We had only three days in Montreal, and Mrs. Redd was determined that not a second be wasted. So instead of going to our hotel to unload after the three-and-a-half-hour trip, we drove straight to our first official tourist destination: the Basilique Notre-Dame. I was tired and cranky and wanted nothing more than to unpack my suitcase and flop down on a hotel bed for a nap, but when our bus pulled up to the massive cathedral, my jaw dropped.
It towered above the city square where it was built. Even with the miserable gray background of the storm clouds and drizzling rain, the whole stone structure stood out, as if it were glowing from within.
“It’s gigantic,” I whispered to Jac. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”
“Well, Notre Dame in Paris,” she said. “And Montmartre. And of course Winchester Cathedral, and Westminster Abbey in London. St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, obviously. And, oh, what’s that one on the thing by the place…?”
Oh. I had momentarily forgotten that Jac had traveled to cello competitions all over the world. I was probably the only one on the entire bus who had never been to Europe, let alone out of the country.
“Oh, but no, I mean yeah, it’s just amazing!” Jac said quickly, with way too much enthusiasm. “No, it’s more beautiful than any cathedral I’ve ever seen. Really, there’s just something… about it!”
I smiled. I appreciated the gesture. Jac’s father was some sort of computer guy who earned a good living, so the Grays had money, and we didn’t. My father had left us four years ago with barely a few words since. There were things Jac had done and seen that I might never experience. Of course, that went both ways. Jac had never been yelled at by a dead person, nor had she been instrumental in guiding a confused and very deceased medium into the light, or chased by a black demonic cloud. The house next door to hers had never been haunted by a whole slew of spirits that wouldn’t leave her alone, and restless ghosts didn’t toss books around in the school library to get her attention. And still, despite all those differences, we were best friends. The middle-school medium and the cello genius.
“Alors, mes enfants,” Mrs. Redd was saying. “Écoutez.”
Why did she insist on speaking to us in French? Mrs. Redd was a round dumpling of a woman, only about Jac’s height, which is tiny. She was almost as wide as she was high, and she favored large men’s shirts that came down to her knees and made her look like the Liberty Bell.
“Nous attendons notre… notre… all right, we’re waiting for our guide, Sid, to join us, and then we will proceed, immediately, into this magnificent cathedral.”
On cue, Tim the Motor Coach Operator pushed a button and the door hissed open. A young, dark-haired man in a leather jacket and a black-and-white checked scarf wrapped around his neck got onto the bus. He was so different from what I’d expected—I thought tour guides were always frumpy middle-aged women—that I assumed for a minute that he was dead.
“He’s adorable,” whispered Jac.
Not dead, then.
There was a PA system on the bus, which the guide turned on.
“Hey, guys,” he said, in a slightly accented voice. “I’m Sid. Je m’appelle Sid. Qui parles français?”
Judging by the shouted responses of “Moi,” a great many more people, especially girls, could miraculously respond to a French question when it was spoken by Sid rather than Mrs. Redd.
“It’s okay, though, we can talk in English, too. I know you are tired, but we’re gonna go into this amazing cathedral right now, la Basilique Notre-Dame, and it’s gonna blow your minds. It’s better than French rap music even, so get ready.”
Mrs. Redd looked a little suspicious, like maybe even a Canadian shouldn’t mention French rap and the Basilique Notre-Dame in the same sentence, but a great cheer had begun in the back of the bus. Sid had navigated the sixty-second window of opportunity eighth graders generally give an adult before they are judged “cool” or “uncool,” and the verdict was clear. Sid was cool.
We filed off the bus. My mom stood off to one side staring up at the cathedral. She must have felt my eyes on her, because she turned and gave me a quick wink. Jac’s mother was standing about four feet away, fiddling with an iPhone, not even noticing the cathedral. She looked even more severe than usual. I smiled at my mother and wondered how she was going to survive three days with Jac’s mom. Actually, I wondered how I was going to survive it.
From the sidewalk, I could now see the cathedral in its entirety. It loomed up like a castle, complete with two huge rectangular towers at each end. There were three massive arched wooden doors in front with larger stone arches over them, and three more between the two square towers, each housing a statue. Staring up at the old stone and stained glass, I felt I had tumbled through the centuries, back hundreds of years.
“Nice,” Jac said.
Nice.
“Okay, guys, so we’re gonna walk in,” Sid was saying.
“We’re going to walk in,” Mrs. Redd repeated, like she was translating for us. Except that Sid was, you know, speaking English already.
“Okay, so this is a very famous church,” Sid called over his shoulder, as we trotted on the walkway behind him like ducklings.
“Very famous,” Mrs. Redd echoed. “To put it in perspective for you all, none other than Celine Dion was married here!”
“What, that chick who sings the Titanic theme song?” called the shortest and squattest of the random jock boys. “Outstanding!”
It was starting to rain as we gathered by the central wooden door. It looked as if it had been built for giants. I felt a surge of excitement and happiness.
“Hey, Spooky, is your mom even allowed to go in there?” I heard.
I turned to see Brooklyn Bigelow, rocking her newest razor-cut trendy hair, which was colored and highlighted within an inch of its life. I stayed away from Brooklyn whenever possible, but I’d had enough encounters with her to know she had an exaggerated contempt for all things supernatural, which she declared to be “against religion,” though she did not seem to have any functioning knowledge of what religion was.
