Under the Light

by Laura Whitcomb

  I felt guilty about being horrified. I should have sent us to some flowery hilltop, but my thoughts had taken a dive.

  “Do you think we could go to places we didn’t want to go?” he asked. Reading my mind again.

  “I don’t know.” I didn’t want to experiment anymore. “Why?”

  “Who is in charge, your brain or your emotions?”

  “I don’t want to play that game,” I said.

  “Where would you not want to go?” he asked me.

  “No,” I said. But it was too late.

  CHAPTER 6

  Jenny

  THAT PARTICULAR LIGHT AT THE BOTTOM of the door was too familiar. I heard the hallway creaking the way it did when my father walked toward the family room.

  Why was I like this? Dorothy would have loved coming back to Kansas for a moment and catching a glimpse of her aunt. But all I wanted was to go back to Oz.

  Back to the field, I thought. But we were still in my darkened bedroom. The light from the hall poured in through my door as it opened partway. The two of us cast no shadows, of course.

  I looked away as my father looked in and then closed the door again. I didn’t want to see him. Or my mother. But it was the idea of seeing my own body lying in bed that turned my heart to ice.

  “Is this your house?” he asked.

  But all I could say was “Let’s go.”

  “It looks nice,” he said. “What’s wrong with it?”

  I could hear my father and mother talking in the office. The words were muffled, but there was something about the way he talked over her, and the soothing tone he used, that depressed me. I wanted my mother to have the last word for a change, but she went silent.

  “I want to leave,” I said.

  He took my wrist, held it hard. And we were thankfully away from there. We stood in a gloomy hallway with barred cells along one wall. I could hear the sounds of prisoners, a cough, a low voice talking, perhaps reading aloud, someone snoring, someone else tapping softly, a nervous habit.

  “Is this where you don’t want to be?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer, just stared down the corridor.

  “I don’t want to play anymore,” I told him. I gripped his shoulders and gave him a shake as I wished us back to the field, but my hand slipped off him at the last moment and I was in the field alone. I turned around and around—he didn’t come back with me.

  Take me to the place I was standing right before this, I thought. And I was back in the prison. But he wasn’t.

  “Take me to him,” I said out loud, and I was instantly in a hospital corridor. I peeked into the closest room. It was dark. All I could see was that a woman lay in the hospital bed with only her pale arm and hand visible, lit by the nurse call button on the side of the bed rail.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have been able to find him that way. I don’t know why I could. But he was sitting on the floor against the side of the bed. He jumped up, furious.

  “How did you get here?”

  “I don’t know. I said I wanted to go to you.”

  “I don’t want you here.” He stood between me and the woman patient.

  “What’s so terrible about visiting someone in the hospital?” I asked. “That’s a nice thing to do.”

  But his fury flared up and he grabbed my wrist. “Field!” As soon as we were there he let go of me. No, he didn’t just release my wrist—he threw it out of his hand.

  “I’m sorry,” I stammered.

  “You think I want you to follow me into a place like that?”

  I could feel him about to disappear. “Wasn’t that the point of the game?” I asked. It was so frustrating to be in trouble when I hadn’t done anything wrong. I’d had enough of that for one lifetime.

  “Stay away from me,” he said.

  “No, you stay away from me,” I told him. “This is my field.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I was here first!” I yelled at him. “You get out!”

  “I don’t take orders from you!” he yelled back. “I can go anywhere I want.”

  “Well, so can I!” I wanted to throw something at him. I hurled a fistful of nothing at his face.

  He flinched as if I’d slapped his cheek and I was instantly sorry. He wouldn’t look me in the eye—he flew backwards away from me in a flash and was gone.

  I hated that I had lashed out at him, and I missed him so hard, I wished I knew his name so I could scream it. I wanted to rewind our fight and take back my words.

  I used to think I was always in trouble with my parents because their rules were so strict, but here was my first new relationship and I had killed it already. I sat down in the grass and cried.

  “Okay,” I heard him say. “We’ll share it.” He stood over me with his hands on his hips. “You can have this side of the field and I’ll take the other.” With his foot he drew a line on the ground that made no impression in the grass. “Deal?”

