He woke to the sound of Chloe talking on the phone. Mark lay still, calm from the gentle emptiness that had just held him; the peace and safety; the pleasant fullness of his penis, erect from some half-remembered dream. Chloe’s voice lilted, and he was so taken with its sound that it took him many minutes to realize she must be speaking to the medium, Trudy Weill.
Yes, Chloe told her, they were still coming, but they were getting a later start than they’d hoped. Would Trudy mind? No? Great!
Mark smelled coffee. Pancakes. He sat up, then stood, his legs aching and wobbly, and visited the bathroom. When he returned to the kitchen Chloe was off the phone, spooning batter into a pan. “Good morning,” she said, smiling, and he almost went to her, to nuzzle her neck beneath her hair, to smell her sleepy warmth.
“You let me sleep in.”
“You needed it.” She handed him a plate of already-done pancakes. “So did I.”
“Was that Trudy Weill?”
Chloe nodded.
“She didn’t already know we were late?”
Chloe looked at him strangely, then barked out a laugh. “Eat your damned pancakes.”
He sat and did so, his heart full. It had been a lot longer since he and Chloe had shared a joke—especially a dark one—than since they’d last made love.
He ate, then showered and dressed. Afterward it was Chloe’s turn. He sat on the couch and watched the news and tried not to listen as, down the hall, the water hissed over and around Chloe’s naked body.
Half an hour later Mark followed Chloe out through the front door into a cutting, windy morning. The sky was sealed by dark clouds; even so, he’d been inside so long he had to shade his eyes at the sight of this new world.
Chloe drove them out of Columbus, onto the highway and north, as she’d always driven: with the posture of an old woman, hunched forward, hands at ten and two. When they were on the interstate she told Mark to pick a CD. The binder she handed him was, he discovered, full of the music she’d loved in high school and college; he couldn’t find anything he and Chloe hadn’t once made enthusiastic love to. Finally he picked Tears for Fears’s Songs from the Big Chair, which he hoped would be mournful enough to keep his mind in the right place.
Two songs in, the highway flowing past, he asked, “So what’s Trudy like?”
Chloe considered this, frowning. “She’s… odd.”
“You mean apart from being a medium?”
“She’s fine. Likable. Kind of… intense.”
“How so?”
“Well… she’s sort of religious.” Chloe eyed him; he kept his face neutral.
“She’s going to mention Jesus to you,” Chloe said. “But I told her you’re a—a nonbeliever. She said—I quote—‘That’s not an obstacle.’ ”
“So what did she say about you? Are you an obstacle?”
Chloe sighed. “I don’t know what I am, anymore.”
This, from the woman who’d told him, firmly, on one of their first dates: I was born Methodist, but have since undergone a Christectomy.
“I mean,” Chloe said, “this changes things, right? Knowing what we know.”
He remembered, queasily, his long conversation with Lewis. “Brendan being in the house isn’t proof of anything but ghosts.”
Chloe said, “No, but… it makes me wonder, you know? About how much Brendan knows, and what he can do. What it all means.”
“Yeah,” Mark said. “You go into that maze, it’s a long time before you come out.”
Chloe nodded—eagerly, he thought. “Trudy wants to talk about all that. She says she can see a little bit of the big picture. But… to her this is all God’s plan. You should prepare for that.”
Chloe glanced at him and—as she always used to—jerked the car to the right along with the movement of her eyes.
He said, “I just don’t know what to think about… about all this.”
Chloe patted his knee. “You’re not an obstacle. Just remember that.”
He leaned back into the seat. The countryside opened up, growing flatter, the clumps of trees more sparse. The sky thickened and puffed, and occasional gusts buffeted the car. He thought about Trudy Weill. Other questions came to him, too, but he didn’t want to ask them—not while he and Chloe were so strangely comfortable:
What did it all mean?
What if Trudy couldn’t help them?
What if she could?
He glanced at Chloe, bent forward, peering at the road.
What would happen to the two of them, once Brendan was gone?
