Under the Light (17 page)

Cathy moved to the open arch of the hall doorway, keeping her back away from her daughter. “I don’t like this,” she told Jenny.

“Do you believe spirits can visit us and take over our bodies?”

“Spirits?” Cathy folded her arms. “What kind of spirits?”

“I don’t know.” Jenny came a step closer to her mother and Cathy tensed.

Coward,
I said.
Talk to her. She’s your only child. Her father will never explain anything to her.

“You and Daddy always had answers about stuff like this,” said Jenny. “Angels and visions and the Holy Ghost. That’s why I’m asking. Do you think a spirit was visiting me?”

“Are you talking about an angel?” asked Cathy.

Jenny hesitated. Too long for Cathy’s comfort. “I don’t think so.”

Cathy’s voice turned hard. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” She marched down the hall and at first Jenny followed.

In the corridor Cathy turned on every light she came to. The hall was lit. The overhead light as she walked into her bedroom, the end table lamp. Even the TV across from the bed.

She grabbed the remote, turned on the television, then pressed the volume control until a row of little blue bars grew across the bottom of the screen and the blare of the weather channel surrounded her with a protective wall of noise. For an extra measure, she closed the bedroom door against any conversations about the supernatural.

Jenny stayed in the hall long enough to take two breaths, then went into her own room and closed us in. She sat at her dressing table and stared first at her own face, then at the closet doors behind her in the reflection. The mirrored surface on the doors would normally send her a view of her own back and of her face in the vanity’s glass, but the closet was half opened, the mirror not showing.

I moved into her line of sight. Something in the backwards reflection, in the space where I stood, captured her attention. She drew a tissue from the box on her dressing table, leaned forward, and rubbed at the glass—I wondered if she could see some vague form of my specter and mistook it for a smudge.

Feeling bold, I glided in front of her, facing the reflection, and lowered myself until my eyes lined up with hers. She was seeing herself
through me.
I didn’t mean to scare her—I wanted to be acknowledged—but she must have seen some wisp of me, for she drew in her breath and lurched back from the table.

She darted to the door and I thought she would flee the room, but instead her gaze fell to the library books on the desk next to her, the ones that used to be in her school bag. She snatched up the top one from the stack,
Jane Eyre,
and sat down on the floor right where she was. After one unsteady breath, she let the book fall open across her knees. I had been frustrated the night before by my sometimes successful, often failed attempts to speak to her through the printed word, but I decided to try again.

I had taken control of her hand to touch Mr. Brown when we came upon him in the high school hallway. But that was a frightening, awkward ordeal. I tried to remember how I had taken gentle control of James’s hand when we wrote together at the back of Mr. Brown’s classroom. I had relaxed him. So now I rested my hand on Jenny’s back, then I slid my palm down her arm from shoulder to wrist. She shuddered for a moment, then let me move her hand, my fingers wrapped around hers, pointing her index finger where I willed it.

I scanned the page and quickly chose a phrase I hoped would express my difficulty in communicating with Jenny:
I could not very well understand her.

Jenny gasped, but did not pull away from my influence. She whispered, “More.”

I helped her turn several pages and chose the line:
my eyes sought Helen.

“Helen,” she whispered, her voice thinned with awe. “Why did you take my body?”

I went ahead to another page, chose another phrase:
I must love him.

“Why did you
leave
my body?” she asked.

I folded over a few chapters of the book and from the page I found I pointed to the words
something not right.

“Why are you still here?” she wanted to know.

I turned a few pages farther along:
to comfort you, as well as I could.

Then I skipped forward several more pages and showed her:
I am here; and it is my intention to stay till I see how you get on.

In a jarring trill, the phone rang, the sound rolling through the halls. I couldn’t remember how many phones Jenny’s family had. Three? Four? They all cried at once.

The spell was apparently broken. Jenny listened toward the hall for a moment—the sound stopped in the middle of the second ring—and Jenny put her hand into the book again, but she wouldn’t let me control her now. She sighed and left the book on the floor. She went to the bed and lay on her side, scanned the room, then asked, “Are you still here?

