The Return

by Margaret Guthrie

The five little girls gathered around the round table where the promised cookies and lemonade waited. Lydia had something else for them also. She had found, upon more investigation of the shed, a small suitcase with magic articles, including some metal links that came apart, a cup and dice, a scarf, a plastic egg with a hole, and a couple of books describing magic tricks. She didn’t remember where they came from, but Margie said it was their father’s from when he was a child. She remembered him trying come tricks on her when she was little, but it hadn’t lasted. Just a passing interest, she suggested to Lydia.

  Lydia poured lemonade into glasses and passed them around. Meagan gave her a shy thank you and retreated to the seat near the radiators under the windows. Amber gave a whispered thanks and embarrassed giggle and sat next to Meagan. Red-headed Robin gave Lydia a smile that might have been sincere and sat next to Amber on the other side and next to her, almost cuddling up as if she were asking to be the favorite. Tanya and Jennifer helped themselves to cookies and finished the circle, Tanya on the other side of Lydia, Jennifer between Meagan and Tanya.

  “Are these things for the treasure hunt?” Tanya asked, reaching out and picking up the three metal rings that were hooked together. They clanged noisily and she put them down.

  “Things to choose from,” Lydia clarified. “I haven’t read this magic book but it seems to describe some simple tricks that we could learn maybe.” Lydia wasn’t really that interested, except in learning how those rings came apart. Otherwise, it seemed like a lot of work. But for now it was a point of interest. In sitting Lydia was not much taller than the girls. She felt a bit like Alice in Wonderland with her tea guests, so unused she was to children. But as the children kept their hands busy with food or testing magic items she relaxed a little.

  “What’s it like to be a ghost?” Tanya asked, looking at Lydia as if she were the expert. There were no teasing twinkles this time.

  Lydia laughed, made a wry face. Was she going to have to come up with a rational answer? “Not being one, I don’t really know,” she said. “But it might be uncomfortable and, uh, frustrating, not having a body to talk through. What do you think it would be like, Tanya?” Lydia recalled the little ‘communication’ she had received from Dale from the other side, about rays and insubstantial bodies, but she wasn’t about to bring that up.

  “I think being a ghost would be fun,” Robin piped up. “You could be around and hear what people said about you when they didn’t think you were there.” She was lining up the small paper cups and sponge ball that were one of the magic tricks, in front of her.

  “What if they said something about you that you didn’t like and that wasn’t true?” Amber asked, a worried expression crossing her usually cheerful face.

  “And you couldn’t even talk back,” Meagan added. She had taken three cookies and was carefully nibbling around the edge of one of them.

  “You could pick something up and throw it at them,” suggested Robin, picking up the little sponge and pretending to throw it. “That’d let them know you were there.”

  “But if you were invisible they wouldn’t know who you were,” exclaimed Amber, her giggle gone.

  “Yeah, so what fun would that be?” asked Tanya. She drank some lemonade and set the glass down so hard the lemonade splashed up and over the rim. “I’m sorry,” she apologized. Lydia got a wet rag and wiped up the sticky excess.

  “So, then why are there ghosts?” Amber asked, before Lydia had sat down again. “I don’t think I want to be a ghost.”

  “What makes a ghost?” Meagan asked, her round eyes on Lydia.

  They all looked at her now, even Jennifer who hadn’t spoken a word but whose attention had been keen. Lydia remained standing, silently calling on her backup team to help her come up with a satisfying answer, if possible.

  “So you all think there are ghosts?” Lydia said as she sat down, again one of the group. “Have you seen something that makes you think you’ve seen a ghost?” Perhaps they’d expand on what they had said at church.

  “Well, my brother said so,” Tanya said. “He used to tell me all the time that I better watch out or the bugger man would get me.”

  “He was just teasing,” said Jennifer, giving Tanya a sullen glower. “Josh and Duane were always teasing us, Tanya. They wanted to scare you.”

  “I believe it was your mother that said the same thing, right?” Lydia reminded Tanya. Tanya scowled and concentrated on examining the scarf and egg, poking it into the little hole she found.

  “Josh and Duane are your older brothers?” Lydia asked for clarification. She hadn’t remembered their names being mentioned before.

  “Yeah,” Tanya answered. “And I’m glad they’re gone.”

  “They’re in boarding school,” Jennifer explained. “Getting a little discipline.” It sounded like a direct quote from a mother. Jennifer was now examining the rings, twisting them this way and that. “I hope they get it, too, the big jerks. We couldn’t even touch their precious basketball without getting yelled at. Dad put up a basketball hoop out by the garage, and they said it was just for them. But it wasn’t.”

