Spirit Legacy

by E. E. Holmes

  “It wasn’t so bad. I had to adjust to new schools, new kids, things like that,” I said, downplaying it with a shrug. It had generally been miserable, but I’d always been a bit of a loner anyway. I’d never stayed in touch with any of my friends.

  “And did you find that difficult … adjusting?”

  “It was fine.” I wasn’t about to hand him psychological ammo.

  Recognizing that he was not getting over this particular wall, he moved on. “Let’s talk about your mother’s death,” he continued, almost cheerfully.

  I shot him a look that should have fried him where he sat. Sadly, he remained uncharred. “I’d rather not, thank you.”

  “Now, now,” he began in what I can only assume he meant to be a fatherly tone. “We can hardly get to the root of your behavioral issues if we can’t even discuss the source.”

  I smoldered. So I had behavioral issues, did I?

  “Why don’t you tell me why you don’t want to discuss it,” he prodded again.

  I barely repressed a roll of my eyes but couldn’t keep the biting sarcasm out of my voice. “Well, Dr. Hildebrand, I don’t actually know you at all, and you don’t know me, so I’m sure you can understand why I don’t exactly want to have a heart-to-heart with you about something so personal.”

  “But I’m trying to get to know you, Jessica. That’s the whole idea of you being here,” he explained in a tone dripping with condescension.

  I narrowly avoided shouting expletives at him and channeled my excess frustration into my rapidly bouncing leg.

  “Now, Jessica, I can’t really get a handle on your current mental state if you refuse to discuss your mother’s suicide, which I’m sure—”

  “—My mother did not commit suicide!” I growled. My fingers clutched at the leather armrests of my chair, digging in against the emotion.

  “Oh, I see.” Hildebrand sighed as though he had just come to a brilliant conclusion. He walked out around his desk and perched on the end of the chair right across from me, leaning his elbows forward on his knees, surveying me thoughtfully.

  “What do you see?” I hissed between my clenched teeth.

  “Jessica, Jessica. I understand, my dear. Of course I understand.”

  I was unsure of many things at the moment, but I was pretty damn sure that he did not understand.

  “I can see perfectly well why you would want to believe that your mother’s death wasn’t a suicide,” he said.

  “And I can see perfectly well why you would like it to be one,” I shot back.

  Hildebrand’s oily eyebrows arched up in exaggerated confusion. “I’m afraid I don’t follow. I certainly wouldn’t want such a—”

  “—Of course you do!” I flung the words at him like verbal grenades. “That would fit me very nicely into one of your predetermined little pigeonholes, wouldn’t it? The perfect explanation for the set of behavioral issues you see me exhibiting.”

  “I was merely pointing out that the circumstances of her death were—”

  “—Undetermined. That’s what the coroner ruled her death: undetermined. It was an accident. My mother wouldn’t ….” My voice trailed off as I bit back the vulnerability that was fighting its way to the surface. This man would not see me cry.

  “Very well, then. I can see we aren’t going to make any headway with that particular issue. Perhaps next week.”

  “Don’t hold your breath.”

  “Why don’t we focus instead on the event that brought us together.”

  This was it—the part of this conversation I had been dreading the most, the part I couldn’t dodge and couldn’t justify in any sane way. If I told the truth, I was certifiable. But what lie could explain it away?

  “Why don’t you tell me about what happened between you and your English professor,” he said, pen poised at the ready.

  I was done with the polite pretenses. “What about it?”

  “Do you have an explanation for your actions that you’d like to share with me?”

  For the tiniest fraction of a second I considered telling him the truth. I imagined the look of wariness and fear that would flit across his chubby face; it was tempting, just to see his reaction. But my defenses quickly shot the impulse down.

  He took my silence as reluctance instead of indecision and tried to prompt me further. “Well, did the two of you get into some kind of argument?”

  “No.”

  “Did she perhaps give you a poor grade on a paper? Embarrass you in front of the class?”

  “No,” I repeated blankly. Why was he asking me these questions?

