by Karen Brown
“He just likes to do it out in the open,” Del said. “He’s claustrophobic.”
She sat on the mattress, trying it out. Then she spotted the travel alarm clock on the end table. “Oh look!” she cried. “Mother’s little clock. She tried to give this to me in the hospital and I told her to take it back.”
Del arranged the pillows and promptly fell asleep, which put an end to my questions. A feeling of both excitement and dread accompanied anything related to Del. She’d come to visit, which meant that I was still someone important in her life, and that pleased me. But we hadn’t spent time alone together in three years, and I wasn’t sure I knew her anymore. It also occurred to me that Detective Thomson may have paid her a visit, that her flight to Maine with Rory had had another purpose.
Across our years of letters, I had never asked Del why she’d turned me away that day I’d tried to visit, and she had never asked me why I’d kept away since. It was as if we had silently acquiesced to a need to keep our distance from each other. That afternoon in Ithaca I watched her sleep, her hands pressed under her cheek like a child. The little travel clock on the end table wasn’t really a gift intended for me, and I wished I had never accepted it. I felt a rush of animosity toward my mother, toward Del, but I tamped it down. As in childhood when she would propose an enticing plan, I was being lured back under Del’s spell.
In the middle of the night I woke up and she was sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark having a conversation with herself.
“You told me that was what it was,” she said, “and then you fell into the gap, and the bees interrupted, and the whole Sunday I couldn’t find the place.”
She cut the air with her hand emphatically, and when I spoke to her she didn’t stop or seem to hear me. “Del,” I said. “Oh, Del?” Clearly, she hadn’t been managing her medication.
I should have expected this. In her letters she’d often talked about despising the medication and wanting to wean herself off of it. Yet it unnerved me. I dug the prescription bottles from her bag and read the instructions for dosage. I filled a glass of water at the sink and I handed the pills to her, one at a time, like a nurse at her bedside.
“You need to get those little plastic cups,” she said, trying to provoke me.
“Your experiment failed,” I said.
“This time,” she said.
Eventually, as days passed, Del’s drama seemed to level off. My mother called, and though it felt like childhood tattling, I told her Del was visiting. She pushed in a chair and crossed the kitchen floor and opened a cabinet. The old regulator schoolhouse clock chimed the hour.
“How is it going?” my mother said, falsely bright.
“We’re having fun,” I said. “I’m showing her the sights.”
One Saturday, I’d taken Del on a tour of the campus. I’d gotten a map from the Campus Information booth, and Del had made fun of me for not knowing my way around. Another time, we’d hiked up wooded, spiraling trails in Buttermilk Falls Park. Yet another day, we’d crouched on flat rocks near falls that wet our faces. I’d even taken her across the suspension bridge over the gorge, clutching her hand, feeling myself drawn to the edge.
“That’s nice,” my mother said. “When is she coming home?”
Home meant Ashley Manor, I assumed, but still her question rankled.
“Soon,” I said. I’d enjoyed having Del around again, and I even felt better with her near. I had willed the dead to keep their distance, and for a while even Mary Rae obliged.
6
I’d wanted to visit the Spiritualists by the Sea—it hadn’t been Del’s idea. I’d been reading my great-grandfather’s manuals, and I wanted some proof of what was happening in the camp. While my grandfather was alive I didn’t dare go against his wishes, but when he died I believed I would find him at the camp, and he would forgive me for defying him. That summer, I turned twelve. I was too old for Del’s games of pretend, too young to care about the boys Leanne and Sarah entertained around the pool. My father had kept the ranch house in the suburbs and had moved in with his new wife by then. We saw him occasionally, staying in our old bedrooms during weekend visits. But the place had never felt like our house—not like my grandparents’ had—and that summer my father and his wife had purchased a cottage on the Cape, and we were allotted a week with him there at the cottage, and then our visit with him was done.
