by Rice, Anne
“I was in tears, but I knew what Mayfair Medical meant to Lynelle. It was a brand-new facility, endowed by the powerful Mayfair family of New Orleans—of which you know at least one member—and its laboratories and equipment were already the stuff of legend.
“Lynelle had dreamed of studying human growth hormone directly under the famous Dr. Rowan Mayfair and being accepted by the revolutionary Mayfair Medical was a triumph for her. But she couldn’t be my teacher and boon companion anymore, it was simply impossible. I’d been lucky to have her as long as I did.
“The last time I saw Lynelle I told her I loved her. And I meant it with all my heart. I hope and pray that she understood how grateful I was for everything.
“She was on her way to Florida that day with two fellow female scientists, headed to Key West for a week of childless and husbandless relaxation.
“Lynelle died on the road.
“She, the speed demon, was not even at the wheel of the car. It was one of the others who was driving, and they were in a blinding rainstorm on Highway 10 when the car hydroplaned into an eighteen-wheeler truck. The driver was decapitated. Lynelle was pronounced dead at the scene, only to be revived and linger on life support for two weeks without ever regaining consciousness. Most of Lynelle’s face had been crushed.
“I only learned of the accident when Lynelle’s family called to tell us about the Memorial Mass that would be said for her in New Orleans. Lynelle had already been buried in Baton Rouge, where her parents lived.
“I walked up and down for hours, saying ‘Lynelle’ over and over. I was out of my mind. Goblin stared at me, obviously bewildered. I had no words. Just her name: ‘Lynelle.’
“Pops and Sweetheart took me to the Mass—it was in a modern church in Metairie—and Goblin became very solid for the event, and I made space for him in the pew beside me, but he agitated me considerably, demanding to know what was going on. I could hear his voice in my head and he kept gesturing. He shrugged, turned his palms up, shook his head and kept mouthing the words ‘Where is Lynelle?’
“The Mass was said by a very elderly priest and had a certain elegance to it, but for me it was a nightmare. When people went to the microphone to speak about Lynelle, I knew that I should step up, I should say all that she’d meant to me, but I couldn’t overcome my fear that I would stumble or cry. All my mortal life I have regretted that I didn’t speak at that Mass!
“I went to Communion, and as I always did after receiving Communion, I told Goblin flatly and furiously to shut up.
“Then came a frightening moment. As you might not expect, I believe strongly in the Catholic Church and in the miracle of the Transubstantiation—that the Priest in the Mass turns the wafers and the wine into the true Body and Blood of Christ.
“Well, as I knelt in the pew after having received Communion, and after telling Goblin to shut up, I turned and saw him kneeling right beside me, his shoulder not an inch from my shoulder, his face as vivid and ruddy as my face and his eyes sharply glaring at me; and for the first time in all my life, he frightened me.
“He appeared quickened and cunning, and he gave me the creeps.
“I turned away from him, trying not to feel the obvious press of his shoulder against mine and his right hand slinking over my left. I prayed. I wandered in my mind, and then, when I opened my eyes, I saw him again—dazzlingly solid—and I felt the coldest escalating fear.
“The fear did not pass. On the contrary, I became vividly aware of all the other people in the church, seeing those in the pews in front of me with extraordinary peculiarity, and even glancing to the sides at others and then turning boldly to look over my shoulder at all those behind. I had a sense of their normality. And then again I looked at this solid specter beside me; I looked into his brilliant eyes and at his sly smile, and a desperate panic seized me.
“I wanted to banish him. I wanted him dead. I wished that the journey to New York had killed him. And who could I tell this to? Who would understand? I felt murderous and abnormal. And Lynelle was dead.
“I sat in the pew. My heart went quiet. He continued his efforts to get my attention. He was just Goblin, and when he cleaved to me, when he gave up the solid image and wrapped his invisible self around me I felt myself relax in his embrace.
