Awakening

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  PATSY METCALF, REGISTERED MEDIUM& SPIRITUAL CONSULTANT

  REV. DORIS HENDERSON, CLAIRVOYANT

  ANDY BRIGHTON, PSYCHIC MEDIUM

  One house even has a pair of shingles, hanging one above the other:

  WALTER DARWIN, REGISTERED MEDIUM

  PETER CLIFFORD, HEALER

  Wow. The whole place really is crawling with . . . freaks.

  Evangeline, standing again, follows Calla’s gaze. “That’s where Jacy lives.” She gestures at the neat little house with double signs.

  “Jacy?” Calla realizes he’s the guy she met just after she arrived.

  “Yeah, he’s this guy . . . he’s pretty new here, too. He came from Jamestown, but before that he lived on a reservation down on the southern tier.”

  “Reservation? You mean like—”

  “He’s Native American,” Evangeline explains.

  Oh. Not Cuban after all, Calla thinks. Native American. She knew he had to have exotic blood, with those unusual good looks.

  Evangeline goes on, “I’m sure you’ll meet him soon.”

  Calla opens her mouth to tell Evangeline that she already did, but Evangeline is the chatty type and rarely pauses for a breath. “I saw him heading toward Leolyn Woods before, when I was coming across the yard to your grandmother’s. Walt and Peter are his foster dads. You have to meet Jacy. He’s really cute.”

  Now that it seems to be her turn to speak, Calla tries to think of something else to say. Something other than, I’m not interested in meeting cute guys.

  Her thoughts shift automatically to Kevin. Kevin and his new girlfriend. Annie.

  All right, so maybe Calla should be interested in meeting cute guys after all.

  Then—as if called up by her consciousness—one happens to materialize right in her path at that very moment. Not Jacy. Another cute guy. Maybe the cutest guy she’s ever seen.

  Evangeline stops short. “Oh, Blue! You scared me!”

  “Sorry.” He’s not looking at Evangeline, though. His eyes—the same deep indigo shade the lake was yesterday, in the sunshine—are fastened on Calla.

  “I’m Blue Slayton,” he says, and sticks out his hand.

  She takes it and finds his grasp strong and sure, though his hand is a little cold and dry for a warm, sticky day like this.

  “Hi. Nice to meet you.” Calla tries not to stammer, unnerved by her own sweaty palm and his good looks. His light brown hair is wavy, and she has the strange urge to run her fingers through it. She releases his hand and shoves hers into her pocket, not just to wipe off the moisture, but in case it’s tempted to stray his way again.

  “She’s Calla, Odelia’s granddaughter from Florida,” Evan-geline tells Blue, and Calla realizes she forgot to introduce herself. “It’s Delaney, right?” she adds, and Calla nods.

  “Hey, I’m really sorry about your mother.” Blue Slayton’s words catch her off guard.

  “So am I,” Evangeline chimes in awkwardly, “but I wasn’t sure if I should bring it up.”

  “It’s okay,” Calla murmurs, wondering just how many people in Lily Dale are aware of her circumstances. Probably just about everyone, she realizes, if Odelia has been talking about her. After all, it’s a small town. People in small towns like to gossip, don’t they? She wouldn’t know, never having lived in one. But judging by the way both Blue Slayton and Evangeline Taggart are looking at her, they both know a lot more about her life than she knows about theirs.

  “Your grandmother’s glad you’re here,” Evangeline offers. “At first, she didn’t think you were really going to be able to come, because of your dad. But I guess it’s good that he’s going to California and you can’t go with him right away. He had no choice where to send you, huh?”

  Sheesh, Calla thinks. Does she know my shoe size and grade point average, too?

  She says nothing to Evangeline, just does her best not to sneak another peek at Blue. She can feel him watching her with those amazing eyes. She wonders if his parents named him Blue, or if it’s just a fitting nickname.

  “So, how long are you sticking around town?” he asks, and she looks up.

  Wow, he really is gorgeous. Even better-looking than Kevin. More sophisticated, too, despite Kevin’s new grown-up haircut and attitude.

