A Bridge Across the Ocean

by Susan Meissner

  As Brette set the glass down on the counter, the ghost swirled into view. She knew what she needed to do.

  “I’ll be fine as soon as these kick in,” she said. “But thanks. Is there a bathroom I could use?”

  “Just down the hall and the first door on your left.”

  Brette smiled her thanks and headed out of the kitchen. She knew she would be followed. Inside the bathroom she closed the door, stood at the sink with her head down, and waited. A moment later she was no longer alone.

  Slowly she raised her head to look at the ghost’s reflection in the mirror above her head. It hovered behind her and to one side, by a sunlit window that sprinkled it with a muted, glitterlike shimmer. Brette saw for the first time that the ghost carried something in one of its hands: a baby doll with a cloth torso, hard plastic limbs. From the 1950s, she guessed.

  “Where’s Bess?” The ghost’s mouth and lips barely moved, but its words were distinct in Brette’s ears, and their airy tone was almost childlike. Pleading. Brette had encountered enough earthbound souls in her thirty-four years to know they were impossible to reason with. Logic meant nothing to souls stuck in the in-between realm, which was why she’d long since decided not to acknowledge their existence.

  She was going to have to engage with this one, though, if she was going to get through the rest of the baby shower.

  She lowered her gaze to the apparition’s reflected midriff. She needed a second before looking into those questioning eyes.

  “I don’t know where Bess is,” Brette murmured, quietly enough that no one in the living room could hear her. “Nobody here does. You must leave.”

  The ghost waited only a moment before repeating its question. “Where’s Bess?” This time the tone was more fretful. Insistent.

  Brette placed her hands on the marble countertop, willing its cold steadfastness to strengthen her. She tipped her head upward and looked into the ghost’s face in the mirror. Its gaze was fixed directly on her own, eyes wide with expectation.

  “I can’t help you,” Brette said quietly but firmly. “No one here can help you. You need to leave.”

  Then, without waiting for a response, she turned and charged through the diaphanous form, dispelling the vision as she opened the door.

  Brette returned to the living room full of happy women, paper hydrangeas, and plates of herbed hummus and pita chips. She maneuvered her way back to the couch without so much as a backward glance. If she could continue to ignore the ghost, it would physically tire and leave. She pasted a smile on her face as she retook her seat, nodding toward her mother to reassure her she was fine. Nadine smiled back, but her eyes were full of questions.

  Brette knew the little reprieve she’d been able to orchestrate for her parents had most likely just ended. She’d enjoyed a long stretch without them being overtly aware that she still saw and heard what few others could, and almost as many years without an incident of direct contact. She’d only just met Keith the last time a ghost had spoken to her. They had been at a restaurant on their first real date after meeting at a party. It had taken Herculean effort to ignore the apparition that had somehow picked up on her ability and then bobbed above their table to repeatedly ask her what day it was. Brette liked Keith Caslake and had known she would eventually have to tell him about her ability if things got serious, but it would not be on that first date. Never on a first date.

  “Is it happening again, Brette?” Nadine asked quietly an hour later, when the shower was over and as they waited for the elevator that would take them to the parking garage. Nadine’s words were robed with a mother’s keen weave of sympathy and protectiveness, as though she already knew the answer.

  Brette wanted to assure her mother that it had been merely a headache and nothing more. But she hated pretending to the people she loved most that she was just like everyone else.

  “It never really stopped,” she said.

  Two

  Nadine waited until the elevator doors closed before asking Brette if the apartment building was haunted.

  “No,” Brette said. “It isn’t.”

  “But you saw one at the shower, didn’t you?” Nadine’s gaze was on the digital screen in the elevator. She watched numbly as it clicked off the numbered floors. “A ghost.”

  Brette hadn’t manifested her gifting in front of her parents in more than five years. Only Keith knew that from time to time she still saw them: on sidewalks, in buildings, in parks, on the beach, even inside churches. “Yes,” she said.

