Authors: Laura Whitcomb
I stood behind her as she sat at the vanity. Or maybe, I thought, I should start explaining it all by beginning with the story of how I met James.
Jenny froze with her brush in midair. She was staring into the looking glass, but it wasn’t the image of her face that made her stop and think—it was the sight of the back of her head reflected in the mirrors on her closet doors.
Cathy had agreed to meet with the pastor and did not want to talk about Jenny’s father in front of her and would not leave her at home alone. Which is probably why it only took a few minutes for Jenny to convince her mother to let her study at the main branch library that day.
Cathy handed over her phone. “Call me when you’re done,” she said, as Jenny climbed out of the car. “Until twelve at the church and after that at home.”
“Okay.” Jenny swung her book bag over one shoulder.
“And don’t talk to strangers.”
“I won’t. I have lunch money. I’ll be fine.”
Do you think I would let anything happen to her?
I said, but Cathy didn’t hear.
Finally she left us on the sidewalk in front of the library. Jenny waited just inside the entrance, trying not to pace, checking the clock every half minute, glancing out the windows in the front doors. I remembered how the last few minutes before I would see James again always felt like hours.
Don’t fret,
I told her. But I did wonder if he would come. Life is complicated and there were scores of obstacles that might hinder him.
But Billy ran up the stairs at last and shoved open the doors at 10:33. Jenny’s shoulders relaxed.
“How did you know I would wait for you?” she asked him.
“You’re a nice person,” he said. “You wouldn’t just ditch somebody.”
Where are your manners?
I scolded him.
“Sorry I was late,” he said. “When you tell your mom you want to study at the library I bet she believes you. Not so easy convincing Mitch. But I promised not to jump bail.”
“What does that mean?” she asked.
He waved the question away. “It’s an in-joke.”
“So, what do you want to do?” Jenny asked.
He gave her a baffled expression and motioned toward the cavernous room beyond the information desk. “Study.”
I followed a few paces behind as Jenny and Billy went in search of an empty table. All the private study rooms were taken. They squeezed into a single carrel, partially screened off by a kind of desk blinder. They sat in plastic chairs pressed side by side—Jenny held her book bag in her lap.
“What do you want to study?” she asked.
Billy pulled out a few pages of folded notebook paper from the back pocket of his jeans. “Something I found last night.”
I don’t know what I had expected, but the sight of those pages, even before they were opened, covered in my writing, startled me so that the cord to the blinds beside me began to swing.
“What is it?” Jenny spread out the papers on the small desk.
“I think somebody lived our lives for us during the time we can’t remember.” His voice was quiet, but inside I could feel him spinning with excitement. “See, I think this comes first.” He turned over the top page and tapped on the word
haunt.
I gripped Jenny’s shoulder, willing her not to be frightened.
She took the paper slowly. “Who would want to live our lives?”
“Someone who needed a body,” said Billy. “Who didn’t have a body of their own anymore.”
“A ghost?”
“Use your library voice,” Billy whispered.
“Sorry,” she whispered back. Billy watched her staring at the page.
“I found it in a box under my bed with some other stuff that wasn’t mine. See?” He took the papers back, ordered them, and ran his finger down the first one. “Two different kinds of handwriting.”
Jenny stared as if Billy had uncovered an ancient treasure.
“Two ghosts,” said Billy, “passing notes in class.” He was grinning now, and I sensed it was not because the idea of ghosts delighted him, but because he had bound himself to Jenny with a story she would find utterly compelling.
“I think this is him, the one who was me.” Billy moved his finger under the words as he read. “
Where have you been? Please don’t be afraid. I would be a friend to you.
”
James’s handwriting was stylish and angled, and even though Billy’s inflections were a little different as he read aloud, the tone of his voice was so like James.
Billy read on. “
Follow me after class. I long to speak with you again.
”
“Again,” Jenny echoed. That was all that was written on the front of the first page, but he turned it over and there was an entire page of writing, alternating between that jaunty hand and my small cursive lettering.
“
How long have you been Light?
