by Edie Claire
I swallowed. It was a reasonable, if unexpected, question. “Well, they’re not solid; they’re transparent. And they’re wearing clothes from other times, and the older ones are fainter.”
The creases in Joan’s brow creased further. “When did you start seeing such things?”
“As long as I can remember.”
“And did you ever have a near-death experience? As a child? A baby?”
I considered. “No. Not that I know of. I thought I was drowning one time when I was little — that’s why I’m still so afraid of the water. But they tell me I was never in any real danger. Other than that, I’ve never even been that sick.”
She gazed at me a long time, her eyes searching. “Tell me more about these people. Tell me everything you see, and everything they make you feel.”
My stomach felt queasy. But I took a deep breath and started talking. I told her what it was like when I was a child, and how, more and more now, I was being affected by the shadows’ emotions. I explained that during my brief time in Hawaii, the whole crazy business had seemed to flip into hyperdrive, causing me to feel the emotions of a live human being I didn’t even know. I told it all like giving symptoms to a doctor, and I didn’t say one word about Zane.
I couldn’t bear to. It had been four days since he’d left Nebraska, and I hadn’t heard a word from him.
When I finished, I grabbed at my glass of limeade and buried my face behind it. Now Kylee’s grandmother would say something. She would tell me some horrible thing I didn’t want to hear. Like how I had a moral responsibility to buck up and do something good with my “talents.” Whatever it was, I knew I couldn’t bear it, not if Zane was lost to me forever. My ability to see his spirit had helped him survive the accident, and I would always be grateful for that. But from this point forward, the “gift” of seeing souls in need was one I could do without.
It hurt too damn much.
“Have you ever heard of anything like that, ba noi?” Kylee asked eagerly. “I told her, I don’t think what she’s seeing are ghosts. Do you?”
Kylee’s grandmother raised a hand to her mouth and drummed her fingers thoughtfully across her narrow chin. “She doesn’t see as you see, no.”
I set down my glass and looked at Kylee. Her eyes avoided mine. “What does she mean?” I demanded. “What do you see?”
Joan shook her head at her granddaughter reprovingly. “Still, you don’t talk about it? Even to this friend?”
Kylee, the most hang-it-all-out-there, never-ashamed-of-anything girl I knew, had the gall to look sheepish. “I don’t mind Kali knowing, ba noi,” she answered softly. “I would have told her before, if it weren’t for what happened with Tara.”
My pulse sped up. I looked from one to the other. “What happened with Tara?”
Kylee rolled her eyes and sighed. “It was a long time ago. Tara and I were, like, in the second grade. We’d been best friends for a while already, and we were used to sharing all sorts of embarrassing things. But then I shared one particular story I shouldn’t have, and little Tara totally freaked out. And I mean: Totally. Freaked. Out.”
“She was raised differently,” Joan said gently. “She wasn’t prepared.”
Kylee snorted. “She wasn’t anything. First she looked like she was having a stroke, then she started screaming about what a liar I was, and then she started crying so hard they had to take her to the nurse’s office. I had no idea what her problem was; I was terrified I’d done something wrong. When she finally calmed down, she wouldn’t even look at me. For days, she pretended I didn’t exist. Then finally, about a week later, she told me we could be friends again — if I admitted I’d made the whole story up.”
A pang of sympathy roiled my stomach. “So you did.”
“Yep!” Kylee acknowledged. She took a loud slurp with her straw. “And all was forgotten. And I do mean, forgotten. I honestly don’t think Tara remembers it anymore. But I do.”
“You have lied to her other times, about other things, yes?” Joan said slyly.
Kylee smirked. “Well…”
Her grandmother chuckled. “You’ve always been a storyteller, my dear. You dramatize. You ‘embellish.’ You can’t blame her for not believing you. Or for forgetting what seemed like just another story.”
“Believing what?” I said impatiently. “Tell me!”
