The Clairvoyants

by Karen Brown

  But one look from the woman stopped me from saying anything. Any hopefulness I’d entertained about a new start dimmed. Her round eyes were blue, thickly lashed, and they stayed on me, beseeching.

  “Now, Martha, I want you to be happy,” my mother called out the car window. The Cadillac idled by the curb. She’d put on her large-framed sunglasses. Her lipstick was cracked, and her face lined under its makeup, and one day I would be older, as she was, and, like her, have no idea how vulnerable it made me seem. “I am! I am happy!” I said. The heat of the car’s exhaust and of the sun on the hood were stultifying, and I leaned in and kissed her dry cheek, which smelled amazingly the same as when she would enter my room in the dark and bend down to kiss first me good night, and then Del, and say she was sorry for telling us she wished we’d never been born. We felt chastened when she did this—as if we’d forced her to make the declaration. And hadn’t we, with our squabbles, our messes, the work that tending us required?

  Under the covers I’d have on a floral, flannel nightgown with a lace ruffle on the bodice that scratched and sleeves that were too short. Del, in the twin bed beside mine, wore a matching nightgown. In winter, the heating registers clanked, snow piled up on the roof, and we were children.

  “I think I can easily make it back by nightfall,” my mother said, sounding like a character in a fairy tale. She rummaged in her purse and made a sound of surprise. “Oh,” she said. “I almost forgot.” She handed me what looked like a cosmetic case—tan leather with brass trim.

  “It’s a travel alarm clock,” she said, brightly. “Your grandmother gave it to me years ago. I thought you could use it.”

  She gave me a smile, and her eyes brimmed with what Del and I always called happy sad. I didn’t beg her to stay. I knew it was no use. Beyond the car, Mary Rae seemed rooted in the shade of the elm. My mother’s car pulled away, and I felt entirely forsaken.

  4

  Up in my apartment, the porcelain taps to the bathroom sink and to the shower were cracked, and a small sign posted above the bathroom sink informed me, in what I assumed was Geoff’s careful printing, that the pipes would make a loud noise when I turned on the shower, but that I should keep turning the taps and the noise would stop. At the spot where the water dripped from the faucet into the tub, there was a dark stain. Combined with the groaning pipes, the tub seemed the scene of a gruesome crime. I would get used to it soon enough, I supposed.

  The couch bed and the table and chairs were delivered by two tired-looking men with packs of cigarettes sticking out of their shirt pockets. Despite my attempt to make friendly conversation, they said very little, as if they’d been warned by some superior not to talk to customers. Still, they left a lingering odor of sweat in my room. I unfolded the sheets and put them on the thin mattress. Out the window, the sight of Mary Rae in her heavy coat, the ice in her hair that refused to melt, surprised me. This was unusual—the dead never remained once I left their presence. A breeze slashed at the elm, thunder rumbled in the distance, and I smelled ozone. I went out with my camera and took Mary Rae’s photograph.

  I’d never told even Del what I saw. At one point, after I stopped believing the writings of “A Student,” I stumbled onto Occult Phenomena in the Light of Theology, by Abbot Alois Weisinger—a theologian who claimed that in Paradise Adam and Eve possessed powers that were afterward lost to them, though some of these powers might have remained, weakened, latent in the gene pool, waiting to be revived. In the Spiritualists by the Sea camp, the mediums gave card readings, group readings in which attendees held hands and a medium summoned a personal spirit guide who might have a message for someone in the audience; I read about the Victorian spiritualist heyday that prompted the proliferation of these mediums. And I read about the popularity of spirit photographs in those days—Mrs. French of Boston, with Spirit Son, 1868, and Moses A. Dow, Editor of Waverly Magazine, with the Spirit of Mabel Warren, 1871—silly images taken by charlatans and tricksters—and this added to my unease about my own photography.

