I went with Colette to the shaman. I thought, why not? I wasn’t getting anywhere on my own with understanding my father or figuring out who Larry had been to him. Also, I was worried about Colette. She had been handling all the logistics surrounding his death, a constant reminder of what she’d lost.
Despite the heat in the un-air-conditioned room at Potomac Elementary, the shaman, whose name was Wendy, wore a gray pantsuit and pearl earrings, which gave her the appearance of a functionary at the Federal Trade Commission.
“Welcome to our circle.” She addressed the seven of us sitting before her in kid-sized chairs. I raised my hand and asked for Wendy’s full name. My plan was to google her, see who she really was. Maybe she was a medium-in-training. Maybe I’d find court filings showing a decidedly unspiritual dispute with her ex-husband. But the shaman didn’t take the bait.
“We go by first names here,” she said kindly, squinting at my name tag and appearing to register that I had written, Hello, my name is the Dark One. I thought about crossing out everything I’d written and just leaving the. But a smart-ass act is hard to keep up when you are the only one doing it or appreciating it. “First names are how spirits announce themselves when they join our circle,” she said. “Sometimes they only use initials.”
“Then how will we know if we have the right spirit?” I asked.
Colette squirmed in the chair next to mine. She had begged me to come with her to “the 60-Minute Shaman” and was clearly regretting it.
Wendy said something placating about how she identified ghosts, but I barely listened. I’d asked a question to establish my superiority and then hadn’t dignified her response by listening to it. I hated myself. Luna had died. I was fatherless. Baseball-less. Lucas’s texts seemed distant. I might as well stop engaging in what my mother called my “smart aleck behavior” and try to help Colette get something out of this.
“Let’s begin,” Wendy the shaman said.
At Dad’s funeral, mourners had bent their heads down in prayer; here, faces were tilted toward the fluorescent lights pulsing on the ceiling. There was a lonely-looking widower, a grandmother in a seashell-colored Ocean City sweatshirt, and an overweight young man holding his hands in front of his stomach. Death did not discriminate, and neither, apparently, did the ability to connect with the dead through a thirty-nine-dollar-an-hour intermediary.
As Wendy’s hands batted a rhythm against the legs of her pantsuit, I thought of a game my father had invented called “Opposites.” The only aim was absurdity. What’s the opposite of a lamp? he’d ask. Zebra, I’d say.
The opposite of a violin?
Chocolate milk.
We played it on long car rides, just the two of us. He would initiate and we would switch back and forth, asking and answering. As I got older and went off to college, there weren’t as many car trips together, but I’d sometimes get a text before a final exam. Opposite of a paper shredder?
“I’m getting a sign from a spirit with an N name. N-A or N-O. This spirit has joined our circle.” Wendy gazed into the middle distance, where a shiny blue backpack hung inside a cubby.
What’s the opposite of third grade?
Shamanism.
There was a brief silence, while everyone pieced together the initials of various dead people they had known.
The grandmother gasped. “My sister Nancy? Nancy O’Leary?”
“She’s talking…” Wendy’s eyes went unnaturally wide and unblinking, as though the spirit were controlling her tear production. “Nancy is telling me that she wants to apologize to you. She’s saying that she never meant to hurt you. She’s pointing to the ground—she hurt you on the floor, or the carpet. She’s very sorry. She’s asking if you understand what she means.”
The grandmother tapped her fingers against her cheek. “She may’ve roughed me up when we were children. She was my older sister. But not for sixty-five years!”
“Perhaps the way she pushed you down is more of a metaphor. She’s gesturing like she really wants you to understand something.”
The grandmother sank back in her chair, stumped. “Well, now, let me think on it.”
Wendy tried again. “She wants to tell you that she’ll come to you as a fox and as— oh, that’s unusual. She says she’ll come to you when you eat ice cream.”
The grandmother gave a loud, delighted laugh. “She ate ice cream every day of her life! That’s her, all right.”
