The Clairvoyants(31)

“It’s winter,” he said, as if this were an answer.

My stomach rumbled, and he said we needed to feed me, and so he pulled me up and my nakedness was light and airy in the dark. I stood on the foldout bed. He slid off the end and stood in front of me, and I was suddenly shy, unmoving under his gaze.

“Look at you,” he said. “Galatea.”

I was still, like marble.

William put his hands on my hips. This moment would stay with me for a long time after—the press of his thumbs, his cradling of me. He leaned in and kissed my hipbones, my thighs, and I gave in to him. I didn’t need food. I wanted to be ravished. This was, for the most part, what became of us. My desire, and William satisfying it. I should have known better—desire brought suffering.

Maybe our movement in the room getting dressed, putting on our boots, alerted Del—she was at the door with her distinctive knock, a pattern we used when we played clairvoyants as children, rigging a lever to make a banging on the underside of the galvanized tub. Some patterns were warnings from the dead, and others, like this one, were more benevolent. “I miss you” or “I’m thinking of you.” I looked at William. “It’s Del,” I whispered.

“I can hear you in there,” Del said. “I was just heading out for a walk. Want to come?” I opened the door to Del on the landing in her new coat, its large hood pulled over her hat. “Finally,” she said.

William shrugged on his corduroy jacket and took a long time with the buttons. He put his hands into his pockets, as if searching for a pair of gloves, but came up with nothing. Del and I waited in the doorway until he was ready. “Are you going to be cold?” I asked him.

He pulled me in close and wrapped his arms around me. “Not with you,” he said.

I buried my face against his chest. He told Del he liked her coat, and she explained it was a dead girl’s coat.

“She got it from the Salvation Army,” I said.

We went downstairs and out into the snowy street. William wore his camera slung under his jacket. I’d left mine behind. The houses lined up in their rows, their roofs thick and white, the lampposts and power lines and tree limbs all leaden with snow. The snow falling was bewitching and oddly warm. William held my hand, and I let him, conscious of Del watching. Every so often he stopped and pulled me in to kiss. A passing car’s headlights would light us up.

“This isn’t the usual way things go with you,” he said, quietly. “Is it?”

“This is out of the ordinary,” I said.

I believed we were both feeling the same thing at the same time—but I knew very little then. I was dangerously close to confusing the sex for love. Thankfully, I never admitted to it. Del had walked on ahead, and she looked back at us.

“Lovebirds? Really?” she said, in her caustic way.

William looked at me, his eyes soft and questioning. “You trust me, don’t you?” he said, as if he needed reassurance. He let my hand drop. I had to retrieve his hand and tell him to stop it, and I knew then that I’d succumbed to something unnameable, marked by this reclamation, this rush to reassure.

We stood on the sidewalk, under someone’s porch light. Inside the house we saw people watching television, just their feet in socks propped up on a coffee table. They’d never removed their jack-o’-lanterns from the porch. Nearly buried by snow, you could make out the carved grimaces. All around, things were caught unprepared by the snowfall—a rake propped on a fence, a child’s bicycle tossed down on the grass. On the porch a pair of socks, pulled off and abandoned, frozen stiff in their contortions.

We kept walking, past Johnny’s Big Red Grill, where a group of students spilled out, singing a pop song, and I had a sense of watching what should have been my life from a distance. We’d been walking behind Del, who steered us past the railroad tracks, into an end of town I had never been. She stopped at the head of a path, and we joined her. Below us a creek, not yet frozen, rushed in the dark. To the right were scattered twinkling lights, and a soft din of conversation. I sensed low-built dwellings coated with snow. There were several fires burning. The place smelled of wood smoke and the dank creek mud.

“Where are we?” I retreated a few steps, tugging on Del’s arm.

“This is the encampment I told you about,” she said. “I want you to meet Sybil Townsend.”

William turned as if to head back toward town.

“These people know me.” Del was slightly exasperated.

“My feet are getting cold,” I said.

I didn’t want to meet Sybil Townsend, especially just then. William stepped toward me and slid his two hands up under my coat, under my sweater and T-shirt. His hands on my skin, the press of his fingertips, were somehow consoling, familiar.

“Oh, let’s just go with it,” he said, quietly, into my hair. “She can tell us our fate.”

Sybil Townsend and her abilities were all a game to him, as such things had been to Del and me as children. Del seemed to have forgotten we’d once played at this. William held my hand and we followed Del down the path worn muddy by others’ footsteps. The enclave consisted mostly of tarps strung on two-by-fours. Sea breezes had aired out the tent encampment erected on the Spiritualists by the Sea site, and those balmy nights had filled with fireflies. Here people huddled in the harsh cold. Strung bulbs, or Christmas lights, powered by a small generator, lit some of the dwellings. Under the tarps, or around the fires, the people sat in aluminum chairs, the kind with plastic slats, on low-slung canvas chairs, camp chairs, the type you took to an outdoor concert or a kid’s sports game or the beach. On end tables were small shaded lamps and tinny radios. I looked for tarot cards, for hands linked in communion. I listened for whispered messages from the dead.