Authors: Laura Whitcomb
I floated after them the way I used to follow my hosts everywhere. Before I met James I’d had a chain of five humans I’d haunted since my death. I found safety from my hell by clinging to them and did what I could to be a friend to each. But Jenny was the only one of the Quick I had ever possessed.
I sat in the back seat behind her as the engine roared. Cathy couldn’t wait for the garage door to rise—the car’s antenna snapped off and clattered onto the driveway.
Billy was waiting on the sidewalk. Cathy slammed on the brakes and rolled down her window. “Go home,” she ordered him.
Jenny leaned forward, about to speak, when she saw Mitch. Wearing a grease-stained T-shirt, Billy’s brother stood leaning against his wreck of a car parked at the curb. Cathy’s angry tone drew his attention. He threw his lit cigarette onto the lawn.
“Is she okay?” Billy asked Cathy.
“If you don’t leave I’ll have to call the police,” Cathy told him.
“Mom!”
Mitch strode toward them.
Cathy rammed the car into park and got out, taking a step toward Mitch before he could get any closer.
“Will you please take your son home?” asked Cathy. She took in his appearance: unshaven face, muscled arms, tattoos. She held her sweater closed as if he could see through her garments.
“He’s not my kid, he’s my brother.” Mitch gave her a sweeping glance, head to foot.
Cathy bristled. “Where are your parents while all this is happening?”
Mitch smiled. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
Billy stood with his hands in his pockets now, watching Jenny through the car window, seemingly oblivious to the argument. And Jenny stared back at him, but she jumped at the sound of angry voices. I didn’t want her to worry.
“All will be well,” I told her, but she couldn’t hear me with so many distractions.
When I left heaven I had a clear plan as to how I would help Jenny. In the same way that I had guided my hosts with an invisible touch on the arm, keeping them from stumbling on an unnoticed stone in their path, I planned to lay my hand on Jenny’s shoulder when she was faced with Billy Blake and turn her from him. After all, it was James and I who had been in love, not Billy and Jenny. She should feel no obligation.
When Jenny’s mother treated her with harshness I imagined I would sit between them, holding each by the hand, and act as the conduit for love as I had with my Poet and his dying brother. And if Jenny’s father were to reappear and throw hurtful words, I would stand like a shield in his face and dampen his wickedness as I had when my Knight was confronted by an angry colleague. And if Jenny found the consequences of my time in her life kept her from sleep, I would sit on the foot of her bed and sing to her, or recite verse, as I did when banishing the nightmares of my Playwright.
But what I had forgotten was that those moments with my hosts were the exceptions. It was a rare thing to affect the realm of the Quick.
Cathy’s voice quavered. “Well, tell your mother for me that it’s impossible for your brother and my daughter to continue seeing each other.”
“Tell her yourself. She’s at St. Jude’s Hospital, but she hasn’t said a word in five years.” Mitch enjoyed her surprise. “Or, my dad’s in the county prison. Or you could mind your damn business.”
Cathy took a flustered step backwards, bumping into the car. “Watch your language in front of my child.”
“Fuck you, lady.” Mitch grabbed Billy by the sleeve and pulled him toward their car.
Cathy hurried back into the driver’s seat, white in the face. The car accelerated, then left the driveway at an odd angle, scouring the tailpipe on the curb.
“Billy wants to help,” said Jenny. “He tried to save me.”
Cathy was breathing too fast. She sat with her shoulders high and tight. She should have at least tried to put on a calm front for her daughter’s sake. But Cathy offered not one word of reassurance. I had planned to draw them closer, and I could have sat between them now and taken their hands, but I didn’t want to touch Cathy. It angered me that she offered Jenny no sympathy. I didn’t want to try to make Cathy a better mother. I wanted to comfort Jenny myself. Someone had to protect the girl.
Even though she might not hear, I leaned forward and whispered to the back of Jenny’s head of gold hair, “Don’t worry. Everything will be all right.”
“Why wouldn’t you open the door?” Cathy asked her.
“The door?” said Jenny. “You mean the bathroom door?”
“Yes, the bathroom door!” Cathy, who hadn’t fastened her safety belt, now tried to force the strap over her chest, but it had locked in place.