  “Can you think of no reason why you chose to target this particular teacher? Why her and not another of your professors?”

  Oh. “You think it was … some sort of practical joke,” I realized out loud.

  “Not a very funny one, to be certain, as I’m sure you can see in retrospect,” Dr. Hildebrand said.

  I stood up. “Okay, we’re done here.”

  “No, my dear, your session lasts an hour. We still have half of your—”

  “—No, I mean I have nothing more to say to you.” I pulled on my coat.

  “Now, Jessica, I disagree. Let’s not be brash here. There is still much to be discussed, but if you won’t be open about things, then ….”

  Something in my expression made him stop. Whatever he saw there told him that he would make no more headway with me today.

  Damn right he wouldn’t.

  I stalked straight through the waiting room and out to the car in silence. Karen put the key in the ignition, but didn’t turn it.

  “I’m sorry you had to do that today.”

  Surprise registered dimly in my brain. That wasn’t really what I’d been expecting her to say.

  “Those shrinks think they know everything, but they don’t. They don’t know a thing about you, just remember that. You aren’t some case study they can just pick apart.” Her voice was unexpectedly bitter.

  I didn’t know what to say. It was like she’d stolen my line.

  “So … does that mean I don’t have to go back?”

  Karen hesitated. For a moment, from the look on her face, I thought that she might actually let me off the hook. “I think it’s important for you to go. Your school arranged it, and I know that your dean is rather insistent on the point. I think, in the interest of staying on the administration’s good side, that you should continue to see Dr. Hildebrand. It’s not worth risking your education.”

  §

  My winter break taught me the truth behind the clichéd observation that the holidays are a difficult time of year. My mom had always made a huge deal of the Christmas season, even though she seemed to have little to no awareness of the fact that it was actually a religious holiday. We drove hours out of whatever city we were living in at the time to get a real Christmas tree, preferably one we could chop down ourselves. There was even one time she almost got herself arrested when she stopped on the side of the road to cut down a tree that turned out to be on someone’s private property. She’d plied the man with Christmas cookies and a sob story to get us out of that mess. Karen laughed herself into tears when I told her about it.

  “So does that mean you don’t want to get a tree? I have a fake one in the basement we usually use,” she said.

  “Ugh! A fake tree? Are you trying to kill me, Karen? What is sadder than a man-made tree?”

  She looked a little sheepish. “I guess you’re right. I just hate cleaning up the needles.”

  “I’ll clean up the needles. You won’t even be able to tell we dragged live foliage through the house, cross my heart,” I promised. “My mom would probably come back to haunt us if I let you have a fake tree while I was living here.”

  I meant it as a joke, but neither of us laughed; Karen looked almost nauseous and I sat silently struggling with a possibility that had been cropping up in my mind ever since my first encounter with Evan. Ghosts existed, that much now I knew for sure. Did that mean that my mom was
still out there somewhere, maybe even close to me? Was there a chance I might roll over some restless night and find her sitting by my bed, humming one of the made-up tunes that used to lull me to sleep? I couldn’t decide if the thought comforted or terrified me. Maybe a little of both.

  Despite the loss that Karen and I were feeling so acutely, we managed to have a very nice Christmas. We double-teamed Noah and convinced him that he would like nothing better than to drive out to a nearby tree farm and trudge around behind us through the snow while we selected the perfect balsam, and then chop it down for us. I was a little disappointed when I came home from some shopping the next day to find that it had been professionally decorated by Karen’s usual interior designer. There was no denying that it was very beautiful, though I thought it lacked a certain charm due to the absence of homemade paper ornaments and stale popcorn threaded on a string.

  I had to admit it was nice sleeping in on Christmas morning. My mother, a child at heart, had dragged me out of bed every year at the crack of dawn, too eager to wait to give me my presents, no matter how hungover she was or how scant the money was for gifts. Karen seemed pretty excited about giving gifts too, but apparently not excited enough to prevent me from sleeping until nearly ten o’clock.

