. . . but so much more . . .
. . . and, by God, her lips moved for the first time in her guardian guise, becoming his thought, enforcing it. For the first time in forever, he realized he’d known her in childhood. Snatches of a past he had no recollection of flashed by: him and her inseparable until, unacknowledged by his mother and father, she’d fallen away.
“We’re sorry. We didn’t mean to upset you.”
“Are you all right, Grampa?” Ward divided his stare between his grandfather and Esme, by turns cautious and astounded.
Calm them. Yes, yes, I should. “Everything’s fine, Ward, I—”
Ward, amazed, said, “I heard her.”
“So did I,” said June.
They came around him then, all four up close but not a stifle, and helped him into an easy chair. Its fake red leather seat was taped together along one side and it gave a high wheeze when his weight sank into it. Esme caressed his face.
Introductions? Her word was a stone dropped into a pond, radiant in mirror-curves outward at the surface and funneling downward as it deepened in his mind. From that one seed, her muse-voice bantered with him, a game she now transcended, not renouncing it so much as showing that it was one among many. He almost foundered in ramification, but waiting eyes—those of Ward and June and the ones who watched over them—brought him back.
“This,” he said, “is Esme. Esme helps me write books and I hope she’ll continue doing so, but I have a feeling she has other things in store for me as well.”
Right. Warmth filled her eyes, and sparks of flint. She was muscled, packed with humor and sorrow, anger and solid compassion, a towering fury tightly contained. It astonished him how swiftly he was adjusting to her in her new guise.
“It feels funny,” said June, “but I guess we’re all in this weird boat together . . . so anyway this is, well I call her Jeannie, so I guess that’s her name.”
He heard her say something like Charmed, saw her lips move. It was a glimpse into June’s soul—short, sweet, privileged, a note like pure high brass.
Ward chimed in, “I heard that too, I can hear her now and I couldn’t before. Your turn, Timothy. Grampa, this is Timothy, as if you couldn’t guess.”
He stifled the urge to offer his hand. “Timothy, at last we meet.” The kind wraith at Ward’s shoulder turned a shy face to him, blushed Big Boy red, and said, An honor, and there was no doubt, despite his clowning, that he was indeed honored.
“Did you hear him?” Ward asked excitedly.
They both said they did and that seemed to turn on a spigot inside Ward’s mouth; the dear boy was suddenly near to bursting with speech. It came in torrents: how in the last many years Timothy had grown in texture, what it had been like for him when he was abruptly able to see June’s guardian and how that had not only revealed Timothy to her but deepened Ward’s own perception of him, and how coming to the treehouse door and watching Esme rise up behind his grampa had somehow sealed his bond to Timothy further. At that, June concurred that her companion had at that moment become more a part of her, and more, she didn’t know, more securely real than before. “But Grampa,” Ward said, “what does it mean?”
He laughed. “You think I have a clue? Ward, I love you. I love you both.” He hugged them where they sat on either arm of the easy chair. “So I don’t mind confiding in you: I have no idea what we’re expected to do, or even if anyone exists to do the expecting. Esme doesn’t appear to be anything but content at the moment. I don’t see any urgency in her eyes, nor anything of the kind in Jeannie’s or Timothy’s. I don’t feel any either, do you?”
“Nope.”
“Not me.”
“So, that being the case,” he said, wondering at how easily he slipped into the role of aged mentor with these two, even in the face of the miraculous, “I suggest taking things nice and easy. Let’s follow our own best instincts and see where things lead. Unless you have other plans, I propose the three of us walk downtown to Gregerson’s for a treat, making one stop at the post office. I was about to do that anyway once I knocked off Chapter Ten, it’s become a ritual; Mindy Rutherford—you remember which one she is, Ward, the thin smiley one with the long straight hair and the garish lipstick and the prominent bosom?—Mindy loves advance warning when I’m near to mailing off another book. She gets all excited like I’m about to ship a bar of gold, which I guess in a way I am, and she loves her part in the process: weighing the sucker, stamping it First Class, and sticking Priority Mail labels everywhere, and fawning over me as if I’m Parsifal bringing home the Grail. Mindy’s in many ways the best part of writing the books.”