“Aunt Queen flew home for the Memorial, but, as she was coming from St. Petersburg, Russia, and there was a delay out of Newark, New Jersey, she did not make it in time. When she saw her room decorated in Lynelle’s favorite blue, she cried. She threw herself on the blue satin comforter, turned over and stared up at the canopy, and looked like nothing so much as one of her own many slender flopping boudoir dolls, with her high heels and her cloche hat and her wet vacant weeping stare.
“I was so devastated by Lynelle’s death that I fell into a state of silence, and though I knew that as the days passed those around me were concerned about me, I couldn’t speak a single syllable to anyone. I sat in my room, in my reading chair by the fireplace, and I did nothing but think of Lynelle.
“Goblin went sort of mad on account of my state. He began to pinch me incessantly, and trying to lift my left hand, and rushing towards the computer and making gestures that he wanted to write.
“I remember staring at him as he stood over there at the desk, beckoning to me, and realizing for what it’s worth that his pinches weren’t any worse than they had ever been, and that he couldn’t make the lights blink more than very little, and that when he pulled my hair I hardly felt it, and that I could ignore him without consequence if I chose.
“But I loved him. I didn’t want to kill him. No, I didn’t. And the moment had come to tell him what had happened. I dragged myself out of the chair and I went to the computer and I tapped out:
“ ‘Lynelle is dead.’
“For a long moment he read this message and then I said it out loud to him, but I received no response.
“ ‘Come on, Goblin, think. She’s dead.’ I said. ‘You’re a spirit and now she’s a spirit.’
“But there was no response.
“Suddenly I felt the old pressure on my left hand, with the tight sensation of fingers curling around it, and then he tapped out:
“ ‘Lynelle. Lynelle is gone?’
“I nodded. I was crying and I wanted now to be left alone. I told him aloud that she was dead. But Goblin took my left hand again and I watched it claw the keyboard:
“ ‘What is dead?’”
“In a fit of annoyance and heightened grief, I hammered out:
“ ‘No longer here. Gone. Dead. Body has no Life. No Spirit in her body. Body left over. Body buried in the ground. Her Spirit is gone.’
“But he simply couldn’t understand. He grabbed my hand again and tapped out, ‘Where is Lynelle dead?’ and ‘Where is Lynelle gone?’ and then finally, ‘Why are you crying for Lynelle?’
“A cold apprehension came over me, a cold form of concentration.
“I typed in ‘Sad. No more Lynelle. Sad. Crying. Yes.’ But other thoughts were brewing in my mind.
“He snatched for my hand again, but he was weaker on account of his earlier efforts, and all he could type was her name.
“At that moment, as I stared at the black monitor and the green letters, I saw what looked like the reflection of a pinpoint of light in the monitor, and, wondering what it could be, I moved my head from side to side to block the light or get a clearer look at it. For one second it became distinctly the light of a candle. I saw the wick as well as the flame.
“At once I turned around and looked behind me. I saw nothing in my room that could have produced this reflection. Absolutely nothing. Needless to say, I had no candles. The only candles were on a hallway altar downstairs.
“I turned back to the monitor. There was no pinpoint of light. There was no candle flame. Again I moved my head from side to side and turned my eyes at every possible angle. No light. No reflected candle flame.
“I was astonished. I sat quiet for a long time, distrusting my senses
, and then, unable to deny what I saw, I tapped out to Goblin the question, ‘Did you see the candle flame?’ Again there came his monotonous and panicky answers: ‘Where Lynelle?’ ‘Lynelle gone.’ ‘What is gone?’
“I went back to my chair. Goblin appeared for a moment, in a vague flash, and there came the pinches and the hair pulling, but I lay indifferent to him thinking only, praying only in a bizarre way of praying backwards, that Lynelle had never really known how badly she was injured, that she hadn’t suffered in her coma, that she hadn’t known pain. What if she had seen the car careening into the truck? What if she had heard some insensitive person at her bedside saying that her face, her beautiful face, had been crushed?
“She never suffered. That was the story.
“She never suffered. Or so they said.
“I knew I had seen the light of that candle! I had seen it plainly in the monitor.
“I murmured to Goblin, ‘You tell me where she is, Goblin. Tell me if her spirit went into the light.’ There came no answer. He couldn’t grasp it. He didn’t know.
