A Certain Slant of Light

by Laura Whitcomb

  “Be right back,” he said. The small grocery store Mitch entered was the only shop open.

  “I have no idea where we’re going,” James said to me. But the next moment, Mitch was walking back toward the car with a bouquet of pink carnations.

  “We must be going to his mother’s grave,” James whispered.

  Mitch got in, looking taut, and tossed the flowers on the seat between them.

  “Nice color,” said James.

  This made Mitch laugh again, for some reason. James watched him as we drove on. A few blocks later, we pulled into an apartment building lot, and a freckled, beaming woman of perhaps fifty waved to them from where she sat on a cinder block wall. She had a rubber-tipped cane and a shopping bag.

  “Here’s Aunt Verna,” said James, fishing for information.

  “Aunt?” Mitch shot him an annoyed glance.

  James watched the woman limp toward them, leaning into her cane. “Wasn’t she Mom’s best friend?” he asked.

  “Do we have to talk about this?” Mitch reached behind him to open the back door.

  “Hey, boys.” Verna got in, sitting forward to see James’s face better. “You look okay,” she smiled.

  The car pulled back out into traffic. The woman buckled herself into the seat beside me. She wore her auburn and gray hair back in a ponytail and dressed like a house painter.

  “How are you, Mitch?” she asked.

  “Getting by,” he said.

  As we neared a huge lawn lined with headstones on the right, James stiffened, his eyes scanning each row of graves, but Mitch didn’t pull into the gate of the cemetery. We passed it, and the county hospital, pulling into the parking lot of the third building. The sign read: St. Jude’s. It was a cement slab, made no cheerier by the clown-colored flowers choking its entrance.

  James looked confused, Mitch looked ill, and the woman with them looked quite happy, as if she were going to a party. They parked in a space marked VISITOR, and I followed them toward the entrance. The boys politely slowed their pace for their friend.

  “Billy, could you take this?”

  James took the woman’s bag, and she shifted to pushing with two hands on the cane. When they entered the glass doors, Mitch and the woman went immediately to the front desk and signed a sheet of paper on a clipboard.

  “Good morning, Karen,” said Verna.

  The girl behind the counter smiled. “How’s the knee, Verna?”

  “Could be worse,” she said.

  I hovered behind James. “Maybe Billy’s mother isn’t dead,” he said. These sounded like hopeful words, but I could feel a foreboding in his voice.

  Mitch started to follow Verna down the hall to the left, but he turned back to James.

  “Hurry up.” He gestured not so gently with the flowers and a bit of petal flew off.

  James went to the counter, picked up the pen attached to the clipboard by a thin chain, and printed on the line below Mitch’s name: William Blake.

  I saw that the girl, Karen, seated behind the desk, was hiding a book under a file folder. Not a hospital text but a dog-eared paperback with a creased corner to mark her place. For one disconcerting moment, I saw my own hands tearing the brown paper off a small blue book as if having to wait one more second for a new novel would drive me mad. As quickly as the vision came, it was gone.

  We followed his brother down the hall, and now it was James who was looking ill. We came through a white door into a sanitized room where a woman in a nightgown printed with tiny Eiffel towers sat motionless in a mechanical bed. Mitch dumped the flowers on the tray beside the patient and took refuge in the chair against the wall, the farthest away. Verna went right to the bed and kissed the staring woman on the cheek, wiping off a smudge of lipstick, the only color in the face. “Hi, Sarah,” she said.

  James stood in the doorway.

  “We’re all here, sweetie: Mitch, Billy, and Verna.” Verna dragged the chair beside the bed right up to the metal rails and took the limp hand. The nails were cut short and there was a wedding band on the third finger.

  “I brought you some surprises.” She motioned for James to bring the shopping bag.

  James did and stayed close to the bed, lingering at the foot.

  “I have the alumni newsletter and a letter from Belle and a recipe I think you’ll like.” Verna rummaged in the bag and brought out a thin magazine. “The boys brought you flowers. Pink, your favorite.”

