“Yeah,” I said, wishing I knew a way to be more polite. Yes? Yes, ma’am? I thought of both of them too late. I pointed at Julia. “She’s not my friend. She’s my sister.”
The woman gave a small, dry laugh. “Gallant for one so young,” she said. I wasn’t sure what she meant. She was hardly wider than my earth science textbook when she stood sideways. She smiled and I noticed that her eyes were bright and sort of pretty. Something made me want to look at them longer.
“What did Ms. Rosoff tell you about him?” Ewan asked.
“Please, come in,” she said, still smiling as if all of this was more funny than it was real. “We’ll sit down.” She gestured into the dining room with an outstretched hand.
Julia swept in front of me. One of my arms swung dangerously near a sculpture that was a tower of crystal blocks with water trickling down into a small pool filled with stones. Ewan grabbed my sleeve just as I was about to follow Gus into the dining room. “Tell her everything,” he said.
“You’re sure she’s real? She doesn’t look like a psychic.”
“What were you expecting, the cover of the Ouija box?”
“Kind of,” I had to admit.
It was cold in the dark dining room, and while I rubbed my hands together, I looked around. Through three windows along one wall we could see bright blue sky. On our right, an arched door opened into a pink room where sofas and low armchairs were clustered in groups like in a hotel lobby. Past that room, through another arched door, I saw bookshelves and a dark rug, and beyond that was a room filled with light and plants.
The old lady beckoned for us to sit down at the polished mahogany table. I felt creeped-out and shy, and I was glad Trip and Gus were there. They looked just about as uncomfortable pulling out the carved wood chairs. I could see Julia rubbing the table with one appreciative finger. It was shiny enough to show her reflection.
“Laura Rosoff tells me, Michael, that she overheard you channeling a message from the dead father of your friend,” the woman began.
“That was me,” Ewan piped up.
“I didn’t get a message exactly,” I said. “It was just that suddenly, I was talking, and what I was saying made no sense.”
“Yes,” she said, smiling as if we were sharing a joke about the weather, or some misbehaving dog. “You will have no control at first.”
“I—,” I started. I had planned not to tell her everything right away, but I felt the story pushing against the back of my nose and eyes like a sneeze. “How can you do that?” I asked. “How can you make me want to tell you things?”
“You’re noticing my way of seeing,” she said. Once she said the word, I realized that’s exactly what it felt like. She was seeing into me and pulling out what she wanted from inside my head. “I look at people and all I’m doing is paying proper attention to them,” she went on. Her brown eyes crinkled.
“I don’t believe in any of this,” Gus interrupted.
“I’m not sure I do either,” she laughed, turning to him. I could see his face relaxing the moment he met her eyes, just as mine must have. “But the people I see,” she went on, “they tell me it feels good. And I understand why. I’m looking for what stretches back to their parents, to things that are printed on their souls when they are very young, knowledge that you acquire before you know that you are acquiring knowledge, and before you learn to resist it.” She looked back at me. “What way do you have of seeing?”
“I’m not really seeing,” I said, and stopped there. It was like being thirsty, the way I wanted to tell her about Grandpa. And it was more than that. I felt a shifting of information in my mind, like there were pieces of thoughts stored in dusty boxes, and she was pressing buttons that put those boxes on conveyor belts and moved them to just behind my forehead. It was like my mom had let Mrs. Victor, our cleaning lady, do my room. I was finding things in cubbies and drawers I didn’t even know had been lost. It did feel good.
“Call me Charlisse,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “Charlisse.” It felt weird calling her by her first name, but I’d already forgotten how to pronounce her last name, so it was convenient. “I see someone else’s memories. I see inside them. And it’s just one person, my grandfather. He’s dead.”
“Yes,” she said, nodding her head as if I was saying things that were as normal as anything in the world.
“I slip—”
“Sleep?” I think she knew what word I meant but was giving me a chance to take it back.
“Slip,” I said. “At least, Ewan calls it that. Slipping. I slip into a place my grandpa calls the river of the dead.”
“What happens when you slip?” said Charlisse.
“He faints,” said Gus. “I saw him.”
“It’s bad,” Julia added. “He has convulsions. I think he needs to see a doctor.”
“I get really cold,” I said. “I feel my feet come out from under me. And then my body is moving through something that’s really cold and clings to me and pushes on me all over. It makes me feel sad,” I said, “and when I’m in it, I see inside my dead grandpa’s memories. It’s like I’m him, seeing things that he remembers.”
It was embarrassing, telling so much of this. Especially the part about being sad. I don’t know why that’s so hard to say, but it is. “And then I stop feeling cold, and I kind of wake up and my dead grandfather—I didn’t even really know him when he was alive—he takes me on a guided tour of other parts of his memories. We’re standing inside the memories, and we’re talking about them, and watching them all at the same time.”
“Tell her about the touching,” said Ewan. “How you could feel your grandpa this time.”
“It’s true,” I said. “I couldn’t feel him the first few times, but now, I think I might have started to.”
Charlisse folded her hands on the table and looked down at them. As soon as her eyes let go of mine, I felt like I’d been standing in a nice warm shower that suddenly went cold. Not so cold that you have to get out, but cold enough so that it just kind of sucks.
