by Lisa Graff
“CJ.” Aunt Nic sinks back in her seat and takes a long breath. I wait. My skin is tingling just thinking about living anywhere else. I can’t. I won’t. “You’re the backbone of this whole crew. Honestly. It’s going to be next to impossible without you. I’m going to miss you so—” Her voice catches. She takes another breath. “But I need to think about what’s best for you, not just this business. It isn’t normal for a girl your age, traveling all over. Being surrounded by dead folks every night.”
I frown at that. “Who wants to be normal?”
“Not everything that’s normal is so bad, Ceej. It’ll be good to get to know more kids your age. You could join the softball team. Get a crush.”
“Dress like a lemon,” I add, nodding toward the box in my lap.
She cracks a smile. “I know you already like the school,” she says. “Remember? After our show in Montpelier in September, we drove by that little stone campus. All the leaves were changing? You said how beautiful it was, and your mother started whispering in my ear. Wouldn’t shut up about it, actually.”
I look up from the horrible yellow blazer. “My mom . . . ?”
“She told me to look into it,” Aunt Nic replies. “So I did. And sure enough, they had one spot open for the spring semester.”
I lift the blazer again, feeling the bulk of the material. It’s hard to argue with Spirit. When they tell you to do something, you’re always better off doing whatever it is right away, because Spirit knows things humans can’t possibly understand. Still. I don’t want to be a Plemmons Lemon. I don’t want to leave the crew.
“Can I talk to her?” I say. My voice is a squeak.
Aunt Nic squeezes my arm one last time, then lets go to make the connection. While I wait, I grab one of the Styrofoam cups. Peel off the lid.
The pudding is chilly and silky and sweet, and the dash of caraway seeds sprinkled on top gives it the exact right amount of crunch. I take another bite and let the taste settle on my tongue.
“Happy birthday, seedling,” my mother greets me.
I swallow quick. “Hi, Mom,” I say.
I’m choked up already.
“You’re growing up into such a beautiful young lady, CJ. I’m so proud of you, every day.” And she reaches out, through Aunt Nic, and touches my cheek. My cherish. I hold her hand there, tight, as she goes on. “I know the road ahead will be hard, seedling, but this is the best course for you—I’m sure of it. Do you understand?”
I want to argue, but she knows I can’t. She’s a spirit now, so she has all the wisdom of Earth and Spirit, too.
“I understand,” I tell her. Even though it hurts to say it.
My mom’s touch lingers on my cheek, Aunt Nic’s hand under mine. “I need to tell you something else, seedling,” she says. “Something very difficult. But I know you’re strong enough to hear it.”
Aunt Nic’s voice is shaky as the words come out, and I don’t know which one of them is upset by what I’m about to hear. I clutch the hand tighter to my cheek.
“I’m not going to be able to visit you anymore, seedling.” The words scratch at my ears. “This is going to be our last visit on Earth. I’m being drawn Far Away.”
It is everything I’ve ever feared.
“No,” I tell her. Because she’s wrong. About this, I’m certain she’s wrong. “No.”
“I’ve waited until I could tell you myself,” she says. “But I can’t fight it anymore. When Spirit draws you, there’s no way to stop it.”
“No.”
The way things are now, my mom can talk to me whenever she wants, as long as Aunt Nic’s there to translate. But once she’s Far Away for good, she’ll be gone—and the only way back, even for a brief visit, is if she’s pulled here, and “I don’t have a tether,” I tell her. “How will I pull you here when I need you?”
“Spirit wouldn’t take me if you truly needed me,” my mom says. Her words are getting fainter, like she’s already drifting away.
“Stop it!” I screech. I don’t know when Aunt Nic wrapped her arms around me, but now she squeezes tight.
“I’ll be watching you, from Far Away,” my mom goes on, her words thin like tissue. “I love you, my sweet seedling. Goodbye.”
“Mom! Stop. You can’t—”
I feel it, when she goes. Aunt Nic’s body drops into mine, her muscles loose. When I look, I see that her face is sickly yellow, her cheeks wet, and I remember that she just lost someone, too.
“I’m so sorry, CJ,” Aunt Nic whispers into my hair.