My mother had continued her volunteer work at the church, and took shifts at the Prison Store, where they sold inmates’ handcrafted tables and chairs, chess boards and jewelry boxes. Del and I always joked about messages in the merchandise—a hidden panel at the base of a wooden candlestick into which had been secreted a manifesto, admitting or denying the inmate craftsman’s crime. The store was in a town plaza—between a bookstore and the one movie theater. Beyond this I wasn’t sure how our mother kept herself busy.
My grandmother was occupied with her bridge club and her garden club. Often, neither of them was home and we were left unsupervised. We spent a lot of time in the house—reading our grandparents’ old books, listening to French language tapes we found in the attic, and using the French around our mother to annoy her. The beach communities filled with summer people, and we spent our time on bikes, or walking the lanes to the beach club with our group of friends. Taking a detour into the woods wasn’t much of a stretch, and Del and I stole down the gravel road through the woods one morning just as the Spiritualists’ organ hit its first notes. We brought a backpack with sandwiches and pretended we were simply out for a hike. The woods were cool, just beginning to fill with bugs, and the sun blinked through the leaves as we walked. Neither of us spoke, solemn with the weight of our disobedience.
Occasionally, a car would come by, and we’d will ourselves invisible and step to the side, allowing it to pass—dusty Connecticut plates, some from New York or Massachusetts. The path through the woods inclined and we emerged at the top of a hill where the trees thinned to a meadow. Ahead the cottages began, brightly painted like gypsy wagons—peaked, wood-framed structures with gingerbread trim—miniature versions, I noted, of our grandparents’ house, connected by narrow lanes. We saw towels and swimsuits on clotheslines, and floats and inner tubes stuffed under cottage porches. One of the lanes ended at a bulkhead, where a path led through rangy swamp rose bushes down to a rocky beach. Del and I paused at the head of the path, partly hidden behind the roses. The Spiritualists had dotted the sand with umbrellas, and children played in the Sound. Someone opened a cooler and pulled the flip top of a can of soda or beer. Del and I surveyed the scene, surprised. This was like any of the other beach communities we’d been to.
The organ sound led us into a grove where the temple stood—a white clapboard building with tall windows and double wooden doors propped open to allow in the sea breeze. Inside, folding chairs made an expanding half-circle, and people had begun to file in and take their seats. That day, according to the placard at the front of the room, Reverend Earline Morrissey, a medium from New London, was scheduled to hold a spirit communication circle. We were told by a lanky man, who bent at the waist so we could smell the moth ball odor of his dress shirt, that children weren’t allowed. Del, sensing my disappointment, waited until the doors had closed, then tugged me into the viburnum shrubs beneath the open windows where we could hear the event commence.
Reverend Earline said she was getting a message for someone named “Jean,” and a woman, supposedly Jean herself, gasped, and Earline and Jean had a conversation—a back-and-forth about who the message was from (her grandmother’s childhood friend) and what she wanted to say (she was the one who stole the silver sugar tongs). The hour went on in this way, with Earline calling out messages, and people claiming them—“Why, that’s my uncle Gem” or “Oh! Mother! That’s Susan Merriman, my mother.” The messages were specific enough that they felt very real to me—the red bike with the basket, the boat named Lucky Again, a child’s hatred of rhubarb, a man’s quirky addiction to warm buttermilk. It didn’
t seem possible that Earline would make these things up. But there were also moments when she called out messages and no one claimed them, when she’d struggle with a message that the audience member couldn’t understand.
“My mother never enjoyed going to the movies,” a woman said, sourly. “She was agoraphobic. I think you have the wrong person.”
In my great-grandfather’s manuals, “A Student” had described how often messages were inaccurate, and how this made charging fees and offering yourself as a medium unethical. To confuse the fitful and unstable sights and sounds of the lower astral plane, which seem so wonderful to the novice, with the steady, pure radiance of the Divine Spiritual Light is profanation! The messages coming from the lower astral plane, “A Student” claimed, were always confused and misleading. I wanted to approach Reverend Earline with this bit of advice. I wasn’t sure what reception I’d receive, but I was looking for acceptance at the time and was intent on corralling her.
