Slipping

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  “But—,” I started. I was going to point out that this was the first time Dad had been home for dinner since I could remember. And the Grandpa I had met wasn’t like Dad was saying. But I knew no one would understand. This may sound stupid, but Dad acted like everything I did was wrong, and Grandpa acted like everything I did was a miracle. He loved me. That is, if he was real. He was real; I knew he had to be because he’d been so nice to me. Nicer than Dad, who only ever wants to correct me and tell me what to do.

  “Fork, Michael,” he said now.

  See?

  • • •

  “Michael, come here a second,” Julia called through the bathroom when she heard me brushing my teeth later that night. I stepped into her room to find her sitting at the long white table where she IMs her exchange student friends and stays up until midnight doing homework because she gets in so late from ballet.

  Last year, Julia redecorated her room by ripping up the pink carpet, taking the posts off her canopy bed, and painting everything white. There’s nothing out on the shelves or bureaus except two big pictures of Mom and Dad, her jewelry box, and the glass dog collection from when she was little.

  “Um, shoes?” she said, and I shrugged off the sneakers I was still wearing.

  “What’s with the obsession with Grandpa?” she asked.

  “It’s not an obsession,” I said.

  “I’m not criticizing you, Michael,” she said. “I’m just surprised. It’s kind of, I don’t know, mature.”

  “I guess I’m the only one in the family who thinks it’s weird that someone dies and we don’t even do anything about it.”

  “I should also point out,” she said, “that you are totally dense. Why do you think Dad came home early for dinner? And Mom cooked? Dad’s sad and wants to be with his family, but he didn’t want to make a big deal about it, and then you go and make it sound like he was this horrible person, not visiting Grandpa.”

  “Sometimes I want to smash one of your glass dogs with my fist,” I said.

  “I’m sick of those dogs anyway.” Julia looked down at her big fat precalculus book, then up at the computer screen. She always wins. “But why Grandpa?” she went on. “I bet you can’t even name all of the cousins on Mom’s side. And you didn’t care about Grandpa any more than you care about them.”

  “Maybe I know Grandpa better than those cousins,” I said.

  “Were you in touch with him?” she said. “Did you write him a letter or something, before he died?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What do you mean, not exactly?” she asked. But I just turned around and left her to stare.

  Chapter 7

  In school on Friday, I passed the daily quiz on Great Expectations. I guess when you do the reading, that’s what happens.

  In history, we were talking about the Depression, and I told the class how my grandpa lived at home and went to City College while he was in the army. Ms. Gellert was like, “City College wasn’t founded until the end of the Depression. And aren’t you a little young to have a grandfather that old?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “I guess he did say it was the fifties.”

  “But it’s nice to hear from you, Michael. Family context is what brings history alive.”

  What ever.

  Fourth period, we had art. I used to look forward to art because art and earth science are the only classes Gus and I have together. But today I was dreading it for the same reason. After what he’d said the night before, would he not talk to me at all? I hated the idea of that so much, I decided I wasn’t going to talk to him.

  I got there late, so I wouldn’t have to deal with Gus. But I guess he had the same idea, because he got there even later. So we ended up next to each other, in the last two seats, at the same table as Ewan.

  I didn’t want to look at either Ewan or Gus, so I buried my head in my book bag, pretending to look for some gum.

  We were learning how to silkscreen T-shirts. All the girls were making flowers on their shirts, and all the boys were making comic book characters. I was making the Hulk.

  Ms. Rosoff had told us to try something simple, and that abstract worked very well, but I thought the Hulk looked easy. I hadn’t realized that the lines that look so simple when you see them on the page get very complicated when you try to make them yourself. I’d kind of imagined feeling bigger because of him on my shirt, and feeling protected from other people laughing at me. But my Hulk was coming out looking like a giant green blob. I couldn’t tell his arm from his head.

