Under the Light

by Laura Whitcomb

  I was pointed in the right direction and kept repeating the room number in my head as if I’d forget it and be lost in a maze of corridors.

  But when I got to the right room, the door stood open and Billy was not lying in a bed hooked up to antibiotics—he was standing with Mitch.

  Their eyes were red. Mitch had his arm draped around Billy’s neck as they listened to the doctor. I moved a step closer and in the bed I saw a woman, sleeping or worse, with two nurses gently removing wires and tubes from her wrists and chest.

  Billy had tracked the miraculous awakenings of coma patients across the globe, but it looked like his own mother would not be one of them. I stared at her lovely white hand on the blanket.

  I was an outsider—I wanted to sneak away without a word, but Billy glanced over just then and caught sight of me. He looked more curious than angry, so I opened my mouth to speak. One of the nurses blocked the door as she wheeled out a rolling monitor and the other nurse closed the door, leaving me in the hall.

  I backed into the corridor wall and leaned there. I wasn’t welcome, I knew that. But I had to wait for him. I went to the lobby and sat. I wished I had not sent Helen away—the waiting room was too quiet. I felt caved in, breathing in little reluctant hitches. I wanted someone to hold me up and convince me everything would be all right.

  But then I remembered, I used to fly like a bird. And I’d escaped an exorcism—I could do anything. I sat up straight and waited.

  Billy and Mitch came down the hall—I stood up and moved toward them with no idea what to say.

  Mitch put a hand on Billy’s shoulder. “Not a good time,” he told me. But Billy came to meet me in the hall beside a little shelf with a courtesy phone.

  “Is your mom okay?” I asked. My heart was beating so hard, I felt dizzy.

  “No.” Billy put his hands in his pockets. “I thought it would kill me if she died,” he said, “but I feel sort of relieved. Is that sick?”

  “No,” I told him. “Not at all.” My tongue was dry and my throat was tight. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked, finally realizing I had invaded his family’s privacy.

  I opened my mouth but couldn’t decide how to start.

  “I can’t believe you’re speaking to me after yesterday,” he said.

  There was nothing to do but jump right in. “I remember what happened while I was away from my body,” I said. “I remember landing in an open field.” I swallowed, but my throat was still stiff. “Do you remember that?”

  “Do I remember what?” he asked.

  “I saw you.” I whispered it, as if it was a secret. “You were there.” I searched his eyes for recognition. “We played a game to see if we could fly to the same place together. You made the stars move.”

  “Jennifer?”

  A chill came over me like a wave of icy water. My father was standing at the front desk with a single white rose in his hand. He walked calmly up to me and lay a heavy hand on the back of my neck. He handed Billy the flower and said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Billy took the rose, confused. “Thank you,” he muttered. As my father guided me toward the exit, Billy followed.

  “Let her go,” Mitch told his brother.

  “Say goodbye, dear,” my father told me.

  But when I turned back to Billy, I didn’t say goodbye—I said, “Don’t you remember? You stopped time.”

  Billy stood at the sliding glass doors like he was in a trance and watched us get into my father’s van. Before I closed my door I pointed to the sky and swept my hand across it. Billy let the rose fall from his hand, and Mitch picked it up.

  “Put your seat belt on, please.” My father was trying to control his temper. I could tell by the way he clenched his jaw.

  “How did you find me?” I asked.

  “You’re not as clever as you think,” he said. “I called Billy’s house and a gentleman there told me you had called and where you’d gone.”

  My father had gotten more information than I had—the idea that he had heard that Billy’s mother was dying and then bought a rose on the way to pick me up should have seemed touching, but it actually felt creepy.

  “I would’ve come home,” I told him.

  “I got us an earlier flight,” he said. “Your mother is finishing packing for you. We’ll drop by the house for the bags and so you can make your farewells.”

  “We’re leaving now?” I asked.

  “The sooner we get you away from here, the better.”