I tried speaking the word, but she couldn’t hear me, even when I shouted it. I tried flickering the lamp, then moving the curtain, but nothing worked. Finally I sat beside her and tapped her shoulder. Nothing. I tapped the back of her hand and she jumped.

She looked frightened at first, but then she lay her hand on the bedspread palm down, offering it to me. I drew a
Y
for the word
yes
on her skin and she shivered.

“Yes?” she asked. I wrote the
Y
again.

“Is your name Mary?” she asked with half a smile.

I wrote an
N
for “no.” She gave a small sound of surprise.

“Is your name Helen?” she asked.

I drew the
Y
again. Jenny closed her eyes for a moment and took a slow breath, in and out, before asking, “Are you an angel?”

I indicated that no, I was not.

Jenny’s smile dropped. “You aren’t evil, are you?”

Well, I was not without sin—I wasn’t sure how to answer. Finally I told her no.

“A ghost?” she asked.

Yes—I told her twice.

To test me again, I suppose, she asked, “Your name is Sarah, right?”

No,
I indicated, and then along her arm I wrote with my finger in block letters as if I were a child practicing at a chalkboard: H E L E N. Jenny shuddered again and let out a breath as if she was chilled.

“Wow,” she whispered. “Helen is here to comfort me.”

Y
for
yes.

“Did you drown?”

Yes.

Perhaps my finger was cold on her skin, for she pulled the covers over her legs and wrapped her free arm around her waist. The other stayed on the bed, waiting for my answers.

“Why do you care how I feel?” she asked. “My father doesn’t—he hates me. I don’t even think my mother likes me very much.”

Silly girl,
I said aloud, but she couldn’t hear me.
Of course I care for you.

“And Billy used to like me,” she said. “But I ruined that.”

I wrote on the back of her hand:
N.

“I did,” she insisted. “I don’t think he wants to see me again. I hurt his feelings.”

I was about to draw a heart on the back of her hand, but she asked another question: “Where is your sweetheart?”

Up her arm I spelled
heaven.

“He must miss you,” she said, which froze me for a moment. How awful if he was missing me, but how much worse if he was not. Could she have sensed my worry? She drew a
Y
for
yes
on the back of her own hand as she said, “Yes, he does.”

Then she sat up with a new idea. “Do you know about a boy I met when I was away from my body?”

She held her hand out in midair and I wrote,
N
for
no.
I had no way of knowing what people, ghosts, angels, or other kinds of creatures she might have visited.

She nodded, trying not to look disappointed. “Maybe I dreamed him.” She lay back down and thought for a moment while I sat on the corner of the mattress. Finally she said, “There’s no one else to talk to. Will you talk to me?”

Yes,
I told her.

“If I have a nightmare, will you come to me?”

Yes.

“If I can’t go back to sleep, will you stay with me?”

Yes, yes.

“If I’m lost and I call you, will you come help me?”

Yes.
I wrote on her arm,
Love.

“Billy doesn’t like me anymore,” she repeated. Tears rose in her eyes.

No,
I told her, but gently she shook her head.

“He told me to leave,” said Jenny. “I didn’t even say goodbye.”

I lay my palm on the top of her head and to my surprise, she fell asleep, with the blankets folded across her legs and her pale hand spread out on the bed.

When I had first become Jenny I had been terrified by the sound, but now the rushing water no longer reminded me of death. The shower shut off, Jenny toweled herself dry and rubbed her hair until it stopped dripping. I wondered if she had forgotten about me—she hadn’t addressed me since her nap. All through dinner and the doing of dishes, nothing indicated she was listening for me or wondering where I was. Now she slipped her nightgown over her head, brushed her teeth. I wished I could help her comb out her hair, as I had with my own girl on my knee, but my hand went through the brush.

Jenny chose a comb instead and began to untangle her wet hair. When she paused, I did not know what she was thinking. She didn’t seem alarmed in any way, and neither did she speak to me. She matter-of-factly drew a tampon from a box under the sink. At first this seemed mundane—I had lived with my last host and his wife for long enough to find the concept ordinary. But when Jenny had applied it and dropped the wrappings in the trash basket, she dropped a tissue into the toilet—before it was flushed away I caught sight of blood.

