Under the Light

Chapter 17





Helen


JENNY TURNED THE PAGE OVER, but that was the last entry. She was trembling. I came to stand behind her again and rested my hand gently on her back to quell her fears.

Billy seemed uncertain now, took his hands off her arm. “Are you scared?” he asked. “They’re ghosts . . .”

“I’m not afraid of them,” she said. “I think one was trying to talk to me yesterday.”

I tensed, my spirit rippling with nerves. I wasn’t sure I wanted her to share our experience with Billy.

“Really?” He watched her face, fascinated. “What happened?”

Jenny folded up the pages. “It’s hard to describe. But I think maybe one of them drowned,” she said. “I don’t know.”

“Was it Helen?”

I squeezed her shoulder, but she made no sign of feeling my presence this time.

“At first I thought it was someone I’d met, maybe, during the time I can’t remember.” Jenny handed the pages back to Billy. “But he was probably just something I dreamed.”

“A ghost tried to talk to you?” he asked. “How?”

“I could have imagined it,” she said. “I’ve had a really strange week.”

“Tell me about it,” Billy whispered. He returned the pages to his pocket and pulled out a small, thin book from his other back pocket and held it out to her. “And it’s about to get even stranger.”

It had a soft cover, plain black, no title.

“Is that a journal?” asked Jenny.

“Sketchbook.” He opened it to the first page, where there was a beautiful pencil depiction of what looked like a wooden ladder and a kind of carpenter’s table. I recognized it but apparently they did not.

“Did you draw this?” Jenny touched the paper tentatively.

“No. Someone living in my room did it with my pencils and left it under my bed.” Billy turned to the second page. Another drawing, this one of the tree under which James and I had shared a picnic. “It’s the tree from school, across from the cafeteria.”

Jenny nodded. He kept turning the pages, five in all, not in chronological order of when James and I had visited them, but laid out as if James had been recalling random moments from our handful of days together. The third was a phone booth (the one where James and I spoke—he was holding the receiver to his ear, but he was speaking to me, and I was inches from him though invisible to everyone else); the next a sketch of two empty chairs and a table in the school library (where we did Billy’s homework assignment together); and the last was a drawing of a face, not mine, and not Jenny’s, but somehow both.

“Is that her?” Jenny asked out loud. An elderly man with an armful of art books was passing their carrel and stopped as if Jenny had spoken to him. Billy motioned her to hush. But the man did not move away—instead he stood a few feet from them, reading book covers in the adjacent aisle.

Billy turned to the next page in the journal and snatched up one of the little pencils from the shelf where scratch paper is left in small trays. On the blank page he wrote: She would have looked like you, right?

Jenny slipped the pencil out of his fingers and under this line wrote: What should we do now?

Billy smiled, and instead of taking the pencil from her, he wrapped his hand around hers and moved her hand, just as I had done with James when I was Light. Jenny read the words they had written together: Field trip.





They boarded a city bus and sat together near the back where no one was close enough to overhear their conversation. I sat across the aisle trying not to think about riding this kind of bus with James’s arm around me—it made me miss him too much.

“What if we get caught?” Jenny asked.

“Caught at school during school hours?”

“But my mother tells me I’ve been pulled out,” she said. “I’m going to be homeschooled.”

Billy was distracted by some thought he didn’t share. “Yeah, Mitch is sticking me in night school if I get probation.”

“Because of me?” Jenny looked guilty. “Is that another in-joke? Does probation mean your brother grounded you?”

“No.” Billy shrugged it off. “It’s a long story you do not want to hear.”

I followed them a few paces behind as they were dropped off a block from the high school and as they made their way onto the campus through the rows of lockers during passing period. Billy found that his locker combination still worked, and there was a soft hooded jacket rumpled up at the bottom. Jenny put it on over her prim, acorn-button cardigan, and Billy carried her book bag over his shoulder.

