A Certain Slant of Light (7 page)

  
The afternoon sun slanted warm on his face like firelight. He
wasn't breathing at all now. I placed my other hand on his shoul
der and stroked his right arm from the top down toward his hand,
willing him to relax. He let me draw the tension out of him, and
when I felt his resistance subside, I started gently to move his
hand. He breathed now, and I could feel his heart pounding. He
looked at the word he had written, that I had written:
Write.

  
"My God," he whispered.

  
"Shh," I warned him as I let go.

  
He glanced back up at the classroom, but no one was watch
ing.

  
"That was amazing," he wrote. Then he waited, trembling a
little, his hand holding the pencil lightly, waiting for me. I put
my hand into his and wrote through him, "How true."

  
"Why do you haunt this place?" he wrote.

  
I took his hand and wrote, "I don't. I'm attached to Mr.
Brown."

  
James took a moment to read this twice, and then wrote,
"Why?"

  
I took such a long time without moving that he looked up into
my face. I finally took his hand and wrote, "Literature."

  
To my surprise, James gave a short laugh.

  
"Why don't
you
give it a try, then?" called Mr. Brown. "Mr.
Blake?"

  
"Sir?" James sat up straighter in his chair.

  
"Care to offer a sentence with an example of an adverb?" Mr. Brown watched him doubtfully.

  
"Breathlessly he watched her hand," said James.

  
Mr. Brown blinked at him. "Okay."

  
As a student in the front row asked a question and Mr. Brown turned his attention elsewhere, James looked down again.

  
"He's my host," I wrote.

  
And James wrote, "Lucky man."

  
Next I wrote, "Have you ever seen Billy's spirit since you took
his body?"

  
James thought about this for a moment. I watched him hold
the pencil, rereading the last line. His hand was a fine thing, lean and long-fingered, as strong as a farmer's but unscarred.

  
"Only once," he wrote. "I thought I saw him watching me for
a moment the first night I slept in his room."

  
I took his hand, hesitating slightly before beginning to write,
wondering whether he'd realize that I paused not because I
couldn't choose the words but rather because I wanted to just feel his fingers for a moment. I wrote, "Did he speak to you?"

  
"Alas, no," James wrote in answer.

  
Again I took control of his pencil. "So you go home to Mr.
Blake's family at night?"

  
I took another moment before letting his fingers go. He kept
his eyes on the page and wrote, "Such as it is."

  
Then I wrote on the bottom line of the page, "No room."

  
He frowned at these two words for a second. Suddenly he was
fumbling so wildly in his bag for his notebook, I thought the pa
per would fly into the next row. He tore out a fresh page and
slapped it down and wrote, "Sorry."

  
I laughed.

  
"Mr. Blake, you seem to be taking lots of notes today," said
Mr. Brown. "Do you remember an example of where not to in
sert an adverb?"

  
James just stared at him.

  
"To desperately hope," I whispered.

  
James let out a breath. "To gratefully believe."

  
"Well," Mr. Brown said. "Claustrophobia certainly has im
proved your grammar skills."

  
"Yes sir, captain sir."

  
The class laughed.

  
"At ease, Mr. Blake."

  
"Helen," James wrote on the paper.

  
I was fascinated by the look of the word. A picture flipped
past my mind—"For Helen" scripted in fading ink on the linen
frontispiece of a small leather volume. One moment, then the vi
sion snapped shut.

  
"Don't go home with Mr. Brown," he wrote. "Come with
me."

  
I read the words and didn't take his hand right away. He
waited, keeping his eyes on the paper. Finally I touched his fin
gers, and it may have been my imagination, but I sensed that he
could feel me trembling and knew before reading the words.
"I'm afraid of leaving my host."

  
With my fingers still entwined in his, James wrote, "You
must've changed hosts before."

  
The young man seated in front of James twisted around, sur
veyed the distance between them, and threw the paper in his
hand backward at James. It swooped and landed in the aisle.
James bent and retrieved it. It was a lined sheet of paper, wrin
kled and torn on one corner. In handwriting that was not James's,
the paper was labeled: "W. Blake, September 4, eleventh grade
English." The page contained only a few lines of messy black ink.
In green ink, at the bottom, in Mr. Brown's hand, were the words, "5/10 points. The assignment was to write a full page of descriptive prose. Please rewrite and submit for full credit."

  
James glanced up. No one was paying us any heed. The stu
dents were looking over their graded papers, and Mr. Brown was
still handing pages to the last few students. James whispered,
with some embarrassment, "This was before me."

  
It was odd to think that just two weeks before, Billy's body had been sitting in this classroom, and I hadn't cared. Now, be
cause he was James, this same body drew my eye like the moon in
a starless sky.

  
James was reading the five-point assignment with a weary ex
pression. I leaned over to see as well.

  
It read: "I'm describing the library where I'm sitting. It kind
of stinks, like old stuff. The librarian watches me suspisiously. Books are boring. I used an adjetive and an adverb so now I'm glad and I leave happily." Mr. Brown had made a small green
check mark beside the two misspelled words but had made no
more specific suggestions.

  
"You'll have to rewrite it for him, I suppose," I said.

  
He smiled at me now. "I need a tutor," he whispered.

  
"What?" The girl in front of him was looking at James with
annoyance.

  
James turned the page over and wrote, "Help me."

  
This made me feel restless, for some reason. I excused myself
and took a walk, back and forth against the rear wall. I strolled up
the outside aisle by the windows, then stopped and stood beside Mr. Brown, who was doing a review of the Dickens story before the students were to take turns reading aloud. I knew that James
was watching me, but I didn't meet his eyes. I needed to just be
still with my host for a moment. I hovered behind Mr. Brown, listening to a girl flatly read of a boy dying in the arms of his cousin
under a tree. But the next to have a turn was James. He didn't
read like the others. He understood the words. His voice rang so
true, it tolled in every corner of me. I had to flee the room.

  
Under the tree where I had hidden before, I waited. Finally
the students appeared, James so full of color now, not at all the pale creature from the first day we'd seen each other. He strode
toward me, his green bag over his shoulder and his hair blowing.
I couldn't take my eyes from him. He stopped under the tree and
let the book bag drop as he knelt, pretending to tie his shoe.

  
"You have to come with me," he said quietly, without looking up. "Can't you see I'm on my knees?"

  
I said nothing.

  
"You move about the school freely," he said. "You don't need to stay in the same room with your host, do you?"

  
To move about freely sounded so appealing.

  
"Well, shadow your professor if you must," he sighed, stand
ing up but still not looking at me. "I'm going to the library." He
put his bag over this shoulder. "Of course, if you don't like li
braries, I understand." With that he walked off down the path,
merging with the rest of the bodies.

  
Except for the librarian and a couple of mice, I spent more
time in the school library than anyone. Of course I followed.

  
I moved past the librarian's desk and between the large tables,
three in a row, but no James. I began slowly to snake my way up
one aisle of books and down the next until I found him waiting
for me at a small study table tucked in the back of the room.
There were four chairs there. James looked up at me and slid his
book bag off the chair beside him.

  
The library was quiet but not silent. There were whispers.

  
He crossed out the last two sentences and wrote, "Books are
okay, I guess."

  
I laughed. Next James wrote, "As I look around the quiet
room, I see a thousand leather covers like doorways into worlds
unknown." He paused and then wrote, "I hear..."

  
"Silence," I suggested. "Eternity."

  
"A silence like the mind of God," James wrote. He gave one
small laugh, then wrote, "I feel..." He paused, then continued
with, "a presence in the empty chair beside me."

  
"James," I scolded.