“We don’t have anything?” I say. “Nothing that might be her tether?”
When Aunt Nic shakes her head, I feel it across my whole body.
“I’m so sorry, CJ,” she says again.
* * *
• • •
When a spirit is drawn permanently Far Away, they can still send messages to their loved ones on Earth through other spirits—but it’s difficult for them to cross back into our realm to speak for themselves.
Difficult, but not impossible.
In order to do it, they need to be pulled back momentarily, by a tether—a physical object that the spirit treasured during their time on Earth, the item that contains their strongest source of emotional energy. In her years as a medium, Aunt Nic’s used all sorts of tethers to help draw back spirits—rings, belt buckles, diaries. Even a dog bowl once. I saw it.
For my mom, there is nothing at all.
I was three months old when my mom came to give us the news that the house they’d grown up in had burned to the ground. We were thousands of miles away already, in Milwaukee, and Aunt Nic says she took it as a sign that there was no turning back on our old life.
“Why don’t you rest tonight?” Aunt Nic asks gently. I don’t know how long we’ve been weeping, but it feels like an eternity. “I’m sure Jax can handle things without you.”
I shake my head. “He can’t.” Besides, I’d rather be surrounded by spirits in the theater than by myself on the bus.
“If you’re sure,” Aunt Nic says, standing. She checks the clock on the dash. It’s past time for sound check, but she doesn’t head out, she just stands there, watching me. “Ceej?” I look up. Wipe my nose. “I know it’s hard, but . . . the longer we hang on to things we’ll never get, the more hurt we end up. Do you . . . ? Can you understand that, CJ?”
“I understand,” I tell her.
But after the door creaks shut behind her, I wipe my eyes as dry as they’ll go. I turn my attention upward, to any spirit who might be able to reach my mom.
“If there’s anything I can do,” I tell them—I don’t ask, I beg—“anything to draw her back, I’ll do it. Give me a sign, and I’ll do whatever you say.”
If Aunt Nic’s worried about getting hurt, fine. I know she’s suffered plenty, losing her sister twice. But me—I can’t get more hurt than I already am.
I wait and I wait for Spirit’s response, but all I hear is a car horn outside. The low buzz of nearby traffic. No sign about my mom’s tether.
My chest heavy, I walk to the bus door. Stretch out my arm for the handle. And that’s when I see it. There’s a stain on my arm, poking out from the bottom of my left sleeve. A thin line of dark-blue ink, curling across my wrist.
I push up my sleeve to discover that it’s not an ink stain at all. It’s an image. A stamp, maybe, or a drawing.
An octopus.
A deep inky-blue octopus with its legs splayed wide, one letter formed in each of its eight tentacles. A message. I bring my face close to read it.
“What—?” I whisper, looking to Spirit as my sleeve falls back over the image. I tug it back up quick.
But even as I do, the dark ink begins to crumble like ash. And by the time my sleeve is rolled up to my elbow, there is nothing to see but skin.
TWO
“AN OCTOPU
S?” JAX asks, examining my arm, even though I told him there’s nothing there anymore. Just a few traces of inky-blue ash. We’re backstage, in the wings of the theater, before Aunt Nic goes on, and I’m helping Jax balance the shoulder rig so he can get a steady live feed with the camera. Across the darkened stage, I can see Aunt Nic doing her preshow stretch in her “teal Thursday” tracksuit. “You sure you didn’t imagine it?” he says as he snaps in the battery pack.
“Yeah, that’s the thing that makes the most sense,” I say. “I imagined I saw an octopus appear on my arm with letters inside it. Who hasn’t imagined that?”
Jax’s face is still scrunched up like he’s worried I have some sort of octopus-hallucinating fever. “It’s just so weird,” he says.
