Two

I WANTED TO BE FAR AWAY from everything, but that was a lie. It was only that I felt confused. I had taught myself so carefully how to be the contented voyeur, and now there was this person watching me.

I stayed close to the classroom, by the trunk of the pepper tree not five yards from the door, waiting. When, and it seemed like a year, the door opened at last, and disheveled boys and girls crowded out of the classroom and away down the path toward other buildings, I hid behind the trunk. Finally he appeared, his bag over one shoulder, his hair falling over his brow on one side. My core jittered with inexplicable excitement. The young man walked alone, head down, toward my tree. He stopped when he was as close to the trunk as the path would allow, but five feet from me. He didn’t look. He smiled, eyes still on the ground, and after one blushing moment, he began to walk again. I had no power to stop myself—I followed.

As I did, I could feel Mr. Brown behind us, walking, as he often did at this time of day, to the administration building. I felt an unpleasant tug. A thread snapped, the threat of a tear in my universe. It was my Familiar pulling at me from one side and my Mystery from the other. The path forked between school buildings, and I let Mr. Brown go his way alone. The boy annoyed me by ducking between the cafeteria and the gymnasium where a small space was set aside for bins of cans and bottles that would be recycled. I followed, but I was not happy about it. I halted as he made to walk directly into the dead end. I was filled with wonder at the idea that perhaps he was going to walk through the wall, but he didn’t—he stopped, three feet short of it, and just stood there.

To my own amazement, I marched right up behind him and spoke. “Can you hear me?”

“I have ears, don’t I?”

I started. What had I expected? “And you see me?” I said.

He kept his head low, turning slowly at the shoulders, peering at me from under a lock of brown hair. He smiled. “Of course.”

I backed away a step. “What are you?”

“Don’t you mean, who am I?” He carefully pivoted his body toward me. An icicle of fear slid down my throat.

“Why do you see me?” I hissed. I couldn’t help myself. Any semblance of manners had dissolved in my alarm.

“Don’t be afraid.” He wasn’t smiling anymore. He looked quite concerned.

“No!” I felt like scolding him, reminding him that we hadn’t been properly introduced. My middle was tingling, as if my Mr. Brown were traveling out of range. A deep bone pain began to form in my joints.

“Don’t speak to me.” I looked around me, somehow certain that every mortal could see me now, but no one else was there. When I turned back, the boy’s eyes held such empathy, I couldn’t bear it. I pushed through the cold and ran from him like a child spooked by an owl in the night.

I’m ashamed to tell the tale now, of how frightened I was at being spoken to—seemingly pitied. I could hear Hamlet moan, “Poor ghost.” I stayed right by Mr. Brown’s side the next day, except when he was in the bed or bath. But when he was teaching that class I stayed in the tiny school library, reading over the shoulders of students, counting the minutes.

The next morning, when Mr. Brown had risen early to go running, he returned to find his wife in the kitchen making coffee and wearing nothing but one of his ragged T-shirts. He discovered that he had a little extra time to spend with her in one of the armless kitchen chairs, so I chose to pass into the garden. On any other day, I would have been annoyed that we might not have a full hour’s writing time before the first class of the day. But today, as I stood staring into the empty birdbath in their tiny back yard, I wondered what the one who had spoken to me was doing at that moment. I didn’t mean to, but I imagined him with a girl, evoking the same sounds from her that came from the kitchen window. I was immediately sorry I had, because a terrible, scalding jealousy flooded me.

I burned with frustration, and even a little anger, as Mr. Brown drove us to school. We would have only half an hour for writing. He was beaming and relaxed, still wet from a hasty shower. His happiness was so vexing. That morning, I wished that Mrs. Brown were far away, visiting her family, anything, just away, at least for a while. I could still hear her sounds of pleasure, or perhaps it was Mr. Brown’s mind wandering as he drove, one elbow out the window, the wind blowing his hair.

