Under the Light - By Laura Whitcomb Page 0,53

Why?”

“Not even the last few days before I went to the hospital?” Jenny seemed oblivious to Cathy’s fear, but I could feel it like a grating vibration in my teeth. “I didn’t talk funny?” Jenny asked.

Cathy took another step back. “Funny in what way?”

Jenny shrugged. “Old-fashioned, maybe?”

Cathy grew pale and walked into the living room. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Jenny followed her, watched her mother straighten things that were already neat. “I’m trying to figure out what happened to me,” said Jenny. “Weren’t there moments when I seemed like someone else?”

I remembered vividly the conversation Cathy and I had after her women’s group meeting. We stood on the sidewalk in the dark and I told her I wasn’t her daughter. Cathy had been in tears. Even now I could almost hear the sprinklers in a stranger’s yard and smell the wet pavement. And Cathy recalled it too—I could see it in the lines around her eyes and where a smile should have been.

Cathy moved to the open arch of the hall doorway, keeping her back away from her daughter. “I don’t like this,” she told Jenny.

“Do you believe spirits can visit us and take over our bodies?”

“Spirits?” Cathy folded her arms. “What kind of spirits?”

“I don’t know.” Jenny came a step closer to her mother and Cathy tensed.

Coward, I said. Talk to her. She’s your only child. Her father will never explain anything to her.

“You and Daddy always had answers about stuff like this,” said Jenny. “Angels and visions and the Holy Ghost. That’s why I’m asking. Do you think a spirit was visiting me?”

“Are you talking about an angel?” asked Cathy.

Jenny hesitated. Too long for Cathy’s comfort. “I don’t think so.”

Cathy’s voice turned hard. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” She marched down the hall and at first Jenny followed.

In the corridor Cathy turned on every light she came to. The hall was lit. The overhead light as she walked into her bedroom, the end table lamp. Even the TV across from the bed.

She grabbed the remote, turned on the television, then pressed the volume control until a row of little blue bars grew across the bottom of the screen and the blare of the weather channel surrounded her with a protective wall of noise. For an extra measure, she closed the bedroom door against any conversations about the supernatural.

Jenny stayed in the hall long enough to take two breaths, then went into her own room and closed us in. She sat at her dressing table and stared first at her own face, then at the closet doors behind her in the reflection. The mirrored surface on the doors would normally send her a view of her own back and of her face in the vanity’s glass, but the closet was half opened, the mirror not showing.

I moved into her line of sight. Something in the backwards reflection, in the space where I stood, captured her attention. She drew a tissue from the box on her dressing table, leaned forward, and rubbed at the glass—I wondered if she could see some vague form of my specter and mistook it for a smudge.

Feeling bold, I glided in front of her, facing the reflection, and lowered myself until my eyes lined up with hers. She was seeing herself through me. I didn’t mean to scare her—I wanted to be acknowledged—but she must have seen some wisp of me, for she drew in her breath and lurched back from the table.

She darted to the door and I thought she would flee the room, but instead her gaze fell to the library books on the desk next to her, the ones that used to be in her school bag. She snatched up the top one from the stack, Jane Eyre, and sat down on the floor right where she was. After one unsteady breath, she let the book fall open across her knees. I had been frustrated the night before by my sometimes successful, often failed attempts to speak to her through the printed word, but I decided to try again.

I had taken control of her hand to touch Mr. Brown when we came upon him in the high school hallway. But that was a frightening, awkward ordeal. I tried to remember how I had taken gentle control of James’s hand when we wrote together at the back of Mr. Brown’s classroom. I had relaxed him. So now I rested my hand on Jenny’s back, then I slid my palm down her arm