  In my art class in high school, the year that Del went into the hospital, we’d been instructed to take the camera with us everywhere, and the first good image I captured was Mrs. Harrington at the Big Y. It was at night, and I’d gone there to buy spice drops—one of Del’s old cravings. I used a 35 mm camera for class, and when I started down the soup aisle and saw Mrs. Harrington I’d hesitated, curious about what the image would reveal if I captured it on film, worried that even an attempt at photographing her would further prove my instability. But like my great-grandfather, who’d sketched what he’d seen, I felt the need to take that photograph, and the next day I developed the film in the lab at school. On the negative I could see the image, but I wasn’t sure what would happen once I printed it.

  Mr. Krauss, our teacher, squat and shaggy, leaned over my shoulder as I placed the paper in the bath. The image appeared, and he said it was excellent. He liked the surreal nature of it, the rows of soup cans, the strange saturated light that was arresting and eerie. He made no mention of Mrs. Harrington in her London Fog, her bruised neck, her bouffant hair flattened on one side. Just of the light, its quality. I’d felt a sharp disappointment.

  “Unusual,” he said, “this shimmer here,” his pudgy index finger hovering over Mrs. Harrington’s figure.

  He liked the absence of people, he told me. I’d captured the loneliness of the place. But when I looked at the image, Mrs. Harrington was there, confused, as if she’d lost her cart in one of the aisles and as if the lost cart had been the only familiar thing in a strange land. Mrs. Harrington had had a daughter, a girl with long, thin appendages who sat in the junior high cafeteria alone during lunch, scribbling verse on lined paper, refusing invitations to join other tables. The printed image of Mrs. Harrington was the first I knew of what I had to do, like a calling. It didn’t matter that I was capturing only absence—an empty supermarket aisle, a deserted, leaf-riddled road. I understood that lost love did that—uprooted you and left you abandoned.

  While I’d been taking Mary Rae’s photograph, Geoff came up the sidewalk with Suzie on her leash and smiled at me, hesitantly.

  “Taking shots of the house?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  Geoff laughed. “I’ve got some stories about this place, if you’re ever interested. It’s got a history, you know.”

  “Ghosts?” I said, raising the camera to set Mary Rae in my sights.

  Geoff put his hand on my shoulder, and I felt a flash of discomfort, then wondered if I was wrong to feel it. Avuncular, I told myself, an old high school vocabulary word I’d never thought I’d use.

  “No, don’t worry about that,” he said. “I wouldn’t have any renters if that were the case, eh?”

  He went back inside, and I followed him, Suzie’s nails clicking on the treads already marred by her ups and downs. We went our separate ways, into our apartments. It grew dark, and I knew I should think about eating something, but I wasn’t hungry. The streetlights came on. Mary Rae tipped her head to meet my gaze, her pretty hair iced over. Though I wanted to ignore her, her continued presence was too baffling. I went quietly down the staircase, unused to living in such close proximity to strangers and leery of calling attention to myself. I stepped onto the porch, and then down to the sidewalk. Mary Rae began to move away from me, leading me along, stopping when I didn’t keep up. I was afraid of getting lost. Though I had my phone, and it continued to pick up a signal, at that time I knew no one I could call, and this was before phones could direct you anywhere you wanted to go. Despite this I kept following her.

  I pretended I was simply out for a walk on a late summer evening. I tried to focus on the trees arching over the sidewalk, the quaintness of the houses with their front porches, imagining how I would describe things to Del in a letter. The air felt cooler and the breeze, which had once seemed to promise a storm, kicked the leaves. We walked down one street, then another—Geneva, Cascadilla. Students had move
d in, had hung their posters, had laid down their rugs, and were acclimating to the people around them. It didn’t escape me that my fresh start so far involved none of those things; rather than making new friends, I was following a dead girl. I approached a party on a candlelit porch—laughter, banter, the group partially hidden by tall shrubbery. Mary Rae stopped walking and paused, lingering, as if she longed to join them; as if she sensed I, too, wished to go in.

  I stepped back into the shadows of the shrubbery, as she did, listening. A woman laughed, softly.

  “It’s a beautiful night,” she said. “God, I wish it would stay like this and never get cold.”

