Silent Echoes

by Carla Jablonski

  “Delighted, madam,” Colonel Phillips said.

  They went into the vast dining room. A row of chandeliers hung above a mahogany table large enough to seat twenty people. At one end, Lucy saw a place setting—they had obviously interrupted Mrs. Van Wyck’s breakfast. Lucy wondered if she was lonely, eating there at that giant table all alone.

  Mrs. Van Wyck pulled a cord just inside the doorway and gestured for Colonel Phillips and Lucy to take seats. As Mrs. Van Wyck settled herself at the head of the table, a housemaid entered.

  “Colonel Phillips and his daughter will be joining me for breakfast, Clara,” Mrs. Van Wyck said.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Clara brought plates, cups, and saucers and then served from the platters sitting on the sideboard. That morning Lucy had thought she had never smelled anything as good as their rasher of bacon. But this was heavenly! Sausages, eggs, toast, and fruit all competed for her attention.

  Another maid entered the room. There seemed to be a never-ending supply of them. “Ma’am, I beg pardon for the intrusion,” she said. “But there is a Mr. Grasser asking to see you.”

  “Really?” Mrs. Van Wyck said. “What a day! Well, send him in.”

  The housemaid went into the salon and returned with Mr. Grasser, the impresario from last night’s séance. “Mrs. Van Wyck, I am so sorry to disturb you—” He broke off when he saw Lucy and her father. “I don’t believe it! You are the very reason for my call!”

  “How providential,” Colonel Phillips said, buttering a piece of toast.

  “How did you do it, young lady?” Mr. Grasser said, addressing Lucy.

  “Do what?” Lucy asked.

  “I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten my manners in my excitement,” Mr. Grasser said. “Please, may I sit?”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Van Wyck said, gesturing to the chair beside Lucy. “Will you take breakfast?”

  “No, nothing for me,” Mr. Grasser said. “I’ve eaten already. I’ve been up for hours. With the newsboys, as a matter of fact.”

  He dropped a newspaper onto the table in front of Lucy. She glanced at it idly; unable to read the headlines, she was far more interested in the food on her plate.

  “You said my daughter and I were the reason for your call upon Mrs. Van Wyck,” Colonel Phillips said. “May I ask why?”

  “I wanted to find out how to contact you. And here you are!” He peered at Lucy with squinty eyes. “So, young lady, who told you?”

  “Told me what?” Lucy asked. What had she said in the séance last night that had Mr. Grasser so worked up?

  “The election,” he said. He tapped the paper. “Every single newspaper in New York City predicted that Cooper would get the nomination. That Jay Gould’s machinations would come to nothing. And then you—” He shook his head. “You called it exactly as it happened. And I want to know how you knew.” Now he looked at Colonel Phillips. “Or perhaps it’s you I should be asking. Who’s in your pocket?”

  Colonel Phillips languidly reached over and turned the newspaper around so he could read the headline. “Well, dearie dear,” he said mildly. “Seems Mr. Grasser is in a dither because your spirit rightly predicted the outcome of the election.”

  “She did?” Lucy said. A surge of excitement welled up in her.

  “My word!” Mrs. Van Wyck said.

  “So how’d you know?” Mr. Grasser pressed.

  “The spirit told me,” Lucy explained.

  “No, really,” Mr. Grasser said. “I don’t care if it’s a scam; I just want to be sure it’s repeatable.”

  Lucy felt Mrs. Van Wyck’s sudden alarm the moment the word scam left Mr. Grasser’s lips.

  “Do you impugn my daughter’s honesty?” Colonel Phillips demanded.

  “The spirit told me,” Lucy insisted, astonished that for all the times she’d lied, it was much harder now to convince Mr. Grasser of the truth. It certainly hadn’t worked with her father. “She said that she didn’t care about it at all but that others thought it was…” She paused, trying to remember the spirit’s exact word. “Relevant.”

  “Really?” Mr. Grasser said, an eyebrow raised.

  “If my daughter says it’s so, it’s so,” Colonel Phillips said. Lucy recognized the hardness in her father’s voice. He was determined to protect his opportunity, and in this case that meant defending Lucy.

