The Clairvoyants

by Karen Brown

  “Like those statues of Apollo, or Bacchus. Or those paintings of satyrs.”

  Since finding the portfolio, since the sex in his office, I’d begun to think differently about him, maybe even to admit I really didn’t know him. Was this what happened to married couples? Did they glance over at their spouses one evening and see a stranger?

  The whole first snowy day I kept under the blankets on the bed, watching an old movie on television. The snow blew past the window glass, masking the world white. Buried cars lined the street, their forms hulking and misshapen. It grew dark quickly, and every so often we’d hear the snowplows, or a patrolling police car, the chains on its tires a soft clanking. When the power went out William paused his pacing in the sudden quiet. We lit two tapers in my grandmother’s sterling candlesticks, and he came over to the bed and slipped under the blankets. I felt myself tense with apprehension. He pressed his mouth to my shoulder, and then he kissed me, almost tentatively. I let him lift my shirt, allowed his mouth to roam over each of my breasts. He moved against me, his fingers groping to remove our clothes, and I remained a passive witness, letting him do these things, letting him think that nothing had changed. I assumed when he noticed I wasn’t participating he would stop, but strangely he did not. It was dark in the room, the candlelight eerie, and I was reminded of the light in one of his photographs—the shadows it left on the woman’s form—Alice, in that image. I pushed him away from me, my hands on his chest. He couldn’t understand at first. He leaned forward to kiss me, and I turned away. He grabbed my chin, his eyes dark beneath his brows.

  “Why are you doing this?” he asked me.

  The snowplow roared past, the snow spraying off its dull blade.

  “Would you ever photograph me?”

  I knew I was being coy and that I should tread carefully. He rolled away to look at me. We breathed puffs of white around our heads. I threw the covers back, and my naked body was gleaming and slick in the candlelight. William smirked. He didn’t think I was serious.

  “Are you asking me if I think you’re beautiful?”

  “I’m asking if you’d ever take a picture of me. Not if I’m a worthwhile subject.”

  William didn’t know what to say. There was a frozen quality to our bodies. I began to grow cold.

  “Why do you want to know?” he said.

  I hadn’t planned to admit to seeing the photographs. This would reveal I’d searched for a key, inserted it in his locked desk drawer—that I had no idea what I’d find, but that I didn’t trust him enough to simply ask. Still, my curiosity got the better of me. Why shouldn’t I confess to seeing them? He might be relieved and even discuss them with me. They were only photographs, after all.

  “Your sleeping women,” I said. “They’re all the Milton girls, aren’t they?”

  William sat up, his back white in the dark room, the splotch that was his heart-shaped mole on his shoulder. He sat that way, statue-like, and I could read nothing of what he thought.

  “It’s understandable,” I said, aware I might be digging myself in deeper. “They were part of your past. Your memories. I could see how they’d be significant.”

  I watched him carefully ease himself off the edge of the bed. He took a few steps away, toward the window, and then stopped and cried out.

  “Goddamnit!”

  I’d never heard him raise his voice like that before, and I withdrew back onto the bed. I felt sure his anger was directed at me. He lifted his foot in the candlelight. He’d stepped on a piece of an ornament. It was a big piece, and he must have stepped on it exactly right. His foot had begun to bleed, and I cringed and looked away.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Does it hurt?” I put my hand over my mouth and felt vaguely sick. I climbed from the bed, the afghan wrapped around me. “What do I do?”

  “When did you see them?” William said, his voice cold.

  He hadn’t removed the ornament from his foot. He balanced with his foot in his hand, hopped over to the bed, and sat down, and I stood nearby, listening to him breathe in and out in his anger.

  “Should I get you a towel?”

  I put on a sweatshirt, slipped on my jeans. I found a dish towel and wet it, and wrung it out. I sat beside him with the towel, my hand growing numb, and I felt odd and displaced. Accused. It had been wrong for me to snoop. He shoved the towel away.

  “When?” he said. “That night in my office?”

