Chance (26 page)

“I've had other genealogists ask me to marry them.”

“Those guys at the meetings?” Kind of narrowed it down. Almost all those people who did roots in Hoadley were women.

“Right. Matt Kohut and Chris Burkheimer. They each asked me to marry them, years back, different times. But Matt is engaged to Carol Tonolini now.”

What brought this on?

“I just didn't feel ready to marry anyone. I still don't. Not until I have my research all done.”

Oh, Jesus.

Matt Kohut was a tan-faced, sandy-blond guy with a real Hoadley face: straight nose, flat mouth, prominent Slavic cheekbones. A hunk. Chris Burkheimer was another hunk, a former football hero and, I heard, a practical joker. They seemed out of place in the library. Deb had evangelized them into genealogy in the first place, and out of inertia they had stayed. But it was Chris and Matt and Carol Tonolini who first gave her the notion that she didn't have to wait until she died to meet her “ancestors.”

Matt, Chris, Carol Tonolini and Chandra Drisana.

False name, Chandra Drisana. Even I could tell that, and I'm no genealogist. She was a drifter, floated in sometime in late January, early February. When the whole world was the color of road slop. Hoadley was close enough to the turnpike that vagrants drifted through from time to time, hit up the churches for a few bucks, tried out the local taverns and went on—quickly. They sensed they were not welcome. Everyone else in Hoadley had lived there since great-grandpa came over from Bavaria or wherever. Chandra Drisana stayed a little longer than most. She was a thin, ravaged-looking woman, older than me, or maybe she just looked older. Very long coarse straight hair, aggressively long, the color of the slag heaps streaked with ice. Plain face, wide mouth, and a sort of gypsy look about the way she dressed. She wore skirts and blouses and shawls even in the horrible Hoadley winter weather. The Salvation Army got her a room by the week in the old hotel, a few doors down from the library.

We met her in the library. She spent a lot of her time there, doing research in the occult, she said. I don't know what she expected to find in that repository of Zane Grey novels, that haven for Harlequin Romance addicts, but she was always there. The old watchdog of a librarian would not let her take books out, so whatever she found she read right in the library, hunched over a table. But I think she came mostly to soak up the heat. Cheap hotels are cold.

She gave me the creeps. The first time I saw her, I tried to ignore her. But she beckoned me over as soon as she saw my pregnant belly.

“Six months,” she said.

I nodded, unimpressed. A horse doctor could probably have told as much by looking at me.

“I am a psychic healer,” said Chandra in tones intended to thrill. “Let me lay my hand on your swelling, and I will tell you the sex of your unborn child.”

“No, thank you.” I didn't want her touching me. Started to walk away, but she grabbed my arm.

“Did you know that the baby whimpers in the womb? Each soul utters a primal cry, its very own, a cry that disturbs its dreams all its life. Love me, wails one. Let me be free, cries another. I will not submit, another will shout, and yet another, Embrace me, in wordless cry. The task of an entire lifetime is to soothe the primal cry.”

At my elbow I saw Deb listening with a fascination that bordered on awe.

“A mother's task is to start her child on the innate path. Let me lay my ear against your side, and I will tell you your infant's primal cry.”

I jerked my arm out of her grasp and stalked off to fume in the stacks. It was a small library, though, and I could still hear Chandra. And Deb. Eagerly discussing Chandra's skills as a psychic healer.

Matt and Chris had some ideas about that.

We had a week of warm weather in late February, a false spring before winter settled back in for another three months. Deb walked the block and a half to the Genealogical Society meeting, since it was so nice out, and I stayed home to fill out some catalog orders for the baby things I needed. That was a mistake, maybe. Though I doubt I could have done or said much if I had gone with her. Anyway, Matt and Chris walked Deb home in the springlike sunshine, past the elm tree stumps, and then she came to see me, all excited. Matt and Chris had told her that Chandra Drisana could help her make contact with her ancestors.

“A
seance
?” I protested. “Deb, that's a pile of crap.”

“It's not a seance. It's a circle of psychic healing.”

“Who needs healing? The dead woman with seventeen children?”

