A Certain Slant of Light (3 page)

  
I longed so to talk to him about this character's name or that
character's motives, about a phrase here that described a river and a word there that described a dying man's eyes. I would fantasize,
as he slept, long conversations we would have if he could see and
hear me—the two of us sipping tea or walking in the country,
laughing together over brilliant ideas. But that would never hap
pen, of course. And so it went, my favorite hour of each day spent
with him and his book, until the writing stopped the day he met
his bride.

  
They saw each other across a lecture hall and met in the door
way as they left. There was an uncomfortable familiarity about it all. The way she smiled at him, the way he was thrilled when she
laughed at his joke, the little excuses each had for touching the
other. Her hand on his arm as she asked a question, his knee
touching hers as they drank coffee at a tiny table in a pub so noisy
they left to take a walk. None of my hosts had lived with a lover.
And I'm ashamed to say I felt jealous when this girl moved into
his life. At first I pretended I disapproved because he'd stopped
working on his novel, but I knew that wasn't the only reason. An
instability clutched me, and I found myself afraid of shadows
and loud noises. I wanted to stop him, but although she had inad
vertently halted his writing, she was undoubtedly making him happy. I wanted to warn her that a man might seem ideal and
then turn cold and distant with no cause, but after all, it was Mr.
Brown she was falling in love with. It would be a lie to argue that
he wasn't worth the risk.

  
And so because I loved him, I let her be, and because I feared
pain, I learned to follow at a distance when they were together. I
felt lonelier than I had ever been with any host, but I tried to love
her as if she were my daughter. She had no quality I could easily
complain about. It would be a sin to whisper discouragement in
his ear. And so they were wed when he was twenty-three and she
twenty-one. I taught myself to ignore the pangs I felt when he
would tickle her while driving in the car or when she would rest her feet in his lap during breakfast. The intimacy hurt because it
wasn't for me. I was Mr. Brown's and he was mine, but not the
way she was his. Not the way he was hers.

  
I taught myself the new rules to survive. Move out of the
room when they kiss, enter the bedroom only when it is silent, cherish my time with Mr. Brown when he is at work. I obeyed
these rules, and one day I was rewarded. Mr. Brown brought out
his old tattered box, put it in his briefcase, and drove us to work
an hour early. For more than a year now, Mr. Brown had been
spending an hour each day, before his first students arrived, work
ing on his novel with me beside him. Feeling inspired by this gift,
I had tried to warm myself to his bride by whispering recipes in
her ear while she was baking cookies or a cake. I thought I was
being as gracious as her own mother might be, until a package
arrived from her grandfather, an album of photographs of Mrs. Brown as a baby. The cub-ear curls of her hair and the dimpled backs of her tender hands bit at me like sleet. I couldn't look at
them, coward that I was. I wasn't her mother. I had chosen Mr.
Brown. And he had chosen her.

Now I was afraid that the rules of my world were changing
again. I had been seen by a human. Sitting on the sloped roof of
Mr. Brown's small house while he and his wife slept and dreamed
below, I studied a crescent moon hung crooked in a plum purple
sky and thought about what it would be like to truly be seen. I
imagined standing before the young man who seemed to see me
and letting him look as long as he wished. How was he doing this? Had he somehow chosen me? I had two strong and seem
ingly contradictory sensations. One was a fear of being seen by a
mortal—as if beheld naked when you know you are clothed. The
other was an almost indescribable sensation of attraction—the
vine curling toward the sun's light in slow but single-minded
longing. I wanted to see him again, to see whether he really was
that rare human who saw what others could not. Nothing was
more disturbing to me, and yet nothing compelled me more.

  
By the next school day, when the same group of students en
tered Mr. Brown's classroom, I deliberately stood in the back cor
ner of the room. I wanted to know whether the boy could see me and not have to wonder whether he was looking through me at a map of the world or a grammar lesson. I stood still as marble in
the far corner between the window frame and the cupboard door.
I remained calm so that nothing, not even a speck of dust on the
floor, would shift from my presence. And I watched the students
enter, one by one, dragging their feet, pushing each other and
laughing, listening to private music with wires in their ears, and
then, finally, the boy with the pale face, moving, almost gliding to
the desk he always sat in, near the back, in the middle.