” Billy read. “That’s still him. And also this word—
Which?
” He leaned close to Jenny as he whispered. “And here’s your ghost.” Billy pointed to the next word and she read it aloud.
“
Write.
” Jenny shivered.
A thrill coiled through me remembering this scene. We couldn’t speak aloud to each other during class because James kept forgetting that he could be heard—we had to write out our first questions and answers.
Billy went on reading what James had written and Jenny read my part.
“
That was amazing,
” he read.
She read, “
How true.
”
And Billy read, “
Why do you haunt this place?
”
Jenny asked him, “This place? The school?”
“Keep reading,” he urged.
Then Jenny read,
“
I don’t. I’m attached to Mr. Brown.
”
My spirit tingled with joy.
“The English teacher,” Jenny whispered.
Billy smiled and read, “
Why?
”
Jenny read the one word answer. “
Literature.
” She blinked and swallowed before she read on. “
He’s my host.
”
“
Lucky man,
” Billy read.
A woman pushing a cart of books passed by the study carrel and Billy leaned in even closer to Jenny as she whispered the next question I had asked James that day. “
Have you ever seen Billy’s spirit since you took his body?
”
Jenny looked at him, amazed. I had been standing behind her chair, resting my hand on her shoulder. But now I felt shy. I stepped back and stood halfway through the window, but still I watched and listened—I couldn’t help myself. It was a peculiar sensation, to have one’s most intimate love notes recited as if they were lines from a play.
“
Only once,
” Billy whispered as he read.
“
I thought I saw him watching me for a moment the first night I slept in his room.
” As if it was the most natural of gestures, he laid his hand on Jenny’s arm. “Is this freaky or what?”
Without answering Jenny read, “
Did he speak to you?
”
And Billy read the reply. “
Alas, no.
”
I read the next line along with Jenny. “
So you go home to Mr. Blake’s family at night?
”
Memories of Billy’s house made me nostalgic for my few days with James. It was a sad home, in many ways, no mother or father, few books, unkept grass and no flowers, empty beer bottles and piles of half-read newspapers. But it was also the place where James and I slept in the same bed; even before I had a body, my spirit lay beside him. I even loved the garage with the rusty patchwork car in which we drove to school one day, and the kitchen where I watched Billy bite into an apple, something I had been deprived of for more than a century.
Billy read James’s remark about this home as if he was not in the least insulted, “
Such as it is.
”
Then Jenny read the two words, “
No room.
” She shook her head, but Billy grinned and placed the other page over the one in her hands.
Jenny smiled back. “They ran out of space to write on the first piece of paper, didn’t they? This is so weird.” The beginning line on the new page was James, so Jenny waited for Billy to start.
“
Sorry,
” he read, then the next word made my heart jump. “
Helen.
”
I knew what we’d written. I remembered it perfectly, but still it made me ache. I began to weep at the sound.
“
Don’t go home with Mr. Brown,
” Billy read. “
Come with me.
”
“Wow.” Jenny covered her cheeks and read my words, “
I’m afraid of leaving my host.
”
“
You must’ve changed hosts before,
” Billy read.
Hosts
was just a word to these children, one they barely understood. But to me it was like a fan unfolding, recollections of my beloved ones: my Saint searching the cairns of books in her tiny home for a certain volume of Homer; my Knight dressing for the theater before his great mirror, struggling with his stiff collar. My Playwright falling drunk onto the bed he shared with dozens of half-read books, their spines cracking under him. My Poet in his dark office, hunched in the light of a single lamp, his gray hair fallen over his spectacles, rereading a poem about Zeus. Mr. Brown driving with his elbow out the open window of his car, looking so young and as if he would live forever, the briefcase on the seat beside him hiding his unfinished novel.
Then Billy read, “
Help me.
”
CHAPTER 17
J
ENNY TURNED THE PAGE OVER
, but that was the last entry. She was trembling. I came to stand behind her again and rested my hand gently on her back to quell her fears.
Billy seemed uncertain now, took his hands off her arm. “Are you scared?” he asked. “They’re ghosts . . .”
