Second Sight

by David Williams

  “Oh, yes?” Mrs. Bates looked startled. “I’m sorry, I never thought, barging in like this. I hope there’s nothing wrong.”

  “No, no, it’s all right, I’m grateful you came, but please hurry. I haven’t much time.”

  Mrs. Bates was stuffing the scrapbook back into her bag. “You will show this to your editor friend, won’t you? Why, just the story of the discovery alone—”

  “Yes, yes. Now, please, you’ll have to forgive me.” She took Mrs. Bates by the arm and hurried her back to the front door. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “You’re sure there’s nothing wrong?”

  “Nothing. Please. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  She closed the door and leaned against it, heart racing, breathless, trying to think. Outside, she heard the car door close, the engine start. She turned and dashed for the stairs. There was still time, time to change into the dress and catch him here, before he left for town. She didn’t know what she would say to him, but it wouldn’t matter; she had only to hold him here, make it impossible to reach the hotel by 11:30. The past could still be changed, the story could still be proved wrong. Upstairs, she burst into the bedroom, flicked on the light, and threw open the wardrobe closet.

  The dress wasn’t there.

  She seized an armful of clothes, wrenched them aside, thrashed her way through the remaining hangers. No dress. Then she remembered: it was still in the suitcase, in the car, where she had left it after returning from the Miller house.

  She slammed the closet door, snatched off the light, and raced out of the bedroom. She almost tripped at the top of the stairwell; catching herself on the railing, she plunged down the stairs and out into the night. The suitcase was in the back seat of the Volkswagen; she wrenched open the door, shoved the seat back forward. She was just lifting the suitcase out when Michael’s car wheeled into the driveway and came to a gravel-grinding stop beside her.

  He was out of the car before she could move.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Michael, I can’t talk, I’m in a hurry.”

  “I bet you are. I just came back from Fire Island. Beverly told me everything. How you’ve never spent one day there, how you’re having an affair. You’ve been lying to me all this time. Now where have you been?”

  She wanted to weep. “Michael, I told you everything last night. It’s him, Michael, it’s David, he’s going to die unless I can get to him. Please, Michael, please . . .”

  “Stop lying to me,” he said, and grabbed for her arm.

  Instinctively, she swung the suitcase between them. It struck the inside of his thigh, and he grappled for her hands, the handle, and—failing that—gripped it by both corners and tried to wrestle it away. There was a snap, and the suitcase fell open, and the long white dress spilled out on the ground. It was the only thing in the suitcase.

  She snatched it up and clutched it to her, the open suitcase dangling forgotten from her other hand.

  “That dress,” he said, staring at it. “You haven’t worn that dress since . . .” Slowly, he focused on her face and began advancing toward her, backing her away. “It’s the dress, isn’t it? The first time it happened was when you tried on the dress. You were wearing the dress that day on the road. And when that man brought you back from the lake. It is true, isn’t it? You are going back into the past. You are having an affair with him.”

  She backed away toward the house, clutching the dress with one hand, holding the suitcase, lid dragging, between them with the other. The look on his face was frightening. She felt hypnotized; she couldn’t speak, could only keep retreating, using the suitcase as a shield, toward the light from the door behind her.

  “Every time you want to go to him you put on the dress, don’t you?” he said, talking softly, hypnotically, inching ominously toward her. “That’s how you do it, isn’t it? You didn’t tell me that, did you, when you were being such a good girl last night? You didn’t want me to know that, did you, you didn’t really want me to know the truth. You didn’t want me to know what the dress was for.” And suddenly he lunged for her. “I’m going to burn that dress.”

  “No!”

