Under the Light - By Laura Whitcomb Page 0,81

found a mate. My Poet became a lecturer in his later years and mentored a seventeen-year-old named Brown.

My Mr. Brown was a devoted student and wrote such passionate stories and listened so purely to all advice, I chose him in advance. I could tell months beforehand that my host was going to heaven without me. I cleaved to Mr. Brown when he came to say goodbye to my Poet. Mr. Brown was moving west to enter a university three thousand miles away. I chose him partly because he loved literature so very much, but I also chose him because he had a kind heart, an honest tongue, and a clear honor and yet seemed totally unaware of the fact that he was virtuous. This made him especially appealing. I had a half memory of being fooled by a handsome smile, but Mr. Brown’s face seemed a true mirror of his spirit. I felt even more attached to him than I had to the others. Perhaps that’s why I called him by his name.

I had learned the rules of my survival well during those decades—stay close to your host or risk returning to the dungeon, take what small pleasure you can from a vicarious existence, and try to be helpful. And I do believe that I was helpful to Mr. Brown when he was writing his novel.

From the time he was eighteen, he would spend at least an hour a day working on his book. He kept it in a box that once held blank paper. He would sit in a park or at a table in the library, composing one paragraph each day. He had more than two hundred carefully handwritten pages but was still on chapter five. I would sit beside him or pace around him, watching him think. Each page was as precious as a poem. When doubts or thoughts of mundane life stayed his hand, I would try grasping his pen to urge him on, but my fingers would only pass through. I discovered that the best way I could help him become unstuck in his writing was to place my finger on the last word he had written. This always brought his pen back to paper and a smile back to his lips. It was a tale of brothers fighting for opposing kings in a medieval setting as rich and mysterious as Xanadu.

I longed so to talk to him about this character’s name or that character’s motives, about a phrase here that described a river and a word there that described a dying man’s eyes. I would fantasize, as he slept, long conversations we would have if he could see and hear me—the two of us sipping tea or walking in the country, laughing together over brilliant ideas. But that would never happen, of course. And so it went, my favorite hour of each day spent with him and his book, until the writing stopped the day he met his bride.

They saw each other across a lecture hall and met in the doorway as they left. There was an uncomfortable familiarity about it all. The way she smiled at him, the way he was thrilled when she laughed at his joke, the little excuses each had for touching the other. Her hand on his arm as she asked a question, his knee touching hers as they drank coffee at a tiny table in a pub so noisy they left to take a walk. None of my hosts had lived with a lover. And I’m ashamed to say I felt jealous when this girl moved into his life. At first I pretended I disapproved because he’d stopped working on his novel, but I knew that wasn’t the only reason. An instability clutched me, and I found myself afraid of shadows and loud noises. I wanted to stop him, but although she had inadvertently halted his writing, she was undoubtedly making him happy. I wanted to warn her that a man might seem ideal and then turn cold and distant with no cause, but after all, it was Mr. Brown she was falling in love with. It would be a lie to argue that he wasn’t worth the risk.

And so because I loved him, I let her be, and because I feared pain, I learned to follow at a distance when they were together. I felt lonelier than I had ever been with any host, but I tried to love her as if she were my daughter. She