—Mother, I got your letter, where is Iver?
Family stops eating and uncle stands and opens mouth to let out words. Uncle sits back down and turns to aunt. Girl stays standing and looks at family. Girl is still mostly frozen and cannot move her limbs in the manner that she normally moves them. Ice has melted into her and her scalp is wet. Girl is hot and sweats but is still numb. People start to eat again. Mother gestures to girl to sit next to mother on wood bench that faces large banquet table but girl’s eyes widen. Cousin looks at girl and says,
—Come sit—
But girl interrupts cousin and screams,
—WHERE IS IVER.
Girl’s mouth is taut and she starts to shake and her teeth make sounds against each other. Grandmother stands up from table, which is hard for grandmother, and whispers,
—Girl, you are not well. You have traveled far. Let me walk you to a bedroom where you can rest your head. Girl stays standing, shaking and yells at mother about how mother never, never tells the truth in letters. Grandmother hooks girl’s arm and leads girl away from banquet table, down another flight of stairs, farther underground into the earth, into a warm small circular bedroom. Bedroom has fireplace with fire and in center of room is bed with many piles of quilts. Girl collapses on bed and puts head in hands and girl’s back heaves up and down with sobs of heavy breath. Grandmother leaves girl on bed and shuts door. Alone on bed, girl shakes harder. Girl rocks back and forth until girl has used all of girl’s breath. Fire is warm and girl is very hot. Girl stands and moves to door and pulls lock in place to bolt door shut. Girl stands in middle of room and takes off all of girl’s clothes. Girl falls to her knees. There on all fours the ground is close. Girl’s braid swings back and forth in front of her face. Girl closes girl’s eyes and reopens them. Girl closes them again, keeping them shut. Girl sits back on her calves and puts her hands together in her lap. The dirt floor is cold. Girl is sitting on the floor. Girl opens her eyes. There is Iver—across from her on the floor. Iver looks at girl without interest. Iver says,
—Cousin, you have come to visit.
—Yes!
Girl says,
—Yes! My mother wrote and told me to come. Iver—
Iver, you look so well!
Iver stays sitting. Iver does not come close to girl. Iver yawns.
—Cousin,
Iver says,
—Cousin—will you build me a chair?
—Iver, what kind of chair would you like me to build you?
—A good chair,
Iver says,
—Made out of wood and without any nails. Just joints.
I need enough chairs to fill the room.
—Iver, that is a lot of chairs.
Girl says,
—Did you bring me a hammer and axe?
—Yes of course, cousin. Look to your left, you’ll find your hammer and axe.
Girl picks up hammer and axe and walks to pile of wood between Iver and her. Dirt walls of room expand out revealing many piles of wood and many tools. A domed ceiling rises and girl sees she will need many, many chairs to fill the room. Girl bends and begins to build. A thing is built from the things around her and girl says,
—Iver, I have finished my first chair!
Iver is napping, curled on the floor, his hands under his head. Girl goes over to Iver and shakes him,
—Iver, Iver please wake up. I have made you a chair.
Iver opens his eyes and yawns,
—Cousin, yes, cousin. You have made me a fine chair.
Thank you. To whom will this first chair belong?
—This chair is yours. The second will me mine. The rest are for the guests.
—Cousin, you have much work to do. The night is old.
—I will work fast.
Iver sits in his new chair and naps some more. Girl makes chair after chair. As the sun rises girl finishes her hundredth chair. Girl looks around for Iver, to show him the hundredth chair. The chairs are everywhere—lined up in the room in neat rows. She has lost track of Iver in this big room.
—Iver!
Girl yells,
—Iver—there are many chairs!
Girl walks down rows. Girl looks under chairs. Girl stacks chairs up to the ceiling to make a mountain of chairs. Girl climbs mountain. The rungs of the chairs are slippery on her bare feet. At the topmost chair, girl puts hand to brow and squints for sight of Iver. Girl sees Iver, bathed in the new day, stretched across several chairs in the far reaches of the room. Girl yells,
—Iver, I built you your chairs!
Iver twitches slightly in his sleep but does not wake. He turns, readjusts himself on his bed of chairs. Girl yells again, her hands cupped around her mouth. Girl is yelling naked on this mountain of chairs, chairs are shaking beneath her feet, her feet slip on the topmost chair and girl falls to the dirt floor.
CLAMOR
THE MEDIUM’S HOME WAS a double-wide trailer inside the Willamette National Forest. She lived in a part of the woods that got very little sunlight except in pronounced shafts that looked like lightning rods shot through the dense foliage of tall Douglas fir trees. Immediately surrounding the medium’s trailer was a ring of fragrant Oregon red cedars. For extra income, the medium harvested bits of the bark and sold it in baggies online to urban hippies who liked making homemade incense and potpourri.
Saturdays the medium held group communications with dead people. Sundays, she held group communications with deceased pets, mainly cats. The second Saturday in September the medium had a good showing: three seventy-and-over women from Bend proper (Lillian, Phyllis, and Carol), one of whom had brought her two teenage granddaughters (Izzy and Olivia), a fifty-something married couple from Portland (Anna and Cliff), and a single just-over-puberty crew-cut-clad man (Sam). Eight total. She told herself she could feel their collective energy, so she began.