Pain weighty as a brick fell through me. I remembered now that when James and I were in Billy’s and Jenny’s bodies we might have created a child. Of course I would not have wanted Jenny to conceive out of wedlock and at such a young age, but I caught myself on the edge of the tub and wept. Jenny stood again at the bathroom mirror, staring at herself until the comb clattered into the basin. She clutched the counter and began to shake—she lowered herself onto the floor near me as the tears came.

CHAPTER 23

I
WANTED TO REACH FOR HER,
but I was too weak.

Almost at once Cathy was in the doorway, gaping at her daughter. Jenny’s cries were hoarse and childlike—her sobs rattled in my own chest.

“What happened?” Cathy demanded.

Jenny couldn’t speak at first. Cathy lowered the lid of the toilet and helped her to sit there. Finally Jenny spoke.

“I’m bleeding.”

“Where?”

“My period,” she told her.

The girl was grieving. But Cathy didn’t embrace her. So I knelt beside Jenny and wrapped my arms around her. We wept together while Cathy hovered, practically twitching with nerves.

“What’s sad about that?” asked Cathy.

“I lost the baby,” Jenny cried.

I know,
I whispered.

“What?” Cathy made an exasperated click of her tongue.

“It’s gone and they’ll never be back,” said Jenny.

It’s not your fault,
I said.
Hush now.

“What baby?” Cathy asked. “
Who
will never be back?”

“I’m sorry,” Jenny told me. She held her stomach as I stroked her hair.

Cathy’s tone was stern. “Jennifer Ann, you were not pregnant.”

“I don’t know if it was a boy or a girl,” Jenny sobbed.

It was a little girl,
I told her.

“That’s absurd.” Cathy stormed out of the room. How shocking to desert her child that way.

I leaned my head against Jenny’s and rocked her.
There’s nothing to be done,
I told her, and I meant to be comforting, but I couldn’t help imagining what it would have been like if my baby girl had died when she was a newborn. I saw her tiny head in the cradle, her rose-gold fuzzy hair when she was only a few days old—I imagined her skin snow white and my hand lowering to her cheek and finding it ice-cold.

I gasped at the idea. Jenny cried out as if she had been struck, and the tears flowed anew.

Cathy stomped back into the bathroom as if the girl’s grief were a personal insult. She had something in her hand. “Look, your period is supposed to start now. See?”

It was the chart from Jenny’s desk, the calendar marked with a red dot on each day that Jenny had her period and a red circle when it would probably start the next month. Jenny gulped in air and blinked at the red circle on tomorrow’s date.

“Now can we stop this nonsense?” asked Cathy.

“I know she was a real baby,” Jenny said.

She was,
I whispered, angry at Cathy for being so dismissive. Of course she was real. I could see the baby’s lopsided grin and feel her chubby fingers clutching at my clothes and hair.

“I was supposed to keep her safe,” Jenny insisted.

“Her?” Cathy felt Jenny’s forehead for fever, but she did it with such a lack of sympathy that I tried to swat the woman’s hand away. “There is no
her,
” Cathy sighed.

“She would have looked like him,” Jenny cried.

My heart ached at this. She would have looked like James, this baby girl who was not to be.

“Heaven forbid,” Cathy whispered. Jenny didn’t seem to hear, but I flew up and tried to shove Cathy out of the room. The woman jumped as if a bee had flown in her face. She searched the air but could not see who or what had attacked her, I supposed.

“Honestly, Jennifer,” said her mother. “Do you think the doctors would miss something like that when they examined you and did all those tests?”

These words gave me pause. As soon as I let go of Jenny, the girl took in a long breath. The tears stopped.

“You don’t want to have that boy’s baby, do you?” Cathy asked.

Jenny blinked and rubbed her eyes dry with her nightgown sleeves. I was taken aback by how suddenly she’d stopped crying. The idea struck me that Jenny had never been pregnant. It was only a thought, a possibility that came to me just before I left her body.