A Bridge Across the Ocean

by Susan Meissner

  “And don’t talk to them. Say it aloud.”

  “And don’t talk to them.”

  “That’s right. Pretend you can’t see them, that’s what I do when I want them to leave me alone. When you are older, you and your mother can come visit me in Phoenix, and we will talk about it again. All right? Can you promise to do those two things?”

  It had seemed easy enough to say she would, and her parents had looked so relieved and happy.

  So she had promised.

  Ellen left the next day.

  And that was the last time Brette saw her. Eleven months later, she died of a massive stroke. Since the episode in the attic, Brette had only seen one other ghost—a fleeting female image outside a Mexican restaurant in Old Town that hadn’t even looked Brette’s way. In the days after Aunt Ellen’s death, Brette wondered if perhaps her great-aunt would come visit her in the attic, like the little boy had, and tell her the rest of what she needed to know.

  But she didn’t.

  Instead, a letter addressed to Brette was found paper-clipped to Ellen’s will, dated just two weeks after she’d left Willow House. It had been sent by registered mail to Nadine from a Twin Cities attorney’s office. Her parents had read it first, and then her mother read it aloud while the three of them sat on the private patio, away from any B and B guests:

  My dear Brette:

  It is my hope that when you are older, I will be able to tell you myself what you need to know. But life is uncertain. I can’t guarantee that in a few years’ time I can share with you in person the fact that there is a dark side to the secret world you are able to see. If you are reading this letter, it means I have passed on, and you must be told earlier than I would have liked that there is a great responsibility attached to the gift you possess. Having the Sight means you can see into the thin places of the spirit world. It is a real world, just like ours, but it is not ours. Angels live there, but so do other beings. I think you know what I mean.

  You will not see the angels. They do not wander, lost and confused, like the Drifters. The angels are good and they do good things. You might see the Others, though. And they are not angels. They are not to be trusted, Brette. They are not good. As you grow older, you may think you can tell which ones are ghosts and which ones are the Others. And maybe you will be able to do so. But trust me, it is not worth trying to see if you can. The Others will try to trick you, or harm you. People who chase after ghosts often encounter the Others instead and they do not even know it. The Others do nothing for your good. Nothing, Brette. But they can’t hurt you unless you befriend them. So don’t.

  You may wonder if I will visit you after I have died to tell you these things, but if the choice is mine, I won’t. I have no assurance that I could choose where I might wander or that I could prevent myself from crossing that bridge I told you about. I don’t even know that I would remember why I stayed behind, if indeed I could do such a thing. An earthbound soul does not think the same way as when he or she was alive. It’s like they are sleepwalking or just on the edge of waking up. They don’t possess all the reasoning skills they had before. They will whisper the same questions, loiter in the same places, move the same objects from place to place. They do not make much progress at anything they attempt and they don’t seem to understand that it’s because they don’t belong here. You may think you can help them. But it is dangerous, exhausting work, Brette. And it is not your responsibility. Remember that. You owe them nothing. Other women in our family who tried to help were overtaken by the weight of spending too much time in a dimension not meant for them. My cousin Lucille spent the first third of her life misunderstood and feared, the second third cavorting with entities on the other side, and the last third as a resident in a mental hospital, dying too young at fifty-three.

  You are the last of the women in our family who has the Sight. It skips around the generations with no regular pattern. Right now, you are the only one. And you must not go looking for other people who can do what you do. You must be very careful who you tell.

  Do not go looking for ghosts, Brette, even if people you care about ask you to. And do not talk to any Drifter that looks like me. Ever. Don’t do it, dear Brette. I assure you, it won’t be me.

  The more time you spend interacting with the souls on the other side, the more attracted to you they will be. And you have your own life to live. Always remember, Brette: You dwell in the land of the living. This is where your life is. This is where you belong.

  All my love,

  Aunt Ellen

  When her mother finished reading the letter, she and Brette’s father gently demanded that Brette promise to heed all of Ellen’s words of advice, adding that to do otherwise would be to disobey a direct instruction from them.

  In her younger years, Brette kept her promise—for the most part. But there were times she failed. When she was nine years old, she couldn’t resist talking to a spectral young woman who said her name was Marjorie, and who for more than a year sat on Willow House’s back porch every night, staring at the surf. And when she was ten, she befriended the ghost of a man wearing a policeman’s uniform, who wandered about the playground at school every noon recess. Just as Aunt Ellen had said in her letter, it was hard to have a meaningful conversation with ghosts. The two she’d encountered were so inwardly focused and seemingly only half-awake. She had eventually stopped talking with them.

  Having a secret life made it hard to make and keep friends, though. Other girls found Brette strange, a bit of a daydreamer and hard to get close to. In junior high, she was befriended by a freckled redhead named Kacey, to whom she told everything, and who did not run home screaming. Kacey was a good friend, but she moved away at the end of eighth grade and stopped writing to her a year later.

  In high school, Brette mostly kept to herself, almost preferring the odd company of a ghost now and then to the self-fixated girls in her classes, who clearly thought her freakishly peculiar.