  After a big breakfast of cheese omelets and bacon (Karen was intensely apologetic, having attempted to cook the bacon on her own and turned it to what Noah euphemistically referred to as “Cajun style”) we sat down to open gifts. Karen glowed as I unwrapped a beautiful new leather portfolio for my artwork and several expensive-looking sweaters. I thanked her profusely and pulled one of the sweaters on over my pajamas to reassure her that I really did like it.

  Karen complained that I’d surely spent too much on the boots I bought her, feeling guilty, no doubt, that she’d been eyeing a similar pair while we’d been out on Newbury Street. I told her that Tia, who never paid full price for anything, had helped me find them on eBay, so I hadn’t paid the laughable sticker price from the boutique. Noah seemed genuinely pleased when he unwrapped a book I’d bought him about the history of Fenway Park. He wasn’t treating me like a leper, so I could only assume that Karen hadn’t told him about my disturbing new talent.

  When the rustle of wrapping paper finally died away, we all settled into the trademark quiet contentment of Christmas afternoon. Noah engrossed himself in the history of his favorite sports team while Karen and I watched Miracle on 34th Street and tidied up under the tree. The rituals were at once familiar and strange, like a jarring note misplayed in a favorite song.

  As I crammed the last of the crumpled gold paper into the trash bag, a small, unobtrusive object caught my eye, tucked partially under the tree skirt. I knelt down and slid it out. At first I thought it was an article of clothing, but as I picked it up, I felt a solid, flat shape beneath the material. A gift, then, wrapped in a scrap of faded blue fabric and tied with a frayed white ribbon.

  I turned to ask Karen about it, but my voice only made it halfway to my lips. A small piece of paper tucked under the ribbon answered my unasked question. In a tiny, elegant hand was the following message:

  Jessica,

  This was your mother’s, once upon a time. Now it rightfully belongs to you. I’m sure you will find it interesting.

  There was no signature. My heart beating inexplicably fast, I tugged gently at the ribbon and followed its floating, featherlike fall to my knees. I unfolded the fabric, an ancient watered silk, and revealed the object inside. A small, leather-bound book rested in my palm. It was by far the oldest book I’d ever handled. Its binding was frayed and tattered; its leather surface was a fawn color, looking more like animal hide than processed leather. The texture had been worn to incredible softness. It took less than a moment to take all of this in before my attention was entirely occupied with the image burned into the leather. It was a line drawing, almost primitive in style. It depicted a woman’s hand in profile, cupped with the palm up, as though waiting for someone to drop something into it. Above it was another hand, identical to the first, but palm down and facing the other direction. In the space protected between these two hands was a symbol composed of three spirals, reminiscent of a pinwheel. I stared at it as one hypnotized. I could barely tear my eyes away from it to open the book. When I finally did, my disappointment was instantaneous. The rough cut pages were all blank.

  Crash!

  Startled, I turned to the doorway. Karen was kneeling there, gathering up dripping shards of porcelain with visibly trembling hands. She looked up and tried to smile, but only managed a grimace.

  “Sorry,” she murmured. “Slipped out of my hand.” A puddle of eggnog was spreading across the floor.

  I got up to help her, but Noah waved me back down. “I’ll get some paper towels,” he said, hopping up from the couch.

  Karen just nodded and kept her eyes carefully on the remnants of her mug.

  “Karen? Is this from you?” I asked, holding up the book.

  When she raised her gaze to me, her casual tone didn’t reach her wary eyes. “Oh, yes, I’d forgotten all about that.”

  “Was this really my mother’s? I don’t ever remember seeing it before.”

  “Yes, it was. She left it here, actually. I didn’t even remember I had it. I found it in the basement last week when I was digging out the Christmas wreaths.”

  “It’s really … what is it?”

  “Just an old blank book. I don’t know where she got it—you know your mother and books. She probably found it in an antique shop or something. Anyway, I thought you might like to have it. Be careful with it, of course. Something that old should be handled with care.”