  Now James glanced at Mitch, but he was brooding and did not look up. There was such a strong pulse to his anger, the room was pounding with it.

  “Why don’t you read to your mother?” Verna gave James the magazine and the chair. “I’ll put these in water.”

  She took the flowers into the small adjoining bathroom, and James looked at the cover of Alumni News without opening it. He reached over and gently touched the hand of Billy’s mother.

  “Class of seventy,” said Mitch quietly.

  James flipped through the pages until he found the right year. “Announcements,” James read aloud. “The planning committee for the thirty-fifth reunion will be meeting in February for a weekend in Lake Florence. Please contact Vicky Hanson if you would like to volunteer. V Hanson at home dot com.” James glanced at the waxwork woman.

  I moved slowly to the other side of the bed and looked at Billy’s mother. She would have been very beautiful if she weren’t ill. I reached down to touch her arm but was startled by Verna passing through my body to display the white plastic pitcher of flowers on the bedside table. I retreated to the doorway.

  “Deaths,” James continued to read. “David Wong died of heart failure August first in Livingston, Vermont. He’s survived by wife Greta Zenner Wong, their two children, and four—” James stopped reading as Verna touched his shoulder. He let her have the chair.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. Then in a much cheerier voice, she scanned the page. “Let’s see. Business. Mark Hogan has opened his third BMW dealership in Seattle and would welcome any Colfax alums to apply for jobs. Especially those who made fun of his sixty-five Ford pickup.”

  James kept watching Billy’s mother. He paused at the end of her bed again and leaned forward, lightly touching the shape under the covers that was her foot. Her eyes were open, but she didn’t blink.

  “Remember Mark Hogan?” Verna asked Billy’s mother. “They called him wing-nut because of his ears.” Verna read a letter out loud from a friend named Belle about her daughter divorcing a gambling addict and their dog Chloe’s leg amputation. James sat in the chair on the other side of the bed from Verna, unconscious of me since we had entered the room. The longer the visit stretched, the more it wore on Mitch. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, staring at the floor, rubbing his fists together as if he were waiting for a jury to convict him.

  After an hour, a nurse paused in the doorway: The visiting session was over. By that time Mitch was slumped back in his chair, a hand over his eyes as if he’d been trying to sleep. Verna packed her bag.

  “Next time I’ll bring that short story about the yard sale,” she promised. “It was a hoot.”

  Mitch got up, battle weary, aching with the weight of his armor.

  “Bye, sweetie.” Verna kissed the patient’s cheek again. “Say goodbye, boys.”

  “Bye, Mom,” said Mitch without looking at her. He was already out the door.

  James waved at the silent woman, a small boyish gesture. “Bye, Mom.” He stayed beside Verna, carrying her bag. She seemed to have even more trouble walking out than in. Mitch was waiting in the car by the time they were signing out at the desk. I trailed behind, mesmerized by Verna’s lurching gait.

  “You take the front,” said James opening the door for her.

  When he was in the back, James finally looked at me. I knew he wanted to speak, but he glanced in the rearview mirror and changed his mind.

  “She loved those flowers,” Verna said to Mitch.

  Mitch turned on the radio and played music
all the way to Verna’s apartment building. As soon as the music came on, James leaned toward me and whispered, “She wasn’t ringing.” When I looked perplexed, he added, “She’s not empty. Their mother is still in her body.”

  I was horrified at the idea of this type of hell. “Without being able to speak or move?”

  As we passed the graveyard again, the stones flashing by seemed to catch and hold his eyes like the pendulum swing of a hypnotist’s watch. “Seven,” he whispered.

  “Seven?” I asked.

  “Ghosts in the cemetery.”

  “What?” asked Verna.

  “Nothing,” said James.

  When Verna got out, James got out too and gave her his arm.

  “Want me to walk you to your door?” he asked.

  She gave him a bemused look. “No, I’ll manage.”

  James bounced into the front seat. I stayed in the back.

  “Bye!” She waved, but the car was pulling down the street before James could answer.