  
I moved not an inch and waited. The shuffling died down, the murmurs ceased as Mr. Brown began to speak. The boy sat lean
ing back, his long legs in denim stuck out in the aisle, his white
shirt rolled up at the sleeves, shirttail out, his dark green bag of
books lying under the chair. I waited.

  
And then he moved. He let the paper that had just been
passed back to him slip off the desktop on purpose; I was sure it was on purpose. And when he sat up and bent to retrieve it from
the floor, he turned his head and looked back into the corner of
the room where I stood. His eyes met mine for one moment, and
he smiled. I was shocked, shocked again though I had longed for it. He sat back up and pretended to read the page, just as the oth
ers were doing.

  
How is this happening? I thought. He couldn't be as I was,
Light. I had never seen another like myself. I felt that it was im
possible— an instinct told me so. I had never truly believed in
mediums, but perhaps this strange boy was some sort of seer. He
seemed to have no interest at all in sharing his knowledge of my
presence with his fellow classmates or Mr. Brown. It made no
sense, and although I was still nervous and full of longing about
him, now I was also angry. How dare this chimney sweep of a boy
shatter my privacy so matter-of-factly and so completely? What
made it worse was that in that moment when he smiled at me, his face flushed. He looked alive and healthy for the first time. It was
as if he'd stolen something from me. I felt humiliated, for some reason, and I stormed straight out of the room, without looking
back, making a flock of papers flutter off the front row of desks.

Two

I WANTED TO BE FAR AWAY from everything, but that was a lie. It
was only that I felt confused. I had taught myself so carefully
how to be the contented voyeur, and now there was this person
watching me.

  
I stayed close to the classroom, by the trunk of the pepper tree
not five yards from the door, waiting. When, and it seemed like a
year, the door opened at last, and disheveled boys and girls
crowded out of the classroom and away down the path toward other buildings, I hid behind the trunk. Finally he appeared, his
bag over one shoulder, his hair falling over his brow on one side.
My core jittered with inexplicable excitement. The young man
walked alone, head down, toward my tree. He stopped when he was as close to the trunk as the path would allow, but five feet
from me. He didn't look. He smiled, eyes still on the ground, and
after one blushing moment, he began to walk again. I had no
power to stop myself—I followed.

  
As I did, I could feel Mr. Brown behind us, walking, as he of
ten did at this time of day, to the administration building. I felt
an unpleasant tug. A thread snapped, the threat of a tear in my
universe. It was my Familiar pulling at me from one side and my
Mystery from the other. The path forked between school build
ings, and I let Mr. Brown go his way alone. The boy annoyed me
by ducking between the cafeteria and the gymnasium where a
small space was set aside for bins of cans and bottles that would
be recycled. I followed, but I was not happy about it. I halted as
he made to walk directly into the dead end. I was filled with won
der at the idea that perhaps he was going to walk
through
the
wall, but he didn't—he stopped, three feet short of it, and just
stood there.

  
To my own amazement, I marched right up behind him and
spoke. "Can you hear me?"

  
"I have ears, don't I?"

  
I started. What had I expected? "And you see me?" I said.

  
He kept his head low, turning slowly at the shoulders, peering
at me from under a lock of brown hair. He smiled. "Of course."

  
I backed away a step. "What are you?"

  
"Don't you mean, who am I?" He carefully pivoted his body
toward me. An icicle of fear slid down my throat.

  
"Why do you see me?" I hissed. I couldn't help myself. Any
semblance of manners had dissolved in my alarm.

  
"Don't be afraid." He wasn't smiling anymore. He looked
quite concerned.

  
"No!" I felt like scolding him, reminding him that we hadn't been properly introduced. My middle was tingling, as if my Mr.
Brown were traveling out of range. A deep bone pain began to
form in my joints.

  
"Don't speak to me." I looked around me, somehow certain
that every mortal could see me now, but no one else was there.
When I turned back, the boy's eyes held such empathy, I couldn't
bear it. I pushed through the cold and ran from him like a child
spooked by an owl in the night.