Under the Light

by Laura Whitcomb

  In that moment, seeing the reflection of my face in Jenny’s eyes, a tiny angel in the blackness, seeing Jenny’s willingness to stare into the face of a ghost, I was changed. My hell was reimagined. I no longer dwelt on how terrified my baby must have been to leave me in the cellar and escape. Instead I was overwhelmed with pride—my baby had run away from death and saved her own life.

  I thought I killed her, I told Jenny, but look . . .

  I pulled her by the hand up through the cellar roof and higher, to the top of the house’s roof, where we sat in the remembered storm and watched what I’d never been able to see before: my little girl making her way to safety. Whether I was imagining it or whether we were somehow able to look back at what really happened, I didn’t know. But what a brave girl she was, picking herself up twice when she slipped in the mud, crying to wake the dead but still marching up the road, holding on to fence posts and blowing clumps of weeds, calling for help, not in words, but with all the hoarse cries that her tiny lungs could give. Jenny watched, her teeth chattering, holding my hand for dear life.

  My daughter, not even yet two, squeezed through the gap in the gate and climbed the steps of our neighbor’s farmhouse on hands and knees. She was far in the distance now, but we both saw the door open, light pouring down onto the wet baby, and a friendly pair of hands lowering to her open arms.

  Isn’t she a marvel, my girl?

  Maybe Jenny had no voice in my memory, but she nodded. Something about her amazed expression made me feel anything was possible. Perhaps I could have seen this part of my daughter’s story anytime, but it felt as if the magic came from having Jenny beside me. She made me believe I could do anything.

  I threw up my arm and pushed the storm and all its darkness away. Jenny shielded her eyes from the light of heaven. I don’t know if she saw the same lakeside celebration that I did, with lanterns in the trees and a smiling moon, or heard the fiddler and the laughter of the dancers, or smelled the crocus scattered in the grass and the pinecone fire nearby. That may have been my personal idea of paradise, but her eyes widened and she gasped in a breath and lifted my hand in hers, pressed it to her heart.

  Your turn, I told her. Take me to your hell.

  I thought she might hesitate, but she pressed her fingers to the back of my hand in a deliberate gesture and we were at once in her memory instead of mine.

  Jenny was sitting with her parents in the Prayer Corner, reading from pages torn out of her journal, and she was staring at her mother’s shoe, the one extended in the air as Cathy sat cross-legged. I was standing in the center of the circle, looking down at Jenny’s head.

  The scene appeared to be frozen, perhaps at the most dreaded moment, the way I had stalled myself before my daughter could find safety.

  I reached down and on the back of Jenny’s hand I wrote a Y: Yes, I’m with you.

  Jenny blinked and the scene began to move. Cathy’s left shoe was gently bouncing as she swung her leg, a nervous habit that I had noticed many times in my days living in Jenny’s house.

  Dan stood by his chair, holding Jenny’s diary. He gripped several pages at once and ripped them out in a savage motion. Holding them under his daughter’s chin, he said, “Read.” And when she hesitated he said, “Take them and read.”

  Jenny obeyed, took these ravaged fragments of her writing in her hands and began to read from the first word on the top page. “. . . don’t know, but I don’t think God did that.” I could see that she was humiliated and disgusted by this punishment, but she kept reading. “Not the God I believe in. Could we really worship different Gods?”

  Dan matter-of-factly jerked the page from her hands and thrust his finger at the next page down. Jenny read, “I dreamed I was walking down a staircase at school and a guy who looked like the guy from that movie we saw in history class walked right up to me and put his hand under my blouse—” When Jenny paused, her father ordered, “Go on.”

  Dan took his seat in the tiny circle of chairs, looking smug, but Cathy, arms folded, legs folded, bounced her foot anxiously.

  “Read,” Dan ordered his daughter. “Or should I have your mother read to you?”

  Jenny held herself stiffly. Her mother’s shoe stopped in midair. Then everything froze again.

  It’s your memory, I told her. Change it. Tear it down.

  Jenny shuddered, but then lifted her gaze to her father and time began again, though I suspected Jenny was creating a new version of her nightmare.