“I hammered at him. ‘You’re a spirit. You ought to know. We are made of bodies and souls. I am body and soul. Lynelle was body and soul. Soul is spirit. Where did Lynelle’s spirit go?’
“He gave nothing back but his infantile answers. It was all he could do.
“Finally, I went to the computer. I wrote it out: ‘I am body and soul. The body is what you pinch. The soul is what speaks to you, what thinks, what looks at you through my eyes.’
“Silence. Then came the vague formation of the apparition again, translucent, face without detail; then it dissolved.
“I went on typing on the computer keyboard: ‘The soul—that part of me which speaks to you and loves you and knows you—that part is sometimes called spirit. And when my body dies my spirit or my soul will leave my body. Do you understand?’
“I felt his hand clamp onto my left hand.
“ ‘Don’t leave your body,’ he wrote. ‘Don’t die. I will cry.’
“For a long moment I pondered. He had made the connection. Yes. But I wanted more from him, and a terrifying urgency gripped me, a feeling very near panic.
“ ‘You are a spirit,’ I wrote. ‘You have no body. You are pure spirit. Don’t you know where Lynelle’s spirit has gone? You must know. You should know. There must be a place where spirits live. A place where spirits are. You do know.’
“There was a long silence, but I knew he was right beside me.
“I felt him grip my hand. ‘Don’t leave your body,’ he wrote again. ‘I will cry and cry.’
“ ‘But where is the home of the spirits?’ I wrote. ‘Where is the place where spirits live, like I live in this house?’
“It was useless. I typed it out in two dozen different ways. He couldn’t grasp it. And it was not long before he began to ask, ‘Why did Lynelle’s spirit leave her body?’
“I wrote out the description of the accident. Silence. And finally, his store of energy being exhausted and there being no rainfall to help him, he was absent.
“And alone, cold and frightened, I curled up in my chair and went to sleep.
“A great gulf had opened between me and Goblin.
“It had been widening for all the years that I knew Lynelle, and it was now immeasurable. My doppelgänger loved me and was as ever fastened to me but no longer knew my soul. And what was all the more ghastly to me was that he didn’t know what he was himself. He couldn’t speak of himself as a spirit. He would have done so if he could. He could not.
“As the days dragged on, Aunt Queen made plans to go off again to St. Petersburg, Russia, to rejoin two cousins she had left waiting there at the Grand Hotel. She prevailed upon me to go with her.
“I was amazed. St. Petersburg, Russia.
“She said in a very sweet and winning way that it was either go to college or see the world.
“I told her plainly I wasn’t ready for either. I was still hurt by Lynelle’s death.
“I said that I wanted to go, and in the future I would go with her if she called me, but for now I couldn’t leave home. I needed a year off. I needed to read and absorb more fully many of the lessons that Lynelle had taught me (that really won the day for me!), and to hang around the house. I wanted to help Pops and Sweetheart with the guests. Mardi Gras was coming. I’d go with Sweetheart into New Orleans to see the parades from the house of her sister. And we always had a crowd at Blackwood Farm after that. And then there was the Azalea Festival, and the Easter crowd. And I needed to be home for the Christmas banquet. I couldn’t think of seeing the world.
“When I look back on that time I realize now that I had slipped into a state of profound anxiety in which the simplest comforts seemed beyond reach. The gaiety of the guests seemed foreign. I felt afraid at twilight. Large vases of flowers frightened me. Goblin seemed accidental and unmysterious, an ignoramus of a spirit who could deliver me nothing of consolation or companionship. I was apprehensive on those inevitable gray days when there was no sun to be seen.
“Perhaps I had a premonition that there were terrible times to come.”
9
“Not six months had passed before Little Ida died in my bed one night, and it was Jasmine who found her when she came to wake me for breakfast, wondering why her mother had not come down. I was hustled away from the bed with crazy gestures and summonses and blank looks from Goblin and finally Pops dragging me out of the bedroom. And I, a spoilt brat who had just woken up, was furious.
