Under the Light

by Laura Whitcomb

  But I wasn’t like her. Even though it seemed as if no one could see me or hurt me, I was still scared.

  A plaque beside the enormous frame said it had been painted by a man named Waterhouse, on loan from Australia. I was in a wing of the county art museum. I’d been there only once, on a school field trip that my parents let me attend because they had been assured there would be no nude statues and because there was an exhibit of artifacts from the Holy Land on display.

  But today the walls were full of skin—pale bodies and rich colors. I was surrounded by Pre-Raphaelite paintings from all over the world. A maiden leaned over a balcony to kiss an armored knight, a lady with waves of auburn hair breathed in the scent of a flower in her hand, mermaids lounged around on rocks, water nymphs hid between lily pads and tried to pull a shepherd into their pool. Something my mother would have considered borderline pornography.

  I stayed there for I don’t know how long before I began to wander and found myself in a wing of photographs. A hundred or more black-and-white pictures surrounded me. No landscapes or bowls of fruit. Every image was human. These were the kinds of photos I’d wanted to take before my parents had shut down my experiments. I stared at the high contrast, deep shade, and blazing light. In one a naked woman lay across a grassy hill, half in and half out of the sun; in the next shadows ran like streams across the speckled skin on the back of a wrinkled hand.

  And these weren’t just pictures about the beauty of the human body; the spirits looking out of those faces shocked me. An old woman waiting on her porch steps, her eyes heavy with pain. A boy balancing on the bow of a broken rowboat in the sand, flexing his skinny arms and staring down the camera with defiance. They were so fearless about who they were.

  I found out how things worked through trial and error. Sometimes I decided to go somewhere, like when I was back in front of the Waterhouse painting in the blink of an eye because I thought of being there, and other times I found myself in a different place without warning or knowing why.

  That’s how I landed beside a podium that held an enormous dictionary. I knew the place even though I’d been there only once—the huge main branch library downtown. I came to a story time there with my first grade class.

  I moved through the aisles between millions of volumes and realized I could read anything I wanted now, uncensored. It wasn’t until I tried to open the cover of a novel on the new arrivals table that I discovered I was wrong. I had to read the back covers of books propped up on book stands and half articles visible on the pages of magazines left open on the couches in the lobby—it was impossible to grasp anything or even turn a page. Eventually I was brave enough to lean over an old man who sat in a study carrel and a woman at the long table in the computer wing and read silently along with them. They weren’t reading what I would have chosen myself, but still I liked the quiet and the colors of floor-to-ceiling books.

  I visited the dance studio where I’d spent hours taking ballet. I hadn’t had lessons in months and I missed it. I loved how the mirrors created a world that went on forever; perfectly matched wooden bars and floors stretched into infinity, with company after company of girls calmly breathing, bending, stretching in unison.

  I could see every detail as clearly as if I were lifting onto pointe myself. But I wasn’t really there. I proved this to myself by rushing toward the mirrors on the far wall, coming smack up against them without ever appearing in the reflection. I suppose I could have continued on through the mirror, but the idea frightened me.

  Once I ended up at the Reed Theater. I stood in the center aisle, a dozen rows from the front, watching West Side Story. My parents refused to rent the movie for me; said it was inappropriate. But I had watched it on TV one day when I was home from school with a cold and my mom was at a church committee meeting. I was twelve, and I cried so hard I caught the hiccups.

  Now I floated up onto the stage and turned back to see what the audience looked like as Maria and Tony sang a duet. The light from the stage turned everyone into angels—a thousand gold faces in the dark.

  I went to a forest many times. There was no sign of humankind, though there were tiny bugs, camouflaged birds, and chittering squirrels. I darted between tree trunks and leapt over bushes. I jumped streams and climbed to the tops of trees to look down on the forest canopy. I threw myself into the thick of the woods to swing onto a branch and perch there like an elf. Since I weighed nothing I didn’t even bend the slenderest twig.

  To my surprise, I once found myself back in my old house, in my old bedroom, at my vanity, where the mirrored closet doors behind showed me a view of the empty chair where I sat.

  I froze, terrified, not because I wasn’t reflected, but because something was moving by the bed. The gentle robot of my body pulled the covers down—I could see it from the corner of my eye. It passed behind me, reflected as a pale apparition I would not focus on. The door swung open and my father said, “Good night, Puppy. Say your prayers.”

  “Good night, Daddy,” said my body.

  I hunched down, too afraid to even run away. It was like a scene from one of those old flying saucer movies they showed every Halloween. There was nothing creepier than the child who weeps as he tells the policeman, “Those aren’t my parents—they look like them, but they’re not my mommy and daddy, I tell you! You’ve got to believe me!” But the policeman never does.

  And I was the alien.

  That’s not me anymore, I told myself. I stood up. I’m riding a sea serpent.

  And I was back in the museum’s Pre-Raphaelite room. But nothing was the same after that. I didn’t want to go back to my old life, but my life out-of-body was becoming unsettling. When I went to the dance studio, no boy could be my partner and lift me in a pas de deux, but now I realized that living as a spirit meant no boy would ever take me in his arms.

