The Clairvoyants(9)

“You doing okay there, William?” a man said. “You’re pretty quiet.”

“Yeah,” William said. And then he stood and looked out of the screened enclosure. He looked past Mary Rae to me, standing there on the sidewalk. I’m not sure why I didn’t flee. Did I think that I, too, couldn’t be seen?

“Oh, hello,” he said.

“Hi,” I said. “Sorry, I was looking for my cat.”

Del would have laughed at me. “That’s all you could come up with?” she would have said.

Then the man, William, turned to the group, some of whom had risen from their seats on the dim porch to see who he was talking to.

“Anyone see a cat?” he said, his voice teasing. I suspected he didn’t believe me. He looked back at me—for some reason I still hadn’t moved.

“What does it look like?” he said. “What breed? Persian? Manx? Maine Coon? Abyssinian? Siamese?”

“Just a tabby.” Could I have told him right then I’d been following his dead friend? What would that have accomplished? I looked toward Mary Rae, but she was gone. William raised his beer to me. “Want to join us?” he said.

Thunder sounded off in the distance, and then the porch door opened, and William stepped onto the sidewalk in front of me. Again, I smelled that pre-storm charge in the air. My grandfather would open the front door wide and stand before the screen, calling us all to him, and telling us to “Breathe. Breathe. Smell that?” Outside my grandparents’ house, the horse chestnut leaves would be torn from the branches. The shrubs would buckle. The clouds would unfurl like great gray tongues. Our mother and grandmother would stand far behind us, safe in the hallway’s shadows. “Get away from there,” our mother would hiss, and we four girls would feel superior to the panic in her voice.

“You don’t want to be struck by lightning,” William said.

He was just being funny, but the mention of the lightning and the sudden disappearance of Mary Rae, the void she had left, made me uneasy.

“I’ll be fine if I avoid trees, high houses, running water, and barns,” I said.

“Or, you could come inside.”

“According to Ben Franklin, to be safest indoors you’re supposed to lie in a silken hammock in the middle of the house.” I sounded odd, I knew that, but William laughed.

“We’ll all have to face the risk then. No silken hammocks here.”

The breeze buckled the porch screens. William’s friends had grown quiet. “My grandfather sold lightning rods.”

“You seem to have the pitch down,” he said. “You’ve got me nervous.”

I laughed, then. We looked at each other in the dark. I could see little of his face, his eyes.

“I’d better get going,” I said. “But thanks.”

I headed back the way I’d come, ignoring the voices that started up on the porch behind me. When I spun around once, playfully, William was still there, standing on the sidewalk, watching me go.





5




In Ithaca, I settled into a new routine—the walk to campus, the classes in historic houses named after university founders and benefactors, with open windows where gusts came through, occasionally dragging a leaf, flipping our notebook pages; the professors distant and oddly dressed, sporting clinking turquoise and silver bracelets, faded jeans, and the heavy shoes I understood would soon be needed to navigate the slush and snow. The area had been established in the late 1700s as the Military Tract, and its townships named by a clerk in the surveyor’s office who may have read John Dryden’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Homer, Hector, Ulysses. Even a village called Dryden, and another after his contemporary, Milton, which was where Mary Rae Swindal, the missing girl, had lived.

A report about her came on the television news one morning in the little diner where I often got my coffee on my way to school. I stood with a small group of students watching—the boys in their skinny jeans, skateboards under their arms, the girls with their phones out, calling friends. Later, I saw a copy of the Ithaca Journal with the headline about how the search for her continued. I bought it and brought it back to my bedsit. I read about the absence of new developments, and how yet another vigil was being held the next evening. There was the photo of Mary Rae, and quotes from her friends, and one from her mother, whom I imagined as a gaunt woman, her eyes red from crying.

“We miss our girl so much,” the mother said. “We hope she will be home soon.”

I felt a pang of sympathy for the mother, knowing Mary Rae would never be home. I’d tried, out of curiosity, to retrace my steps from the night she’d led me along, but without much luck. In the daytime, things looked off, and I had a crippling inability to get my bearings. I was often lost, and trying to squelch my panic. I must have seemed, to anyone who met me during those first weeks, strange and standoffish. Awkward. Other than Mary Rae, who made an almost daily appearance beneath the elm, I had no consistent visitors. And while I was conscious of having gotten what I wanted with this move away from home, I was apprehensive of my good luck. I found myself confusing new faces with those already familiar. I would smile and wave at someone, and, confronted with a stare or a hostile look, I’d realize my mistake. I’d get my bearings soon. And then I’d be able to be myself—whoever that new person was, waiting to emerge.