My mind turned a corner then. I needed to talk to the one who’d seen me. Even if what I found out was dreadful or terrifying. What could be worse than hiding and not knowing? That afternoon, I stayed in the classroom, though I stood behind the flag stand. It felt safer. Mr. Brown wrote a series of page numbers on the blackboard, and finally the young men and women began to enter. I felt my being flutter. Each tousled head that came through the door I wanted to be his, but on and on, a dozen boys entered, yet not the one.

I was appalled. The bell rang, the students whispered and laughed and tugged books out of their bags, Mr. Brown began to speak, and still the one who had seen me wasn’t there. I watched that desk, near the back in the middle, imagining him, but he would not materialize. I crossed in front of Mr. Brown and stood in the open doorway, scanning the path in both directions. Only a squirrel and a gardener with a rake. I wouldn’t accept it. I crossed back in front of Mr. Brown again and went this time to the windows on the far side of the room. They looked out onto the playing fields. A group of boys in gray ran over the grass, but the one who had spoken to me was not one of them. I looked beyond the field to the pavement just outside the fence, but he was not there either. And he was not sitting on the benches or standing at the water fountain. He’s doing this on purpose, I thought. He is punishing me because I stayed away.

I could not be still. I crossed again and looked out the open door once more. A bird’s shadow passed, nothing more. I was on the glass edge of panic, when I turned back toward the classroom and saw him, the one, standing beside his empty desk. He was watching me and when our eyes met, I had no fan to cover my face, no way to hide my feelings. I was desperate for him, and he could see it, all the way in me.

“You’re late enough, Mr. Blake,” said Mr. Brown. “Hop to.”

He must’ve entered the room when I had been at the window. I think I would’ve been completely done in by my embarrassment except that he, too, looked taken aback. Perhaps it was something in the sight of me searching for him. He sat down, his cheeks flushed, and put his book bag on the floor. I looked away and moved slowly back to the flag stand and quieted myself. After many moments, I saw that he was sitting with his open book before him and a sheet of lined paper on top of it. He was eyeing me, not unkindly, but most gently. And when I felt an anxiety at the length of our gaze, he politely dropped his attention with a slight nod, almost a bow. This gave me the courage to move slowly along the windowed wall until I rested in a vacant desk next to his.

With the stub of a pencil, he wrote something on the paper he had over his book and slid it a few inches closer to me. I looked across the aisle and saw that he had written the words “Where have you been?”

However improper, I was amused. And, I admit, a little flattered. It made me nervous, though, that there was now something tangible that referred to me. I thought of retreating to the flag stand. He pulled the paper back and wrote again, this time letting the page hang over the desk edge like a banner so I could see it easily. It read: “Please don’t be afraid. I would be a friend to you.”

I can’t tell a lie; the fact that he didn’t speak or write like the other students in the room intrigued me. I surveyed him, but he kept his eyes on the blackboard. The brown paper cover of his English book was filled with little drawings of what appeared to be mythological beasts.

“I was hiding from you,” I said finally.

He wrote on the paper again. My whole self was quivering as I waited for the page to be slipped my way. It read, “Follow me after class. I long to speak with you again.”

Someone longed to speak with me.

I was startled when the girl who usually sat in the desk I was occupying walked in late, handed a note to Mr. Brown, and made her way toward us. I rushed to stand against the wall. I watched the boy slip the paper on which he’d been writing into the pages of his book. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Like a desert wanderer afraid of mirages, I gazed at my oasis, but he was real. It pleased me that he seemed to take no notice of the young lady who now sat across the aisle from him. He shifted in his chair, pretended to listen to Mr. Brown, and then my cherished preserver glanced over at me, without turning his head, and winked.

When the bell rang, he slowly closed his book. The other students had already slung their bags onto their backs and were migrating toward the door. The young man gathered his belongings and turned halfway back toward me. With a flick of his head, he beckoned. I followed him closely up the aisle, out the door, down the pathway. He kept his eyes straight ahead of him. When he came to the recycling bins where we had stopped before, there were a boy and a girl there, holding hands and talking. He paused for only half a moment and then kept walking. He came around the side of the library and stopped suddenly, stepping into the phone booth beside the caged vending machine. The booth was the older style that stood like an upright glass coffin. He dropped his bag at his feet and looked me in the eyes as he picked up the receiver.

