set it in my lap.

Part of my brain knew everyone had stood up for singing the Doxology, but it was a world away from what was happening to me. I turned to the back of the Bible and found the subject lists. Holding my breath I searched, waiting to be guided.

“What are you doing?” my mother snapped at me.

I didn’t mean to lie, exactly—I just said what I thought she wanted to hear. “I’m reveling in the word of God.”

The offering plates were being passed now, but I had plenty of time before I would have to hand a plate to anyone. This was more important. I was creating a new language with someone or something otherworldly.

I began by running her finger down the subject list, feeling for passages that vibrated—but all I felt was a pressure around my head. I stopped, shut the Bible. Still I felt squeezed. I let go of the Bible and it fell open naturally (or so it seemed) across my lap. The pressure was gone, so I looked into the two pages that had come to me by accident.