The Clairvoyants(4)
I was sure my great-grandfather had seen what I saw, and recorded his visitors alongside his sketches of the birds, their little clawed feet penciled in a violent grip, similar to the one my mother used on the wheel of the car. His manuals had become my own, their catechism one I memorized as a gullible child—What is the ethereal double? Who travels on the astral plane? How does the clairvoyant receive messages from the dead? Once all manner of dead began to appear to me I began to resent him for passing down his curse, and the manuals revealed themselves for what they were—the esoteric ramblings of a cult. It didn’t matter that I had once believed in them. I felt foolish for doing so now. The Ithaca move came from my hope that the dead might not follow me out of the area, that perhaps they’d been summoned by the inept mediums affiliated with the Spiritualists by the Sea. According to “A Student,” the people I saw were shells of themselves, trapped on the lower astral plane, manifesting in the places they once inhabited. I might be able to leave them behind.
My mother helped with my application, claiming she wished the best for me, but her eagerness also meant I’d played right into her hand. She wanted me gone, away from Del. Three years before, Del had suffered a psychotic break and had been admitted to a hospital for treatment. Though she’d recently settled into a kind of assisted-living arrangement called Ashley Manor, I hadn’t seen her since our family’s last attempt at therapy two years ago, and as the space between Del and me widened like an extending rubber band, my resentment toward my mother grew. I was being shuttled out of the way, while Del, still her favorite, was allowed to stay close.
“While you were in the kitchen, Detective Thomson asked me a lot of questions about Del,” I said.
My mother pursed her lips but kept her eyes on the road, the river a dark, churning stripe beyond the guardrail and the dead summer grass. “He’s a nuisance.”
“He’s been to talk to her at Ashley Manor,” I said.
As I guessed she would, my mother glanced at me, concerned. “Your sister never mentioned that.”
“She told me in one of her letters,” I said.
My mother seemed to relax then. She sighed. “I don’t think we can believe everything Del writes in her letters.”
“Oh, I know what to believe,” I said. “And what not to believe.”
I saw the shape of her mouth like a rebuke. She suspected I did know, and held her own resentment against me for keeping things from her.
I was a prickly girl, difficult to love.
The summer I was fifteen, David Pinney died. After that, I saw the dead again for the first time since I’d seen Sister in the barn, and Del’s behavior first bloomed out of control. She’d always been a little reckless—the result of imaginative plans and games that my mother couldn’t help but marvel at. But her inventiveness took a self-destructive turn after that disastrous summer. Despite my admittedly distracted efforts to keep track of her, during the next year Del was caught with various boys—in cars, in a camper sitting in someone’s side yard, in the Mile Creek Beach Club changing rooms. Her favorite place to take boys was a ravine off Mile Creek Road, the edge of someone’s property where two cars had been abandoned—the springs and tufts of stuffing sprouting from the vinyl seats, moss and fern growing out of the rusted floorboards. There were drugs involved, too, and alcohol. I’d followed her and found our grandfather’s old bottle of Glenfiddich wedged into a wheel well. When I’d confronted her she’d simply grinned, grabbed the bottle back from me, unscrewed the top, and taken a swig.
“You’re such an innocent, Martha Mary.”
The following year things worsened, and I’d wake at night to Del talking in her sleep. She always sat upright. Sometimes, she stood in the closet. I was half-asleep, and the talking rarely made any sense. I would awaken with only pieces of things—her tone, imploring or urgent, a word or two—camellia or mirror? Broken branch? I stopped trying to understand and I accepted the spiral of words that charted her forgetting everything—who she was, what she meant to me. It was a sad sort of relief to think that the only thing allowing me to slacken my watch over her was the understanding that she had moved into a place I could not follow.
Even my mother could no longer excuse Del’s behavior as brilliance, and when I was a senior in high school and she was sixteen, she was sent away, to a place that had been founded in 1824 as the Connecticut Retreat for the Insane, then renamed the Hartford Retreat, and finally, more hopefully, the Institute of Living. Still the place couldn’t shake the pall that came from the many lobotomies performed there from the 1940s to the 1960s. Gene Tierney, the actress who appeared in Laura and Tobacco Road, was admitted in the 1950s and suffered twenty-six shock treatments that robbed her of her memory. She tried to flee but was caught and returned. None of these things could convince my mother or my father that they had made a mistake sending Del there. They were resigned, convinced that this type of thing ran in the family—citing Great-aunt Rose, who had lived out her days in that Fairfield asylum in Newtown, long since closed down and abandoned to ruin.
Without Del, I worried I’d come home to an ambulance in my driveway, men from the hospital poised to chase me down and drag me in, too. Gone was the sister who posed beside me in photographs of our childhood, the two of us wearing Easter dresses or Christmas robes, identical except for color, Del with her blond hair and winning smile, me pouting and angry over some slight no one ever took the time to understand. I knew I was being selfish, that in some way Del had been taken in my place. If I had described my visions, I would have been the one drugged and shuffling through therapy groups and arts and crafts. But I wasn’t brave enough to confess anything.