by Phoef Sutton
Click. Gone. No room to maneuver. Me sitting there listening to a dial tone. How many times had that happened?
Yellow light filled the kitchen as I looked around, seeing it with new eyes. She was here, I knew. The Good Mother. She was always here; had always been here. Comforting me. Let her comfort me now, I thought. Let her show herself and tell me what to do.
Of course, she didn’t show herself. Of course, I felt no reassurance.
I looked at the clock. Almost 6:30. Mrs. Day would just be getting up, I thought. Without conscious thought, I knew she was the only one who could offer me any help.
I took the time to make myself a scrambled egg for breakfast, somehow sensing that I was going to need my strength for what lay ahead. Seven-thirty was as long as I could make myself wait. I grabbed a coat and headed out the door just as Neil’s truck pulled up and you and your mother bounded out, all laughter and sleepy smiles.
“We stayed in a motel with room service!” you cried, a four-year-old convert to the high life.
Charlotte took my arm with a conspiratorial grin. “How did things go?”
“You mean before or after I scared the hell out of her and made her think I was a total lunatic?”
“Before.”
“Before that it was great. I think I’m in love.”
I socked Neil one in the arm for good luck, climbed into my Mustang, and pulled away, leaving you all staring at me.
Mrs. Day was putting her older kid on the school bus when I drove up. I let the bus pull away before I pulled up to the curb.
She finished waving good-bye before she glanced down through my window. “The little ones are with my sister, so we have some time. I’m thinking you need some pie,” she said.
“Why me?”
“Why not you?”
“I didn’t ask for this.”
“Maybe you did.”
Mrs. Day sat back, the smell of flour and buttered toast surrounding her like the perfect perfume. “I’m going to throw a lot of ideas at you. If you don’t believe any of them, that’s okay. What’s true for me might not be true for you. Okay?”
I thought about that. “Is this going to be, like, cosmology, meaning of life, nature of the universe stuff?”
She smiled. “Yeah, that stuff.”
“Then, no, it’s not okay. I mean, something like that, you can’t just shop around for it. You can’t just pick and choose. My universal truth can’t be different from your universal truth.”
“Why not?”
“Because my universe can’t be different from your universe.”
“Why not?”
“Because there can’t be more than one universe.”
“Why not?”
“Well, fine, you can just say ‘why not’ to everything like that means something, like that’s profound, but it doesn’t answer the question. I mean, last time I was here you were the one who was talking about only believing in what you can see. Now you’re getting all vague and fuzzy on me.”
She dropped her wise smile, and I think she took my objections seriously for the first time. “Oh, I never want to be that. Before I was talking about what you can see, but now I’m talking about what it means, and that’s a lot harder to pin down.” She thought for a moment. “All right, maybe there is only one truth, if that’s what you want to call it. But there are many paths to that truth. And your path might be different from mine. Does that way of putting it suit you better?”
I thought it over. “I don’t know. I was brought up agnostic, you know? To believe all Ways lead to folly.”
She nodded. “I’m just saying this is a system of life that works for me. And it might help you. Do you want me to go on?”
“Sure. Shoot.”
“I believe our souls experience many lifetimes in many different bodies.”
“Okay.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I believe you believe that. Go on.”
She smiled again, letting me know I hadn’t offended her. “I believe this soul never stops growing, never stops learning. It never stops striving for perfection.”
“And when it succeeds?”
“I don’t think it ever does.”
“That I do believe.”
“I don’t mean that cynically. Growth is a constant state. It’s what being is all about.”
“Okay.”
“Now, every time we come into a new life it’s in order to learn. To grow in some new way. That’s the purpose of life.”
“Oh, is that it?”
“This seems funny to you?”
“I don’t know, it’s just that people have been looking for the meaning of life forever, and I think it’s a little funny for me to find it in a kitchen in Fox Island.”
“Where else? And I said purpose, not meaning.”
“You did. Go on.”
“Now, in order to learn what we need to learn, each life presents us with certain tasks, certain obstacles, certain ordeals. That’s why we are the way we are. That’s why what happens to us happens to us.”
“So, it’s all laid out in advance?”
“Not at all. A path is open to us, but we don’t have to take it. We may go off another way altogether.”
“But then we don’t learn what we’re supposed to learn?”
“Maybe not. Then we just try again in another lifetime.”
“Sounds easy.”
“If you let it be. Usually, it’s anything but.”
“So, according to this theory, it’s a part of my life’s plan to see spooks?”
“Spooks. I like that. It’s so much friendlier than ghosts.” She smiled as if we were discussing kittens. “You want to know why you can see spirits when other people can’t—is that what you’re asking?”
“That’s what I’m asking, yeah.”
“I believe that before we come into a new incarnation, we agree to take on certain things. Some of these are burdens. Some of these are talents. Some of them are both. Either way, we take them on to help us accomplish what we need to in this life.”
“And I agreed to be a medium?”
“That’s what I believe.”
“Why would I be such a schmuck as to agree to that?”
