“Well, when he did used to come,” Helen persisted, “what did he look like?” She didn’t fancy the idea of encountering a spirit alone in her room.
“His name is Gerard. He is dressed in hunting clothes, like my grosspapa,” Ursula replied. “But I cannot see the face. Only light there.”
“What should I do if someone comes to me?” Helen asked nervously.
“Like with anybody. Tell your name. Ask his name. Ask how to make the contact again. If it is a person, not an animal, maybe ask who he was in this life. If you have the curiosity.”
Helen didn’t think curiosity would be her foremost reaction. Her grandmother clucked her tongue.
“A spirit guide is a helper, Helen. He is like a part of you, the part that can see the unseen and know the unknown. You have a pure heart. Your guide will be a good spirit. And remember, if ever any spirit frightens you, order it to leave and it will go. It is your own fear that gives such a spirit power.”
Helen nodded, only somewhat reassured.
“It can happen slower,” Ursula continued, “if you ask that the guide comes first to your dreams. One night, maybe after many times of asking, you will feel him behind you. Turn around just when you are ready. Look at the feet, then slowly up. Speak, too, only when you are ready. You can use many nights. The spirits are patient.”
Helen had been attempting automatic writing daily for ten days now, and last thing before sleep every night she’d asked for a guide to come into her dreams. So far, neither exercise had borne fruit. Still scribbles. Still dreams populated only by schoolmates and neighbors, or blank nights of no dreams at all. Helen wondered how long her grandmother would expect her to keep trying without any sign of success.
Today’s practice was extra onerous because she didn’t feel well. Since mid-morning her stomach had been aching in a strange tugging way, as if some small animal were methodically pawing her insides. She’d gone to the school nurse, but since she showed no fever, the nurse had only let her recline on the couch in her office for twenty minutes and then had sent her back to her classroom without even a note to excuse her from making up the math quiz she’d missed.
Helen hadn’t bothered to tell her mother or grandmother when she got home. They, too, would simply have taken her temperature, then passed over her complaint as indigestion or growing pains, maybe offering her a cup of heavily sweetened chamomile tea. Helen went to her bedroom, closing the door to shut out the sounds of Mary Noble, Backstage Wife from the radio in the living room.
Resignedly clearing a space on her desk, she set out pencil and paper and sat down. As she slid into the familiar float on her breaths, the dull pain in her abdomen gradually muted until it was just one other vaguely registered physical fact, like the sweep of hair into her barrette, or the ribs of the braided rug under her stocking feet. As she continued to ride her breaths, she felt suffused with warmth. The sensation was such a pleasant relief she put off picking up the pencil.
Then, between one breath and the next, she knew someone else was in the room. Her heart heaved with apprehension. There was the same prickly feeling in her armpits as when she had to walk at night past the overgrown yard of the spooky old house two blocks over, and the same lurch of dread. She sat rigidly still, and resolutely shut her eyes.
For almost intolerable long minutes, nothing changed. Helen realized that playing possum was not going to work, and doing nothing was itself becoming distressing. Remembering her grandmother’s advice, she decided to find out who was there. She wasn’t brave enough to move or open her eyes, but she shifted her mind toward the presence as pointedly as if she had actually turned around and looked.
She saw a tall woman wrapped in the graceful folds of an emerald green hooded cloak. Her feet were clad in thin sandals. One pale hand held a single iris so rich a purple it was almost black. Helen made out a soft, close-lipped smile and widely spaced dark eyes within the shadows of the hood. A deep calm close to joy fell upon Helen.
“Who are you?” Helen said.
The figure did not stir or speak.
“Are you my guide?”
The woman bent her head over the flower as if she were smelling it. Could she be nodding yes?
“I’m Helen Schneider,” Helen said.
“I know,” the woman said. Except that she didn’t really say it. Her voice came into Helen’s head as smoothly as one of her own thoughts.
“Why are you here? Is it for the writing? Will I see you again?”