In Toledo they stopped for a bathroom break. The sky was darkening, and traffic was sparse; the Starbucks they chose was nearly abandoned. Mark took his phone with him to the bathroom, and sat on the toilet checking his work email. He’d been neglecting his job for days. He fought back the urge not to care—or, worse, to send the same answer to everyone: My son’s ghost is real! Instead he chose more measured language: I’m sorry, I’ve been unexpectedly sick, and I should have been in touch with you earlier. I’d appreciate a little more time with your project, but I understand if you can’t wait for me, and in that case will be happy to recommend another designer, and issue a refund. Thanks for your patience.
It occurred to him that Chloe’s school must be back in session by now. This was a Monday. Had she called in sick? Was she even still employed? If he lost a client or two, he could replace them with a little hustle. Chloe might be risking a lot more.
But what else could she do? Brendan needed their help, and Trudy Weill thought he needed it now. Chloe would do whatever she had to. He could see it in her face.
Of course, he’d been promising the same.
He hesitated before returning to the car. His euphoria from yesterday had faded, just a little. He knew—knew in his bones—that something had happened to him in the old house. But the sensations that had burst through him, that had sent him plunging like a madman down the stairs—all he had of them were memories barely more real than a dream. Brendan had come to him—he knew this today, but he didn’t feel the surge of wonder that yesterday had left him giddy.
But it had happened. It had.
Can you hear me, all the way from here?
I’m coming. Mommy and I are coming to help.
He whispered the next words out loud: “I promise.”
An hour later they crossed the Michigan state line. Chloe handed Mark a folded piece of paper with directions to Trudy Weill’s place from the interstate. She lived a good thirty miles west of the highway, past the small city of Adrian, in gently rolling farm country.
Chloe asked Mark to play the Cocteau Twins: Heaven or Las Vegas. She sang along in her airy high-school-choir voice. Mark closed his eyes and listened to her, not quite awake, not quite asleep. She used to sing this way to calm Brendan, when he’d fussed in the backseat. It had always calmed him, too.
They passed through Adrian; ten minutes later, they were crawling down the main street of an even smaller town: a strip of storefronts that, apart from the cars parked in front of them, probably looked the same as they had in the fifties.
Chloe turned off the main drag, then stopped the car in front of a small one-story ranch, one of a long line of them, all the same model. Across the street from the houses was a line of young elms, planted at equal intervals, one facing each house. Beyond the trees was a vast field, chocolaty brown, streaked with snow and broken, canted cornstalks. At its far end new snow was falling, smudging out the horizon.
The house’s siding was painted white, its shutters blue; the roof was slate gray. A young tree stood in the sloping front yard, emerging from a dark circle of earth. One of those absurd stone geese certain Midwesterners loved so much squatted beside the front door, wearing a maize-and-blue vest.
Chloe turned off the car. “Ready?”
“I’m ready,” he said, reminding himself that he really was.
Trudy Weill opened the door as they mounted the steps. “Hello!” she called.
Mark was taken aback by the woman’s height; Trudy was tall, almost eye-to-eye with Mark, and bone-skinny. She wore a brown jumper over a T-shirt and too-big, flapping blue jeans; her bare arms were stretched, knobby. Her dull red hair was pulled back into a bun, and she wore heavy, squared tortoiseshell glasses. Her skin was densely freckled, except for a whitish streak on the left side: a massive scar, Mark realized, curling from beneath her eye, along the jut of her cheekbone and then up into her hair, where it made an unnatural part in the shape of a knife blade.
“Mark,” she said. “Chloe. Welcome to you both.”
Her voice was ruddy, warm, disconcertingly like Helen Etley’s. She held her hand to him, and he shook it. Her grip was strong, but her fingers were slim and light. Her eyes—magnified behind her glasses—had warm green irises, and though the scar tissue beside her left eye was smooth, her right eye was surrounded by tiny wrinkles, the kind that implied a lot of laughter.
“Come on in,” she said. “I’ve got a fire going that needs souls beside it.”
Mark followed Chloe into a small living room. The furniture was overstuffed and beige; the carpet was a dark brown. The air was warm, and sweetly scented—too sweet, almost as though, hidden somewhere in the house, was a baby.
