The Clairvoyants(101)
The sun setting beyond the rise of the golf course lit the sky a deep orange. The wind picked up and scattered geranium petals across the porch, shuffled the horse chestnut leaves together like a deck of cards. Evening blotted out the place where the barn once stood. I left the porch and went inside. As part of Owen’s bedtime ritual, my mother read to him, and after she’d left his room I stuck my head in the doorway to say good night. I didn’t know what he expected of me or who I might be to him. In the dark of his bedroom his face and hair were pale against his spaceship-patterned pillow.
“You were in the living room today, Auntie Martha,” he said. His voice was clear and soft.
I stood in the doorway. Was he listening to my breathing, to the beating of my heart? “You knew.”
He propped himself up, as someone might who wanted to see you better. “You smell like yellow.”
Outside the cicadas sounded. A bicycle passed in the lane beside the house, its tires shushing over the sandy road.
“What does yellow smell like?” I asked him.
“Aunt Martha, quiet, lemons.”
*
I AWOKE AT dawn to Owen’s voice in the room across the hall. I listened to him turn the pages of a book. Every so often he would ask a question: Will the rabbit ever become real? There’d be a silence, and more turning pages, and more of the one-sided conversation. Soon after, he came into my room, stood beside the bed, and touched my face.
“It’s time,” he said. “Don’t you hear the birds?” The light played in his hair, swept over the shoulders of his pajamas where stars and blasting rockets dotted the dark blue background.
“Your grandfather used to say that about the birds,” I said.
My heart caught with sorrow, imagining William, Owen’s age, collecting apple money in the little tin.
The Spiritualists’ organ’s notes came through my open window, and he pressed his face against the screen. “Where does that come from?”
I wanted to say it was the sound you heard on the astral plane, as my grandfather had once told me. Instead, I helped him dress, and we slipped downstairs, unhooked the porch screen door, and left the house. I took him along the path through the woods, shadowed and cool from the recent rain, to the gravel lane that led to the Spiritualists by the Sea camp. We moved through the silence of the tree canopy to the open meadow, where the sun colored the blowing grass, and then down the little tarred lanes, Osprey to Nehantic, to the bulkhead. I told Owen about the cottages with their gingerbread trim. I described the hand-painted road signs. We took the path between the swamp rose bushes to the beach, where the tide was out, the Sound glazed and calm. We gathered jingles and arks that littered the wet sand.
A pair of mute swans passed overhead, their wings disturbing the calm of the water, making a sound like singing. Owen tipped his face to them, and the breeze moved his fine hair, jostled the swamp roses, heavy on their stems. We listened to the organ in the temple, its notes flung out to sea. In the camp, we passed the meditation garden, where Reverend Earline, now a spirit herself, sat alone on a bench wearing her Diane von Furstenberg sheath, her scarab bracelet. She followed our approach with a yearning expression.
“Aren’t you going to say hello?” Owen said.
“No,” I said. “No, I’m not.”
Could he read my surprise in the dampness of my palm?
I circled the shell paths through the camp, and when we passed one of the dead Owen would squeeze my hand, and then we’d walk on. When I asked him how he knew them, he said they were quiet, like me.
“Do they smell of lemons?” I said, smiling.
“No, never,” he said. “They smell like anise.”
It was the spice drops that Del brought him. Then I caught the scent myself, jumbled with that of the mown grass, the wildflowers, the gasoline of a boat powering out.
His one-sided conversation over The Velveteen Rabbit in his room earlier suddenly struck me as odd. Despair filled me, and I scanned the camp grounds for Del, for the blouse my mother had bought for her when she was pregnant, the last thing I’d seen her wearing in a photograph she’d sent me in Ithaca: C’est Moi, Garden Club Secretary. But I saw nothing and reassured myself that Del, the living, breathing version of her, was still somewhere, sailing the Caribbean Sea, asleep in an island hammock, toasting an approaching hurricane with a glass of rhum agricole.
Owen tapped his little cane along the shell path. Up at the old house, my mother would have made coffee, set out cups on the linen cloth. She’d wait for Owen and me on the porch, and when she saw us her expression would alter—happy sad—the closest to joy we would ever allow ourselves. Sister Martha Mary had shown herself to me on a summer day in a cold barn, the sun on her face, her hands clasped in her dark robes’ folds. And later, innumerable dead had disclosed their heartbreaking faces; Mary Rae had kept her frozen vigil beneath the elm. I’d believed the dead had expectations of me. But what if they asked nothing but that I serve as a witness to their longing?
I told Owen that it was time to go home. My grandfather had a book with an Irish tale about the swans I’d find on the shelf and read to him. And maybe all that could happen to us in our lives was portended in fairy tales. I held Owen’s hand, warm and smelling of copper pennies. We made our way back along the wooded lane to the old house.