  CHAPTER 3

  Jenny

  I DIDN’T KNOW WHY I FOUND myself in front of that store window with a display of tie-dye kaftans and hemp shirts, but maybe I’d wished for the opposite of my old life. The shop was called Reflections; their logo, made into a stained-glass window in the front door, was a tree of life with a rainbow behind it. My mother refused to go into this or any other New Age store because she was afraid they were fronts for satanic cults.

  I slipped right through the door without jingling the tiny string of brass bells that warned the cashier when customers entered. The room was filled with books up to the ceiling, and displays of candles, incense, crystals, massage oils, yoga mats, CDs with monks and angels on the covers, DVDs of Tai Chi masters and pregnant women meditating. Even statues of the Virgin Mary, Saint Francis, Buddha, and a goddess with six arms. There were two customers, an elderly man with glasses pushed low on his nose, and a young woman in overalls who had a sleeping baby strapped to her belly. She chatted with the cashier, a young man wearing black eyeliner and his long hair in a braid.

  Even though I felt out of place in this world, the soundtrack that was playing—flute over the sounds of a babbling brook—calmed me. I was attracted to laughter from somewhere beyond the main room of the shop. I drifted back through a grass mat doorway and found a group of seven people sitting in a circle with their eyes closed and their hands in their laps, palms up.

  The woman who was speaking seemed the same age as my mother, but she wore her hair in dreadlocks pulled back, and had a single silver stud in one nostril and a tattoo of a flying bird on one wrist. No shoes, no makeup. Like my mom’s polar opposite.

  “Lift up this picture of your desires to God,” she said. “Don’t try to figure out how you will receive this gift. Just know that you already have received it and feel the joy. You don’t have to know how this blessing will come to be. You only need to be grateful.”

  Then the woman, who was apparently the leader of the group, stopped and turned her face, eyes still closed, toward me. “Someone’s here.” She smiled. She opened her eyes for a moment, looked through me, then closed them again. “A spirit has com
e into the room.”

  I scanned the room for a strange light or some other sign of the supernatural.

  “Is it my father?” one of the others asked. “He died last month.” They all stayed still, eyes shut.

  I didn’t want to see a ghost, so I stopped looking around.

  “No,” said the leader. “I don’t think this person is dead.”

  I froze. She means me. If I moved or breathed she might catch me somehow.

  “What?” one of the others whispered. “What did she say?”

  “It’s nothing to worry about,” said the leader. “This soul means no harm. She’s just visiting.”

  “Does she have a message for us?” someone asked.

  “Do you have a message for us?” said the leader, looking right at me with her eyes shut.

  I said nothing. But I thought, Please don’t talk to me.

  “She’s shy,” said the leader. “I think she’s a little lost.”

  Childishly I thought, I know where I am—I just don’t want to go home.

  “Oh,” the leader laughed. “I stand corrected. She’s not lost— she’s a bit of a runaway, I think.”

  Maybe I knew where I was—the street name and which city—but she was right. I was lost. I’d gotten stuck in the land of bodiless wandering. I couldn’t use a phone or take a drink of water or smell a flower.

  “You’re welcome here, sweetheart. We won’t bother you if you don’t bother us. Don’t be afraid,” said the woman.

  But I was afraid.

  I started going to Reflections every day at around the same time, just as this woman arrived or sometimes just after she started teaching one of her classes. The second day she seemed surprised when she sensed me watching. The third day, she seemed to expect me. By the fourth she had named me “the Runaway.” It was my only pleasure now, having a nickname and being noticed.

  I came to sit in the same place every day, on the top of the bookshelf between the two windows. Her name was Gayle. Even though I spent the rest of each day and night alone backstage at the theater or in the arms of a pine tree, I made sure I visited Gayle every day she was there.

  “Aren’t you ever going home to roost?” she asked me one day.

  I’m scared to go home, I thought.

  “You’re a lonely bird, aren’t you?” said Gayle. And then she sang a simple song I’d never heard before—it sounded like a hymn:

  The lone wild bird in lofty flight

  Is still with thee, nor leaves thy sight

  For I am thine; I rest in thee;

  Great Spirit come and rest in me.

  No one had sung me a lullaby since I was tiny. My mother used to sing me songs about everything we were doing. When she made me a bowl of oatmeal in the morning she’d sing about hungry bear cubs. When she washed behind my ears, leaning over the side of the tub, she would sing about soap bubbles. And when she brushed my wet hair in front of the mirror, she used to press her hand on the back of my neck and comb my curls up over her fingers, singing a song about daisies. I could almost feel the palm of my mother’s hand, warm and safe, cupping the back of my head as Gayle sang to me.

  And that was the moment I felt called.

  Every other time I had gone from one place to another, I’d either decided where to fly and swam in the air to the spot, or I’d wished to be somewhere and found myself there. Or I’d appeared in a new setting instantly without knowing why. But now I felt drawn to move in a specific direction as if I were in the blackness of outer space and there was only one star to follow. I flew slowly at first, east, between buildings, then over railroad crossbars and along farm fences. I became more confident and started gaining speed, even though I still had no idea what I was looking for.

