Authors: Laura Whitcomb
Hebrews. I dropped my hand on the page and read the line above my fingertips:
Don’t forget to be kind to strangers. For some who have done this have entertained angels without realizing it.
I didn’t know I’d made a sound, but my mother shot me a look. I passed the offering plate she handed me to the waiting usher.
I paused until my mother stopped glaring at me. So weird to be watching both her from the corner of my eye on the right while I still had that vague shadow on my left back in the edge of my vision. When it seemed safe, I slowly pressed the Bible closed between my palms and meant to let it open randomly, but it landed at my feet with a clunk.
“What’s got into you?” my mother whispered.
As I reached down to pick up the Bible, I noticed Mrs. Caine in a pew across the aisle watching me. I spread the Bible out on my lap just as it had fallen, open to the book of Ruth. My finger dropped onto the page:
Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.
I could hear the drone of the pastor beginning his sermon but not the words. My head was full of loud silence, like the running of a stream. My heart was full too—I was happy in a way that didn’t make sense. Like how the day before it made no sense that I felt more at home lying in the grass outside my house than I did in my own bedroom. Like how I fell apart during a stupid credit card commercial on TV. The night before I felt like I was missing someone I’d left behind, and now someone had come to see me.
CHAPTER 15
J
ENNY SMILED TO HERSELF,
glanced around again, searching for me, I was sure. You would think I would be the one to explain how this language worked, but it was a mystery. Whether my desire to speak with her had bent the binding of the book and forced a certain page to fall open and then guided her hand to find words that made sense to her or whether we were only imagining it, I had no idea. This had not been in my plan—I’d never done such a thing with any of my other hosts. But Jenny dropped the Bible on the floor again, intentionally this time. The thud reverberated through the sanctuary. The woman across the aisle who had been watching made an audible gasp. She was one of the ladies from Cathy’s women’s group. She stared at Jenny as if the girl had shouted out a blasphemy. Cathy swooped down and snatched the Bible away, stuffed it under her purse where Jenny could not reach it.
Did she think she could keep me from talking to my girl that easily? I tapped the bulletin lying on the pew. It didn’t move, but Jenny picked it up and opened it all the same. I pointed to one word after another, jumping around from this line to that. Jenny ran her finger along the print, through prayers and Scripture quotes and hymn titles, following my lead, and we shared (I hoped) a poem of my constructing:
I – will – protect – thee – let – not – your – heart – be – sorrow.
When I couldn’t find the phrases I needed, I placed my finger on the white space in the middle fold of the bulletin. Jenny’s finger glided into the blank place between my finger and a staple and stopped. She stared at the page, her breaths coming in shallow puffs.
Leaning toward her ear, I whispered, “Please forgive me for leaving you alone in such a dark place. I’m here now, and I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
Her whisper was so soft, Cathy couldn’t have heard her unless she’d pressed her ear to the girl’s lips. “Is it you?” Jenny asked.
“Yes,” I whispered. I couldn’t find the word in the bulletin. I wrote the letters gently on her arm.
Yes.
Jenny nodded ever so slightly.
“Ghost,” she whispered.
Again I wrote with my finger on the back of her hand a
Y
for
Yes.
She shuddered, I thought, with equal parts fear and joy. My spirit answered in kind, flickering with nervous excitement.
I thought I felt someone watching me, which is an uncommon sensation for a spirit, but when I turned I saw that the woman across the aisle was studying Jenny. Her gaze went right through me. Behind this woman’s eyes I saw an unsettling mix of concern and pleasure. And under her eyes, a shadow.
At the end of the service Cathy took Jenny’s hand and tried to hurry out the back way before anyone spoke to them. A plump woman with a Noah’s ark sweater blocked the side door and began smothering Cathy with sympathy. I paced around them, impatient to be alone with Jenny. The woman asked Jenny to volunteer in the babies’ room so she could take Cathy to the ladies’ lounge for a talk.
“Oh, here’s Brad,” said the woman. “Honey, why don’t you walk Jennifer to the nursery?”
I stayed between this boy and Jenny, though he seemed perfectly harmless. He was thin and dressed as neat as a missionary. He chatted, oblivious that Jenny was not listening.
“If you ever need anyone to talk to,” he said. “Or pray with.” Jenny didn’t seem to have heard him. “Do you think you’ll want to go to the Harvest Dance?” he asked.