That’s the first thing he’s said that I agree with. “Definitely. But signs from Spirit don’t always make sense right away. Spirit’s as clear as they can be, but it’s our job to figure out what they mean.” One by one, I pull the three handheld mics from the nearby table and check that they’re flicked to STANDBY before tucking them into my mic belt. I had to poke an extra hole in the belt just to cinch it, because it was custom built for Cyrus, and he’s got at least a hundred pounds on me. “Like, once,” I go on, “Aunt Nic was doing a reading for this woman whose dog kept barking at this tree in her backyard, and Aunt Nic said, ‘It’s a sign from Spirit, you gotta pay attention.’ And then a year later, the woman told Aunt Nic that same tree crashed through her house during a storm—right onto her bed. The only reason she wasn’t sleeping was ’cause she was up early walking the dog.”
“Huh,” Jax says. But I can tell he’s only half listening. He’s staring out toward the stage, scratching at his arm again.
“You’re not freaking out, are you?” I ask him. I really hope not, because any second now the audience lights will dim, and then it’s officially showtime—although for a while it’s just Aunt Nic and the spotlight on the stage alone. She always spends at least twelve minutes—thirteen, if it’s a laugh-heavy crowd—introducing herself and explaining how readings work. But as soon as Spirit leads her into the audience, that’s when me and Jax will have to move.
Jax scratches harder, then stops when he notices me watching. “I might be a little freaked,” he admits.
“You sure you don’t want to swap?” I ask. “Cyrus lets me play around with the camera all the time. I know how to focus and steady it and everything.”
Jax only squints at me, like that’s the dumbest thing he’s ever heard. “You can’t run all over with this thing on,” he says, shrugging his shoulder under the rig to lift the enormous camera up and down. “It weighs a ton.” Okay, so maybe he has a point. “Anyway, I know how to use it. I took Media and Tech at my old school.”
Then he stares out at the stage again, and I realize what’s really freaking him out.
“It’s not creepy,” I tell him, securing the last mic in my belt. “When Aunt Nic talks with Spirit, I mean. You’ll see. It’s not like in the movies, where little kids’ heads spin around on their necks. In real life, spirits act basically the same way they acted here on Earth.” Then I say, “‘Take heed’ means ‘be careful,’ right? It’s, like, a warning?”
“More like ‘pay attention.’” Jax isn’t actually scratching at the moment, but that might only be because it’s hard to balance the rig with one hand. I honestly don’t know how Cyrus manages that thing and the mic belt every night. “If it really is a sign from Spirit,” Jax says, yanking his gaze away from the stage, “then what do you think you’re supposed pay attention to?”
I shrug. “Octopuses?” I say.
“I think the plural of ‘octopus’ is ‘octopi,’” Jax tells me. Like that’s the thing to focus on.
“Maybe Spirit’s saying I can pull my mom back with an octopus,” I say, thinking it over. I never knew my mom had emotional energy stored up in octopuses, but . . . “I could take the bus to the L.A. aquarium tomorrow, before the show.”
“Or maybe you’re supposed to go to a sushi bar,” Jax says. “Or learn how to scuba dive.”
I think he’s joking, but he has a point. “I guess I just have to figure it out,” I reply.
That’s when the lights go down. The roar of the audience drops to a hush. And after Oscar’s canned announcement about cell phones and recording devices, Aunt Nic strides onto the stage to loud applause.
“Good evening, Santa Barbara!” she calls out cheerfully. No matter what’s going on offstage, Aunt Nic always puts it aside when the spotlight’s shining. “Welcome, friends, alive and deceased!” There is another roar of applause.
Beside me, Jax has turned his arm into a scratching post again. “Spirit is friendly, I promise,” I whisper.
He nods but does not stop scratching.
“Any of you fine folks ever been to a medium before?” Aunt Nic continues. Light applause. “I bet it was some stuffy old lady with a crystal ball who stunk like Vicks VapoRub, am I right?” The audience responds with chuckles, but I swear she could get a bigger laugh there. I told her nobody knows what VapoRub is. “Well, I’m a little different.” Aunt Nic gives a kick then, showing off her sneakers under her tracksuit. She has seven different tracksuits, one for every night of the week. “What you see is what you get with me. No fake tarot cards or crystal balls or hocus-pocus. Just you, me, and your loved ones. Whatever they say to me, I pass it directly to you, bad words and all.” That’s always a bigger laugh.
