It had been my great-grandfather who first leased the land to the Spiritualists by the Sea. In the late 1890s they’d arrived in wagons and pitched tents on the property. My grandfather had allowed them to expand, to build the temple and the cottages along the cart paths. What other relationship he’d had with the group remained obscure. We were cautioned as children to leave the Spiritualists alone, and I sensed that whatever they did in the camp was taboo. Every summer, we’d hear the organ’s notes climb over the trees, signaling the start of their season, and we knew to stay away from that part of the woods.
By the time the dead began to appear to me again, at fifteen, I’d long been familiar with the manuals and the drawings. Cindy Berger, freckled, nervous, dead two years from leukemia, was the first. She appeared beside my grandparents’ privet hedge, by the path to the pool. I saw Mrs. Harrington, my junior high school art teacher and a victim of spousal abuse, wearing her trademark silk scarf knotted around her neck, in the soup aisle at the Big Y supermarket. The old drunk, Waldo, found dead on the railroad tracks when I was twelve, appeared by the Mile Creek Beach Club gate on a summer afternoon. I didn’t recognize some of the dead, but I soon learned not to startle at their arrival, to predict their appearance by the way the light seemed to waver and fold. I could distinguish them from the living by the way they stared at me, their expressions anxious and filled with longing, as if their appearances had been conjured by the despair of a lost love and the possibility of connection that only I might give. Their expressions compelled me to do this one thing for them, yet I refused. I continually let them down, believing they would catch on soon enough and leave me alone.
I was sure my great-grandfather had seen what I saw, and recorded his visitors alongside his sketches of the birds, their little clawed feet penciled in a violent grip, similar to the one my mother used on the wheel of the car. His manuals had become my own, their catechism one I memorized as a gullible child—What is the ethereal double? Who travels on the astral plane? How does the clairvoyant receive messages from the dead? Once all manner of dead began to appear to me I began to resent him for passing down his curse, and the manuals revealed themselves for what they were—the esoteric ramblings of a cult. It didn’t matter that I had once believed in them. I felt foolish for doing so now. The Ithaca move came from my hope that the dead might not follow me out of the area, that perhaps they’d been summoned by the inept mediums affiliated with the Spiritualists by the Sea. According to “A Student,” the people I saw were shells of themselves, trapped on the lower astral plane, manifesting in the places they once inhabited. I might be able to leave them behind.
My mother helped with my application, claiming she wished the best for me, but her eagerness also meant I’d played right into her hand. She wanted me gone, away from Del. Three years before, Del had suffered a psychotic break and had been admitted to a hospital for treatment. Though she’d recently settled into a kind of assisted-living arrangement called Ashley Manor, I hadn’t seen her since our family’s last attempt at therapy two years ago, and as the space between Del and me widened like an extending rubber band, my resentment toward my mother grew. I was being shuttled out of the way, while Del, still her favorite, was allowed to stay close.
“While you were in the kitchen, Detective Thomson asked me a lot of questions about Del,” I said.
My mother pursed her lips but kept her eyes on the road, the river a dark, churning stripe beyond the guardrail and the dead summer grass. “He’s a nuisance.”
“He’s been to talk to her at Ashley Manor,” I said.
As I guessed she would, my mother glanced at me, concerned. “Your sister never mentioned that.”
“She told me in one of her letters,” I said.
My mother seemed to relax then. She sighed. “I don’t think we can believe everything Del writes in her letters.”
“Oh, I know what to believe,” I said. “And what not to believe.”
I saw the shape of her mouth like a rebuke. She suspected I did know, and held her own resentment against me for keeping things from her.
I was a prickly girl, difficult to love.
The summer I was fifteen, David Pinney died. After that, I saw the dead again for the first time since I’d seen Sister in the barn, and Del’s behavior first bloomed out of control. She’d always been a little reckless—the result of imaginative plans and games that my mother couldn’t help but marvel at. But her inventiveness took a self-destructive turn after that disastrous summer. Despite my admittedly distracted efforts to keep track of her, during the next year Del was caught with various boys—in cars, in a camper sitting in someone’s side yard, in the Mile Creek Beach Club changing rooms. Her favorite place to take boys was a ravine off Mile Creek Road, the edge of someone’s property where two cars had been abandoned—the springs and tufts of stuffing sprouting from the vinyl seats, moss and fern growing out of the rusted floorboards. There were drugs involved, too, and alcohol. I’d followed her and found our grandfather’s old bottle of Glenfiddich wedged into a wheel well. When I’d confronted her she’d simply grinned, grabbed the bottle back from me, unscrewed the top, and taken a swig.