“What’s your name?” he said. I was breathless. “What should I call you?” he asked.

It wasn’t that I had forgotten; it was just that no one had asked me in a long time.

“Helen,” I said.

He glanced around to see whether anyone was eavesdropping. Then he pushed himself back into the corner of the cramped space and gestured with one hand, inviting me into the glass booth. I was shocked, but I moved toward him, and he closed the sliding door behind me. It wasn’t until then that I realized he could talk now without others hearing.

“Helen,” he said.

“Mr. Blake,” I said.

He smiled, a brilliant moment. “Not really,” he said. “My name is James.”

There was such an odd silence, he staring into my eyes, and me, well, I was so lost; I could scarcely speak. “How is it you see me?” But I wanted to cry, Thank God you do.

“I’m like you,” he said. When I only blinked at him, he added, “In spirit.”

“You’re Light?” I couldn’t believe it.

“Light.” He adopted my term instantly. “Yes.”

“That’s not possible.”

“I only borrowed this flesh,” he said. “I couldn’t see you before I was in a body.” As someone passed by the booth, he jerked the phone back to his ear, having let it slip absently down to his chest. “Are you still there?” he said into the phone, but he was smiling. “Miss Helen, if you’ll pardon me asking, why did you hide from me yesterday?”

“I’m not sure why. I was afraid.”

“Please don’t be.”

He seemed so clever, the way he moved among the Quick as if he were one of them. “How long have you been dead?” I asked.

“Eighty-five years.”

“How old were you when you died?” I asked. I wanted to know everything about him.

“Twenty-nine.”

I had forgotten that even if he’d died at a hundred and nine, he’d look seventeen in Billy’s body. Perhaps I blushed, if that’s possible, for now he watched my face with great interest.

“Are there others like me, then?” I asked. The idea that I might be ordinary to him hurt me inexplicably.

“No,” he said. “Now that I’m in a human body, I can see other spirits, but none like you.”

There was something about him that continually disarmed me. “Mr. Blake...” I hesitated. “That’s not your name, is it?”

“It’s Deardon,” he said, “but it would be a crime for you to call me anything but James.”

He’d left me speechless again. He was truly exasperating.

“Please,” he said.

“James...” The word felt strange. “Why did you—” I stopped myself. “How did you take Mr. Blake’s body?”

“He vacated it,” said James. “He left it, mind and soul, like an empty house with the door open.” He seemed excited to tell me his strange adventure.

“When his spirit left his body, why didn’t he die?” I wanted to know.

“His body didn’t die,” he said, still fascinated by his own luck. “His spirit chose to leave. It’s difficult to explain. Instead of the ship going down taking the crew with it, the crew abandoned the ship, but the ship was still seaworthy.” Now he looked embarrassed. Something in my expression had shamed him.

“It seems wrong,” I said. “Like stealing.”

“Better that I have him rather than—” An untold and eerie story flashed by behind his autumn eyes.

“Than what?”

“Well, left adrift, something evil might pirate him away.” James had let the phone slip down again. I raised my hand to my ear, and he smiled and raised the receiver again.

“How long have you been inside there?” I asked.

“Since September ninth.”

That was a fortnight. “Then how is it you saw me only last Monday?”

“That was my first day back,” said James. “Billy’s body was so sick, I was in bed for a week.”

“What was wrong with him?” I asked.

James looked sorry to tell me. “He took so many drugs he almost died.”

“But how could you tell he was empty?” I wanted to know. Plenty of the students in Mr. Brown’s classroom looked fatally bored.

“It was the way his body resonated when he left it. It sort of rang.”

“It rang? Like a bell?”

“No.” He thought for a moment. “Bodies with souls in them are solid, like a beam in a house. And bodies that are empty make a very small vibration, the way the wind can blow past the gutter on the roof and make the rain pipe hoot like an owl.”

“You heard this boy hooting?” I was sure he was teasing me.

