58

The process had begun in Paris, with Valfort and the candle flame.

My brother’s eyes acted on me more powerfully than any hypnotic suggestion.

No, I tried to reassure myself. Surely not. You don’t really remember.

I can never sleep as others can. I lie awake in the long nap, the baby brother dozing, the mother lifting her voice. The shrubbery is brambled. The trees pruned, scars the shape of closed eyes where there were branches.

It was easy to recall in that instant. She stood among the fleshy, topsy-turvy past-peak roses, and spoke to what I thought must be my father, must be—was it possible—a relative we had not yet met. Such a loving, lovely voice.

And then I saw, in my mind, a flash of what I had wanted to avoid.

Ahn’s eyes were like Valfort’s eyes. Something of my session with him rose up within me.

“I don’t,” I said brokenly, “want to remember.”

My mother spoke to beings which were not there. She spoke to spirits. And I had always known this, even as a child. It had been our secret, our family’s secret.

I could remember her now, how she would speak, nearly singing, standing in the back garden. Or she would be in her bedroom, holding discourse with what we all knew—and could not mention—was nothing. Nothing at all.

My father had never acknowledged it, but it was evident that this aberration on the part of my mother was acutely embarrassing to him. Was it possible? Had I actually forced myself to deny this memory of my mother’s sweet voice asking, “Why have you come to see me again?” A fresh tone in her voice, a spritely tone, unlike the tone she used with anyone else. How I must have envied her spirits!

Painful. Too painful, the sound of her voice.

Everyone must have known. Friends, casual acquaintances. It must have been plain to so many.

Dr. Ahn’s voice was gentle. “And now your brother wonders if the same sort of delusions are troubling you.”

“She spoke to angels,” I breathed. “Like the angels in the Bible. The ones that announce that a barren woman will have a child.”

“Did she tell you they were angels?” asked Dr. Ahn.

I wondered. “I assumed they were,” I said.

“It was a little lie you told to yourself,” said Rick. “To make the truth sweeter.”

How hard and ugly Rick’s voice sounded.

“This is happening to you, Strater,” said my brother.

“I have ghosts killing people for me, you mean?” I was shivering, the sensation in my body that of deep cold, a feverish, sick chill.

“That’s what I mean,” he said.

I wanted to avoid what I was about to say, but perhaps my brother’s unloving voice made me respond with this recollection, perhaps as a way of hurting him, perhaps to show that my memory was, for the moment, entirely free. “I saw her in the garden. Behind the rhododendrons. I saw her there.”

Words stuck.

“She was always disturbed,” said Rick, plainly dismissing what I was beginning to say.

“She was talking to a man, I thought at the time. She was saying how much she loved him. I thought it was a man I must know. I was happy. Happy to hear her say such good things, because she and Father didn’t really say things like that to each other, not when we could hear them. And maybe never—they were cold toward each other. And so I peeked.”

I was icy. “I should not have looked. That was bad. That was very bad.” I closed my eyes then. Don’t, I told myself, say any more.

“She was naked,” I breathed, “and she was making love. With no one.”

“She was sick,” he said. There was something ugly in his voice.

I gazed upon my brother. “Why are you so harsh, Rick? Maybe you don’t like these memories any more than I do.”

“Maybe not,” he said.

I turned to Dr. Ahn. “Why didn’t you tell the police when you uncovered all of this?” I asked.

“At the time of your father’s death, and for a matter of two or three years afterward, I didn’t know. Only in the years that followed, when we discussed her life, and searched the memories that she saved from the past, and the ones that she invented, did we begin to uncover the truth. By then, she was in the hospital your family built, ordered there by the court. I felt that it would be senseless agony to share this truth with you.”

“This sort of sickness,” Rick began. “This tendency. It can be inherited, right?”

“You think I hold congress with spirits? Is that what you think, Rick? None of this has anything to do with me. Come right on out and say it. Go ahead.”

I stood and paced.

We are real. Don’t let this woman deceive you.

I put my hands to my head.

“I don’t believe you,” Rick said. “I believe you are just like Mother.”

“And if I am? What will you do to help me?”

“I should leave now,” said Rick. “This is the sort of thing that should be done in private, doctor to patient.”

“Stay here,” said Dr. Ahn.

“Stratton is your patient,” Rick protested.

I realized why this room had seemed so right for this conversation with Dr. Ahn. My mother’s presence, her taste, the weight of her personality, was everywhere suddenly. The vase of irises—it was as though my mother had put them there herself.

“You’re afraid to talk to me, aren’t you, Stratton?” said Dr. Ahn.

“No,” I said, truthfully. “I’m not afraid.”

“What are you hiding?” she asked.

Quite a bit, I nearly said. “Do you have anything else to tell me?” I said.

“What do you have to tell me?”

“Someone tried to kill Nona. While she was here in the hospital. It was me, wasn’t it? I tried to take her life.”

Dr. Ahn looked, if anything, satisfied that I had mentioned Nona. “Valfort says that someone tried to suffocate her. She spoke about it, a gush of words Dr. Valfort couldn’t quite catch. She says someone put a pillow over her head. When she was first here after the beating, when there were nurses coming and going, and she was in a twilight state.”

“How could it have been me? I was in a room by myself.”

“Immobilized?”

“Hardly. I could walk. I was in pretty good condition when you consider—”

Why would I try to kill Nona?

“You can get help, Stratton,” said my brother.

Help. I can get help. The thought made me sit back and reconsider all that I had heard. I was shuddering, quaking inwardly, but I took a long moment to ask myself how.

How could spirits kill someone? Unless the spirits themselves were corporeal. Could spirits do harm in the world, pick things up—actual, material things of weight and texture?

Spirits need help. Spirits need a human agency. These hands. These two hands.

“Rick,” I said at last. “Tell me what you knew about Mother.”