Under the Light (3 page)

Then the woman, who was apparently the leader of the group, stopped and turned her face, eyes still closed, toward me. “Someone’s here.” She smiled. She opened her eyes for a moment, looked through me, then closed them again. “A spirit has come into the room.”

I scanned the room for a strange light or some other sign of the supernatural.

“Is it my father?” one of the others asked. “He died last month.” They all stayed still, eyes shut.

I didn’t want to see a ghost, so I stopped looking around.

“No,” said the leader. “I don’t think this person is dead.”

I froze.
She means me.
If I moved or breathed she might catch me somehow.

“What?” one of the others whispered. “What did she say?”

“It’s nothing to worry about,” said the leader. “This soul means no harm. She’s just visiting.”

“Does she have a message for us?” someone asked.

“Do you have a message for us?” said the leader, looking right at me with her eyes shut.

I said nothing. But I thought,
Please don’t talk to me.

“She’s shy,” said the leader. “I think she’s a little lost.”

Childishly I thought,
I know where I am—I just don’t want to go home.

“Oh,” the leader laughed. “I stand corrected. She’s not lost— she’s a bit of a runaway, I think.”

Maybe I knew where I was—the street name and which city—but she was right. I
was
lost. I’d gotten stuck in the land of bodiless wandering. I couldn’t use a phone or take a drink of water or smell a flower.

“You’re welcome here, sweetheart. We won’t bother you if you don’t bother us. Don’t be afraid,” said the woman.

But I
was
afraid.

I started going to Reflections every day at around the same time, just as this woman arrived or sometimes just after she started teaching one of her classes. The second day she seemed surprised when she sensed me watching. The third day, she seemed to expect me. By the fourth she had named me “the Runaway.” It was my only pleasure now, having a nickname and being noticed.

I came to sit in the same place every day, on the top of the bookshelf between the two windows. Her name was Gayle. Even though I spent the rest of each day and night alone backstage at the theater or in the arms of a pine tree, I made sure I visited Gayle every day she was there.

“Aren’t you ever going home to roost?” she asked me one day.

I’m scared to go home,
I thought.

“You’re a lonely bird, aren’t you?” said Gayle. And then she sang a simple song I’d never heard before—it sounded like a hymn:

The lone wild bird in lofty flight

Is still with thee, nor leaves thy sight

For I am thine; I rest in thee;

Great Spirit come and rest in me.

No one had sung me a lullaby since I was tiny. My mother used to sing me songs about everything we were doing. When she made me a bowl of oatmeal in the morning she’d sing about hungry bear cubs. When she washed behind my ears, leaning over the side of the tub, she would sing about soap bubbles. And when she brushed my wet hair in front of the mirror, she used to press her hand on the back of my neck and comb my curls up over her fingers, singing a song about daisies. I could almost feel the palm of my mother’s hand, warm and safe, cupping the back of my head as Gayle sang to me.

And that was the moment I felt
called.

Every other time I had gone from one place to another, I’d either decided where to fly and swam in the air to the spot, or I’d wished to be somewhere and found myself there. Or I’d appeared in a new setting instantly without knowing why. But now I felt drawn to move in a specific direction as if I were in the blackness of outer space and there was only one star to follow. I flew slowly at first, east, between buildings, then over railroad crossbars and along farm fences. I became more confident and started gaining speed, even though I still had no idea what I was looking for.

It’s heading straight for you,
I heard some voice inside me whisper.

Instead of scaring me, this only made me want to get there faster. The world rolled forward, the horizon in front of me curling like the crown of an ocean wave. And then, in a rush of magnetic energy, I was swung around and then stopped, hovering in midair. Whatever was coming at me had passed by me, or possibly
through
me. I set my feet down in the grass of an open field where the horizon in every direction was flat. Not a hill or tree to give it shape or size. I had no idea how many miles I’d flown or what state I was in. The heavens came smack down to the earth all around, and I could see the faint curve of the planet in the distance.