Wendy, smug, opened her arms again with a flourish. “I’m getting a signal from a J name. Let’s see, it’s J-O.”
“My wife, Joan?” the widower asked. “Joanie?”
“It’s a male spirit.”
Colette pitched forward. “Could it be J-A? James?”
Wendy the shaman nodded. “He’s pointing to his head. He had headaches before he died? Something with his brain.”
“He did.” Colette nodded. “He had headaches!”
“That’s not how he died, though,” I said.
“No, of course not, it was his…” The shaman put her hand out as if testing the air. “It was his heart, wasn’t it.” I was beginning to see how this shaman operated. She avoided questions, spoke with a commanding certainty even when she was wrong.
“It was his heart!” Colette’s eyes flitted wildly over my face. “It’s him, Ellie. He’s with us.”
“James will come to you in various forms from now on. When you see butterflies or forget-me-nots, that will be him telling you he’s present.”
Colette reached over and gripped my hand. Tears were making fresh tracks down her cheeks. “So he’s okay, where he is?”
“More than okay. He wants you to know that he’s at peace. He has no regrets.”
“Oh!” Colette clapped a hand over her mouth. “I’m so happy. Oh, Jim, honey. You’re here with us.”
“No regrets?” I pressed.
“He has wonderful memories of his family. He doesn’t want you to suffer.”
“He doesn’t want me to suffer?”
The shaman looked in my direction. Her eyes were cloudy, unfocused. “Your father is standing behind you,” she said.
I whirled around. On the opposite wall, student assignments about the Atlantic Ocean ruffled in the breeze from a fan.
“If he’s really here, I want to talk to him,” I said.
“He’s a presence, not a person. More like an essence.”
“Dad, who is Larry Taylor to you?” I directed this question toward an essay entitled “Tides Are Controlled by the Moon.”
The shaman cleared her throat in a way that suggested this was not going to go well for me.
“Why did you leave Larry your baseball?” I asked. “Why did I get the, um”—I lowered my voice—“tie rack?”
For the first time, I wondered if it had something to do with Lucas. Not that Lucas character, my father had said in the car on Summer Thanksgiving. Could a man who had himself been married three times and had an affair with Linda be this harsh in his judgment about his eldest daughter dating an older, married man? I don’t want you to get hurt, he’d said. Why had I even told him?
When my father was alive, I’d never whined at him. I’d been careful to reflect only how he treated me, a peer worthy of his confidences. Now I let loose. He wasn’t really there, so I could say anything. “What were you thinking? It isn’t fair,” I said. Aside from ordinary grief, there was the twisted pain of feeling insulted, punished. “If I did something wrong, why didn’t you talk to me about it? Why was there this posthumous betrayal?” I asked. How hurtful it was, at the reading of the will, when Colette had flipped the page over and told me about the tie rack. I felt like all the blood had drained out of my face and whooshed down to my feet.
I imagined my father hovering against the bulletin board, in front of the student handwriting marooned there on lined paper.
“Do you love me?” I listened to myself say the words, the quiet desperation in my voice. I heard them without understanding their meaning. A tender cord was pumping in my throat. It was enough now, I saw that. Hunching over in my seat, I avoided the eyes on the baffled faces of the believers. A spurned relative complains about an under-inheritance. It was an old story. Biblical.
What is the opposite of love?
A glow-in-the-dark gingerbread-man tie rack.
A hand landed on my shoulder. Close up, Wendy looked older. The makeup on her face had been caked on unevenly; yellow streaks were melting on her chin. Lines fanned her eyes. When she spoke again, she whispered, “Ask your mother. Your mother will help you answer your questions.”
“She’s not my mother.” I pointed to Colette, who was staring at me with an uneasy, troubled expression. I knew I had embarrassed her. And myself. And maybe frightened us both.
“Also, he wants you to know”—Wendy cocked her head, listening—“that he loves you.” She said this as though it was the most obvious love in the world, the love of a father for his child.