Ward looked uncertain. “June and I sort of had other plans, but—”
“But,” she chimed in, “they can wait.”
“Yeah, things have shifted and I’d kinda like to hang out with you and Esme here.”
“Me too.”
Something was going on between them, something new. He felt a question rise in him, but then—
Desist.
—she was right, and she was him, instinct intruding on impulse, not making him feel small despite her vastness but almost as if he were two bodies and her insight blent with his like converging binocular lenses.
“What does she mean, Mister Jameson?” An automatic question, not one she wanted answered.
“No matter. Let me save my work and shut everything down in the study, and we’ll be on our way.” He eased to his feet, not having felt this jubilant in years. Esme sailed with him like a full moon along a darkened highway, not something new but a sense too long neglected that made itself right at home where it had always been. Everywhere his eyes lighted, an astounding correctness to each object greeted him. His chocolate-brown floor lamp, seldom used and rarely brought to consciousness, tubed up shiny from the floor and arced-over its black flex-neck near his PC, its bulbed pillbox-hat head a halo of brown and white. A look at the screen was something he avoided. No point in spoiling a high. Time enough to assess the damage later. Yet he suspected, and Esme confirmed it on the spot, that Thalia’s fix would be a breeze, and that far more wondrous tales waited in the wings.
He shouldered an empty backpack shoved behind the old ThinkJet on his closet floor. It felt light now, the hand of a friend on his back, but—part of his penance—he knew how weighty it would be on the way home with the fan-flood of fame dragging at his shoulders and slapping against his spine.
“Okay, you two,” he said, leaving the study, then saw that they were by the window, holding hands. Timothy and Jeannie enstatured them, that’s the word that occurred to him—they amplified the Wardness of Ward, the Juneness of June, just as Esme, now enveloping and looming like mists of sea spray about him, amplified what he thought, what he felt, what he sensed. In love, said Esme. “I’d say so,” he said, and the children, after a fumbling break by Ward and a re-clutch by June, just beamed. “Good for you,” he added, “and by the way, I’ll be damned if I’m going to say ‘you four.’ It sounds wrong and it feels wrong. In some way I don’t yet understand, you and Jeannie are one, just like me and Esme, or Ward and Timothy.”
The guardians nodded, content to let the kids voice their agreement.
“Fine. Now let’s have at the world. After you.”
June paused on the balcony. “Mister Jameson, do you think anyone else will be able to see them?”
“Highly doubtful, I’d say. No, things somehow came together for us three because we’re who we are, more open to otherworldly things: old T. E. Jameson, the oddball; Ward here clinging to his invisible companion way beyond the acceptable time; and you, well you’re Ward’s closest friend—getting closer if I’m not mistaken; sure go ahead and blush if you like, I think it’s great—and you were a part of that club of his, so maybe you stuck with Jeannie just long enough to make her retrieval possible now. It’s only a guess, but I’d imagine this trio of ghosts is going to be our little secret from here on out.”
“Timothy isn’t a ghost, Grampa,” said
Ward, catching the ladder with his feet and starting the climb down, his guardian negotiating a playful corkscrew around him as he descended. June and Jeannie went next, the latter a film of solicitude about the former. He waited until the kids were down, then swung out onto the ladder and took in its familiar sounds and sway as the underside of the treehouse diminished above him. Whereas Esme the muse had been more pest than pleasure much of the time, Esme the guardian was a joy to have about him, confirming his confidence in body motion, enspiriting his thoughts. Nonetheless, the earth was a downer for both of them and she shared the tinge of sadness he felt as he trod the ground for the first time today. He waved as usual to Nora, sitting at her window, then walked toward the house with the others.
His first indication that he’d been wrong about who would be able to see their guardians was the look on Joy’s face when the three of them entered the sliding glass door to the kitchen. She was sitting at the table with a salad and a glass of apple juice in front of her. Her fork hung in the air and she tried to speak, but it looked like her eyes were open too wide to allow her mouth much latitude.