  Abruptly, she seemed released from her spell. She dropped the suitcase and ran for the house, hearing him swear behind her. Over her shoulder she saw that in trying to pursue her he had stepped into the suitcase; the lid had banged up against his knee; he was down and scrambling to his feet. She slammed the door behind her, frantically fumbled the lock into place just as she felt him turning the knob; as she started up the stairs she caught a flash of him running past the dining-room windows toward the kitchen door. She scrambled up the stairs and ran along the hall, heart pounding, lungs sucking air; as she slammed and locked the bedroom door behind her, she heard his footsteps racing through the dining room, starting up the stairs. The clock beside the bed said 10:27. Hurriedly, she kicked off her shoes and began stripping off her blouse, hearing him pounding on the door now, shouting, “Jennie? Jennie?” Stripped, she snatched up the dress, slipped into it, frantically trying, elbows akimbo, to button up the buttons, all those buttons, her heart rattling like a kettle drum, her mind a blank, a one-note plea: no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no . . .

  • • •

  Outside in the hall, Michael hurled himself against the door. Again. Again. He lifted one foot and kicked against it near the lock, but it was too solid, no give. Almost blinded by frustration, he turned and braced himself against the opposite wall for leverage, but then his foot wouldn’t reach the door. Swearing, he wheeled, saw the buffet down the hall, ran to it, seized it, began shoving it along the floor. One leg snagged in the runner rug. He tilted the buffet and ripped the rug out from underneath, pulled it back beyond the door, then ran back to shove the buffet along the hall again until it was even with the door. Then, half-sitting on it, bracing his hands on the edge of the top, he reared and lunged and kicked with both feet at the door, again, and again; and then, feeling it begin to give, he hurled himself off the buffet against it, felt it break open, sending him inward, tumbling to the floor.

  He scrambled to his feet. “Jennie? Jennie?”

  For one blind second in the dark he thought the room was empty. Then he flicked on the light and saw her lying on the bed, wearing the dress. She was very still. He stepped to the bed, awe-struck, afraid, seeing the hands folded across her breast.

  His heart in his throat, he whispered, “Jennie?”

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t move.

  He reached down and touched her shoulder. “Jennie?”

  She didn’t answer.

  In sudden panic, he said, “Jennie?” and shook her by the shoulder and stared with slow horror as one hand slid slowly off her breast and flopped lifelessly down at her side. Terrible dread congealed his heart. He heard Dr. Salzman’s words—I don’t want to alarm you, but the human mind is capable of willing itself to die—and, moving as if in slow motion, he picked up her wrist and felt for her pulse, but beneath the touch of his fingers there was only inert, lifeless flesh: no pulse, no tremor, nothing but the warm and waxen clay.

  25

  * * *

  IT WAS A VERY GRAY day. A faint wind flapped and rustled in the canopy over the grave. Michael sat on a metal folding chair in a row of chairs just under the edge of the canopy. He sensed Don’s firm bulk in the chair beside him. Through blurred eyes, over the top of the wreath-covered coffin, he could see the line of twisted black trees along the crest of the hill, where the older part of the cemetery fronted the road. At the edge of the artificial turf, the minister murmured in hushed tones with one of the attendants from the funeral home. Behind him he heard another attendant guiding people into a row of chairs—hushed whispers, muffled shuffle of feet. In the chair at the end of the row, he saw Beverly dabbing with a Kleenex at her eyes.

  He looked at the coffin lying mute and still on the device above the grave. Its gleaming chrome and plastic was like an affront to his eyes. Jennie had hated
chrome and plastic, would have preferred the natural warmth of wood. But he had been too upset to make any arrangements, had left everything to Don and Beverly. It was hard to believe that Jennie was in that box, cold in the icy grip of death. I killed her, he thought. I let my stupid jealousy make me believe for one insane instant that the story could be true, that she could actually be deceiving me with a man dead almost a hundred years. Poor sick Jennie.

  The minister stepped to the front of the chairs, a man at least without the practiced ooze of his profession, with the honesty to show in his face that he was a stranger here, providing what little he could. He bowed his head and gave a mercifully short prayer. Then he opened his Bible, glanced over the rows of chairs, and began to read. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. . . . ”

  Michael let the words fall unheeded on his ear, through the reading and the short and expected speech afterward, the minister working to give shape and meaning to a brief life he had not witnessed but had only been told about. He was surprised when the words stopped and the minister stepped abruptly aside. He heard movement behind him, a cough, a muted whisper, the creak of metal chairs as the crowd began to rise. Don shifted in the chair beside him, took his arm.