“I don’t know.” Jenny peered into the back seat, looking through me. “Maybe I didn’t want to get out of the tub.” Then she asked, “Who else was at the house?”
“What?” Cathy glanced at her. “You mean Billy’s brother?”
“No,” said Jenny. “Wasn’t there someone else in the bathroom?”
CHAPTER 9
W
HAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?”
said Cathy.
A queer tremor rippled through me.
I
was the someone who had been in the bathroom with them, standing beside the tub.
“Other than that boy?” Cathy asked.
Jenny caught sight of something outside the car—she pivoted in her seat. I wondered what had captured her attention. We passed store window displays filled with autumn leaves and the silhouettes of crows.
“Why are there pumpkins everywhere?” she asked.
I didn’t know exactly how long Jenny had been away from her body before I entered it, but I knew it must be unsettling to be thrown blindly back into her life. If she could have seen me, I would have smiled at her, because her mother’s expression was far from soothing.
“What is wrong with you?” Cathy demanded. “How many pills did you really take?”
Jenny stared at her mother as if something was missing—I could see it in her blue eyes and feel it in the trembling of her narrow shoulders. She was afraid.
“Mom?” Jenny asked. “Where’s Daddy?”
Cathy started weeping as she drove. “He’s probably at
her
house.”
“Whose house?”
But Cathy wouldn’t answer. She muttered to herself and strangled the steering wheel with twisting fists. She drove past a stop sign without slowing down and did not seem even to hear the honking horns. This danger she was exposing her child to made me wish I could take over Cathy’s body the way I had Jenny’s.
I had been an imperfect protector for my own daughter, but I knew I could be a better mother to Jenny than Cathy was proving to be. It struck me then that even if I hadn’t been able to save myself, I could have acted as a kind of guardian angel to my daughter as she grew up if I’d been clever enough to find my way into heaven sooner. Instead, I was foolish and frightened and got stuck. I’d been taught by my father how to milk a cow and at my mother’s side how to make shortbread. But no one had taught me how to die.
At the emergency room, we were escorted into a cubicle, where Jenny sat staring at her hands. I stood behind her chair. The small space flickered with fairylike lights from the fluorescent overheads and reflected off Cathy’s diamond wedding ring as she furiously filled out a form on a clipboard.
I wanted to point out how pretty the twinkling lights were, but Jenny couldn’t hear me, of course, and she wasn’t a baby. She was a grown girl.
The nurse asked many questions and Cathy answered them, never making eye contact with her daughter. Jenny could probably have stood up and walked away and her mother would not have noticed. I took a seat in the empty plastic chair to Jenny’s right.
“The nurse is asking you a question.” Cathy tapped on Jenny’s knee as if the girl had been napping in church.
“So, you threw up the sleeping pills,” asked the nurse. “Is that right?”
“That’s right,” she said.
“But she’s having memory problems,” Cathy insisted.
The nurse asked Jenny about alcohol, drugs, head injuries. She took Jenny’s pulse, blood pressure, temperature. All the while I thought of the things I would want to hear if I were Jenny:
Don’t worry about a thing—we’ll take care of you.
Finally we were taken into the emergency room examination area. The doctor was reading his clipboard when he pulled open the curtain. He wheeled a little stool up to the narrow bed where Jenny sat on a white paper sheet. He sat down, smiled, a neutral expression.
“You’re having trouble with your memory.” He clicked his pen. “What did you have for breakfast?”
“I don’t remember,” she said.
“Do you know today’s date?” he asked.
“No.” Jenny looked embarrassed. “Is it fall? It doesn’t feel like fall to me.”
“That so?” The doctor scribbled a note. “Why?”
Jenny flexed her hands, felt her face as if she was still getting used to being back inside her own flesh. “Not sure,” she said.
“What were you doing before you came here?” he asked.
“Taking a bath,” said Jenny.
“And before that?” The doctor, whose tag read
DR. A. LAWRENCE,
waited, his eyebrows raised.
“I wish I knew,” Jenny admitted.
“What’s the last thing you remember before the bath?”
Jenny swallowed uncomfortably. She slipped her hands under her thighs and stared at her knees for a moment. “I remember being in the Prayer Corner.”
“That wasn’t this morning,” Cathy said. “We didn’t have Bible study today.”