Colette and I had dropped Van off at the National Mall before we went to get shamaned. Van had wanted to do the tourist thing while he was here in D.C., and Mal had offered to take him. The mall was packed with summer visitors holding little American flags on sticks. Rivers of people streamed around us in sensible shoes. It had been many minutes since either Colette or I had spoken, and as we walked I felt the silence build walls around us, until I couldn’t figure out how to apologize for what had happened or whether I should.
The pebbly path we traversed was wide and grand, the color of Katherine’s blond hair. I thought again of the bitterness I was harboring toward her, for exposing Lucas, the reality of his wife and marriage. Because of her, I didn’t know where I stood with him. We’d gone away overnight for the first time, we were halfway up Gumdrop Mountain, and Katherine had cast us back to the Peppermint Forest. She had made me question whether we could ever summit Gumdrop Mountain at all.
“Ellie, I didn’t know how upset you were about the tie rack,” Colette was saying now. “He did love you, you know. It was obvious that he did. Very much.”
This was the most intimate Colette and I had ever been with each other; I was grateful to her, even if I didn’t quite believe her. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I feel embarrassed about what happened with the shaman. It’s just that Dad would have known the tie rack would make me feel terrible. He knew me so well. He’d understand exactly what it would do to me. He’d know I’d want the baseball.”
“Are you angry?” Colette asked.
“No.” Yes.
“You sure?”
“No.”
We looked out over the plain of marble, searching for Van and Mal. “You’re allowed to be angry,” she said after a moment. “But it’s not me you’re angry at. Or Wendy. It’s your father.”
Colette could surprise me. She had some substance beneath those herbal remedies. I suppose I’d known this, but I’d been so focused on my father when he was alive that I hadn’t spent much time thinking about her. We drew up beside the reflecting pool, where a shadow image of the Washington Monument fizzed in the water. “This is a weird question,” I said, “and I don’t want you to take it the wrong way, but is there any chance Dad was gay?” I must have spoken loudly, because a woman in a GW T-shirt glanced at us as she jogged past.
“Of course not. Why? Is the tie rack a gay symbol?”
I laughed. “No. But Larry Taylor is gay. L. M. Taylor from the will.”
Colette’s smile had a hint of pleasure in it, as though she was recalling a private moment between them. “Trust me. I’m positive your father wasn’t gay. Though it’s weird your dad never mentioned this guy. But I wouldn’t worry so much about it, Ellie. Oh, there they are,” she said, waving happily.
When I followed her gaze, I saw my father. The breath I inhaled was so sharp it hurt. I catapulted forward. It was Van. Van, walking toward us with a slight hitch in his left leg, confident and reflective, his arms swinging powerfully at his sides. Van was doing my father’s walk.
“Is he doing it on purpose?” I asked Colette.
“Doing what?”
“Imitating Dad.”
I watched my half-brother interpret our father in a wordless language. So he had inherited some of our father’s magnetism. I wondered what else of my father’s Van had received.
What were you thinking? I’d asked my father’s ghost in the elementary school classroom. I’d wanted to ask Larry the same thing. What are you thinking? I’d wondered when Lucas kissed me greedily on the bench by the tidal basin in November, a few yards from where I was currently sitting. With a start I realized it wasn’t What are you thinking? It was What are you thinking about me? Men didn’t have to explain themselves the way women did. Women were always having to bring men out, to get them to talk, to explain, to emote. Always wondering where they stood and figuring out how to get the answer.
Mal and Van joined us on the grass. From her backpack, Colette produced a sleeve of Fig Newtons and handed it to Van, who unwrapped it, stuffed a few in his mouth, and passed the package around. He gazed out at the reflecting pool with his bright, watchful eyes. Mal took a sip from the iced coffee I’d brought her. I put my hand on her shin, which was stretched out next to me.
Van tapped my shoulder and signed something, his mouth still full of crumbles. “Ellie, how tall would Lincoln be if he stood up?” Colette translated.