Everyone sat in white folding chairs in a circle in her living room. An afternoon chill had most people in at least two layers. The medium had a silk white cloth wrapped around her head as a headband.
“A moment of silence,” she said. And everyone was still. She held out her hands, one to each side, and the people joined hands and touched each other’s fingers lightly to form a connected circle. The two teenage granddaughters fidgeted a little in their seats and looked at each other. If the medium noticed their skepticism she didn’t say a word.
“A man in a lab coat,” the medium said.
“Is he wearing tennis shoes?” said Lillian, one of the retiree Bend women.
“No,” said the medium. “He is only wearing socks.”
“It’s Roger,” said Phyllis, one of the other Bend women. “My dead dermatologist. He was into the whole barefoot thing. You know, how it is healthier to stand and run and balance in your bare feet and in his office he only wore those little slippers with the separated toes.”
In addition to having a dead barefoot dermatologist, Phyllis also had a husband, who was at home watching daytime television, and two children and several grandchildren, who lived far away. Phyllis enjoyed being in groups and participating in things with other people, which in the past had made her an ardent churchgoer. Mimicking the actions that she saw other people perform gave her a great deal of comfort. She liked knowing what she was supposed to do and then doing it. Like how after church you are supposed to stand outside and drink coffee and eat donuts, and all you have to do is eat and drink, and then you have done what you are supposed to do so that when you run into people at the grocery store they wave to you and respect you and know that you are a respectable person who belongs to a group. When her children had been young, she was very involved in the PTA and the local women’s club and ran a lot of bake sales and Christmas caroling drives, although she was never particularly good at cooking or singing or any other craft. Which was part of what brought Phyllis into the medium’s trailer. One of her friends from the Bend gardening club, Lillian, was evangelical about genealogy and was excited about connecting with h
er dead relatives who had homesteaded on the Oregon coast many generations before. So Phyllis came to the medium’s house as a follower, as an eager friend open to seeing people pop out from the afterlife, and she was desperate to share this experience with Lillian and the rest of the ladies from the gardening club, because her greatest fear, the one that came to her late in the evenings, was that she had no true friends and that the friends she did have talked about her meanly. She strongly remembered her mother telling her when she was a teenager, “Don’t worry so much about having friends in high school. People grow out of their cattiness. Wait until you’re older. People will accept you.” This Phyllis had found to be wholly untrue. People, regardless of age, were always interested in group-forming. Phyllis felt her life was one long failed attempt to not be left out. So when Lillian had seductively suggested the visit to the medium’s house, Phyllis had immediately agreed because it was an easy way to be included and one more Saturday she didn’t have to spend alone with her dreaded husband, and this was why she was so eager to claim the first dead spirit as her own—to show Lillian that she was willing and adventurous and able to do anything, and that she was a very good friend who could be trusted to go on other fun outings down the line. When she had gotten in the car over an hour ago, as soon as she had departed from Bend proper, she had made up her mind that she would see a ghost and that was that. When she claimed Roger, her dead dermatologist, everyone looked startled but she was unabashed.
“What does he want?” Phyllis asked the medium. “I don’t think I ever paid my last bill.”
The medium looked calmly into the space in the middle of the room. She squinted her eyes and said, “He wants you to know it’s fine,” which seemed to satisfy Phyllis who smiled wildly and mumbled “Thank goodness!” and looked over to Lillian for approval which Lillian did not give.
“He’s walking away,” said the medium. “And now he is coming back again. With a child. A small child who looks to be about four or five. He doesn’t know the child. He’s just helping her. It’s a little girl. He’s carrying her. Now he’s leaving again so it’s just the little girl.”
“Oh my God,” said Anna, the wife from the Portland couple. She shook slightly as her husband, Cliff, held her hand. Her eyes were big and wet and her mouth was open.
“Anna, please,” said Cliff.
“Is she yours?” said the medium.
“Yes, she is,” said Anna, almost screaming. Cliff looked down into his lap.
“I think there is something wrong with her ear,” said the medium. “Something on the side of her head.”
“She was crushed in an elevator shaft,” said Anna. “We lived in an old house with a grocery dolly. She liked playing in spaces where she wasn’t supposed to be.”
“How long has she been dead?” said the medium.
“Twenty years,” said Cliff. He was dry-eyed. Confused, mostly. Trying to figure out the best way to handle his wife.
