The Secret Life of Sparrow Delaney

by Suzanne Harper

  “And he wants you to know he’s all right,” I chanted wearily. “Now if he would just go be all right someplace else and let the rest of us get some sleep—”

  “Not a very gracious attitude, I must say, Sparrow,” a new voice said tartly. Professor Edna Trimble was shimmering at the end of my bed, accompanied, as always, by the brisk scent of liniment. She had been in her eighties when she Passed On and long retired from her career terrorizing students at an academically rigorous women’s college. However, she still dressed in a tweedy, professorial way and wore her gray hair in a severe bun. Her wintry blue eyes eyed me sternly over silver-framed bifocals. “I really expect better of you.”

  “I’m too tired to be gracious.”

  She gave a disapproving sniff. “Even when utterly exhausted, one should always demonstrate common courtesy to others.”

  I fell back on my pillows, knowing better than to argue. Professor Trimble appeared about a year after Prajeet and immediately began nagging me about my homework (sloppy), my posture (bad), my manners (careless), and my general attitude (poor). After her first alarming appearance I asked Prajeet, with some trepidation, if my bedroom would soon be crowded with ghosts, offering unwanted advice and commenting on whether I had made the bed.

  “No, no, do not worry,” he had said. “You see, we three are your spirit guides. You have heard of such beings, have you not?”

  I had, of course. Unlike friends or relatives who Cross Over and then come back with specific messages for their loved ones, spirit guides are assigned to watch over people here on Earth for longer periods of time. I had always found the concept comforting, although I began to revise that opinion after meeting Professor Trimble.

  “So you’re here to help me, right?” I had asked, just to be sure.

  “Yes, indeed,” Prajeet had said. “Guidance, support, a helping hand, they are all part of our brief. We each have our little specialties, of course. Floyd, for example, is your gatekeeper, who has watched over you since birth. I have a certain humble talent for explaining metaphysical concepts. And Professor Trimble is here to, er . . .”—he had paused, his eyes sparkling with mischief, then continued diplomatically—“I suppose I should say she is here to make sure you fulfill your potential.”

  “Oh.” I’m sure I sounded rather gloomy at this news. Even then I had sensed that Professor Trimble and I were going to have very different ideas about what fulfilling my potential meant.

  “So why are you doing all this?” I had asked. “It sounds like a lot of work. I thought the afterlife was supposed to be kind of, I don’t know . . . relaxing.”

  “An excellent question, my dear Sparrow!” he had said with delight. “The answer is quite simple. Helping others enables us to advance to a higher spiritual level on the Other Side, just as it does here on Earth.”

  “Really? What’s the next level? Do you get promoted to angel or something if you do a good job?”

  But apparently even Prajeet couldn’t (or wouldn’t) reveal all the secrets of the universe at one go. He had just smiled a little and said, “Ah, well, the universe offers many mysteries to unravel—but not tonight, I think.” And I could never get him to utter another word on the subject after that.

  I rather liked having spirit guides, even if I did have to be careful to talk to them only when no one else was around. But shortly after that conversation I began seeing other ghosts, ghosts that definitely weren’t interested in achieving a lofty spiritual goal through unselfish assistance to others. No, they wanted me to help them. They would come up to me anytime, any place—in my bedroom, on the front porch, at the dinner table, in study hall, at the bus stop. The only place that seemed to be off limits, thank goodness, was the bathroom. I really didn’t want to have to deal with spirits in the shower.

  “They’re everywhere!” I had complained. “Like flies at a picnic!”

  “More like moths to a flame, honey,” Floyd had answered.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means,” Professor Trimble said, “that you have an extraordinary amount of psychic talent.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I’d said, uneasy. “If I’m so talented, why didn’t I show signs of it before now?”

  “That was my doing,” Floyd had said, pleased with himself. “You remember when I first came to you? You were already demonstrating all four kinds of psychic ability, but you were such a little thing. I knew we had to take it slow, so I didn’t let other spirits approach until you were ready. It’s like baking a soufflé. You don’t want to overbeat the eggs, or it won’t rise. You don’t want to keep opening the oven door, or it will fall. You don’t want to—”

  “I have four kinds of psychic ability?” I had interrupted. Floyd’s baking metaphors tend to be long and elaborate. Plus they make me hungry.