“What?” She didn’t appear to comprehend.
“I should ask your father if I can invite you.” Brad realized his faux pas. “I mean your mother, I guess. I think my mom already talked to her.”
How I wanted to swat him away as I would a horsefly. Jenny swung open the half door under the sign
CHERUBS’ NEST
and slammed it shut without inviting him in.
“I could come by your house,” he told her, leaning on the door shelf, but Jenny only smiled at him weakly and turned away. “I’ll just call.”
The nursery was full and loud. A dozen babies under the age of two sat, crawled, rolled, and toddled around the rainbow carpet. Half were laughing, half were fussing. No one napping. My heart clutched at the sight—every round face reminded me of my own child.
A tiny woman with thick spectacles was taping a torn page in a picture book. “Are you helping with second service?” she asked Jenny. “You’re a lifesaver.” She came over and put an arm around Jenny’s waist, gave her a squeeze, and whispered, “I’m so sorry about your father.”
News travels swiftly among the church ladies—some things never change.
The woman adjusted her glasses. “The usual sunbeams are here. Russell’s got a runny nose, but everyone else is full of spunk. Darryl Ann needs changing. Would you be a dear?”
A dimpled one-year-old waddled over to us, glanced at me without interest, and wrapped her arms around Jenny’s legs, grinning with four tiny teeth.
Jenny sighed. “Come on, you.” She swung the baby onto her hip and headed to the next door in the hallway. A utility closet had been remade into a diapering station with paper diapers in three sizes, boxes of wipes, powders, lotions, and a large lidded trash can.
It might have been the way the child held the back of Jenny’s dress in her fist, or the way her leg swung as it dangled, or the size of the closet, but I imagined I could smell the baby’s sweaty hair and milk-sweet breath. I felt the weight of her, the warmth of her on my side, though she was not in my own arms. Impossible.
Jenny diapered the child as I watched, teasing her to laughter by tickling her in the ribs, and I was struck by how I imagined I could taste the salt as Jenny pretended to bite one chubby hand.
Maybe it was because I had been inside Jenny, tasted an apple with her tongue, kissed James with her lips, breathed through her, and smelled the sweet foresty pine of James’s hair. I had controlled Jenny’s every joint and muscle, looked through the lens of a camera using her eyes. I recalled it so crisply, as if it were still true. Even now I thought I felt the shape and vibration of wearing her flesh.
If I knew what it was like to be under her skin,
I thought,
couldn’t I induce her to feel what it was like to be me?
It wasn’t as if I told her how I died, but the flood came all the same. That it appeared to us both should have come as a surprise to me, but it felt perfectly natural.
The little room shook as if a cannon had fired into the wall. Jenny snatched up the baby and held her against her chest. The familiar howl of the storm swelled from every direction. I felt somehow vindicated when Jenny seemed to hear it too. She turned around in a circle, confused.
And then the lights went out.
“No way!” Jenny’s voice went fierce to cover the shock. She held the whimpering baby close to her heart, just as I had.
Jenny felt her way to the door and tried to push it open, but something was blocking it. I knew what it was, of course, but I could sense Jenny’s thoughts—a bookcase or some other heavy piece of furniture? She threw her shoulder against the door, but it didn’t budge. No, not a bookcase. There was a fallen tree against the cellar door. My cellar, my tree.
“Hello?” Jenny called. “Can I get a hand here?”
It’s all right,
I told her.
Don’t be scared.
And then the water came. Rushing under the door, a roaring river of it. Jenny shrieked. The baby let loose, crying in earnest. But this little girl couldn’t hear the storm or see the flood, could she? I supposed it was Jenny’s fear that was upsetting her.
Jenny held the little girl on one hip, away from the door, then banged with her fist. “Hey! A pipe broke or something!”
I knew the water could not drown her—I wasn’t afraid. I was thrilled. She was attuned to me, powerfully. My spirit swelled with joy.
Jenny shrieked as a branch broke through the door with splinters flying. Water shot in at her face. “Somebody help!” Jenny kicked the door. “We’re trapped in here!”
Icy water swirled around our ankles.
Do you understand what’s happening?
I asked her.
I’m telling you my story.
“Help!” Jenny yelled, guarding the baby from the phantom spray of water.
