Under the Light - By Laura Whitcomb Page 0,16

slipped into it again. She was shivering and naked like a newly born creature, the water swirling ’round her and down the drain.

I realized, as I stood beside her bathroom sink, that I was mistaken. Somehow I had returned to visit her before I last left her—the shock of this went up through my spirit like a mouse up a bell cord. I knew that time was not strictly linear, as the Quick measure it. But arriving before I’d left should have been impossible.

Jenny seemed unaware of being observed. She breathed unevenly and wiped wet strands of hair from her face. How odd that I was the one who commanded that hand moments ago.

Now that I was back in the land of the Quick, heaven seemed like something I must’ve dreamed. Yet I knew I had been there with James. Some things, for instance—who were guests at the great feast—I noticed had already been lost in crossing back into the world of the Quick. Other things—the way leaves floated down gently onto the linen tablecloth, the smell of fresh bread, and the simple beauty of a bowl of magnolia blossoms—these images were still bright in my mind.

Heaven was real.

I didn’t think James would understand, which is why I hadn’t said goodbye. The idea had come to me in a rush—I knew that I had to go back to earth and find Jenny. One does not abandon a child in a storm. I was determined to stay with the girl until the wrong I had done her had been righted. Just a short time. Then I would go back to him.

Heaven is not a place you leave behind carelessly—I wanted to stay, of course. And I would have thought it a great struggle to return to the earth, but for me the crossing was easy.

As I focused on the last place I had seen Jenny, I found I was on a road, but still in heaven. I strode to the point of convergence between my pathway and the first row of trees, then pictured Jenny’s face. Not my reflection in a mirror when I was inside her, and not her empty shell before I stole her flesh, but her wet, bewildered eyes just after she had reclaimed her body. I saw those curved lashes and her pale face and neck, her round ears, her pointed chin.

There was a kind of flattening then, as if the road and the woods were drawn on a piece of paper and some unseen hand had turned the page away from me, foreshortening the landscape. The folding, inky bridge to Jenny pressed me like the claustrophobic moment when you try to pull a too-tight dress off over your head and it catches at the ribs. I drew myself in and pushed through.

Everything beyond was blinding white: white walls, white tiles. And there she was, waiting in the water.

The bath had drained out and the tap was pouring water down over Jenny’s feet. She was quivering and pale, but her cheeks were flushed as she took in her surroundings—the sweater lying on the floor, the empty prescription bottle, the scattering of sleeping pills.

Most of her troubles were ones I had brought to her when I’d stolen her body. In my defense, she had left it empty, but that was no excuse—I was a thief. For the chance to be a solid, living girl again, I had taken up the shell of this fifteen-year-old. At a church picnic, no less, as she sat with head bowed in prayer. Every time I remembered this, it shamed me. The fact that I was in love at the time and that borrowing a body was the only way to touch James, skin to skin, made it no less wicked.

I had been Light, dead and bodiless, for more than a century before I laid eyes on Jenny. When I slid my spectral fingers into her folded hands and breathed through the instrument of her ribs and belly for the first time, I wept with joy.

How strange that after waiting a hundred and thirty years for a body, I kept hers for only six days. For less than a week I played the part of Jenny. Slept in her bed, answered to her name. I’d shocked her family and friends, said and done things Jenny never would have. I inadvertently brought accusations against an honorable man. I bedded James using Jenny’s body without permission and then left her alone and unprotected with no