  This morning I would have gone quietly. But after remembering what happened to me when I was out of body, everything had changed—it was a whole new world. How could it be flipping over again so soon? Billy’s mother died, he didn’t remember meeting me in the field, and I was being shipped away like a prisoner.

  My mother was in the driveway, standing beside my suitcase and book bag. She was anxiously pacing in a short path and talking on her cell.

  When we pulled in and parked, she hung up and ran to my door. She took me aside as my father put the suitcase in the back of the van and my book bag on the passenger seat. “Are you all right?” she whispered. “Why didn’t you wait for me?”

  I was about to tell her that I was okay, but she said, “I’m sorry about what happened at the Caines’. But your father doesn’t need to know about that.” She smoothed my hair and checked my clothes.

  “I don’t want to go with him,” I said.

  “Last night you said you’d cooperate.” Worry lines darkened her brow. “It’s not forever.”

  Her cell rang and she glanced at the number, silenced the call. My father was leaning on the hood now, his own cell pressed to his ear, smiling like a man in love, cooing to someone and not remembering or caring that we were watching.

  “Just for a little while,” my mother whispered.

  “Okay!” My father pocketed his phone. He was happy. “Time to go.”

  I faced my mother and wanted her to drag me into the house, call the police, threaten my father, maybe throw something. But she just put her arm around my shoulder.

  “You can call me every day,” she said.

  “Mom?” I put my arms around her neck. I hardly remembered the last time she hugged me. “I love you, Mommy.”

  She locked both arms around me, shaking. Then she pressed her hand to the back of my neck and squeezed me to her. She gasped in a breath and sobbed it out as if I’d been kidnapped as an infant and this was the first time she’d held me in fifteen years. “My baby,” she whispered.

  “Call her from the road,” said my father, but he was the one with the phone. I knew he wouldn’t keep that promise.

  As we pulled away, my mother just stood in the driveway, holding herself and weeping. I watched her in the side mirror. But then her head came up. Someone rolled into the drive on a bike. To my amazement, my mother shot out her arm and pointed toward my father’s van.

  I whipped around and looked out the back window. Billy was chasing after our car on a ten-speed.

  “Please sit back,” said my father.

  My stomach was fluttering. This was like a movie.

  “What is that boy doing?” My father sounded disgusted.

  As he pulled up to a stoplight, I tried to roll down my window, but my father pushed the dashboard control and rolled it back up. Billy skidded to a stop next to my window. He was out of breath, slapped a hand on the glass, as if knocking to get in.

  His voice was muffled, but I heard him perfectly. “What did you remember?”

  My father honked the car horn irritably and beat the green light by half a second. We roared down the next block. Billy pedaled after us.

  “Idiot,” my father muttered.

  Yes, for a minute it seemed like a movie, but then we ran a yellow light while Billy was still half a block behind. I turned to see him stop, resting his foot on the curb. He looked after us for a few moments, then turned onto a side street and disappeared.

 
“It’s time to grow up and forget about that boy,” said my father.

  “Won’t there be boys in San Diego?” I asked.

  “There will be appropriate young men at church, I’m sure.”

  “Will you help me choose the right kind of boy to go out with?” I asked my father.

  “Eventually.”

  “And you’ll help me choose the right man to marry someday?”

  “Someday.”

  “And someday, when I have an affair with my husband’s best friend . . . ?”

  I tensed, expecting him to shout at me or maybe even slap me, though it would be the first time. But he forced out a laugh and shook his head. “Judy said you’d be bitter, but I told her no. Jenny’s a good girl.” He sighed. “I’m starting to think you’d be better off with very limited access to your mother.”

  “Don’t you think it would be better for my walk with Christ if I lived with the parent who did not break the seventh commandment?” I asked.

  Of all the things I didn’t expect—after thinking for a moment, he said, “I misinterpreted God’s message for me when I married your mother. But we all make mistakes and ask for forgiveness.”

  If he hadn’t married my mother, there would be no me.