  “Is it . . . is it here with us? In the elevator?”

  “No.”

  The elevator came to a gentle stop and the doors opened. Brette stepped out into the warm parking garage.

  Nadine followed. “I honestly thought maybe you had found a way to make them go away. I was hoping you had.”

  Brette offered a wan smile. “I wanted you and Dad to think that. I’ve gotten pretty good at pretending I can’t see them, but I was careless today.”

  Their shoes tapped an echoing staccato beat as they walked together across the concrete floor.

  “What did it want?” Nadine said a second later.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  They neared her mother’s car, and Nadine’s hand trembled as she pressed her remote to unlock it.

  “Mom. You don’t have to be afraid,” Brette said. “I’m not. They don’t scare me.”

  Nadine looked down at her feet before turning to face her daughter. “I know you’re not afraid.” But her expression was concerned.

  “Then what?”

  Nadine shrugged, and even in the shadowed confines of the parking garage, Brette could see her eyes were rimmed with tears. “It’s been so long since . . . since I’ve seen you that way.”

  “You don’t need to worry about me. Honestly. I can handle it.” Brette crossed over to the passenger side and got into the car, closing her door with a resounding thrump.

  Nadine opened the driver’s-side door and lowered herself onto her seat. She said nothing as she closed her door and slid the key into the ignition.

  The sound of the car’s engine echoed around the low-ceilinged garage. A few moments later they emerged onto a sun-drenched street in San Diego’s Little Italy.

  “Does Keith know you still see them?” her mother asked as she turned onto Cedar Avenue.

  “He doesn’t ask much about it, and I really don’t want him to. I just made a careless mistake this afternoon. Don’t let it ruin your day, Mom. I’m not letting it ruin mine.”

  Nadine smiled weakly. She pressed a button on her steering wheel to activate a playlist, and Debussy filled the car.

  The conversation shifted and the heaviness in the car seemed to lift. Her mother had never been one to discuss the Sight for longer than a few minutes, and that fact suited Brette far more now than it had when she was young. The Sight was a gifting Nadine had passed on to Brette, but she didn’t possess the ability herself. It showed up only in female members of the family and hopscotched across generations with apparent randomness. Nadine’s mother also had it, and so did an aunt, and there’d been a few distant second cousins, whom Brette had never met, with the Sight. As far as Brette knew, she was the last person in the immediate family who could see earthbound souls. Drifters, Aunt Ellen had called them.

  Nadine had married Brette’s father, Cliff, in her late twenties, and together they’d moved to San Diego from Minneapolis to take jobs in retail—she in human resources and he in sales—that paid well. They had been in no rush to become parents, so the story went, and waited for five years before casting off all forms of birth control. Brette had been born on Nadine’s thirty-fourth birthday.

  When she was a toddler, her parents began to tire of the relentless pace of the workplace. Cliff had no free time to play his guitar or write music or jam with his friends. Nadine wanted more time to experiment in
the kitchen, grow an herb garden, and take interior decorating classes.

  A couple of years later, Cliff inherited a substantial sum of money from his maternal grandfather’s estate. He and Nadine quit their corporate jobs, bought a near-to-crumbling Victorian mansion in the charming coastal suburb of Solana Beach, restored the house, and opened a bed-and-breakfast. Nadine was finally able to indulge in culinary pursuits and decorating instead of personnel matters, and Cliff could at last spend the hours he wasn’t tending to the inside sales job penning music that he sold for good money to recording artists who didn’t write their own tunes.

  Brette’s bedroom off the kitchen had once been the maid’s quarters. Her parents slept in what had been the original owner’s private library. When they wanted a little privacy, a back porch off the kitchen—with ocean views—gave them a quiet place to relax. Mimosas and omelets were served to guests in the formal dining room, and the expansive living room was a common area for anyone who happened to be in the house in the evening to enjoy a drink and conversation before heading out to dinner. Cliff, a self-proclaimed wine connoisseur, liked to wow his visitors with robust Zinfandels and Cabernets crafted from old vines up the coast in Paso Robles. Cliff had given Nadine the naming rights to the B and B, and she settled on Willow House, an homage to the aging arroyo willow that stood squarely on the tiny front lawn.