“I noticed that he sounded hollow. Like holding a seashell to your ear,” he said. “I doubt that anyone who wasn’t Light could hear it.”

This was becoming as curious as Wonderland. “How is it that I have seen more years than you, but you know all these things that I don’t?”

James laughed. “It’s being in a body again,” he said. “For once I saw through a glass darkly, but now I see the world clearly.”

“How did you find this body?” I sounded more demanding than I intended.

“I saw him almost every day. He came to my haunting place to hide from his friends or take pills or smoke.” James watched a student thump past the booth, his shoulder rattling the glass door. “I knew there was something wrong with this boy, that he sounded empty sometimes. I wasn’t sure what it meant. He seemed hollow, but he was living, not Light,” said James. “I was held to my haunting place, but I felt responsible for this boy because I could tell he was in trouble, and yet I couldn’t warn anyone.” James took a deep breath, remembering. “So I followed him home that afternoon. On other days, I’d seen the way he came in and out of his flesh when he put poisons in his blood. His spirit seemed to go to sleep for an hour or two and he’d start to ring empty. But this day, he closed himself in his room and took pills and sniffed powder and even inhaled fumes from a bag. This day, when his spirit left his body, it didn’t come back.”

I felt a chill encircle my heart.

“I watched for seven hours,” said James.

The pathways outside the phone booth quieted. Students and faculty had migrated to the parking lots. I was running out of time before I would have to leave with Mr. Brown.

“Then I felt something wrong pulling at the body, something evil,” said James. “I tried to wake him up, but his spirit wouldn’t come back, so I went inside him, and I tried to scare away the evil. The trouble was, it wasn’t afraid of me. I couldn’t drive it away; I couldn’t even open my eyes or move, the body was so sick. The evil didn’t quail until Billy’s brother came in and called for an ambulance. Then it disappeared.” He sounded as if he had finished the story.

“What happened?” I said.

“We went to the emergency room, Mitch punched a hole in the waiting room wall, and I stayed in Billy’s body while they flushed the poisons out. It was frightening.”

I must’ve looked horrified.

“It wasn’t that bad,” he said. “We’re all right now.”

“Did the evil that tried to get Billy look like a person or a creature?” Perhaps I had read too much about Middle-earth over Mr. Brown’s shoulder, but I thought it was important to know the shape of the enemy.

He shook his head as if he’d never want to describe such a thing to a lady. I was fascinated by his adventures, but they still seemed so unreal.

“Do you have any of Billy’s memories?” I asked him.

“No, I don’t. And that does make life in a stranger’s body rather tricky.”

“Where is your haunting place?” The more I heard, the more I wanted to know.

“It’s a park a few miles from here. There used to be a two-story house there. That’s where I was born.”

“You remember your life as James Deardon, then?” I said.

“Not at all, when I was Light,” he said. “But since I’ve been inside a body again, some things have been coming back to me. I don’t know why.”

“Do you remember how you died?”

“Not yet,” he said. “But I remember more things every day.”

“But you must’ve been with your family at first,” I said, “if you were haunting their house.”

“The house had burned down long before I was haunting that land. Before I was in Billy’s body, I didn’t even know why I was stuck there. I just knew I couldn’t get more than a hundred feet away.”

“How did you know you were stuck?”

“If I tried to walk more than a hundred feet down the sidewalk...” He thought for a moment and shortened the description for me. “It hurt too much. I’d have to go back.”

A queer recognition shook me. “Is it like black icy water crushing you?”

He gave me an odd look. “Mine’s more like a light that burns and a wind that cuts you.”

We looked into each other’s eyes, picturing each other’s hell. What a strange goblin God must be, I thought, to torment James. He was just to punish me, for I sensed that I had truly sinned. But not James.

“You spent almost a hundred years on an acre of land by yourself?” I asked.

“Well, after a few years, they built a park,” he reassured me.

I suddenly felt like crying.”You didn’t have lamps at night or books.”

“Some people read in the park,” he said. “Horror stories mostly.”

“No poetry,” I said. “No Shakespeare. No Austen.”