  “Okay,” Mitch sighed. “Light me a cigarette.”

  When we arrived back at Amelia Street, James pretended to watch television as Mitch read the sports section of the paper. Finally Mitch got his jacket and picked up his keys.

  “Can I take a walk if I stay out of trouble?” James asked.

  “I guess.”

  “Since I got brain damage and all,” said James, “can you remind me, how long am I grounded for?”

  “To be announced,” was all he’d say.

  I watched James eat a peanut butter sandwich.

  “I’ve always wondered what that tasted like,” I said, sitting across from him at the kitchen table.

  “Well, now I know what to get you for Christmas.” When he’d finished, he drank a full glass of orange juice and said, “Let’s go hunting.”

  “Where will we go?”

  “Where people go in September on a Sunday afternoon,” he answered. “The mall.”

  It was strange following James while he rode his bicycle. He’d look about now and then but couldn’t focus on me. He locked the bike to a rack outside the huge shopping plaza, and we wandered into the cavernous clatter. The mall was choked with people and echoing with babble. Music of various kinds mixed in disconcerting waves. Mr. Brown hated shopping, so I hadn’t been in this sort of place for several years.

  James moved slowly against the current, “hunting.” Wrinkled faces with thick saucer eyeglasses, baby faces half-hidden by plastic pacifiers, bearded faces with mirrored sunglasses, blue-lidded faces with rings in their noses, spotted faces with braces: All swam past me, misunderstood like foreign words. James walked the length of the vast mall and back again three times with me in tow. He sat on a stone ashtray, his brow dark, watching a flock of youngsters as they ate at little round tables. Finally he rose and began walking again, staying in the center of the wrong side of traffic. I was feeling much less nervous now than I had the night before. It seemed so farfetched, finding an abandoned body, that I felt I had nothing to fear yet. It would take us days to find someone to save.

  “That one,” he whispered.

  Near the entrance to a large store, a woman of perhaps thirty crouched down to tie her running shoe. Her chopped brown hair covered her face; she wore sweatpants and a hooded jacket. I hid behind James as he slowly approached her.

  “She’s empty?”

  “Listen,” he whispered. “Don’t you hear it?”

  As she stood up, the hair fell back to reveal a thin face with a shadow of tension around the mouth. She walked into the store, and we followed three paces behind. I did begin to hear a faint buzz, but I couldn’t tell whether it came from the woman or the lights from the jewelry cases.

  “What should I do?” My nerves twisted in me like wires.

  “Cleave to her,” he whispered. “And when she’s alone, go into her.”

  I didn’t want my spirit to cleave to anyone except James, but a body seemed to be the only way to truly be with him. “What if there’s an evil that isn’t afraid of me?”

  “She’s not on drugs.” James stopped when the woman hesitated in an intersection of the aisles. “It won’t be like with Billy. She’s an athlete—she takes care of her body.”

  Now the woman turned left, and we circled after her until she opened a door marked “Ladies” on the far wall. James turned and pretended to check the price of a bathrobe on a rack beside him. The empty woman was alone now.

  “I’ll be right here,” said James.

  Against my better instincts, I passed through the restroom door just as she was locking it. It was a tiny room with one toilet and one sink, a metal bin, and a warning sign posted for shoplifters.

  The woman looked at herself in the mirror as if she’d forgotten why she was there. Perhaps she had an athlete’s body, but her face looked far from healthy. It was pale and dark under the eyes, lined with small scars as if she had once been attacked by a cat. I wondered whether I could fit behind those lips and make them smile again.

  I didn’t need to cleave to the woman, as James was only a few feet away outside the door, but I would soon lose my chance to be alone with her. Although still afraid, I stood beside her at the mirror and touched her left hand where it rested on the edge of the sink.