  Gus was making the Japanese flag, a red circle in the middle of a white T-shirt. Gus lived in Tokyo for a year with his mom, who is a financial expert on Japan and speaks the language fluently. In their house they eat a lot of sushi, and always have Pocky sticks and Japanese comic books, which Gus pretends he can read. It used to kind of confuse me, since Gus’s mom is Indian, but the one time I asked her why she wasn’t a financial expert on India, she rolled her eyes and said, “You sound like my mother.”

  Ewan’s face was screwed up in concentration, his shoulders lifted up around his ears as he filled in his design, which was the road, of course. I knew I should say something to make him feel better about his dad, but I couldn’t think of a thing that would be helpful.

  Gus finally broke the silence, which I think surprised Ewan as much as it did me. “I heard about your dad, Ewan,” he said. “I’m sorry.” Ewan looked up, but he didn’t say anything. Eventually, he just nodded, and we all buried our heads back in our work. So what, I thought, it doesn’t matter if Gus knew how to do the right thing with Ewan. He didn’t do the right thing with me.

  Ms. Rosoff circulated. She stopped by our table, looking over Gus’s shoulder first. “That is stunning, Gus, really exceptional.”

  At Ewan’s T-shirt, she sighed, and said, “I ordered extra gray. It should be in by tomorrow.”

  I tried to block mine with an arm so that she wouldn’t see it too, but she leaned over my shoulder anyway. She usually says something fake and encouraging to me like, “I love your use of color,” but today she ignored what I was working on entirely. “I need to see you in my office after class,” she said.

  Stepping over to the sink area, Ms. Rosoff clapped her hands. “Cleanup time, everyone.” Her voice would have sounded like a kindergarten teacher’s if it hadn’t been low and gravelly and weak from the cigarettes. Everyone filed out of the room except Ewan, who asked if he could work a little longer on his project. Gus didn’t even look at me as he walked out the door.

  Ms. Rosoff’s office is supposed to be a supply closet, but since it has a tiny window, she’s shoved in a desk and a couple of chairs and made it extra-claustrophobic by covering the walls with students’ artwork that she likes enough to save if they don’t collect it at the end of the term.

  I saw a picture Gus had drawn in September. It was of his own reflection in the mirror of his bathroom. He’d made his face look all angles and sharp lines. And there were three of Julia’s photographs. She’d done a series of ballet dancers’ feet; Ms. Rosoff sent them in to a city competition and they won a prize.

  But I didn’t have much time to look at the art, for Ms. Rosoff had squeezed herself into her desk chair and beckoned for me to sit across from her in the straight-back chair jammed behind the door. She was wearing something so much worse than her usual big purple dress—gold pants, black sweater, gold dangling earrings, and gold socks with black bows on the ankles. She looked like a bumblebee.

  “Michael,” she said, turning to me, her gold pants crinkling. She was wedged so far back into the chair she had to wiggle her body from side to side in order to lean forward. “I want to talk to you about your gift.”

  No art teacher in the world has ever told me I had a gift. “My what?” I said weakly.

  Ms. Rosoff gathered herself like a black and gold bird puffing out its feathers. “I’m talking about what you said yesterday,” she said. “To Ewan. About his father. The one who spoke to you from
the beyond.”

  “What?” I said.

  “You were telling the truth, weren’t you, when you said you didn’t know his father was dead before you spoke to Ewan?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I didn’t understand what I was hearing immediately,” Ms. Rosoff said. “You’ve always struck me as someone with low creativity, and it’s unusual for a gift like yours to take hold so strong in someone so little.”

  “I’m not little,” I answered.

  “I meant your age,” she said. “Twelve is very young.”

  “I’m thirteen.”

  The correction didn’t faze her. “Even so,” she went on. “You must have very open parents. Sometimes, the children of seers—” I think at this point she realized that I wasn’t following her. “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  “No,” I said.

  “What happened to you yesterday in assembly hasn’t happened to you before?” Her voice was coy, like the answer just had to be yes.