  She’d been able to keep the Sight a secret from everyone at school until her senior year, when, in a moment of weakness, she spilled it to ever-popular Kimberly Devane. Brette had mistaken Kimberly’s patronizing kindness as a true overture to friendship, an error high school wallflowers too often tend to make. The fact that weird Brette Mason claimed she could see and talk to dead people had been the kind of secret that Kimberly Devane simply had to blab—in record time—to everyone she knew. Sixteen years later Brette could still see the repulsed and astonished looks of classmates—in the hallways, in class, and in the library—who’d been on the receiving end of Kimberly Devane’s bit of hot gossip that day. Kimberly and every other high school classmate who’d heard that Brette Mason talked to ghosts dissolved into the thorny horizon of post–high school life. Brette went away to college, though she could have stayed in San Diego, choosing Arizona State University to get her psychology degree, mostly because Aunt Ellen had lived in nearby Phoenix, and there had been a time when she thought all of her questions would be answered if only Aunt Ellen had lived a little longer.

  She did get some answers in Arizona, but they were not provided by Aunt Ellen.

  A fellow ASU student, and the first true friend Brette had made since eighth grade, was keenly interested in all things supernatural. Heather was a Phoenix native and had a sizable group of friends in the area who shared her fascination with the paranormal. Within a few months of meeting Heather, Brette found herself the center of attention after her new friend told several of her chums what Brette could do. There had been no disbelieving eye rolls, no wide-eyed stares, no fearful uneasiness. On the contrary, the response from Heather and her friends had been near-reverent curiosity. To suddenly have peers genuinely impressed with her was a new and thrilling feeling for Brette.

  She declined their initial requests to demonstrate her ability, but eventually Heather convinced her to let them witness her encountering a Drifter. The first ghost hunt had b
een tame and easy. One of Heather’s longtime friends lived in an older house where unexplained things happened all the time. Objects went missing, strange noises were often heard, and lights and other appliances would switch on for no reason. Brette was able to easily make contact with the Drifter—a woman who had died during the influenza epidemic of 1918. Her name was Blanche, and she’d left behind a fiancé who went on to marry another. Nearly one hundred years later the Drifter was still pining after a love she’d not been able to fully experience in life.

  The second hunt took place at a hotel known for its share of ghosts. Again, Brette had easily been able to wow her new friends with her talent. It wasn’t until three or four encounters later that she remembered Aunt Ellen’s warning that using the Sight would attract unwanted attention, and that dark forces residing in the spiritual realm would also begin to show interest.

  The shadowy apparitions started first, then the sense of being continually followed, and then the outright stares from beings that looked like Drifters but seemed highly aware of their surroundings and intentional in their behavior. Then, late in her sophomore year, one of Heather’s friends threw a party that included a séance, and Brette, against her better judgment, was prevailed upon to invite an audience from beyond the physical realm. The response had been swift and oppressive, a malevolent force so heavy and thick that Brette had screamed and then passed out under its weight. When she awoke, the lights had been turned back on, the candles blown out, and the curtains in the room pulled back. Festive music was playing, and all signs of the séance had been whisked away.

  A shaken Heather was standing over Brette, holding a compress to her head while the other partygoers hovered nearby, equally stunned. For a few fleeting moments, Brette learned later, Heather thought she was going to have to call 911.

  It had taken weeks for the sensation that demons were tracking her every move to dissipate, and even longer for the whispers of We can help you to fully fade. For months, vivid nightmares disturbed her sleep, blinding headaches interrupted her days, and a raw sense of foreboding shadowed her even after she returned home for the summer. Her parents had been worried about her, and the experience had so unnerved Brette that she opted not to return to Phoenix. She transferred to San Diego State, changed her major from psychology to public relations, and slowly learned how to ignore anything having to do with the Sight. Over the next few years she fell in and out of love and made new friends. But she told no one. Not the roommate she shared an apartment with in Pacific Beach. Not the boyfriend she met at a New Year’s Eve party three years after graduation. Not the next boyfriend she met online a couple of years later. She even put off telling Keith until after he’d proposed and she’d accepted. And even then she shared with him only the barest minimum. Ghosts exist, Keith. And I can see them.

  There were days she wished there were another female in the family whom she could talk to. Surely there must be someone among her second or third cousins who had the Sight. But she had never summoned the courage to locate and then reach out to any of them. What was she to have done? Send off a letter that began with, Hi. You don’t know me, but I’m your distant relative. Do you happen to be able to see ghosts? The idea was laughable.

  The circle of people who knew was as small as it had ever been. Her parents and Keith. Just three people. Keith’s parents and brother didn’t know. Her friends at the hospital and in book club didn’t know. The couple next door with whom she and Keith sometimes double-dated didn’t know.

  Most of the time the ghosts she saw didn’t even know.

  And that was the way she intended to keep it.

  Eight

  The days following the baby shower were challenging, but that came as no surprise to Brette. A physical encounter with a ghost always seemed to lay out a welcome mat to other nearby Drifters.

