The Clairvoyants

by Karen Brown

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Del didn’t make a move to leave. I rinsed the blood from the cloth, my hand cold in the water.

  “What do you mean you don’t know?”

  I sat back on my heels. “I mean I have no idea where he went. He left.”

  “He couldn’t have taken his motorcycle,” she said.

  “Yes, we’re snowed in. No, he couldn’t have taken his motorcycle.”

  She had her arms folded tight across her chest. “So he just left? Did anyone pick him up?”

  “Why do you care?” I said. I threw the cloth into the bowl and I stood. “Why do you care what happened to my husband?”

  She bit her lip and looked away from me. “That sounds funny,” she said, softly.

  “I know,” I said. I was so tired I began to laugh, and then Del was laughing. It was, suddenly, the strangest of things to have married him.

  “It does look like a crime scene,” Del said.

  “Whatever,” I said. “It’s not.”

  She shrank back from my glare and slipped down the stairs to her apartment.

  “Don’t forget to lock up,” she said before she closed the door.

  Del had become vigilant about locking doors. Each night she moved about the house, checking them all. She’d climb the stairs and I’d see my own knob turn.

  “Go to bed,” I’d say.

  It was almost like when we were young, but then we shared a room, and I couldn’t put a door between us. Her sleeplessness had always made me anxious. It seemed wrong, somehow, to remain awake while others slept. Sleeping was a rule you couldn’t break—like refusing food or water. Yet Del slept very little during the night. And I was now experiencing the same wakefulness.

  I went back to cleaning. I had to change the soapy water in the bowl, and by the time I reached the bottom step I felt drained. William still hadn’t returned. I climbed the polished stair treads to my apartment, and inside I discovered the television on, its screen flickering a jumbled static; the stove burner brightening under the teakettle; the lamp’s yellow circle illuminating William’s papers and notes spread out on the table. The power had come back on.

  The domestic scene comprised of our disorder now seemed almost comforting, and my anger wavered. Had I been wrong to look through his things? Had I “broken his trust,” as he’d said? Was I no better than Del had been when as children she’d gone through my things? Then I fingered the sore place on my breast, replayed the night in his office, the sex. Hadn’t he broken my trust? He would need to prepare for his upcoming classes. He’d have to return for his notes, his slides. Maybe the weather had kept him away, but the streetlights had come back on; electricity hummed along the wires overhead.

  I undressed and got into bed, hoping to finally sleep. William would be moving along the sidewalk beneath the elm, slipping in through the front door and climbing the stairs to me. I would play his dutiful wife, waiting for him. I remained awake and watchful, but he didn’t return. Rather than try to sleep, I began straightening up the room, putting the clean pot under the sink, stuffing laundry into a basket in the closet. Through the window the elm’s branches shifted, brittle with ice. I opened the apartment door. Below me in the vestibule a door’s latch clicked. Del’s door opened, quietly, carefully, as if the person knew the way the hinges groaned. I stepped back into my doorway and listened as whoever it was stepped into the vestibule and moved stealthily to the front door. I peered, careful not to be seen, but just missed whoever it had been. The front door closed and footsteps crunched the snow on the porch.

  On the landing I felt the cold creeping under the front door and reminded myself of Geoff the time we’d caught him standing there in his robe. I moved down the stairway to Del’s door, light-headed with fear, but slowed. Had it been William? He couldn’t have gone into her apartment the same way he’d once come into mine—not with Del so adamant about locking doors. I tried her door and found it locked. Had Del let in whoever it was and let the person out? I felt a wave of doubt. I opened the front door and looked down the sidewalk, but there were only the piles of snow, the cold house fronts, their windows black, and no sign of anyone. Maybe it had been Randy, his car parked around the corner. But there were no cars out on the roads. I returned to my apartment and quietly closed the door.

  Outside the snow still fell. The streets echoed with the passing snowplows. I sat on the bed. I could go down to Del’s and ask her if William had been there. But what if she denied anyone had been there at all? Was this what I’d done to her all those years in the guise of being a custodian? Established the parameters of what was real and what wasn’t?