“I’m not afraid of them,” she said. “I think one was trying to talk to me yesterday.”
I tensed, my spirit rippling with nerves. I wasn’t sure I wanted her to share our experience with Billy.
“Really?” He watched her face, fascinated. “What happened?”
Jenny folded up the pages. “It’s hard to describe. But I think maybe one of them drowned,” she said. “I don’t know.”
“Was it Helen?”
I squeezed her shoulder, but she made no sign of feeling my presence this time.
“At first I thought it was someone I’d met, maybe, during the time I can’t remember.” Jenny handed the pages back to Billy. “But he was probably just something I dreamed.”
“A ghost tried to talk to you?” he asked. “How?”
“I could have imagined it,” she said. “I’ve had a really strange week.”
“Tell me about it,” Billy whispered. He returned the pages to his pocket and pulled out a small, thin book from his other back pocket and held it out to her. “And it’s about to get even stranger.”
It had a soft cover, plain black, no title.
“Is that a journal?” asked Jenny.
“Sketchbook.” He opened it to the first page, where there was a beautiful pencil depiction of what looked like a wooden ladder and a kind of carpenter’s table. I recognized it but apparently they did not.
“Did you draw this?” Jenny touched the paper tentatively.
“No. Someone living in my room did it with my pencils and left it under my bed.” Billy turned to the second page. Another drawing, this one of the tree under which James and I had shared a picnic. “It’s the tree from school, across from the cafeteria.”
Jenny nodded. He kept turning the pages, five in all, not in chronological order of when James and I had visited them, but laid out as if James had been recalling random moments from our handful of days together. The third was a phone booth (the one where James and I spoke—he was holding the receiver to his ear, but he was speaking to me, and I was inches from him though invisible to everyone else); the next a sketch of two empty chairs and a table in the school library (where we did Billy’s homework assignment together); and the last was a drawing of a face, not mine, and not Jenny’s, but somehow both.
“Is that her?” Jenny asked out loud. An elderly man with an armful of art books was passing their carrel and stopped as if Jenny had spoken to him. Billy motioned her to hush. But the man did not move away—instead he stood a few feet from them, reading book covers in the adjacent aisle.
Billy turned to the next page in the journal and snatched up one of the little pencils from the shelf where scratch paper is left in small trays. On the blank page he wrote:
She would have looked like you, right?
Jenny slipped the pencil out of his fingers and under this line wrote:
What should we do now?
Billy smiled, and instead of taking the pencil from her, he wrapped his hand around hers and moved her hand, just as I had done with James when I was Light. Jenny read the words they had written together:
Field trip.
They boarded a city bus and sat together near the back where no one was close enough to overhear their conversation. I sat across the aisle trying not to think about riding this kind of bus with James’s arm around me—it made me miss him too much.
“What if we get caught?” Jenny asked.
“Caught at school during school hours?”
“But my mother tells me I’ve been pulled out,” she said. “I’m going to be homeschooled.”
Billy was distracted by some thought he didn’t share. “Yeah, Mitch is sticking me in night school if I get probation.”
“Because of me?” Jenny looked guilty. “Is that another in-joke? Does probation mean your brother grounded you?”
“No.” Billy shrugged it off. “It’s a long story you do not want to hear.”
I followed them a few paces behind as they were dropped off a block from the high school and as they made their way onto the campus through the rows of lockers during passing period. Billy found that his locker combination still worked, and there was a soft hooded jacket rumpled up at the bottom. Jenny put it on over her prim, acorn-button cardigan, and Billy carried her book bag over his shoulder.
No one paid them any attention and they remained inconspicuous, staying near the bicycle racks until the second bell rang and the paths between buildings were empty again.
“So.” Billy walked up to the tree in front of the cafeteria and looked around. “This is the tree he drew.” Jenny scanned the lawn and looked up into the branches. All I could think of was the glory of tasting fresh orange and the crunch of an apple, the familiar softness of a boiled egg, things I had not eaten in 130 years until I sat under this tree with James.