Under the Light

Chapter 16





Helen


A HYMNAL OR A BIBLE IS A LOVELY TEXT, but I was so looking forward to talking with Jenny using a novel or a collection of poetry. I’d always had a special love for books. I liked all kinds—children’s stories, song books, poetry, histories—but my favorites were novels. Our town didn’t have a library and when I was a child my parents did not own books, so I was forced to borrow them from neighbors and friends, sell what I could to buy them—my plum preserves bartered a slightly used copy of Ivanhoe once. I never stole one, but when I was sixteen I did trade a tablecloth for Little Dorrit. A tearful confession of love for which you have waited three hundred pages was much better than eating off white lace.

I sat in the back seat of Jenny’s car on the way home from church, my mind swimming with wonderful stories, any one of which I would love to read for the first time all over again along with Jenny. I could hardly sit still in the car—to think I could reread any books we chose, that I helped Jenny choose, running my finger under certain words and phrases to communicate with her all my deepest thoughts. Impatiently I flew through the closed door as the car turned onto Jenny’s street—I rushed into the house right through the kitchen wall.

How could I be so forgetful? I floated from room to room and found no novels at all. There were manuals and cookbooks, Bibles and catalogs, Christian magazines, audiobooks, but no Dickens or Hugo or Austen. I had discovered this tragedy the first night I slept in Jenny’s home. Even at Billy’s house James had hidden a book of Robert Frost poetry under the bed. But Jenny’s house was a wasteland. I longed for the book-heavy homes of my past hosts.

I paced in the hallway having searched every room for novels—perhaps the book bag she took to school might still have school library books in it? But I found it sitting closed beside her desk and I couldn’t open it. I waited there for Jenny in her bedroom. Perhaps there were no volumes of Robert Louis Stevenson or Emily Brontë to be found, but I used to tell my daughter stories from memory, paraphrasing scenes without looking at the books—The Water Babies and Jane Eyre—while I bathed her or as she watched me hang up the wash or as I nursed her by the hearth.

When Jenny walked in I practically pounced on her, but all the things I wanted to tell her leapt up in my mind at once and confused me.

Although some of my plans to contact Jenny had been ill- conceived, she and I had been bound by an invisible cord now. Clearly she had felt my thoughts through the printed word—she’d seen and heard my death scene. I was confident that if I spoke to her as she slept tonight, she would understand me.

How vexing that it was only midday. I paced back and forth in and out of the bedroom wall as Jenny changed from church clothes to simple cotton slacks and shirt—she wrapped herself in an oversize sweater as if still cold after the spectral flood I had shared with her. Jenny sat at her vanity table and began to brush her hair.

So many things to tell her. I had abandoned her studies—embarrassing, but not dangerous. I must tell her about how Mitch had banned James (well, Billy) from being alone in their house with me. Billy wouldn’t remember that. Oh, yes, and I had said some rather shocking things to the church ladies—I was angry that they seemed to think they knew who was in heaven and who wasn’t. I even got out of Cathy’s car in a strange neighborhood and accused Cathy of driving Jenny away from her life. I told her the truth, which of course she would never believe, that I was not her daughter. Oh, and I couldn’t forget to tell her what went on in the principal’s office—I was sent to the office, where her parents were waiting to confront Mr. Brown, who they thought had seduced me. A sickening misunderstanding—Jenny needed to know what was said.

I stood behind her as she sat at the vanity. Or maybe, I thought, I should start explaining it all by beginning with the story of how I met James.

Jenny froze with her brush in midair. She was staring into the looking glass, but it wasn’t the image of her face that made her stop and think—it was the sight of the back of her head reflected in the mirrors on her closet doors.





Cathy had agreed to meet with the pastor and did not want to talk about Jenny’s father in front of her and would not leave her at home alone. Which is probably why it only took a few minutes for Jenny to convince her mother to let her study at the main branch library that day.

Cathy handed over her phone. “Call me when you’re done,” she said, as Jenny climbed out of the car. “Until twelve at the church and after that at home.”

“Okay.” Jenny swung her book bag over one shoulder.

“And don’t talk to strangers.”

“I won’t. I have lunch money. I’ll be fine.”

Do you think I would let anything happen to her? I said, but Cathy didn’t hear.

Finally she left us on the sidewalk in front of the library. Jenny waited just inside the entrance, trying not to pace, checking the clock every half minute, glancing out the windows in the front doors. I remembered how the last few minutes before I would see James again always felt like hours.

Don’t fret, I told her. But I did wonder if he would come. Life is complicated and there were scores of obstacles that might hinder him.

But Billy ran up the stairs at last and shoved open the doors at 10:33. Jenny’s shoulders relaxed.

“How did you know I would wait for you?” she asked him.

“You’re a nice person,” he said. “You wouldn’t just ditch somebody.”

Where are your manners? I scolded him.

“Sorry I was late,” he said. “When you tell your mom you want to study at the library I bet she believes you. Not so easy convincing Mitch. But I promised not to jump bail.”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

He waved the question away. “It’s an in-joke.”

“So, what do you want to do?” Jenny asked.

He gave her a baffled expression and motioned toward the cavernous room beyond the information desk. “Study.”

I followed a few paces behind as Jenny and Billy went in search of an empty table. All the private study rooms were taken. They squeezed into a single carrel, partially screened off by a kind of desk blinder. They sat in plastic chairs pressed side by side—Jenny held her book bag in her lap.

