The Clairvoyants(14)
Across our years of letters, I had never asked Del why she’d turned me away that day I’d tried to visit, and she had never asked me why I’d kept away since. It was as if we had silently acquiesced to a need to keep our distance from each other. That afternoon in Ithaca I watched her sleep, her hands pressed under her cheek like a child. The little travel clock on the end table wasn’t really a gift intended for me, and I wished I had never accepted it. I felt a rush of animosity toward my mother, toward Del, but I tamped it down. As in childhood when she would propose an enticing plan, I was being lured back under Del’s spell.
In the middle of the night I woke up and she was sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark having a conversation with herself.
“You told me that was what it was,” she said, “and then you fell into the gap, and the bees interrupted, and the whole Sunday I couldn’t find the place.”
She cut the air with her hand emphatically, and when I spoke to her she didn’t stop or seem to hear me. “Del,” I said. “Oh, Del?” Clearly, she hadn’t been managing her medication.
I should have expected this. In her letters she’d often talked about despising the medication and wanting to wean herself off of it. Yet it unnerved me. I dug the prescription bottles from her bag and read the instructions for dosage. I filled a glass of water at the sink and I handed the pills to her, one at a time, like a nurse at her bedside.
“You need to get those little plastic cups,” she said, trying to provoke me.
“Your experiment failed,” I said.
“This time,” she said.
Eventually, as days passed, Del’s drama seemed to level off. My mother called, and though it felt like childhood tattling, I told her Del was visiting. She pushed in a chair and crossed the kitchen floor and opened a cabinet. The old regulator schoolhouse clock chimed the hour.
“How is it going?” my mother said, falsely bright.
“We’re having fun,” I said. “I’m showing her the sights.”
One Saturday, I’d taken Del on a tour of the campus. I’d gotten a map from the Campus Information booth, and Del had made fun of me for not knowing my way around. Another time, we’d hiked up wooded, spiraling trails in Buttermilk Falls Park. Yet another day, we’d crouched on flat rocks near falls that wet our faces. I’d even taken her across the suspension bridge over the gorge, clutching her hand, feeling myself drawn to the edge.
“That’s nice,” my mother said. “When is she coming home?”
Home meant Ashley Manor, I assumed, but still her question rankled.
“Soon,” I said. I’d enjoyed having Del around again, and I even felt better with her near. I had willed the dead to keep their distance, and for a while even Mary Rae obliged.
6
I’d wanted to visit the Spiritualists by the Sea—it hadn’t been Del’s idea. I’d been reading my great-grandfather’s manuals, and I wanted some proof of what was happening in the camp. While my grandfather was alive I didn’t dare go against his wishes, but when he died I believed I would find him at the camp, and he would forgive me for defying him. That summer, I turned twelve. I was too old for Del’s games of pretend, too young to care about the boys Leanne and Sarah entertained around the pool. My father had kept the ranch house in the suburbs and had moved in with his new wife by then. We saw him occasionally, staying in our old bedrooms during weekend visits. But the place had never felt like our house—not like my grandparents’ had—and that summer my father and his wife had purchased a cottage on the Cape, and we were allotted a week with him there at the cottage, and then our visit with him was done.
My mother had continued her volunteer work at the church, and took shifts at the Prison Store, where they sold inmates’ handcrafted tables and chairs, chess boards and jewelry boxes. Del and I always joked about messages in the merchandise—a hidden panel at the base of a wooden candlestick into which had been secreted a manifesto, admitting or denying the inmate craftsman’s crime. The store was in a town plaza—between a bookstore and the one movie theater. Beyond this I wasn’t sure how our mother kept herself busy.
My grandmother was occupied with her bridge club and her garden club. Often, neither of them was home and we were left unsupervised. We spent a lot of time in the house—reading our grandparents’ old books, listening to French language tapes we found in the attic, and using the French around our mother to annoy her. The beach communities filled with summer people, and we spent our time on bikes, or walking the lanes to the beach club with our group of friends. Taking a detour into the woods wasn’t much of a stretch, and Del and I stole down the gravel road through the woods one morning just as the Spiritualists’ organ hit its first notes. We brought a backpack with sandwiches and pretended we were simply out for a hike. The woods were cool, just beginning to fill with bugs, and the sun blinked through the leaves as we walked. Neither of us spoke, solemn with the weight of our disobedience.
Occasionally, a car would come by, and we’d will ourselves invisible and step to the side, allowing it to pass—dusty Connecticut plates, some from New York or Massachusetts. The path through the woods inclined and we emerged at the top of a hill where the trees thinned to a meadow. Ahead the cottages began, brightly painted like gypsy wagons—peaked, wood-framed structures with gingerbread trim—miniature versions, I noted, of our grandparents’ house, connected by narrow lanes. We saw towels and swimsuits on clotheslines, and floats and inner tubes stuffed under cottage porches. One of the lanes ended at a bulkhead, where a path led through rangy swamp rose bushes down to a rocky beach. Del and I paused at the head of the path, partly hidden behind the roses. The Spiritualists had dotted the sand with umbrellas, and children played in the Sound. Someone opened a cooler and pulled the flip top of a can of soda or beer. Del and I surveyed the scene, surprised. This was like any of the other beach communities we’d been to.