Del went up to a figure whose boots smoked on the rim of the fire.
“Where’ve you been? Come back for another reading?” he said.
We stood beside the group, the warmth of the fire on our faces. Still, I couldn’t shake the cold that seeped down the back of my neck.
“So, what do you have for us?” someone asked. Was this request for a gift a kind of password or mode of entry? I couldn’t distinguish between the men and the women. Their voices were deep and gravelly. They wore knitted caps, some with pompoms, some striped and bright. They seemed like children sitting by the fire. I pictured Del here with these people, placid in their midst, her old boyfriend, Rory, adding a broken chair leg to the flames.
“I brought my sister,” Del said, and as an afterthought, “and her friend.”
“That’s it?” someone said.
Del laughed. She pulled a bag of candy corn out of her coat pocket and dropped it in the man’s lap. “Where’s Sybil?”
Snow blew softly around us. The sky was a black and starless bowl rimmed with the lonely shapes of trees, their remaining withered leaves. Someone leaped up, startling me—a smallish man with a gleeful face. He disappeared into one of the nearby tents and emerged with Sybil Townsend, who made her way toward us cloaked in layers of what looked to be long skirts, a knitted poncho draped over it all. She was small, wizened, though with a youthful, quick way of moving. She wore a scarf wound around her dark hair.
She approached me with her bare hand held out, and I hesitated, not wanting to touch it. In the sudden quiet a throat cleared, raspy, horrible. Her eyes were flinty in the firelight. The smallish man hovered near Sybil’s shoulder, his round face lit up.
“Take her hand,” he said.
William hadn’t said a word, and when I looked at him for some sign of encouragement he put out his own hand and shook Sybil’s.
“Nice to meet you,” he said. “I’m William.”
Sybil seemed flustered. “Nice to meet you, too, Billy.”
William took his hand away quickly. “William,” he said.
“I know what it is.” Sybil folded her hands together, clasped over her heart.
The first of Sybil’s tricks was a more malevolent, gypsy-like version of Reverend Earline of the Spiritualists by the Sea, who’d worn Diane von Furstenberg sheaths, coiffed hair, and expensive costume jewelry. Someone had called William “Billy” before. I’d been indoctrinated in the methods of the Spiritualists by the Sea mediums—their calm, inquisitiveness, their ability to read body language, movement, the small adjustment of pupils to pain, sadness, joy. But so had Del, and she was watching me, waiting for something more, as if she had discovered my secret. Her gaze made me feel unhinged. I might have given in and told them all what I heard, what I saw. Was this what I was doing with William? Giving in to the feeling of bodily closeness because it kept me grounded?
The cold came in through my boots. I’d thought I could leave the dead behind, but they were here, summoned by Sybil Townsend’s shoddy tricks. Behind me, in the tent from which Sybil had appeared, an open flap served as an entrance, and a woman sat within clothed inappropriately for the weather—in a sundress patterned with faded flowers. The snow seemed to land on her bare arms, and she appeared not to care. Her hair was cut short to her head, and she peered out with the look I’d come to associate with the dead. Others, woeful, seemed to keep a respectful distance. I could have summoned them closer and held my own spirit communication circle. And what if I had agreed to help them all? To connect them to their living in some grand spectacle? A woman is looking for her daughter, given up for adoption in Seneca Falls in 1955. A man who died in a fire caused by a gas heater is seeking his father, Herbert. William wouldn’t have believed me. I might have consigned myself to this ragtag group and never have seen him again.
And then Mary Rae stepped toward us in her down coat. Her pretty curls lay on her shoulders, frosted with ice. I felt a surge of panic. But rather than continue toward me, she addressed William.
“Oh, Billy, don’t,” she said.
Sybil reached out to me again.
“Don’t touch me,” I said angrily, loud enough for everyone to notice. “I’d like to go. My feet are cold.”
What did Sybil see when she looked at me? My aura, my etheric double, its bulging edges signaling neurosis? I’d slipped back into a reliance on the manuals, and I grew even angrier.
“Take her home,” Sybil said to Del.
She shuffled away and someone gave her a seat at the fire. Del turned us back down the path and behind us we heard sad, cackling laughter. We made our way up the embankment, listening to the creek slough its banks. In a week or two, the temperature would dip and its surface would still and thicken. Underneath, the rainbow trout would sit, dumb and cowed, waiting for spring.