  Someone set a bottle of beer on a table. “You’d get sick of the sameness,” a man said.

  “I’m happy to be here with all of you. I’m just happy to be alive,” the woman said.

  There was a hush then, the laughter dying away. “Someone walked over my grave,” the man said.

  “Oh, stop,” another woman said, her voice garrulous. “You’re all so superstitious.”

  “I wish I would stop feeling guilty,” the first woman said.

  “For what?” the other woman said.

  “Well, for Rae.”

  I felt a sudden apprehension. Mary Rae must have been the “Rae” the woman referred to, though her face showed no real emotion, just a placid, glazed-over expression, as if recollecting something from long ago.

  “You doing okay there, William?” a man said. “You’re pretty quiet.”

  “Yeah,” William said. And then he stood and looked out of the screened enclosure. He looked past Mary Rae to me, standing there on the sidewalk. I’m not sure why I didn’t flee. Did I think that I, too, couldn’t be seen?

  “Oh, hello,” he said.

  “Hi,” I said. “Sorry, I was looking for my cat.”

  Del would have laughed at me. “That’s all you could come up with?” she would have said.

  Then the man, William, turned to the group, some of whom had risen from their seats on the dim porch to see who he was talking to.

  “Anyone see a cat?” he said, his voice teasing. I suspected he didn’t believe me. He looked back at me—for some reason I still hadn’t moved.

  “What does it look like?” he said. “What breed? Persian? Manx? Maine Coon? Abyssinian? Siamese?”

  “Just a tabby.” Could I have told him right then I’d been following his dead friend? What would that have accomplished? I looked toward Mary Rae, but she was gone. William raised his beer to me. “Want to join us?” he said.

  Thunder sounded off in the distance, and then the porch door opened, and William stepped onto the sidewalk in front of me. Again, I smelled that pre-storm charge in the air. My grandfather would open the front door wide and stand before the screen, calling us all to him, and telling us to “Breathe. Breathe. Smell that?” Outside my grandparents’ house, the horse chestnut leaves would be torn from the branches. The shrubs would buckle. The clouds would unfurl like great gray tongues. Our mother and grandmother would stand far behind us, safe in the hallway’s shadows. “Get away from there,” our mother would hiss, and we four girls would feel superior to the panic in her voice.

  “You don’t want to be struck by lightning,” William said.

  He was just being funny, but the mention of the lightning and the sudden disappearance of Mary Rae, the void she had left, made me uneasy.

  “I’ll be fine if I avoid trees, high houses, running water, and barns,” I said.

  “Or, you could come inside.”

  “According to Ben Franklin, to be safest indoors you’re supposed to lie in a silken hammock in the middle of the house.” I sounded odd, I knew that, but William laughed.

  “We’ll all have to face the risk then. No silken hammocks here.”

  The breeze buckled the porch screens. William’s friends had grown quiet. “My grandfather sold lightning rods.”

  “You seem to have the pitch down,” he said. “You’ve got me nervous.”

  I laughed, then. We looked at each other in the dark. I could see little of his face, his eyes.

  “I’d better get going,” I said. “But thanks.”

  I headed back the way I’d come, ignoring the voices that started up on the porch behind me. When I spun around once, playfully, William was still there, standing on the sidewalk, watching me go.

  5

  In Ithaca, I settled into a new routine—the walk to campus, the classes in historic houses named after university founders and benefactors, with open windows where gusts came through, occasionally dragging a leaf, flipping our notebook pages; the professors distant and oddly dressed, sporting clinking turquoise and silver bracelets, faded jeans, and the heavy shoes I understood would soon be needed to navigate the slush and snow. The area had been established in the late 1700s as the Military Tract, and its townships named by a clerk in the surveyor’s office who may have read John Dryden’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Homer, Hector, Ulysses. Even a village called Dryden, and another after his contemporary, Milton, which was where Mary Rae Swindal, the missing girl, had lived.