  “Yes,” I said. I couldn’t deny it now.

  William felt for the glass in his foot and cursed, softly. Then he looked at me, our faces so close I could see the anger in his eyes, smell the sour tinge of his breath. He was struggling to maintain his composure, and I wasn’t sure why he didn’t discuss them—why they had to be a secret. Still, I couldn’t say it.

  The snow pinged against the window and the panes rattled.

  Outside we could hear the plows moving up and down the grid of streets, throwing snow in high banks. I had the distinct feeling we were being buried. The candle flickered over his hair, his face, his tense jaw. Why was I the one who needed to explain? He’d photographed the girls of Milton, in bed, exposed in the intimacy of sleep. I felt a surge of jealousy.

  “This is a breach of trust,” he said. “You broke into my desk, went through my private things.”

  “I didn’t break in,” I said. “I used the key.”

  This made my prying even worse. He could now imagine me taking down the little tin, opening the lid.

  “I asked to see them, and you told me no,” I said.

  “I’m still working on them,” he said, slowly.

  I handed him the towel. “I think you apply pressure to stop the bleeding.”

  He shoved my hand away again and stood and felt for his shirt, his pants.

  “Where are you going?” I asked him. “There’s a snowstorm.”

  He hunted around in the bureau, and then he grabbed his socks, threw open the apartment door, and started down to the vestibule. At the bottom, he put on his boots, his jacket, the ridiculous hat. He flung the front door open and his dark shape moved across the porch, down the steps into the snow. The front door wasn’t closed all the way, and I slipped down and stood in the doorway, watching him go. The streetlights were out. He was a moving figure, disappearing into that darkness. The snow blew in over my bare feet, but I didn’t feel the cold. I didn’t call out to him or beg him to stop. He was going to his office to find the portfolio, and when he saw it was gone, he would be back.

  I closed the front door, and Del opened hers. The beam of her flashlight blinded me.

  “Why are you down here?” she said, her voice lit with alarm. She came to me and put her hand out and touched my face. When we were little I would unconsciously frown and Del hated when I wore the expression.

  “I was looking at the snow.”

  I felt like a child with her cold hand on my cheek. I felt as if our roles were slowly revolving, reversing. In the darkness, with the wind rattling around outside, knocking off roof tiles, I thought about being Del, the uncertainty the world presented her, and I felt twinges of bewilderment as if I were now experiencing what she usually did.

  “I want to see Mary Rae’s journal,” I said.

  She pulled me into her apartment. She made me tea and laced it with brandy. We sat on the couch wrapped in woolen blankets with tattered satin edges, blankets that reminded us of the ones on our beds when were little. In the wavering candlelight Del was a small shape beside me.

  “All of the Milton girls posed for him,” I said. “He has a series of photographs, all of them sleeping.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call them that,” Del said. “It’s disparaging.”

  “You knew about the photographs?” I pulled away from her on the couch. The brandy made me light-headed.

  “They brag about it when they aren’t around Anne. They keep talking about how there’ll be a show in a gallery, and they’ll be famous.”

  “I thought they hated him,” I said.


  Lit by the candle’s flame, the lines around Del’s mouth, at the corners of her eyes, were deep grooves that made her seem older than she really was. Her dark hair had grown out, and her blond roots were even more pronounced. “Maybe they don’t really hate him as much as they say.”

  Around us, in other houses in town, students who hadn’t gone home for break gathered in groups to talk and dance, to laugh. How had I become so removed from them? Why hadn’t I ever tried to fit in? I hadn’t needed to. Del had arrived to keep me company in my strangeness. She looked at me over her teacup, her brow creased, her eyes worried.

  “The journal?” I said.

  She set her cup on the table and pulled the blanket tighter around her. I suspected she knew other things she wasn’t going to tell me, things she might have explained further, like the sandalwood smell in William’s office. My suspicions about the two of them together on the office couch were ungrounded. I knew I was mistrusting, spiteful.