Kylee gazed out into space, her dark eyes hooded. “It happened when I was five. My mother and I were visiting ba noi at her house in San Jose, and I was out in the backyard, playing with my Barbies under her apricot tree. None of my cousins was around, and I remember feeling kind of lonely. But then a little Vietnamese girl popped up at the back door and asked if she could play with me. I’d never met her before, but ba noi always had lots of neighbors visiting, so it was no big deal to meet somebody new. We started playing — she was really funny, and I liked her. But then all of a sudden she got really upset, and she told me we had to go inside right away. I didn’t want to go — I was having fun where we were. But she wouldn’t stop, she said that Hoa wanted me — that I had to go in and see her right away. I’d never heard of anybody named Hoa and had no idea what she was talking about, but she was practically flipping out about it, so I finally laid down the dolls and followed her to the back door.”
Kylee lowered her eyes. “What happened next was like a bad dream. I was standing on the steps with the door open, and suddenly it was like the whole backyard just blew up. There was this terrific crash, and then another, and when I looked back, everything had changed. The place where I’d been sitting was just… gone.”
Joan smiled at her granddaughter. “You make it sound as though a bomb exploded.”
“That’s what it felt like!” Kylee insisted. “I was terrified.”
“What did happen?” I asked.
“A man driving an SUV had some kind of seizure at the wheel,” Kylee explained. “Ba noi’s house is on a corner, but the streets are kind of staggered, and this car was going straight, came to a T in the road and just kept going. It crashed through her wood fence and shredded it to splinters, then plowed through the yard and smashed into the apricot tree.”
“Oh, my God,” I said weakly. “The one you were sitting under?”
Kylee nodded slowly, then raised her head. “My Barbie doll was still there. I could see her yellow hair sticking out from under one of the tires.”
Joan reached out a skinny arm and hugged her granddaughter’s shoulders. “It was a terrifying day for all of us,” she told me. “The driver turned out to be all right, thanks to his air bags. But there was no question that if Kylee hadn’t gotten up and moved when she did, she wouldn’t have survived.”
A moment of painful silence followed, during which I got the creeping idea that I could see where the rest of the story was going. “The girl who warned you,” I asked. “She wasn’t… alive?”
The two exchanged a glance, then shook their heads. “Ba noi never saw her,” Kylee said. “She was keeping an eye on me from the window and never saw any other girl, even though I seemed to be talking to one. She thought I was just playing pretend. Once I came into the house, I couldn’t see the girl anymore, either. She just disappeared.”
“So you never knew why… I mean, who she was?”
Joan smiled. “Oh, we know. As soon as Kylee told me the story — I knew.”
“She was dressed funny,” Kylee explained. “Not that I cared at the time. I was bored enough that I would have played with her if she’d been wearing black leather with a snake for a belt. But I did notice that she looked odd. Her hair was very long and she was wearing this brown tunic thing. She said her name was Tien, but that didn’t seem strange — it’s a pretty common name.”
“She wasn’t transparent?” I asked.
Kylee shook her head. “Not at all. She looked just like you and me.”
“So she was… what you’d call a ghost?”
Kylee nodded. “The ghost of a real person who died a long time ago.”
Joan put out a tiny hand and touched mine. “She was my sister. My dearest Tien. My twin. She died of typhoid when we were seven years old, back in Vietnam.”
I felt a sudden urge to pull my hand back. I wasn’t ready for all this. I knew I should be, given my own macabre history. But I wasn’t.
With a mighty effort, I left my hand where it was. “How do you know?”
“She called me Hoa,” Kylee’s grandmother said with a smile. “The name I was born with. Only when I moved here did I become Joan.”
“I didn’t know that Hoa was her name,” Kylee insisted. “I’d never heard anyone call her that before. And then there was the picture.”
“A picture of Tien?” I asked.
Joan shook her head. “No. No pictures of her were ever taken. But there was one of me, when I was a little older. I didn’t show it to Kylee, then. But later, I left it out where she could see it.”