  “Well, well, well.” Mr. Grasser drummed his fingers on the table. “Well. Well, well.” He stood and paced.

  “Please, do sit down, Ben,” Mrs. Van Wyck said. “You’re making me terribly nervous. And my nerves are already frayed, hearing that this spirit is haunting me! Here in my own house.”

  “Is she, now?” Mr. Grasser glanced sharply at Lucy, then at Colonel Phillips. He sat back down and stroked his pointy chin thoughtfully for a moment. He swiveled in his seat to face Lucy directly. “Do you think you can contact the spirit again?”

  “I intend to,” Lucy said firmly. “I called to her this morning and she responded, but then the connection closed.”

  Mr. Grasser started to rise, then sat back down. He crossed one leg over the other, his foot bouncing. Finally he pointed a finger at her. “If you can guarantee contact, young lady, I can make you famous.”

  Lucy’s eyes widened. She didn’t need a spirit to predict that her fortunes were about to change.

  Five

  Lindsay shoved her backpack into her crammed locker. She kept everything that mattered at school now. She had the creepy suspicion that the Husband went into her room and rummaged through her stuff.

  “Hey, Lindsay, have you decided on a topic for Nunez?” She turned and saw Karin Muller leaning against the opposite wall of lockers, a pile of books clutched to her chest. Karen sat next to her in history of science.

  “Not sure yet.” Lindsay closed her locker and spun the lock.

  Karin fell into step beside her as they made their way to class.

  “I can’t believe school’s barely started and we already have to propose a term paper,” Karin complained.

  Lindsay had felt lucky when she’d walked into history of science the first day and been told to sit next to Karin. Karin was the cool, popular kind of girl Lindsay assumed would ignore her and the other brainiacs, but Karin seemed to like her. Still, Lindsay was aware that this friendship was new and as precarious as life on a fault line.

  “Uncertainty,” Lindsay said, following Karin into the classroom and settling into her seat. “I’m going to write about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Not sure what, though.”

  Mr. Nunez strode into the classroom. “Okay, today we’re going to talk about objectivity and probability.”

  “Objectively speaking, there is a strong probability this is going to be on the test,” Lindsay whispered to Karin.

  “Ya think?” Karin pulled out a notebook and pen. “But I believe what we’re going to find out is that there is no objective reality. Or is that Philosophy 101?”

  “I object to this reality,” Lindsay joked.

  She shifted in her seat, trying to accommodate tight muscles cramped from the night spent in her closet. She pushed the memory of the dark space and the raging fight from her mind.

  “We were discussing the complications introduced by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle,” Mr. Nunez said, erasing the French on the blackboard left over from the previous class. “The difficulty for scientists is that the position of a particle and its momentum cannot be described simultaneously. Today we’ll talk about Schrödinger and his equally uncomfortable thought experiment that called into question the very notion of scientific objectivity.”

  Nunez had a little smile on his face. Lindsay had already learned that this meant a particularly exciting discussion was about to take place.

  “For all you sci-fi fans out there—and you know who you are…” He paused and looked them over with a smirk. “An oversimplification of Schrödinger’s famous cat-in-a-box thought experiment supports the theory of those parallel universes taking up so much space in film a
nd television today.”

  Cool, Lindsay thought. She’d have to tell her best friend, Tanya—who’d been a hard-core sci-fi freak since kindergarten. But when? Since the move to Manhattan and the switch in schools, it had been hard to find time to get together.

  “Think we’ll get tips on how to move into alternate universes?” Lindsay whispered to Karin.

  Karin smirked and doodled a picture of multiple universes as Venn diagrams.

  Lindsay listened as Mr. Nunez discussed Schrödinger’s thought experiment in which a cat in a box is either dead or alive and its aliveness or deadness is determined only once the scientist opens the box. At that moment of observation, the universe forks: in one universe, the cat is alive, with the consequences of that fact (“needing to buy litter, getting cat food, finding the proper allergy medications”), and in the other, the cat is dead (“tearful goodbyes, vet bills, accusing stares as you walk down the hall”).

