He pulled me in close and wrapped his arms around me. “Not with you,” he said.
I buried my face against his chest. He told Del he liked her coat, and she explained it was a dead girl’s coat.
“She got it from the Salvation Army,” I said.
We went downstairs and out into the snowy street. William wore his camera slung under his jacket. I’d left mine behind. The houses lined up in their rows, their roofs thick and white, the lampposts and power lines and tree limbs all leaden with snow. The snow falling was bewitching and oddly warm. William held my hand, and I let him, conscious of Del watching. Every so often he stopped and pulled me in to kiss. A passing car’s headlights would light us up.
“This isn’t the usual way things go with you,” he said, quietly. “Is it?”
“This is out of the ordinary,” I said.
I believed we were both feeling the same thing at the same time—but I knew very little then. I was dangerously close to confusing the sex for love. Thankfully, I never admitted to it. Del had walked on ahead, and she looked back at us.
“Lovebirds? Really?” she said, in her caustic way.
William looked at me, his eyes soft and questioning. “You trust me, don’t you?” he said, as if he needed reassurance. He let my hand drop. I had to retrieve his hand and tell him to stop it, and I knew then that I’d succumbed to something unnameable, marked by this reclamation, this rush to reassure.
We stood on the sidewalk, under someone’s porch light. Inside the house we saw people watching television, just their feet in socks propped up on a coffee table. They’d never removed their jack-o’-lanterns from the porch. Nearly buried by snow, you could make out the carved grimaces. All around, things were caught unprepared by the snowfall—a rake propped on a fence, a child’s bicycle tossed down on the grass. On the porch a pair of socks, pulled off and abandoned, frozen stiff in their contortions.
We kept walking, past Johnny’s Big Red Grill, where a group of students spilled out, singing a pop song, and I had a sense of watching what should have been my life from a distance. We’d been walking behind Del, who steered us past the railroad tracks, into an end of town I had never been. She stopped at the head of a path, and we joined her. Below us a creek, not yet frozen, rushed in the dark. To the right were scattered twinkling lights, and a soft din of conversation. I sensed low-built dwellings coated with snow. There were several fires burning. The place smelled of wood smoke and the dank creek mud.
“Where are we?” I retreated a few steps, tugging on Del’s arm.
“This is the encampment I told you about,” she said. “I want you to meet Sybil Townsend.”
William turned as if to head back toward town.
“These people know me.” Del was slightly exasperated.
“My feet are getting cold,” I said.
I didn’t want to meet Sybil Townsend, especially just then. William stepped toward me and slid his two hands up under my coat, under my sweater and T-shirt. His hands on my skin, the press of his fingertips, were somehow consoling, familiar.
“Oh, let’s just go with it,” he said, quietly, into my hair. “She can tell us our fate.”
Sybil Townsend and her abilities were all a game to him, as such things had been to Del and me as children. Del seemed to have forgotten we’d once played at this. William held my hand and we followed Del down the path worn muddy by others’ footsteps. The enclave consisted mostly of tarps strung on two-by-fours. Sea breezes had aired out the tent encampment erected on the Spiritualists by the Sea site, and those balmy nights had filled with fireflies. Here people huddled in the harsh cold. Strung bulbs, or Christmas lights, powered by a small generator, lit some of the dwellings. Under the tarps, or around the fires, the people sat in aluminum chairs, the kind with plastic slats, on low-slung canvas chairs, camp chairs, the type you took to an outdoor concert or a kid’s sports game or the beach. On end tables were small shaded lamps and tinny radios. I looked for tarot cards, for hands linked in communion. I listened for whispered messages from the dead.
The people eyed us warily from inside the tents. They were dressed in layers of clothes that made them look lumpy. We kept walking down the narrow paths, one leading to the next. The snow fell, landing in their fires and hissing. The mud sucked at my boots. From the tents came the smells of humans—stale breath, refuse, the odor of a dirty clothes hamper—all mixed with the wood smoke of the fires. I had a disorienting feeling of having stepped into a separate world with its own time and place—a ghost camp. We arrived at a site removed from the others, a larger community fire. Around it, the people laughed and passed a bottle. They smoked and their exhaling formed large clouds about their heads. When they saw Del, they greeted her, all at once.
“Well, if it isn’t Delores,” a man said.