  In a jarring change of subjects he said, “There’s a Christian school near our new place, but I’ll have to see it before I decide whether to have you homeschooled or not.”

  “You’re going to homeschool me?” It made no sense. He was a workaholic.

  “Or Judy.”

  I’m sure homeschooling me would be the last thing my father’s mistress would ever want, but it would make no difference to my father. I suddenly felt sorry for Judy Morgan.

  I glanced in the side mirror, but there was no bicycle coming up behind us. I felt myself caving in again, my ribs tightened up so it was hard to breathe. I knew what Helen would do—she’d reach up and tear the roof off of this bad dream.

  I squeezed my bag to my chest, and that’s when I felt it. The top of the bag was stuffed with things in baggies my mom had tucked in it—a granola bar, some tissues, little bottles of hand sanitizer. But the bottom of the bag felt soft like a pillow. I reached in and pulled out what had been buried—Billy’s sweatshirt jacket. I held it to my face and breathed in the scent of him. I leaned forward and pulled the jacket around my waist, tying the sleeves in a knot in the front.

  Maybe my silence annoyed my father. “You’re my child,” he snapped at me. “You don’t get to decide where you go to school.”

  Strange for him to act possessive when a minute ago he had implied that I was a mistake.

  We stopped at a red light.

  I pushed my hands into the jacket pockets and felt the specks of lint and grit at the bottom. And there were three things Billy had left behind—in the right pocket a gum wrapper and a bus transfer, and in the left an old tardy slip. It was scrawled with the date and time and his first-period class, his name printed BLAKE, W., and on the back, sketched by Billy’s hand, not a ghost’s, a cartoon of a dinosaur devouring a math book. I smiled and hid the paper in the pocket.

  “I decide where you go and what you do,” my father told me.

  I took a deep breath and sat up straight.

  “No,” I told him. “I’m the one who decides where I go and what I do.”

  He glared at me as if I’d used a four-letter word.

  “Hear me out,” I said, “because I have some very important information for you that you’ve never heard before.”

  “Is that so?” He smirked. The light turned green and he drove on, turning right at the next corner. Only one block and we’d be on the freeway on-ramp, only a few miles from the airport.

  “I’m not going to San Diego,” I said, “and I will never live with you.”

  “Really?” He was amused.

  “If you don’t let Mom have full custody of me,” I told him, “I’ll tell the judge how you treated me, everything, all the details.”

  His face went chalky. “Plenty of marriages dissolve,” he pointed out.

  The traffic was backed up—our car sat still.

  “I don’t mean about leaving us for another woman or lying about it,” I told him. “I mean how you held a measuring tape against my thigh to see if my skirt was long enough. How you made me jog in place to see if my breasts jiggled.” These things sounded crazy when I said them out loud, but it was all part of his daily routine since I turned twelve. Once, after I’d been to a Bible camp party with a few college-age boys present, he’d threatened to take me to a doctor and have my virginity checked. All I had to say was “And remember how you wanted to take me in to the doctor’s—” before me stopped me, a raised hand in my face.

  I stopped talking. He lowered his hand. I knew he was furious. Veins stood out on his temple and neck. Could it be he didn’t know what to say?

  “That’s what I’ll swear to in court,” I added.

  “Are you trying to blackmail me?” he asked. “I had no idea you were this far gone.” For one moment I thought I’d thrown him so far off his game that he was going to let me go quietly.

  “You don’t have to worry about me anymore,” I told him as I unlocked my seat belt. “Just have your lawyer talk to Mom’s lawyer.”

  Then he snapped. He tried to grab me as I hopped out of the car, then jumped out his own door, slamming it so hard, the whole van rocked. I just stood and watched, with no idea of how crazy he might get. He flung open the back and pulled out my suitcase.

  “Get back in this car now or your things go in the gutter,” he told me.

  This was his best idea? Once he had taken my favorite possessions, the objects that reflected my personality and my passions, and he’d thrown them in the garbage. Did he really not know how little I cared about anything packed in that suitcase?