As if to cheer me, he said, “I read a comic book of Frankenstein sitting next to a ten-year-old girl once.”

“That’s too awful.”

“It’s all right now.” James saw that I was on the verge of weeping and fumbled in his pocket. Then he smiled. “I was going to offer you a handkerchief, but I haven’t got one and even if I did...”

That made me laugh.

“What do you recall about life as James?”

He straightened up as the janitor walked by our glass booth. “Very little. We had an almond orchard and a weather vane of a running horse.” He thought for a moment. “When I was small, I had a rocking horse named Cinder because his tail got burned off when he sat too near the fireplace.”

I felt cold and thin as tin for a moment, made fragile by a half memory of a child at play. A blonde head bent over a little wooden lamb on wheels.

“My dog was named Whittle,” he told me. “My cousin taught me to swim in the river. One year we made our own raft and nearly drowned.” He laughed, then saw something that worried him in my face. “What’s wrong?”

“What else?” I didn’t want to hear about swimming.

“My father carved me soldiers out of basswood.” He switched the receiver to his other ear. “That’s all that’s come back to me so far.”

I wished I had a picture of James in his true body.

“And what do you remember from before you were Light?” he asked me. “Tell all.”

“Nothing.” Then I realized that wasn’t true. “Only my age, my name, and that I was female.” He waited for more. “The rest is only images. And feelings. I won’t go inside closets,” I said.

The way he was gazing at me made me curious. “What do I look like to you?” I heard myself asking. Immediately I was embarrassed, but James wasn’t.

“You look beautiful,” he said. “You have dark eyes and light hair.” He stopped but continued to stare.

“How old do I look?”

“A woman, not a girl.” He shrugged. “I can’t tell.”

“I was twenty-seven,” I said. “What am I wearing?” I added, “I can’t see myself in a reflection.”

“I know,” he said softly. I had almost forgotten that he had been Light as well. “You’re wearing a gown with a striped ribbon here.” James drew the neckline of the dress on his own chest.

“What color?” I wanted to know.

He smiled. “It’s difficult to explain. You’re not like a painting. You’re like water. Sometimes you’re full of color, sometimes you’re gray, sometimes almost clear.”

“And when I’m full of color,” I said. “What then?”

“Then your eyes are brown,” he said. “Your hair is golden and your dress is blue.”

One slow, hard pulse of cold clay beat through my heart. I leaned closer to James, banishing the fear.

“What did you wear before you were inside Mr. Blake?” I wanted to know.

He laughed. “I don’t know. I couldn’t see my reflection.”

I laughed too; the feeling, so unfamiliar, made me giddy. Were we actually joking about our deaths?

“Is the dress blue now?” I asked. “Or am I clear as water?”

“Now?” He stared a moment more, still holding the phone to one ear. “You’re silvery, like the Lady of the Lake.”

I had so many more questions for him, but I couldn’t stay.

“Tell me about haunting the school,” he said.

“I need to leave now.”

“Wait.” He reached out to take my hand but couldn’t. I was startled by the flash of warmth. He took a moment before speaking.

“Miss Helen, you have a way about you. When I watched you with Mr. Brown, the way you read over his shoulder, how you listened to him recite poetry. I don’t have the words,” he told me. “It was as if you were the only one in the world who could understand me. And now you’re looking at me and speaking to me.” He spoke very confidentially into the phone. “It’s like a miracle.”

Perhaps it was because Mr. Brown was preparing to drive off, perhaps it was because James seemed to be speaking from my own heart, or perhaps it was simply that I had gone for 130 years without being heard or seen, but all at once I felt faint. I dropped my gaze.

“Did I say something wrong?”

“No.” But I was fluttering madly like a winged thing about to fly apart. Then a pang of ice told me Mr. Brown was moving too far away.

“Please be there tomorrow,” said James.

When you are Light, you may move through solid objects with no more effort than it would take to add sums in your head. But at that moment, if James hadn’t opened the glass door, I’m not sure that I would’ve had the strength to pass through it.