Under the Light

Chapter 27





Helen


IN MY PERSONAL HELL, time had stopped. I was already drowned and now I was seeing the gap in the cellar door through a distorting veil of silty water. I was upright, the crown of my head floating just a few inches below the ceiling, my body hanging below, my hands floating at shoulder height.

This time the scene felt different—it used to scald my skin with cold and chill my bones to aching—now the cold only brought a numbing sensation. I was as stiff as clay. I could see one frozen bolt of lightning hanging in the sky, its brilliance diffused in waves of blue and green.

What tortured me was that this storm would never grow or wither. No sunset was pending, no season change. No one would ever come to find my body.

Better that I should hide here instead of haunt Jenny, I told myself. Yet a hard lump of doubt weighed on my heart—I had abandoned her. That was worse than pushing my baby out into a storm, wasn’t it? At least I had told my daughter which way to run. I had left Jenny alone in a sea of dangers, most of which I had stirred up. And I hadn’t even said goodbye.

I would have loved to grab the rope of time and reel back in all that had happened. Even if I couldn’t go back so far as to save my own life—run upstairs with my baby girl and survive the storm—why couldn’t I at least pull time backwards far enough to start over with Jenny? If I could begin again, arrive when she awoke in the bathtub, I could take more care. I would keep my sorrows and fears out of her way. And I would come to her only if she called me. I would never force myself on her again—she would have to invite me back.

Even if time could be moved like tugging a rope, it would certainly be a ponderous rope that stronger spirits than I found immovable. As I watched that single thread of lightning billow through the water above me like the aurora borealis, I imagined the heavy cord of time stretching away from me in the water like the hard, thick rope on a great ship. And I imagined it wavering, softening, then flattening into a ribbon.

If time was as thin and flexible as all that, I should be able to pull it with ease—I could unroll it from its spindle and be back with Jenny. I pictured the last time I had seen her—she’d been sitting on her bed, holding out the back of her hand that I might speak to her. I couldn’t hear her voice, but she might have been asking me a question that a Y or an N would have answered: Are you with me? Will you help me?

She was far away, but I could feel her lifting her hand to me now, waiting for me to speak. She needed to know: Am I crazy or are you real? Am I alone or will you come to me and help me?

Jenny was calling for me.

And I tried to write the letter that would reassure her. Two simple strokes that made a Y on her skin. Yes, I am real. Yes, I will help you. But my fingers were as still as a statue’s, white and lifeless, floating in the dark water.

I wished I could grasp that ribbon dangling in the flood and drag myself closer to her, because I felt as if her hand was tied or chained down. She couldn’t reach any farther—I needed to close the distance. And the questions she was asking me, she hung her life on them.

Do you care what happens to me? she was asking.

I could not see her—the water was too dark—but I felt her thoughts. Yes, I answered. And a ripple rolled away from my fingers. I had moved.

Are you there? she asked me.

Yes, I answered, and this time I saw my finger move. Yes. Two strokes that crossed. Yes, I am here. And I could feel the back of her hand. I wasn’t under water. I was standing in an unfamiliar living room.

To my horror Jenny was being held in a chair, physically bound by four women. Two held her wrists and legs and two pressed her shoulders to the back of the chair. And there was Cathy herself, sitting beside Jenny’s chair, looking uncomfortable but doing nothing to stop them.

“Dear God, spare us.” The woman who spoke stood over Jenny, holding a small pitcher in her hands as if it were a holy relic. She was the one who had watched Jenny from across the aisle in church.

“Dear God,” the other women repeated. “Spare us.” Cathy was the only one who didn’t mimic these words.

Jenny held her eyes closed and squeezed the tears back. She trembled and strained with her left hand to raise it to my touch.

I drew my Y on the back of her hand. Yes, I’m back.

She drew in a sharp breath and relaxed, as tears began to roll down her cheeks. I knelt in front of her chair. On her arm, next to the hands that were holding her down, I wrote love.

Jenny shuddered and let out a sigh.

I looked around at the frightened women holding Jenny down, and Cathy, appalled and yet merely watching, and the one woman who wasn’t scared glowering at Jenny with something akin to pleasure. I noticed the crosses and the Bibles.

Is this an exorcism? I asked Jenny.

She must have heard me, because she lifted her left index finger and wrote a letter Y in the air.

“What’s she doing with her finger?” one of the ladies whispered.

I wanted to slap those stupid women, but I remembered my promise to be careful. There’s nothing wrong with you, I whispered to Jenny. In case she couldn’t hear me, I wrote on her arm: no fear.

“Deliver us, O mighty God, from all evil,” the woman with the pitcher intoned. She dipped her fingertips in the pitcher and lifted them out, dripping with water. She flicked an angry splash into Jenny’s chest.

“Deliver us,” the ladies chanted, “O mighty God, from all evil.”