Anna felt her body turn warm and then cold again, as if Wilma, their dead daughter, had come over and sat on her lap and started grabbing at Anna’s hair the way she always had. It had been so long since Anna had seen Wilma. She’d been gone four times as long as she had lived. When Wilma died Anna could feel her presence palpably. She could feel Wilma around the corners, yelling out the window, playing with her stuffed dog, sitting quietly watching television, crawling into bed between her and Cliff. It was impossible for Wilma not to be there so she was there for a very long time, even after they moved houses, even after they had Gabriel, their son. Anna thought of Wilma like a type of weather, like a freeze that had set in on their lives for several years and then lifted, leaving them chilled and disoriented and confused. Wilma was a child. She had only ever been a child and she would be one forever, which terrified Anna and made Wilma seem less like she had ever been a human and more like she had always been an angel that Anna had, unforgivably, let slip through her fingers and die. Anna’s sister, Pat, used to tell her on the phone, joke with Anna when Wilma was crying lots in the middle of the night and Anna and Cliff were just young fresh parents. Pat would say, many years Anna’s senior, “Honey, your only real job at this point is to just keep her alive.” And Pat would laugh because it was a joke, and keeping someone alive was supposed to be an easy thing to do, but it turns out, in Wilma’s case, it was not easy, and it did not get done. So that when the funeral happened and Pat flew in from Baltimore she could not look Anna in the eye because she knew that the words she had said on the phone all those years that were supposed to be words of sisterly comfort were stuck in Anna’s head and they would not, no matter what Pat said, be able to get free. In the medium’s house, deep in the woods away from their pretty Portland home, Anna knew Cliff, her husband, was miserable, but she did not care because after Wilma died, she had learned to be selfish with her feelings and ask for what she wanted with a sense of conviction that she never used to have. She wanted to go to the medium and go they did, because she had asked Cliff with the kind of brokenness in her voice that reminded him that she had been the one who had found Wilma’s body crushed in the dolly shaft, Wilma’s head smashed, her skull cracked open, her stuffed dog in hand, blood leaking out of her left ear and through a fissure in the top of her head.
“She wants to stay,” said the medium. “She has something in her hand. She’ll stay until they all have to go away. Is that alright?”
Anna nodded while Cliff stayed silent. Phyllis, who was sitting next to Anna, reached out her arm to offer a comforting hand.
Cliff felt as he had felt since Wilma’s death: completely useless. Half of his life had passed in this way. It was a wonder that he and Anna were still together, that they had a son, Gabriel, who was at all able to comprehend them, his grief-ridden, broken parents who were continually haunted by the death of a sister he had never met. When Cliff looked at Anna, he saw Wilma, which made things both harder and easier—harder to forget and easier to remember. He’d been better than Anna at everything in regards to parenting. He’d been better than her at taking care of Wilma and he was better than her at watching Wilma die. And he’d been better than her at having another child, Gabriel, and caring for him, which all contributed to Cliff’s belief that there are some people who are better at not being broken, and that his quick tools to repair people, to keep him and Anna together, were a special gift. He had bouts of impatience with Anna, but he learned to leave her alone. He believed much could be said for letting people be. If Anna woke up crying, especially when Gabriel was young, Cliff took off work and got Gabriel out of the house and didn’t come back until late in the evening where they always found Anna asleep, no sign she had ever left their bed. So although Cliff was certainly not interested in psychics or the future or in meeting Wilma in some half-dead form, he had gone willingly to the medium’s house because it was something that his wife wanted to do and he thought he could handle whatever was going to happen, which it turned out, as he watched Anna cry in the folding chair next to him, he maybe could not.
“She’s sitting at your feet,” said the medium. “Her head is smudged around the edges so she goes kind of in and out. Now she is using her toy as a pillow. I’ll let her rest there and we’ll move on.”
Anna looked down at her feet as if her eyes could rip into an opening. Cliff tried to look anywhere else but there.
“A young woman,” said the medium. “With long blond hair.”
Nobody said anything.
“My sister had long blond hair,” said Phyllis.
Lillian looked at her menacingly, a look that anyone with any sensitivity knew was a request for Phyllis not to speak.
The young crew-cut clad man, Sam, still sat alone, silently, directly to the medium’s left. He looked patient and calm, as if waiting for a bus that he was very sure would come on time.
“Maybe she’s got the wrong address,” said the medium. “Or, she could be a spectral projection of an earlier, younger version of the deceased—a younger version of an elderly l
oved one who died.”
Carol, one of the Bend women from the garden club, the one who brought her two granddaughters, thought the spirit might belong to her but didn’t say anything. She didn’t say anything not because she was embarrassed or scared or superstitious, she just didn’t really want to talk to the person who she thought it might be—her best childhood friend, Alice, who had grown up with her in Kansas and gone to college and become a hippie and overdosed on heroin when everyone was doing it and nobody really even knew what it was. As girls, Alice had always been prettier than Carol. Carol’s mother used to fawn after Alice and her long blond hair and loudly tell Carol that Carol should eat less and be more demure and Carol mistakenly thought that maybe being a girl now was easier, or at least easier than when she had been growing up in Kansas, and chastised for her size eight frame. Carol tried to imagine what Alice would look like now, old and strung out, missing all her teeth and with yellow fingernails and wrinkly skin. It wasn’t really fair, Carol thought, that Alice’s ghost would get to stay young forever. She hoped it wasn’t Alice, but someone else’s fantasy, someone else’s dead friend or relative wandering in to find them, or that none of it was real and there was, in fact, no one there.
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