by Phoef Sutton
“Gawd,” said Melody, “that’s amazing.”
“What did he want you to forgive him for?” Angela asked, still skeptical.
“That’s the mystery,” I said.
They asked if I’d ever seen anything else like that, and I shrugged, as if in modest reluctance to tell all my marvelous stories.
“What if you’re, like, a medium?” Melody asked. “What if you have a real gift?”
She was praising me, and her finger was still touching mine, and I was tingling all over with rapture. I caught Charlotte’s eye, and even she seemed intrigued. They were all treating me like I was something special. I wasn’t used to being special; the sensation was intoxicating.
“You’re not shitting us, little brother?”
“I saw him,” I said.
“Well, let’s see what else you can come up with,” Angela said.
“Yeah, little brother, show us some spooks,” Charlotte said with a laugh; we called them “spooks” from then on.
I swallowed nervously. Were they expecting me to perform now? Was I going to have to follow this up with some new apparition? Was I going to have to live a lie for the rest of my life just to keep that look of admiration in Melody’s eyes? It seemed worth it.
The first half-hour went like any teenage Ouija-board session. The glass slid from letter to letter, with everyone laughing and denying that they were the one doing the pushing. I knew only that I wasn’t doing the leading, but I imagine no one thought they were; they were all following little gestures from the others and pushing the glass together. You see, I’ve always been a skeptic, too.
So, we communicated through the board with the usual cast of Shakespeare and Amelia Earhart and Abe Lincoln, and it all seemed like harmless fun until Angela reminded them that they had a real medium on their hands and couldn’t they do much better? There was some laughing now and some teasing, and just when it looked like it was going to die down and be forgotten, Melody had to speak up for me. “I bet he could do it if he really tried.”
Was she mocking me or defending me or a little of both? It didn’t matter; there was only one way to save my dignity either way.
I closed my eyes and tried to get in touch with the Other Side, ignoring the fact that I didn’t believe there was another side. I summoned all my energy to contact someone, anyone, over there. No use. It was like trying to make myself cry or force a sneeze.
I looked and saw all those beautiful eyes staring at me. I was going to end up humiliated, a laughingstock. How could a good night have gone this wrong? But I could still save myself. They were all half-kidding anyway, weren’t they? Why couldn’t I kid along? Why couldn’t I loll my head back and start speaking in voices and do the whole routine, like I’d seen in a hundred movies from Blithe Spirit to The Legend of Hell House?
I closed my eyes tight, till the blood pounded and my head started to throb. I moaned once, just to see if I could do it without bursting out laughing. The girls giggled; I didn’t. I kept going.
“Who has disturbed my rest?” I asked, in as deep a James Earl Jones voice as I could muster.
The girls really cracked up now. If I could keep playing this angle, somewhere between reality and camp, I just might get out of this.
“Who are you?” Charlotte asked.
“Vincent Kehoe.” A dead ancestor from the Ould Sod seemed a good bet. “Dead these many years.”
“What’s it like?” Lyn asked, laughing.
I gave another moan. “Some things are just not meant to be known.”
“Your brother’s a nutcase,” Angela said. The other girls poo-pooed her for spoiling the fun, and I peeked enough to see her slump back in her chair, muttering, “This is stupid,” her mantra.
“Who did you wish to speak with?” I said, wishing I hadn’t sounded so much like a switchboard operator.
“Elvis,” said Jamie. “I want to know if he’s really dead.”
“Or Jim Morrison!” Lyn said.
“Or Marilyn Monroe!” Jamie said.
“Or President Kennedy!” Charlotte said.
“Or Melody’s father!” This was Angela. The room gasped. Melody snatched her hand away from the glass. My eyes flew open just enough to see the look of glittering satisfaction in Angela’s eyes. I shut my eyes, hoping no one had seen me cheat.
“Angela, you are such a cunt,” Charlotte said.
“What?” Angela protested in mock innocence. “If he can really do it…”
“Let’s stop this,” Lyn said.