I turned to look up at Lincoln in his great marble catacomb. “I don’t know. What do you think? Maybe three stories?” I gazed at Lincoln’s stern expression, the judgment in his brow. What was he thinking?
“At least five stories,” Van signed.
“This kid’s going to be an architect.” Mal ruffled Van’s hair.
Colette translated Mal’s prediction, and Van smiled. “Or maybe I’ll be in construction and I’ll earn a buttload of money and Mom will never have to work again,” he signed.
It took Colette a moment to translate. “A buttload?” she said, looking at Van. He grinned. “Don’t say buttload,” she said.
“A buttload! Right on, little dude,” Mal said at the same time. She smiled sheepishly.
Colette rolled her eyes, but I could tell she didn’t really care. She was glad Van was enjoying himself. We were lucky to have Mal with us as our family facilitator and all-around good sport. She was a buffer against mourning. We wouldn’t talk about Dad when she was around; we were forced to be present in the sunshine, the sweet breeze off the Potomac.
“It would be a cool idea for a movie, actually. Lincoln Awakens. If Lincoln stood up, what would he do?” I asked. Colette signed my question. I was starting to recognize the sign for Lincoln—an L shaped with forefinger and thumb at the side of the forehead.
“He’d go to the new ham-and-sherry bar on R Street,” Mal said.
“He’d stomp over to the nearest computer and surf the interwebs,” I added.
Van’s hands made large swoops and then fell to his lap. “No, he’d help Obama pass a better version of Obamacare,” Colette translated.
I giggled despite myself. “That’s a nice thought.” I reached over and found Van’s hand, squeezed it. After a moment he squeezed mine back. Twice. I was newly conscious of how little I could communicate with him without Colette as an intermediary. I had been focused on my father when he was alive, and I hadn’t taken the time to get to know Van or to learn his language. Our communication had been purely functional: What do you want to eat? Should we play? Where are the keys? Everything between us as basic as air.
When Colette and Van went to poke around the gift shop, Mal and I took over the Fig Newtons. Mal always looked so cool, I thought. Today she wore a high-waisted blue-checkered dress like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, though she had doctored hers with her punk elements: a jean vest, black nail polish, thick black eyeliner.
“I saw my father,” I told her through the cookies that had coated my mouth in a gluey paste.
“At the shaman workshop?”
“Just now. I thought it was him, but it was Van.”
Mal smiled. “He’s a good kid, Ellie.”
“I know,” I said. But I didn’t really. Not well enough. I understood that now.
“We never checked in about what happened with Katherine. Are you ever going to make up with her?” she asked.
“I guess, eventually. But I don’t want to talk about Katherine,” I said. “Hey, can you do something for me?”
“What?”
“I need you to google her. His wife.”
“Is that a good idea?”
“No. But if you won’t do it, I will. And that would be worse.” In the months since Lucas and I had been together, his wife had been a faint and ghostly shape. It had worked best that way. A few times I’d tried to figure out who he was married to, but the internet gave me nothing—no wedding website or shared photo album. But now I knew too much. The details Katherine had given me about the event at the embassy had contoured her. I had put Lucas’s wife together piece by piece. High cheekbones in an oval face. Glossy dark hair that fell in waves. European elegance. Her blouses were silk, pleasing colors, maroon, marine blue. She left lipstick traces on teacups. She ate only vegetables and seafood, not because she was watching her weight—she was naturally slim!—but because she cared about the carbon cost of beef. She was soft-spoken, but her opinions were carefully considered. The questions that concerned her were the profound rather than the mundane.
Mal pulled out her phone, thumbed the screen. I watched her face for a reaction.
“Are you on the Moroccan embassy events page?” I asked anxiously. “It was an event in April.”
“Okay, it looks like there was a panel honoring economists from the Middle East. Maybe that’s it.” Mal lifted her bangs away from her face. “Her name is Mina,” Mal said.
Mina.
It was a soft name, like marbles rolling around the mouth. A name that came from the back of the throat, a deep place. Ellie was a teeth name.