She chuckled. “I don’t know if it makes you a smuck,” she couldn’t quite pronounce the word; not a lot of Yiddish slang was used in Maine. “Can I speak from my own experience?”
“Please do.”
“I have some awareness of my previous incarnations.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“Because I’m a crackpot?”
“I didn’t say that. Were you, uh, Cleopatra? Queen Elizabeth? Empress Josephine? Why is it no one was ever a nobody in their past life?”
“I was. Just peasants and poor people. No one who mattered much. Not in the way you mean, anyway. One of them was a boy who died in the Civil War. I was running away during the Battle of the Wilderness and got shot in the back. I felt so guilty, so bad about dying that way, I couldn’t let go of my life. I became trapped between worlds. That’s what a ghost is. Someone so caught up in the unfinished business of life that they can’t cross over. They cling desperately to all the same hates, all the same worries. The same patterns and prejudices.”
I thought of Mr. Meloni and his ‘pick ’em up, faggot’ and felt a new sense of sympathy for the guy.
“Of course, you can’t grow in that state,” she went on. “You can’t learn. You’re stuck, which is the worst thing that can happen to anyone. It’s like being in that horrible place at the end of a bad dream when you can’t move, can’t scream, can’t make yourself wake up. And it’s like being there forever.”
The pain in her expression was so real, I couldn’t help but feel she was speaking from personal experience, and I didn’t even notice that I was believing her.
“How did you get out of it?” I asked.
“Someone helped me. Someone like me. Someone like you. A medium listened to my pain and
helped me pass to the other side. So, when I came to this life, I agreed to help other…spooks. It’s a part of my path. I’m here to be of service.”
“And that’s why I’m here, too?”
“I wouldn’t presume to say. But one of the reasons you’re here must be to help those poor lost ones.”
Lost ones. I thought of Jellica.
“So, what do I do? How do I help them cross over? Buy a Junior Exorcist Kit?”
“No,” she didn’t even laugh. “You work through what they’re working through. That’s why you can feel what they’re feeling. If you let it in, if you allow yourself to know whatever is trapping them, if you face that and take it into your heart, then they can do the same. And once you face something, you understand it. And then you can let it go.”
“I have to say, on the one hand this kind of makes sense, but on the other hand it sounds like the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard.”
“Of course. Because it’s absurd. It’s the meaning of life in a kitchen on Fox Island. Take it or leave it.” Her smile was open and full of love. It made my heart weak.
“I’m sorry, I just can’t believe this,” I said.
“I know you can’t. I think not believing is one of the main things you have to work through in this life.” She took my hand. “You’ve been in turmoil for a long time, haven’t you?”
I rolled my eyes. “I wouldn’t say turmoil.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
“Turmoil, okay.”
“Because you’ve been trying to be something you’re not. Or worse, you’re trying not to be something you are. You’ve been on the wrong path, and it’s led you nowhere. When that happens, sometimes, if you’re lucky, your path reaches out to you. It sends you a jolt, a shock, to wake you up, to bring you back in line. That’s what’s been happening to you now. You can ignore it if you want; you can just go on the way you’re going. But if you do, all this will just happen again. And it’ll keep happening until you listen.”
“To what?”
“To yourself.”
Fair enough. I tried to listen to the voices in my head. Problem was, as always, there was more than one voice. The first one believed everything she said and felt a wild sense of exhilaration at having my whole life explained. The other voice said it was all wish-fulfillment and cheap New Age claptrap. How was I to know which voice spoke for my true self? I decided to bring this down to specifics.
“All right, Mrs. Day, let’s just say this is true. Let’s just say I have this power and I’m supposed to put these spirits to rest. What do I do about it? I can only see them when I’m sick or heartbroken.”
“They come to you at those times because that’s when you’re most distracted; that’s when your defenses are down. But that’s not an issue now. Your defenses are gone.”
“That’s a scary thought.”
She touched my face gently. “Don’t worry. You’re equipped to handle this.”
I felt a rush of adrenaline, a powerful sense of elation and happiness. I think they call it an epiphany; a sense that the truth was right there waiting to be grasped. Well, can you blame me? If you’re a wanderer like me (and I hope that’s one way, at least, we are not alike), if you’ve felt lost and without direction most of your life, to hear someone say in calm gentle tones ‘this is who you were meant to be’ is a powerful thing. Almost like a dream or a drug. Like winning the lottery. One feels for a frightened heartbeat that this could be it—the answer, the end to the anxiety, the key to peace of mind.
But, of course, the feeling was gone as soon as I felt it, replaced by my usual state of disappointment and distrust. How could it be so easy as this? How could it be in front of me for the taking?
Still, Mrs. Day was a kind, lovely person, and I didn’t want to disappoint her. I came to my feet, ready to at least go through the motions. “All right, I guess I’ll give it a try.”
She gave me a quizzical look, and I realized she was one of those annoying women you couldn’t get anything by. “What are you afraid will happen if you allow yourself to hope, Sam?”
