Under the Light

Chapter 22





Helen


ALL THE WAY HOME FROM THE LIBRARY, Cathy was lost in thought. She didn’t notice that Jenny was sad. At home, the dining room table was stacked high with organized file folders, photocopied papers stapled or paper-clipped together; accordion files with titles such as HOUSE and MONTHLY EXPENSES stood beside open file boxes.

Jenny reached to open a file labeled PARENTING but withdrew her hand when Cathy came into the room.

“Dad was the one who left us,” Jenny told her. “He can’t get custody of me.”

“He says legally—”

Jenny interrupted her. “He doesn’t know how the law works.”

“He knows how to make deals,” said Cathy. “He knows how to blackmail people.”

“But you won’t let him take me.” Jenny came up and stood beside Cathy’s shoulder. “Right?”

Cathy was looking over her documents, eyes flicking nervously from one to another.

“I’m trying,” she said absently.

“You’re my mom,” said Jenny.

I wanted to sweep her away from rejection, but she needed to ask her mother for help. She needed to see with her own eyes, and hear for herself, if Cathy was not up to the task of loving her.

“Don’t I get to say who I want to go with?” Jenny asked.

Cathy put a belated arm around the girl’s shoulder. A hollow gesture, not even an afterthought. “I didn’t get your homeschooling materials yet,” she said. “I can go tomorrow.”

“It’s okay.” Jenny rested her head on Cathy’s shoulder. “Mom?”

She answered automatically. “Yes?”

“You know during the time I can’t remember . . . Did my voice sound different?” Jenny looked up at her mother, waiting. “Did I use words I don’t usually use, or did I have an accent or anything?”

“What?” Cathy separated from the girl, her brow tight and strained. “Of course not. Why?”

“Not even the last few days before I went to the hospital?” Jenny seemed oblivious to Cathy’s fear, but I could feel it like a grating vibration in my teeth. “I didn’t talk funny?” Jenny asked.

Cathy took another step back. “Funny in what way?”

Jenny shrugged. “Old-fashioned, maybe?”

Cathy grew pale and walked into the living room. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Jenny followed her, watched her mother straighten things that were already neat. “I’m trying to figure out what happened to me,” said Jenny. “Weren’t there moments when I seemed like someone else?”

I remembered vividly the conversation Cathy and I had after her women’s group meeting. We stood on the sidewalk in the dark and I told her I wasn’t her daughter. Cathy had been in tears. Even now I could almost hear the sprinklers in a stranger’s yard and smell the wet pavement. And Cathy recalled it too—I could see it in the lines around her eyes and where a smile should have been.

Cathy moved to the open arch of the hall doorway, keeping her back away from her daughter. “I don’t like this,” she told Jenny.

“Do you believe spirits can visit us and take over our bodies?”

“Spirits?” Cathy folded her arms. “What kind of spirits?”

“I don’t know.” Jenny came a step closer to her mother and Cathy tensed.

Coward, I said. Talk to her. She’s your only child. Her father will never explain anything to her.

“You and Daddy always had answers about stuff like this,” said Jenny. “Angels and visions and the Holy Ghost. That’s why I’m asking. Do you think a spirit was visiting me?”

“Are you talking about an angel?” asked Cathy.

Jenny hesitated. Too long for Cathy’s comfort. “I don’t think so.”

Cathy’s voice turned hard. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” She marched down the hall and at first Jenny followed.

In the corridor Cathy turned on every light she came to. The hall was lit. The overhead light as she walked into her bedroom, the end table lamp. Even the TV across from the bed.

She grabbed the remote, turned on the television, then pressed the volume control until a row of little blue bars grew across the bottom of the screen and the blare of the weather channel surrounded her with a protective wall of noise. For an extra measure, she closed the bedroom door against any conversations about the supernatural.

Jenny stayed in the hall long enough to take two breaths, then went into her own room and closed us in. She sat at her dressing table and stared first at her own face, then at the closet doors behind her in the reflection. The mirrored surface on the doors would normally send her a view of her own back and of her face in the vanity’s glass, but the closet was half opened, the mirror not showing.

I moved into her line of sight. Something in the backwards reflection, in the space where I stood, captured her attention. She drew a tissue from the box on her dressing table, leaned forward, and rubbed at the glass—I wondered if she could see some vague form of my specter and mistook it for a smudge.

Feeling bold, I glided in front of her, facing the reflection, and lowered myself until my eyes lined up with hers. She was seeing herself through me. I didn’t mean to scare her—I wanted to be acknowledged—but she must have seen some wisp of me, for she drew in her breath and lurched back from the table.

She darted to the door and I thought she would flee the room, but instead her gaze fell to the library books on the desk next to her, the ones that used to be in her school bag. She snatched up the top one from the stack, Jane Eyre, and sat down on the floor right where she was. After one unsteady breath, she let the book fall open across her knees. I had been frustrated the night before by my sometimes successful, often failed attempts to speak to her through the printed word, but I decided to try again.

I had taken control of her hand to touch Mr. Brown when we came upon him in the high school hallway. But that was a frightening, awkward ordeal. I tried to remember how I had taken gentle control of James’s hand when we wrote together at the back of Mr. Brown’s classroom. I had relaxed him. So now I rested my hand on Jenny’s back, then I slid my palm down her arm from shoulder to wrist. She shuddered for a moment, then let me move her hand, my fingers wrapped around hers, pointing her index finger where I willed it.

I scanned the page and quickly chose a phrase I hoped would express my difficulty in communicating with Jenny: I could not very well understand her.