  I smiled, which sent him into a fury. He lifted the bag over his head and slammed in into the asphalt. The clasps popped open and my clothes exploded out. A wind whipped up and blouses, pants, even socks rolled and danced away between and over other people’s cars as if I were running away in little pieces, too many and far to chase. My clothes took every direction and fled with glee.

  I watched in wonder, instead of the horror he expected, I guess, which made him even more furious. He went red in the face and pulled out my book bag, flinging it right at me. I dodged as it hit a stranger’s car in the tire. Someone honked at him. Someone else rolled down a window and yelled. Even if he hadn’t been stuck in traffic, I don’t think he’d have turned the car around.

  I slipped between idling cars, stepped up onto the sidewalk, and walked downhill along the block where an empty lot stood open to my left, a field with a fence on the far side.

  As I stared across the dry grass, I saw something curve out of the alley beyond. A bike hit the chainlink fence and someone jumped off and then tackled the fence like a prisoner of war escaping. By the time his sneakers hit the grass, Billy was running for the cars that waited to get on the freeway. He limped as if the landing hadn’t gone right, but he didn’t slow down. He galloped like a madman.

  I thought I might be hallucinating. Amazed at what I was seeing, I stepped off the pavement and into the field. At first he didn’t see me—he headed for the white van, the top of which was visible behind another car.

  “Hey!” I called. He stumbled when he caught sight of me. In his face I saw both of them, the boy I’d met in a field in the middle of nowhere and the boy who had broken down my bathroom door to save me.

  “Hey!” He pointed at me. He was a hundred feet off and still limping, out of breath, his shirt torn from the teeth of the fence. “You lived in a field.”

  I’d been moving toward him, but that stopped me. I wanted him to remember meeting me when we were outside our bodies, but now that he did, it took my breath away.

  “I remember you,” he called, loping toward me. He laughed. “You took us to the Lincoln monument and the Great Wall of China.”

  He stopped to catc
h his breath a few yards away. “You took us to the Eiffel Tower.” He dropped to one knee, exhausted but smiling. “And you were freaked out when I took us to the moon.”

  “It was scary,” I told him. I couldn’t move—I was as light and breathless as if he’d lifted me straight up into the sky.

  He got to his feet and walked the rest of the distance. “You.” He shook his head. “You took us to a volcano.” When he got to me, he took my shoulders and held me at arm’s distance. “We had a fight.”

  I nodded.

  “You told me to go away.” Then he released me, took a step back, looking astonished. “But you waited for me.”

  “Of course I did.”

  He gasped in a breath and came at me. The first kiss knocked us to our knees. “You told me I wasn’t dead,” he remembered.

  “You drew a line down the middle of the field,” I laughed.

  “I did!” He pulled us into the grass and held me so tight, I could hardly catch my breath. “What a stupid ass!” he laughed. “You took me to Paris and I took you to the bumper cars at Fun Zone! I’m such a loser.”

  “You took me to a magic waterfall,” I reminded him. “You stopped time.”

  We lay tangled up in each other, leg over leg, fingers in each other’s hair. And that’s when I realized what the kites had been. Our spirits had flown toward each other when the ghosts had come together in the bodies we’d left behind.

  Bless them, I thought. Bless the souls that flew us together and tangled us up.

  “Oh my God,” he sighed, staring into my eyes. “I’m going to jail.”

  “Why?” For a moment I was frightened, but he laughed.

  “That bike back there,” he confessed. “I stole it.”

  “It’ll be okay,” I told him. “I’m holding on to you. Where you go, I go.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Helen

  TIME IS A RIBBON, A DELICATE ORGANDY, so thin that you can see through it to the layer of time below and the layer above. Moments overlapping, lying on top of each other. In this way, past things and things yet-to-be are happening together. The hurt and the healing. The death and the reconciliation in heaven. The childhood and the womanhood. The first glance and the first kiss and the last.