A slight inclination of the head. The hood slid forward, further obscuring the face, which Helen now imagined must be beautiful.
“When? How?” Helen asked urgently.
A flood of words cascaded into her mind, tumbling over one another, yet she was able to comprehend perfectly. The woman told her she’d come whenever Helen wanted to contact someone in the spirit world, that Helen only need open herself and wait. Helen understood that she could dispense with the automatic writing practice, that it was not to be her way until later in her life.
Surprisingly, after the first rush, no further questions bubbled up in Helen. She was content simply to behold her visitor, who shimmered like a reflection on quiet water. Again, words came to Helen from the woman, this time in a dreamy flow even more like the winding circuits of her own mind. The woman let her know there would be times when she’d come to Helen unbidden and that at those rare times Helen might experience her only as a strong desire or a strong distaste, or a nudge to unaccustomed action. Helen wondered how she’d be able to tell when such feelings were her own and when they’d been sent from the woman, but at the moment it seemed an unimportant quandary.
Helen felt a cool breeze. The woman withdrew the flower into her cloak and was gone. So was the warm, floating feeling. The pain in her abdomen reasserted itself.
She stood up and stretched and looked around her room, half expecting it to be different, but, of course, it wasn’t. Or was it? The colors in the worn patchwork quilt didn’t seem as faded, the starched linen dresser scarf looked crisper, the windowpanes more clear, the jumble of books, games, and old toys on the open shelves tidier. Something had definitely happened here.
Helen knew she ought to feel special, and in a way she did. But special had two sides. When the woman was smiling and speaking, Helen had felt large and strong. Now what she mostly felt was empty, and that let a little of the fear creep back. She worried that something about her might show that she was a girl whom spirits visited, and that kids at school would notice. Surely it wouldn’t be as obvious a badge of difference as that fifth-grader Charlene Thatcher’s big bosom or Harvey Winkel’s stutter. But what if it were?
The woman had promised to return. Helen wondered if it would feel as good every time and whether she could stop her from coming again if it didn’t. She wished she knew her name. She thought that would make it feel safer somehow, friendlier, more ordinary.
She decided to call her Iris. She also decided that she wouldn’t tell her grandmother just yet. Iris hadn’t wanted to answer too many questions right away, and neither did Helen.
Helen was silent at dinner, which was not unusual enough to provoke comment. She couldn’t stop thinking about her encounter with Iris, but not in a dissecting way. The enormous fact of it was simply claiming all the space in her mind. Eventually, however, the adult conversation snagged her attention. Her grandmother was recounting a letter she’d gotten from a nephew in Berlin.
“Otto says things are better. Everyone has jobs.”
“The radio says there are still shortages of meat and butter and fruit,” Walter said. “And long lines at food shops.”
“Better are lines for food than no food at all,” Ursula retorted.
“But at a price,” Walter said. “The Reichstag a powerless sham. Nazis in charge of everything. They arrest anyone who speaks against them, even priests. Why, they don’t hesitate to kill members of their own party who aren’t loyal enough.”
“What do we know?” Ursula argued.
“Only that Germany was on its knees and now it is not. That people were in despair and now they are not.”
“We can be glad for that, I suppose,” Emilie put in.
Walter nodded grudging agreement.
“Remember in ’thirty-three when Herr Hitler first took charge?” Ursula said. “Otto wrote then that people lit bonfires on every hilltop to show the nation had awakened.”
“But awakened to what?” Walter said. “I’d like to see Germany on its feet again, and I know the state has to be strong for that to happen, there must be order, the people must make sacrifices, but I still think placing all law in the hands of one man is dangerous.”
“Otto does not complain,” Ursula sniffed.
“Maybe Otto doesn’t dare.”
Ursula had grown up in Germany, coming to America when she was twenty, while Walter and Emilie had both been born right here in New Jersey, but of late, news from Germany, whether from the radio or family letters, seemed to interest them all equally. Helen had never met this cousin Otto, nor had her parents. Yet her father acted as if Otto’s plight were a part of their lives they must not ignore, like cobwebs in the corners of an otherwise well swept room.