  I finished organizing the apartment—numbly folding and sorting the clothing, returning each item to its place, washing the dishes and putting them away. I piled William’s things—those he’d left behind—neatly on his desktop.

  Things were shifting, becoming not as they had seemed.

  I climbed into bed and slept all day until evening, lulled by the sound of the snowplows, the settling and contracting of the old house’s bones. When I awoke my mother’s little travel clock read six thirty. The windows were dark, but the streetlights shone in. I sat up and turned on the lamp. The apartment wasn’t as I’d left it. The drawers had been gone through, and not closed all the way. The cabinets were open, the closet door—things I’d purposely closed hours before.

  I heard knocking at my door, a gentle, repetitive tap—Del using our old séance knocking. I rolled over and burrowed deeper. I didn’t trust what I would say to Del. Since the heat had come back on the apartment had warmed a bit. William was still gone, but he’d been there, searching for the portfolio. He had every right to it. But the prints themselves weren’t that precious—he had the negatives and could make new ones. The hidden negatives of Mary Rae were what he wanted. I ignored Del, and soon her knocking ceased and she headed down the stairs.

  I couldn’t sleep any longer. I got up and took a shower, nervously listening for footsteps. Something dark and lonely had settled over me.

  In the refrigerator I found the makings of a sandwich—cheese and a bit of lettuce. Del had been cooking—I could smell it coming up the stairwell—roasted meat, like our grandmother used to make on Sundays when we were small. Still my sandwich was fine. Nothing came from Geoff through the wall and I wondered if he’d unburied his car. I took my plate with me into the cold hall and I knocked on his door. Del must have heard me. Her door opened below, and she came out into the vestibule.

  “He’s not there,” she said. Her voice echoed slightly as it came up the stairwell. “You must have been knackered. You slept all day.”

  Del was using Geoff’s slang again. I went to the top of the stairs and looked down at her. Her hair was dyed platinum blond—so bright and different, I barely recognized her. She smiled when she saw my reaction, and she ran her fingers through the long, whitish strands.

  “Very Marilyn Monroe,” I said. “Or Jayne Mansfield.”

  “Or Jean Harlow,” Del said. Then she posed with her hip out, her hand in her hair. “‘Mind if I change into something more comfortable?’”

  Now she looked like the Del from our childhood.

  “Why don’t you eat with us?” she said.

  “Who’s down there?” I asked.

  Geoff popped his head out the doorway. “It’s just me, Richard Burton,” he said. He laughed as if at my expression, which must have seemed comical. Then William came out into the hallway, too.

  “And me, Clark Gable,” he said.

  They both held glasses of wine, jewel-toned in the light that spilled from the apartment, out into the dark vestibule and up the stairs, illuminating the bottom treads. I was watching a play, a world below me moving on without me, Del and William now the happy couple.

  I didn’t want to join them. Del’s apartment door had been left open, and the heat and the cooking smells filtered out into the vestibule, where William’s beaver-skin hat was once again hung on its peg. Will
iam climbed the stairs, took my plate, and tried to take my hand in his like a gallant escort, but I shrugged him off of me and I continued down to the lighted bottom. Del’s apartment was softly lit with candles, the stairs and the landing above dark and cold-looking. Del looped her arm through mine and led me to the couch. Over on the bookshelf, tucked between Ovid’s Amores and Ars Amatoria, were Mary Rae’s last written words.

  “I’ll get her a glass of wine,” William said. “She looks like death warmed over.”

  “Where have you been?” I asked him.

  William paused in the middle of the room. “I’ve been working up at school. I got stuck in my office during the storm.”

  “That whole time? Did you sleep there?”

  “I did,” he said.

  “Did you think it might be nice to let me know?”

  William shifted from one foot to the other. I knew he was thinking, Now? Do we have to do this now?

  Yet he appeared to be no longer seriously upset. He seemed almost at ease with his wine, grinning in his usual way at Geoff. I had the negatives of Mary Rae, and he wanted them back, desperately enough to pretend it didn’t matter.