“Is there a photo?”
Mal hesitated. “Yeah.”
“Is she thin?”
“That’s your insecurity talking, boo.”
“Show me.” My voice caught and I reached for her phone. “Wait, actually, don’t.” I withdrew my hand.
Mal clicked her iPhone off with a snap. “Getting involved with a married man is not exactly a recipe for success. You’re going to get hurt. Plus, he’s much older.”
“Only fifteen years!”
“Fifteen years ago you were nine.” She screwed up her mouth and looked around the memorial as if someone among the crowd of tourists could verify my age.
“I’ve never felt this way about anyone.”
“Though your sample size remains small, no?”
“I’ve dated other people!” I said defensively.
I told myself that Mal didn’t understand what it was like to lose a parent. When I had told her what happened, her eyes went wide with shock and she’d said, “Oh, Ellie, I’m so sorry,” and I’d cried in her arms, but then when I came home to 1938 House after the funeral, she was acting uncomfortable around me, and shortly after that she was back to normal, as though the world hadn’t unmade itself in the split seconds it took for my father’s heart to constrict and then fail altogether. How could I expect her to understand that Lucas was the one person around whom I didn’t feel pain, only hopefulness? Now that I knew his wife’s name, though, it felt different. She was real.
“From what you’ve told me, Lucas seems nice, and he’s hot in that sensitive academic kind of way.” Mal sniffed a big, wet, uncomplicated sniff. “But you’ll meet other men, lots of them, who are less, you know, married.”
“I’m in love with him. I’ve never been in love before,” I said.
“You aren’t on equal footing with him. You need to fall in love with someone single. I don’t believe there’s only one person for any of us.” She chewed on the straw of her iced coffee.
“I know he loves me. I don’t know why he isn’t just choosing me. Maybe I still seem too young to him? I need to give him more time, I guess. He doesn’t know me that well yet.”
“Ellie, do you want my honest opinion?” Mal put her coffee down and touched my arm. “It’s kind of harsh.”
“Okay.”
“Why are you spending all this time thinking how you should be different, when he’s the one cheating on his wife? There’s nothing wrong with you, and if he makes you feel like there is—well, that’s what I’m worried about. I’m sick of seeing men do shitty things to women and then only the women feel bad about it. It makes no sense, and it happens constantly. And men don’t stop that shit just because they’re older. I bet you can come up with like a million examples of what I’m talking about. Just think about it for two seconds.”
I thought of the looming man and the girl on the train when I was coming back to D.C.; instead of being angry at him, I had excoriated myself for my lack of action. Instead of being mad at my father about the tie rack, I wondered what I had done wrong. And I didn’t feel any anger toward Lucas, none at all, only love and hope and despair—
“He has too much power over you,” Mal said. “You have to be honest with yourself about what you want. What you really want. Protecting men’s feelings is like the least feminist thing you can do.”
“I thought you were a socialist, not a feminist,” I said.
“Lol,” she said. “You’re hilarious.” She paused. “Oh, they’re back.”
Mal greeted Van fondly, and I watched him light up in her presence.
What is the opposite of Ellie? I’d asked my father once.
A waffle iron, he said.
Maybe we had it wrong about opposites. Two things, however absurd, couldn’t be opposites if the mind linked them. True opposites would not even glance off each other in the night. This is my daughter, I imagined him introducing me to a colleague of his at Chesapeake College. She’s a waffle iron.
A swirl of butterflies flew overhead, getting the hell out of town, and Colette threw her head back, her mouth a cavern of longing. The butterflies flapped, spun, danced away. Maybe they were headed to Florida, to clubbed yellow forests and rivers of bilge, armored beasts in the reeds. They’d be welcomed by my mother and Dr. Gettleman. What would the butterflies do when they arrived? Unpack. Take a quick rinse before dinner.
Van scampered up the marble steps toward Lincoln, his hair full of the sun’s gold. No longer walking like our father.