Under the Light

  I didn’t answer. I walked up to him and he hung up.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked him.

  “I needed to see you, Puppy.”

  “Mom’s supposed to pick me up.”

  He sighed patiently. “Jennifer, I know you’re angry with me right now, but get in the car. I’m not kidnapping you. Your mother knows I’m here.”

  I didn’t want to throw a fit in front of Billy, who might still be watching us from the steps. As I opened the passenger door I realized I still had Billy’s sweatshirt jacket tied around my waist. I slipped it off and stuffed it in my bag before sitting down in the front seat—my father didn’t seem to notice.

  He got behind the wheel and fastened his seat belt. My phone rang again, muffled by Billy’s jacket pocket. I fished it out as we pulled away from the curb. It was home.

  “Put on your seat belt,” he ordered. “Just because your mother and I are ending our marriage does not mean I stop being your father.”

  I pulled the belt across my chest—it smelled like some flowery perfume, not like Mom. Then I answered the call.

  “I’m okay, Mom.”

  “Your father is coming to get you.” She sounded panicky.

  “He’s just bringing me home,” I faced him. “Right, Daddy?”

  He didn’t bother to respond.

  “He says he’s not kidnapping me,” I said. “See you in a few minutes.” I put the phone into my bag. “You left without saying goodbye,” I told him, but he didn’t react at all. “Mom told me you’re moving to San Diego.”

  “We are.”

  “What did you want to tell me?”

  He raised one eyebrow but was in too good of a mood to actually be angry with me. “There’s no need to be disrespectful.”

  He had always been the director of my tone. If he said I sounded belligerent or insincere or ungrateful, it was so. But this time instead of apologizing for sounding rude, I asked, “How long have you been seeing Judy?”

  He gave a little puff of indignation, but smiled, pleased with himself. “That’s none of your business, young lady.”

  He wore a shirt I’d seen him in dozens of times before, but he had the sleeves rolled up and he wasn’t wearing his wedding ring. “We need to make plans,” he said. He’d changed his hairstyle.

  “If you’re leaving, I should make plans with Mom from now on.”

  “Your mother does not decide what happens to you,” he said. “You’re still my daughter. I know what’s best.” We paused a little too long at a stop sign. I was afraid that he wasn’t taking me straight to the house. That he would take me out to dinner or to Judy’s place, but after a long moment he drove on toward home.

  He was never frazzled, always right. I tried a different line.

  “We didn’t have as much time to get used to this as you,” I reminded him.

  Ignoring this, he said, “I hear your mother wants to homeschool you.”

  I pictured the pew where Judy always sat in church, right in front of us, and how she and my father often stood together talking at coffee hour.

  “San Diego is beautiful,” he said. These words made my stomach tense up. He’d been there with Judy already, I knew it. Some long weekend he’d pretended to be at a small business conference, probably. They’d chosen a neighborhood and maybe a house to rent.

  I hated it when he got angry, but I couldn’t stop the words that came out of me. “Does Judy have any children?”

  His voice went cold. “You know she doesn’t.”

  “Does she want kids?” I looked at him a long moment, and when he glanced over I knew he wasn’t sure how to read my meaning. Was I asking if Judy wanted to have his babies? Or was I asking if she would be acting as my second mother?

  “I didn’t want to talk about it over the phone,” he said. “I’ve decided it would be better for you to live with me in San Diego.”

  My ears started ringing.

  “Your mother is simply an unfit parent. There’s no way around it.”

  “What did Mom do?”

  “Wives are responsible for the house and children.” He was so relaxed, he rested his arm over the steering wheel, his wrist bouncing gently to some happy song I couldn’t hear. He was wearing a new watch. Maybe Judy had bought it for him and he’d never been able to show it off until now. “Your mother was the one who let you get out of control.” He wore a new, peppery aftershave like a teenager on a first date. “Let’s face it,” he sighed. “She’s not smart enough to manage a budget, and she’s ill-equipped to make money.” He smiled at me sympathetically. “We both know what she’s like,” he said. “But no one knows her abilities and shortcomings better than I do.”

  I had an urge to slam my hand onto the steering wheel and lay into the horn, just to interrupt him. But I didn’t, which made his sudden flinch a mystery. He swatted at a fly that wasn’t there.

  Recovering, he said, “You need guidance, and your mother’s not spiritually mature enough to interpret God’s plans for you. It’s not her fault. Her character simply lacks the strength to protect you or manage your walk with Christ. I’m the one who has the means and the will to see you into adulthood.”

  There was no way even a man as cocky as my father could take me away from my own mother.

  “You can pack a few of your things,” he said. He was always so dismissive of my belongings. “But we’ll buy you whatever you need. It’ll be a fresh start.”

  My throat had tightened up. I suppose the silence bothered him.

  “Don’t you think it might be nice to begin again without people gossiping behind your back?” he asked me. “No one needs to know what happened here.”

  Before the car could come to a full stop outside our house, I opened my door and flung off my seat belt.

  “I haven’t finished,” he reminded me.

  I told him a lie I was sure would make him want to get away quick. “I think Pastor Bob is coming over in a few minutes.”