  It felt nothing like touching Mr. Brown or James. Her flesh had a prickling heat like frostbitten toes being revived in a hot bath. With her right hand, she turned on the tap, then leaned down and took a handful of water, swashed it in her mouth, and spat. Then she took a long drink and straightened up. I moved closer, my right hand on her left hand, my right arm in line with her left. She looked in the mirror again, a drop of water on her chin. I could feel the definition of each of her fingers, though our thumbs were on the wrong sides. The hot tingle of her rose up my arm.

  The woman was looking into her own eyes, but she frowned now as if she didn’t recognize herself. She pulled her left arm in front of her and my right was drawn with it. I moved deeper into her, my right eye now looking out through her left into the reflection that showed only one woman. Where the darkness around her mouth met the corner of my lips, I felt a tremor. I tried to move out of her, but I was stuck. From the back corner of her heart, a memory flitted by—the woman as a girl of ten, spitting into a bathroom sink, gagging and drinking water as she wept, her brown braids hanging in the bowl. Flashes of her hands trying to hold the door handle still in her dark bedroom, but the knob twisting in her grip. Her stepfather mutely smoking a cigarette on the porch as her mother scolded her for wetting the bed again.

  It was gone as suddenly as it had come. The woman in the mirror was looking me in the eyes, one of my eyes inside one of hers, the other in midair and invisible. She was seeing me, I could tell because her lips curled. But it wasn’t the woman who was smiling. That child had fled this body when she was still a teenager. What looked back at me was not a woman at all.

  There was a knock at the door. The handle shook. But a twisting doorknob couldn’t make this flesh tremble or cringe anymore. These bones now housed something unshakable that rose like a puddle of tar and then, from a hiding place in the woman’s belly, fanned up black like the head of a cobra.

  “Helen!” James was on the other side of the door and sounded scared. “Don’t do it!”

  I felt a stinging anger rise through my fingers, bringing with it the urge to take that hand and scratch the cheek where half my face was hidden, tear it bloody. It frightened me so much that I tried to dive out of her. The hand I possessed only jerked into the air and then gripped the sink as I fought for the use of it.

  “Helen!” James pounded on the door.

  The creature raised its right hand into a fist, pulled back, and broke the mirror. At this sound, James threw his shoulder against the door. Only one shard of glass dropped into the sink—the other pieces reflected monstrous deformities but stayed on the wall. With a disgusted grunt, the creature flung me from the body, and I flew through the wall and into a rack of clothes outside the b
athroom. My fear caused the hangers to gently swing around me. I looked out from the circle of cotton nightgowns and saw James step back in surprise as the ladies room door opened and the woman in the hooded jacket walked out, her right hand bloodied on two knuckles. She kept glancing behind her as she strode off, ready to fight.

  I moved to James’s side and the relief in his face did nothing to calm my panic.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispered. I followed him into a corner behind a rack of slippers. “I thought she sounded empty.” He had to catch his breath. “The machines in here confused me. It won’t happen again. I am so sorry.” Finally he looked me in the eyes for a long moment. “Was there someone inside her?”

  “Something dark.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.” He knew I was lying—I was still quaking. All I wanted to do was be alone with him and far from everyone else.

  Finally we walked out of the store and into the mall again, moving slowly back toward the entrance where we’d started. Without warning, James stopped in the flow of walking people so that a couple holding hands had to part and walk around him on either side. I looked around, not knowing what had caught his attention. He stepped off to the side, up against a huge potted plant.

  “There,” he whispered, nodding in her direction. “The girl on the bench. Wearing yellow.”

  I saw a teenaged girl, wearing a yellow linen dress and brown shoes, sitting with a small brown purse under the hands in her lap. She stared at the floor.

  “She’s empty,” he whispered.

  “Are you sure?”

  “She has a pure ring.”

  The girl, her blonde hair neatly combed and hanging to her shoulders, looked familiar.

  “She goes to Billy’s school,” James whispered. “Her name’s Julie or Judy or something like that.”

  Then I heard it, a faint sound like a finger moving on the lip of a crystal goblet. And it was coming from this girl. A pair of women crossed in front of her, bumping into her knees with their shopping bags, but the girl didn’t even blink.