“It's not for healing,” said Debora frostily. “It's for strength. The circle of us together, we can venture backward in time, beyond the womb. To the place where the families are. The dead and the unborn.”

She wanted me to be in on it, of course. As always, my cynicism seemed only to encourage her. Nothing could make me take part, but I did finally say I'd come along and watch. I dreaded it. Boredom or my sense of superiority couldn't have dragged me to a seance. But—go ahead and laugh, I know this is me, Lin Burke the loner, talking—I had a feeling I ought to go and try to keep Deb out of trouble.

So there sat Lin Burke at the irrational affair taking place in Chandra's fleabag hotel room. At night, of course, amid flickering candles and incense. Five in the circle—Deb, Chandra, Chris, Matt and Carol. I said I'd watch, and Chandra just looked at me, then went ahead and set up. She laid out an old plastic shower curtain on the bare floor. A five-pointed star on it, drawn in magic marker—hell of a thing to call it, magic marker, at a seance or whatever. I said something about it, but nobody got the joke. Chandra set some mismatched dinette-set chairs on the points of the star, facing in. She was very careful how she placed them. Then the five venturers sat down. Deb was wearing a look as if she was taking first communion or losing her virginity in the back seat of a Mercedes. She had told me breathily that this was the most important day of her life. If I had vomited, I suppose she would have blamed it on my pregnancy.

The fearless five crossed their arms above their bellies and joined hands at close quarters. They sat with their eyes shut, breathing deeply, and Deb's heightened expression changed after a while to one calmer but even more rapt.

“We are children,” Chandra intoned.

They sat being children. I yawned.

“We are very young.”

Deb looked it, too. The soft, pouting way she held her mouth—I expected to see her insert her thumb and suck. Chandra had hold of her one hand and Matt the other, or maybe she would have.

“We are babies.”

Deb's knees swiveled outward and her feet cocked so that the soles faced each other.

“We are babies unborn. We are in the warm, dark womb.”

So help me, Deb drew her feet up so that she assumed, as nearly as she could, the fetal position. The others sat still.

“We are smaller, smaller. Back, back to the place of origins. We are each a single cell. We are nothing.”

They sat very still, looking like elaborate dolls, scantily breathing.

“Yet we still are,” Chandra whispered. “We exist. We are souls, the soul circle. We are seekers. We seek Debora's family.”

Deb had relaxed from her fetal pose, but despite her closed eyes her face looked frightened, strained. The five “seekers” sat silently for a few minutes. Then I noticed faint movement. Chandra was stiffening, sitting up straighter in her chair. As if someone had stuffed her broomstick up her ass, I thought.

“Hostility,” she said sharply.

I glanced at Deb. She looked terrified. Her face, screwed up as if she would cry with fear. More. Heartbreak. I sat with my cynicism suddenly gone, passionately hating what was happening.

“Something is wrong,” Chandra shrilled. “I sense hostility.”

“It's me,” I said out loud, very coldly. I thought the sound of my voice would jolt them out of it. No such luck.

“It's them,” declared Chandra, though not, seemingly, in answer to me. “The ones at the tables. Grandfather Michaels, great-grandfather Elijah Michaels. And their wives. And the Wheelers, the Stewarts. And Noah Saltzgiver in his broadcloth suit, and Felicity in her gray bonnet and wedding dress.”

The soul-scared look on Deb's face—I could not keep from staring at her. But even so I clearly saw a slight movement beyond her. Chris Burkheimer blinked one eye open, caught Matt Kohut's eye and smirked. And I knew who had told Chandra what to say.

“They want us to go,” Chandra declaimed in breathy tones. “There must be some mistake. They say Debora is seeking the wrong family. A family to which she does not belong.”

I could have killed. No matter what sort of a snotty bitch Deb was, no matter what she had done—

“We're not welcome,” declared Chandra. “We must go back.”

Out of my chair at the same moment, I reached for Deb. “Come on. We're getting out of here.” But she did not seem to hear me or feel my hand.

