The Clairvoyants

by Karen Brown

  “You know it isn’t,” he said.

  How much easier it might have been to admit I had it, and yet as a child, caught in a lie, I had always found it easy to convince others that they were wrong: the lie mixed with what I pretended until the division between truth and untruth disappeared altogether.

  “Where is it?” His voice was harsh, angry, transformed. Like the voice he used the night of the snowstorm. Then he closed his eyes, as if gathering his thoughts. “I’m sorry,” he said, almost guiltily. He stepped toward me, his hands tense in the air to make his point. “You’re my wife,” he said.

  I had failed in that capacity. I was supposed to support him, no matter what. If I’d loved him, this rift would never have occurred, and we’d be having sex now on one of the old beds in the patient rooms. Except Mary Rae had sent me on this chase. The circumstances never seemed to be on our side.

  “What is so fucking important about that portfolio?” I said, dismayed. “Is it the negatives in the back? The ones of Mary Rae?”

  William paled.

  “I made a mistake marrying you,” he said, his voice leaden. “You’ve lied to me—about other things, too. Don’t think I’m such a fool. You and Charles Wu? Is that it?”

  “What?” I said. “Me? Weren’t you at Del’s apartment yesterday?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” William shifted his bag to his other shoulder.

  It had grown darker, the shadows sifting out from the corridor. A voice was calling me from downstairs—Del. She had somehow gotten inside and was looking for us, tired of waiting in the car. “I’m ready to go home!” she called. I felt a rush of shame—for suspecting Del of her old ways, for doubting William and being such a terrible wife. I wondered if we could go back—despite everything, I told myself I had been happy. We could forget about this and forgive each other.

  “I should have known you were as crazy as she is,” he said, under his breath.

  I pushed past him, to the top of the stairs. “Del! Up here!”

  And then he came for me, his hands gripping my forearms. His expression had altered to one I’d never seen—a dark caul seemed to have slipped over his features. He couldn’t love me. What had I been thinking?

  “William, don’t,” I said, and I realized, with a vague disappointment, that I sounded like Mary Rae’s ghost in the encampment. Had this been who she faced when she died—this man, broken and disheartened by something she’d said or done or failed to do? The first time he’d spent the night in my apartment I’d watched him sleep, and his face had seemed a stranger’s.

  Del had gotten closer, her voice louder, more panicked.

  “This is your fault,” William said, anguished. “What do you expect me to do now?”

  He held me at the top of the grand staircase, and I called Del again. We might have looked in the gloom as if we were dancing. His hands tightened on my arms, and I struggled to free myself, and in my struggle my legs tangled with his—the way legs tangle together in sleep under bedsheets, that twining of limbs during sex. We both lost our footing—me sprawling back onto the wood floor, William cartwheeling into the void where the staircase descended. I watched him flail for the banister, and then he fell backward, disappearing as he tumbled, his body curled in on itself. I put my hands over my ears so I wouldn’t hear the sickening sound of him falling, of his landing in a pool of darkness at the bottom.

  From below, Del screamed. Maybe she thought it was me.

  27

  Did it anger me, the summer David Pinney died, that Del had claimed him as her own? The day after I found out, I came upon my mother on the terrace reading a magazine and I told her that Del had a boyfriend.

  “And who would that be?” she said, flipping one page, then another. I could tell she didn’t really want to be bothered.

  “I don’t know, a boy from the Spiritualists’ camp,” I said. “They snuck off to the barn together.”

  My mother bit the inside of her cheek—something she did when she was nervous. She looked up from her magazine. “And what did she say they did?”

  “She didn’t,” I said. “I thought you should know.”

  That afternoon Del was told she had to accompany my mother to the Prison Store. I had Jane Roberts come over, and we spread our towels in the grass and waited for our other friends. It was a hazy day, the air dense with humidity. The cicadas whined overhead. Jane was sluggish and silly, and I knew she’d taken some of her mother’s pills. My grandmother came out of the house and called to me, and told me she was heading to a luncheon. She had on her pearl earrings, her floral skirt with the large peonies.

