Trace

by Pat Cummings

  “Trace,” Presley said abruptly and way too politely, “will you please show me where to find my hat?” Her eyebrows had stopped twitching, but she had a crazed grin on her face that made Trace think of the smiley-face emoticon.

  “S . . . s . . . sure, Presley,” he said, pushing back his chair.

  Auntie Lea looked up from the index card she was writing out. “The hat’s in the front room, guys,” she said distractedly. And to Dallas she said, “So ‘Charles’ is all it says, right? No other details?”

  “Mmmm-hmmm,” Dallas said.

  Trace and Presley had reached the kitchen door.

  “Wait a minute!” Dallas said. “Here she writes, ‘Forgive me, my dear, sweet Cholly.’” The man’s head swiveled sharply toward Trace and their eyes locked.

  Trace froze. Presley froze too.

  “’Kay, thanks. Probably only a nickname, but you never know, it might help.” Auntie Lea bent over the card to write Cholly in parentheses. Dallas crooked his head slightly and frowned questioningly at Trace.

  “My hat,” Presley insisted. She grabbed Trace’s hand and pulled him toward the front room before he could do more than shrug at Dallas.

  “Look,” Presley said once they were alone. “Don’t ask me how I know, but I know that I know, okay? I’m just not sure what I know I know, you know?”

  Presley trained her eyes steadily on his and Trace could only nod. For some reason, that made sense. She was weird. Scary weird. But he knew she was trying to help him.

  “That lady I saw? I’m pretty sure it was your great-great-great dead whatever, okay? And the him she was talking about? I’m pretty sure she was talking about that Cholly guy she was writing to in her letter. That name just clicked for me suddenly.”

  Presley was waiting for a response, but Trace just sat down on the couch and shook his head slightly. Pieces of a puzzle seemed to be scattered all around him . . . not that there were so many, really, but he had no idea how they all fit together.

  “I don’t like to brag, but this kinda stuff is my gift,” Presley said proudly. “My forte, my specialty, my strong suit, my—”

  “I get it,” Trace said, looking up at her. She seemed to almost glow in the cool gray light of the unlit room. He believed her. What surprised him even more was that he trusted her. “Do you know anything about what happened to me?” he asked quietly.

  Presley picked up her Abe Lincoln hat, sat down on the couch next to him, and rested it solemnly on her lap. “Tell me,” she said.

  And so he did. Trace went back to the highway and the flash of a deer leaping from the woods, took himself willingly into the back seat of the car and to its slow, desperate plunge into the river. He told Presley about the water rising, about his dad kicking and about the way his mom had turned toward him, twisting around in her seat, searching his eyes. He had to stop for a minute. He tucked his head in his lap, trying to shake off the dizziness that came with the memory of his mom’s face. He didn’t worry about what Presley might think; he simply took deep breaths until his head cleared.

  “The windows were closed, Presley,” he said finally, sitting up straight and looking into her eyes. “I have a newspaper clipping that shows the car after they pulled it out of the river. They were closed. So how did I get out? I know that someone pulled me out, I saw her hands, I felt them. I can still feel them sometimes. But how? When it was happening, I never thought how? I wasn’t thinking anything—except maybe Help! or Air! or I don’t want to die! you know?” Trace met Presley’s eyes. “A pair of long, brown, bare arms came for me. Grabbed me and pulled me right through the window. The window Dad couldn’t break. And when I hit the surface, these two EMT guys lifted me onto a raft or something. Two guys in uniforms.” Trace shook his head.

  “Okay. Strange. Definitely. Gotta think about that. But tell me about this Cholly,” Presley said.

  Suddenly, Dallas was standing in the doorway, a concerned look on his face. “I have to run to my workshop for bit,” he said. “You guys want to come?”

  Dallas drove.

  “I think we need to regroup,” he had said after pulling the car out into traffic. “I haven’t said anything to your Auntie Lea, and I think I get why you’d rather not tell her. At least not yet. But what are the odds of that name, Theo? If you’re related to this Cholly, you’re going to need to let her in on this.” He added in a quieter voice, “I’m guessing you’ve told Presley about things?”