  Del retrieved the book, shelved among the professor’s translations.

  “Are you sure you want to read this?” she said.

  I took the journal from her hand and, using the flashlight, began to thumb through the entries, written in Mary Rae’s girlish script. Soon enough it was clear she’d been seeing William, that her dream of being back together with him had come true. She met him once in the Viking Lanes lot, and they sat in her car and talked until morning. The sun was coming up, and we were so surprised. We hadn’t noticed the passing time. He is different now. We are both different. She’d let him take her to dinner, in a restaurant in the next town. Had the necklace had been a gift from him? In December, there was a hasty entry: Made the appointment. Will says he will take me. And a week later: I went into the clinic, and then I couldn’t do it. “It’s not really anything yet, Rae,” Will says. Last time I was in high school, and he could talk me into anything, and then he left me. It’s a baby, a real thing. The last entry, two weeks before she disappeared, was angry, and cryptic. How could he? she’d written. What good is anything now? A pregnancy, and when she wouldn’t have an abortion, a final breakup. And maybe the New Year’s Eve out to make a show of being fine?

  “Have you shown this to Alice?” I said.

  “I hid it from her,” Del said. “She was desperate to find it. She knew there must be a newer one. She even went back to the house to look.”

  “He said he hadn’t seen her,” I said.

  We looked at each other. “Why does anyone lie?” Del said.

  I was drunk on the brandy, and the wind howled. Del leaned against me, and I felt the urge to pull away and accuse her of being with William, but I had no reason, really, to do that, and I’d already driven one person away that night.

  “Officer Paul would love to get his hands on this,” I said.

  William, my new husband, would be a suspect. Detective Thomson had always had a particular look on his face as he leaned in toward me, the smell of starch coming off his shirtfront.

  Where was your sister, Delores, on the afternoon of August eleventh?

  At the Prison Store with our mother.

  What time did she leave?

  I’m not sure. Before lunch, I think.

  How long was she there?

  You’d have to ask our mother.

  When did you see her next?

  Later that day. She was on the back porch with the other kids.

  The ones who’d been swimming?

  Yes.

  Who’d run up to the porch during the storm?

  Yes.

  “Maybe he had something to do with Mary Rae’s disappearance,” Del said, quietly.

  I knew she wouldn’t go to Officer Paul. She’d kept the journal because of me.

  “This doesn’t prove anything,” I said.

  “You’re right.” She took the journal and returned it to the shelf. “He’s your husband. You would know.”

  I ignored the sarcasm in her voice. We leaned into each other, our heads touching, and listened to the wind rattle the trees, the windowpanes. We watched the candle flame dip and flicker in the draft, and I felt as if we were reprising our old roles—the clairvoyants.

  “I wish there really was a way for the dead to tell us what happened,” Del said.

  I didn’t ever want to know things—how people died, what they felt, who they loved. I didn’t want to understand the dead’s complicated existence, or feel their ache of longing weighing me down. But the dead appeared, sometimes bearing an indecipherable message or an image of a place; a bed against an open window, the scrape of the sea on stones, a dark hallway with threadbare carpet, the smell of lilacs, or rot, or blood. I would never know who they all were. I supposed that one day I would recall them like old friends—confusing them at times with the living.

  Mary Rae wanted to share something with me. I’d heard her voice at the encampment: “Oh, don’t, Billy.” I’d seen her outside the apartment, as if waiting for me. Sitting in the dark, neither Del nor I talked about David Pinney, or about that summer. That time in our lives seemed to have been snipped out by a great pair of shears—leaving a blank space we had never bothered to fill in. Wasn’t that the problem, though? There remained a dark hole either of us could fall into. I felt myself there—teetering on the edge.