  “Some believe that the implications of this experiment support the existence of alternate universes, like in those episodes of Star Trek where the crew returns to a world in which Hitler won or evolution went a different way,” Mr. Nunez continued. “This is called the many-worlds interpretation. What I’d like us to do now is find all the arguments these scientists would have been having among themselves at the time.”

  “Shoot.” Karin dropped her pen onto the desk. “That would have been a great term paper.”

  Lindsay allowed herself to get caught up in the discussion, getting into a heated debate with Justin Michaels over the need to stay with observable and verifiable data instead of going off into “Loopy Land.”

  The bell rang, and Lindsay felt like she had grown a few inches since she entered the room. “Quantum totally rocks,” Karin said as they headed down the hallway. “It’s just so goofy. Who knew scientists had a sense of humor?”

  “I think they must have all been high,” Justin said. “Only someone in an altered state of consciousness would have come up with those theories. Or could understand them.” He nodded toward a classroom. “This is me.” He ducked inside.

  “I’ve got to go conjugate verbs,” Karin said. “See ya.” She turned down a corridor, the sea of students parting for her.

  Lindsay walked into her civics classroom and settled into her chair, feeling ready to take on any subject, even boring history. How come it’s so easy to remember equations and formulas, but I have such a hard time with names and dates? All this stuff about the electoral process. Who cares?

  Lindsay recognized that most of the kids in her school would think just the opposite, that memorizing physics equations and calculus rules was torture and far less relevant than historical events. But people were too unpredictable, far more corruptible than an equation. Like the most recent assigned readings—all about the ways elections could be manipulated. All they did was depress her. It was kind of interesting that all the papers had gotten it wrong and predicted Governor Cooper would win, despite the financier Jay Gould’s scheming. But still…

  “Okay, class,” Ms. McLain said from the front of the room. “We all take the right to vote for granted. Let’s take a look at the hard, long struggle getting it actually was.”

  Lindsay dutifully took extensive notes, knowing that if she didn’t, she wouldn’t remember the rapid-fire list of names and dates flying out of Ms. McLain’s mouth.

  “What we’re going to discuss are the competing interests of various groups—all of whom were striving to gain the vote. Various movements dovetailed, and I’d like you to write an essay on a particular group that supported the ideal of universal suffrage and was also engaged in other social causes. For example, in the nineteenth century, many in the early women’s movement participated in campaigns for temperance and abolition. Many were part of the spiritualist movements that swept the nation from time to time.”

  Once school ended, Lindsay went to the library. She had signed up as a physics tutor, but today there weren’t any takers, so she started preliminary research for both history of science and civics. A stack of books surrounding her, she happily took notes, cross-referenced, and made lists of ideas until the librarian turned off the lights.

  As she headed for home, Lindsay’s pace slowed once she’d crossed Sixth Avenue. The closer she got to her building, the more her feet dragged, the more her shoulders hunched. I should sign up for some more clubs, she thought, arriving at the building. It was an old strategy—for years Lindsay had found ways to disappear: into libraries, after-school groups, geometric dimensions, Cartesian planes, physics equations, word problems; places where there were rules, cause and effect, logic. Avoiding her mom during her binges had brought Lindsay right up to the top of her class, into advanced calc and quantum. Now there was a hulking new reason to vanish.

  Or to stay home. She had to find a way to snap her mom out of it, orchestrate an intervention. Melanie had gone wild for guys before, but they never lasted all that long—either they got fed up or she did.

  But she never got married before. What is up with that?

  The Husband’s apartment was on the ground floor, so people came and went as she stood listening at the front door. A neighbor left with his dog, and when he returned, he glanced at her curiously. “Lose your key?” he asked, smiling.

  “What? Oh. No.” Lindsay pulled out her key. “I guess I was spacing.”

  She put the key in the lock and stepped inside, her back rigid. She snuck down the hall, noticing how dark the apartment was, wondering why no one bothered to turn on the lights now that the sun had gone down. A lump in the shape of Melanie lay on the sofa.