  Trace only nodded at Dallas. Sitting in the front seat, he watched Presley through the side-view mirror, where she was belted into the back seat and staring silently out the window.

  “So, Presley, that day I was supposed to meet you guys in the library, remember?” he asked over his shoulder. “Something happened.” And then he told her almost everything—about the stacks, about the boy in tatters, and about the guards. He left out his opinion of Lemuel T. Spitz. There was a chance, although Trace thought it a slim one, that Dallas was actually friends with the guy. But he did tell her about the smoke and his suspicion that it was connected to the draft riots fire. Finally, he told Presley about the toy rattle, only leaving out the fact that it had disappeared when Cholly did. He hadn’t told Dallas that bit either, and he wasn’t sure why.

  “So that’s why it burned my hand,” Presley said as though talking to herself.

  They were inching onto the Brooklyn Bridge, and Trace studied the twin stone arches towering before them. Normally, they made him think of castle walls, of fortresses and moats. But today they were making his head swim. Everything—this bridge, the trees in City Hall Park, the traffic lights, every building they were passing—had been left behind by people who were long dead. How did that make any sense? People died, but the things they made survived. For ages. How could that rattle have held on to the heat of the fire? If his iPod had ended up in the river and someone ever fished it out, if it washed up on the bank and was found by someone like Presley, someone who heard things, saw things, felt things . . . what kind of sounds would it make? Trace leaned his head against the cool glass of the window. Sometimes he missed his parents so badly that his skin burned.

  “This time last year, I was in New Orleans,” Presley said, breaking into his thoughts, her voice raised to combat the sounds of the traffic around them. They were zooming up Sixth Avenue at a nice clip now; the Sunday afternoon traffic was very light. “My Granny Taylor lives there in a big old house that used to give me the heebie-jeebies. Yeccccchhhh! Creepy with a capital K! And pleeeeeeease don’t ask me for details!” No one did.

  Dallas smiled at her in the rearview mirror. Trace merely waited.

  “Trace, you know about All Souls Day, Day of the Dead and all that?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “In Mexico it’s called El Día de los Muertos.” Presley leaned forward and lowered her voice dramatically. “The gates of heaven open at the crack of midnight on Halloween to let all the spirits of the dead come back to visit their families for, like, a whole day. There’s like a window, an aperture, a perforation . . . a peephole in the universe. And, let me tell you, they take this realllllll seriously in Looooosiana! Granny Taylor made us troop around to family graves—well, to family gravestones, anyway. They had a big flood down there long ago, right? So no one knows who’s buried where anymore, which is crazy. Coffins just popped up outa the mud in the graveyards and started floating around. When the water finally receded, they stuck ’em back in the ground every which way. Can you imagine?”

  Trace couldn’t imagine. He didn’t want to imagine. Dallas threw him a quizzical, sideways glance but said nothing. They turned onto West Fortieth Street and Dallas slowed down to look for a parking space.

  “Anyway, Granny Taylor says this is the absolutely best, consummately, unequaled, hands-down el primo time of the year for a palaver with the dead.”

  Dallas grinned at her in the rearview mirror. “Let’s just see if we can think through this thing, okay?” He edged the car into a parking space near the corner of Fifth Avenue.
>
  They were out of the car, around the corner, and climbing the stairs between the lions minutes later. Once they were in the elevator, Dallas turned his key in the control panel that would let them into the stacks.

  “I told your aunt I could scan the letter and maybe show it to someone,” Dallas explained. “There are folks working here who are experts at reading old documents.” Before Trace could say anything, the elevator doors dinged open and the three of them were greeted by the smell of cold, damp earth.

  “Whoa,” said Presley. The stacks yawned before them.

  25

  The wavering wall of wilted fortune slips was a big hit with Presley.

  “Brilliant idea, Mr. Houston,” was how she had put it after slipping off her coat.