I drew the shape of a heart on the back on Jenny’s hand and felt her relax a bit more, just enough to take in another slow breath. Her spirit was still weighed down, though. Even if she agreed with me that there was nothing to fear in the room, something on the inside of her was holding her captive.

Are you still frightened? I asked her.

She nodded.

“She’s agreeing,” said one of the women.

Jenny lifted her finger and painted the air with a Y. But she was answering my question, not agreeing with the text of the ceremony.

I stood in front of Jenny’s chair, right beside the woman with the pitcher of water. I held my hand out to Jenny and said, Take me to see what frightens you.

To my surprise, Jenny’s chin began to quiver. She still had her eyes closed, but she turned toward me, I knew it. She shook her head no.

“She’s saying no,” one of the women whispered.

The woman with the pitcher hushed this woman.

When James was afraid to remember what had happened at his death, I had gone with him into the memory and witnessed his most painful moment—I wanted to do the same with Jenny, but she was scared.

Take hold of me, I told her. I leaned down and wrote on her arm: Show me.

“Drive out all unclean spirits,” the woman beside me chanted.

I ignored her and held out my hand to Jenny. We’ll look together, I told Jenny.

Still she shook her head.

It’s easy, I told her. Like the flood I showed you. That was my hell.

I decided to show her my own scars again before demanding to see her wounds.

I reached down and slipped my hand into hers, lifting her mind into my memory. My death scene closed around us, the flood was up to our chins. Jenny’s spirit appeared with me in this reimagining of my death. She held my hand tightly and opened her eyes. She turned to me, astonished, shivering. The scene was active again—time had found its legs again.

Look, I whispered. I pointed to the hole in the cellar door, no bigger than a cat, and showed her my daughter’s tiny fingers holding the jagged wood and then disappearing. There was a crack of thunder and a flash of lightning. We heard my baby shriek, which made Jenny cover her ears.

It’s all right, I told her.

Jenny tilted her head back, trying to keep her face above the surface. She spit out a mouthful of water that sloshed over her chin. Finally the flood overtook us completely. We stared at each other through the dark water.

In that moment, seeing the reflection of my face in Jenny’s eyes, a tiny angel in the blackness, seeing Jenny’s willingness to stare into the face of a ghost, I was changed. My hell was reimagined. I no longer dwelt on how terrified my baby must have been to leave me in the cellar and escape. Instead I was overwhelmed with pride—my baby had run away from death and saved her own life.

I thought I killed her, I told Jenny, but look . . .

I pulled her by the hand up through the cellar roof and higher, to the top of the house’s roof, where we sat in the remembered storm and watched what I’d never been able to see before: my little girl making her way to safety. Whether I was imagining it or whether we were somehow able to look back at what really happened, I didn’t know. But what a brave girl she was, picking herself up twice when she slipped in the mud, crying to wake the dead but still marching up the road, holding on to fence posts and blowing clumps of weeds, calling for help, not in words, but with all the hoarse cries that her tiny lungs could give. Jenny watched, her teeth chattering, holding my hand for dear life.

My daughter, not even yet two, squeezed through the gap in the gate and climbed the steps of our neighbor’s farmhouse on hands and knees. She was far in the distance now, but we both saw the door open, light pouring down onto the wet baby, and a friendly pair of hands lowering to her open arms.

Isn’t she a marvel, my girl?

Maybe Jenny had no voice in my memory, but she nodded. Something about her amazed expression made me feel anything was possible. Perhaps I could have seen this part of my daughter’s story anytime, but it felt as if the magic came from having Jenny beside me. She made me believe I could do anything.

I threw up my arm and pushed the storm and all its darkness away. Jenny shielded her eyes from the light of heaven. I don’t know if she saw the same lakeside celebration that I did, with lanterns in the trees and a smiling moon, or heard the fiddler and the laughter of the dancers, or smelled the crocus scattered in the grass and the pinecone fire nearby. That may have been my personal idea of paradise, but her eyes widened and she gasped in a breath and lifted my hand in hers, pressed it to her heart.

Your turn, I told her. Take me to your hell.

I thought she might hesitate, but she pressed her fingers to the back of my hand in a deliberate gesture and we were at once in her memory instead of mine.





Jenny was sitting with her parents in the Prayer Corner, reading from pages torn out of her journal, and she was staring at her mother’s shoe, the one extended in the air as Cathy sat cross-legged. I was standing in the center of the circle, looking down at Jenny’s head.

The scene appeared to be frozen, perhaps at the most dreaded moment, the way I had stalled myself before my daughter could find safety.

I reached down and on the back of Jenny’s hand I wrote a Y: Yes, I’m with you.

Jenny blinked and the scene began to move. Cathy’s left shoe was gently bouncing as she swung her leg, a nervous habit that I had noticed many times in my days living in Jenny’s house.