  Why is he staring at her? He seems to be waiting for something.

  Oh! He asked her a question. What was it?

  She backtracks to How long are you sticking around town?

  “Until, um . . .” How long is she sticking around? Distracted by his stare, she searches her sluggish brain for the information.

  “You’re here until the beginning of September, right?”

  “Oh! Right,” Calla says, grateful to Evangeline for bailing her out.

  “That’s good,” Blue tells her, barely glancing Evangeline’s way. “Maybe we can hook up at some point while you’re here.”

  Hook up? Does hook up mean the same thing here in Lily Dale that it does back home?

  She dares to sneak another glance at his face, sure someone like him can’t possibly be interested in her. But his expression sure makes it look that way.

  Hmm. Maybe hook up means the same thing everywhere.

  Her heart pounds a little faster as she says, “That would be good.”

  “Good. See you around, then.” He gives a little wave and takes off.

  “OhmyGodheissototallyintoyou!”

  Calla shifts her focus from the departing Blue Slayton to Evangeline.

  “Just so you know?” Evangeline goes on, bouncing a little on her purple sneakers, “Blue Slayton is the hottest guy in the Dale. Not that there are all that many guys here, but . . .”

  But Blue Slayton would be hot anywhere, as far as Calla’s concerned.

  “Plus,” Evangeline tells her, “he just broke up with his girlfriend, so he’s available.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s . . .” Calla trails off, not sure what it is. Encouraging? Scary?

  Both, she decides, but says only, “too bad. About the breakup, I mean. Breakups are hard.”

  They start walking again, and Evangeline asks, “So, you don’t have a boyfriend, do you?”

  You mean Odelia didn’t cover that breaking news? Calla thinks wryly, kicking a stone with the toe of her white Ked. Wait— would her grandmother even know about Kevin? Calla didn’t mention it when Odelia was in Florida, and she doubts her father brought it up, either. They certainly had other things, far more traumatic things, on their minds then.

  “No,” she says in answer to Evangeline’s question. “No boyfriend. Not anymore.”

  “Nasty breakup, huh? Like you said, they’re hard. Especially when you get dumped for somebody else.”

  Calla looks up sharply. “How do you know?”

  “Not from experience—I’ve never had a boyfriend myself—but that’s what just happened to my aunt Ramona. Her boyfriend was cheating on her with some Buffalo Jills cheerleader with blond hair and huge—”

  “No, I meant how do you know what happened to me?”

  “I was right, huh? Sometimes I’m off, but I’m getting better.”

  “You mean you’re . . .” One of them?

  “Clairvoyant. Yup.” Evangeline looks pleased with herself. “It runs in my family. Same thing with Blue. His dad’s David Slayton, the guy who solved that jewelry theft after the Oscars in L. A. last year, with that actress . . . what was her name?”

  Calla, stunned into silence, doesn’t answer. She knows exactly what Evangeline is referring to. Anyone who watches TV or reads People magazine knows about that. A movie star had borrowed a million-dollar diamond necklace to wear to the Academy Awards. It disappeared even though the jeweler’s security detail was on her all night. At first, there were rumors of a publicity stunt by the actress or the jeweler himself.

  But the case was solved a few days later when the necklace was found. One of the security guards turned out to have been in on it. A psychic hired by the actress claimed to have helped the police sol
ve the case. Calla remembers seeing him on TV and thinking he looked like a movie star himself.

  Blue’s father. Wow. She asks Evangeline, “So Blue is . . . ?”

  “A medium. Right. Like his dad.”

  “And . . . so are you?”

  “Yup. My whole family is. My brother, Mason—he’s thirteen—and my aunt Ramona, who we live with. My parents were, too, until they died.”

  “Both of them? How?” Calla blurts, and is immediately sorry. She, more than anyone, should know enough not to force Evangeline to talk about something so painful.

  But her new acquaintance merely nods and says, matter-of-factly, “It was a car crash out on Route 60, in a blizzard. Mason and I were with them, but he was a baby and I was only two, so I don’t remember any of it, thank God.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Horrible as it is to have lost her own mother, at least Calla had her for all these years—and still has her father.