  The minute they arrived, Dallas had made a quick phone call, then brewed a pot of hot chocolate. He was idly leafing through papers on his worktable as Presley examined every nook and cranny in the workshop. “So . . . what I was thinking,” Dallas began, “was that I could get someone down here to read the letter and maybe we can figure out enough to make some educated guesses about the rest.” He paused. “Okay? First of all, what do we actually know?” Dallas and Presley both looked at Trace expectantly.

  But Trace was staring at the corner where he had last seen Cholly. There was no toy on the floor, no electrical buzz in the air, not the slightest whiff of smoke, nada. Had it all been his imagination on overload? Dallas and Presley were waiting, but a serious discussion about ghosts, whether it was All Souls or All Saints or El Día de los Zombies, suddenly seemed ridiculous.

  “So, you saw this kid, right? And he said his name was Cholly?” Dallas prompted.

  “Um, yeah, sure,” Trace agreed. “He was waiting for his sister, I think.” Trace tried to recall the boy’s exact words. “Sissy. He called her Sissy. I thought he was calling me names.” Trace chuckled, trying to lighten the mood. But just saying those names aloud had given weight to his memories.

  “Well, your great-great-great grandmother’s name was Melissa, so Sissy could easily have been what her little brother would have called her,” Dallas said. “Did you notice her dates on your Auntie Lea’s family tree? She was born in 1856. So by the time of the draft riots she would’ve been, what?”

  “The riots started on July 13, 1863,” Trace said quickly, glad to have something as concrete as math to think about. “So she would’ve been around seven years old at the time of the fire.”

  Dallas smoothed the letter out on the tabletop just as someone knocked loudly on the door. Both Trace and Presley jumped.

  “You rang, Tex?” The woman from the front desk with the cotton-candy hair was leaning in the doorway.

  “C’mon in, Margaret. Meet my friends. This is Theo and his friend Presley. We’re tryin’ to do some historical research and I just knew you were the one who could help us.” Dallas got up from the stool he had been occupying, the most comfortable one in the room, and offered it to the woman.

  Presley rolled her eyes at Trace. He knew he was going to hear about Margaret later. The woman wore a jumble of colors that seemed to bounce against one another as she waltzed over to accept the stool. Her hair now had a purple tinge to it.

  “Hello, children,” she drawled in a curious accent. Her heavily dusted green eyelids half closed as she eyed them. “Now, what sort of research might I help with?” she asked Dallas.

  Before he could answer, the woman was leaning over the opened letter, drawing a long, lavender nail across the writing. Blinking rapidly, she set small green clouds of powder adrift as she read.

  “Mid-nineteenth century, American, definitely not an upper-class hand,” she announced confidently. Dallas nodded, then winked at Trace, as though Margaret’s expertise had just been confirmed.

  “We were hoping you’d have an easier time reading this than we’ve had, Margaret,” he said. “It’s a family letter, but you see there’s no date. And some damaged areas too that—”

  “Tears,” Margaret stated firmly. “Yes, I see. This is written in a woman’s hand. Ahh, yes,” she continued, her eyes dropping to the bottom of the page, “M-e-blank-iss—probably it is from a Melissa?” She shrugged at her guess. “Verrrrrry popular name at the time,” she added, rolling her r’s dramatically.

  And then she began to read from the top, slowly, in her weird drawl, as Dallas hovered discreetly by her shoulder. “‘Dearest Charles . . .’” Trace felt a slight shift in the air; a barely noticeable current of electricity seemed to run through him. Looking up, he saw that Presley was staring at the same corner where he had seen Cholly. It took every ounce of his will to follow her gaze, worried about what he might—or might not—see.

  “‘I was pulled away, crying for them to let me save . . .’ Ahhh, these water marks are everywhere. I see why you’ve had such difficulty. ‘. . . def to my words, so furrus was the heat and smoke.” Margaret paused to point out to Dallas the line she had just read. “See here, how she misspells furious and deaf? I think whoever wrote was quite distraught and hurrying to get her thoughts down, Mr. Texas.” She gave Dallas a forlorn smile, her lips disappearing into a thin, red line.

  Trace was watching the corner of the room. Something was changing. In the same way that he had seen air quiver over hot asphalt on a summer day, the area where Cholly had crouched had begun to shimmer slightly. Was Presley seeing this? He turned to look, but she was sipping her hot chocolate and watching Margaret intently, a frown of concentration on her face.