  Prajeet held up one finger. “Clairvoyance. The ability to see spirits.” He held up another finger. “Clairaudience. The ability to hear spirits.” Two more fingers. “Clairsentience, the ability to feel or sense the presence of spirits. And clairgustance, the ability to sense smells or tastes associated with a spirit. Most mediums have only one such gift. It is quite rare indeed to possess all four.”

  “Oh.” That did sound overwhelming.

  Professor Trimble had nodded austerely. “It will require discipline and work and many hours of study for you to learn to control your abilities.”

  That had sounded daunting.

  “Fortunately,” she had added smoothly, “we are here to help you.”

  That had sounded terrifying.

  Now, as I listened to a reading that was heading into its fourth hour, I didn’t feel overwhelmed or daunted or even particularly terrified. I just felt very tired. As an experiment, I closed my eyes to see if I would miraculously fall into a dreamless sleep despite the ghosts in my bedroom and the people downstairs. . . .

  “Sparrow! Wake up!” Professor Trimble snapped.

  I pretended to snore.

  “I know you’re awake. I want to talk to you,” she said. “I notice that you have once again turned down a perfect opportunity to begin fulfilling your potential.”

  I opened one eye. “Excuse me?”

  “You could be downstairs right now, instead of lolly-gagging about in bed—”

  “Lollygagging? It is after midnight! And it’s not healthy,” I added piously, “for adolescents to get less than eight hours of sleep a night.”

  Professor Trimble narrowed her eyes. “This is not about losing sleep, Sparrow. It’s about offering people hope, comfort, and a connection to the world of Spirit. But most of all, it is about accepting—no, embracing— your destiny.”

  If I had learned only one thing from four years of arguing with Professor Trimble, it was this: how to keep my mouth shut. So I bit my lip to keep from saying something I would seriously regret and settled instead for reciting the words that had become my mantra: “I do not want to be a medium!”

  “You keep saying that,” she replied tartly. “I’d like to know what kind of life you think you do want.”

  “Anything else,” I said. “Anything at all. I mean, I could be an accountant in Santa Fe, or a pastry chef in Paris, or a real estate agent in Sandusky, Ohio, or—”

  “Those choices sound very agreeable for some other person,” Prajeet chimed in. “But as far as you are concerned, they are mere piffle and poppycock.”

  “Piffle and poppycock?” I said, betrayed. “Prajeet! I thought you were my friend!”

  Then I smelled a sugary fragrance and saw the air in front of the window shiver. Floyd’s outline wavered a bit, as if he were uncertain of his welcome.

  “Come on in, Floyd,” I said with weary resignation.

  “The party’s just getting started.”

  He firmed up and smiled at me. “Thanks, honey.”

  “At least I know you’re on my side,” I said, with an accusing glance at Prajeet and Professor Trimble.

  “Of course I am!” He turned to the others. “Spa
rrow is still young. She has a right to be a little confused at this stage in life.”

  “Thank you,” I said with dignity. Finally, someone who understood how I felt, who could see my side of things, who wasn’t always telling me what to do—

  “Although,” he said comfortably, “I do think you should consider going to the last message service of the season.”

  I gave him my best you-must-be-kidding look. He gave me his best I’m-just-making-an-innocent-suggestion look in return.

  Go to a message service? Was he insane? It was bad enough to sit in a crowded auditorium for an hour while one medium after another passed on spirit messages to people in the audience. What was even worse was the idea of skulking in a corner, trying to escape the attention of all the ghosts who would also be there. I shuddered.

  “Message services,” I said. “Ick.”

  “Ah, well.” Floyd looked downcast. “It was just an idea.”

  I felt a little tug of guilt. I hated disappointing Floyd.

  Now Professor Trimble was shaking her head sorrowfully. “You have so much potential. So much untapped talent.”

  “It is not right that you toss it to the dogs,” Prajeet agreed.

  “I’m not tossing anything to the dogs, and what does that even mean?” I threw my pillow at him.