Helen only half-listened to the news reports on CBS, but she was aware of Adolf Hitler and his rise to prominence. Her father’s concern that Hitler now constituted the whole of the German government intrigued her. In their home, her father was the holder of all the rules. The fact that her mother and grandmother might find ways around him from time to time didn’t dispute that. And wasn’t a country a more difficult thing to manage than a family? How much more necessary for someone to be clearly in charge. Like FDR was here. In his second inauguration at the beginning of the year, he’d said he saw one-third of the nation still ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished. How would he fix that if not with a strong hand on the reins of government, even now when things were so much better than they had been when he was first elected? But maybe strength wasn’t the only way to judge a leader. Maybe, as Walter implied, Hitler wasn’t a safe man to give the reins.
Helen went to bed early, curling up in a ball around the lingering ache in her belly. She was disappointed to awaken some time later and find she hadn’t yet made it to morning.
She fumbled out of a tangle of blankets and went to the bathroom. When she stood up from the toilet and turned to flush, she saw by the glow of the night light something dark in the bowl. She flicked on the overhead light. A bloody cloud was seeping through the water. Then she felt small splashes of warm liquid on the insides of her thighs. She thrust her hand into her pajama pants and with a gulp of terror brought it back, the fingertips wet with bright red blood.
“Oh, oh,” she said aloud.
She wanted her mother, but she shrank from the thought of what would come next. The rousing of the rest of the household in alarm, the summoning of Dr. Nichols. It would be mortifying to have the doctor and her father learn the nature of her illness, but with such dire symptoms how could they be left out?
She pictured them all standing funereally around her bed. They would speak softly and smooth her covers. Her mother would wear a brave smile. Dr. Nichols would tell them to get some rest. He wouldn’t even give her a shot or any foul-tasting syrup because what remedy could there be for someone whose insides were leaking out?
Was this Iris’s doing? Helen couldn’t believe Iris would wish her harm, but there was no denying the succession of events. Maybe it was Iris’s mark on her. Like when Lloyd Mackey and Owen O’Brien sliced their fingers to pledge themselves blood brothers. If it were just a mark, then it would be okay. If it were just a mark, it would stop, and she wouldn’t have to tell anybody. With shaking hands, she pulled off her pajama pants and was shocked to discover a huge scarlet stain spread across the seat. This was no brotherhood mark. What a stupid idea. This could mean only one thing. She was dying. That’s why Iris had come.
She threw the pajama pants into the sink and turned on the faucets. Taking her bathrobe from a hook on the back of the bathroom door, she hastily put it on and hurried to her parents’ room.
She knew her mother slept on the side of the bed nearest the door. Clutching her robe tightly, Helen inched forward through the darkness until her knees bumped the edge of the bed. She gently shook her mother’s shoulder.
“Mama,” she whispered. “Mama.”
Emilie raised herself up on one elbow and glanced at the Big Ben alarm clock, whose luminous hands indicated two-thirty. She waved Helen back and got up, pushing her feet into terry-cloth slippers. They went out onto the landing. Emilie shut the door behind her and turned on a small table lamp at the head of the stairs.
“What’s wrong?” she said, laying an assessing hand on her daughter’s brow.
“I don’t know.”
“Bad dream?”
Helen shook her head.
“I think I’m sick. Really bad.”
“What do you mean? You were fine at bedtime.”
Helen led her mother to the bathroom and pointed to the sink. Her pajama bottoms lay in a pool of pink water. Helen began to cry.
“And it’s still happening. I’m still bleeding. Down there. My stomach hurt all day, but the nurse at school said I was okay, so I was just waiting for it to go away. But it didn’t, and now—”
“Sh, sh,” her mother said, pulling out the sink plug. “You’re all right.”
