Under the Light

Chapter 13





Helen


SILENT UPON THE GRASS, she had gazed to her right and to her left in the light rain like Ophelia waiting for a flood. I sat beside her and, in hopes of lifting her spirit, recited poems my first host had written—“The Hearth Cat,” “Even Apples Remember,” “Below This Leaf.”





Below this leaf there lies its brother;

Beneath this root one finds another.

And so the layers of time press deep,

Make mud of us all as down we seep.

But do not read your graveyard stone;

You are more than blood and bone.

Up your soul like a fairy flies

And paints its Heaven on the skies.





I hoped that she had heard me with her inner mind the way my hosts sometimes listened to me while they slept, but it may have been simple chance that when I came to the last line Jenny got herself up and went inside. She took off her wet clothes, showered, dressed herself. She and her mother spoke hardly a word all afternoon and into the evening.

Cathy closed herself in the study or the bedroom and talked on the phone, trying to hide her pain, but the muffled sounds of her tears and anger could be heard through closed doors. I found it disturbing that Cathy abandoned her child for so many hours.

I stayed close to Jenny, told her George MacDonald stories of Curdie, the princess, and the goblins as she brushed out her wet hair, set the table, even as she sat with her mother for an awkward dinner and later helped fold laundry. But I couldn’t tell if my poems or stories were truly heard—I sensed no reaction. Frustrated, I swatted at the laundry basket, but neither of them saw it rock.

When her mother left her that evening, retired to the master bedroom to shower, when Jenny was alone and the phone line was free, she stood in the darkened kitchen and called Billy. They spoke but half a minute.

“What did the police do to you?” she asked. She listened, trying with her fingers to rub out a stain on the doorjamb, but it was actually a place where the white paint had chipped away and the dark wood showed through. Then she whispered, “Okay.” And, “Monday at ten.” She looked down the hall as the sound of the shower shut off. “Don’t you have to be at school?” she asked him. Jenny stepped back away from the doorway and hid in the shadows. “The main branch?” Then she laughed, stifled the sound with her hand, and hung up.

She crept back into the living room, where Cathy joined her, wearing pajamas under a long sweater and her hair wet around the edges. It was rare to see the woman dressed so informally. And without makeup she looked young and lost.

They watched television, a concert of Christian music that Cathy said Jenny could stay up for if she wanted to; a baritone sang a gospel song older even than I was, a full choir performed an arrangement of “God Bless America,” a boy’s chorus sang “This Little Light of Mine.” Cathy held a cup of tea she never drank—her eyes were focused not on the television screen but at the floor below it. Jenny didn’t seem to be watching the program either, except that one of the advertisements made her sit up straight.

It was a commercial for a credit card that would, it was implied, be accepted anywhere on the planet. A montage of famous places was accompanied by romantic strains of cellos and oboes. The Great Sphynix in Egypt, a white beach and blue lagoon in Greece, the Lincoln Memorial, the Taj Mahal, the Golden Gate Bridge, Big Ben, the Great Wall of China, the Eiffel Tower.

Jenny stood up. “I’m going to bed.” Perhaps on other nights she might have asked permission to go to her room, but this evening she turned without saying good night to her mother and walked out of the room and down the hall. Cathy seemed not to notice.

I followed Jenny into her room, where she closed the door. She walked to her bed, but instead of sitting or lying down, she crouched beside it on the floor and began to cry as if her heart had been shattered. She reached up and took one of the pillows off her bed, holding it to her face.

I sat on the rug beside her and tried to stroke her hair or rub her back, but I was having trouble keeping my spectral body together. I felt nervous and vaporous. With each of Jenny’s sobs I shifted in the air, a little closer, now away, like a cloud of gnats.

“Hush,” I whispered. “Poor thing.”

She cried into the pillow until I thought she might become ill.

“Get into bed now,” I told her.

After a few moments she took a hitching breath and crawled up onto her mattress, still clutching the pillow.

“Rest your head and I’ll sing you a song,” I whispered. I was relieved that she seemed to be sensing my message—by and by she stretched out and put the pillow under her head, wiped her eyes on her sleeves, and gave a heavy sigh.

I sang a folk song I’d sung to my own little girl a hundred times—the one about the rolling river. Soon Jenny’s eyes were closed and her breaths came smooth and far between. Tears had dried on her face in delicate salt lines. Her hair fanned out on one side of the pillow.

“Why are you sad?” I asked her.