A small oval picture of Jesus—the white, well-groomed Jesus, gazing up into a warm glow—hung beside the mantel, right where it had hung in all the houses of Mark’s childhood friends.
“Sit anywhere you’d like,” Trudy said. “Juice? Coffee? Soda? I’ve only got Diet Coke.”
Chloe asked her for a water, and Mark asked for more coffee. When Trudy had left the room, he glanced at the top of the mantel and saw many pictures, but only of adults—Trudy herself, and many family members in bad suits. The coffee table in front of the couch was bare; on an end table was a basket of potpourri and a white leatherette Bible.
A man materialized then from a hallway leading away from the living room. Chloe took Mark’s hand; Mark was startled, too.
The man wore a crew cut and a fringe beard that, if it were longer, could have marked him as Amish. His face was tanned and deeply lined; his eyes were squints. His dark blue polo shirt was pulled nearly skintight across considerable muscle in his arms and chest.
“Hello there,” he said. His voice was reedy, mild. “I’m Trudy’s husband. Warren.”
They introduced themselves; Warren’s handshake was surprisingly delicate, his palms smooth. “Trudy told me about you both,” he said. “I am so very sorry for your loss.”
He touched Chloe’s shoulder on the way past her to the kitchen—almost a professional touch. A deacon’s, or an undertaker’s.
Moments later Trudy came back; she carried drinks on a tray, and Warren followed, carrying a cookie tin.
“Mr. Mark,” Trudy said, “I know you’re nervous, but if you don’t sit down, you’ll get me in a tizzy, too.”
Mark began to sit beside Chloe on the couch, but Trudy said, “Next to me, please”—the space on Chloe’s other side, in the corner. He did so. Trudy sat down in a high-backed wooden chair at right angles to the couch and crossed her long spindle legs. She was wearing gleaming white Nike sneakers—this, of all things, made him want to laugh giddily.
Warren leaned against the wall beside the front door, his chin lowered to his chest.
“Thank you so much,” Trudy said, “for driving all this way. Warren’s got a bad back, and it’s nice to stay at home if we can.”
Chloe said, “It was good of you to make time for us.”
“Well, dear, this is what I do.”
Trudy smiled broadly at her, then at Mark.
“Chloe, dear,” she said, without looking away from him, “I wonder if I could speak to Mark alone?”
Warren lifted his chin. “Ms. Ross, why don’t you come on with me into the kitchen? We’ll have a chat.”
Warren held out his hand, and Chloe stood—reluctantly, Mark thought—and walked ahead of him, into the kitchen. He fought down a sudden irrational panic—that Chloe was being led away from him to be killed.
Trudy said, “Please be at ease, Mark. We don’t bite.”
“I apologize. This is all… new to me.”
“So I gather,” Trudy said. “None of this could have been easy for you.”
Mark was taken aback, again, by Trudy’s gentle, lined face, by her easy tone. These people wanted to help them; Chloe trusted them. “Now that I’ve had… an experience, it’s easier. But getting to this point—”
“I can only imagine.” Trudy leaned forward and tapped his knee. “Chloe has told me a great deal about you, you know.”
Mark was intensely curious as to what, exactly, Trudy had been told. She reached out and covered his hand with her weightless fingers. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Only good things.”
The skin on his arms prickled. “I sincerely doubt that.”
Trudy patted his hand. “Has Chloe been frustrated with you? Yes. But this way is not so easy for some of us. Our world is not receptive to the sort of news you and Chloe have received. Many of us—people like you—have never been prepared to hear it. That isn’t your fault.”
Only a month before, hearing something like this, he might have risen to his feet, left the house insulted and furious. But he found himself nodding.
He trusted her. He had been bracing himself for someone more obviously odd, or who presented as a con artist. Not whatever, whoever, Trudy was.
“Now, don’t think of me as a flirt, Mark, but I’d like to hold your hand for a moment. It won’t take long.”
He nodded, extended his hand. Trudy cupped his hand between her dry palms, and bent her head over it. The scar on her face shone in the firelight. She moved her lips, and then her face hung slack—just for a moment—before she straightened and released him.