  “Why would you do that?” she asked her father. “Why would you threaten your own wife with that kind of humiliation? I was the one who was in trouble.”

  Dan looked at her blankly as if she were speaking another language.

  Jenny turned to Cathy. “And why do you let him do that to you? Would you really have read my dream out loud if he asked you to? Do you want me to think that’s how husbands should treat their wives?”

  I could feel the loathing flood out of Jenny as she began to cry—her tears made little blue pools on her diary pages, words became watercolor clouds and lakes.

  Jenny sucked in a breath and stopped crying. “Daddy, go away.” And he disappeared. Then she looked at her mother. “Mommy,” she said. “Show me the last time you defied Daddy for me.”

  Cathy blinked at her slowly, and the Prayer Corner was replaced with a church sanctuary. A coffin and white roses stood at the altar. The organist was playing a quiet hymn. Cathy’s hair was longer, and she wore a black dress. Dan sat beside her in his black suit, an arm across the back of the pew behind his wife but not touching her shoulder. Three-year-old Jenny sat in a navy sailor dress, her white shiny shoes swinging. She climbed up to stand beside her mother, straining to see the coffin, but Dan snapped his fingers. The little girl obeyed and ducked down into a squat.

  Next she lay down on the bench, staring into the rafters. Dan leaned over Cathy and whispered, “Sit up, young lady.” Then to his wife he said, “Teach her some reverence.” Cathy nodded, helped Jenny to sit up again, but when the pastor began to give the eulogy and Dan’s attention had shifted, Cathy patted her thigh—Jenny lay down on the pew with her head on her mother’s lap, and Cathy stroked her golden hair. When the little girl looked up, Cathy winked at her. Mother and daughter floated alone on a life boat of peace that no one could see but the two of them.

  Dan glanced over and whispered, “Sit up!” But Cathy said, “Shhh, she’s almost asleep.” And Dan did hush. He left them to themselves.

  “I’m not sleepy,” Jenny whispered.

  “It’s okay,” Cathy whispered, more softly, words only for Jenny to hear. “You don’t have to sleep if you don’t want to. You’re a good girl. God loves you. He says you can look at the roof of his house if you feel like it.”

  “He did?” Jenny whispered.

  Cathy nodded and stroked her hair. “He said you can do whatever you want because you’re one of his angels.”

  Jenny tried to whisper quieter still. “I don’t have any wings.”

  Dan cleared his throat, apparently a warning against secrets being shared between his wife and daughter, but Cathy only leaned closer to her child and whispered, “They’ll grow.”

  And at this little Jenny laughed. A sound that crossed over into the grown Jenny, who was back in the chair with four church ladies binding her wrists, legs, and shoulders.

  Jenny’s face lightened as if she had thrown the roof off the room and flooded it with heaven.

  I was again standing over her. On her left arm I wrote: Safe?

  Jenny nodded and in the air her finger drew a Y: Yes.

  “She’s doing it again,” someone whispered. “Look at her hand.”

  I’m still here, I told her. I will never leave you.

  But to my surprise she lifted her finger and in the air made an N: No.

  I was taken aback. I should go?

  Jenny nodded.

  “Who is she talking to?” asked one of the ladies.

  “You know who it is,” said the woma
n with the pitcher.

  Jenny was releasing me from my promise to stay and protect her, but I had to see for myself that she was strong enough. She’d fought her way through the storm, but I wanted to see that door open and the light of safety pour over her.

  Jenny opened her eyes, then blinked at the church ladies and their terrified faces. “I am not possessed.”

  “That’s the demon talking,” said Mrs. Caine. “Keep her in the chair.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Helen

  JENNY CARRIED A NEW AUTHORITY IN HER VOICE—when she said, “Let go of me” and tried to lift her arms, the women holding her released her instantly. Mrs. Caine shot her fingers into the little pitcher again and tried to splash Jenny with more holy water but missed and sprayed one of the ladies in the eyes instead. The woman jerked her head to one side with a shriek.