  That he drove off should have felt good, but he left a shadow over me that I couldn’t escape. I tried to outrun it, but dread trailed after me as I ran up the walk and settled in deep as I found my mother in the dining room.

  She had a dozen file folders and pieces of paper—receipts, letters, bank statements—spread across the table.

  “He says we’ll lose the house,” she told me.

  “Who says?”

  “Your father’s lawyer.”

  “That can’t be true,” I tried to tell her, but she was in another plane of reality.

  “He won’t sue for sole custody if I let you go to San Diego.”

  “No judge would give him that.”

  “More than fifty percent of cases find for the father.”

  “Did Daddy tell you that?” I put down my book bag and came to her side. “He lies.”

  “But people believe him.” She started to cry, and I put my arm around her waist. I expected her to hold me, but she only held her eyes with one hand and a bank statement in the other. “I don’t want to be alone,” she sobbed. “They’ll take you to church in San Diego and people will think she’s your mother.”

  “I’m not going with him,” I told her. “You’re my only mom.”

  But as soon as I went to my room, I heard her go into the garage. I heard her drag the stepladder to the high shelves and the hollow scrape of her sliding down the big suitcases.

  In my room I sat on the bed—I wanted someone to talk to but there was no one. Then I wondered about Helen. I scanned the room slowly in case she was nearby. If she could send me messages in church, words, and visions of a flood, I thought, she might be in this room right now. But I didn’t know what to look for. She might look like a shadow or a mist or an orb of light. Or she might be completely invisible.

  I jumped up and took my Bible from the dressing table. I stood in the middle of the room and held out the book. “Okay, Helen,” I said aloud. “Talk to me.” I dropped the Bible and it fell open. I picked it up without l
ooking at the page and closed my eyes, slammed my finger down, but when I looked it had landed in the white space between columns.

  I thought she might need to warm up. “Guide me,” I said. I let my finger move all around both pages. I didn’t feel any push or pull on my hand. I finally stopped and saw that my finger was pointing at a blank space again, this time between two chapters.

  Maybe she was taking a vacation from me. Or maybe she didn’t like to be ordered around. Or maybe she was done with earth and had moved on. I shut the Bible and set it aside.

  Or maybe I had only imagined us having a conversation. I could have dreamed the flood because I was overwhelmed by everything. I was a bad soap opera.

  I sat again on my bed. “Or maybe I’m just crazy,” I said aloud. No ghost contradicted me.

  But it felt like the mattress rocked very gently. Something light was sitting by my side.

  CHAPTER 20

  Jenny

  THIS TIME BILLY WAS ALREADY WAITING for me just inside the library doors. Every time I saw him again I felt instantly happy: I didn’t imagine him—he is real.

  “Where are we going today?” I asked him as we walked to the bus stop. We’d already found the places his ghost had drawn—tree, phone booth, backstage in the auditorium, all but the inside of the school library.

  “My house.” He held my hand as if he was leading the way.

  “Why?” I realized after I said the word that it sounded stupid.

  “We know the ghosts went there together,” said Billy. “In that picture of us, they were in my bed.”

  I was nervous—I liked him, more than he knew, but I didn’t know what to expect. Did boys go around having sex with girls they hardly knew? Not the ones at church. At least I didn’t think so. And we didn’t remember being lovers. We were just getting to know each other.

  We took the bus west, then transferred and went south a few blocks past the high school. On foot it only took a couple of minutes. Billy’s house was small and old, with a scrawny tree in the front lawn. There were no cars parked outside, but still, after Billy took a key from the lip of the door frame and unlocked the house, he called, “Mitch?” And then, “Anybody?”

  It seemed we were alone.

  He motioned to me, put the key back, then closed the door, locking us in. I was startled by the living room. The furniture was beat-up and stained, magazines everywhere, a basket of unfolded laundry in front of the TV. It smelled like pine cleaner and wet newspapers.

  When Billy swung the door of his room closed behind us, I couldn’t help noticing the gash in it, as if someone had struck it with a baseball bat.

  Maybe the photo of us proved that I had been here, but it didn’t seem familiar. The narrow bed with a brown wool blanket, the bulletin board crammed with drawings, the posters and magazine pages corner to corner as if Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone had been in the same recycle bin that then exploded all over the walls. I didn’t remember any of it, but I liked the craziness.

  Maybe he thought I was disgusted, because he said, “It’s okay. We don’t have to stay.”

  “It’s nice,” I said.

  “Nice?”

  “I mean, it’s you.”

  “Hey now,” he said. “I don’t have to take that kind of abuse.”

  “No, really,” I told him. “It’s the kind of room where you could just kick off your shoes and leave them in the middle of the floor instead of having to put them back in the shoe box and put the box on the shelf in your closet and close the closet and wipe your fingerprints off the closet door—”

  “I believe you,” he interrupted. “Feel free to kick off your shoes.”

  I pushed off my Keds, toe to heel. He sat on the desk chair and I sat on the bed, the one I didn’t remember lying in naked.

