Authors: Laura Whitcomb
Jenny seemed unaware of being observed. She breathed unevenly and wiped wet strands of hair from her face. How odd that I was the one who commanded that hand moments ago.
Now that I was back in the land of the Quick, heaven seemed like something I must’ve dreamed. Yet I knew I had been there with James. Some things, for instance—who were guests at the great feast—I noticed had already been lost in crossing back into the world of the Quick. Other things—the way leaves floated down gently onto the linen tablecloth, the smell of fresh bread, and the simple beauty of a bowl of magnolia blossoms—these images were still bright in my mind.
Heaven was real.
I didn’t think James would understand, which is why I hadn’t said goodbye. The idea had come to me in a rush—I knew that I had to go back to earth and find Jenny. One does not abandon a child in a storm. I was determined to stay with the girl until the wrong I had done her had been righted. Just a short time. Then I would go back to him.
Heaven is not a place you leave behind carelessly—I wanted to stay, of course. And I would have thought it a great struggle to return to the earth, but for me the crossing was easy.
As I focused on the last place I had seen Jenny, I found I was on a road, but still in heaven. I strode to the point of convergence between my pathway and the first row of trees, then pictured Jenny’s face. Not my reflection in a mirror when I was inside her, and not her empty shell before I stole her flesh, but her wet, bewildered eyes just after she had reclaimed her body. I saw those curved lashes and her pale face and neck, her round ears, her pointed chin.
There was a kind of flattening then, as if the road and the woods were drawn on a piece of paper and some unseen hand had turned the page away from me, foreshortening the landscape. The folding, inky bridge to Jenny pressed me like the claustrophobic moment when you try to pull a too-tight dress off over your head and it catches at the ribs. I drew myself in and pushed through.
Everything beyond was blinding white: white walls, white tiles. And there she was, waiting in the water.
The bath had drained out and the tap was pouring water down over Jenny’s feet. She was quivering and pale, but her cheeks were flushed as she took in her surroundings—the sweater lying on the floor, the empty prescription bottle, the scattering of sleeping pills.
Most of her troubles were ones I had brought to her when I’d stolen her body. In my defense, she had left it empty, but that was no excuse—I was a thief. For the chance to be a solid, living girl again, I had taken up the shell of this fifteen-year-old. At a church picnic, no less, as she sat with head bowed in prayer. Every time I remembered this, it shamed me. The fact that I was in love at the time and that borrowing a body was the only way to touch James, skin to skin, made it no less wicked.
I had been Light, dead and bodiless, for more than a century before I laid eyes on Jenny. When I slid my spectral fingers into her folded hands and breathed through the instrument of her ribs and belly for the first time, I wept with joy.
How strange that after waiting a hundred and thirty years for a body, I kept hers for only six days. For less than a week I played the part of Jenny. Slept in her bed, answered to her name. I’d shocked her family and friends, said and done things Jenny never would have. I inadvertently brought accusations against an honorable man. I bedded James using Jenny’s body without permission and then left her alone and unprotected with no memory of the days I had lived as her. I owed her my protection and loyalty now.
The girl jumped at the sound of the doorbell. What was about to happen both thrilled and worried me. I had seen part of what was coming already. Forgetting the obvious, I reached for a towel to wrap around her, but my fingers passed through the cloth. I’d imagined exactly how to protect her, fashioned a detailed plan in my mind as I traveled back to earth. How could I help if I couldn’t even make the towel tremble when I swiped at it?
Jenny was about to be thrown into great difficulties, all my doing, all while her spirit had been away on some mysterious adventure I knew nothing about.
Watching her cower in that porcelain coffin brought me back to my last day as one of the Quick. And that’s where every ghost story begins, with a death.
I didn’t know I was about to die, of course, but even so, my last day held a strange undercurrent that began with first light. The air smelled familiar, although I couldn’t place the scent. I was sitting in the rocker, holding my sleeping baby, as the sun rose with an ominous hue. I wondered if a neighboring farm was on fire, but I smelled no smoke and I’d heard no warning bells or cries for help.
