In the Shadow of Blackbirds(32)

“How did you get rid of them?”

“I gave them away.”

I scowled. “Did you burn them?”

“It doesn’t matter how I got rid of them. Neighbors had seen them on my shelves. They would have questioned my loyalty to the country if I had left them there.”

“What type of world are we living in if we’re destroying books? Isn’t it the Kaiser’s job to annihilate German intellectualism?”

“Shh! Don’t talk like that.” She waved at me to be quiet and glanced at the window, as if the neighbors had climbed the walls and were eavesdropping from behind the lowered panes. “You sound like your father. You’ve got to keep opinions like that to yourself.”

I flopped back down to my pillow with a huff and pulled my blanket over my shoulders.

“I’m sorry you’re stuck like this, Mary Shelley. I know you have no one to keep you company.”

Ah, but I do. If that wasn’t just a dream.

“You’ll find a deck of cards in the living room. Why don’t you play some solitaire?” Her footsteps retreated across the floorboards, out of my bedroom. She closed the door, leaving me behind in the near darkness.

Her feet pitter-pattered down the stairs. The front door shut. I sat up, relit my bedside lamp, and drew a deep breath.

The compass’s arrow pointed at me.

I looked toward the butterfly and lightning photographs on my wall and remembered the burning air from the night before, the distressed movements of the compass, the restlessness, the fear.

“Stephen? Are you here? Are you safe?”

A mourning dove cooed its five-note song outside my window, but nothing else stirred.

“Stephen?”

The compass remained fixed on me. I slouched back down on my bed and felt as alone as Aunt Eva had thought I was.


THE BELLS ON MY AUNT’S WOODEN TELEPHONE RANG ON the kitchen wall as I scrounged around for breakfast in the icebox. I slid the horn-shaped receiver off the side latch and held the cold metal to my ear.

“Hello. Ottinger residence,” I said into the gaping black mouthpiece that always reminded me of the lips of a person shouting “Oh!”

Crackling static met my ears. My heart leapt.

Stephen is somehow on the other end of the line.

“Is this Mary Shelley?” asked a male voice that could have been his.

“Yes.”

“This is Julius.”

“Julius? Oh.” I settled back down on my heels, not even realizing I had risen to my toes.

“I’m in between sittings right now,” he said, “and I have a line of customers spilling out to the street again, but I wanted to talk to you a moment.”

“About what?”

“How are you?”

“I’m all right.”

Static buzzed through the silence again before he asked, “Did you really hear him whisper?”

I swallowed. “Yes.”

“Do you believe in spirits now?”

I leaned my forehead against the telephone’s glossy oak and debated my answer.

“Mary Shelley?”

Another swallow, one that scraped against my throat. “I don’t know about other spirits, but I think … I might believe … I can communicate with Stephen.”

“Do you want to come to a séance with me?”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“I know a spirit medium. She holds séances in an apartment over her grandparents’ hardware store downtown. Her circles are legitimate—there’s no hanky-panky, no flimflamming, no reason to be afraid. She’s an upstanding girl who attends the local Spiritualist church.”

“I don’t want to contact Stephen through a medium.”

“You don’t have to contact him. Just come as a learning experience and witness the way other people summon spirit phenomena. You’re a smart girl, right? Come see what Spiritualism is all about. You’ll fit in with everyone else there. You’re like them, Mary Shelley.”

I bit my lip, troubled by how much I wanted to go, to find people like my strange new self.

“Are you home alone right now?” he asked.

“Why?”

“That’s an awful way to live, sequestered like that, hiding from the flu until you die.” His voice sounded louder, as if he had moved his lips closer to the mouthpiece to speak more directly into my ear. “Come with me tonight. These people are all well educated and inquisitive. Everyone’s young and eager to learn more about the connection between the living world and the afterlife.”

“Aunt Eva would have to come, too.”

He paused. “Yes, of course.”

“What time?”

“The circle doesn’t start until nine o’clock. I’ll pick you up at eight thirty.”

“I’ll try it once, but if I find the experience upsetting, I don’t want you to ever talk to me about spirits again.”

“You have a deal, Mary Shelley. I’ll see you this evening. Dress nicely. No goggles.”

He hung up.


AFTER BREAKFAST, I STARED AT STEPHEN’S PHOTOGRAPHS in my bedroom and dared myself to contact him as if I were a Spiritualist medium. Maybe a trance was what I needed to understand these teasing glimpses of his life after death. A spiritual state of mind. Full belief in the other side.