“I can help you,” she said. “You’re ready to be helped.”
Just like that? “Can I ask—what did you—?”
Trudy plucked a tissue from a square box on the end table between them and wiped at her eyes—she was crying.
“Your Brendan has asked for you,” she said. “You are a necessary part of what must be done for him. But you are an unbeliever by nature. It might be possible for you to talk yourself into taking part even if you were not ready to. I had to look inside you and make sure.”
Was this real? What could she have found in him that both reassured her, and had put tears in her eyes?
“You’re thinking about your doubts,” Trudy said, and sniffled. She smiled at his alarm. “No mystery, there—I saw it on your face. Faces are easy to read. Hearts are harder.”
“You’re crying,” he said.
Trudy’s smile vanished. When she did not smile her face was deeply, heartbreakingly plain, and ten years older. “Hearts are full of pain. Every one of them. But especially yours, Mark Fife.”
To this he had no reply at all.
“You have questions, now,” Trudy said. “I do wish you’d ask them. Be at ease. I assure you it’s been a long time since a human being found a way to offend me.”
“I don’t know what to ask.”
She was right. He had a hundred questions. Five hundred. All right, then. “Why did you have Chloe go into the kitchen?”
Trudy gazed at him for a beat longer than he liked.
“I met with Chloe for over an hour last week,” she said. “We spoke of Brendan, and we spoke of you. By the time we were done, I was a little bit in love. And why not? Chloe Ross is a remarkable and charismatic woman. I wish she and I could be friends. I wished—and still wish, with all my heart—that I could mend the hurt in hers.” Trudy blinked; to Mark, caught by her gaze, this carried as much force as the touch of her fingers on his hand. “I can imagine how difficult it might be for you—who were married to her, who fathered a child with her—to say no to her.
“It doesn’t matter that you’re divorced. You two are bound.”
She took his hand, kneaded it. His heart thumped guiltily.
“To know your true will, I had to see you alone.”
He was alarmed by her frankness. “How do I know you’re not conning us?”
She grinned, leaned forward. “You don’t. I’m not able to”—she looped her hands in front of her face in a magician’s flourish—“do any kind of hocus-pocus. I can put you in touch with people who will vouch for me. But the proof is going to be in the so-called pudding.”
“How much do you charge?”
“Charge?” She lifted her eyebrows. “I ask that folks I assist make a donation to my church. I don’t ask for a specific amount—whatever someone thinks my help is worth, it is worth. You can speak with Warren about that, if you’d like, or Chloe—she’s already made a donation. May I ask you a question?” She smiled wider. “Make that two questions.”
Chloe had already paid? “Yeah. Sure.”
“One. If I were a con artist, don’t you think I’d live in a nicer house?”
She’d begun to laugh even before she reached the end of her question. “You don’t have to answer that. But do answer this one. Chloe said you’re—an atheist?”
Mark straightened. “Yes. I always have been. Chloe—Chloe said that wouldn’t be a problem for you.”
“It won’t affect what we do. You only need to be convinced of the truth of Brendan.” She straightened, too. “But I do believe in God. I believe in the sacrifices of His Son, and that Son’s teachings. I spend hours a day at my church. It is my entire life.” Her smile turned wry. “I’ll be honest with you, Mark. My church is not very big. Not many so-called Christians accept me, and what I do. So you might say I am a Christian who has had to learn the value of adaptation.
“I don’t believe, for instance, that a man like you is bound for hell. I believe that anybody who lives a life of care and sacrifice is doing God’s work. I do believe I am in possession of good news, for anybody—even a man like you—but in the end I am most concerned with good acts. Mine most of all.
“I believe I have a gift, Mark. I mean that word: gift. And I would be a terrible Christian if I auctioned off any gift of God’s for profit.”
She seemed to be waiting for him to ask her more questions. But a single word she’d said had caught at him. Thinking of Allison, he said, “But I haven’t sacrificed. That’s not how—”
“You haven’t?”
He fell silent.