My husband walked past us, displeased with me, as usual, because he thought my answering our daughter’s cries in the night would spoil her. But his coldness toward her made me want to comfort her more. If I could have climbed into her cradle, I would’ve made it my nightly refuge—we were each other’s favorite and only companions.
On my last day, I knew something was not right. Something was approaching—either dangerous, like a storm, or wonderful, like a gift by post. Or better, a sea voyage, an adventure to rival the novels I read again and again. The excitement that was hiding behind the foreboding sunrise, the possibility of a marvelous change, some new opportunity, was the only reason I agreed when my husband said he would be away from home all day. We didn’t need protecting, so I thought.
As I baked the morning biscuits, the screen door creaked but did not open, dust devils danced at the foot of the porch, and the light became more and more queer. The air was thick and yellowed. As my husband walked out of the house, I looked out through the lace curtains to catch the last glimpse of him. He took our mare, but not the wagon. I saw his broad back in a white shirt, his hair blowing as he rode bareheaded through our gate and away.
It wasn’t until that moment, when the weathervane above us squealed to change position, that I recognized the smell of that morning: It was the scent of a mountain of unshed rain. So it was a storm that was coming after all. Uncommonly big, perhaps, but just rain. No impending miracle on the horizon. A bad rain would mean lots of work cleaning up afterward. But I tried to cheer myself—my husband was gone for the day and that freedom always lightened my heart. We had the house to ourselves.
The weather continued to vex us with peculiar scents, vibrations, and utterances. The windows rattled as if some invisible hand played them with a fiddle bow. On the bulging black horizon, flashes bounced like fireflies in the dark cupped hands of the sky.
I took out a bowl and pan, but before I had even scooped out the flour for the cookie dough, the wind that leaked through the windowpane seams blew a puff of white powder off the top of the sack like a tiny specter. I lifted my child out of the wooden highchair and left the kitchen. As I passed through the dining room, the lace cloth on the table was rippled by some mysterious draft.
I headed upstairs with the idea that I would sit in bed with the baby in my lap and the blankets over our heads, but was stopped by a crash, then the sound of breaking glass. A gust of cold air swept over us—a second-floor window must have broken. A branch from our oak tree had probably smashed into one of the bedroom casements. My daughter whimpered and clung to me mightily. I stopped with my feet on two different steps.
I returned to the lower of the steps—should I go up and try to save certain treasures from the rain? The two nice pictures we had in frames on the dresser—a portrait of my parents and a tintype of my husband as a boy? My grandmother’s christening gown, folded in paper and sprinkled with dried lavender in the cedar chest, should be safe. But my books—I should hurry and save them.
Or should I run downstairs with my girl and close us into the cellar?
If the winds became a tornado, that would be the safest place to hide. The whole house could rip out at the foundations and the cellar would still be there, the two of us dug down in the bottom corner.
Everything in the dining room trembled as we passed through again. Shadow and light mixed in a frightening dance on the other side of the lace curtains. The winds began to take on a human sound, a moan under the hiss and growl of air. I opened the back door and the handle jerked out of my grip before the door slammed into the outside wall. The sky was full of topsoil and leaves, twigs, even a gardening glove with fingers flapping.
I didn’t know I had only a handful of minutes. Or that the cellar was a mistake. That strange feeling in my gut, that something wonderful might be just around the corner, flared back up inside me as we stepped out the kitchen door and into the wind. A thrill shot through me. God made the storm just as God made the rainbow and the calm that comes after the storm. God made the earth and all that dwelled there and also heaven and hell and all the angels and devils that dwell there, too. So there is God in everything, in the wind and the rain and the burning white of lightning.
Maybe if I could have held on to that thought, I might have left that cellar for heaven instead of hell. But then, I never would have found James. So maybe God truly was in the rising water and the darkness and the terror. His eye, the unblinking funnel of cloud at the center of my panic.
CHAPTER 8
T
HE SOUND OF A DOORBELL
still hung in the air. I watched Jenny, how her eyes darted back and forth—she listened to the sound of footsteps and muffled voices in the hall.
“Jenny?” It was Cathy’s voice, Jenny’s mother, just outside the bathroom door. “Are you feeling sick?” The handle turned, but the door stayed shut.