While Jax works on scratching his arm off, Aunt Nic explains about her Gift—how it works, when she first realized she had it, and how my mom pushed her to share it with others after she died. I’ve heard her give this speech so often, sometimes I actually say it in my sleep. So I’m mostly thinking about octopuses—octopi?—until Aunt Nic calls out, “Now, who’s the one with the sister? Died of cancer?”
“Come on, newbie!” I whisper, tugging Jax so we can follow Aunt Nic into the crowd, where she’s searching for the person Spirit’s directing her to. We whip across the stage just as the projection screen drops down behind us, missing Jax’s head by inches.
“I’m getting a name,” Aunt Nic goes on. “Starts with ‘M.’ Marie, maybe, or Mary?”
“I’m Mary!” comes a shout. A woman jumps out of her seat, and just like that I rush over with my mics, Jax following with his camera. “That’s my sister Eliza!”
Mary is about fifty, thin, with a bright-green blouse and short hair. As we reach her, Mary’s handing a purple scarf to Aunt Nic. Jax takes it all in with the camera, and the live feed transmits to the screen onstage, so that everyone can see and hear what the lady and Aunt Nic have to say. That was one of Cyrus’s innovations, when we started booking bigger venues, and it’s definitely made our whole operation seem more professional.
I pass a microphone to Mary, who takes it without hardly glancing at me. Her attention is on Aunt Nic, who’s tilting her head, purple scarf in her hand. Mary looks terrified about whatever it is she’s about to hear—or not hear.
“Eliza hasn’t been drawn Far Away,” Aunt Nic says after a beat, and Mary lets out a breath so huge it sounds like a storm over the handheld. “So you don’t need a tether. But Eliza’s thrilled you brought this scarf anyway. She says, That one looked real good on me!”
Mary cries around a breathy laugh. “That’s Liza, all right,” she says, and suddenly it hits me all over again that I may really never hear any more of my mother’s words.
I only get to worry about that for a second, though, before I notice that Jax has the camera focused on me instead of Aunt Nic and Mary. I tug it in the right direction.
“She was smart, your sister, huh?” Aunt Nic is saying. “Used lots of big words?”
Mary thinks about it. “Sometimes, yeah.”
“But she didn’t like to show off. Didn’t want everyone else to feel bad, knowing they weren’t as smart as she was. She was always looking out for
other people.”
That gets a huge nod from Mary. “Oh, yeah. Always.”
Aunt Nic smiles back, and I sideways glance at the screen to make sure everything’s in focus. “She’s still looking out for you now,” Aunt Nic continues. “Every day. She wants you to know that. She says, I’ve always got your back, sis, same as before. You and the— You got kids? Eliza’s mentioning kids.”
“Yeah. Just had my first grandbaby.”
Aunt Nic spends a few more minutes with Mary and Eliza before a spirit calls her from a different side of the audience and she races over to make the connection.
It’s hard work keeping up with Spirit. Aunt Nic always ends up darting between one side of the audience and another, like a tennis player chasing a ball. But so far, Jax is handling himself pretty well, especially since there are more obstacles to dodge than normal tonight, with Roger and his two camerapeople grabbing footage of their own.
When Aunt Nic is called to three grown-up sisters, at first my heart aches for them, because Aunt Nic tells them right away their dad was drawn Far Away long ago, and she can’t pull him into our realm to make the connection. But then one of the sisters shows her a doorknob and says, “Will this help? It’s from the door to his den. That’s where he spent most of his time.”
And as soon as Aunt Nic grips it, he is pulled down to Earth.
“Which one of you just got married?” Aunt Nic asks the sisters. “He’s telling me, My daughter looked gorgeous in that dress.” One of the women is so overwhelmed that another sister has to hold her up. “He was there,” Aunt Nic tells the women. “You sensed him, didn’t you?”
While I’m passing out mics to the sisters so they can answer, Aunt Nic tells the crowd, “A lot of folks ask me about tethers—how to know which one thing, of all the stuff you might have, is filled with enough emotional energy to pull your loved one back.”
I tighten my jaw, thinking about families with whole houses of items to sift through. All I have of my mother’s are photos. But those aren’t things she touched and loved and cared about.