“I didn’t know it was ba noi,” Kylee recounted. “To me, it looked nothing like her. But I took one look and started telling everyone that the child in the picture was Tien, the girl who had saved my life. I still thought that she was a real girl.”
I took a deep, shuddering breath. No wonder “little Tara” had run screaming. No doubt she could see, just as I could, that this time Kylee was telling the absolute truth. I just wished I could understand. “But why could you see her when your grandmother couldn’t?”
“I’m sensitive to many things,” Joan explained. “But I’ve never glimpsed death. All my life, I’ve been fortunate with good health. Our Kylee here was not so lucky. At six months, we almost lost her.” She leaned over and twirled a lock of her granddaughter’s sleek black hair around her fingers. “Meningitis, the doctors said. She survived, but they told us she would have brain damage.”
“Explains everything, doesn’t it?” Kylee said, throwing me a grin.
I smiled hesitantly back at her. I had heard this particular story before. Kylee’s struggling mother had moved in with her in-laws before Kylee was born, and after her illness, they had stayed with the family for nearly two years. Kylee’s complete recovery was considered miraculous. “Is that why you asked me if I’d ever had a near-death experience?” I asked Joan.
She nodded. “The souls of those no longer living are never completely separated from us. I feel the presence of Tien every day, here.” She touched a knotted fist to her heart. “But I can’t see her. I’ve never seen her. To appear to the living, to manifest as something visible, a soul must expend great energy. To appear to someone without sensitivity is almost impossible. But those who have been close to death have already stood with one foot on the other side. They recognize the very feel of it — even without realizing. Children are especially perceptive, because they lack doubt. Tien could appear to my girl because with her, the bar was lower. The barriers to overcome, not so great.”
“I haven’t seen her since, though,” Kylee added. “They can’t appear for just any reason. Right, ba noi?”
Joan shook her head solemnly. “Once a soul has crossed over, to show themselves even to a sensitive person requires great effort, great love, great devotion. Those who have newly crossed do not have the strength — but some may acquire it over time. For many decades no one saw so much as a glimpse of my Tien, yet she was able to appear to Kylee to save her from death, because she knew it was not her time. Our Kylee has a purpose to fulfill yet. We all have a purpose.”
Don’t look at me now, I thought, even as I cursed my cowardice. Do NOT look at me!
I searched my mind desperately for a change of topic. “But what if Kylee couldn’t see ghosts?” I blurted. “Could Tien still have saved her?”
Joan’s face turned thoughtful. “I don’t know. But I believe she would have tried. I’ve heard of people without near-death experiences who have seen manifestations, but lack the means to understand them. Rather than the image of a person, they may see a mist, or a column of light, or nothing at all. They perceive that someone is with them… but they can’t interpret what they perceive.”
“So what is it that you think Kali sees?” Kylee asked with sudden urgency. “If they aren’t ghosts, what are they?”
I wanted to run. Right now, before Joan could answer. Whatever it was I saw, I didn’t want to know any more about it. I didn’t want to be saddled with some cosmic destiny that would link me forever with the spooky and the creepy and the dark. All I wanted was to be normal. To be normal, and to hear from Zane. I wanted to be with his living self, in Oahu, walking along the beaches in the sun, smiling and laughing again…
“I’m not sure what Kali sees,” Joan said heavily, snapping my mind back to the present. “I’ve never heard of anything quite like it before. Unless,” she said dreamily, her dark eyes assuming a far-away look, “there was that one man…”
My heart all but stopped.
“There was a story the old people told,” Joan continued after a moment, still looking off into the distance. “The story of a man long before my time. A ways upstream from where I lived as a child, there had once been another village that lay in a bend of the river. As the story goes, a newcomer came into that village one day looking for work, but after looking about, he refused to live there. He said it wasn’t safe, that the river would flood. Of course the people only laughed at him, because the village had sat in the same spot for as long as anyone could remember, and it had never flooded, no matter how hard the rains came. Other places flooded, but not their village. No, the man insisted, your village has flooded before, and many people died. He was accused of trying to tell the future, but he insisted that no — he spoke only of the past. He claimed that he could see it. He pointed to places that were dry, and insisted that he could see the water roiling, and houses tumbling, and flailing limbs tossing helplessly in the current. He said that he could hear the people’s screams.”