  “No,” I said.

  “Michael.” I think she was finally starting to understand that I was completely lost. She opened the narrow window above her desk, turned on a miniature fan, and lit a cigarette. I didn’t mention that we were in a smoke-free zone.

  She took a long drag, closing her eyes. She blew out a smoky breath of air. “Throughout the course of human history,” she said, “certain people have been endowed with the ability to communicate with those who have gone before.”

  “Do you mean dead people?”

  “Well, yes,” she said, nodding solemnly. “But they’re no longer people, exactly. They’ve turned into something else. I don’t know if you’re aware that there has been a great deal of reporting on the ways that the dead communicate with the living. Every civilization that has left any kind of written record behind makes reference to it. Always, there are select people who are sensitive to communication from spirits who have lost their physical form. These special people are called seers. Some seers hear rapping, some are elevated into a trance, some call spirits to show themselves through the levitation of objects. When I worked as a handwriting profiler and analyst, this subject was of great interest to me.”

  “Are you—” I couldn’t remember the word she had used.

  “A seer?” She looked at me straight in the eye as if what she was about to say was going to take me completely by surprise. “I am not.” She drew in a breath and held it, like she was trying to keep herself from crying. “I have not been chosen for this,” she said. “I think that you have.”

  The laugh started as a cough, a pocket of air stuck inside my nose, a reaction to the cigarette smoke. It ended up coming out my nose and mouth at the same time, sort of a cross between a snort and a brain explosion.

  Ms. Rosoff ignored my laugh, turning her back for a second, as if giving me a chance to take off my clothes in privacy. She dropped the cigarette butt in a little bag she kept in her purse.

  “Years ago,” she said, “my mother died, and even after we cleaned out her apartment—the one I live in now—I could not find a special ring that she had always promised would be mine. I went to a seer I knew from my work as a handwriting analyst, who told me to look under a phone book in the back of a closet, and I found the ring exactly where she said it would be, inside an envelope with a note that said it was for me. My mother had dementia at the end of her life, and must have left it there and forgot where it was. I can’t tell you how much it meant to me, to know that she was thinking of me, that her spirit is still in the world, and that she cared enough to send the message.”

  Ms. Rosoff turned back to face me. Her eyes had filled with tears, and suddenly, I felt sorry for her, with her purple muumuus and her dead fish eyes. I know it’s not the same, but once, when I was little, I got lost in FAO Schwarz. I didn’t panic but went to the glass elevator, sure that as I rode up and down in it I would see my mom. Which I did, only I hadn’t realized that once I saw her I wouldn’t be able to get her attention. There she was looking for me behind the stuffed animal displays, talking to the security guards, and I was inside the elevator, banging on the glass, but she couldn’t hear. I didn’t get scared until I saw how scared my mom looked, pointing the guards in one direction after another, squeezing the sides of her head between her palms. Is that what it felt like, to be dead, to be watching the living? Or to be alive when someone you knew really well was dead?

  “Michael,” Ms. Rosoff said, “tell me about your gift.”

  “Um,” I said, feeling like I’d been asked a question about homework I hadn’t done. First of all, I didn’t have a gift. Grandpa was the one in control. And second of all, I really didn’t like being this close to a strange grown-up in such a small room.

  “It was my grandpa,” I said, mostly because I couldn’t think of a lie, but as I started talking, it felt good to tell Ms. Rosoff what had been happening. I could tell that she believed me. “He died, and yesterday, I saw his memories,” I went on. “He spoke using my body. I saw things about other people, things that only someone who was dead could know about.”

  “Yes,” Ms. Rosoff said. “That’s called channeling. The spirit of a person who once lived comes into your head and controls you from the inside. They’re often in communication with others who have passed into the spirit world.”

  “He made me eat spinach,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Ms. Rosoff again, as if my eating spinach was the most exciting thing she’d heard in years. I glanced down at the black bows on her gold socks. Maybe it was. “Tell me more.”