I didn’t expect her to answer, but from her throat came the faintest sound of question, as if she hadn’t understood me properly. It gave me a thrill to think she might have actually heard my question in her sleep.

“Why were you crying?” I asked.

Then the faintest sound of regret from deep in her dream. And four words, “I used to fly.”

I wanted so for her to say it again so I could be sure I’d heard correctly—she used to fly, and that was sad.

I sat on the edge of her bed all night long, but she didn’t speak again. After watching her in silence for a time, I decided to slip back to heaven and tell James that I had finally spoken with Jenny. To tell him that from now on I was sure it would be easy to talk to her. I was certain I could visit James and be back before Jenny woke up in the morning.

I thought about the last place I’d seen James, in a shaded wood beside a clover-covered tree trunk. I pictured the quality of light, the scent of damp earth, the piano music, a lilting melody, a folk song I couldn’t place, sweet even in its minor keys.

And in the same way it happened when I neared Jenny, as I closed in on heaven everything in front of me thinned into converging lines. Jenny’s bedroom and the garden outside her window and the hills beyond her neighborhood flattened like a sketch of themselves drawn on a sheet of paper and contracted into black and white, ink on a blank page, but then it stopped. I couldn’t stretch it any further, and try as I might I couldn’t slide into it between the shadow and the light.

I was frightened for a moment, but fear had not helped me find heaven the first time. Then I was angry—how could God deny me entry when I’d had such a charitable motive for leaving? The truth was, I realized, that I had made a promise to come back to Jenny and be her guardian until the troubles I brought her had been calmed. If I broke my word, it seemed I would not be traveling back to James.

I was trapped in the land of the Quick until I fulfilled my promise to Jenny.





Because I had borrowed Jenny’s body for only six days, and since I had claimed her on a Sunday afternoon, I had never been to church with her family. Now I trailed after mother and daughter into a back pew. Cathy didn’t admit to it, but I believe she made sure we arrived a little late to the church service so that she would not be stopped on the way in and have to answer questions about Jenny’s father leaving.

The sanctuary appeared to make Jenny uncomfortable. Her bones seemed to stiffen, her muscles to contract in a subtle way, as if she were preparing to be struck. Tolerantly she adjusted herself to Cathy’s nagging—pulled her skirt down closer to her knee, tucked a lock of hair behind her ear.

There were things about Jenny’s church that I found familiar—the iron chandeliers were so like the ones from my childhood church, only these were fitted with artificial candles and electric bulbs. The dark wooden pews, worn smooth where a thousand hands had rested, seemed familiar, as well. And the carpets and pew cushions, a maroon brocade made murky with years of wear, bothered me most. Even the most mundane memories, if drawn from a deep-enough well, can chill the heart. The baskets of flowers on either side of the altar in Jenny’s church were almost identical to those at my mother’s funeral—lilies in white wicker. And the carvings on the wooden gate leading up to the altar, they were exactly like ones from my youth. I was unprepared for recollections from my girlhood: candlelit Christmas services, sunny Easters, brooding autumn Sundays when thunder could be heard over the groan of the pump organ. The scents and emotions made me ache, but I cherished them too. I could almost taste the metal cup and feel the icy water of the well in the churchyard, smell the mint that grew below the well stones.





I moved closer to Jenny on the pew. I wanted to cover her like a blanket.

She looked pale, as if she’d been bleached into a faded version of herself. The organist was playing a prelude, a chain of old hymns slowed to a merciless dirge meant to stretch until the Judgment Day, it seemed. As the hymn “This Is My Father’s World” changed into “Leaning on the Everlasting Arm,” I began to see glimpses from my childhood acquaintances scattered through the congregation—a head of ash-colored hair to our left, broad shoulders in a black suit a few rows in front of us, a sharp jaw turning halfway toward me. But these were not my people. My people had been gone for decades, even the babies, grown, withered and cold, dead and in the ground fifty years back or more.

But I am still here, I thought. And Jenny is here.

The prelude had finally ceased and the pastor was greeting the congregation and making announcements. The pews were set with paper bulletins every few feet—Jenny took one and stared at the cover, a photograph of a field of gold wheat under a blue sky. Across the curved stalks of grain a line of Scripture was printed in slanted cursive:The fruit of the Spirit is love—Galatians 5:22.

As Jenny studied the picture, the pink began to return to her cheeks. Cathy was reading ahead in the order of service and must have expected the same of her daughter. “Jen,” she whispered.

But Jenny was rubbing the picture of a field with her thumb, tilting it toward the light as if she could not decipher its meaning.