  He didn’t bother to duck. It flew right through him and hit my oak dresser. His image trembled a bit, but his serene expression didn’t change.

  “It means throwing away something valuable, tossing it aside as if it were garbage—”

  “Okay, okay, I know what it means.”

  “We are just trying to offer you a little guidance, that is all,” he added. “Do not be angry.”

  “I’m not,” I muttered. “But do you even remember what it’s like to be a teenager? I’m going to be in high school! I don’t want people to think I’m a freak!”

  Professor Trimble raised one eyebrow. “And why should anyone think that?”

  “People think Emily Lawson is a freak just because she plays the oboe,” I replied. “If they knew I talked to dead people—”

  “Not the same thing at all,” Professor Trimble said. “The oboe is a horrid instrument.”

  “That’s not the point—oh, never mind.” I sighed. “I just—I don’t want any more guidance, all right? I want to make my own decisions about my life.”

  There was a brief, fraught pause. Then, to my surprise, Professor Trimble actually conceded the point.

  “And so you should. An excellent idea.” Her tone was brisk. “It really should have nothing to do with us, should it, Prajeet?”

  She caught Prajeet’s eye, and he quickly shook his head. “No, nothing to do with us,” he said. “Nothing at all.” Then he paused to listen. “Ah, I think your guests are leaving.”

  Sure enough, I could hear the murmur of thank yous and good nights as the visitors drifted out of the house. A few moments later I heard my sisters arguing about whose turn it was to clean up the parlor and then mutually agreeing (as always) that it could wait until morning.

  “Good,” I said. “Now I can finally get some sleep.” Professor Trimble added, “Yes, my dear, you do that.” She began to flicker. “And thank you for your honesty, Sparrow. You have given me much to think about.”

  “Sweet dreams, cupcake.” Floyd winked.

  They all vanished.

  And I was left, of course, staring at the ceiling, wide awake until dawn.

  Chapter 3

  If you took a wrong turn off the highway and drove through Lily Dale by accident, you’d see what looks like a normal, if slightly dilapidated, small town. Most of the houses are Victorians—not reproductions but houses that were actually built when Queen Victoria sat dumpily on her throne. Very few have been painted or repaired since. Every house leans a little to one side or the other (ours tilts north-northwest), most porches sag in the middle, and a fair number of windows are either cracked or boarded up with plywood.

  (Well, as Grandma Bee always says, a spiritual life is not a lucrative life. That’s why we buy our clothes in thrift shops, or at least my sisters do. They complain bitterly about this, but I point out that there’s something worse than wearing thrift store clothes, and that’s wearing thrift store hand-me-downs.)

  If you actually stopped here after taking that wrong turn, you’d find out that my hometown is not normal at all. That’s because Lily Dale was founded in 1879 as a Spiritualist community, a place where mediums could live and work. Here talking to the dead is as normal as pumpkin pie, although we don’t actually say that people have died. We say they’ve Passed On or Crossed Over or Gone to Summerland, which sounds much less scary and morbid and, well, final.

  My great-great-grandmother moved here in 1912 to hang out her shingle as a medium, and Delaneys have been serving Spirit in Lily Dale ever since. Grandma Bee, my mother, and Oriole all have passed the test to become registered mediums, which means that they are allowed to give public readings. But everyone in the family has some psychic talent. Raven is quite skilled at picking up messages that warn of doom and disaster; coupled with her long black hair, sharp black eyes, and sardonic expression, this has kept her from attracting many customers. Oriole is attuned to communications dealing with love, romance, and hair-styling tips (she’s very popular). Dove specializes in weepy messages of reconciliation. Wren usually gets information about unfinished housekeeping details (the will that was hidden a little too carefully, the stock certificates that were lost in the attic). Lark sees auras, and Linnet creates spirit drawings, done with pastels.

  And we’re pretty run-of-the-mill compared with our neighbors. Mrs. Winkle, who lives next door, believes that fairies live in her garden. Who’s to say, she might be right. Her backyard is a wild, overgrown quarter acre of wildflowers and weeds. A troupe of circus clowns could be living there, and no one would ever know.

