Under the Light

Chapter 9





Helen


WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?” said Cathy.

A queer tremor rippled through me. I was the someone who had been in the bathroom with them, standing beside the tub.

“Other than that boy?” Cathy asked.

Jenny caught sight of something outside the car—she pivoted in her seat. I wondered what had captured her attention. We passed store window displays filled with autumn leaves and the silhouettes of crows.

“Why are there pumpkins everywhere?” she asked.

I didn’t know exactly how long Jenny had been away from her body before I entered it, but I knew it must be unsettling to be thrown blindly back into her life. If she could have seen me, I would have smiled at her, because her mother’s expression was far from soothing.

“What is wrong with you?” Cathy demanded. “How many pills did you really take?”

Jenny stared at her mother as if something was missing—I could see it in her blue eyes and feel it in the trembling of her narrow shoulders. She was afraid.

“Mom?” Jenny asked. “Where’s Daddy?”

Cathy started weeping as she drove. “He’s probably at her house.”

“Whose house?”

But Cathy wouldn’t answer. She muttered to herself and strangled the steering wheel with twisting fists. She drove past a stop sign without slowing down and did not seem even to hear the honking horns. This danger she was exposing her child to made me wish I could take over Cathy’s body the way I had Jenny’s.

I had been an imperfect protector for my own daughter, but I knew I could be a better mother to Jenny than Cathy was proving to be. It struck me then that even if I hadn’t been able to save myself, I could have acted as a kind of guardian angel to my daughter as she grew up if I’d been clever enough to find my way into heaven sooner. Instead, I was foolish and frightened and got stuck. I’d been taught by my father how to milk a cow and at my mother’s side how to make shortbread. But no one had taught me how to die.





At the emergency room, we were escorted into a cubicle, where Jenny sat staring at her hands. I stood behind her chair. The small space flickered with fairylike lights from the fluorescent overheads and reflected off Cathy’s diamond wedding ring as she furiously filled out a form on a clipboard.

I wanted to point out how pretty the twinkling lights were, but Jenny couldn’t hear me, of course, and she wasn’t a baby. She was a grown girl.

The nurse asked many questions and Cathy answered them, never making eye contact with her daughter. Jenny could probably have stood up and walked away and her mother would not have noticed. I took a seat in the empty plastic chair to Jenny’s right.

“The nurse is asking you a question.” Cathy tapped on Jenny’s knee as if the girl had been napping in church.

“So, you threw up the sleeping pills,” asked the nurse. “Is that right?”

“That’s right,” she said.

“But she’s having memory problems,” Cathy insisted.

The nurse asked Jenny about alcohol, drugs, head injuries. She took Jenny’s pulse, blood pressure, temperature. All the while I thought of the things I would want to hear if I were Jenny: Don’t worry about a thing—we’ll take care of you.

Finally we were taken into the emergency room examination area. The doctor was reading his clipboard when he pulled open the curtain. He wheeled a little stool up to the narrow bed where Jenny sat on a white paper sheet. He sat down, smiled, a neutral expression.

“You’re having trouble with your memory.” He clicked his pen. “What did you have for breakfast?”

“I don’t remember,” she said.

“Do you know today’s date?” he asked.

“No.” Jenny looked embarrassed. “Is it fall? It doesn’t feel like fall to me.”

“That so?” The doctor scribbled a note. “Why?”

Jenny flexed her hands, felt her face as if she was still getting used to being back inside her own flesh. “Not sure,” she said.

“What were you doing before you came here?” he asked.

“Taking a bath,” said Jenny.

“And before that?” The doctor, whose tag read DR. A. LAWRENCE, waited, his eyebrows raised.

“I wish I knew,” Jenny admitted.

“What’s the last thing you remember before the bath?”

Jenny swallowed uncomfortably. She slipped her hands under her thighs and stared at her knees for a moment. “I remember being in the Prayer Corner.”

“That wasn’t this morning,” Cathy said. “We didn’t have Bible study today.”

“How long ago was that, the morning you’re thinking of?” the doctor asked Jenny. “Any idea?”