When the door swung in at us, the light from the hall blinded me for a moment. I turned to Jenny. She swallowed back a scream and blinked.
“What in the world is going on in here?” the short woman asked.
The moment had passed. The water was gone. No tree limb stuck through the door.
“I pushed and pushed but the door wouldn’t open,” said Jenny.
“It opens inward, honey.” The woman studied her.
“And the lights went out,” said Jenny.
The woman reached over and flipped the light switch on. The room was perfectly bright. “Seems fine now.”
The woman adjusted her glasses then held out her arms to the weeping baby. “Did Jenny scare you? You’re all right, doodle bug.” The child flung herself at the woman and Jenny was left alone with me in the changing room, breathing hard.
I moved close to her shoulder to calm her. We were one now. We could feel each other’s pain and fear. She had let me in.
I will never quit you, not by the threat of hell or the promise of heaven,
I told her.
I am yours to command.
CHAPTER 16
A
HYMNAL OR A
B
IBLE IS A LOVELY TEXT
, but I was so looking forward to talking with Jenny using a novel or a collection of poetry. I’d always had a special love for books. I liked all kinds—children’s stories, song books, poetry, histories—but my favorites were novels. Our town didn’t have a library and when I was a child my parents did not own books, so I was forced to borrow them from neighbors and friends, sell what I could to buy them—my plum preserves bartered a slightly used copy of
Ivanhoe
once. I never stole one, but when I was sixteen I did trade a tablecloth for
Little Dorrit.
A tearful confession of love for which you have waited three hundred pages was much better than eating off white lace.
I sat in the back seat of Jenny’s car on the way home from church, my mind swimming with wonderful stories, any one of which I would love to read for the first time all over again along with Jenny. I could hardly sit still in the car—to think I could reread any books we chose, that I helped Jenny choose, running my finger under certain words and phrases to communicate with her all my deepest thoughts. Impatiently I flew through the closed door as the car turned onto Jenny’s street—I rushed into the house right through the kitchen wall.
How could I be so forgetful? I floated from room to room and found no novels at all. There were manuals and cookbooks, Bibles and catalogs, Christian magazines, audiobooks, but no Dickens or Hugo or Austen. I had discovered this tragedy the first night I slept in Jenny’s home. Even at Billy’s house James had hidden a book of Robert Frost poetry under the bed. But Jenny’s house was a wasteland. I longed for the book-heavy homes of my past hosts.
I paced in the hallway having searched every room for novels—perhaps the book bag she took to school might still have school library books in it? But I found it sitting closed beside her desk and I couldn’t open it. I waited there for Jenny in her bedroom. Perhaps there were no volumes of Robert Louis Stevenson or Emily Brontë to be found, but I used to tell my daughter stories from memory, paraphrasing scenes without looking at the books—
The Water Babies
and
Jane Eyre
—while I bathed her or as she watched me hang up the wash or as I nursed her by the hearth.
When Jenny walked in I practically pounced on her, but all the things I wanted to tell her leapt up in my mind at once and confused me.
Although some of my plans to contact Jenny had been ill- conceived, she and I had been bound by an invisible cord now. Clearly she had felt my thoughts through the printed word—she’d seen and heard my death scene. I was confident that if I spoke to her as she slept tonight, she would understand me.
How vexing that it was only midday. I paced back and forth in and out of the bedroom wall as Jenny changed from church clothes to simple cotton slacks and shirt—she wrapped herself in an oversize sweater as if still cold after the spectral flood I had shared with her. Jenny sat at her vanity table and began to brush her hair.
So many things to tell her. I had abandoned her studies—embarrassing, but not dangerous. I must tell her about how Mitch had banned James (well, Billy) from being alone in their house with me. Billy wouldn’t remember that. Oh, yes, and I had said some rather shocking things to the church ladies—I was angry that they seemed to think they knew who was in heaven and who wasn’t. I even got out of Cathy’s car in a strange neighborhood and accused Cathy of driving Jenny away from her life. I told her the truth, which of course she would never believe, that I was not her daughter. Oh, and I couldn’t forget to tell her what went on in the principal’s office—I was sent to the office, where her parents were waiting to confront Mr. Brown, who they thought had seduced me. A sickening misunderstanding—Jenny needed to know what was said.