  I was glad to have him back, more than I was willing to admit to him, but I still felt unlovable. He lay down on the ground just on the other side of the invisible line, his arms folded across his chest.

  “Shouldn’t sharing be like both of us enjoying the whole field?” I asked.

  “It’s sharing like I break my cookie in half and give you one of the pieces.”

  I lay down on my own side inches away from him. “No, my cookie and I give half to you.”

  He moved closer to me, fitting his shoulder, arm, hip, and leg up against me in such a comfortable way, I worried again that his attraction to me might be brotherly. “Same difference,” he said.

  The night was deep, the stars had risen, a faint glow defined every blade of grass. Wasn’t it strange that the stars sparkled in his eyes even though he would not cast an image in a mirror himself? When I looked up, the heavens seemed so big, I almost felt like I was falling into them.

  “Let’s just forget what we saw,” I whispered. “I can’t even remember where I found you.”

  “Okay.” His arms relaxed.

  “Did I hurt you?” I asked, turning to see if his face was marked.

  “No,” he said, but I wasn’t so sure.

  I pushed up even closer to him—arms, sides, hip to hip, legs, even our feet, his right and my left, pressed together. He lifted his foot and rested it over my ankle, gently pinning me down.

  Then he pointed into the heavens. “Want to go there?”

  “Where?”

  “That star.” He gave his finger an extra stretch toward the dozens of stars in that general direction. “The one by those other two stars.”

  “What do you mean?” I lifted my arm so it was touching his, our hands and fingers aligned, and pointed. “That one?”

  “No,” he complained. Then he swiped his fingers across our view of the sky, like he was flicking away a speck of dust or a drop of water, and the night surged forward. The stars, staying perfectly aligned, curved across the sky—time had sped into the future an hour.

  I gasped at this and grabbed his hand, pulling it back toward our bodies as if he might accidentally throw the earth off its rotation. The stars slowed again, appearing to have stopped.

  “How did you do that?” I whispered.

  “I took us somewhere we hadn’t been yet,” he said. “Forward in time.”

  He said it so matter-of-factly, but the idea made me shiver on the inside.

  “Just a little,” he reassured me.

  “That’s . . . so cool.” I pointed at one particularly bright star and gave it a push with my fingertip in the air. The map of stars glided forward again, constellations staying aligned as they gracefully passed over us, not a long way, just a bit into the tail of the night, an hour or two closer to morning.

  He made a sound of alarm, a fake cry, and then laughed. “Here.” He lifted his arm to mine, our hands together, our index fingers pointing up. As one, without saying aloud what we would do, we moved the stars a few minutes westward, then froze. “Look what we can do together,
” he said.

  “What did we do?”

  “We stopped time,” he whispered.

  I didn’t believe him at first. I watched the star at the end of my finger for a long while. He just lay there waiting for me to admit it. “Did we really?” I asked.

  “We pooled our superstrength.”

  “So you think I couldn’t have done it by myself?” I teased him.

  “Okay.” He withdrew his hand and folded him arms over his chest again. “Now you’re just getting power hungry.”

  Of course we hadn’t truly stopped planets and suns in the vacuum of space—I supposed we had stopped our perception of time. Which was just as magic.

  The warmth of his spirit along the side of mine made me bold. I pointed both my hands toward the east and swept my arms westward. As the night sky appeared to fly by, and the sun raced up the ceiling of purple, brightening it to blue, as clouds sailed over us, scudding along, he slid between my open arms and kissed me.

  I’d never been kissed, so I had nothing to compare it with. We had eyes to see and we could hold hands, and I supposed we had lips, because we kissed. But I also knew we were out of our bodies. So how was it that he tasted like rain? It was dizzying how we could press into each other further than humans ever could. He was pulling something out of me, like my sense of balance—he was dropping me off a cliff and I never wanted him to let go.

  But it was also disturbing. How would we ever sort ourselves out from each other again?

  The heavens were still floating along, faster than they should. I didn’t know how many days had rolled past. I shot my hand up and slowed down the sun halfway up the sky. Maybe time didn’t mean anything to us anymore, but if flinging the stars around shortened the number of minutes I had with him, I needed to put the planets back in rhythm. How many times had the moon crossed over us while we were kissing?