  On the board over his desk, one of the pinned-up sketches started to flap in a draft. It was the only one that wasn’t a dragon or a monster. It was a beautiful line drawing of eyes. Maybe my eyes.

  “I have something for you.” Billy reached under the mattress, making the bed rock under me. He pulled out a piece of cardboard, the back of a tablet with all the pages used and torn off. It must not have been what he wanted, because he dropped it on the bed and reached under again.

  I picked up the cardboard—one side was blank and the other had a long list of dates and numbers, 7/03 19 years, 6/08 6 weeks, 5/05 10 years, etc. The list was titled: C/PVS.

  “What’s C slash PVS?” I asked.

  Billy had a piece of notebook paper in his hand now and said, “Coma slash persistent vegetative state.”

  “Why?” I asked. “What are these dates?”

  He took the cardboard from me and slid it back under the mattress. “Stories I found about people who wake up after doctors say they never will. It happens all the time.” Billy unfolded the piece of paper, ready to present it to me, but I couldn’t stop thinking about that list. The idea of him tracking miracles gave me a chill. It looked like he’d made a note of the dates they woke up and how long each person had been unconscious. His mother had been in a hospital and hadn’t spoken a word in how many years?

  “I think this was written for you.” Billy smiled. He sat beside me on the bed.

  I glanced over the single page of notebook paper he’d given me. “Is this a homework assignment?” I asked. It was labeled with Billy’s name, September 16, English. I started to read it out loud. “The library smells like old books—a thousand leather doorways into other worlds.”

  “It’s from when I was him,” said Billy.

  I kept reading. “I hear silence like the mind of God. I feel a presence in the empty chair beside me. The librarian watches me suspiciously. But the library is a sacred place, and I sit with the patron saint of readers. Pulsing goddess light moves through me . . .”

  I stopped and Billy whispered, “I guess I should say, he wrote it for her.”

  My heart took a shuddering surge forward. “Wow.” Then I read, “Pulsing goddess light moves through me for one moment like a glimpse of eternity instantly forgotten. She is gone. I smell mold, I hear the clock ticking, I see an empty chair. Ask me now and I’ll say this is just a place where you can’t play music or eat. She’s gone. The library sucks.”

  The soul who looked out of Billy’s eyes in the photograph of us together had written this for the soul who had been looking out of me.

  “And get this.” Billy held the paper so we could look through it using the light from the window. “See?” He pointed out where the misspelled word sacrid had letters underneath that had been erased. “He misspelled a word on purpose.”

  I couldn’t believe it. “Because he was pretending to be you?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Smart boy,” I whispered. That the ghosts had to pretend to be us, the way I pretended to be what my parents wanted me to be, made me sorry for them. First you’re alive, then you’re dead, then you get a chance to be alive again and you have to walk around in disguise.

  Billy stretched out on the bed. “Here’s where that picture of us was taken.” He examined the room from this position. I lay down beside him, my head next to his on the pillow—he put his arm behind his head to make room.

  “Think of the stuff they probably talked about,” he said. “How did you die? And why are you a ghost? Didn’t heaven or hell want you?”

  I rolled on my side to see if he was joking. “You think heaven wouldn’t take them?”

  “Well, how do you become a ghost?” He shrugged. “It’s not like everyone who dies ends up like that.”

  That seemed sad, but at least they had each other. For a while. “I wonder when they first met,” I said. “She was haunting Mr. Brown.”

  “I had Mr. Brown for English,” said Billy. “So they were in the same classroom every day for fifty minutes.”

  He was lying on his side now, his head propped in one hand. A sheet of cold air came over me and I had a random thought that didn’t seem like my own: You have to step in
to a body if you want to smell grass again.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  I closed my eyes and hid my face on his chest. As he put his arm around me, the wintry feeling lifted off my skin and I breathed in the heat coming through his shirt. I wasn’t nervous anymore. I relaxed into him, safe and at home. I imagined we were lying under the stars, stretched out in a field of grass.

  “I thought of a knock-knock joke,” he said.

  I must have heard him wrong.

  “You know,” he said. “Something you can’t do alone.”

  I opened my eyes and used his arm as a pillow. “Okay.”

  “You really remember me from junior high?” he asked.

  “I do.”

  “Will you remember me from now on?” he asked. “If you see me on the street someday, you won’t pretend you don’t know me?”

  “I don’t go around sharing amnesia ghost possessions with just anyone,” I reassured him. “I will always remember you.”

  “Good.” He sighed. “Knock knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Billy.”

  “Billy who?”

  “I told you you’d forget me.”

  I groaned. Sometimes he seemed like a twelve-year-old.

  “Sorry,” said Billy.

  I laughed, but then I explained. “I’m not laughing at the joke. Do not take this as encouragement.”

  I jumped when the bedside table gave a shake. Nothing there but a clock. It was already almost eleven. Billy narrowed his eyes and pointed his hand at it like Darth Vader trying to strangle the clock to death.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m trying to stop time.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Jenny

  IT WAS A SIMPLE, DORKY THING for him to say, but it felt like a comet went through my chest. He stopped time for me.