The Clairvoyants(8)

In my art class in high school, the year that Del went into the hospital, we’d been instructed to take the camera with us everywhere, and the first good image I captured was Mrs. Harrington at the Big Y. It was at night, and I’d gone there to buy spice drops—one of Del’s old cravings. I used a 35 mm camera for class, and when I started down the soup aisle and saw Mrs. Harrington I’d hesitated, curious about what the image would reveal if I captured it on film, worried that even an attempt at photographing her would further prove my instability. But like my great-grandfather, who’d sketched what he’d seen, I felt the need to take that photograph, and the next day I developed the film in the lab at school. On the negative I could see the image, but I wasn’t sure what would happen once I printed it.

Mr. Krauss, our teacher, squat and shaggy, leaned over my shoulder as I placed the paper in the bath. The image appeared, and he said it was excellent. He liked the surreal nature of it, the rows of soup cans, the strange saturated light that was arresting and eerie. He made no mention of Mrs. Harrington in her London Fog, her bruised neck, her bouffant hair flattened on one side. Just of the light, its quality. I’d felt a sharp disappointment.

“Unusual,” he said, “this shimmer here,” his pudgy index finger hovering over Mrs. Harrington’s figure.

He liked the absence of people, he told me. I’d captured the loneliness of the place. But when I looked at the image, Mrs. Harrington was there, confused, as if she’d lost her cart in one of the aisles and as if the lost cart had been the only familiar thing in a strange land. Mrs. Harrington had had a daughter, a girl with long, thin appendages who sat in the junior high cafeteria alone during lunch, scribbling verse on lined paper, refusing invitations to join other tables. The printed image of Mrs. Harrington was the first I knew of what I had to do, like a calling. It didn’t matter that I was capturing only absence—an empty supermarket aisle, a deserted, leaf-riddled road. I understood that lost love did that—uprooted you and left you abandoned.

While I’d been taking Mary Rae’s photograph, Geoff came up the sidewalk with Suzie on her leash and smiled at me, hesitantly.

“Taking shots of the house?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

Geoff laughed. “I’ve got some stories about this place, if you’re ever interested. It’s got a history, you know.”

“Ghosts?” I said, raising the camera to set Mary Rae in my sights.

Geoff put his hand on my shoulder, and I felt a flash of discomfort, then wondered if I was wrong to feel it. Avuncular, I told myself, an old high school vocabulary word I’d never thought I’d use.

“No, don’t worry about that,” he said. “I wouldn’t have any renters if that were the case, eh?”

He went back inside, and I followed him, Suzie’s nails clicking on the treads already marred by her ups and downs. We went our separate ways, into our apartments. It grew dark, and I knew I should think about eating something, but I wasn’t hungry. The streetlights came on. Mary Rae tipped her head to meet my gaze, her pretty hair iced over. Though I wanted to ignore her, her continued presence was too baffling. I went quietly down the staircase, unused to living in such close proximity to strangers and leery of calling attention to myself. I stepped onto the porch, and then down to the sidewalk. Mary Rae began to move away from me, leading me along, stopping when I didn’t keep up. I was afraid of getting lost. Though I had my phone, and it continued to pick up a signal, at that time I knew no one I could call, and this was before phones could direct you anywhere you wanted to go. Despite this I kept following her.

I pretended I was simply out for a walk on a late summer evening. I tried to focus on the trees arching over the sidewalk, the quaintness of the houses with their front porches, imagining how I would describe things to Del in a letter. The air felt cooler and the breeze, which had once seemed to promise a storm, kicked the leaves. We walked down one street, then another—Geneva, Cascadilla. Students had moved in, had hung their posters, had laid down their rugs, and were acclimating to the people around them. It didn’t escape me that my fresh start so far involved none of those things; rather than making new friends, I was following a dead girl. I approached a party on a candlelit porch—laughter, banter, the group partially hidden by tall shrubbery. Mary Rae stopped walking and paused, lingering, as if she longed to join them; as if she sensed I, too, wished to go in.

I stepped back into the shadows of the shrubbery, as she did, listening. A woman laughed, softly.

“It’s a beautiful night,” she said. “God, I wish it would stay like this and never get cold.”

Someone set a bottle of beer on a table. “You’d get sick of the sameness,” a man said.

“I’m happy to be here with all of you. I’m just happy to be alive,” the woman said.

There was a hush then, the laughter dying away. “Someone walked over my grave,” the man said.

“Oh, stop,” another woman said, her voice garrulous. “You’re all so superstitious.”

“I wish I would stop feeling guilty,” the first woman said.

“For what?” the other woman said.

“Well, for Rae.”

I felt a sudden apprehension. Mary Rae must have been the “Rae” the woman referred to, though her face showed no real emotion, just a placid, glazed-over expression, as if recollecting something from long ago.