  “He came and took me last night to where he went to college, and it was really, really cold inside the river of the dead.”

  “What?” she said, for the first time sounding surprised.

  I repeated myself. “The river of the dead. That’s what he called it. You know, he could make tunnels through it, but it was really cold.”

  Ms. Rosoff squinted, took my chin with her thumb, and moved her face close to mine. “Michael, now you’re beginning to tell a story.” She let my face go.

  “It’s true,” I said. “Honest.”

  “Look,” she said, “there’s no need to exaggerate. This is how so many seers get in trouble—trying to pretend they can do more than they can. But no matter. I can help you. If you want to talk about your gift, see my friend Charlisse. I can take you, but I also will give you her card. Because if you want to live up to the kind of story you just invented, you will need to train.” She handed me a piece of thick, cream-colored paper the size of a playing card.

  Charlisse Hillel-Broughton

  768 Park Avenue, Apt. 8A

  New York, NY 10021

  212.555.1737

  “I wasn’t lying,” I said.

  She closed my hand around the stiff card and nodded for me to go. “Charlisse can help you.”

  • • •

  I ran all the way down the stairs to the first floor, where the lunchroom is. I didn’t even glance over to the loudest table in the room, where the basketball guys were cracking jokes, and Gus was laughing with Trip. Somehow, I made it through the line, emerging with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

  I was too busy thinking about all the things Ms. Rosoff had said to care that I looked like a loser, sitting with Ewan for the third time in two days. Maybe I was a loser. Even the craziest woman in the world, who believed in psychic channeling, thought I was telling lies. At least Ewan, who was reading a book with a picture of a kid’s body twisting around planet earth, wouldn’t make me talk to him. And now that I knew about his dad dying, I guess I understood why he always looked like he’d just been slapped. With my own dad, I could imagine him stopping an oncoming car with his open hand, kind of like Superman, before I could imagine him being dead.

  I’d never thought about it much, but suddenly the fact that Dad—anyone—can go from being alive to being dead—it gave me a chill. And then I started thinking about how stupid I was to take PB + J on a Tater Tot day.

 
; Just as I was thinking of asking Ewan if he wanted to trade his, he put his book down, slapped both of his hands on the table, and said, “You weren’t lying. I know you didn’t make any of it up.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I was listening. From the art room. Ms. Rosoff doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” I must have still looked blank. “You told her about going with your grandfather into the river of the dead.”

  “You heard that?” I said, feeling panic rise. “Did anyone else?” I had a vision of what Trip Hall would say if he found out some teacher-lady thought I had seen a ghost.

  “I knew it,” Ewan said. “I knew you’d gotten a message from my dad. But you weren’t just channeling through your grandfather. You were doing a lot more than that. People try to make channeling simple, but it’s not.”

  “She told me I was a seer.”

  “You’re not a seer. Something else is happening to you. It’s rare. And dangerous too.”

  I felt scared by what he was saying, but also a little proud of myself. “How do you know?” I asked. “How do you know any of this?”

  “Because I read,” Ewan said. “All I do is read. And all I read about are ghosts.”

  Chapter 8

  Half an hour later, Ewan and I were sitting in the living room of his mother’s apartment. It looked the way you’d expect the dad’s apartment to look, if the parents are divorced. A half-eaten muffin had left a trail of crumbs to a cup of coffee on the low table in front of the sofa. Piles of magazines sometimes topped off by books lying on their faces to mark a place covered the rest of the surface area. I noticed a pair of socks, and a wineglass with a bead of dried-up red wine at its bottom. Ewan’s mother’s shoes were heaped under a small table by the window. A door behind the couch led to Ewan’s bedroom, which was just big enough for a bed and a desk, which in turn was just big enough for a gigantic computer. The computer was covered with magazines and books, just like the coffee table in the living room. There was no TV.