“It’s okay, Joy,” Ward said. June, to the other side of Joydrop, concurred, patting her shoulder.
Her eyes went to their faces but could not help being drawn beyond to Jeannie, and to Timothy insofar as he kept to one place long enough to fix on. “Who . . . I mean, I, what uh . . .” and then her gaze was drawn to Esme lofting over her employer.
“You’re not going mad, Joy,” he assured her, sitting across from her and taking her free hand, as chilly as his doorknob had been. “They’re just—”
He stopped. A flit of gnats he thought he’d seen in the air above her resolved themselves into moving beads of dew strung on invisible wire—dew or tiny gems, clear and glinting, defining with their motion lines of force about her head and yet raised away a foot or more, like an airy exploded view of her skull.
“This . . . is so beautiful, Ted.” She marveled at the gems about her head. “How are you doing it?”
“It’s not me, not us. It’s you. Your guardian.”
She laughed. The crystalline framework circling her wavered, winked out, came back again. “I don’t know what you mean exactly, but since I must be dreaming, or having the most beautiful flashback one could hope for, I guess anything goes. I like it whatever it is. I feel some—I don’t know—affinity for it, for him.”
He took her hands in his, curve within curve, giving them an affectionate squeeze. “The three of us are going downtown. You’ll be all right?”
She glanced at the backpack. “Is it Mindy Rutherford day again? So soon?”
He shrugged. “I’m just a writing fool.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Nora. Joydrop didn’t take note. She hadn’t heard. “How is she?” he asked her.
“As always.”
“Wait a second, you two.” He rose. “I’ll be right with you.”
“Take your time, Grampa.”
Halfway through the TV room, he glanced back. It was a subtle change, the look on Joy’s face. She seemed like one mildly stricken. The airy sculpture of gems about her head had evaporated and it appeared that even Timothy and Jeannie had dimmed somewhat upon his leaving. A trick of the light, perhaps. Esme, after all, felt no less potent for the temporary separation. It was comforting to have her with him as he entered Nora’s room and shut the door.
There was a vaguely medicinal smell to the room even though Joy gave Nora nothing of the sort. The room seemed stuck in time, an invisible patina of dust everywhere. It had been their bedroom between the time Ward was born and the building of the treehouse. For the first eight months of their grandson’s life, they’d loved one another dearly and often on this large firm bed with its frilled spread. Then, for two years after, he’d lain, hard-put for sleep, beside her stilled body, holding her, his fingers at her unresponsive hand, hoping his warmth might wake her. His refuge in the trees had weaned him away from that time of hopelessness.
The sun lay slantwise across Nora’s lap.
Beautiful. Yes, she is.
“Nora? Hello, sweetheart, it’s Ted.” He never felt heavier, more dragged down by the world’s weight, than in his walk across this room. And Esme echoed that too. No easing to have her beside him, just a confirmation of his sorrow. He laid a large gentle hand along the right side of his wife’s face, his last two fingers lost in the silk of Nora’s long white hair. The tip of his nose caressed her left cheek, the soft yield of it, the warmth. “Come back to me, dear love,” he said. It was what he always said, and Esme though fully with him, was silent; he knew without her guidance that what he did here, what he said, was right. His lips left soft kisses along the stretched flesh of her jaw, lingering upon her lips. When he broke away to test her eyes, they were vacant as ever.
There. “Yes, I’m sure of it,” he said. “She’s close to the surface, she can hear me. You’ve always been able to hear me, haven’t you, Nora?” The eyes blinked then but there was nothing startling in that. She always complied, if soullessly, to Joydrop’s promptings regarding meals and bodily functions; in acts of dressing and undressing, her limbs moved with the suggested flow; her eyes might blink, an audible sigh might escape her lips at times, but never did this compliance seem willed, never a sign of impending emergence from the state Nora had lapsed into twelve years before. Yet he had faith that one day it might happen.
A flicker occurred on the moist surface of one eye, a feint toward a glance at Esme. He looked again. Nothing. Pure imagining. Mere eye adjustment after blinking, like a contact lens settling back over its cornea.