  “Be good,” she said, as if she knew I would not. “It’s supposed to rain this afternoon.”

  She got into her car, and I watched her drive away, the sound of the pebbles crunching under the wheels.

  We were swimming when David Pinney arrived. He dove in off the board, and then surfaced and came up to me. I felt as if I’d taken one of Jane’s mother’s pills—flushed and dizzy.

  “Where’s your sister?” he said.

  The water ran down his shoulders, and his eyes were bright against his tan face. I stared at him, defiant.

  “Well?” he said, annoyed.

  “She’s not here,” I said. “And you can just stay away from her.”

  He laughed, and I watched him swim back to the deep end, a streak beneath the water. He pulled himself up to dangle under the diving board and grinned at me. “Jealous?” he mouthed.

  Jane sat on the pool steps, talking to Katy and Paul Grant. Every so often she gave Paul a playful shove. Paul had his cooler of beer, and I swam over to him and he handed me one. David stayed in the pool in his spot, and eventually others arrived, and we got out of the water and started a game of croquet. The wind had picked up, and the sun kept disappearing behind clouds. Over the ninth hole the sky was gray, threatening a storm. I had it in the back of my mind that David was still under the diving board, and I wanted him to watch me, to want me, even, so that I could be vindicated by refusing him again. I drank more beer, and we played the game, the wickets set along the wide lawn. At one point I looked for David, and he was gone. I should have been relieved, but for some reason I was not. I was drunk and wanted the last word. I left my mallet leaning against a tree and went to look for him, stumbling a bit over the hillocky grass.

  I approached the barn. The big doors were closed, as they usually were since my grandfather had died. I went in through the side door—a wooden door that stuck in its swollen jamb. I felt the familiar coolness, the smells of the stalls nearby still emanating cow and sheep. The dim light seemed to amplify sound for me and something high and lilting—a girl’s laugh cut off—came through the barn. I guessed it was someone at the pool, the sound traveling between the barn’s slats. The sun kept flickering in and out. I heard thunder, not too far off, and then another sound, rustling—hay being disturbed—and jagged breathing. Once I stepped around to my grandfather’s workbench, I saw David. His bathing suit was lowered, and he worked, panting, furious, between two spread legs. I watched him and the girl, her knobby knees, oddly numb. David held her arms over her head with one hand and I knew the weight of him would have kept her from fleeing. There was no way to tell who the girl was, until I noticed her bathing suit bottom ringing one ankle, Sarah’s orange bikini, the one I’d worn my own day in the barn with David Pinney. It was Del held pinned beneath him.

  At what point she’d arrived home I couldn’t say. Later, no one would have a clear memory of where we were, if we were in the pool or inside the house. No one would place David Pinney swimming that day at the pool at all. One moment David Pinney was hovering over Del, his suit down around his knees, and the next he had collapsed on top of her. She rolled him off, her eyes wide with shock. She lay there, unclothed, the pale places ordinarily covered by the bathing suit revealed in the flickering light, her hair tangled in the hay. I had taken a sharp breath in, and I felt the air in my chest, held, waiti
ng for release. I had my grandfather’s hammer in my shaking hand. My arm throbbed from the impact of the blow. David Pinney’s eyes looked up from the barn floor, dark and empty. Around his head a blackish puddle had begun to form.

  Outside, the leaves shuddered in the tall trees. The petals of my grandfather’s hydrangea scattered into the grass. Clouds covered the sun, and the light went out. Thunder sounded again, and I smelled the ozone in the air, the scent of hay and copper wire and chlorine. The rain hit the barn roof in a torrent. The sparrows cried out in the eaves, churee, churee. Once, near the spot where David Pinney and Del had lain, Sister Martha Mary had sat, cool and implacable, her hands clasped in the black folds of her lap. I didn’t know how long I stood there, looking down at David Pinney. Del had scrambled to pull up her suit, to fasten her top.

  “What did you do? What did you do?” She was next to me, breathing in a high, panicked way.

