The Clairvoyants(39)

“What are we doing here?” I wanted to say to Del, but she never caught my eye. She had found acceptance with the Milton girls—replacements for the sisters who’d snubbed the two of us all of our lives. Maybe we had both found a way to be happy. That the Milton girls ignored me didn’t hurt my feelings. I had William.

The focus of the evening, I gathered, was to give thanks to Mary Rae’s memory. The girls told more stories about her—these less complimentary than the ones I heard on All Hallows’ Eve—how she slashed an ex-boyfriend’s tires in high school, how after an abortion she decided never to have children and would only care for the children of others as her penance. She had been attending Tompkins Cortland Community College and wanted to one day run a child care center. It seemed unfair that Mary Rae, the object of so many stories, was unable to correct anyone or set the record straight.

I wanted to know who had gotten her pregnant, but Mary Rae, listening in from the ether, knew their talk had turned to gossip, and if I indulged them they’d find other cruel things to say about her. The whole discussion felt wrong.

“She misses us,” Kitty said. “Yesterday I found a rose petal in the snow in front of my house.”

“Where could that have come from?” Lucie said. She seemed the most practical—looking for reasonable explanations.

“A florist delivering roses to your neighbor for her first anniversary was careless,” I said.

“The spirit has spoken,” Del said in her medium’s voice.

Del had obviously been talking about the Spiritualists by the Sea and our childhood séances.

After the meal, the girls all stayed together in the living room smoking clove cigarettes, the smell competing with the roasted meat, the wood smoke. No one seemed queasy about smoking indoors. William spent time in the kitchen with the men. When I managed to slip away from the living room, I found them all leaning against the kitchen counter with cigars and glasses of brandy, having their own quiet conversation. I looked in at them and the talking ceased.

“Lost?” Geoff said.

The dirty dishes piled on the counter glistened with fat and butter, with the remains of the turkey bones. “Are you going to do the dishes?” I asked.

William said that Anne had a maid who would do them the next day. Randy shuffled his boots on the slate floor. “Are you looking for the bathroom?” William asked.

“Are you planning a bank robbery?” I said.

Joseph slapped the counter. “Hah!” he said. He kept the cigar in his teeth and used both hands to tuck his hair behind his ears.

William raised his eyebrows at me. He was the odd man out in this group. I got the impression that he was avoiding the living room and the Milton girls.

“I’ll show you the way,” he said, and he came toward me and slid his hand into mine. He led me to a narrow back staircase, which we climbed, single-file, our hands joined between us. Upstairs he stepped into a small room with a twin bed and a painted pine bureau. He closed the door behind us. I looked around for the bathroom, but it was clear that there wasn’t one.

“What’s this?” I said.

He pulled me in. I smelled the roasted poultry on his sweater, and I almost told him no before his mouth found mine and quieted me, his hands slipping beneath my clothes, cool and quick. One plunged down the front of my jeans, and I knew that we would have only a short amount of time, but we were good at this, having found ourselves able to complete the act any number of places at short notice—his office, with a line of students in the hall, at the back of the library, behind the last stack of books, beneath the dust-filled light of the projector, the only patrons in the little cinema downtown. The coolness of his hand on me made me tremble, and I bit his lip, and he moaned and turned me facedown on the bed. He unzipped his pants, and then he was on top of me, inside me, and the bed’s old springs recoiled against his thrusting, a sound amplified in my ear, my face flat against the raised pattern of the bedspread. There was no explanation for his sudden desire, there never really was. Just the darkness of the stairs, our bodies in that close space, the idea of the other, and the pleasure that could be ours in a matter of moments.

Afterward, in the bathroom downstairs, I rubbed at the mark of the bedspread on my face and swung my hair over my cheek to cover it. I felt slightly abject. It never occurred to me to protest or refuse him, yet he’d refused me just that afternoon. Back in the living room, I took a seat on the floor by the fire, separate from the others. I knew they all knew. “It’s obvious they’re fucking,” the girls would say to each other out of my earshot.

“Mary Rae would have liked you, Del,” Alice said across the room. “You’re just the right amount of smart and crazy.” An irritating remark. Mary Rae had chosen me.

I felt too warm by the fire and regretted sitting there. Anne was watching me, making me feel odd. William’s semen seeped into my underwear.

“Have the police found any clues about what happened?” I said.

A log fell into the flames. Kitty, sitting the closest to me on the floor, bit her fingernails, smearing her lipstick. Alice played with the fringe on the afghan she’d wrapped around her and Del’s shoulders. I’d made yet another mistake.

“No one seems to know anything,” Anne said, her cigarette dangling from her bony fingers. “Her mother has been hounding the police. But they aren’t used to this sort of thing. This is a small town.”