  “So they made up ghost stories?” Lydia asked.

  “Well, those people got murdered right by the boys lockers, didn’t they? Boys always brought that up. Oh, oh, look out, he’s coming down the stairs, he’s coming in the locker room. They’d reach out their arms and act crazy.” Jennifer didn’t seem to realize ‘those people’ were Lydia’s parents. Or did she say it on purpose. Lydia sensed the anger in the girl, sensed she might be unconsciously taking it out on her. She apparently hadn’t had a chance to do much with it, give it a proper expression.

  “And who were they talking about?” Lydia asked from where she was rinsing out the dishrag at the sink. She hung it up to dry, then walked back to the table.

  “The murderer. Jennifer’s dead uncle,” Tanya said, daring a sly look at Jennifer, then up at Lydia.

  “I’m confused,” Lydia said, her hand on the back of her chair, not quite ready to sit down. “Why would your brothers be talking about something they knew nothing about? something that happened before they were ever born?” Lydia took the cookie plate, filled it up and came back, placing it on the table. The silence that had followed her was settling in, getting uncomfortable.

  Tanya broke the silence with a big drawn out “Wellll, they kept hearing about it from bigger boys,” Tanya said, a bit defensively.

  “Oh, I see,” Lydia said as she slowly sat down. “It was a story that got passed down from big boys to little boys, and when the big boys graduated, the little boys became the big boys who passed on the stories to little sisters. I guess murder isn’t something that happens around here very often.” She reached for a cookie and bit into it, a bit dazed at the way the conversation was going.

  “Josh always hated it when they talked about his dead uncle,” Tanya said. “It made him mad when Duane, he’s my brother, would laugh with them when they tried to act spooky.” She sneaked a look at Jennifer, who was engrossed with the metal rings.

  “Sounds like those two boys had some issues,“ Lydia said. “Compe-tition, maybe? Trying to be liked by their friends? Seeing who could make up the most frightening story?”

  Tanya was busy twisting the scarf into a little ball and not looking at anyone. Jennifer looked unhappy, her lips tightly pressed together, her hands clanging the metal rings in frustration.

  “I’m sure sorry about that,” Lydia said. “I guess that made you both pretty uncomfortable.”

  “Yeah,” Tanya admitted. “Jennifer takes it too seriously.” She smiled up at Lydia, as if wanting her approval. A curious girl, Lydia thought. The wise protector, or savior. And competitor.

  Suddenly the rings Jennifer had been playing with came apart and she gasped. “How’d that happen?” she asked. Immediately, Tanya leaned over and looked at the separated rings. Lydia suggested they pass it around for all
to take a look.

  “We’ll have to read the book, girls,” she said. “We’ll learn that trick and then show it to your brothers on their next visit home. How would that be?” The suggestion met with enthusiastic ‘yeahs’.

  “So what happens to dead people?” Meagan asked as the metal clanked in her hands. Lydia realized her original question hadn’t been answered, but the new topic seemed to be of immediate interest.

  “They go to heaven,” Robin answered. Her cookie had crumbled and she wiped her hands on the large paper napkin Lydia had given each of them.

  “Or hell,” Amber whispered and giggled again, her mood apparently returned to normal.

  “But what’s it like to be dead?” Meagan insisted, her voice rising in frustration. She put the rings down and pushed them to the middle of the table.

  “It’s like going to sleep, only you never wake up.” Robin answered.

  “Does an angel take them to heaven?” Meagan was really puzzled.

  “Unless they become a ghost.” Tanya said.

  “All right, all right,” Lydia exclaimed. “Let’s see if we can understand something here. It’s true we all have energy, right?” The girls nodded.

  “And energy itself can’t be seen. Just like electricity. We just see the result of energy.” The girls were all attention. “OK, so most people leave their body when they die and go to an astral plane, which some call heaven. Did you ever hear about heaven having many mansions?”

  They nodded.

  “Well, that means our spirit, when it leaves the body, goes to whatever energy, or ‘mansion,’ it’s most familiar with. If in this body you’re used to being kind and good, you’ll go to a ‘mansion’ where there are other people like you. If you are grouchy and mean, your ‘mansion’ will have people like that. At least, that’s one way of thinking about heaven,” Lydia explained. “But then,” she continued, “there are some people who die in a terrible way, like being murdered, and their energy isn’t ready to let go of the body. So maybe some of that energy is left hanging around in this world trying to figure out what happened to it. That’s when we get a ghost. And hopefully, when there’s an energy around like that we can help them move on. Because maybe they can hear us and know what we are saying. So if we say things that this energy can understand, maybe we can get it to release itself and go on into the light, into a higher purpose.” Lydia felt exhausted, and didn’t know whether her long speech had any meaning to these ten and eleven year olds. Still, they were asking some profound questions that must have puzzled them for a long time. Maybe they needed release, too.