Dan stood by his chair, holding Jenny’s diary. He gripped several pages at once and ripped them out in a savage motion. Holding them under his daughter’s chin, he said, “Read.” And when she hesitated he said, “Take them and read.”

Jenny obeyed, took these ravaged fragments of her writing in her hands and began to read from the first word on the top page. “. . . don’t know, but I don’t think God did that.” I could see that she was humiliated and disgusted by this punishment, but she kept reading. “Not the God I believe in. Could we really worship different Gods?”

Dan matter-of-factly jerked the page from her hands and thrust his finger at the next page down. Jenny read, “I dreamed I was walking down a staircase at school and a guy who looked like the guy from that movie we saw in history class walked right up to me and put his hand under my blouse—” When Jenny paused, her father ordered, “Go on.”

Dan took his seat in the tiny circle of chairs, looking smug, but Cathy, arms folded, legs folded, bounced her foot anxiously.

“Read,” Dan ordered his daughter. “Or should I have your mother read to you?”

Jenny held herself stiffly. Her mother’s shoe stopped in midair. Then everything froze again.

It’s your memory, I told her. Change it. Tear it down.

Jenny shuddered, but then lifted her gaze to her father and time began again, though I suspected Jenny was creating a new version of her nightmare.

“Why would you do that?” she asked her father. “Why would you threaten your own wife with that kind of humiliation? I was the one who was in trouble.”

Dan looked at her blankly as if she were speaking another language.

Jenny turned to Cathy. “And why do you let him do that to you? Would you really have read my dream out loud if he asked you to? Do you want me to think that’s how husbands should treat their wives?”

I could feel the loathing flood out of Jenny as she began to cry—her tears made little blue pools on her diary pages, words became watercolor clouds and lakes.

Jenny sucked in a breath and stopped crying. “Daddy, go away.” And he disappeared. Then she looked at her mother. “Mommy,” she said. “Show me the last time you defied Daddy for me.”

Cathy blinked at her slowly, and the Prayer Corner was replaced with a church sanctuary. A coffin and white roses stood at the altar. The organist was playing a quiet hymn. Cathy’s hair was longer, and she wore a black dress. Dan sat beside her in his black suit, an arm across the back of the pew behind his wife but not touching her shoulder. Three-year-old Jenny sat in a navy sailor dress, her white shiny shoes swinging. She climbed up to stand beside her mother, straining to see the coffin, but Dan snapped his fingers. The little girl obeyed and ducked down into a squat.

Next she lay down on the bench, staring into the rafters. Dan leaned over Cathy and whispered, “Sit up, young lady.” Then to his wife he said, “Teach her some reverence.” Cathy nodded, helped Jenny to sit up again, but when the pastor began to give the eulogy and Dan’s attention had shifted, Cathy patted her thigh—Jenny lay down on the pew with her head on her mother’s lap, and Cathy stroked her golden hair. When the little girl looked up, Cathy winked at her. Mother and daughter floated alone on a life boat of peace that no one could see but the two of them.

Dan glanced over and whispered, “Sit up!” But Cathy said, “Shhh, she’s almost asleep.” And Dan did hush. He left them to themselves.

“I’m not sleepy,” Jenny whispered.

“It’s okay,” Cathy whispered, more softly, words only for Jenny to hear. “You don’t have to sleep if you don’t want to. You’re a good girl. God loves you. He says you can look at the roof of his house if you feel like it.”

“He did?” Jenny whispered.

Cathy nodded and stroked her hair. “He said you can do whatever you want because you’re one of his angels.”

Jenny tried to whisper quieter still. “I don’t have any wings.”

Dan cleared his throat, apparently a warning against secrets being shared between his wife and daughter, but Cathy only leaned closer to her child and whispered, “They’ll grow.”

And at this little Jenny laughed. A sound that crossed over into the grown Jenny, who was back in the chair with four church ladies binding her wrists, legs, and shoulders.

Jenny’s face lightened as if she had thrown the roof off the room and flooded it with heaven.

I was again standing over her. On her left arm I wrote: Safe?

Jenny nodded and in the air her finger drew a Y: Yes.

“She’s doing it again,” someone whispered. “Look at her hand.”

I’m still here, I told her. I will never leave you.

But to my surprise she lifted her finger and in the air made an N: No.

I was taken aback. I should go?

Jenny nodded.

“Who is she talking to?” asked one of the ladies.

“You know who it is,” said the woman with the pitcher.

Jenny was releasing me from my promise to stay and protect her, but I had to see for myself that she was strong enough. She’d fought her way through the storm, but I wanted to see that door open and the light of safety pour over her.

Jenny opened her eyes, then blinked at the church ladies and their terrified faces. “I am not possessed.”

“That’s the demon talking,” said Mrs. Caine. “Keep her in the chair.”