The Clairvoyants(13)

I pulled my hands away. Mrs. Parmenter took a deep breath, exhaled, and opened her eyes. In the candlelight she wiped her tears gingerly with her fingertips. Then she stood and smoothed down her skirt.

“Thank you, girls,” she said. She stepped to the door and then paused. “How’s your mother, by the way?”

Del drew her legs up and hugged them. The candle sputtered and made our shadows glimmer.

“She’s fine,” I said.

Mrs. Parmenter hardened her eyes. “So happy to hear that,” she said, though I could see that she was not happy about anything.

She turned to step outside and had forgotten Mr. Parmenter’s watch. I picked it up to hand to her, and she took it, grudgingly, and slipped it back into her purse. We’d watched as she’d disappeared through the gap in the hedges toward the lane.

*

GEOFF CAME OUT the front door and gave us a little wave. Del was checking out his boots as he passed by.

“Those are desert boots,” she said.

“This is my sister, Del,” I said.

Geoff paused on the sidewalk and shaded his eyes. “Lovely,” he said, then he walked off.

“Cheerio,” Del called out after him, imitating his accent.

She unwound the stocking cap from her neck and fiddled with the fringe of the pompom.

“Mr. Parmenter committed suicide,” she said.

“At the Stardust Motel,” I said.

“Supposedly, he was waiting for the woman he’d been seeing, and she never showed.” Del stared at me.

“What?” I said.

“Never mind,” she said.

I’d never told her about Mr. Parmenter’s watch. This was years before the dead began to appear to me again, and at the time I believed I’d imagined it. When I’d touched the watch I’d seen a man stretched out on a bed, his hair dark and wet against his head, the pillow stained and his mouth open, as if in sleep, or in the process of a yawn or a scream. The motel room’s paisley bedspread held its own dark stain, the man’s feet shod in dress shoes and the thin dress socks the fathers all wore splayed at the bed’s foot. And the terrible stillness, a slight wheezing sound that may have been last breaths, and then nothing, nothing but the cars passing on the turnpike, nothing but the dust and the spring day shifting through the blinds, and the long length of silence.

Del had goaded me on during the pool shed sessions—“Tell us what you see, Sister. What is he saying?” so I was forced to reply, to invent lies, and to keep the things I believed I was imagining to myself—vivid, disconcerting scenes, ones that would suddenly be presented to me while I sat in the quiet of the shed, smelling the citronella and the chlorine: an old man with a belt, beating a child on the back of his legs; a woman leaning over a toilet, spitting up chalky, white pills into the bowl; a dog locked in a toolshed, clawing at a door. The children returned with messages, with news of their accomplishments, with admissions, sometimes shyly expressed, so that I felt, at times, like the priest in the confessional. The Spiritualists by the Sea had taught me that there were places where others who purported to see what I saw gathered. I suspected that many if not most were liars and fakes, and was certain that to align myself with them would be a grave mistake.

“Think of the money we might have made if Mother hadn’t caught on,” Del said, in that wry, raspy voice I had missed more than I’d realized. I felt a twinge of sorrow, too, for all the time we’d spent away from each other, and for the way I’d let resentment color our childhood.

The wind swirled leaves around our ankles on the porch. I told Del to come inside, and she picked up her backpack and followed me. It seemed that she’d not come directly to Ithaca but had in fact taken a side trip to Maine with Rory. From her letters I’d gathered he was older, in his thirties, a gentle man who dyed her hair for her, and took her out places and always brought her back. I’d pictured his trembling hands in plastic gloves squeezing the bottle of dye onto the top of her head and tenderly distributing it through her roots.

“So what happened?” I asked her.

I’d showed her into my tiny bedsit. I’d told her she could put her backpack anywhere.

“What do you mean happened?” Del was sitting on my couch. “Where do you sleep?”

“What happened with Rory,” I said. “Why did you call off the wedding?”

They’d had an argument and gone their separate ways, Del explained. “He was too controlling,” she said. “Always wanting to have sex in the woods.”

I leaned on the small counter, feeling the smallness of the room with the both of us there.

“Like some sort of pagan ritual?”

I told her the couch pulled out into a bed, and she removed the cushions right then, and marveled at the way the bed unfolded, as if it were something she’d never seen.

“He just likes to do it out in the open,” Del said. “He’s claustrophobic.”

She sat on the mattress, trying it out. Then she spotted the travel alarm clock on the end table. “Oh look!” she cried. “Mother’s little clock. She tried to give this to me in the hospital and I told her to take it back.”

Del arranged the pillows and promptly fell asleep, which put an end to my questions. A feeling of both excitement and dread accompanied anything related to Del. She’d come to visit, which meant that I was still someone important in her life, and that pleased me. But we hadn’t spent time alone together in three years, and I wasn’t sure I knew her anymore. It also occurred to me that Detective Thomson may have paid her a visit, that her flight to Maine with Rory had had another purpose.