Del fidgeted, waiting for me to fulfill my end of our pact.
“Del has seen someone,” I said. I didn’t say she thought she’d seen someone. I didn’t want her to doubt herself.
“Why are you really here?” Sybil Townsend said. “Don’t you have other means of discovering the truth?”
I wanted to say I’d tried everything I could. I was confused. The dead had secrets, but no dead were offering them up to me. Around us a small group had gathered. They began to make a queue outside the tarp’s posts. Sybil smiled a mysterious smile that might have served her well in her little shop. I wanted to slap her. My last conversation with Reverend Earline, I’d wanted to know why my mother visited the spirit circles, who she wanted to hear from, and Reverend Earline had said a man was trying to reach her. He was a suicide—a special case—someone who hadn’t been able to abandon the lower astral plane. Mr. Parmenter. My mother was the woman he’d been in love with, the woman who’d never shown up at the Stardust Motel. I was the one to put this together, but Reverend Earline saw the recognition, the shock, on my face.
“We don’t always hear the things we want to hear from the dead,” Reverend Earline had said.
“Especially when they have to speak through people like you,” I’d said.
Like the old game of telephone—a message passing from one person to the next becoming distorted and muddled, the dead pretending to be someone they were not, the messengers unable to tell the difference. In my great-grandfather’s manuals “A Student” made it clear that the practice of contacting spirits through mediums was prone to error.
“What are these people doing?” Del said.
Beneath the tarp we could see the boots of people lining up in the slush.
“They’re here for your sister,” Sybil Townsend said. She stood, her large bosom heaving under her shawls. She led Del out from under the tarp just as a woman in a fleece jacket, her hair dirty and her face lined, ducked under and sat down across from me. She took my hand and gave me an imploring look across the table. Her hand was chapped, the palms calloused.
“I want to know about my father,” she said. “He was living in California.”
The light wavered around me. Water dripped from the fringe of the tarp, overbright and shimmering. I pushed back from the table and reeled with anger out from under the tarp and through the encampment.
Del was in Sybil Townsend’s tent seated in a camp chair. I pulled Del out of the tent, down the mud path to the creek. My anger receded as we climbed toward the road, and I breathed, deeply, once we’d left the place behind altogether. You couldn’t expect the dead to provide answers. Those lingering behind, trapped on the lower astral plane, were filled with desire. They only wanted what they’d always wanted. William had stood at the curb multiple times. I’d told myself that he always appeared the same, his outfit the last he’d worn in life, like Mary Rae, but that wasn’t true. Sometimes he wore his corduroy coat, his green sweater, his faded jeans. Sometimes a gray sweater, khaki pants I’d never seen him wear before.
34
Del was quiet on the walk home. The sidewalk was bright with tree pollen, and the warmth of the sun was like a balm. As we approached the house, she slowed and seemed apprehensive.
“I suspected you saw things,” she said. “After, you know, that summer.”
It was easier to let her believe in what she’d seen. It was a relief to have her understand what that was like.
We went right into her apartment, and I helped her pack for Connecticut. She’d asked me again to come with her, but I told her I couldn’t.
“I have classes to finish,” I said.
“Will he follow me?” Del asked. I’d loaned her a suitcase, and she folded hand-me-down sweaters and T-shirts from the Milton girls.
“No,” I told her. “He won’t.”