Charlisse looked at her hands a long time. Ewan was staring at her worshipfully. Julia, Trip, and Gus were watching her too. Did they feel as lost as I did?
When Charlisse raised her head and looked straight at me again, I felt comfortable, safe, and warm. Her eyes—I really hadn’t understood them before. They weren’t bright. They were dark. Maybe she was frail in every place in her body, but her eyes made me think she’d be strong enough to pull me up a cliff by her pinkie.
“You are not a seer the way Laura Rosoff thought you might be,” Charlisse said. “You might have the ability to become one, but for now, what’s happening has more to do with the force of your grandfather’s spirit than yours.”
“Ewan says my grandpa’s sucking out my life force. Do you think that’s true?”
“Let me explain to you what I know,” she said. “There is no hope of understanding if I give it to you in fragments. All right?”
“All right,” I said. She looked at Ewan, who nodded, and then she turned her gaze to Julia, Trip, and Gus, each of whom nodded as well.
“Many ancient civilizations describe the world of the dead as a river,” Charlisse began. “Or sometimes as a land you can only reach by crossing a river. But in all the legends, the river is always there. And mind you, these are very different civilizations we’re talking about, civilizations that could not possibly have had any contact with one another. And yet they all came up with the same story. I believe the reason so many are in agreement is simple. They are right. The dead do form a river.
“We’re born knowing this, but learn to reject the knowledge because none of us can see the river, and we have become slaves to the unforgiving requirement of science: proof. Though proof in this case would do no one any good. We return to our essential knowledge only through faith and trust. We attain truth only through the deepest meditation and study. And even then, we never see the truth but through a fog. One of the many great myst
ical texts calls it seeing ‘through a glass darkly.’” She smiled wryly when Ewan raised his hand.
“Yes, Ewan,” she said, with a look like she already knew what he was going to say.
“That’s a quote from the Bible,” he sputtered. “That’s not a mystical text.”
“I consider it to be one,” Charlisse answered. “I’m aware that many people disagree with me. In any case,” she went on, unlacing her fingers and laying them flat on the table, “many of the texts describe this river as lying beneath the earth. Which would make you think of sediment, shale, rock, lava, the tectonic plates that we know about today, all of which I’m sure you’ve learned about in school. So try to think of it this way: what the ancients were describing was not the earth our planet, but the earth our home.”
I wasn’t following her exactly, but I understood that she was saying the river was real. Which was scary, because she was a grown-up, and I think there was a part of me that had been pretty sure all the grown-ups who heard my story would insist to me that I had made it up, like Ms. Rosoff. I wanted to have made it up. But as long as she was speaking, and looking at me, I felt comfortable and warm. I trusted that I would soon understand.
“There’s a philosopher named Plato you might have heard of who talked about the difference between something that is ideal and something that is real,” Charlisse went on. “Do you know what I mean by ideal?”
“The best case?” said Julia.
“That’s what it’s come to mean,” said Charlisse. “But Plato was talking about ideal as something that exists as an idea. Inside your head. If I say the word ‘chair,’ you see a chair in your mind. Does it look like the chair you’re sitting in right now? No, because you’re sitting in a real chair, and you’re thinking of a simpler, basic chair. The ideal chair in your mind could be any chair and no chair at all. When I say ‘a mother,’ the picture you see in your mind is very different from when you think of your own mother, isn’t it?”
“We don’t get to Plato until AP English,” Julia said, referring to the advanced placement classes Selden offered—they were hard, and counted for college.
Charlisse waved a hand in the air as if to dismiss the entire notion of AP. “The river of the dead is not a real river,” she went on. “It’s an idea of a river. It is an ideal river. There are no rock caves dripping with stalactites as so many painters have postulated. The river lives and flows inside of us. I like to think of it as a kind of water source for the plant life that is the human soul. It keeps us green and healthy. It nourishes us, and reminds us that we are part of something larger—something that connects all of us one to another.”
Ewan raised his hand again. Charlisse kept hers flat and relaxed on the table. I don’t know if they were aware of it, but Trip and Gus had laid their hands flat on the table too.
“Listen only for now,” Charlisse said, nodding in Ewan’s direction. “You’ll find you understand better when you trust that your questions will be answered. And they will be.” She turned to me. “What I do,” she said, “is descend to the edge of that river and stand still by its side.”
I wasn’t sure if she was expecting me to respond to this, but she was quiet for a minute, and I thought about how little she must look standing next to the river. I wondered if she was at the shore of the river, which suggested that the river had a surface. To me, it felt like you could swim and swim inside it forever and never reach the top.
“Have you ever known you were near the beach but not been able to see it?” she continued. “What do you hear? The waves. You feel moisture on your skin. You smell salt. If you know the spot, you can judge whether the tide is in or out based on the concentration of seaweed smell in the air.”
I looked around at that moment at Gus and Trip. Was Trip hiding a smirk? His face showed nothing. Was Gus kicking him under the table? It didn’t look like it. Wasn’t someone going to interrupt Charlisse to say, “This is totally ridiculous. This can’t be true.” I wanted someone to. I wanted whoever that was to be right.