  Brette was confident that the ghost anxious over the whereabouts of someone named Bess wouldn’t trouble itself to follow her home twenty miles up the coast from downtown San Diego. Ghosts tended to stay in one place. But the little conversation in the bathroom had temporarily increased Brette’s sensitivity to other Drifters and theirs to her. Like the floating dust motes from a shaken rug, the air around her needed to settle again, and that always took too long.

  On Monday, there had been a ghost at the microbrewery where Keith wanted to have dinner. On Wednesday, a Drifter stared at Brette during her lunch hour at the hospital where she worked as an admissions counselor.

  On Thursday, as she and Keith took an evening walk along the beach, an apparition of a skinny man with a ragged beard began to trail them. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Keith wanted to have the “let’s have a baby” discussion again, and he had no sooner mentioned it than the hair on the back of Brette’s neck prickled. A quick glance back was all she needed to see that a ghost was now following them.

  She’d mentioned that fact to Keith and suggested they walk a little faster. Keith immediately assumed she was just looking for reasons to talk about something else.

  “Come on, Brette.” His voice was tinged with disappointment.

  “There’s a Drifter. He’s right behind us,” she said softly.

  Keith exhaled heavily, the sigh of a frustrated man.

  “I’m not kidding. There really is one.”

  Keith had glanced back but she knew he wouldn’t be able to see anything out of the ordinary. He said nothing when he swung his head back around, and the expression on his face was difficult to read. She actually hadn’t had that many ghostly encounters since meeting Keith, and so few in his presence that he had begun to minimize the ability in a way that made her feel like she might one day outgrow it, even though she knew that was unlikely. Aunt Ellen had the Sight until the day she died. So did Cousin Lucille. So did the grandmother she had never met. Keith’s being able to downplay that which had seemed to define her was one of the things that she’d liked best about him. A researcher for a biomedical firm, Keith was decidedly a man of science, but he had never made light of her gifting. There were plenty of things science couldn’t explain, he’d told her on the night he proposed—a year after they met—and the same night she’d at last confessed what she could do.

  “Are you saying we’re not going to talk about this?” he asked now.

  “I’m just saying I want to walk a little faster.”

  He had looked behind them again. “Because there’s a ghost following us.”

  “Yes. Why would I lie to you?”

  For a moment there were just the sounds of the lacy surf off to the right, the call of a gull, and the whirring of a cyclist moving past them in the bike lane.

  “So we can talk about it then?” he asked.

  She hesitated.

  “You asked for some more time. I think I’ve been patient,” Keith continued, when she said nothing.

  “I know you have,” she murmured.

  He had been patient. The last time he’d brought up the topic of having a baby had been six months ago.

  “I hate to be cliché, but we aren’t getting any younger. We’re both thirty-four. And we don’t even know if you’ll be able to get pregnant right away. What if it takes a while?”

  They stopped and Brette looked out toward the indigo vastness of the Pacific Ocean. Ellen’s words from long ago echoed in her mind for the first time in years. They are afraid of what they can’t see, just like us. It’s as if there’s a bridge they need to cross. And it’s like crossing over the ocean, Brette. They can’t see the other side. So they are afraid to cross it.

  “Brette.”

  She turned from the blue-gray seascape to face her husband.

  “What is it you’re afraid of?” Keith asked, almost as if he’d read her thoughts.

  Brette paused a second before answering. “What if we have a girl?” She shuddered slightly as the words passed her lips.

  “A girl?” Keith echoed
.

  “Yes.” Brette turned to face him.

  Keith was silent for only a moment. “That’s what’s bothering you?”

  “Of course that’s what’s bothering me! Aren’t you concerned about it?”

  He put his arm around her. “No. I guess I’m not.”

  For the first time in their married life Brette wished she had shared more, told him more, opened Keith’s eyes to what it was like to be able to see into the thin places where ghosts resided. The ragged Drifter hovered a few yards away, staring at her.

  “You should be,” she said gently. She had thought she was doing them both a favor by keeping him largely in the dark. “You don’t know what it’s like. It’s nothing I would want to afflict a daughter with.”

  “Brette—”

  “It only shows up in the women in my family, Keith!”

  “Some of the women. You told me it was just some.”

  “There’s no regularity to it! It just pops up without warning!”

  Keith coaxed her to sit down on the cement wall that separated the sand of the beach from the sidewalk and the street.

  “I hear what you’re saying. But that didn’t stop your parents from having you,” he said.

  “My mother doesn’t have the Sight. I doubt she was even thinking that she could pass this on to me.” Keith didn’t appreciate the risk at all. And that was her fault.

  “But how do you know that? She knew it skipped generations, right? She knew her mother had it and her aunt had it. So she probably did consider it.”

  This was a thought she hadn’t pondered before. She was silent as she let this revelation wash over her. Her mother had to have known that if she gave birth to a girl, that child might end up with the Sight. Of course she had known.

  “And maybe it’s not really as bad as you think it is. Maybe . . .” Keith’s voice trailed off.

  She turned to face him. “Maybe what?”