  The other women backed away from Jenny’s chair as she rubbed feeling back into her wrists. I surveyed the room. Before I had taken only a glance, but now I stared down the women around me with a galvanized intention. I bore into these ladies’ thoughts, a kind of eavesdropping more powerful than anything the ears of a mortal could provide.

  “Cathy, control your daughter,” ordered the woman with the pitcher.

  “Excuse me?” said Cathy.

  I noticed now a black mist hanging behind the head of the woman with the pitcher, just at her right shoulder. It throbbed and flared when she expressed anger. “If we stop what we’ve started now, it will be a grave mistake,” she said. Her cheeks were blotchy with red. “It’ll just get worse.” And the darkness behind her inked into such density that I could almost feel it sucking at the light in the room.

  I came close to the woman’s left shoulder and whispered in her ear. “Heal thyself.” She shuddered on the inside, just a little, enough to turn the darkness that was attached to her a lighter color of charcoal gray.

  “I thought Pastor Bob would be here,” said Cathy. “Why isn’t he here?”

  When the woman with the shadow hesitated, the others stared at her—she was apparently the one who was supposed to have all the answers.

  Jenny stood up and the woman’s eyes flashed with fear.

  Cathy stood too, holding a protective arm in front of her daughter. “Beverly Caine, I’m going to ask you a direct question and I expect an answer. Did you know Judy Morgan was fornicating with my husband?”

  The others gasped.

  The dark cloud behind Mrs. Caine disappeared except for one small black flame that came to rest behind her sorry eyes, perhaps in the part of the skull where the ego lived.

  “So I guess lying and keeping secrets are not necessarily signs of demonic possession,” Jenny pointed out.

  “Oh, my Lord,” one of the other women whispered.

  “Jennifer Ann,” another of the ladies scolded, “you’re speaking to your elder.”

  “Eudora Franck,” said Cathy, “Be quiet.”

  I drew closer to Mrs. Franck. She was embarrassed and annoyed and it made her thoughts vulnerable for a second. I saw an image pop up and sent it to Jenny.

  Her mother’s mother, I called. In the garden.

  Apparently she heard me. “If I’m possessed because I believe in ghosts,” said Jenny, “then we should perform an exorcism on Mrs. Franck, too, because she told my mom that after her grandmother died she saw an apparition of her in the backyard, isn’t that right?”

  Everyone looked at Mrs. Franck, who seemed mortified. “I did see her,” she confessed.

  “And if you think a demon’s living inside me because I had sex outside of wedlock,” said Jenny, “then my father and Judy Morgan must be possessed too.”

  Cathy sat down in astonishment. I felt a waver in the confidence of another of the women. I glided over to the head of the one wearing the pink striped sweater. Again I told Jenny what she was thinking.

  “And Mrs. Lowe, too.” Jenny nodded at her. “You slept with your husband before you were married, right?”

  “Cathy!” Mrs. Lowe gaped at her. “I told you that in confidence.”

  “You told me a secret,” Cathy agreed, “but not the one about my husband sleeping with your next-door neighbor.”

  “Jenny, sit yourself down. You are in my house,” Mrs. Caine snapped. “Show some respect and do as you’re told.”

  The darkness began to form again behind her shoulder, like a hornet’s nest of shadow.

  “Sit,” Mrs. Caine ordered.

  “No,” said Jenny. Cathy stared at her daughter as if she had never heard her say the word before. “Why should I? You have no respect for me.”

  The cloud of negativity behind Mrs. Caine’s shoulder fluttered, and I blew it away. As it flew off through the wall, it made one of the little angel figurines in the bookcase below wobble in a little dance of joy.

  Jenny looked down at her mother. “Mom, let’s go.”

  “We did not give you permission to leave,” said Mrs. Caine.

  “And I didn’t give you permission to humiliate me,” said Jenny.

  Cathy did nothing more than vaguely reach for her daughter. Her fingers lightly brushed Jenny’s sleeve as the girl walked out.