  She shudders at the thought of being orphaned, and suddenly misses her father. A lot.

  What if something had happened to him, too, and she had to stay with Odelia forever?

  “It was a really long time ago,” Evangeline is saying. “But believe me, I sort of know what you’ve been through, with your mom and everything. I miss my mother all the time.”

  “So you can’t just . . . connect with her?”

  Evangeline raises an eyebrow. “You mean, as a medium?”

  “Right.”

  “Sometimes I feel her, and I hear her in my head.”

  “You don’t see her?”

  “I haven’t. My father, either. But I don’t need to see my parents to know that they’re with me. And actually, I don’t have to be a medium to talk to them.”

  “But . . . they talk back, right?”

  “Usually.”

  “My grandmother said it doesn’t work that way. She said it’s not like a telephone where you can just place a call to the other side and get in touch with someone.”

  “She’s right. It’s not. It’s more complicated than that. Sometimes, it’s the opposite of what you might think. Like, you know, you aren’t always in touch with spirits who are close to you.” She pauses. “It’s just . . . hard to explain, to someone who doesn’t have the gift.”

  “Yeah? Try me.”

  Evangeline’s hazel eyes darken. “You seem skeptical.”

  “I am. I mean, my grandmother said the same thing—that she can’t just get in contact with my mom whenever she feels like it. But she claims that she can communicate with all these other random spirits, like the lady who used to live in her house.”

  “Miriam. Right. She can. And I’ve seen her, too. She’s been around for years. She pops in next door, too. She was the first apparition I ever saw.”

  She might be mine, too, Calla thinks—before she remembers the strange woman in the cemetery in Florida. She’s pretty sure that wasn’t Miriam, though her recollection of the woman’s features isn’t very clear. She sure would have taken a much harder look if she’d had any clue that she was seeing a ghost.

  Maybe you weren’t, a little voice—a skeptical little voice— pipes up in her head. Maybe you’re just imagining stuff now that you know about Odelia and Lily Dale.

  Then again, she saw the figure in the cemetery—and the one in the mirror here—before she knew there was anything supernatural about the house or town, let alone her family bloodline.

  She realizes Evangeline is watching her thoughtfully.

  “Listen, Calla, I know it’s not easy to be plunked down in a place like this, and I don’t blame you for doubting, really. I guess I’d feel the same way if I hadn’t grown up here.”

  “You’ve never lived anywhere else?”

  “Nope. My parents were mediums, like I said. And so were their parents.”

  “So it runs in your family.”

  Evangeline nods. “But not in yours, right? Is that what you’re thinking?”

  Calla shrugs. “Nobody in my family other than my grandmother goes around saying they’re a medium, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Well, you never know. Maybe they just don’t want to admit it.”

  “They . . . who?”

  “The other people in your family.”

  “There is no one else. Not on my mother’s side, anyway. My grandmother had a sister, but she died a few years ago. I never knew her, but she didn’t live here, anyway. She lived in Rochester. And I never knew my grandfather—they were divorced years ago. And then there’s my mom, but she definitely wasn’t . . . you know . . . a medium.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive,” Calla says firmly, remembering how Mom told her to keep her “women’s intuition” to herself. “And I’m not a medium, either.” Sheesh, Calla, why don’t you just say “So there,” and stick out your tongue? But she can’t help it. She can’t let herself buy into this whole supernatural scene just because she’s here and it’s apparently a way of life for these people.

  Now it makes sense that Mom never brought her and Dad to Lily Dale. The weather is lousy most of the year, but the summer months are “the season.” Mom wouldn’t have wanted Calla and her father exposed to all that.

  She was the most pragmatic person Calla’s ever known. And it doesn’t take a so-called gift to know what Mom would say if she were here right now. She would tell Calla to use her common sense. And common sense tells her there’s no such thing as ghosts, and you can’t communicate with the dead no matter how desperately you want to reach your lost loved one.

  Even Odelia and Evangeline seem to back up that part of the theory.