Chandra snapped her eyes open and looked straight at me. “No, wait,” she ordered. “We must exit. We are something now, each a single cell in the warm dark womb, growing, dividing.…”

I stood still for this bullshit only because I was afraid Deb would crack up otherwise. I waited until they got past the child. All the while Deb did not make a sound. She had not made a sound even when they had stabbed her in her back and twisted the knife. But her face was shrieking a strangled cry.

“We are no longer children,” Chandra finished. “But we are yet growing.”

They all let go of each other's hands and opened their eyes. Before they could say anything I took Deb by the shoulders, urged her up off her chair, grabbed her coat and purse and steered her out the door. She still had that awful look on her face.

“Deb,” I yelled at her, “it's all a bunch of crap!”

Before I could say more, Matt and Chris came running after us. “Deb,” Matt said, “I'm really sorry.”

“You should be!” I retorted.

“Now what's that supposed to mean?” It was Chris, the practical joker, all hot and bothered. Protesting too much.

“You know damn well what I mean,” I told him. “Come on, Deb.” I got the coat on her, took the keys from her pocket, got behind the wheel of her Corvette and drove her home.

“They told Chandra what to say,” I explained to her. “All that stuff about picnic tables and Noah Saltzgiver, that's stuff you told them, maybe years ago when you were dating them.”

She wasn't listening. “They hate me,” she whispered, and looking at her I saw she didn't mean Matt and Chris, her rejected suitors.

“Come on, Deb,” I pleaded. “That's a pile of shit. Anyway, you're you and it's now, 1983. You're here. Your parents love you. It doesn't matter where you came from.”

That was about as heavy as I'd ever talked with anyone. But it made no impression on her at all. “I saw them,” she said numbly. “Around the picnic tables. Under the elm trees. They looked at me and told me to go away. Go back to Eleventh Street. They don't want me.”

“This is the goddamn twentieth century, for Christ's sake!”

I took her to my place and worked on her for two hours over coffee, trying to argue some sense into her, while Brad sulked and watched TV in the other room. I even thought of calling that so-called preacher of hers, and decided against it. He was crazier than she was. Finally, late, after the lights had gone out over at her place, I gave up on her and sent her home. At least the mindless crying look had faded somewhat from her face.

A trace of it stayed there, though, for months.

Chandra had left Hoadley by morning, on a Greyhound bound for Akron. No fool, that one. She knew the Michaelses would have crucified her if they'd heard. I wondered what Chris and Matt had given her besides bus fare, or if she just liked messing up people's lives. I wondered if Deb's parents would want to crucify me as well. In fact, I think no one ever told them what had happened. Deb least of all.

The winter crawled on into a slow spring. Tree buds swelled like something sore, turned red and stayed that way. Some of the ice became slush and mud. The Spirit Church preacher spearheaded a drive for a new building, then disappeared along with the funds, and Deb started going to the low-roofed, square-steepled Lutheran church with her parents again. Not much else happened.

I was fixing up the baby's room. Deb hung around. She would go shopping with me or come into the apartment and watch me hang curtains or whatever. She never offered to help, no matter how much my frontage got in my way. I think she felt out of her element but at the same time, for some reason, fascinated. And fear still hanging like tears at the corners of her eyes.

“You love the baby already,” she said to me one day. “Don't you?”

I had bought some flowered paper and was lining drawers in a little dresser. When she said that I stopped with scissors in air. Very uncomfortable. Scared, even. I'm not used to thinking in those terms, as if love is something you can get hold of. Something solid, like money in the bank. Though I guess you take that on trust, too.

“I have no idea,” I said.

She seemed shocked. “But you
want
the baby, don't you?”

“Of course.” What sort of peabrain did she think I was? “I wouldn't be in this condition if I didn't.”

“Well, then you must love it.”

“Give us a chance to shake hands first, would you?” I went back to cutting my drawer linings.

“I sent for my birth certificate,” said Deb suddenly.

“Huh?” I couldn't follow her leaps of logic, or illogic, sometimes. “Are you going to France after all?” Thinking maybe she needed it for the passport.

“No, not that birth certificate. The one my natural mother filed before she—gave me up. It just came in the mail today. You know what?”

“What.” Morosely.