Trudy locked her fingers around his hand. “God took your son from you, Mark. He took that beautiful woman in the kitchen from you. I have looked into both your hearts—I assure you, the loss of your family, the love that created it, is a sacrifice beyond price.”
She whispered this: “And you’ve given up far more than just your Chloe and your Brendan. To be here, with me? To have gone to the house, and opened yourself? You’ve sacrificed your beliefs, too. Your very way of life.” She stared into his eyes. “And the woman Chloe told me about—”
He whispered: “Allison.”
“Allison. Allison who is somewhere else, while you’re here. Allison who is probably terrified that you are with Chloe today.” Trudy did not blink. “Am I wrong?”
“No.”
“You have sacrificed, Mark. So, so much. I am praying, and praying hard, that by the time we are done, God gives you a little peace. I have to allow God His mystery… but even I believe you have suffered more than you deserve. I believe—but I am not blind to it, Mark. The cruelty of my God in heaven.”
She released his hands, and sat back. He was dizzy.
“How do you know?” he asked. “Any of this?”
Trudy wiped again at her eyes. Fixed her gaze upon him again. “You might have noticed my scar.”
“I—”
“Shush. Of course you have. Everyone does. The scar is how I know.
“When I was a little girl my father repaired farm equipment, not ten miles from here,” she said. “He worked out of a garage behind our house. The summer I was five, I sneaked in and watched my father and my older brothers at work. They were raising up a truck on a hydraulic lift, and the lift failed. The truck crashed down, right on top of my brother Jack, who was sixteen. And when it landed, one of the tires blew out, and a big piece of rubber flew across the room and struck me in the face—it knocked me back against the wall and fractured my skull. I was in a coma for three days.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Trudy was smiling. “Why would you be? God acted, not you. There’s no fault.” She said, “While I was in the coma, a strange thing happened to me. I traveled freely, back and forth between this world and the next. I spent most of my time playing with Jack, in a wide meadow under a clear blue sky. We were both very happy, and time… time rushed past, and yet did not move at all.
“But then, all of a sudden, my brother didn’t want to play. He sat down and took my hands and told me—I remember this very clearly—that it was not my time. I was needed back in this world. And he told me I would return bearing a gift.”
Trudy’s voice, for the first time, began to shake. “He was my great big brother, and handsome, and I loved him. And I was afraid to leave that meadow. Desperately afraid. I begged Jack to let me stay. But he said, ‘Trudy, you have to go back. You have a life to live, yet. You have to tell Dad not to feel bad. That I’m all right.’ He told me, ‘It won’t be easy. You’re being sent into a world of pain and trouble. Be strong.’ Then he kissed me, right where my scar is, and waved goodbye.
“I woke up, right away, and the pain in my head made me scream. It was more than I could bear. For weeks all I could do was beg the doctors to let me go back to my brother. But of course they didn’t understand. They didn’t listen; they kept fixing me up. Even so, as soon as I could, I gave my father the message from Jack. And once I had delivered it, I felt a glorious peace.”
She pulled the tissue from her pocket and dabbed at her eyes.
“After that I realized that, sometimes, I could hear voices. If I listened very carefully, I could make out their words. It was a long time before I could understand, but now I do. The voices I hear have always been messages. Sometimes they come from inside of living people. Sometimes they belong to those who have crossed over.”
Trudy smiled; her eyes were red. Mark’s own body seemed to have vanished.
“How is it possible?” he asked. Then: “Why does this happen? Why is Brendan here?”
“We keep the dead close,” she said. “I’ve learned this all too well. The bonds between parents and children, especially, are strong, and sometimes death does not sever them.
“I’ve seen it happen, but I won’t know the exact reason why until I try to reach him. Maybe Brendan’s death came so quickly that he did not realize he was gone, and he came to look for you. Maybe he got halfway down the tunnel and then turned back. Now the two of you—calling to him from different places—confuse him. His home is no longer his home. The people who live in it are no longer his family.”
Mark rasped, “Is he… afraid?”
Trudy squeezed his hands. “This is very, very important for you to understand, Mark. Brendan is not flesh anymore. He is not alive. He is spirit—and the rules we follow, stripped of the needs of our bodies, are different. Brendan is now memory, emotion and dream. He does not know cold or hot or pain. He does not know time, not like we know it.