  “Come on.” Evangeline glances at the sky, then picks up her pace. “We should get moving.We’ve got a lot of ground to cover before it rains again.”

  “Maybe it won’t.” Calla spots a few broken patches of blue amid the clouds.

  “No, it will.”

  “Psychic vision?”

  “No, meteorological tradition.” Evangeline smiles demurely. “I’ve lived here all my life, remember? Western New York isn’t exactly known for its balmy weather, Sunshine State Girl.”

  Again, Calla is overtaken by homesickness for Florida. But she’s not even going home after the summer. No, instead, she’ll be headed to another strange place. And by the time she gets back to Tampa, she’ll be on the verge of going away to college. All her friends will be moving on, too. And Mom will still be gone. The old life she longs for no longer even exists.

  “Are you okay?”

  She looks up to see Evangeline watching her, concerned. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  Sorry, Mom, she thinks silently. Sometimes you can’t help telling a lie. She only wishes she honestly believed her mother could hear her.

  “I didn’t mean to bring it up.”

  “Bring what up?”

  “Florida,” Evangeline says simply. “I know it’s hard. And if you ever need to talk . . . I’m a good listener.”

  “Thanks,” Calla says, wondering if she’s just made her first friend in Lily Dale.

  EIGHT

  Ninety minutes and a drenching downpour later, Calla is soaked through, and knowledgeable enough about Lily Dale to understand what Evangeline means when she says, “See you at message circle some night, right?”

  “I’ll try.” Calla waves and starts up her grandmother’s porch steps before remembering to add, “And thanks for everything. It was great getting a personal walking tour.”

  “Enjoy this place while you can. Once the season ends, it’s desolate around here.” Evangeline said earlier that the local population will shrink drastically after Labor Day. Most of the registered mediums board up their cottages and hang CLOSED UNTIL JUNE signs, spending the cold-weather months in warm-weather places. “Oh, wait, you won’t be here then, anyway.”

  No, she won’t. The season, Calla now knows, is July and August, when Lily Dale’s gatehouse is occupied. Nonresidents have to pay to come into the town, where they can attend a daily schedule of events: sem
inars, workshops, services, lectures, group readings. People who want a private reading or healing session but haven’t scheduled an advance appointment are free to wander up and down the streets, knocking on doors of spiritualists in residence here. The streets are filled with people who are grieving or sick or at some crossroads in their lives.

  It’s hard for Calla to believe that this is where they turn for comfort, but judging by the number of registered mediums in town, spiritual counseling is a booming business.

  “Hey, don’t forget,” Evangeline calls after her, “you can come over to our house whenever you want to get online.”

  “Thanks, I will,” she says gratefully.

  Calla was dismayed to find out that there’s no public Internet access here in Lily Dale. The Maplewood Hotel’s lobby is wireless. She’s out of luck without a laptop to use there. But Evangeline said Calla can check her e-mail on her aunt’s computer anytime.

  “It was really nice of you to show me around, Evangeline.”

  “No problem. It was fun.” With a wave, Evangeline disappears into the house next door.

  It was fun, Calla thinks as she walks up the path toward Odelia’s porch, wondering if her grandmother ever locks the door. Maybe she doesn’t bother because it doesn’t do much good when you’re dealing with the spirit world. A deadbolt wouldn’t stop the likes of Miriam.

  Terrific, now you’re starting to think like they do, Calla scolds herself. Maybe that’s because Lily Dale has turned out to be more ordinary—at least, on the surface—than she expected.

  The locals who were out and about today could live in Anytown, USA, as far as she can tell. She wasn’t sure who was a medium and who wasn’t unless Evangeline pointed it out, and even then, she was often surprised.

  The ordinary-looking, balding middle-aged man on a ladder washing the windows of his cottage over on Cleveland Avenue was a world-renowned clairvoyant, which means he can see into the future. The word, Evangeline explained, literally translates from French into “clear seeing.”

  Meanwhile, the elderly woman decked out in a black felt hat and some sort of cloak, who looked for all the world like she must live in a haunted house, turned out to be nothing more than a local busybody who works for the post office and supposedly steams open other people’s mail.