  The old house creaked and groaned with the changing seasons, and its walls were infused with the memories of forty thousand days. But Brette didn’t see her first ghost in Willow House until she was six.

  Her mother’s aunt Ellen, a silver-haired spinster who smelled of cloves and Camay soap, had come for a visit after selling her Midwest home and before taking up residence in a stylish retirement village in Phoenix. She’d brought with her four trunks containing photo albums, picture frames, dishes, and stacks of lace and linens that had been her grandmother’s and that Nadine had claimed for Willow House when Ellen called to announce they’d be sold at an estate auction if no one else in the family wanted them.

  Brette had never met Aunt Ellen, as most of the extended family lived east of the Mississippi and were infrequent travelers to the West Coast. But she was curious about her after hearing snippets of a hushed conversation in the car between her parents a couple days prior to Aunt Ellen’s arrival. It had been late in the evening, and the three of them were returning to Solana Beach following a wedding in Los Angeles. Brette had been faking sleep as they neared their exit off Interstate 5. If she was asleep when they got to Willow House, her father would carry her in—and she liked being carried in.

  Brette hadn’t been paying much attention to her parents’ conversation until her name popped up in it.

  “Do you think I need to tell Aunt Ellen to be mindful of what she says around Brette?” her mother had said. Brette cracked open one eye as she lay curled up in the dark on the backseat.

  “Do you really think she’ll say anything?” had been her father’s quiet reply.

  “No, not intentionally,” Nadine answered. “But you know how it can be with older people who don’t spend much time around kids. They say things too loudly and they don’t stop to think who might be listening.”

  “But do you honestly think the topic will come up? I mean, if you don’t ask Ellen for an update, then how likely is it she will even say anything about it?”

  “Yes, but do we really want to take that chance? What if I ask her what she’s been up to lately and she tells me—in front of Brette—that she’s, you know, still conversing with the deceased?”

  At six, the word deceased meant nothing to Brette. She’d continued to listen.

  “Then don’t ask her what she’s been up to,” her father had answered, almost playfully.

  “Cliff, I’m serious!”

  “So am I. Don’t ask her. Don’t ask her what she’s been doing since the last time you saw her. Assume she’s been watching Jeopardy and playing bunco and getting her hair done. Keep it about the right here and the right now. Take her to the zoo. Take her to Balboa Park. Take her to Coronado. Keep her busy with happy activities that have nothing to do with any of that other stuff. You bring it up and then it’s up.”

  The conversation never went any further. But Brette’s interest in her great-aunt had been piqued.

  Two days later mysterious Aunt Ellen arrived. But six-year-old Brette saw nothing remarkable about her, though she followed her everywhere. Aunt Ellen was just a warm-hearted old lady who wore rosy-pink eyeglasses that dangled on a chain around her neck and who liked tea, not coffee. She didn’t seem to converse with the deceased, whoever or whatever the deceased were.

  One morning during the visit, Brette trudged up the attic’s folding stairs behind Aunt Ellen, who’d insisted to Nadine that the box of old photo frames and empty albums wasn’t too heavy for her to carry. She was leaving the next day and wanted to store the box for her niece where it wouldn’t be in the way. There was a single window in the attic at Willow House, all the way at the back, and it let in the only natural light in the small A-framed room. When Brette entered the dim-lit space, just behind Aunt Ellen, she saw a boy crouched on the windowsill. His hair was tousled, his clothes were rumpled, and he wore no shoes. Sunlight dappled him, making him seem like nearly a shadow.

  Brette’s reaction was a mix of curiosity and surprise.

  “Hey!” she’d said to the boy. “How’d you get in here?”

  He cocked his head, seemingly both pleased and surprised by her question.