Jenny gasped, but did not pull away from my influence. She whispered, “More.”

I helped her turn several pages and chose the line: my eyes sought Helen.

“Helen,” she whispered, her voice thinned with awe. “Why did you take my body?”

I went ahead to another page, chose another phrase: I must love him.

“Why did you leave my body?” she asked.

I folded over a few chapters of the book and from the page I found I pointed to the words something not right.

“Why are you still here?” she wanted to know.

I turned a few pages farther along: to comfort you, as well as I could.

Then I skipped forward several more pages and showed her: I am here; and it is my intention to stay till I see how you get on.

In a jarring trill, the phone rang, the sound rolling through the halls. I couldn’t remember how many phones Jenny’s family had. Three? Four? They all cried at once.

The spell was apparently broken. Jenny listened toward the hall for a moment—the sound stopped in the middle of the second ring—and Jenny put her hand into the book again, but she wouldn’t let me control her now. She sighed and left the book on the floor. She went to the bed and lay on her side, scanned the room, then asked, “Are you still here?

I tried speaking the word, but she couldn’t hear me, even when I shouted it. I tried flickering the lamp, then moving the curtain, but nothing worked. Finally I sat beside her and tapped her shoulder. Nothing. I tapped the back of her hand and she jumped.

She looked frightened at first, but then she lay her hand on the bedspread palm down, offering it to me. I drew a Y for the word yes on her skin and she shivered.

“Yes?” she asked. I wrote the Y again.

“Is your name Mary?” she asked with half a smile.

I wrote an N for “no.” She gave a small sound of surprise.

“Is your name Helen?” she asked.

I drew the Y again. Jenny closed her eyes for a moment and took a slow breath, in and out, before asking, “Are you an angel?”

I indicated that no, I was not.

Jenny’s smile dropped. “You aren’t evil, are you?”

Well, I was not without sin—I wasn’t sure how to answer. Finally I told her no.

“A ghost?” she asked.

Yes—I told her twice.

To test me again, I suppose, she asked, “Your name is Sarah, right?”

No, I indicated, and then along her arm I wrote with my finger in block letters as if I were a child practicing at a chalkboard: H E L E N. Jenny shuddered again and let out a breath as if she was chilled.

“Wow,” she whispered. “Helen is here to comfort me.”

Y for yes.

“Did you drown?”

Yes.

Perhaps my finger was cold on her skin, for she pulled the covers over her legs and wrapped her free arm around her waist. The other stayed on the bed, waiting for my answers.

“Why do you care how I feel?” she asked. “My father doesn’t—he hates me. I don’t even think my mother likes me very much.”

Silly girl, I said aloud, but she couldn’t hear me. Of course I care for you.

“And Billy used to like me,” she said. “But I ruined that.”

I wrote on the back of her hand: N.

“I did,” she insisted. “I don’t think he wants to see me again. I hurt his feelings.”

I was about to draw a heart on the back of her hand, but she asked another question: “Where is your sweetheart?”

Up her arm I spelled heaven.

“He must miss you,” she said, which froze me for a moment. How awful if he was missing me, but how much worse if he was not. Could she have sensed my worry? She drew a Y for yes on the back of her own hand as she said, “Yes, he does.”

Then she sat up with a new idea. “Do you know about a boy I met when I was away from my body?”

She held her hand out in midair and I wrote, N for no. I had no way of knowing what people, ghosts, angels, or other kinds of creatures she might have visited.

She nodded, trying not to look disappointed. “Maybe I dreamed him.” She lay back down and thought for a moment while I sat on the corner of the mattress. Finally she said, “There’s no one else to talk to. Will you talk to me?”

Yes, I told her.

“If I have a nightmare, will you come to me?”

Yes.

“If I can’t go back to sleep, will you stay with me?”

Yes, yes.

“If I’m lost and I call you, will you come help me?”

Yes. I wrote on her arm, Love.

“Billy doesn’t like me anymore,” she repeated. Tears rose in her eyes.

No, I told her, but gently she shook her head.

“He told me to leave,” said Jenny. “I didn’t even say goodbye.”

I lay my palm on the top of her head and to my surprise, she fell asleep, with the blankets folded across her legs and her pale hand spread out on the bed.





When I had first become Jenny I had been terrified by the sound, but now the rushing water no longer reminded me of death. The shower shut off, Jenny toweled herself dry and rubbed her hair until it stopped dripping. I wondered if she had forgotten about me—she hadn’t addressed me since her nap. All through dinner and the doing of dishes, nothing indicated she was listening for me or wondering where I was. Now she slipped her nightgown over her head, brushed her teeth. I wished I could help her comb out her hair, as I had with my own girl on my knee, but my hand went through the brush.

Jenny chose a comb instead and began to untangle her wet hair. When she paused, I did not know what she was thinking. She didn’t seem alarmed in any way, and neither did she speak to me. She matter-of-factly drew a tampon from a box under the sink. At first this seemed mundane—I had lived with my last host and his wife for long enough to find the concept ordinary. But when Jenny had applied it and dropped the wrappings in the trash basket, she dropped a tissue into the toilet—before it was flushed away I caught sight of blood.

Pain weighty as a brick fell through me. I remembered now that when James and I were in Billy’s and Jenny’s bodies we might have created a child. Of course I would not have wanted Jenny to conceive out of wedlock and at such a young age, but I caught myself on the edge of the tub and wept. Jenny stood again at the bathroom mirror, staring at herself until the comb clattered into the basin. She clutched the counter and began to shake—she lowered herself onto the floor near me as the tears came.