  I sat down on the couch. I felt wholly unlike myself.

  “How’s your foot?” I asked him.

  “You gave the girls a scare leaving your blood on the stairs,” Geoff said.

  “I’m really sorry,” he said. Then he reached out and squeezed my hand. “For everything, really.”

  As the party commenced around me, as the wine was poured, and I was given a plate of chicken coated with rich gravy, William watched me, his eyes lit with something I couldn’t interpret.

  We sat around the coffee table, William and Geoff in the wing chairs, and Del and I on the couch. The room’s shadows wavered with candlelight—a large pillared candle Del had placed in the center of the table. The incense smell was overpowering. I sat listening to them talk, observing William and Del for signs of some affection. Tonight she seemed quieter than usual, put-out. Had she cooked this meal for William? Or had they been together this afternoon while I slept, and was this coolness toward each other an elaborate game?

  Soon, the conversation lapsed into silence.

  “Is it twenty minutes past the hour?” Geoff asked. “Are we listening for angels singing?”

  “Let’s tell ghost stories,” I said.

  “Let’s not,” Del said.

  “Oh, come on! Like we used to,” I said. But Del, always ordinarily open for a good ghost story, seemed anxious.

  “We would hold séances in our pool shed when we were kids.” I leaned forward and drew the pillard candle closer. “We brought back people’s grandmothers and dead aunts.”

  “The neighborhood clairvoyants,” Geoff said, sprinkling pot onto a rolling paper. “Anne is still waiting to see your talents.”

  “We had a whole system.” I spread my two hands out on the tabletop. “Didn’t we, Del?”

  Del’s face was shadowed by the candlelight.

  “We would alternate. Whoever wasn’t playing the medium would be in charge of the tapping.”

  Del began to gather the plates.

  “What was it we said? ‘Please give us two taps if you’re here,’” I said.

  William looked at Del, adoringly, I thought. Why would he ask me to marry him if he was going to run around with Del? Would he ask me for a divorce because I’d gone through his things? He’d already shifted his attention, wanted or not, to her.

  “Sometimes I was afraid the spirits were really there,” Del said. She stood over us cradling the plates. “It was eerie in that little pool shed.”

  Geoff lit his joint and inhaled, then exhaled. “You two were regular flimflam artists.”

  “There were things that felt real.” Del looked at me.

  “No,” I said. “It was never real.”

  Jane Roberts’s earrings caught the light and trembled in Del’s earlobes.

  “Hey, now,” Geoff said. “I’ve got a story for you.” The room’s shadows wavered with candlelight. The radiators clanked. Outside, the snow filled the streets and drives, obscuring the routes into and out of town. Geoff had opened another bottle of wine. His story was a confession of sorts, in the dim, incense-filled room.

  “I was driving along,” he said. He took a sip from his glass. “It was night, with no moon, and I didn’t know the road. I’d just dropped off a girl I’d been seeing—Eloise, I think it was—soft brown hair, wonderful legs, I thought, well, from what I could see up under her skirt.”

  “Go on already,” William said, reaching for the joint.

  “Yes, please.” Del set the plates in the sink and returned to the couch beside me.

  Geoff liked to digress, and we knew the story might have changed if we let him go on about Eloise.

  “I thought I’d hit something, but I was afraid, really, to stop in the dark. It was well past midnight. I assumed it was a hare or a stray dog.”

  Del reached out and touched Geoff’s arm. “What was it?” Her eyes shone.

  “Oh, well,” Geoff said. “I’d driven through, and was miles away by morning. It came to me months later, when I’d revisited that part of the country again, and heard the story of the little girl who wandered the moor in her white cotton nightgown, how some used to see her, a daft girl, out late at night. And then how she disappeared, and how her body was found, hit by a car. It was a ghost story they were telling. And then I put it together.”

  The space around us swelled with the darkness beyond the candles’ flames.