“What do you want to study?” she asked.

Billy pulled out a few pages of folded notebook paper from the back pocket of his jeans. “Something I found last night.”

I don’t know what I had expected, but the sight of those pages, even before they were opened, covered in my writing, startled me so that the cord to the blinds beside me began to swing.

“What is it?” Jenny spread out the papers on the small desk.

“I think somebody lived our lives for us during the time we can’t remember.” His voice was quiet, but inside I could feel him spinning with excitement. “See, I think this comes first.” He turned over the top page and tapped on the word haunt.

I gripped Jenny’s shoulder, willing her not to be frightened.

She took the paper slowly. “Who would want to live our lives?”

“Someone who needed a body,” said Billy. “Who didn’t have a body of their own anymore.”

“A ghost?”

“Use your library voice,” Billy whispered.

“Sorry,” she whispered back. Billy watched her staring at the page.

“I found it in a box under my bed with some other stuff that wasn’t mine. See?” He took the papers back, ordered them, and ran his finger down the first one. “Two different kinds of handwriting.”

Jenny stared as if Billy had uncovered an ancient treasure.

“Two ghosts,” said Billy, “passing notes in class.” He was grinning now, and I sensed it was not because the idea of ghosts delighted him, but because he had bound himself to Jenny with a story she would find utterly compelling.

“I think this is him, the one who was me.” Billy moved his finger under the words as he read. “Where have you been? Please don’t be afraid. I would be a friend to you.”

James’s handwriting was stylish and angled, and even though Billy’s inflections were a little different as he read aloud, the tone of his voice was so like James.

Billy read on. “Follow me after class. I long to speak with you again.”

“Again,” Jenny echoed. That was all that was written on the front of the first page, but he turned it over and there was an entire page of writing, alternating between that jaunty hand and my small cursive lettering.

“How long have you been Light?” Billy read. “That’s still him. And also this word—Which?” He leaned close to Jenny as he whispered. “And here’s your ghost.” Billy pointed to the next word and she read it aloud.

“Write.” Jenny shivered.

A thrill coiled through me remembering this scene. We couldn’t speak aloud to each other during class because James kept forgetting that he could be heard—we had to write out our first questions and answers.

Billy went on reading what James had written and Jenny read my part.

“That was amazing,” he read.

She read, “How true.”

And Billy read, “Why do you haunt this place?”

Jenny asked him, “This place? The school?”

“Keep reading,” he urged.

Then Jenny read, “I don’t. I’m attached to Mr. Brown.”

My spirit tingled with joy.

“The English teacher,” Jenny whispered.

Billy smiled and read, “Why?”

Jenny read the one word answer. “Literature.” She blinked and swallowed before she read on. “He’s my host.”

“Lucky man,” Billy read.

A woman pushing a cart of books passed by the study carrel and Billy leaned in even closer to Jenny as she whispered the next question I had asked James that day. “Have you ever seen Billy’s spirit since you took his body?”

Jenny looked at him, amazed. I had been standing behind her chair, resting my hand on her shoulder. But now I felt shy. I stepped back and stood halfway through the window, but still I watched and listened—I couldn’t help myself. It was a peculiar sensation, to have one’s most intimate love notes recited as if they were lines from a play.

“Only once,” Billy whispered as he read. “I thought I saw him watching me for a moment the first night I slept in his room.” As if it was the most natural of gestures, he laid his hand on Jenny’s arm. “Is this freaky or what?”

Without answering Jenny read, “Did he speak to you?”

And Billy read the reply. “Alas, no.”

I read the next line along with Jenny. “So you go home to Mr. Blake’s family at night?”

Memories of Billy’s house made me nostalgic for my few days with James. It was a sad home, in many ways, no mother or father, few books, unkept grass and no flowers, empty beer bottles and piles of half-read newspapers. But it was also the place where James and I slept in the same bed; even before I had a body, my spirit lay beside him. I even loved the garage with the rusty patchwork car in which we drove to school one day, and the kitchen where I watched Billy bite into an apple, something I had been deprived of for more than a century.

Billy read James’s remark about this home as if he was not in the least insulted, “Such as it is.”

Then Jenny read the two words, “No room.” She shook her head, but Billy grinned and placed the other page over the one in her hands.

Jenny smiled back. “They ran out of space to write on the first piece of paper, didn’t they? This is so weird.” The beginning line on the new page was James, so Jenny waited for Billy to start.

“Sorry,” he read, then the next word made my heart jump. “Helen.”

I knew what we’d written. I remembered it perfectly, but still it made me ache. I began to weep at the sound.

“Don’t go home with Mr. Brown,” Billy read. “Come with me.”

“Wow.” Jenny covered her cheeks and read my words, “I’m afraid of leaving my host.”

“You must’ve changed hosts before,” Billy read.

Hosts was just a word to these children, one they barely understood. But to me it was like a fan unfolding, recollections of my beloved ones: my Saint searching the cairns of books in her tiny home for a certain volume of Homer; my Knight dressing for the theater before his great mirror, struggling with his stiff collar. My Playwright falling drunk onto the bed he shared with dozens of half-read books, their spines cracking under him. My Poet in his dark office, hunched in the light of a single lamp, his gray hair fallen over his spectacles, rereading a poem about Zeus. Mr. Brown driving with his elbow out the open window of his car, looking so young and as if he would live forever, the briefcase on the seat beside him hiding his unfinished novel.

Then Billy read, “Help me.”