No one paid them any attention and they remained inconspicuous, staying near the bicycle racks until the second bell rang and the paths between buildings were empty again.

“So.” Billy walked up to the tree in front of the cafeteria and looked around. “This is the tree he drew.” Jenny scanned the lawn and looked up into the branches. All I could think of was the glory of tasting fresh orange and the crunch of an apple, the familiar softness of a boiled egg, things I had not eaten in 130 years until I sat under this tree with James.

“Do you get any hits off this place?” Billy asked.

“Hits?” Jenny smiled out from under the black hood. “I’m not a medium.”

“You told me a ghost was trying to talk to you,” said Billy. “Can you try saying something to them right now?”

I bristled at this childish game. I am not a Halloween party prank, I snapped at him, but he was oblivious.

A woman in kitchen whites came out of the cafeteria and frowned at Billy and Jenny. “Why aren’t you in class?” she called.

“We’re going,” Billy called back. He pulled the notebook pages from his back pocket and waved them at her in a blur. “We got hall passes.”

The woman propped the door open with a wooden wedge and left them alone again.

They gave up trying to conjure a spirit at the tree and moved on to the phone booth beside the gymnasium. My soul fluttered with nerves at this place. It was where I first learned James’s name and where we shared our secrets, my bondage to hosts, his imprisonment to the land where his childhood home had once stood.

Billy opened the squeaking door and stepped inside. He looked for clues, but all the scratched and painted messages were from others and in a quite different tone than any note James or I might have left behind. Jenny stepped up to the opening and looked up and around through the cracked glass.

“Maybe one of them called the other from here,” Billy suggested.

Jenny shrugged. “Does it even work anymore?”

Billy lifted the receiver and clicked the button hidden underneath.

I had the odd idea, just then, that only Billy’s fingerprints would be found on the phone, if a detective were working to piece together the mystery of my days with James. For our conversation in this tiny booth was before I had fingers.

They paused at the school library window, but Jenny grabbed Billy’s sleeve, holding him back. “There are too many people,” she said. “The librarian knows me too well.”

For a moment I thought, I have spent more hours here than either of you. Remembering how I had helped James compose an essay as if he were Billy, sitting at a table in this little library, made me miss James again. But as I tried to recall the last time I had seen him, heaven did not come into focus in my mind. I wanted to remember the last thing he said to me before I left heaven to find Jenny, but there was only silence. This bothered me so much that as I dragged behind Billy and Jenny toward the auditorium it felt as if I were wading through a drift of snow.

The double doors had been left propped open even though there didn’t seem to be anyone inside. The house was dark, but there was a pool of light on the stage and a can of paint and two wooden chairs nearby sitting on a tarp. Nothing else.

Billy paused at the back of the house, perhaps listening to hear if there was anyone about. Jenny let the hood of the jacket drop off the back of her head.

“Your ghost didn’t draw this,” she pointed out.

Billy motioned her to come and I walked behind them as slow as smoke might, though I was not even that substantial. I was melancholy and thinking in dreary metaphors. I was the moon by day, displaced and faded.

We followed Billy, watched him explore the stage right wings until he found what he was looking for. He grinned at Jenny and started up a built-in ladder beside the stage crew’s work table, just as it appeared in the drawing. It was dark—Jenny came to the foot of the ladder and gazed up at the shape of Billy climbing into the blackness, ten, twenty feet up, then disappearing.

She had begun to ascend when his voice made her hurry.

“Wow.”

I remembered the feeling of the hard wooden rungs through the soles of my shoes, but this time I floated up to the loft. When Jenny got to the top, Billy put a hand on the back of her head to make sure she didn’t hit the slanted wooden beams. They had discovered the platform, no bigger than a bed, which would’ve been plain wood except for the thick black cloth that James and I had left there, a faded pile of curtain, spread across the surface. Jenny simply stared, but I dropped to the boards and wept.

The material was wrinkled, yet even in the low light it remembered the shape of two bodies.