  A report about her came on the television news one morning in the little diner where I often got my coffee on my way to school. I stood with a small group of students watching—the boys in their skinny jeans, skateboards under their arms, the girls with their phones out, calling friends. Later, I saw a copy of the Ithaca Journal with the headline about how the search for her continued. I bought it and brought it back to my bedsit. I read about the absence of new developments, and how yet another vigil was being held the next evening. There was the photo of Mary Rae, and quotes from her friends, and one from her mother, whom I imagined as a gaunt woman, her eyes red from crying.

  “We miss our girl so much,” the mother said. “We hope she will be home soon.”

  I felt a pang of sympathy for the mother, knowing Mary Rae would never be home. I’d tried, out of curiosity, to retrace my steps from the night she’d led me along, but without much luck. In the daytime, things looked off, and I had a crippling inability to get my bearings. I was often lost, and trying to squelch my panic. I must have seemed, to anyone who met me during those first weeks, strange and standoffish. Awkward. Other than Mary Rae, who made an almost daily appearance beneath the elm, I had no consistent visitors. And while I was conscious of having gotten what I wanted with this move away from home, I was apprehensive of my good luck. I found myself confusing new faces with those already familiar. I would smile and wave at someone, and, confronted with a stare or a hostile look, I’d realize my mistake. I’d get my bearings soon. And then I’d be able to be myself—whoever that new person was, waiting to emerge.

  My photography workshop was the focus of my studies, even though I was enrolled in other courses—Romantic Poets, Women and Grief, a horrible statistics course that I might withdraw from. We were a small group, assorted and equally strange, if in different ways. When one of the girls, Sally Crowder, made the observation that we were weirdos, a few others laughed, softly, almost proud.

  “Artists,” Charles Wu said. He wore heavy-framed glasses and had dyed a white stripe in his hair, like a skunk. “We’re artists.”

  I said little, preoccupied with my contact sheets. For me the work was less about art than about reassuring myself that what I saw existed in some form—just enough to assuage my fears about my sanity. Still, I was welcome in this group—we were all compelled to create images out of pieces of our own unique worlds. None of us saw things the same way as the other, and even if I wasn’t sure I entirely belonged, I was grateful to be there.

  I didn’t bring any of my photography classmates home with me—even though Charles Wu kept inviting me places alone, then suggesting he walk me home afterward. I liked my privacy, and I often pictured living in the entire house alone, moving freely through all the rooms, enjoying a dining room and a kitchen at the back of the house, and this idea had taken hold so I’d almost forgotten that others living
separate lives occupied these spaces—the elusive Professors Whitman and McCall downstairs, Geoff and Suzie upstairs in the room next to mine. Our lives did invade one another’s in unwanted, unacknowledged ways. The floors creaked, and I listened to Geoff’s slippered footfalls on nights I couldn’t sleep—they shushed across the oak flooring, back and forth. Sometimes, at a deliberate, thoughtful pacing. At others, in a slow, anguished dragging. Once in a while I’d hear his dog Suzie’s clacking nails trailing after. Each morning, though, Geoff emerged in the upstairs hall, boisterous and hearty.

  “Come, Suze! Come on, girl,” he’d say.

  He was from London, and a craftsman. One day I chanced to open my door at the same time he did, and he stepped up to my doorway and peered behind me, asking if the place was working out. “Do you have any tea?” he said. “I’m out.”

  “I do,” I said. “Would you like to borrow some?”

  “Would you make it up?” he said. “Would you mind?”

  He slipped around me and into the apartment, dragging Suzie by her leash. He sat at my little table and began to roll out a joint, the pot spilling to the floor by the chair legs. His hair was wild and gray around his ears. He wore a camel overcoat with soiled elbows that smelled of the cigarettes I’d seen him smoke furtively, like a teenager, at his cracked window.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t smoke that in here,” I said.

  “The tea?” he said. He reached over, cracked the window, and lit his joint anyway. His eyes were wide and dark, and I got the impression he was simply looking for someone to tend to him. In his youth he might have been the Heathcliff type—black eyes and hair, a rogue.