As she finished up the circle, she called out one last message. “I have a message from an older gentleman. He is trying to speak to his daughter. Has anyone recently lost a father, or a father figure?”
Earline’s voice, grating, high-pitched, rang out into the room. I heard a few mumbles, some shuffling feet. No one claimed the old gentleman, but I thought of my grandfather, and even though his message wasn’t for me, I wanted to call out, to hear what his message might be. Del pinched my arm, cautioning me. I closed my eyes and smelled the fresh oil paint on the clapboards. “He is enamored of our organ, and once looked forward to hearing its notes in the evenings,” Earline said.
The circle proceeded like an auction, the souls of the dead and their lost messages divvied up among this group of strangers. How sad, I thought. I waited for Earline to say more, but she did not. I planned to confront her once the circle was finished. Soon the folding chairs clattered along the wood floor. The attendees’ voices swelled, and the doors fell open, and everyone came out. Clusters of people emerged, their feet moving past us. Del and I remained behind the viburnum, the large leaves keeping us hidden, until a pair of Bernardo sandals joined the group, and I peered out to note the woman’s wicker purse—our mother’s purse. She wore large sunglasses, the skirt and blouse she had on that morning when she left the house.
Del nudged me, having seen her, too. Our mother moved among the Spiritualists until we lost sight of her on the lane leading down between the cottages. We crept from our hiding place, but by the time we entered the temple, Reverend Earline had gone.
“She’s disappeared into the ether,” Del said, her eyes wide.
“Our mother, too,” I said.
“Why didn’t she answer when the old gentleman wanted to speak to her?” Del said.
We walked down to the little beach to sit in the sand and eat our sandwiches. I didn’t want to believe then that it may not have been her “old gentleman.”
“She must not want to hear his message,” I said.
“Then why come?” Del said. She broke off bite-size pieces of her sandwich and put them in her mouth.
The Spiritualists’ children were gone—all called in to lunch. I buried my feet in the warm sand. “There may be someone else she wants to hear from.”
We couldn’t conceive who our mother might wish to contact, who she’d known who had died. We knew very little about our mother’s life. Sometimes, our grandmother would talk about old boyfriends our mother had spurned, boys who drove from college in their sports cars to the house.
“Drove five hours from Penn and she wouldn’t even come downstairs to say hello,” my grandmother had said.
“Maybe one of the old boyfriends,” I said. This idea was tantalizing, and it overshadowed, somewhat, my regret at not hearing my grandfather’s message.
We both knew that we couldn’t let our mother know we were there, but it would be our mother, and the chance of eavesdropping on her, that brought us back down the wooded gravel road again and again that summer, hoping for a glimpse of her in the medium’s cottage, eager to hear her claim a message in the spirit circle. If she ever returned, we never saw her, and once we were caught playing clairvoyants Del lost interest. Eventually, my attraction to the Spiritualists ended as well. I’d grow to dislike the way their mediums drew people in with false hope and provided paltry messages that might not have come from anyone they knew. Those of the lower astral plane were tricky, tiring, and deceitful. You could trust the messages just about as much as you trusted the things you saw in your sleep.
7
Del’s visit extended to over two weeks. On the days I had classes I didn’t know what she did or where she went, and when I asked she was always vague. “Here and there,” she’d say. “Out and about.” It was my responsibility to shop for food, to buy shampoo and soap. Del would add things to the list—razor blades, rat poison, clothesline rope.
“What is this?” I said, shaking the list at her.
Del stood at the mirror trying on winter hats from a pile she’d thrown on the bed. I had no idea where she’d gotten them. “I was kidding,” she said. “You don’t joke anymore. You’ve gotten old.”
“I don’t think this is funny,” I said.
Del turned to me wearing a faux fur Russian hat. “Because you’re worried I’m crazy.” She pulled the hat’s flaps over her ears.