“Only an hour later, when the doctor and the funeral director came, did they tell me what had gone down. Little Ida was the angel of my youth as surely as Sweetheart was, and she had died so quiet, just like that.
“She looked tiny in the coffin, like a wizened child.
“The funeral was in New Orleans, where Little Ida was buried in a tomb in St. Louis no. 1, which her family had had for well over a hundred and fifty years. A host of colored and black relations were in attendance, and I was thankful that it was all right to cry, if not even wail out loud.
“Of course all the white people—and there were plenty from out our way—were a little more subdued than the black people, but a good commingling shed tears.
“As for my mattress back at home, Jasmine and Lolly flipped it over. And that was all there was to that.
“I framed the best picture there was of Little Ida, a photograph taken of her at Aunt Ruthie’s house in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, and I hung that on the wall.
“In the kitchen now there was general crying, Jasmine and Lolly sobbing about their mother whenever the mood came on them, and Big Ramona, Little Ida’s mother, went silent and quit the big house altogether, sitting in her rocking chair all day for several weeks.
“I went out there again and again with soup for Big Ramona. I tried to talk to her. All she said was: ‘A woman oughtn’t have to bury her own child.’
“Crying came and went with me.
“I took to thinking of Lynelle constantly, and now Little Ida was mixed up with it too, and each day it seemed that Little Ida was more dead and gone than the day before.
“Goblin accepted that Little Ida was dead, but Goblin had never been too crazy about Little Ida—certainly he had loved Lynelle more—and so he took it rather well.
“One day when I sat at the kitchen table paging through a mail-order catalog, I saw that they had flannel nightshirts for men and flannel gowns for women.
“I ordered a whole slew of these, and when the goods arrived, I put on the nightshirt in the evening and went out to Big Ramona with one of the gowns.
“Now let me clarify here that Big Ramona is called Big Ramona not because she’s big but because she is the grandmother on the property, just as Sweetheart might have been called Big Mama if she had ever allowed.
“So to go on with my story, I came out to this little mite of a woman, with her long white hair in its nighttime braid, and I said:
“ ‘You come on and sleep with me. I need
you. I’m alone with Goblin and Little Ida’s gone after all these years.’
“For a long time Big Ramona just looked at me. Her eyes were like two nickels. But then a little fire came into them, and she took the gown from me and looked it over, and, finding it proper, she came into the house.
“Thereafter we slept spoon fashion in that big bed, flannel to flannel, and she was my bedfellow as ever Little Ida had been.
“Big Ramona had the silkiest skin on the planet, and, having kept her hair long all her life, had a great wealth of it, which she always plaited as she sat on the side of the bed.
“I took to sitting with her as she went through the ritual, and we talked over all the trivia of the day, and then we said our prayers.
“Now Little Ida and I had pretty much let prayers go by the boards, but with Big Ramona we prayed for everybody in one fell swoop, reciting three Hail Marys and three Our Fathers and never failing to add for the deceased:
Let perpetual light shine upon them, O Lord,
and may their souls and the souls of all
the faithful departed rest in peace.
“Then we’d chat about how it was a blessing Little Ida never knew real old age, or suffered illness, and that she was surely up there with God. Same with Lynelle.
“Finally, after all that, Big Ramona would ask if Goblin was with us, and then she said:
“ ‘Well, you tell Goblin it’s time to sleep now,’ and Goblin settled down beside me and kind of merged with me, and off I went to sleep.
“Gradually, over a period of several months, a semi-calm came over me entirely due to Big Ramona, and I was astonished to discover that Pops and the Shed Men, and even Jasmine and Lolly, credited me with kindness to Big Ramona in her time of grief. It was all our grief. And Big Ramona was saving me from a kind of dark panic which had begun in me with Lynelle and was now creeping closer with the loss of Little Ida.
“I took to going out fishing in the swamp with Pops, something I’d never been all that crazy about before. I got to like it out there as we poked our way through in the pirogue, and sometimes we went deep into the swamps, beyond our usual territory, and I got a kind of fearless curiosity about the swamps, and whether we might find Manfred Blackwood’s island, but that we did not do.