She unfurled a long strip of toilet paper, folded it into a square, and handed it to Helen. “Wait here.”
Sniffling, Helen pressed the square of paper between her legs and sat down on the edge of the tub. She was astounded at her mother’s calm. All right? How could she be all right?
Emilie returned with a cardboard box and an elastic strap. She drew a thick, rectangular white pad out of the box.
“This is a sanitary napkin,” she said. “It works like this.”
She showed Helen how to fasten the tails of the napkin into two little metal S-hooks on the elastic strap, then she helped Helen step into the strap and pull it up around her waist so that the pad was positioned firmly between her legs. Although it was soft, its bulk was uncomfortable.
“Tomorrow we’ll go out and get you your own belt,” Emilie said, adding cheerily, “You won’t mind missing a half day of school, I guess?”
“Whose is this one?”
“Why, mine, of course.”
“This happened to you once, Mama?” Helen felt hopeful. Maybe she was going to be all right after all.
“Yes, yes. It happens every month. It will to you, too.”
“Every month?”
Emilie took both of Helen’s hands in hers and looked deeply into her eyes.
“You know, Helen, that babies grow inside their mothers, right?”
Helen nodded.
“Well, a woman’s body makes a sort of nest every month just in case a baby wants to grow. When one doesn’t, the body throws the nest away, so it can start fresh the next month.”
“A nest of blood?”
“It doesn’t sound very nice when you put it like that, but yes, a nest of blood. It’s what babies need when they’re inside their mothers.”
“But I’m not a woman.”
Emilie bit her lip, as if it might be her turn to cry.
“Actually, my dear, now that this has happened, you are a woman. In one way, anyway.” She leaned forward and hugged Helen tightly. “But you’ll always be my little girl, too.”
Emilie straightened up and smoothed her nightgown over her hips. “Maybe you can get a book from the library that will explain it better.”
“Then I’m not going to die?”
“Heavens, no! Everything is as it should be. Just sneaked up on us is all. Now, let’s get back to sleep, shall we?”
CHAPTER 6
Helen was excruciatingly aware of her body below her waist. She worried constantly that the outline of the ungainly sanitary napkin might be visible through her skirt. Afraid to turn her back on anyone, she didn’
t volunteer to write on the blackboard, and she sketched with a dull nub of lead rather than go to the pencil sharpener. At recess, she kept on her long tweed coat even though an Indian summer sun had sidetracked autumn’s chill. The coat would have hampered her at tag or jump rope, but the pamphlet in the Kotex box had advised avoiding strenuous exercise, so she’d declined all invitations to play.
Watching the other girls play, she wondered if any of them had been struck yet. She looked at the teachers and at women on the street and even her own mother as if she’d suddenly acquired x-ray vision, like Superman, and had just discovered that beneath their dresses and slips, these women had bodies that did amazing things quite apart from their wills or wishes.
On Helen’s third day of sitting out recess, Rosie O’Brien came over and put her foot up on Helen’s bench in order to retie the shoelaces of her scuffed brown and white saddle shoe.
“We’re gonna play Giant Step,” Rosie said. “Wanna come?”
Helen looked up from the book on her lap, smiled, and shook her head no. Rosie sat down beside her. Helen read a few more sentences of Lad, A Dog, then closed the book.
“You don’t have to sit here with me, Rosie.”
“Oh, I don’t mind. Not enough time left for a good game, anyway.”
Together they gazed at the schoolyard of children noisily engaged in various pursuits, most involving running and tagging, as either part of an official game or as a tease.
“Is it a good story?” Rosie pointed to Helen’s book.
“Pretty good.”
“Good enough to keep you on this bench an awful lot.”
Helen felt herself blushing. She knew Rosie was looking at her, but she kept her eyes focussed on the playing children.
“You got the curse, don’t you?”
“The curse?” Helen gave her a startled look. She hadn’t heard the term before, but she was sure she was guessing its meaning correctly.
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