“Think of it this way: He is asleep, most of the time. But he is a fitful sleeper, and sometimes he wakes, and then—then, yes, he is troubled. He is tempted by peace. By the great rest that awaits him. By voices like that of your mother’s—familiar to him, yet unknown—that call to him from the next life.”
Mark’s eyes filled with tears.
“But Brendan is aware of you, too. You two, his parents, who created his spirit, call out to him, and so he calls to you, too.” Trudy’s hands seemed hotter. “This is the trouble. He is dreaming, missing you. You are alive, dreaming, missing him. Your dreams call to him, wake him, and then he is calling you in yours, waking you. Each of you picks up the phone the moment the other hangs up.”
Only the dry palms of her hands, their warmth, convinced him she was, herself, flesh.
“Can you help him?” he asked. “What do we do?”
Her voice lower, calmer, she explained: Had he seen a séance on television, in the movies?
He had.
The ceremony she would perform would be similar. He and Chloe, as well as Connie and Jacob, would all join her and Warren at the house on Locust—
“Even the boy?” Mark asked, alarmed.
“Jacob Pelham is a focus of Brendan’s attention. Brendan trusts him, comes to him. Jacob must help us. I’ve spoken to his mother—he will.”
Then, Trudy told him, with the help of concentration and prayer, everyone gathered would try to summon Brendan from his hiding place. To awaken him. She told him that Brendan might speak, then. Or, more likely, he would speak through her, with her voice.
This, she said, was sometimes difficult for a parent to hear. “But it will be him,” she said. “You can address me, and Brendan will hear your voice, even if he answers in mine.”
“And then what?”
“Then we will tell him what he needs to hear. We will guide him to his rest.”
She turned her head toward the hallway that led to the kitchen. Both of them, over the crackling of the fire, heard Chloe’s voice.
Trudy whispered, “Mark. There is another reason I had to speak with you alone.
“Parents and children are tightly bound. But they are tied to their fathers and mothers with different cord. Mothers carry children, bear them into the world, know them from the inside out. This is why it is easier for Chloe to feel Brendan. Chloe has likely known the truth—known it in her belly—all along. She always will.” She squeezed his forearm. “This means you and Chloe have very different tasks ahead of you.
“I can guess why Brendan has been calling for you. Chloe told me: You used to make things right—you put him to bed, you scared away the monsters. You were the one who punished him, and who forgave him.”
Mark’s vision closed to a pinhole.
“He can see the open doorway, Mark. He can hear the voices on the other side. But he is afraid of it.
“Deep inside, Brendan calls for you because he knows you will tell him what to do. Because the part of him—like the part in all of us—that is wise and ancient, that is full of the voice and the memory of God—knows this is what fathers do.
“Mothers tell a child how to be born, and to grow. But fathers are closer to death. Fathers show us how to fight. How to die.
“Mark,” Trudy whispered, “Chloe has been very brave until now. But the ceremony will be awful for her. She only thinks of the good she will do—and why wouldn’t she? She has held her baby again, loved him again. She is a mother again.
“She might forget that our ritual will send Brendan away from her, into the next world, for good. I have my doubts whether Chloe is strong enough to do this. So you must be.”
He wanted to pull his hands free of Trudy’s and run out the door. “I don’t—”
Trudy was rocking back and forth, now, as though listening to slow, soft music: a lullaby. “You can. This is not a betrayal, Mark. It is the way of things, and that is all.”
Her voice now dropped so low that he wondered whether her lips were really moving.
She said, This is what you’ll do.
You’ll tell Brendan nothing is wrong. You’ll tell him not to be afraid. That you and Chloe are all right; that you love him and each other. That someday, before he knows it, you will be with him. He will know, then, where to go. We all know the way on, deep down.
She said, And in the next life we are all reunited—not only with one another, but with God. With time. Past and present do not matter there. There we are all safe.
Trudy smiled, pressed his hands.
On and on, she said, Forever safe. Isn’t that a comfort?