  I’d seen them together, and something had filled me—but what that was I couldn’t explain. I’d taken the hammer from the workbench. I’d been too late to protect her from him. I didn’t want him to ever look at me again with that mocking expression.

  “He was hurting you,” I said.

  David’s pants were still down, his limp penis pale against the dark hair. The hammer had grown heavy in my hand. Blood had splattered on my arm. Del’s face, her chest, were speckled with blood. I had to do something with the hammer, and I looked around the barn—at the tool bench, the boxes of copper rods and fittings, the stalls, the loft. Despite my daze, my trembling, I remembered the cistern. Up until the 1940s the cistern had been the source of water for the barn. My grandfather had shown it to me when I was a girl. I went to the back and opened the barn door. The rain fell from the eaves. The world beyond the dark barn was shimmering and wet and green. I went to the cistern, pried the cement lid from the top, and dropped the hammer in. I found I was still trying to catch my breath. Back in the barn, my hair matted to my head, and I bent down and tugged David’s pants up. Then I grabbed one of his arms and told Del to take the other. She looked at me, horrified, but took his arm, moving mechanically, taking his wrist, and pulling him. It took us over fifteen minutes to drag him through the barn’s back door, to draw him under the barbed-wire fence, to roll him beneath one of the golf course’s elegant weeping willows. The whole time it rained, watering the trail of blood into the pebbled drive, into the earth beneath the grass. The sky shuddered with lightning. We cleaned the barn floor with borax, scrubbing with brushes that we dropped, like the hammer, into the cistern.

  No one came looking for us. Jane Roberts and the others had run up to the porch off the back terrace to wait out the storm, as we’d done so many times that summer. Since the porch was on the other side of the house, they wouldn’t see Del and me leave the barn behind the cover of the privet hedges and enter the house through the front door. My grandmother would be gone for another hour or more, eating tiny sandwiches, sipping iced tea. Our mother’s shift at the store ended at four o’clock. We went into the kitchen in our wet suits. Out on the porch, Paul Grant teased Jane, whose laughter rang out, a bell-like sound. Through the screen door I could smell the joint they’d lit.

  Del and I stood dripping in the kitchen. Neither of us had spoken. I took two beach towels from the linen closet, and we wrapped up in them. I breathed in the smell of the kitchen—my grandmother’s bread, her cinnamon tea. I expected Del to look confused, but her eyes greeted mine with a glinting alertness. We needed to join everyone on the porch. The sooner we pretended nothing had happened, the more real it would seem that nothing had.

  I went outside first. Jane saw me and called me over. I took the joint from her fingers, trying to keep my hand from shaking.

  “Where were you?” she said, her eyes laughing. “You missed the drama.”

  It seemed that a boy had nearly drowned, and Jane had saved him. He was a middle school kid, who sat on the porch steps, looking peaked.

  I listened to the story, told by two or three people at once—how Jane had jumped in to drag him out, how she’d given him mouth-to-mouth. The kid looked so mortified, it was a wonder he didn’t run home. Del came outside then and sat on the railing. No one questioned us about our damp hair, the bits of straw in Del’s. The rain stopped, but none of us wanted to go swimming again, and eventually everyone left. Del and I were alone. When the sun came out I pictured David Pinney beneath the willow shade, his mouth on mine, the rough press of his dry lips. The moment in the barn pivoted on the horror afterward: his empty eyes, the sheen of sweat that remained on his skin.

  That evening, a dog showed up at the kitchen screen door, a stray, scratching and whining to be let in. My grandmother, home by then, shooed it off the porch. But that night, the dog remained nearby, barking and howling. Below our bedroom window its nails scrabbled on the porch boards. Del had the first of what would become a series of sleepless nights, murmuring, sitting up in bed and pacing the room. She turned on the little milk glass lamp between our beds.

  “You have to stop,” I said. “Don’t even think of it.”

  I didn’t admit I couldn’t sleep, either. I kept running through the day, worried I’d forgotten something, worried we would be approached and questioned, that David Pinney would appear, alive and bloody, sitting at the edge of my bed, holding my grandfather’s hammer. There was no possibility of telling our mother. Even if our actions could have been forgiven, we were better at lying than telling the truth.