  Michael looked around. “Is that all? Is it over?”

  “Yeah,” Don said, “that’s it.”

  Michael stood and with blurred eyes approached the coffin. He sensed the crowd shifting and moving behind him, felt their eyes on his back. The coffin seemed bulky and heavy, much too large for the Jennie he remembered, lying slight and slim in her white dress inside. He swallowed hard and turned to Don.

  “Don’t they lower the coffin in? I thought we’d see them lower the coffin in.”

  “No, Mike, that’s not done anymore. They do that afterward.”

  Michael put his hand on the coffin; it was cold and hard under his palm. The wind rattled the fringes of the canopy overhead. Through swimming eyes he saw the black of the trees twisted against the gray of the sky. In a surge of grief, he bent to kiss the coffin. “Goodbye, Jennie,” he said, and allowed himself to be led away.

  The minister shook his hand, said words he did not retain. He moved numbly through the crowd—people from town, friends from the city—shaking here and there a hand, dimly aware of hushed words and strained faces. Then they shifted, began to eddy away, drifting up the slight slope to where the cars lined the road. He felt Don take his arm, and together they started up the hill after the others. Stumbling across the manicured grass toward that line of black trees, he thought: That’s not done anymore. No ceremonial handful of dirt, no watching the first shovelfuls fall, no real goodbyes. Just walk away and leave her lying in the barren air, cold in her chrome and plastic bed, uncomforted by the warm earth. There is no warmth in modern life, she had said. And in this case she was right.

  They were under the trees now, in the old part of the cemetery, approaching the road and the hearse and the row of parked cars. He felt Don hesitate and stop beside him.

  Don said, “Isn’t that—?”

  “What, Don?”

  “No, never mind, Mike. Let’s go.”

  He wiped his eyes so that he could see. The slope was studded with old and weathered gravestones, ghostly white in the dark gray day. At his feet, where Don had halted him, stood an old marble slab cracked and covered with moss. Slowly he focused on the words chiseled in its face:

  DAVID REYNOLDS

  1868-1899

  By An Unknown Hand

  Beside it, leaning slightly in the decay of age, was a smaller, similar stone:

  PAMELA REYNOLDS

  1874-1899

  Beloved Wife

  He felt Don tug at his arm, allowed himself to be drawn away. Up ahead of them the crowd had reached the road. Car doors were opened and closed; from here and there came the quick squeal of an ignition and the sound of a motor coming to life. Slowly he mounted toward the crest of the slope, hazy-eyed once more, his every step ringing the words in his mind: beloved wife . . . beloved wife . . . beloved wife . . .

  26

  * * *

  IT WAS A WEEK before he felt like seeing anyone again. He called Don then and arranged to stay in Don’s apartment until he found a place of his own in the city. Don came out to help the day the movers came. It was a clear bright afternoon. He sat with Don around the table on the patio, the ice tinkling in his glass. It was the first time he had trusted himself to drink all week. In the house, he heard the scrape and bump of the moving crew carrying furniture to the big van at the front door.

  “You sure you’re doing the right thing, moving back to the city?” Don said. “You haven’t even sold the house yet.”

  “It’ll be sold. I’ve got it listed with every real estate agent around. I couldn’t live here anymore, Don.”

  “Sure, I understand that.”