  Lindsay held very still in the doorway to the living room, listening for clues. She heard sounds from the street and music from next door, but the apartment was quiet. Maybe this was a chance to talk to her mom.

  Lindsay crossed to the sofa, eyeing her mom. Where was she on the inebriation scale? Lindsay knew all the stages, the subtleties, the benefits and risks of each degree of drunk. She couldn’t waste this chance to talk to her alone—they’d had pretty much zero time that didn’t include the Husband.

  Lindsay lowered herself to the edge of the couch, jostling her mother just enough to wake her.

  “Wh-what?” Her mom’s eyes fluttered open. She inhaled deeply and shut her eyes again. “Hi, kiddo.”

  Lindsay studied her mom’s face. She looked older. For the first time there were gray roots contrasting with the brassy red of her uncombed hair. She wasn’t even forty yet.

  Her mom’s eyes opened again and she frowned. She rubbed her face, smoothed her hair. “What are you staring at?” When Lindsay didn’t answer, Melanie wriggled up into a sitting position. “What’s with you?”

  “Nothing. Just, you know, wanted to…say hi.”

  Melanie smiled. “Hi.”

  Lindsay shoved her hands into the pockets of her hoodie. “Uh, so, Mom.” How to start? “How’s the store?” Melanie worked part-time in a boutique in a trendy section of Brooklyn, full of kids with tattoos and dyed hair.

  Melanie sighed. “I thought because the commute was better from here, it would be less of a hassle. But it’s such a drag trying to get out there on the weekends for the long shifts. There’s always track work screwing up the subway.”

  Warning sign. Melanie started complaining about her job at the start of a bad patch. She’d quit or get herself fired, all to have more time to drink or smoke pot.

  “I thought Katherine was going to start selling your earrings,” Lindsay said. “Aren’t you still making them?”

  “Nah. When you think about how much time I spend on each one, plus having to pay for the materials up front, it’s not really worth it. Carl thinks I should go back to bartending. It pays so much better than the store.”

  Lindsay swallowed, pushing down the sour taste. “But—but then you’ll be out really late.”

  “I’ll be here when you get home, though,” Melanie offered. “And if I work in a place with live music, maybe I could get back into
singing. You really should hear Carl on keyboards.”

  “I have,” Lindsay said flatly. “Look, Mom, about this married thing. I…I—”

  “I know this is a big adjustment,” Melanie interrupted. “But give it a chance.” She ran a hand through her hair. “We’re all giving it a chance,” she said much more quietly. Almost in a whisper.

  Alert to the possibility that her mom wasn’t so thrilled about being married, Lindsay took a breath. “Yeah, but Mom, how long do you stick it out? The guy—” Lindsay stopped short of saying “hits you” when her mother’s eyes narrowed in anger, as she clearly prepared to fight whatever came next.

  Melanie stood. “Lindsay, you’re a very smart girl, but you don’t know everything. Carl and I, well, we—”

  The front door opened, and Melanie’s head whipped around. The Husband was home.

  “Hi, honey,” she called. Her voice was chirpy, but her eyes glared a message easy for Lindsay to read. She knew to back off.

  For now.

  “Man, I’m beat,” the Husband said. He dropped a briefcase on the chair just inside the living room. He looked from Melanie to Lindsay and back again. “What’s up?” he asked. Even at a distance, Lindsay could smell the whiskey.

  “Nothing,” Melanie said. “Lindsay’s here.”

  “Yeah, I can see that.” He pulled off his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. “Is there going to be something to eat anytime soon?”

  “Sure,” Melanie said. “Lindsay, have you eaten?”

  “I’m not really hungry,” Lindsay answered. “I just want a yogurt.” She hurried out of the living room and into the kitchen. She heard her mother and the Husband following her.

  “God, I hate that damn job,” he said. “They’re such a bunch of idiots.”

  “It’s being in an office,” Melanie said. “The nine-to-five thing. You’re too creative for that.”

  “Yeah, but now there are new bills I gotta stay on top of,” he said. “Someone has to be responsible around here.”

  Lindsay reached into the fridge and pulled out a yogurt.