It stumped me. I hadn’t thought of it quite that way, which I suppose was why she’d asked it that way. “I guess I’m afraid I’ll be disappointed.”
“So, what’s new in that?”
It made me laugh, though I’m not sure she meant it as a joke. It relaxed me enough to carry me with her out to the barn and to wonder as I walked if keeping hope out of my life was really such a sound strategy.
In the winter daylight, with the bleak sun making diagonal slashes of swirling dust around us, the museum looked far more haunted than it had the night before.
“How many spooks do you see here?” I asked Emily.
“None. I’ve cleared them all.”
“Then what am I supposed to see here?”
“Oh, I’ve cleared my spooks. I don’t know about yours.”
“I have my own?”
“Of course. You see, in my experience, spirits don’t haunt places. They haunt people. They attach themselves to people with similar weaknesses to their own. As if they believe, by connecting themselves to you, they can continue to live. By latching on to your weakness, maybe they can learn the lesson they meant to learn in their own lives.
“The danger to you is, they can also end up amplifying your weaknesses. If a spook attaches itself to, say, a quality of indecisiveness about you, if it clings to it stubbornly, then you end up even more indecisive. Indecisive for two, as it were. Have you ever sensed anything like that?”
I laughed, and the sound startled something scrabbling in some dry papers off in the corner—a shivery sound in a cold room.
“I should ask Maggie how she does it. Does this thing run in families?”
“It can.”
“Well, it must have skipped a few generations before me and Maggie, that’s all I can say.”
“Why’s that?”
“The Kehoes are a very rational family. On both sides. No Salem witches in the family tree.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. My mother would never have allowed it.”
Mrs. Day sat down in an old bent willow chair that looked like some thorny torture device. “Tell me about your first ghost, Sam.”
So, I settled onto an old, monstrously uncomfortable horsehair sofa and started to tell her the story of Mr. Meloni and the Dodge Ball game.
“No, your first,” she said.
“That’s it. That’s the first one I remember.”
“Maybe that’s just the first one you’ve chosen to remember.”
I hate it when people presume to tell me things about myself that I know perfectly well aren’t true. “Same difference.”
“There wasn’t an incident when you were very young? When you were Maggie’s age?”
“Ask me all you want, the answer’s not going to change.”
“You said you used to have night terrors. That your mother used to open the door and show you there was nothing there. Was there nothing there?”
“Absolutely. I was just a kid afraid of the dark.”
“But what was in the closet before your mother opened the door?”
“I don’t know. Whatever all kids have in their closets, you know? Monsters. The Bogey Man.”
“What does the Bogey Man look like?”
“I don’t know. He’s big with a scratchy beard and a red face and a big weird laugh.”
“Sounds like Santa Claus.”
“Well, Santa Claus is scary enough, isn’t he?”
“Is he?”
“Man, I wish you’d stop that.”
“Why is that?”
“All right, okay, when I was a kid I was afraid of Santa Claus, okay? It just struck me as very troubling, this fat old man breaking into my house and sneaking around at night. And my family were all terrible liars, too, so when they told me the story, I knew they were holding something out o
n me. This St. Nick character was not all he was cracked up to be. Maybe that’s why I liked ghost stories at Christmas; they weren’t nearly as scary as that damned jolly old elf.
“Also, when I was really little, my weird Uncle Willie used to dress up as Santa and just creep all us kids out. He was this smelly, fat old drunk, and my mother hated him.”
“Was he her brother or your father’s?”
“Hers. That’s the only reason she put up with him. God, he used to stink of this awful mix of, I don’t know, whiskey and male sweat and whatever chemical he kept that moth-eaten red suit packed up in the rest of the year. He’d grab us kids and throw us around—why do grown-ups think kids like being manhandled like that?—and hold us in his lap a little too long, if you know what I mean? I used to just bolt out of the room as soon as he let me go, and I’d hide down in the rec room behind the heater. I mean, I didn’t know what was wrong with this guy, but I knew something was wrong with him.”
“And when did your mother tell him to stop coming?”
“She didn’t.”
“But you said he only came when you were really little.”
“Well, he died. When I was about four. I’m surprised I even remember him.”
“Did he die before the Bogey Man started showing up?”
I gave her a look. “So, you’re saying that was Uncle Willie in the closet?”
“I don’t know. I just want to know what you saw when your mother opened the door. I want to know what she saw.”
I don’t have revelations very often. It’s not every day I get that feeling of revealed truth knocking my feet out from under me and sending me pratfalling to the floor. I felt it then. An obvious, simple thought that rang through my head and echoed back through all the years of my life.
She saw him. She saw the Bogey Man.
I sat up in bed, hollering in stupid fear at what I knew was behind that door, and my mother stormed in, snapped on the light, wrenched open the door, and he was there. She saw him. And she stared him down. Stared into his wandering, rheumy eyes until they blinked and turned away, until his big shape cowed and shrank. Then she turned to me and said, “See, there’s nothing there.”