“What I do is inexact,” Charlisse went on, “and it has taken me years to come as close to the river as I do. Still, as far from the river as I stand, it has changed me. I find myself struggling to pull back into this world. Standing at the river’s edge is wonderful. It’s death, but I don’t feel alive anymore without it. It’s why we love the ocean—it reminds us of this river we came from and will return to. But it’s unnatural to know too much about it.”
“And Michael is swimming in it!” Ewan interrupted, his sharp voice disturbing the calm. “Isn’t he?”
Charlisse took a deep breath as if she wasn’t quite ready to get there. “Yes,” she said. “What Michael is doing is different from what I do. He is getting too close.”
“Sometimes the dead pull someone into the river with them,” she went on. “When there is a strong connection between two people, such as between a long-married couple, you’ll often see one follow the other into death within a year of the first one’s passing. This is actually a form of slipping—unbeknownst to those around them, the one who remains alive is going back and forth from the moment their beloved dies. They’re so used to each other, they hardly realize what is going on. And when the second one dies, it’s not a surprise. You see, most of us know about slipping without really knowing that we know. The married couple—in truth, they never were apart.”
“But we didn’t know my grandfather,” Julia said. “How could he go six years without seeing us while he was alive, and then come back for Michael the moment he died, as if they had this great connection?”
“His desire,” said Charlisse, “must be strong.”
“But why?” Julia asked.
“Are you wondering,” said Charlisse, “why the ghost of your grandfather didn’t choose you?”
“No,” said Julia, sounding so offended that I wondered for the first time if she was wondering that.
“It would be a very helpful question,” Charlisse said, “if you were to wonder. Wondering will be what saves you. Pay attention to the questions you think to ask.”
Julia seemed to recover a little of her dignity. “I don’t know why Grandpa’s doing anything,” she said. “I don’t know if I really believe any of this.”
“But you do,” said Charlisse. “You believe. Because you understand your grandfather. As does Michael. You know that once you discover what it is he is after, you will think, Yes, I knew that all along. You just can’t articulate it now. Your challenge will be unlocking the knowledge.”
“And you’ll help?” Gus said. “Didn’t you say that’s what you do, help people find the knowledge they already carry around inside?”
Charlisse lifted her hands from the table and folded them. Somehow I knew that this gesture was a closing of a door. “In this case,” she said, “Michael’s access to the river running inside us is so much more powerful than mine, there is little I can do.”
“He’s having seizures,” Julia said. “This is really dangerous. Mom and Dad should know.”
Charlisse gently shook her head. “I know that you are children, and that what I am going to tell you now will seem a great shock. But you should try to see this situation from your parents’ point of view. They will be—understandably—overwhelmed by fear. They will bring in doctors, counselors, even some incompetent practitioners of my own art. They will be trying to protect you, but what they will in fact be doing is imprisoning you, taking away your ability to focus on what you need to learn. You must tell them if you feel you have exhausted your own chances, but before you do that, I want you to understand what will happen if they know.”
I looked down at the shining table. My hands were shaking. Inside this cold, formal palace of an apartment, under Charlisse’s bright gaze, I was starting to actually believe that this was happening to me, that Charlisse was right, that there was a river, that I was swimming inside it.
“No way,” said Trip. “There’s always something that can be done. Is it money?
My parents—”
Charlisse looked directly at me, and I felt my worry lie still. At the same time, Trip stopped talking in midsentence. I think he realized that this wasn’t about money, which is weird, because when you live in New York, and when your family has as much money as Trip’s does, I guess you don’t hear that very often. He looked right at Charlisse, almost defiantly, but when she kept looking only at me, he lowered his gaze. I was starting to think that it didn’t matter what Charlisse said. I had to tell Mom and Dad.
“Michael,” Charlisse commanded. The strength of her voice matched the strength in her eyes. “Whatever it is your grandfather is looking for, you’re the only one who can help him find it.”
“What if I can’t figure out what he wants?”
“It’s not a question of whether you can figure it out,” she said. “It’s a question of whether you will or will not help him. I do hope you will, because if you don’t, you will drown.”
“Drown?” I said. “What are you talking about? Like, really drown?”
But Ewan was ahead of me, as always, asking a smarter question. “And if Michael does help his grandfather,” Ewan said, “will he be okay?”
Charlisse looked old for the first time, and far away from us. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not.”
I felt again a rush of cold and fear. A sob was starting to block my throat. “Maybe?” I repeated. “Maybe not?”
“You should help us,” said Julia. “This is crazy that a kid would have to do this on his own. It isn’t fair.”
“You’re right,” Charlisse said. “It isn’t fair. But make no mistake. I am helping you. I am telling you what you need to know. You need to know that this is real. And that it’s up to you children to solve it. And that I believe you can. But I can’t do it for you. It will take all of you. All of your strength and wisdom and whatever self-knowledge you have managed to acquire in your young lives.”
“Couldn’t you go into a trance and visit Michael’s grandfather in the river?” Ewan asked. “You said Michael can figure out what his grandpa wants, but what if he doesn’t do it fast enough?”
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