  It’s heading straight for you, I heard some voice inside me whisper.

  Instead of scaring me, this only made me want to get there faster. The world rolled forward, the horizon in front of me curling like the crown of an ocean wave. And then, in a rush of magnetic energy, I was swung around and then stopped, hovering in midair. Whatever was coming at me had passed by me, or possibly through me. I set my feet down in the grass of an open field where the horizon in every direction was flat. Not a hill or tree to give it shape or size. I had no idea how many miles I’d flown or what state I was in. The heavens came smack down to the earth all around, and I could see the faint curve of the planet in the distance.

  But the field wasn’t completely empty. About a hundred yards away, I saw a boy levitating three feet off the ground. He came to rest with his sneakers in the grass and walked in my direction as if he’d forgotten he could just fly to me.

  CHAPTER 4

  Jenny

  IN THE MIDDLE OF WHO KNOWS WHERE, in a huge abandoned field, I stood in the grass and watched this boy walk toward me as if it was a perfectly normal way for him to meet a girl.

  He strolled right up to me. “Hey.”

  I wasn’t afraid of him, but I felt nervous. “Where did you come from?” I asked.

  He gestured with a flick of his head. “That way.” Then he smiled. “Is this your place?”

  I glanced around to make sure I hadn’t imagined where we were standing. “This field?” I said. “Are you asking me if this is my empty field?”

  He shrugged, looked me up and down. I scanned my feet, my hands and arms, and I could see myself but I wasn’t sure if he viewed me the way I did. And I was too embarrassed to ask him what I looked like. In my own eyes I wore jeans and a white T-shirt and, strangely, the soft black jacket my father had thrown out. Even stranger, my feet were bare.

  “Are you dead?” he asked.

  “What?” It seemed almost insulting. Did I look like a corpse? “No.” I thought I knew how these things worked. The spirits I had seen on my travels weren’t ghosts—they were people out of their bodies temporarily. “You’re not dead, are you?”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “Do you remember dying?” I asked.

  He put his hands in his pockets. He wore jeans too, with a black shirt rolled at the sleeves and open at the throat. But he had the good sense to be wearing sneakers.

  “I don’t want to remember that.” His face went gray and he held out a hand as if he wanted to protect himself from me.

  And then he was gone.

  Weird. I just stood there, doing nothing, for a long time. He was a stranger—it would be impossible for him to hurt my feelings. I couldn’t miss him, seeing as how I’d only known him for a few seconds. It wasn’t as if he had made me doubt the truth—I wasn’t dead. And neither was he: he just didn’t know it. What was it that bothered me about him?

  I sat down on the grass and replayed our conversation. I couldn’t figure out why we had looked at each other and spoken to each other when I hadn’t been noticed by any of the other souls I saw floating outside their bodies: an old woman napping in a wheelchair while her spirit danced around her, a man meditating on the beach with his spirit levitating a foot over his head. They hadn’t seen me.

  And what made this boy and me fly toward each other literally out of the blue? It felt as if we’d been running along trying to launch kites and then our strings got tangled and swung us back toward each other.

  But what were the kites we were hanging on to?

  I realized why I missed him—he could see and hear me, and it was almost like being real again. But there was nothing I could do about it—he’d run away. I finally got myself up and went to some of my favorite locations: museum, beach, theater. But by the next day, I had to return to that field. It was haunting me.

  But why would he be back? What were the chances that he was still thinking about me?

  Then he dropped down out of the air and went into a skydiver roll a dozen feet away from me. He brushed himself off, an unnecessary gesture that cracked me up, but I wouldn’t let myself be charmed. I didn’t trust him yet. Hadn’t he said I looked dead and then run away?

  “You don’t think I’m a ghost?” he asked, as if our pr
evious conversation were still on the table.

  “I don’t think I can see ghosts,” I explained. “Only spirits.” He waited for more. “Spirits on vacation from their bodies,” I explained. “You know, not done with their bodies.”

  “Like when someone’s asleep?” he asked.

  “Or meditating.”

  He strolled up a little closer. “Which one are you?”

  “None of the above. I just left my body, you know, like breaking out of prison.”

  “What made your body a prison?” he asked me. When I didn’t answer right away he lifted one eyebrow. In another setting it would have been cute, but everything about him was annoying me for some reason.

  “You don’t want to know,” I said.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Well, I don’t want to tell you.”

  “No questions about the past. I get it,” he said. “If I’m not dead,” he went on, “I guess this isn’t heaven.”

  “No.” More like hell, I wanted to say, but why spoil his fun. Maybe he was still rejoicing in his freedom the way I had at first.

  “Well, it can’t be hell.” He gestured at me as if I were proof of that. “Is it like a parallel universe?”

  That didn’t sound good. Too much like purgatory. I felt a ripple of fear spread through me. Maybe it felt like hell because it was hell.

  “It’s the same world as before,” I insisted, trying to convince myself. “Just the outside edge. My house is the same. All the street signs have the same names.” It was scaring me, the idea that he might be right, that we were in some kind of limbo. “Didn’t you see your house and family after you left your body?”