“No,” said Charlotte. “We were having fun. There’s no reason to stop having fun just because of Angela. Vincent, are you still here?”
I had an easy way out; I could say the circle had been broken. But, like Charlotte, I wanted to get back to the fun.
“Yes. To whom do you wish to speak?”
“How ’bout John Lennon?”
“I will see if I can contact him.” I let my head drop. The pounding in my skull was much worse, not helped by the tension of the last few moments. I tried to clear my head, tried to remember what a Liverpool accent sounded like, but I was distracted by the awareness that someone was standing behind me. Watching me. I wondered which of the girls had left the circle, what prank they were trying to pull. I felt the figure move away from me, move toward Melody. Then I asked myself—how did I know where it was moving if it didn’t make a sound?
My eyes flew open. Melody’s father stood over her, in the cardigan sweater and flannel shirt I’d seen him wear the one time we’d met, when I stopped by her house and saw him watching a football game and dying by inches. My breath stopped in my throat. Melody’s father looked at me with pleading eyes. My hand was shaking; the glass was clattering on the table.
The girls were laughing again, but in a tight nervous way, as if the joke was going sour.
“Are you okay?” Charlotte asked.
Melody’s father stared at me. I felt anguish rush through my body. Deep, powerful, aching. Like no pain I had ever felt before. His lips trembled and he spoke, with a voice full of yearning. “Tell her I’m here.”
I blinked, my eyes feeling as dry as my throat. Melody was looking at me, too, with fear and concern.
“Why won’t you tell her?” Melody’s father moaned.
But every muscle was frozen, and I couldn’t make a sound. The man raised a bony finger and pointed it at me. “I want a kiss from my little angel,” he said.
I came out with a low whisper barely audible to anyone but Melody sitting right next to me. “He wants a kiss from his little angel.”
Melody flinched as if struck. She bolted to her feet and spit angry words at me. “You sick little jerk!” I knew she meant it, because she didn’t even bother to swear. She ran out the door, never to come back again.
The party was over, and from then on, to all of Charlotte’s friends, indeed to the whole school, I was a “sick little jerk,” either crazy or ghoulishly cruel or in touch with the devil or some combination of the three.
Whatever I had, it was not a gift.
And again, Maggie, I did not, could not, let myself believe it. I’d been asked to produce Melody’s father, so I had, out of my own memories and my own twisted brain. After all, why should this ghost be wearing the outfit he was wearing the one time I’d seen him in life?
And the delusions kept coming after that. Visions of spirits known and unknown, yelling at me, nagging at me, pleading with me. Not all the time. Usually only during periods of extreme emotional stress. Analysis didn’t help. CAT scans didn’t help. So, I bottled it all in, ignored the spooks when they came, and felt myself grow more and more isolated from the world around me.
Until they stopped coming.
I had gone without them for five years. That’s about the only positive thing I could say about the last five years. If they started coming back, it would be more than I could bear.
I turned away from the river and drove my loyal Mustang up the hill to Charlotte’s place. I parked in fro
nt of her little house. Two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, three baths, and a full basement. They didn’t make houses that small anymore. All the new ones they were building along the river and in the few patches of farmland that survived were huge $500,000 jobbies that nobody I knew could ever afford, certainly not the kids who’d grown up here. They had all moved into condos and townhouses, if they were lucky. And guys like the “I don’t like black and white movies” jerk-off from the video store would be the ones who would ultimately inherit these neighborhoods.
Them and the guy who owned the BMW parked in front of Charlotte’s house. I checked my watch, but it was a useless gesture, since I didn’t know when he’d gotten here and I didn’t know when he’d be leaving.
If I’d had a car phone, I’d have called her house just to hear her not answer. But I couldn’t afford a car phone, and if I could have afforded a car phone, I probably could have afforded a life, so I wouldn’t be spending my evenings spying on my sister.