He knelt to contemplate the face of the woman he had loved, through good times and bad, for so long. Despite her stasis, Nora’s face, not a trace of make-up on it, as there had never been in her life, looked healthy, neither bleached nor sallow. The heart trouble she’d had fifteen years before—shortly after their stay at a friend’s cabin in upstate New York—had caught them both by surprise, but they pulled through that, and neither then nor now did she show any outward sign of that inward distress. He gentled his thumbs up over her cheekbones, again and again, trying to massage her out of the depths of her entrapment.
Time I think. Esme brought him to himself. Rising, he kissed Nora’s forehead, lingered one last caress across her face, and left the room, the hallway air rushing into his nostrils, as it always did, like sea breezes after the close air of a diving bell.
II. The Blooming of a Community
5. Monday Afternoon in Downtown Auroville
When Ward’s grampa had left them in the kitchen with Joydrop Heartline, June had had a moment of disorientation come over her. Foolish, recalling it now as they paraded single file along the shoulder of Bedford Avenue, Ward and Timothy in the lead, Grampa and Esme bringing up the rear like sheepdog and shepherdess. But then, what with Joy’s diamond-gridded guardian evaporating and the dimensional flattening of Jeannie and Timothy, her faith had wavered, had to be buttressed with assurances from Ward, indeed did not return entirely until Grampa himself returned to shore it up. Joy pleaded with them not to go, but they promised they’d be back by mid-afternoon. She’d waved to them from the picture window, again bereft of her guardian but doing her best to smile in spite of her loss.
Cars whizzed by in both directions. June had earlier voiced the fear that a startled driver might lose control and plow into them. But once past the Grant place, they’d watched a dozen vehicles go by with no more than a curious stare in reply to theirs—Grampa’d been convinced and Esme concurred that either not many folks would be as receptive as Joydrop or that it took sustained personal contact, not the sweep of vehicles past quick-vanishing pedestrians, to bring the guardians into focus—so they’d taken a right on Bedford and begun their trek into town. It took Jeannie’s ethereal gauze of comfort, several repetitions of Nothing to worry about, and the safe if shuddery buffet of a few cars and trucks shumphing past to calm her jitters.
By that time, sidewalk
had begun and an odd mingle of old and new homes kicked in too. Just before they reached Pleasant Street and the edge of the business district this side of I-50, they passed a man sitting on his porch. She had seen him before—quite often in fact—on her walks to and from Ward’s house. He was chubby and balding, he had a warm glint for her always and a smile, and he invariably wore less clothing, by at least a layer, than the season called for. At the moment, although no sunlight reached him, his feet were bare and a bare chest souffléd out from beneath a pair of worn railroad coveralls. “‘Afternoon!” June said as they passed, louder and more confident than her usually more guarded greeting. But instead of the “Hi there, little lady” she expected in return, his mouth O’d like a light bulb socket and he said, “Holy . . . what in the Sam Hill . . . I . . . wait, I . . ,” his eyes not knowing where to focus, his body rising slowing from his ratchety wicker chair until his hands gripped the railing and an ancient Orientalesque figure faded in and then out as they passed by and left him wheezing in the distance, a hand to his heart. June, not breaking stride, waved back to him, and his hand rose and finger-waved like a bleary-eyed toddler.
He’ll be okay, Jeannie assured.
But how can you know that?
Trust me. And June did, increasing her pace until she was even with Ward and Timothy. She took Ward’s hand, trading smiles with him. Timothy corkscrewed around them, a jumbled dryer-window of colors, yet he raised no wind in doing so.
“Look,” Ward said. Two men in three-piece suits and a woman gripping a zippered leather briefcase against her side were working on ice cream cones and trading business gossip outside First National.
“Whatever happens,” cautioned Grampa behind them, and Esme chimed in her support, “smile and just keep walking.”
Ward gave June’s hand a squeeze. “Why do I feel like I’m getting away with something?” he whispered.
It was great to see him this excited. “Beats me, but I bet you can’t keep a straight face.”
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