But the field wasn’t completely empty. About a hundred yards away, I saw a boy levitating three feet off the ground. He came to rest with his sneakers in the grass and walked in my direction as if he’d forgotten he could just fly to me.

CHAPTER 4

I
N THE MIDDLE OF WHO KNOWS WHERE
, in a huge abandoned field, I stood in the grass and watched this boy walk toward me as if it was a perfectly normal way for him to meet a girl.

He strolled right up to me. “Hey.”

I wasn’t afraid of him, but I felt nervous. “Where did you come from?” I asked.

He gestured with a flick of his head. “That way.” Then he smiled. “Is this your place?”

I glanced around to make sure I hadn’t imagined where we were standing. “This field?” I said. “Are you asking me if this is
my
empty field?”

He shrugged, looked me up and down. I scanned my feet, my hands and arms, and I could see myself but I wasn’t sure if he viewed me the way I did. And I was too embarrassed to ask him what I looked like. In my own eyes I wore jeans and a white T-shirt and, strangely, the soft black jacket my father had thrown out. Even stranger, my feet were bare.

“Are you dead?” he asked.

“What?” It seemed almost insulting. Did I look like a corpse? “No.” I thought I knew how these things worked. The spirits I had seen on my travels weren’t ghosts—they were people out of their bodies temporarily. “You’re not dead, are you?”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Do you remember dying?” I asked.

He put his hands in his pockets. He wore jeans too, with a black shirt rolled at the sleeves and open at the throat. But he had the good sense to be wearing sneakers.

“I don’t want to remember that.” His face went gray and he held out a hand as if he wanted to protect himself from me.

And then he was gone.

Weird. I just stood there, doing nothing, for a long time. He was a stranger—it would be impossible for him to hurt my feelings. I couldn’t miss him, seeing as how I’d only known him for a few seconds. It wasn’t as if he had made me doubt the truth—
I
wasn’t dead. And neither was he: he just didn’t know it. What was it that bothered me about him?

I sat down on the grass and replayed our conversation. I couldn’t figure out why we had looked at each other and spoken to each other when I hadn’t been noticed by any of the other souls I saw floating outside their bodies: an old woman napping in a wheelchair while her spirit danced around her, a man meditating on the beach with his spirit levitating a foot over his head. They hadn’t seen me.

And what made this boy and me fly toward each other literally out of the blue? It felt as if we’d been running along trying to launch kites and then our strings got tangled and swung us back toward each other.

But what were the kites we were hanging on to?

I realized why I missed him—he could see and hear me, and it was almost like being real again. But there was nothing I could do about it—he’d run away. I finally got myself up and went to some of my favorite locations: museum, beach, theater. But by the next day, I had to return to that field. It was haunting me.

But why would
he
be back? What were the chances that he was still thinking about me?

Then he dropped down out of the air and went into a skydiver roll a dozen feet away from me. He brushed himself off, an unnecessary gesture that cracked me up, but I wouldn’t let myself be charmed. I didn’t trust him yet. Hadn’t he said I looked dead and then run away?

“You don’t think I’m a ghost?” he asked, as if our previous conversation were still on the table.

“I don’t think I can see ghosts,” I explained. “Only spirits.” He waited for more. “Spirits on vacation from their bodies,” I explained. “You know, not done with their bodies.”

“Like when someone’s asleep?” he asked.

“Or meditating.”

He strolled up a little closer. “Which one are you?”

“None of the above. I just left my body, you know, like breaking out of prison.”

“What made your body a prison?” he asked me. When I didn’t answer right away he lifted one eyebrow. In another setting it would have been cute, but everything about him was annoying me for some reason.

“You don’t want to know,” I said.

“Yes, I do.”

“Well, I don’t want to tell you.”

“No questions about the past. I get it,” he said. “If I’m not dead,” he went on, “I guess this isn’t heaven.”

“No.” More like hell, I wanted to say, but why spoil his fun. Maybe he was still rejoicing in his freedom the way I had at first.

“Well, it can’t be hell.” He gestured at me as if I were proof of that. “Is it like a parallel universe?”