Jenny twisted the faucet until the water shut off. Next a male voice was on the other side of the door—I knew who it was because I had already witnessed this scene.
“Jenny? Can I talk to you?”
It wasn’t James, of course, simply the body he had borrowed, but the sound still thrilled me.
“Honey, there’s someone here to see you,” called Cathy.
Jenny opened her mouth to speak, but her chin was quivering.
“I’m serious.” Cathy’s tone was harsh. “This is your mother speaking. You let me in this minute.” She was making the hinges rattle.
“Are you hurt?” His voice again.
Jenny finally answered. “No.” But too soft to be heard.
“Open this door!” Cathy’s tone was high-pitched now, on the brink of panic. “I’m going to call the police.” The door shook so hard, the empty pill bottle on the floor bounced. “I’m calling 911!”
“I’m all right!” Jenny shouted. Then she looked at me, but of course she couldn’t see me. At least I didn’t think she could.
Although I knew it was going to happen, I still jumped when the door burst in, cracking the wood frame, and Billy Blake crashed into the room like a fireman.
Jenny blinked at him. She held her knees up to her chest, hiding her nakedness.
“Are you okay?” he asked. He was breathing hard as if he’d run for miles to get to her. I was not in love with Billy, of course, but that particular shade of brown hair and the shape of those hands made my heart ache.
“I don’t know,” said Jenny.
He tore a bath towel off the rack and bent down on one knee, unfolding it over her shoulders like a cape.
“I’m sorry I said I didn’t remember you,” he told her, “when you came to see me today.”
“I came to see you?”
So, she didn’t remember what her body had done while I was its captain. I was not surprised.
Billy reached to the back pocket of his jeans. “After you left, I found this in my room.”
He held the shiny plastic square in front of Jenny, a photo. “This is us,” he said.
Jenny brought the picture closer to her face, tilting it so that the glare on the glossy finish shifted. I knew that picture, of course. To Jenny the photo would look like a picture of her and Billy, but it was actually James and me while we occupied their bodies—it was the only way for us to be together.
A drop of water from Jenny’s hand ran down the white border.
“I’m having some trouble remembering things,” Billy told her.
“Me too,” she said.
“You look happy with me,” he said, as if astonished that someone could ever love him.
Jenny looked pleased, but she was still dazed. “Yeah, I do,” she told him. He started to rub the towel on her head, drying her cold hair. “Is your name Billy?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
Here was all I remembered seeing before I left earth.
Cathy, the phone to her ear, stopped in the bathroom doorway. “Jennifer!”
It was strange to think that I had left this bathroom and climbed to heaven, into James’s arms. That was happening at the same time that I was standing here and looking down at Jenny. I could not regret now that I had become a ghost, because how else would I have met James? Yet looking back, my inability to cross into heaven for so many years seemed foolish.
Cathy snapped her fingers at Jenny. “Cover yourself!” Then she motioned for Billy to get out. “Do you mind?”
Billy backed into the hall as Cathy closed the door in his face. “Why don’t they answer?” Cathy scowled at the phone, pressed two buttons, listened again. “How many did you take?” she asked.
Jenny searched the room as if she felt watched.
“How many?” Cathy demanded.
“I’m not overdosing,” said Jenny. “I threw them up.”
“Were you trying to kill yourself?”
“No.” Jenny paused. I could tell she didn’t remember one way or the other. “I spilled them and the ones I swallowed I threw up. Don’t call an ambulance.”
Cathy tried to dress her daughter as if the girl were five years old—buttoned her buttons, flicked her collar down straight, pulled her hair out of her sweater for her.
Cathy agreed to drive Jenny to the emergency room instead of calling the paramedics. When they emerged from the bathroom at last, Cathy shooed Billy out of the house, rushing to gather her purse and keys.
She bustled Jenny through the kitchen toward the door that led into the garage, but Jenny was staring at the house—the broken picture frames in the living room and dining room, the mess in the kitchen as if someone had pulled half the contents of the cupboards out and dumped them onto the floor and into the sink.