  “You see, I remembered something when I heard the story,” he said. He had set down his glass and was rolling another joint. In the morning the floor would be speckled with flakes of the pot. “It was the nightgown, you see. I had seen a bit of material, the child’s gown, float across my dash.”

  We sat quietly then, drinking.

  “Good one, Geoff!” William said, his face open with amusement. He settled back into the chair cushion. “You’re actually a decent storyteller.”

  Del wasn’t amused. “Do you think it was you that hit her?” she asked.

  Geoff lit the joint from the pillard candle on the coffee table. “I tell myself it was the ghost I saw,” he said. “But it wasn’t something I could ever know for sure, was it? The timing was right, it could have been me.”

  The smoke from his joint rose from the lit end. I felt Del’s body tense beside me on the couch.

  “It must be awful to think it was your fault,” she said.

  We all sat, puzzling, drunk. Del stood and gathered the glasses, as if the party was now over, and William reached out and grabbed her wrist. “She’s not done,” he said, and he returned my glass to me and took Del’s spot on the couch.

  I watched Del’s reaction to William’s hand on her wrist. It was an odd feeling to suspect I was being duped. It made me feel a little sorry for myself, but it also gave me some power. I took a sip of my wine.

  “If the roads are clear, maybe we can go to Buffalo State tomorrow.”

  I was testing him, I suppose, trying to see if he would placate me. It was fine to play these games now that I believed my feelings for him had changed.

  “Sure,” he said. He relaxed a little, as if he’d just been waiting for me to reveal some sign that I still loved him.

  “What’s this now?” Geoff said.

  “The old asylum,” William said. “Martha was talking about getting some shots before it’s gone for good.”

  Del was wrapping a dish towel around her hands. “Do you really want to go there?” she said. “Should I call Randy and everyone?”

  William got up from the couch and walked over to the window. He parted the curtains and made a show of looking out. “Why do they have to be dragged into it?” he said.

  “That was the plan originally,” Del said. “Wasn’t it?”

  “I’m too tired to think,” I said.

  Del put her hand on my forehead. “Are you sick?”

  “Let
’s do the séance,” I said to her. “Like we used to.”

  “Not now,” Del said.

  “Who would you like to bring back, William? What about your old girlfriend, Mary Rae?”

  Del sat down beside me, the dish towel tight around her hand.

  “We can ask her if you were a good boyfriend,” I said to William.

  He stood, stiffly, by the window. I thought he might yank the curtain from its rod.

  “What about that boy you liked?” I said to Del. “The one they found on the golf course?”

  Del took my glass before I could stop her, and she crossed the room to the kitchen. Geoff stared at the joint in his hand and leaned back into his chair. William left the window and came to the couch, the candle sputtering at his movement. The room grew cold with their silence. I almost regretted speaking up, but I sensed they were playing a game with me. I lay back and closed my eyes, overcome by a wave of exhaustion. Geoff told another story—this one about an old girlfriend who’d rejected him and later died. Though I’d been asleep all day, I felt myself succumbing again, a dizzying fall. Geoff leaned over, and I felt him lay his coat over me.

  “You two might have tried to speak to her. I’d love to ask her a few questions,” he said about his dead girlfriend.

  Del spoke, and then there seemed a shaving away of time, and Del was at the sink, and Geoff was at the door, saying good night. William murmured, and Del spoke again, more caustic. The water ran in the sink. “What did you do to her?” Del said.

  “What are you talking about?” William said.

  I wanted to awaken, but I was not really asleep. I tried to sit up and accuse them but I could not. William walked across the room and then I felt him lift me in his arms.

  “Be careful with her,” Del said.

  “She’s out,” he scoffed.

  The door to Del’s opened and I felt the draft coming from under the front door, and then I was being carried, and William was fumbling with the door to our apartment. He deposited me on the bed, and I expected he would lie down next to me, remove his clothes to sleep. I tried to reach for him, but found I could not. I sensed him standing over me, watching me, but I couldn’t open my eyes. Then he moved about the apartment, opening the drawers, emptying their contents. “Damn witches,” he swore under his breath.