  Three streets over, Mr. Sanderson channels a spiritual sidekick named Ojai Cinnabar. He gets a lot of business, even though he usually just tells people to eat more vegetables and to exercise every day. They often report back that they feel amazingly better and have lost several inches off their waistlines.

  Mrs. O’Malley sits on her back porch every evening and watches long-dead Iroquois Indians walk by single file, tomahawks in hand. They never speak to her, but she claims that their “energy vibrations” give her warrior strength. She’s sixty-five years old and runs a marathon twice a year. I have to admit that imparts a certain authority to this claim.

  Miss Robertson lives with nine cats, five dogs, three gerbils, and a rabbit. She specializes in contacting the spirits of dead pets. Even in the afterlife, she reports, cats are standoffish, dogs are devoted, and gerbils speak nothing but nonsense. She refuses to channel rabbits because, she says, “they have only one thing on their minds, and I prefer to focus on more elevated topics.”

  Truthfully, I would love to live in a boring suburb where kids play soccer, dads grill hamburgers on the weekend, and moms divide their time between high-powered corporate jobs and PTA meetings. Still, I must admit that there are some good things about growing up in Lily Dale. You learn to be open to the mysterious and the unexplained. You learn not to judge people as nuts until you’ve known them for years. Then, even if you decide they are nuts, you realize that you already like them, so that’s okay.

  But even if Lily Dale had its good points, I knew that I didn’t want the life that my family had planned for me here. Their dream was that I would discover my psychic ability, join the family business, and settle down to many years of buying clothes at thrift stores, worrying about the electric bill, and having everyone in the outside world think that I was seriously weird.

  That was most emphatically not the future I wanted.

  I wanted a world that was bigger than Lily Dale and a life that was absolutely ordinary in every way. And I was determined to have both.

  I woke up late on my birthday and wandered down to the kitchen, yawning, at noon. My mother is n
ormally far too distracted to cook (or at least to cook without setting the dish towels on fire). However, for each of our birthdays, she rises early, concentrates fiercely, and produces our favorite breakfasts without incident. As I walked into the kitchen, still blinking the sleep from my eyes, she greeted me with a floury kiss on the cheek and a smile that made her deep brown eyes crinkle warmly.

  “Happy birthday, Sparrow,” she said happily. “What a wonderful morning! I feel quite certain that today is going to be a most auspicious day!”

  “Thanks, Mom.” I smiled and sat down to a plate of blueberry pancakes. Every year my mother tells each of us, her voice trembling with thrilling conviction, that she can sense that our birthday is a “most auspicious” day. We tease her about it, but we all would be very upset if she ever forgot to say it. It’s the only day that I can count on feeling that my life is going to be completely fabulous in every way.

  After breakfast I walked to the lake and spent the afternoon swimming and lying in the shade, reading. That evening we gathered to eat my favorite dinner (pot roast and potato pancakes). For the finale, Wren proudly carried my birthday cake into the dining room and set it down on the table with a flourish.

  “Ta-da!” she said as triumphantly as if she had traversed the Antarctic to deliver it.

  Actually, crossing a polar landscape might have presented less of a challenge; at least there wouldn’t be as much to trip over. Tonight, for example, Wren had to dodge Mordred, our one-eyed malevolent tabby cat, who kept weaving between her feet in a deliberate attempt to trip her. She had to step over a pile of laundry that someone (I suspect Lark) had left on the floor. And she had to squeeze by the battered old piano, grandfather clock, and three end tables that had been pushed against the wall to make room for last night’s reading.

  I saw a faint flicker out of the corner of my eye, caught a whiff of nutmeg, and knew that Floyd had joined us. I glanced casually to my right. He gave me a little wave as my family, oblivious to his presence, chatted on.

  Well, I guess there is some truth to that old saying about the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. At least, I’m the only person in my family who can see ghosts anywhere, at any time. My mother and Grandma Bee can also see spirits, but it usually requires great concentration and focus. None of my sisters has ever seen a manifestation (a source of much sorrow for Oriole, Dove, and Wren and a matter of true indifference for Lark and Linnet, while Raven claims bitterly and unconvincingly not to care a bit).