No, not spying. Just coming to talk to her and politely waiting for her gentleman caller to leave. Politely waiting, since I didn’t have a high-powered rifle to take the asshole’s head off as he stepped out the door.
I fell asleep, then awoke with a start as Charlotte climbed in and slammed the door. “Are you spying on me?”
I shifted around and saw that the Beemer was gone. “Did Mr. Right leave?”
“Fuck you, okay? Let’s go pick up Maggie. She’s at her friend Jordan’s house.”
The radio blared as I started the car; I switched it off. “I thought you weren’t seeing the asshole anymore.”
“I am not seeing him, and he’s not an asshole. When will you see that he’s done the right thing through all of this?”
“The right thing? The right thing is not fucking around when you’re married.”
“I knew he was married.”
“The right thing is not fathering a child and then not even acknowledging her.”
“He always gives me money for Maggie when I need it. And besides, would you rather he hadn’t fathered her?”
Cheap shot. “No, of course not.”
“Well, he was never going to leave his wife; that was never in the cards. So, what was he supposed to do?”
“I don’t know. Something decent. Commit suicide?”
Charlotte laughed with surprising kindness. “I love it when you try to protect me, little brother, but some things just aren’t perfect.”
She’s a beautiful woman, your mother—is, was, will always be. Not that I could really see her beauty (what brother sees that in a sister?), but I could see it in the way men acted around her. Her blond hair, long legs, dazzling smile, and creamy white skin attracted men with disastrous enthusiasm. Ever since she began to bud at the cruelly young age of nine and a half, boys had phoned, followed, courted, and stalked her, lied to her in act and word, all in hope of gaining access to her beauty. The arbitrary fact of her appearance had affected the way the world treated her and the way she saw the world, so that now, at thirty, she was tired of the whole ride.
I drove on a block. “I don’t like it when you ask him for money.”
“I don’t like it either. Neither does he.”
“There’s something seedy about it. It’s like you’re blackmailing him or he’s—”
She turned to me. “Or he’s what? I don’t sleep with him for the money, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“But you do sleep with him?”
“Sometimes. We’re both lonely.”
“Well, if he’s so fucking lonely, why doesn’t he leave his wife?”
“It’s complicated.”
“It’s complicated, fine. Just tell me this, does he know you’re not sleeping with him for the money? Because if he thinks you are, that’s just as bad, isn’t it?”
“Shall I call him up and ask him?”
I sighed and turned onto Jordan’s street. What the hell gave me the right to tell her how to live her life? “We’re both a couple of freaks, Charlie.”
“Speak for yourself,” she said.
“I think we should go to the island,” I said.
Charlotte blinked at me, patronizingly. “The island?”
“For Christmas. We always talked about that.”
“You know how long it’s been since we were there?”
“I know exactly.”
A somber look came into Charlotte’s eyes; she banished it at once. “I got jobs lined up.”
“Come on, it’ll be good for us. Like going home. That was always the one place where we could think. Where we could figure things out. We need it now.”
“Maybe you do.”
I stopped the car. “Face it, our lives have been screwed up ever since Mom and Dad died.”
“My life is perfectly on track, thank you.”
“Did you call the asshole, or did he call you?”
“I called him. I wanted to ask his advice about Maggie’s school situation.”
“How long has it been since you’ve seen him?”
“About a year.”
“Was it nice to see each other?”
“He’s really a very charming guy, if you’d get to know him.”
“Damn it, Charlie, you’re letting him back into your life, can’t you see that? You’re like an alcoholic with this guy. One taste and you’re hooked again, letting him string you along, convince you this time is gonna be different. He’s gonna fuck up your life all over again.”
(Maybe I’m being too hard on the guy I hate to call your father. Maybe you’ve tracked him down and gotten to know him and you think he’s a real decent guy. God, I hope not.)
She gave me a hurt look, climbed out of the car, and slammed the door.
Fuck. I hurried after her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t even mean to bring up all this Big Picture stuff. I’m just talking about Christmas. The island. Maggie’s never been to Maine. She deserves a Christmas on the island.”