That didn’t sound good. Too much like purgatory. I felt a ripple of fear spread through me. Maybe it felt like hell because it
was
hell.

“It’s the same world as before,” I insisted, trying to convince myself. “Just the outside edge. My house is the same. All the street signs have the same names.” It was scaring me, the idea that he might be right, that we were in some kind of limbo. “Didn’t you see your house and family after you left your body?”

I could see the tension of his own story behind his eyes, but he didn’t share it. “Sorta like there’s safety glass between us and everything else,” he said. To test the rules, he reached out and took my hand. I jumped but didn’t pull away. The warmth of his fingers fascinated me. But I wasn’t sure if I was feeling his hand or the energy of his hand. Or the heat of his
thinking
of my hand in his.

He let go. “No wall between us, though.”

My blush throbbed hot like a bad sunburn even though I technically had no skin. “I didn’t say you could touch me.”

“Sorry . . .” He paused. “What’s your name?”

The idea of telling him my name and where I lived and what made me leave my body, the idea of explaining about my parents, made my stomach go cold. Again, no organs. Why could I still feel emotions forming in those parts of me I’d left behind?

“I forgot,” he said. “No questions about the past.” He smiled. “So if this isn’t your field, why do you come here?”

To find you, stupid,
I thought. Before I landed in the field, I’d been racing toward something I couldn’t name—a boy I couldn’t name. If he hadn’t felt the same force I had, throwing us at each other, maybe that wasn’t real.

I felt deflated, but I told him the truth. “I was rushing toward something—you, I guess. I only stopped here because that’s where I found myself when I passed you going the other way.”

He thought for a moment. “I thought I saw my shadow on the ground. That never happened before. Like the shadow of a bird on the ground before it lands, only the shadow wasn’t bigger than me and it wasn’t getting smaller when I got closer.” He looked uncertain. “I guess that was you.”

A chill fluttered up what would’ve been my neck.

“You’re the only other ghost I’ve seen,” he told me.

“I’m not a ghost.” Odd that he hadn’t seen one single other person out of body. “Where do you usually hang around?”

“Sand dunes and caves. The ocean. The mountains.”

He didn’t travel populated areas—maybe he was a beginner. “How long have you been out of body?”

“I don’t count sunsets,” he said. “I chase them sometimes. Think I could ever make time go backwards?”

He was so immature. “No.”

“But if I flew so fast toward the sunset that I passed it, wouldn’t it be up in the sky again? Would I be hours back?” He studied my face and throat. “Let’s say I flew three hours backwards. Why can’t I fly ten times faster and get to yesterday?”

“Go ahead.” I smirked at him. “I’ll wait here.”

He grinned and flew away so quickly that I could hardly make out the blur of his black shirt, like a faint storm cloud against the sky. Then nothing, as if he’d never been there at all.

The wind still shifted the grass and there was the distant cry of a crow somewhere, the tick of a beetle, but otherwise silence.

I did not miss him. How could I? Our two conversations still totaled less than ten minutes. It was ridiculous. But the idea of leaving our field depressed me. I couldn’t imagine a single inspiring place to visit.

Irritating as he was, I wanted him to come back, but there were no stars out yet for making wishes. It was almost sunset, though. How many hours had passed?

Like a sneak attack, he rushed at me from the side and threw his arms around me, sending me into the grass. He rolled away laughing. The tingle of his touch vibrated up and down and all through me, cold and warm at the same time.

“Did it work?” He sat up. “Do you remember me or is it yesterday?”

I acted without thinking. I sped away, wanting to get back at him. I went to a cliff I’d been to many times. It was twilight there already, and the forest below was dim—only the mountain across the valley still glowed pink from the sunset. It made me smile, thinking of him standing there in the field alone. The same way he’d left me.

But as the light crept away, I started to realize that I might never see him again. How could I find him? Even if I raced around the globe at light speed, the chance of crossing paths with him again might be microscopic. And it wasn’t as if I could go back to my body and look him up in the phone book. I didn’t know his name or what part of the world he lived in. The only thing connecting us was that stretch of grass.