  Del fell asleep on the couch, and I left her apartment. I could understand William’s anger but not the desperation in it. I pictured him trudging through the snow to campus, his foot bleeding into his boot. Upstairs, I entered the empty apartment. I felt my way toward the cedar closet in the dark, and I took the portfolio from its hiding spot and sat in the duck-carved chair. I flipped through the images again by candlelight. I reached the last one and discovered a pocket in the back of the cover and, hidden away, a sleeve of negatives. I got out my loupe and went through each image. Despite the quality of the flickering candlelight, I could see they were of Mary Rae. Her hair covered one of her breasts, her mouth was pursed in sleep—a pouf of pretty lips.

  Mary Rae’s death had yet to be deemed a murder. Her face came on the evening news, in the daily newspaper—the dimpled cheek, the soft hair—and now I pictured her with William, the two of them drinking wine at Anne’s, side by side on the velvet couch. I imagined her asleep in a room, and William’s camera whirring and clicking, or in the back of Geoff’s car. I’d hidden the necklace in a small plastic bag taped to the back of the bureau. I didn’t know where else to put it where it wouldn’t be found, though I hadn’t been sure who I was hiding it from. Was I more sure now?

  Before I hid the portfolio away, I paged through it again. Each girl was lovely in her own way, unique—bare breasts, arms thrown over heads, sheets threaded between legs. There was a sense of the abandon that sleep provided, a stillness so like death. How had William managed to capture them that way? Spagna had used a time-release camera placed in the room. But these were from differing angles, as if he’d been beside them while they slept and chosen each shot. What had prompted him to take each one? The slant of light? Maybe something in the aspect of each woman’s face: the way her lips parted, the veins on her eyelids, the luminosity of her skin. Who was she, sleeping, but whatever he determined? He’d come into my apartment while I slept. Were we all someone he wished would awaken to love him?

  25

  I sat by the window most of the night keeping watch with my candle, frightened by the images of Mary Rae in the back of the portfolio. Had William hidden them when she went missing to avoid being implicated? I kept trying his cell, and at first the calls went to voice mail, but the thought of leaving an apology, my recorded voice saying those words, irked me. Eventually, the calls stopped going through at all, and I guessed the cell was dead. I had no idea where he might go in the middle of the night—if he had colleagues he socialized with, if he might find a business open. He’d invited people to a party he’d given the night I first met him; he had to know someone in town.

  Yet, the only people I’d seen him with were in Milton. He must have staye
d in his office. Surely he wasn’t out in the night, just walking in the snow. I fell asleep in the duck-carved chair and dreamed of William’s body covered in ice like the homeless people you saw occasionally on television, like the vision I’d had of Mary Rae in the Silver Streak. I wasn’t sure whether I was keeping watch out of fury or fear. I couldn’t assess my feelings for him. I was holding my watch for Mary Rae—determined to find out the truth.

  I was awakened by a scream—one I quickly identified as Del’s. It came up the stairwell, and Geoff threw open his door. The power was still out, but weak daylight came in through the window and I could see my breath. I rushed to the door. Del was down in the foyer crying over and over, “Oh my God!”

  Geoff stood with Suzie at the top of the stairs. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said.

  He looked toward my door, where a trail of blood began, and then down the stairs, where it continued—large, vivid smears on every step. Del rushed up the stairs, avoiding the stains. “I thought something terrible had happened to you,” she said.

  “Call the crime scene detectives,” Geoff said. He was half asleep, his hair sticking up at the top of his head.

  The blood, in the daylight through the transom, was terrible. I found the trail of it in my apartment, all of it smeared over by my own footprints the night before. I’d tracked some into Del’s apartment, too. Blood covered the bottoms of my feet.

  “William cut his foot,” I said. “I’ll clean it up.”

  “Well, is he OK?” Del said, wiping her eyes with her shaking hand.

  “He’s fine,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her what had happened. I went into my apartment. I got a bowl and filled it with water and dish soap. Del stood in the doorway as if afraid to come inside.

  “Where is he?” she said.

  I carried the bowl out to the landing and began to wipe up the blood. Geoff went back into his apartment and I could sense Suzie behind the shut door, sniffing at the crack. My head felt heavy—I had barely slept.