  “My mother’s dead,” Jennifer said, startling Lydia again. She remembered Pearl saying Jennifer’s birth mother was in the east somewhere. She looked at Jennifer quizzically.

  Tanya noticed and said “She means her real mother went off to school.”

  “But she never writes or anything. She might as well be dead.” Jennifer had taken up the book and was looking at it idly, flipping its pages, staring at some of the pictures.

  Lydia put a gentle hand on her shoulder, uncertain whether the child would allow it. But there was no resistance so she left it there awhile. Then she got up and offered the children more lemonade. She spoke as she went around the table. “We never know all the circumstances that make people do what they do, do we?” she asked.

  “What’s circumstances?” Robin asked.

  “The stuff the other person is involved in, the things happening around them. Or what they’re thinking, how they might be hurting.” Lydia put the pitcher back on the counter near the sink. Sid wandered in and meowed as if asking what she was up to, why all these people around the table? He went to the wiggling fingers of Amber and started licking. She giggled.

  “But if she weren’t dead, she’d write, wouldn’t she? Doesn’t she love me?” Jennifer didn’t look at anyone, just the book.

  “Ah, it’s love we want, isn’t it?” Lydia asked. “Everyone wants to be loved. But sometimes, it’s just hard to love. And sometimes, it’s hard to see that we really are loved.” Lydia wanted to think of something to illustrate what she was trying to say but not coming up with anything.

  “Sid loves me,” Amber offered. “He’s purring.”

  “Sid loves just about everybody,” Lydia said, smiling. “But if someone hurts him, or does something he doesn’t like, he won’t purr for you.”

  “My dad’s afraid of death,” Jennifer said, again startling Lydia. “He says we shouldn’t talk about ghosts and dead people. It makes him nervous.”

  “Yes, I can imagine,” Lydia said. “Your father...” she paused, wondering about correcting that to grandfather but decided to let it go. “...has had some bad experiences.”

  “He needs an angel,” Meagan offered. “An angel to take his hand when he’s scared.”

  “You can be an angel, Jennifer,” Robin said. “Mom says we can all be angels. She calls me one sometimes.”

  “You’re right, you know. We can all be kind and thoughtful and take someone’s hand sometimes. I bet you do that anyway, Jennifer,” Lydia suggested.

  “He doesn’t like to be touched,” she replied.

  “Well, soft words sometimes work. A ‘love you, dad,’ once in awhile. Bringing him a cup of coffee or something when you see he might want one.” Lydia thought how Margie always seemed to know when Uncle Ted or Aunt Nora needed something and got it for them. It was a real knack, something Margie had learned that she seemed to lack. But she was thinking. If her mother was listening right now, wouldn’t she think maybe it was love she wanted, too? These little girls yearned to know what made suffering, in the now and the hereafter. Maybe it was all a matter of loving. Maybe love was the cue to release all of us from our suffering.

  “She does that,” Tanya said. “But her dad doesn’t seem to notice.”

  “Oh, you never know, girls. I bet he does, just doesn’t show it. Some people are like that. We just love them, anyway.” She thought of the man who had laid spring blooms on the graves of his mother and brother. A man who didn’t say much about what he felt inside. Lydia clapped her hands. “So. Have you chosen anything for the treasure hunt? How about the egg with the scarf hidden inside? Then afterward, when you all come to the gym to have refreshments you can show the two boys and the 6th grade how to make the scarf appear? and disappear?” Lydia felt mischievous for a moment. And the girls were getting restless. Such a long, serious conversation she had never imagined.

  Tanya said the egg would do just fine, and the others agreed. “Thanks for the cookies and lemonade, Miss Kinnen,” she said, her smile not like the cockiness which Lydia remembered from that first day in Pearl’s class.

  “When can we come learn the magic tricks?” Robin asked.

  Lydia shrugged. “Better wait until I’ve read the book and figured some out. I’ll let you know.”

  It was past the noon hour when the girls left. The grounds were quiet. Lydia decided to walk over and explain to Pearl why her class didn’t come in on time. How would she accept the explanation that they were discussing death and the hereafter?

  Chapter 16