  A faint breeze whispered through the flower bed in the center of the drive; from the woods along Summer House Road came the call of a dove. “Jennie loved this place so much—I can’t bear to look at it anymore. Even the trees seem to be accusing me. When I think what it meant to her, and that if I’d . . . if I hadn’t—”

  “You’ve got to stop thinking that way, Mike. You’ve got to stop blaming yourself. Jennie was a very sick girl.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “I mean, maybe it’s better this way. Better than having her locked away in an institution, living permanently in a fantasy world, totally insane. Could you have lived with that? I mean, the psychiatrist said it—she wanted to die. Oh, sure, the doctors can call it a heart attack, but you and I know she wanted to die. She had a better world to go to, like the preacher said, and she chose to go. I mean, we all choose to die, ultimately. For some it comes early, for most it comes late, but we all die when we decide death is preferable to living. We give up the ghost. Stop blaming yourself, Mike. Jennie’s happy now.”

  Michael listened to that soothing rhythmic voice—the voice of calm reason, relating the incomprehensible. He’s doing his best to believe it, he thought. Old cynical Don, he’s trying to believe it for my sake.

  “I wish I knew you were right.” He jostled the ice cubes in his glass, watching the sunlight diffuse through the liquor. “You know, Jennie said something about the whole thing being a test. It was the last night we talked together. Looking back now I think we were closer that night than we’d ever been before, strange as that may seem, strange as she was then. But she said something about it all being a test, and her destiny depending on whether she passed it. And, you know, since the funeral, every now and then I catch myself thinking, what if it was all true? Everything she said. Maybe it was all true, only maybe it was me being tested. I didn’t believe, and I didn’t love her enough to let her go. And if I’d let her go maybe she could have saved him and she wouldn’t have died. Sometimes I think that. Maybe I was the one being tested, and I failed the test.”

  “Well, Mike, you start off thinking things like that, you never know where you’ll end up. I think you need another drink.”

  “Mr. Logan?” It was the foreman of the moving crew, coming across the patio, removing his gloves. “Sorry to bother you. I just wondered what you want done with those old paintings up in the attic. They’re just sitting there. You’re either gonna have to take ’em out of those frames and roll ’em up, or they’re gonna have to be crated. And we got nothing to crate ’em up with. Nobody said anything about crating any paintings up.”

  “What paintings?” Numbly, Michael stood up from the chair. “There aren’t any paintings in the attic.”

  “Well, I don’t mean to argue, but there is. Several of ’em. Up there in that unfinished part of the attic.”

  Don’s eyebrows raised. “Maybe they weren’t all lost after all. Maybe the fella hid ’em. You could be rich, Mike.”

  The foreman led them back into the house, the rooms looking ba
re and alien without furniture. “One of my men found ’em,” he said as they mounted the stairs to the attic. “I took ’em in that room there with the skylight to get a look at ’em, but he found ’em back in that unfinished part under the eaves. Looks like they been there a long time, look old as hell. Maybe you never knew they was there.”

  The attic studio stood bleak and empty under the slanted ceilings. Their footsteps seemed to echo across the bare floor. Hesitantly, Michael knelt in front of the large luminous skylight, where the paintings had been neatly stacked. They looked very old—dusty and covered with cobwebs. He brushed the cobwebs from the one on top and leaned it up against the wall. It was a painting of a young woman leaning back against some sort of railing, behind her a seemingly endless expanse of glittering water churned into waves by the wind. She wore a lacy white high-collared dress, her burnished gold hair up atop her head.

  He felt his heart begin to race. “Jennie,” he said, “that’s Jennie.”

  “No, Mike,” Don said, “it can’t be. You’re just upset. It must be his wife, and he stashed these paintings up here. You know Jennie said his wife looked a lot like her.”

  “Don, that’s Jennie. That pendant, Don, that’s Jennie’s pendant. I gave her that pendant no more than three weeks ago.”

  Suspended from the woman’s neck, on a slim chain, was a pendant shaped like a butterfly, in a filigree of gold, with multi-colored enameled wings.

  27

  * * *

  HE HAD FORCED the others to leave the attic. Downstairs, he heard Don talking to the movers, footsteps crossing the kitchen, the slam of the door. Alone now, he sat on the floor, the drink still in his hand, the paintings leaning in a row against the wall. So you beat me, he thought; it was true all along, David Reynolds, I was competing with you, and you beat me.