A cold pit sat heavy in the depths of my stomach, even as a part of me wanted to cry aloud, Yes! That’s just like me!
“He told them he often saw scenes from the past,” Joan continued, “But the villagers didn’t believe him. They grew angry with him, and he moved on. A few years later, the village did flood, killing many, many people — an unspeakable tragedy. It was a hundred years’ rain, they said, the kind most people went a lifetime without seeing. Those who survived remembered what the strange man had said, and then they did believe him. But no one could ever find him again. It was said that he must have had a gift — a very rare and special gift. Yet no one could explain what it was.”
Kylee’s eyes sparkled; her mouth drew into a smile. “I’ll tell you what it was. It was Kali’s gift.”
I could say nothing in return. My mouth was bone dry.
Kylee turned back to her grandmother. “What could it be, do you think? Some kind of energy in the environment that only rare people are sensitive to?”
Joan looked at me thoughtfully. “I’m only guessing, of course. But I wonder if what our Kali is perceiving isn’t some kind of imprint. Not an action of those souls in the present, but a trail they have left behind. I’ve heard that when a person’s soul is most awakened, by an event of great emotional importance such as falling in love, or suffering from grief, or horror, or fear — there is a burst of spiritual energy. Perhaps when this energy spikes, it leaves traces behind to which Kali is uniquely sensitive. She sees not the souls themselves, but a projection of them. A residue.”
“That makes sense!” Kylee said with enthusiasm. She shot a brief, sideways glance at me, then turned back to her grandmother. “What about people who have separated from their bodies, but haven’t died? You know, the out-of-body experiences where people claim they saw the top of the doctor’s head who was resuscitating them, and stuff like that?”
My heart began to race again.
Joan’s lips twisted with thought. “Some people think that those souls actually leave their bodies and come back, but I’ve never thought that myself. I’ve always believed the soul is captive
in the body until it is truly and permanently released by death. But I do believe that some elements of a soul can travel — even when the body is alive and well. Like an octopus stretching out an arm, the tentacles at the tip can perceive what the head cannot.”
She turned and studied me keenly. “A temporary vacation from the body… one might consider that a ‘projection’ of the soul as well. I wonder…”
My phone jingled suddenly, startling me. It was a text tone I didn’t recognize. “I’m sorry,” I apologized, unable to resist pulling it out and looking at the number. I had different ringtones for pretty much everyone who ever texted me — to hear the generic one was strange.
I looked at the words on the screen. There were eight of them.
Got a phone! How’s everything with you? — Zane
“Kali!” Kylee said sharply, grabbing my arm. “Are you okay? What is it?”
I could barely hear her, what with all the hot blood pounding in my ears. It was pounding pretty much everywhere. I said nothing, but turned the phone where she could see it.
Her face brightened instantly to a smile, followed by a very Kylee-like shriek. “He does still care, Kali!” she shouted. “I told you he did! I told you!”
I read the text again. And again.
And again.
Sheesh, I was pathetic!
“Well, that answers my next question,” Joan said dryly, smiling to herself.
“What’s that?” Kylee asked, still beaming at me.
“Kali said that her abilities grew more acute while she was in Oahu,” Joan continued smoothly. “Those with gifts of extraordinary perception often find that when their own emotions are in turmoil, their sensitivity is heightened. With girls your age, that may be most of the time. But some emotions carry more firepower than others.”
The older woman’s eyes twinkled into mine. “I was going to ask if Kali had fallen in love.”
Chapter 5
“So is he still texting?” Tara asked, catching up with me as we headed out of advanced bio, our last class of the day and the only one we had together.