  I got out of my bed and sat down on Del’s. I took her arm from beneath the sheet and held it out into the light. There were bruises beginning to form, dark fingerprints on her forearm, a ring of bruises on her wrists.

  “Look,” I said.

  Still, I hadn’t really saved her. Del would suffer because of what we had done—David and me. The dog renewed its barking, on and on that night, and for several days after. Sometimes, it would appear to whine at the screen door, and once it chased me down the pebbled drive, and the sound of its chuffing breath, the pebbles kicked up by its paws, terrified me. The next day, I saw Cindy Berger. At first, I thought she was one of the summer people who sometimes cut through the yard to avoid the rocky bulkhead. I even called out to her, “Hello,” foolishly, and started across the lawn toward her. But she stood completely still and luminous by the privet hedge to the pool. She disappeared just as I recognized her dress as the one they buried her in—a satin halter dress she wore to the eighth-grade dance, her last school function before the leukemia killed her.

  I knew nothing would ever be the same.

  28

  At the top of the grand staircase in the old Buffalo State Hospital, my warm breath condensed in the cold. The dead waited in the corridor’s shadows—pale arms and feet and glowing white gowns. They’d come finally, as witnesses. Del arrived at the top of the stairs, her blond hair incandescent in the darkness. I couldn’t quite make out her face. Sleet slashed at the big windows, but there was no sound from below.

  She held William’s Leica. The camera’s body was dented, the lens cracked. Its back swung away and the film was revealed. She shut the back and held the camera closed.

  “It was at the bottom, beside him,” she said, her voice small.

  “Is he—?” I said.

  William’s bag sat on the floor behind me, and Del dug through it and found his flashlight. She located his wallet, his cell phone, his keys, and then stuffed them along with the camera back inside. The darkness seemed to tighten in on us where we squatted over the bag.

  “We have to call for help,” I said. I knew this was what needed to be done, but I let myself breathe, slowly in and out, and I told myself he would have thrown me down the staircase. I felt amid the rush of emotions a sense of relief at having been saved, and then a terrible wave of guilt.

  Del gave me a hard look and shouldered the camera bag. “Get up,” she said. “We have to leave.”

  Behind the flashlight’s trembling beam we started down the long, curving stairway
. As the light neared the bottom, she shined it away from a crumpled shape that might have been anything.

  I made a move toward him, but Del stopped me, her hand icy on my wrist.

  “I have to see how he is,” I said. I watched the shadow on the floor for some sign of movement, but there was none.

  “We’ll call from the car,” Del said. “We need to get out of here.”

  I sensed the urgency, the fear in her voice, and I knew William was gone. Was she afraid he might reanimate and slink after us, like the villains in horror films?

  Del dragged me along to a broken lower-level window, the place where she’d come in. The glass was gone, and the sleet blew past the caution tape wetting the floor, making the window ledge slick. It was nearly dark, and much colder than when we’d arrived. The sleet had iced the branches of the old trees, the few remaining leaves, and the grounds looked like an eerie fairy tale in the flashlight’s beam. We made our way through the little woods, the snow now layered with ice, and found the car, forlorn and dirty, still parked in the lot. I looked back a few times, watching for a figure trailing behind us, searching for William’s furious, heartsick face framed in one of the broken windows, but the path back and the windows of the place were dark and I couldn’t see anything at all.

  Inside the car, we sat listening to the sleet slash the metal body, to the wipers mechanically moving back and forth. The smell of the asylum remained attached to our clothes and hair. Del had gotten behind the wheel. She kept shivering, the shaking making her whole body quake. I told her I would drive, and she refused. I got out my cell phone.

  “Who are you going to call?” she said. “They’ll see our footsteps. They’ll know we were with him.”

  Anyone else might have claimed an accident, called for help and gotten it. Not us. All of this was my fault, tied as it was to another time. Del put the car in drive.

  “Wait, please,” I said. “We can’t just leave him.”