“How long ago was that, the morning you’re thinking of?” the doctor asked Jenny. “Any idea?”
She sighed. I sensed her mind spinning with images, though I could not see the story of pictures there. “I remember going on a trip . . .” Jenny’s voice trailed away.
“Speak up, Jennifer,” Cathy ordered.
I lay my hand on Jenny’s arm and the familiar tingle of spirit touching the living licked through me, cold and warm at the same time.
I did not sense in Jenny any recognition that I had tried to comfort her by my touch. She was still shaking and pale. But I was sure she would learn to recognize my help.
Claims made by the Quick as to the powers of ghosts are often exaggerated. It was difficult for me to move any object in the world of the living. Emotions are what can be heard or at least sensed by the living, rarely one’s voice—sometimes the touch of my hand, but more often it was my desire to reach out.
“I think I went to the country,” said Jenny. “There was a field—”
“No.” Cathy shook her head. “We haven’t taken a trip since last summer, and it was to Sacramento.”
If Jenny remembered anything more, she didn’t speak it aloud. But she did look at my hand where it lay on her arm. She lifted her own hand slowly as I drew mine away. She rubbed the place where I had touched her. Then she flexed her fingers and looked around, her gaze passing through me.
She may not have realized it was me beside her, but I had at least changed something in her world. It was a start.
The doctor must have noticed that Jenny was shaking—he took a folded blanket from the foot of the examination table and handed it to her. “Did you have a recent upset?”
Jenny took the blanket absently.
“Anything frighten you or make you sad?” he asked. “Did you have a fight with someone?”
Cathy took the blanket from Jenny’s hands and snapped it open, then put it around her daughter’s shoulders as she spoke. “She hasn’t been herself for days now.” Cathy sat back down and watched the doctor’s pen as if wanting to dictate what he recorded. “She started seeing a boy in secret.” Her voice dropped. “Intimately.”
Jenny pulled the blanket around her as if trying to hide a scarlet letter her mother had sewn onto her blouse.
Cathy looked humiliated to add what followed, “And her father left.” She folded her hands and held them down in her lap. “He moved out this morning. Jenny found out about it right before her bath.”
This was no surprise to me—I’d still been Jenny then. Cathy had wept with me about her husband, Dan, running off with another woman and then we’d celebrated by burning down the Prayer Corner. But Jenny’s head came up, her eyes wide.
“Do you remember hearing about that?” the doctor asked her, and Jenny shook her head no.
“How does it make you feel?” he asked.
I was afraid Jenny would be hurt—he was, after all, her father. I would have been devastated if my own Papa had left me when I was a girl.
“Confused,” said Jenny.
“That’s understandable,” the doctor told her.
The questions were over for a while, but there were hours of waiting—they performed many tests. There were machines for tracking brain waves, diagramming the inside of the head, making a graph of heart patterns—little tubes of blood were taken from Jenny’s arm. They taped a ball of cotton to the tiny wound and Cathy brought the girl a bottle of orange juice and a muffin. This should have been a sweet gesture, but in the same way Cathy had flicked the hospital blanket around Jenny’s shoulders without asking her if she was cold or frightened, Cathy applied food and drink as if Jenny were a dish that needed drying or a dress that needed mending.
The way the nurses, wearing matching pale blue uniforms, busied themselves around Jenny’s body, measuring blood and checking monitors and applying disinfectant, reminded me of cooks preparing a feast. Jenny, watching them, looked as anxious as the Christmas goose about to be cooked.
Cathy looked nervous, as well, but didn’t include herself in the scene. Couldn’t the woman see that Jenny needed to be held and comforted? I ached with the realization that I had never been able to take my own girl in my arms when she was Jenny’s age. Not one afternoon spent together when she was old enough to tell me her dreams. It was torture to observe Cathy sitting blindly and stupidly beside her daughter when I would have given anything just to brush my daughter’s hair one single night when she was fifteen.
Even though every test showed that Jenny was healthy, I knew she was not all right. I’d made a plan to help her, but this rescue was not an easy thing.
“Where are we going?” Jenny asked her mother.
I had little experience with the order of these streets, but even I could tell that Cathy was not driving us home. And she wouldn’t explain. Jenny watched her with concern.