She sighed. I sensed her mind spinning with images, though I could not see the story of pictures there. “I remember going on a trip . . .” Jenny’s voice trailed away.

“Speak up, Jennifer,” Cathy ordered.

I lay my hand on Jenny’s arm and the familiar tingle of spirit touching the living licked through me, cold and warm at the same time.

I did not sense in Jenny any recognition that I had tried to comfort her by my touch. She was still shaking and pale. But I was sure she would learn to recognize my help.

Claims made by the Quick as to the powers of ghosts are often exaggerated. It was difficult for me to move any object in the world of the living. Emotions are what can be heard or at least sensed by the living, rarely one’s voice—sometimes the touch of my hand, but more often it was my desire to reach out.

“I think I went to the country,” said Jenny. “There was a field—”

“No.” Cathy shook her head. “We haven’t taken a trip since last summer, and it was to Sacramento.”

If Jenny remembered anything more, she didn’t speak it aloud. But she did look at my hand where it lay on her arm. She lifted her own hand slowly as I drew mine away. She rubbed the place where I had touched her. Then she flexed her fingers and looked around, her gaze passing through me.

She may not have realized it was me beside her, but I had at least changed something in her world. It was a start.

The doctor must have noticed that Jenny was shaking—he took a folded blanket from the foot of the examination table and handed it to her. “Did you have a recent upset?”

Jenny took the blanket absently.

“Anything frighten you or make you sad?” he asked. “Did you have a fight with someone?”

Cathy took the blanket from Jenny’s hands and snapped it open, then put it around her daughter’s shoulders as she spoke. “She hasn’t been herself for days now.” Cathy sat back down and watched the doctor’s pen as if wanting to dictate what he recorded. “She started seeing a boy in secret.” Her voice dropped. “Intimately.”

Jenny pulled the blanket around her as if trying to hide a scarlet letter her mother had sewn onto her blouse.

Cathy looked humiliated to add what followed, “And her father left.” She folded her hands and held them down in her lap. “He moved out this morning. Jenny found out about it right before her bath.”

This was no surprise to me—I’d still been Jenny then. Cathy had wept with me about her husband, Dan, running off with another woman and then we’d celebrated by burning down the Prayer Corner. But Jenny’s head came up, her eyes wide.

“Do you remember hearing about that?” the doctor asked her, and Jenny shook her head no.

“How does it make you feel?” he asked.

I was afraid Jenny would be hurt—he was, after all, her father. I would have been devastated if my own Papa had left me when I was a girl.

“Confused,” said Jenny.

“That’s understandable,” the doctor told her.

The questions were over for a while, but there were hours of waiting—they performed many tests. There were machines for tracking brain waves, diagramming the inside of the head, making a graph of heart patterns—little tubes of blood were taken from Jenny’s arm. They taped a ball of cotton to the tiny wound and Cathy brought the girl a bottle of orange juice and a muffin. This should have been a sweet gesture, but in the same way Cathy had flicked the hospital blanket around Jenny’s shoulders without asking her if she was cold or frightened, Cathy applied food and drink as if Jenny were a dish that needed drying or a dress that needed mending.

The way the nurses, wearing matching pale blue uniforms, busied themselves around Jenny’s body, measuring blood and checking monitors and applying disinfectant, reminded me of cooks preparing a feast. Jenny, watching them, looked as anxious as the Christmas goose about to be cooked.

Cathy looked nervous, as well, but didn’t include herself in the scene. Couldn’t the woman see that Jenny needed to be held and comforted? I ached with the realization that I had never been able to take my own girl in my arms when she was Jenny’s age. Not one afternoon spent together when she was old enough to tell me her dreams. It was torture to observe Cathy sitting blindly and stupidly beside her daughter when I would have given anything just to brush my daughter’s hair one single night when she was fifteen.





Even though every test showed that Jenny was healthy, I knew she was not all right. I’d made a plan to help her, but this rescue was not an easy thing.

“Where are we going?” Jenny asked her mother.