  Trace heard the scrabbled, piecemeal words as Margaret read them aloud, absorbing their emotion, surprised that complete, logical sentences did not seem necessary. He understood. He got it. Melissa was sorry. She had lived her whole life being sorry. She had tried to save her brother, but “they” did not believe a child had been left behind. “They” were in charge. And “they” had dragged her to safety. A safety she had regretted and cried over and resented for what it had cost her until the day she died.

  “‘I could not come back for you,’” Margaret read, “‘but you are always with me.’” She let out a long sigh.

  “She is writing to the dead, you know. And this poem, one of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets—you’re familiar with it, I’m sure, Tex?” Margaret said to Dallas. “‘How Do I Love Thee?’ Browning published it in the 1850s, I believe. So at least we know that this letter was written around that time or after it.” Margaret held up the letter, lowered her green eyelids, and read dramatically, “‘I love thee with the breath / Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, / I shall but love thee better after death.’”

  The corner seemed alive now. The two bare walls that met looked just as wavery to Trace as the one with the Chinese fortunes. He blinked. And there was Cholly.

  “‘Forgive me, my dear, sweet Cholly,’” Margaret read in her peculiar accent, her voice sounding far away and sad, as though the words were draining her. Trace listened. He saw that Cholly was listening too, aware that every word, every tearstain had been just for him. The boy’s face was soft-edged and bathed in some light that Trace realized was not in the room.

  “You can have the paper analyzed to get a better sense of its age,” Margaret was saying to Dallas. Trace heard the letter rustle softly, knew that she was turning it over in her long, thin hands. But he kept his eyes on Cholly. Cholly, the lost little boy with the big wet eyes who must have been alone and terrified when an angry mob burned down his home. Cholly, or maybe just a memory of Cholly that was trapped here, like an image on film, in these dark halls, waiting for a sister who could not come. Cholly, who, if any of this was real, was his own great-great-great-great-uncle.

  Trace wanted to cry; he wanted to hug the little boy and tell him that he was sorry. Sorry that Sissy couldn’t save him. He wanted to read those words to Cholly himself, tell him that his sister never meant to leave him; she loved him and even death would never change that. But he only smiled.

  And Cholly smiled back.

  Message deliver
ed.

  “That won’t be necessary, Margaret,” Dallas said behind him. “Thanks, though. This was helpful, right, guys?”

  His voice seemed to break a circuit, turning off the electricity in the room. Trace glanced quickly at Presley. She looked as though she had just awakened. “Yes, th . . . thanks. Thank you,” he said politely, nodding as Margaret stood to leave.

  “Be right back, guys,” Dallas said, walking Margaret out the door.

  “Was Cholly here?” Presley asked quietly. She had gotten up from the couch where she’d been sitting and walked straight over to the corner. Stooping down, she picked up the metal rattle, stood, and ran her fingers over it.

  It was back! Trace shook his head slowly. Cholly was really gone.

  “It doesn’t burn,” she said, holding it out to Trace. “The heat is gone.”

  Trace took the rattle, turned it over in his hands, then slipped it into his jacket pocket. It hadn’t been there when they came in. He was certain of that. “Did you . . . could you see him?” he asked.

  Presley shook her head. “I felt somebody here, in that corner, to be exact. But no, I didn’t see Cholly. He was here for you.”

  Dallas bustled back into the room, rubbing his hands together excitedly. “So you may be right, Theo! That letter does make it sound like this Melissa and her younger brother got caught up in the fire. And, if this really was your great-great whatever, then it sorta makes sense that you’re the one who can see him, right?”

  Trace just nodded. He felt sure that Cholly was gone. This was finished. Wherever Cholly was, he could rest now.

  “What do you say we let your Auntie Lea in on this story? She might even get into it, do a bit more research, you know?” Dallas continued as he rinsed out the mugs they had used. He reached for his jacket and Presley slipped into her coat.

  “Sure,” Trace said. It really was over.