  He had made the world of wandering spirits safe for me. But again came that nagging feeling that there was something wrong. We’d never be able to eat in a restaurant together. We’d never have our picture taken in a photo booth. He’d never pick me up in a car. I’d never make him a birthday cake.

  A random cloud muted the light and I felt the heaviness of my old life pushing down on me, a lead coat I wanted to shrug off.

  “If we’re dreaming,” I asked him, “do you think one of us might wake up by accident?”

  “What are you talking about?” He smiled.

  “One day I saw a baby napping and its spirit was three feet away from its body, but then it woke up and the baby ghost disappeared.”

  “The spirit disappeared?”

  “No, I mean, its spirit went back into the body. But if I’d been looking at just the spirit, you know, it would have seemed like it vanished.”

  “Are you worried I’ll disappear?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” I felt embarrassed to have brought it up. “I felt like I almost got sucked back to my old life a couple of times, but you’re probably not going anywhere. I mean, you could be in a coma.”

  He sat up. “Why did you say that?”

  He was angry again. It stung tears into my eyes. “I didn’t mean anything bad.” He still looked so dark—I’d damaged him somehow. “I don’t know what I’m talking about,” I said. “Don’t listen to me.”

  “I can’t stay here.” He stood up.

  “I take it back,” I said, scrambling to my feet. “What did I do?”

  He seemed far away—I couldn’t quite reach him.

  “Aw, shit,” he sighed.

  “Where are you going?” I reached for him. “I’ll go with you!” My fingers gripped his shirt.

  For one moment we were both on a city bus. He was staring at a boy and girl sitting across the aisle. I wanted to look at them too, but a man was standing between us. Was that boy him? Or his body?

  Everything was blurry. My hand slipped off his sleeve and I was in the field again, fallen in the grass. He came back, but it was as if he was a faded picture of himself.

  “You can’t come with me.” He knelt beside me—his voice wavered like a blowing leaf twisting in and out of the light. I tried to take his hand but I couldn’t seem to.

  “Why do you have to leave?” I asked.

  His face, like his voice, was getting lost in waves of shadow and sunshine. “Listen,” he said, and then he told me his name aloud. The words, though, curled and evaporated in the air before I could catch them. Then he was telling me a street name. And a list of numbers so I could find him.

  I threw myself toward him, stretching out to try to put my arms around him, but there was nothing to hold on to. He was there and then not and there again. His mouth was moving. I couldn’t read lips, but I thought he said someone was crying.

  “Who is crying?” I asked him. But my words were coming apart. My voice turned to colors and tastes and scents instead of sounds. Blue and salty tears and fresh grass. I tried to tell him my name, the street where I lived, but my words and the numerals of my phone number turned into dust and flew off on the wind. What I thought were his eyes in the fluttering light were just flashes of sun reflecting off the blowing specks of my voice.

  The breeze calmed and the face of the sun was clear again. I was alone. I tried to remember every detail I could about his face and the tone of his voice. I tried to remember everything he’d said to me. I was sure there were clues there that would help me find him.

  A sound vibrated through me like a note played on a cello, low and sad, and then the bow lifted off the string and there was silence.

  I had just been trying to remember something about a field.

  Now someone was pounding on the door.

  PART 2

  CHAPTER 7

  Helen

  STRANGE HOW MANY THINGS CAN frighten a ghost. Staring down at a body I had so recently possessed, for one. Knowing that the choices I had made while I occupied it would take a heavy toll on its rightful owner—that was another.

  I felt that I had lived for many days in heaven, but it looked to me as if on earth the Quick had been suspended in time. Apparently for Jenny, less than a minute had passed since I left her. She was still in the bathtub where I’d stepped out of her body and she had slipped into it again. She was shivering and naked like a newly born creature, the water swirling ’round her and down the drain.

  I realized, as I stood beside her bathroom sink, that I was mistaken. Somehow I had returned to visit her before I last left her—the shock of this went up through my spirit like a mouse up a bell cord. I knew that time was not strictly linear, as the Quick measure it. But arriving before I’d left should have been impossible.

  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 f
ace. 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.