  An argument broke out anew, but no one followed Jenny, not even her mother. I was the only one who watched her march away through the door and down the walkway. She picked up her pace and was soon running. She didn’t look back as if she feared being chased—she just ran. I worried that she would revel in her new freedom and leap from a curb without looking for traffic, but she made her way smoothly block after block, running not in the direction of home, just away.

  I was still nervous for her. Where would she find a safe place to land? But when she was passing a store where a woman was just leaving and they collided, I felt as if something had shifted.

  The woman was carrying a large bag of books and file folders. She was dressed in an Indian skirt and had her strangely matted hair pulled back in a bright beaded headband. As Jenny clipped her shoulder, they both stumbled. Jenny caught herself and the woman dropped her bag.

  “Sorry!” Jenny helped her pick up two books that had slid nearly to the curb.

  “Where are you flying off to so fast?” asked the woman.

  “I don’t know,” said Jenny, handing her the books.

  “You don’t know?” The woman smiled at her. “Are you lost?”

  “No.” Jenny thought for a moment. “I’m just running.”

  “Do I know you?” asked the woman.

  “I don’t think so,” said Jenny.

  The woman shrugged. “Well, be safe.”

  Jenny nodded and turned to go, but the urge to run had subsided, it seemed, because she walked slowly toward the next corner.

  I didn’t know this woman, but she must have known Jenny after all, because she watched her back for a second and then called, “Hey!”

  Jenny turned back.

  “Are you my Runaway?”

  CHAPTER 29

  Jenny

  THIS WOMAN WHO HAD ALMOST thrown me to the ground was staring at me, fascinated, but I’m sure I didn’t know her. She wore hippie clothes and had a henna flower stenciled on the back of her hand. She wasn’t from church, obviously. She’d been walking out of Reflections, a bookstore my parents wouldn’t be caught dead in. No way she was one of the teachers from school. For a moment I thought she might be someone’s mom—she made me think of a lullaby. But I would definitely have remembered seeing this woman in the school parking lot—she wore dreadlocks under her headband. I couldn’t think where in the world we could have met, but she started walking toward me.

  “Do you remember me?” she asked.

  She smiled at me in such an open way, I stood still and waited for her.

  “No?” She planted herself in front of me, her eyes tearing up. “Are you okay now?”

  I nodded.

  “You found your way home, did you?”

  The rasp in her voice and the way she wrinkled her nose when she smiled were familiar.


  “Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked again.

  Like a forgotten dream opening up, I remembered watching her for hours from the top shelf of a bookcase. But that was crazy. “Did you sing to me?” I asked her.

  Gayle’s arms flew open like wings and caught me up in her rough wool warmth. “My little bird,” she said.

  Every second of my lost days came back as I clung to her. My first glance of my own soulless body, the cavernous museum rooms and running at the mirrors in ballet class and the view from a hundred-foot tree in the forest and the hiss of waves on the face of a midnight beach.

  And finding myself in an empty field with a boy who could fly.

  Gayle’s hug was a safe place to cry. “I remember,” I told her over and over. “I remember.”

  She invited me to come in for tea, and I would have loved to sit in the back room of the shop with her and tell her my story, but I had to hurry.

  I borrowed Gayle’s phone, but that same friend of the family answered.

  “Billy’s not home,” said the man. “He’s at the hospital.”

  My joy was ripped away at the idea that he might be hurt. “What happened?”

  “An infection or a fever or something.”

  I had the terrible feeling that I had remembered too late. “Which hospital?”

  “St. Jude’s,” he said. “Who’s this?”

  I was afraid this friend of the family would know that Billy had broken up with me, so I just hung up without answering. I returned the phone to Gayle and would’ve asked for a ride, but she only had a bicycle.

  She did look up the address of the hospital and which bus to take. She even gave me enough quarters to get there and drove me to the stop on her handlebars. But when I arrived at the hospital, it didn’t look right. There was no emergency room entrance.

  I ran to the front desk and said I had come to see Billy Blake. When the receptionist asked if I was a family member I lied. When she made me sign in, my hand was shaking as I wrote Jenny Blake. The line above it was scrawled with the words Mitch and Billy Blake.