  She walked into the kitchen—fled may have been a better word for it. I realized as I watched her whip around the corner that I didn’t believe a word she had just said to me, except maybe for the part about handling the book carefully.

  I looked back down at the book. Why would she take the trouble to wrap it so distinctly from the other gifts, setting it apart as something special, but then claim to forget about it? Why the note, if it was just some old thing she found lying around? It didn’t make sense that she’d forgotten to give me something of my mother’s, especially when, as the note said, she thought it “rightfully belonged to me”.

  Then of course there was the mystery of the book itself. She’d obviously seen it before, because she knew that the pages were blank, although I supposed she could have just glimpsed them when she came in the room. Why would my mother have such a thing and why, in all the time she had it, did she never write in it?

  All through the rest of the evening, I kept the odd little book cradled in my hands, tracing and retracing its cover. Finally I trudged up to bed around ten-thirty, after nodding off during the middle of It’s a Wonderful Life, which I was pretty sure I would never get to see in its entirety. Balancing my mother’s book on top of my stack of other gifts, I was almost to my room when I heard Karen’s voice, hushed but urgent from her office.

  “… had no right to send it to Jessica without talking to me first.”

  Silence. She was obviously on the phone.

  “Oh.” Her harsh tone was suddenly confused. “Well, if you didn’t send it to her, then I’d like to know who did!”

  Silence. Karen was tapping something sharply against her desk.

  “I understand that, Finvarra, and that may very well be the case in the end, but it wasn’t my decision. There wasn’t anything I could do to persuade Elizabeth against it, as I explained to the Council.”

  The unusual name caught my attention. Who in the world was Karen talking to?

  “We’ll just have to agree to disagree on that and see what happens. But I will not actively go against my sister’s wishes. You know as well as I do why I can’t do what you ask.”

  A longer silence. I could hear Noah puttering in the kitchen below me.

  “I understand, Finvarra. Oh, believe me, I intend to. And please speak to the others and find out who has done this. What
ever the disagreement on this situation, you and I both know this was not how it should be handled.” Another pause. “Very well. I’m sorry to have bothered you. Good night, then.”

  I didn’t stay put long enough to hear her hang up the phone. I was already safely shut away in my room when I heard her slide her door carefully open and close it again.

  10

  DROWNING

  MY MOTHER’S BOOK WASN’T MENTIONED AGAIN BY KAREN for the remaining two weeks of break. She did, however, seem unusually quiet and a little jumpy. And of course, she said not a word about her mysterious late night phone call to this Finvarra person. I had stowed the book carefully in my sock drawer, taking it out only when I was alone to examine it.

  Further inspection revealed little else. I thought about using it as a diary; the blankness of the pages seemed to suggest it. But when I sat down to write, a sudden, unexplainable fear gripped me. My fingers started to shake, and I couldn’t bring myself to put pen to paper. Only when I had put the pen away and closed the book again did my breathing ease and my nerves calm themselves. After that, I wrapped the book in my favorite St. Matt’s sweatshirt and tucked it gently into the front pocket of my duffel bag, ready to return with me to school.

  I tried not to waste the plethora of free time at my disposal. I sketched a lot, and I realized how much I had missed it while I was so busy and distracted at school. I also exhausted every avenue I could think of to locate the elusive Hannah. Trying to take a page from Tia’s book, I took to haunting the Boston Public Library, telling Karen I was trying to get ahead on next semester’s reading material. I was enough of a bookworm to pull it off, thank goodness. I managed to locate two more potential Hannahs. One lived on the street where Evan grew up, and the other attended the sister school that sometimes held social functions with Evan’s all-boys high school. I found them both on Facebook and stalked their photographs; there were none that included Evan. Emails to both girls yielded nothing; the neighbor had only known him casually and the second had never even met him. Frustration mounting, I took to locating every mention I could find of Evan, on the internet, local papers, everywhere, which I pasted together into a morbid scrapbook. I even found a memorial Facebook page set up in his honor, which I joined. On the wall I simply posted: “I’m trying. I promise.”