I had little experience with the order of these streets, but even I could tell that Cathy was not driving us home. And she wouldn’t explain. Jenny watched her with concern.

Eventually we stopped in front a tiny house with a porch swing outside the front window.

“Mom,” Jenny said. “Why are we at Mrs. Morgan’s house?”

There were two cars, tail to nose, in the narrow driveway. One was a white van.

“Why is Dad’s car here?” Jenny asked.

Cathy let the engine idle in the middle of the street for a moment, staring at the lights shining through the curtained windows, then she dug the heel of her hand into the steering wheel, blaring the horn in a savage blast before pulling away.

“Daddy left us for Mrs. Morgan?” Jenny shook her mother’s arm, but Cathy wouldn’t look at her or answer. “Isn’t she your prayer partner?”

Cathy wept, silently steering with one hand, the other pressed to her middle as if she might be sick.

As the car neared Jenny’s driveway, I saw a piece of white paper sticking out of their front door. Cathy pulled into the garage, but as soon as she entered the house, she walked straight to the front door from inside, opened it, and pulled out the note.

“Is that for me?” asked Jenny.

Cathy slammed the door and locked it. “No.” She unfolded the page and gave it a quick glance. I saw, before she crumpled it, that it was a phone number and looked like Billy’s handwriting. “It’s nothing.”

Jenny followed her mother into the kitchen and watched her toss the ball of paper into the sink. I think Jenny might have protested but the mess in the kitchen distracted her.

The sink was splattered with an odd mix of foods. Vegetable drinks, protein powder, and granola. Perhaps Dan’s favorites. The jars and cans still lay open around the drain. The tall rubbish can nearby overflowed with half-empty packages of molasses cookies, seaweed crackers, and power bars. A nearly full jar of fig jam was crammed in the top, upside down, where I assumed Cathy had stuffed it after Dan walked out.

“I didn’t do this, did I?” asked Jenny

When her mother failed to answer, Jenny followed her down the hall.

The dining room and living room were littered with broken glass and bent picture frames. Photos of Jenny’s family had been mutilated so that her father’s image was torn or twisted from each picture. The only one still on the wall was of Jenny as a baby, alone beside a little wading pool.

Cathy kept walking, down the hall and into the office, where many shelves had been emptied. A pile of books—business advice, sports memoirs, and how-to manuals. Two tan rectangles of unfaded paint were left under empty nails on the wall where Dan’s diplomas used to hang.

Cathy stepped around the piles and sat at the desk. She picked up the phone and stared at it for a moment before she began to push numbered buttons—not a word to her daughter. Jenny paused for a moment, took in the new imbalance in what had been a very tidy room.

“Bev?” Cathy said, her voice quavering. “Something’s happened.”

Jenny continued down the hall and into the family room, and I followed, wanting to tell her what had happened that day.

The smoke alarm cover dangled at the top of the doorway; a liquor decanter lay empty on the carpet. The floor was strewn with board games, pink and blue paper money, dice, Scrabble tiles. And there in the far corner, where Jenny used to sit with her parents every morning for Bible study and prayers, where I had to sit with them just yesterday (if that was possible), there the three chairs lay broken and charred atop a huge melted burn mark in the rug. The Bible itself I had saved—it sat on the arm of the sofa—but Jenny saw another book had been torn to shreds and singed. Scraps of burnt pages and the twisted brown binding lay all around the chairs. Could she tell it was her journal? Jenny picked up what was left of the diary she was once forced to keep. The pages were mostly gone. A jagged wing of paper fluttered from the spine as she dropped it back into the ashes.

She looked up—a black cloud hung above this mess, a smoke stain, four feet wide, on the ceiling.

“Jenny.” I spoke her name and she turned, but not to me. She looked at the doorway and her mother appeared, eyes red, arms filled with cleaning supplies.

“We made the mess together, we’ll clean it up together,” said Cathy.

Jenny looked proud. “We did this together?”

Cathy handed her a scrub brush and a spray can of spot remover. “We need to make it right before anyone sees it,” she said, pulling on a pair of yellow rubber gloves and kneeling in the Prayer Corner.