Charlotte stopped and turned to me, her face blotchy with tears. “You don’t really think he thought he could sleep with me because he gave me a check, do you?”
“God, of course not. Anybody who could think that about you would have to be such an asshole.”
“Which he is,” she laughed once, then started to cry harder. I grabbed her and hugged her tight, and she whispered to me, “We’re not really freaks, are we, Sammy?”
“No,” I told her, thinking they could open a carnival sideshow with me alone. “Of course we’re not.”
We left for Maine late that night, during the first snowfall of the year.
FIVE
It’s a mercy that school kids don’t realize that summer vacation is a cruel tease; that a morning will come when they are adults and they are rudely told that those blissful, unproductive months of idleness are to be no more; that they are expected to work year-round, with maybe a week or two off, until the day they retire or die or both.
It’s even worse for the children of university professors. Their parents have every summer off, even though they are at least technically grown-ups, so there is no reason to ever suspect the vicious switcheroo that lies in wait. Because of this, the Kehoe kids were able to go to paradise for two months out of every year, and we had no idea that one day we would be cast out for the simple sin of having to make a living.
Every summer, the Monday after the spring semester ended, Dad would wake us up before the first light, already nattily dressed in his knit tie with its always perfect four-in-hand knot, and tell us it was time to hit the road. My mother would already be out in the driveway, packing the car with mathematical precision, filling the station wagon to its maximum volume.
(I still can’t reconcile myself to the fact that you never met Mom and Dad; will never meet them. You’d have laughed just to see them. Dad, short and round, with gray hair and a tiny mustache. Mom, tall and thin, with gray hair and no mustache. They looked like the king and queen from Alice in Wonderland.) We’d all help cramm
ing in the last of the luggage, books, toys, and whatever pet had survived the winter, and start the drive up to Maine. Since summer days were precious, we would make it without stopping, driving all night, Mom and Dad taking shifts behind the wheel. Later on, Charlotte would drive, too, and George, and finally even me, with my learner’s permit sweaty in my shirt pocket and Mom nervous and wideeyed beside me.
Bleary-eyed, reeking of sweat and fast food, we would climb out at the ferry landing in Rockland, make a mad dash for the bathroom, and buy our round-trip tickets for the ferry boat to Fox Island. To rolling meadows of wild-flowers, to rocky beaches strewn with lost buoys and starfish and the occasional carcass of a dead seal, to twisting broken roads just made for a swiftly cruising bicycle, to old men perfumed of fish sitting on bustling docks and telling lies, to summer personified.
All of this I wanted to give to you, Maggie. And to give back to your mother and to myself.
We picked up 95 from the Beltway, following the old route north, knowing it so well that glances at the map were a formality. We’d always been Summer People, so we’d never made the trip in winter before, on icy roads and snow. December in Virginia that year had been mild, chilly but clear—jacket weather. With every hour we traveled further into winter so that by nightfall we were in the thick of it, wheels gliding over ice or spinning in gray slush, wipers fighting a losing battle to clear the windshield of splattered freezing rain, headlights illuminating the twirling ice drops and reflecting them back into my eyes.
“We ought to stop,” Charlotte said.
You were snoring in the back, strapped into that car seat you always hated, your head rolling back on the belly of Mr. Tee, your soft Gund teddy bear. Nothing on the radio but talk shows, so I plugged in a tape I’d made back in college expressly for this drive, filled with incongruous summer songs. “Folks come driftin’ round the bend, why must summer ever end?” Louis Armstrong sang to Dave Brubeck’s piano, while the windows fogged up and I tried to punch the defroster back to life.
Once we’d grown up, what with summer jobs and college and all, it had been harder and harder to make the trips to the island and the house on the Thorofare. But we were an unusually close family and always made it together for at least a week or so. The yearly reunion on the island was the beacon in our lives, the one steady element in the roiling sea of young adulthood.