She thought my mother, who made no attempt to hide the fact that she communicated with the dead for a living, might as well have a little pair of devil horns sticking up through her hair. I also knew Brooklyn’s supposed disgust concealed a very real terror of all things ghostly. It was knowledge I tried not to take advantage of, though at times like this it was very, very difficult.
“You have something in your teeth,” I said, before turning away.
“Ew—you do,” Jac echoed at her, squeezing my arm.
Brooklyn was always suspicious of anything I said to her, but her vanity was more powerful, and she ducked her head and began fishing in her gargantuan purse for a pocket mirror.
“She thinks she’s some kind of genius for coming up with the name Spooky,” I said, flushing with irritation.
“She stole it from The X-Files. I hate her,” Jac declared.
And just like that my irritation dissolved. Sometime it’s enough for your best friend to state she hates the same person you do. It’s just enough.
We walked through the big wooden door through a small, screened ticket area. When our line moved beyond the screen, I stopped in my tracks and gasped.
It was so huge. It was so ethereal. It was so beautiful.
Enormous wooden columns lined each side of the church, a delicious mix of wood and paint and gilt. The air smelled like incense and candles and furniture polish. The ceiling, impossibly high, was a rich blue and covered with golden stars. At the far end behind the altar stood something I hardly knew how to describe—a building-sized golden framework of arched windows and towers housing life-sized painted statues of various figures, prophets, or saints, I guessed. Behind the framework the wall had been painted to look like a deep blue sky dotted with clouds.
I was speechless.
I looked around to see how everyone else was taking it.
Sid was standing in the center aisle counting us, Mrs. Redd at his side imitating his counting. Beside her stood Mrs. Gray, who looked like she was trying in vain to get a signal on her iPhone. My mom was sitting in one of the pews, her eyes closed.
The other students were standing stock still at various places in the center aisle staring, open-mouthed, grabbing each other and pointing at things. A few had started taking pictures. I was almost gratified to see that even Brooklyn Bigelow looked stunned by the magnificence of the architecture around her. So she was human after all. A little, anyway.
And Ben Greenblott. He had walked over to one of the huge carved wooden pillars, and as I watched he reached out very gently and brushed the wood with his fingertips. Then he closed his eyes, like he was absorbing the feel of the wood. For a moment, he looked as beautiful and ethereal as any of the statues in this church.
Yep—it was definitely love.
Ben had apparently caught Brooklyn’s attention, too. She had arranged herself in one of her Entertainment Tonight poses—one hand on her hip, the other twisting a lock of her hair through several well-manicured fingers. She shot Ben a look through lowered eyelids, but he seemed totally unaware of her. I wanted to hurl a prayer book at her silly flirting head. Didn’t she know Ben Greenblott was way too good for her?
Sid was talking now—his voice went in and out of my consciousness as I tried to recover from the daze I felt.
“… building completed in 1829… gothic style… hand painted…”
But another voice was intruding.
“… la… C’est mal, la fenêtre… elle est trop claire… trop chaude… elle ne marche pas, la fenêtre…”
I felt dizzy. I couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from. I wasn’t sure what it was saying, though I knew from our most recent vocab quiz that fenêtre meant window. And mal meant bad. The window was bad? How could a window be bad?
“… Okay, guys, so we’re gonna go into the little chapel in the back now, so you can see how they rebuilt it after the fire…,” Sid was saying.
“Kat, are you coming?”
Jac was standing right next to me, peering into my face a little anxiously. It was only then that I realized I had totally spaced out for some time. Our group had followed Sid almost to the very front of the church. Brooklyn had abandoned her “look at me” pose and followed. Only Jac and I were still standing in the aisle.
And one other person.
Ben Greenblott was still standing by the wooden pillar I’d seen him touching.
“We’ll get in trouble if they realize we’re not with them,” Jac said. “Come on!”
She began marching up the aisle, shooting looks over her shoulder to make sure I was following her.
“I, um… think we’re supposed to go now,” I said, awkwardly directing my voice in Ben’s direction. He looked at me. I looked… away.
“Wow, yeah,” Ben said. “I kind of zoned out. Thanks, Kat.”
He was so nice.
We began to walk up the aisle—our group had disappeared around the back of the altar in the direction of the little chapel. Think of something to say, you nitwit, I silently screamed at myself.
“It’s hard to picture it was ever there, isn’t it?” Ben asked.
He had spoken again. To me. We. Were. Talking.
“Yeah. I mean, what? Picture…”
Oh. Prizewinning banter, Kat, great job.
“The window,” he said.
Wait. What?
“The window?” I asked.
I did not see any windows anywhere in the direction Ben was pointing, which was by the altar and the golden towered thing with the statues, a painted blue sky peeking out from behind.
“Sid said there used to be a huge stained glass window there,” Ben replied. “And the sun would come directly in during mass and everyone complained it was too bright and too hot. So they eventually plastered the window over and built that.”
The window was bad. Trop claire, trop chaude. Too light, too hot. But who had been telling me this?
People get information from the dead in all different kinds of ways. Both my mom and I are what you call clairvoyant—we see ghosts. We can interact with them and talk to them and stuff, but the main connection at first is usually visual. But some mediums do it differently—and the ones who hear voices are called clairaudient. I wasn’t supposed to be one of those.
In the seven months since I’d turned thirteen and seen my first spirit, it had taken all that I had to start getting used to the fact that I saw dead people. One way or another, I knew I was going to be able to deal with it.
Unless I started hearing voices, too.