  Ellen turned around, to peer first at Brette and then at the window. She looked surprised, too. But more alarmed than pleased.

  “Who are you talking to?” Ellen said.

  Brette pointed toward the window. “Him.”

  Ellen glanced toward the window again and then back to Brette. “Him?”

  “That boy.”

  Ellen tipped her head in wonderment or concern or maybe both. “Can you see a little boy sitting on the windowsill?” She’d smiled in a strange way.

  Even at six Brette could tell the smile was fake. Aunt Ellen was not happy with her. She didn’t answer.

  “No one is angry with you, sweetheart.” Ellen knelt down and put her arms gently on Brette’s shoulders. “Look at me, dear. Only at me. Did you see a boy on the windowsill?”

  As Brette nodded, she caught movement out of the corner of her eye. The boy was coming toward them. But his feet were making no sound.

  “Look only at me,” Ellen said, and her smile was genuine now but her tone was firm. “Only at me. We’re finished here and we’re going to go downstairs. Let’s play a little game, all right? You close your eyes and hold my hand and then tell me when you think we have reached the ladder.”

  But Brette hadn’t wanted to leave the attic or play the game. She wanted to know how that boy had gotten inside their house.

  “Why is he here?” she asked.

  Ellen had tucked in her lip for a second. “He’s just got the wrong house, Brette. That’s all. I am sure he’ll figure that out soon enough.”

  The wrong house, Brette wondered, and then she’d felt fear. She didn’t know the word intruder but she’d felt its meaning within her. “Is he a bad boy?”

  Ellen leaned in closer and locked her gaze with Brette’s. “No, he’s not a bad boy. That’s not what he is. You don’t need to be afraid of him. Do you understand? He doesn’t want to hurt anyone.”

  The boy was suddenly right beside them and Brette couldn’t not look at him. He looked as if he were standing in a tiny burst of mist, the kind that gathered over the ocean every morning. If she were to reach out and touch him, she thought, her hand would come away wet and he would not be there.

  And then he suddenly wasn’t there. He wasn’t there at all.

  Brette whipped her head around the room. Ellen’s strong arms were still on her shoulders.

  “Where did he g
o?” she exclaimed.

  Ellen stood up straight and let out a long breath. “We need to go to find your mommy and daddy, Brette.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Come along.”

  “Are you going to tell them about the boy?” Brette asked, still gazing about the little room, looking for the child made of mist.

  Ellen took her hand to lead her back to the stairs.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I am.”

  And her voice had sounded sad.

  Three

  VENELLES, FRANCE

  JUNE 1944

  Simone Devereux woke to the sounds of scuffling feet, voices shrouded in hoarse whispers, and the slamming of the wine cellar trapdoor. A sallow glow from a flashlight bounced off the wall opposite a staircase mostly hidden from her view by stacked wine barrels. She sat up on her makeshift bed as heavy boots clunked down the stairs. She expected to hear next the guttural shouts of the Gestapo ordering her in halting French to put her hands above her head or they’d shoot, and she felt strangely detached from the moment. Simone had imagined this day when the SS would find her. Her mind had played it out for her in different ways: Getting inside her empty barrel but forgetting the blanket. Getting inside her barrel with the blanket but leaving a bit of her clothing peeking out from the lid. Getting inside the barrel but having one German reach down to the pile of straw that was larger than the others and feeling the warmth left behind by her body. Or not getting inside the barrel at all and feeling the piercing bullets at her back as she tried to climb in. And the worst of all scenarios—the one her mind cruelly revisited over and over—safely inside the barrel with the blanket, the straw strewn about, but the Germans firing into all the barrels anyway, her blood mixing with the red wine as it spilled onto the dirt floor.

  But the voices of the men descending into the cellar in the agitated manner she’d imagined a thousand times were strangely hushed, and it was this anomaly that kept Simone frozen on the straw and not dashing for cover in those seconds before whoever was coming down the stairs rounded the corner and saw her.