Under the Light - By Laura Whitcomb Page 0,32

behind houses and trees and power lines. And somewhere the grass grows long with no lawn mowers cutting it and it gets dry and brown without sprinklers, and the land is so flat, you can almost see the curve of the earth if you try.

I had the strongest feeling that someone should be lying next to me. I turned my head to the side, but there was empty air. There used to someone there, though, I thought. I looked back into the gray.

A drop of rain, invisible until just before it hit my throat, startled me. I have no idea why, but I thought it should have passed through me instead of tapping a wet spot on my skin. As another drop struck my cheek and another my wrist, I lifted my arms and stretched my fingers toward the sky. I tried to move that gray cloud out of the way, but I had no power over it. Of course. If I’d ever had powers, I’d lost them. Another drop hit the corner of my eye like a cold tear.

CHAPTER 13

Helen

SILENT UPON THE GRASS, she had gazed to her right and to her left in the light rain like Ophelia waiting for a flood. I sat beside her and, in hopes of lifting her spirit, recited poems my first host had written—“The Hearth Cat,” “Even Apples Remember,” “Below This Leaf.”

Below this leaf there lies its brother;

Beneath this root one finds another.

And so the layers of time press deep,

Make mud of us all as down we seep.

But do not read your graveyard stone;

You are more than blood and bone.

Up your soul like a fairy flies

And paints its Heaven on the skies.

I hoped that she had heard me with her inner mind the way my hosts sometimes listened to me while they slept, but it may have been simple chance that when I came to the last line Jenny got herself up and went inside. She took off her wet clothes, showered, dressed herself. She and her mother spoke hardly a word all afternoon and into the evening.

Cathy closed herself in the study or the bedroom and talked on the phone, trying to hide her pain, but the muffled sounds of her tears and anger could be heard through closed doors. I found it disturbing that Cathy abandoned her child for so many hours.

I stayed close to Jenny, told her George MacDonald stories of Curdie, the princess, and the goblins as she brushed out her wet hair, set the table, even as she sat with her mother for an awkward dinner and later helped fold laundry. But I couldn’t tell if my poems or stories were truly heard—I sensed no reaction. Frustrated, I swatted at the laundry basket, but neither of them saw it rock.

When her mother left her that evening, retired to the master bedroom to shower, when Jenny was alone and the phone line was free, she stood in the darkened kitchen and called Billy. They spoke but half a minute.

“What did the police do to you?” she asked. She listened, trying with her fingers to rub out a stain on the doorjamb, but it was actually a place where the white paint had chipped away and the dark wood showed through. Then she whispered, “Okay.” And, “Monday at ten.” She looked down the hall as the sound of the shower shut off. “Don’t you have to be at school?” she asked him. Jenny stepped back away from the doorway and hid in the shadows. “The main branch?” Then she laughed, stifled the sound with her hand, and hung up.

She crept back into the living room, where Cathy joined her, wearing pajamas under a long sweater and her hair wet around the edges. It was rare to see the woman dressed so informally. And without makeup she looked young and lost.

They watched television, a concert of Christian music that Cathy said Jenny could stay up for if she wanted to; a baritone sang a gospel song older even than I was, a full choir performed an arrangement of “God Bless America,” a boy’s chorus sang “This Little Light of Mine.” Cathy held a cup of tea she never drank—her eyes were focused not on the television screen but at the floor below it. Jenny didn’t seem to be watching the program either, except that one of the advertisements made her sit up straight.

It was a commercial for a credit card that would, it was implied, be accepted anywhere on the