“You look it wearing that,” I said.
I crossed out her ridiculous additions to the list, folded it over, and tucked it into my purse.
I came home from Wegmans, lugging the bags up the stairs, and discovered her setting up an old television, fiddling with its connections.
“Does that even work?” I said. “Where did you get it?”
Del explained that she’d found it for free on the side of the road. “And it does work,” she said. “The sign said it did.”
Another day I came home to find her reading in an upholstered chair, its cushioned arms curving to end in the carved heads of ducks.
“How did you get this up here?” I asked.
“Good ol’ Geoff,” she said. “Don’t you love it? It’s a gift for you, from me.”
I didn’t say that it left less space in the apartment or that it seemed a little threadbare. I didn’t ask where she got it—if it had been left out in the rain or was covered in animal hair.
“Don’t worry,” she said, returning to her book. “The stains aren’t blood.”
* * *
ONE AFTERNOON SOMEONE knocked on my apartment door. Both Del and I were home. It was Halloween, and Del had purchased a bag of candy corn, which we ate in handfuls. The television was on, and I was trying to read poems assigned for class—Wordsworth and Shelley, the print so small on the thin page of the anthology that I kept losing my way. At the sound of the knock we startled and eyed each other warily.
“Maybe it’s Detective Thomson,” Del whispered.
She’d confessed that he had visited her at the manor, “with his shiny shoes and his suit,” she had said, scowling. “I’d almost forgotten all about him.”
He’d asked her the usual questions, and she’d done her best at “dazed and forgetful.”
“I kept asking him to repeat the question,” she’d told me. “Then I would spend at least three minutes thinking it over before I answered.”
She’d stared through me, disconcertingly, imitating her interview behavior with the detective. “You’re good at that,” I’d said. “You didn’t even blink.”
We’d both laughed about Detective Thomson’s growing bulk, his white legs that showed above his socks when his slacks rode up. Neither of us mentioned the sense that he’d sharpened his focus—mentioning Jane Roberts and some of the others we’d hung out with that summer. We didn’t admit to feeling afraid, but there we were, startled by a knock on the apartment door.
Del answered the door with a lavish flourish, her hand filled with candy corn. “It’s a visitor!” she cried. “We’re not alone!”
Geoff stood in the doorway, surprised.
He seemed a little cautious around Del. Since she’d been with me, his visits to my bedsit had stopped.
“I’ve been invited to an outdoor party,” he said, clearing his throat. “I wondered if you two would like to join me.”
Del put a piece of candy in her mouth. She held her hand out to Geoff, but he declined.
“What does that mean?” I asked Geoff, rising from the couch where I’d been reading.
“Outdoors? A party?” Del slapped my shoulder, as if I needed waking up.
It had grown quite warm the last day or two—a welcome Indian summer.
“A cookout?” I said. “Or something?”
“Yes, yes,” he said. “You know, to celebrate All Hallows’ Eve. Grilled meat and that sort of thing.”
Del laughed at me. “Are you dense, Martha? Yes, we’ll go with you!” she cried. She put the remaining candy corn in her mouth, wiped her hands on her jeans, and grabbed her backpack. “I look OK, right?” She smoothed down her T-shirt. There was a stain on the front, but she let down her long hair from its clasp, and it fell over her shoulders and covered the spot. “Oh, do we need costumes?” she asked, concerned.
Geoff began to speak, but Del cut him off.
“That might be fun,” she said. “We’d have to stop to pick something up, though.”
“You can just wear your Dr. Zhivago hat,” I said.
Geoff stepped into the room, waving his hands. “Hold on, now. No one mentioned costumes were required.”
Del went to the bureau and began opening drawers. “No costumes at a party on Halloween. That’s a first.”
I clutched my book to my chest. “Who’s going to be there?” I pictured a group of older men and their wives, and Geoff showing up with Del and me, looking like his two lost daughters.
“It’ll be a nice group,” Geoff said. “Some artists, some students.”