The Clairvoyants

by Karen Brown

  “Why do you want me there?” I asked.

  “It’s your birthday. And it’s time you met your nephew.” The pendulum of the old regulator clock echoed through the kitchen. “Stay for a few days. Stay for a month or the whole summer. It’s up to you.”

  “You’ve heard something about Del,” I said.

  “No, I have not.” My mother’s voice was crisp, annoyed.

  I took the train into the Old Saybrook station and called a cab to take me to my mother’s house.

  The morning was cool, the weather always changeable near the shore. Driving down our road I smelled the Sound, the remains of morning fires lit to ward off the damp. Overhead the trees shook their bright leaves. The house was the same, the windows flashing the sun. The barn was gone. My mother had called me two years before to tell me we’d lost it, but I’d forgotten. “Fire,” she’d said, and nothing more. As the cab pulled into the pebbled drive the missing barn was all I could see. My mother came out onto the wide front porch.

  She was thinner. She’d let her hair go gray, though it was still long to her shoulders and styled. She wore no makeup. “You made it,” she called.

  The driver went to the trunk for my bag, and then the cab drove away. I stood below my mother on the pebbled drive. “What really happened to it?”

  She put her hand up to shade her eyes. “Lightning,” she said. Then she did something astonishing. She tipped her head back and laughed.

  “Are you my mother?” I asked.

  “Oh, Martha,” she said. “Still the same.”

  I followed her inside the house, where the sea breeze came through the windows into the kitchen. The Spiritualists by the Sea camp had opened—I could smell the scent of oil paint. And then Owen came into the room with a little white cane, tapping it in the doorway. He held his two hands out and my mother told me to kneel down onto the kitchen’s worn wood floor. I smelled his breath, cloying and sweet. He placed his small hands on my face.

  “This is how he knows you,” my mother said.

  His little fingers were nimble, searching me out.

  “Girl,” he said, quietly, his hands on my hair.

  “Auntie Martha,” my mother told him. “Run along and play while we visit.”

  He put his small arms around my neck and squeezed. His cane tap-tapped along the wood floor into the living room.

  My mother set out two cups of coffee and poured a shot of Baileys Original Irish Cream into each. Though Del had claimed she and I would raise Owen, we both knew that would prove impossible. I’d stayed in Ithaca to finish school, and my mother had taken on the care of Owen. As we drank our coffee, the breeze through the screen door riffled the linen tablecloth, and I wondered if she forgave me for never visiting, even on holidays, for never offering to help with Owen. I’d come for my grandmother’s funeral last year but left immediately after. My sporadic phone calls and texts relayed only basic information about my own life—a new apartment in the city, a small show at a gallery—and never inquired into hers except to ask about Del.

  My mother had put swatches of fabric on the door frames, on Owen’s chair at the table, until he’d learned which was his. His toys lined the shelves in the old den, where my grandfather once watched his documentaries—Braille lettered blocks, stacking cups, puzzles with little knob handles, textured books. Owen’s artwork hung on the walls—brilliant and full of colorful dabs and smears. I put my finger out and felt the dried paint on the paper. I closed my eyes and listened to the tapping of the little cane.

  That afternoon, Leanne and Sarah arrived—Leanne with her baby, and Sarah with her two, a boy and a girl. We chatted, sitting at the old iron table in the iron mesh chairs, and watched the children play on the steps of the pool. They each, grudgingly, acknowledged my birthday.

  “Mother says you don’t want to celebrate,” Sarah said. “Here’s this, anyway.”

  She handed me a small wrapped box. Inside was a silver cuff bracelet of my grandmother’s that Sarah had owned for years.

  “You always wanted it,” she said.

  Leanne gave me a silk scarf that reminded me of Anne.

  Neither of my older sisters mentioned Del. We managed not to argue about anything, but they both ended their visit by claiming they had to get going—Leanne to the grocery store, Sarah to get ready for a dinner party. Even in my apartment in the city, I had nowhere pressing to go. I’d abandoned any friends I’d made in Ithaca; they’d served their purpose in that part of my life, and felt temporary, as if I were supposed to let go of them. I had made a few new friends in the city. I had a job at a gallery. I had my photographs. But I was often alone.

  Before Sarah left, after the children were buckled into their car seats and she had gotten into the driver’s seat, she called me over.

  “Remember that birthday you were banished from the house?” she said. She wore a small smile I couldn’t quite read.

  “No,” I said, though she must have meant the time I’d spent the night.

  “You had gotten into it with Del,” she said. “And one of you threw something that shattered that framed picture in the living room? Glass was everywhere. Mother went crazy.”

  The heat from the car fanned my face, and I took a step back. “I don’t really remember.”

  Sarah snapped on her seat belt, reprimanded her younger child in the backseat. “Well, we all knew you’d broken it. Del never got angry, if you think about it.” She gave me that odd smile again, a little sorry for me. “I guess you put that memory aside.”

  I watched her drive away. Aside, I thought. As if that could be accomplished with pieces of the past.

  Later, I sat in the living room wing chair with a book, not reading, just thinking. Owen came tapping into the room where I sat, and I remained quiet, believing he wouldn’t know I was there. After a moment, he left, and the tapping moved down the front hallway, up the front staircase, and down the back kitchen stairs, a circuit of the house. My mother called him for his bath, and I went out onto the porch.

  The site of the leveled barn was shaggy with weeds, the remains of the cement and stone foundation like a ruined mouth. The golf course, its stands of weeping willows, was visible now from the porch. Near the debris of the barn, the hammer rusted in the cistern. Would I ever see David Pinney’s ghost peering at me from beneath the willow? I had hidden my crime and gotten away with it. I had continued on as if it had never happened, but I was wrong. I would always carry my blame. I’d thought my mother believed that she and I were covering for Del, but she’d known from the first it had been me.

  The sun setting beyond the rise of the golf course lit the sky a deep orange. The wind picked up and scattered geranium petals across the porch, shuffled the horse chestnut leaves together like a deck of cards. Evening blotted out the place where the barn once stood. I left the porch and went inside. As part of Owen’s bedtime ritual, my mother read to him, and after she’d left his room I stuck my head in the doorway to say good night. I didn’t know what he expected of me or who I might be to him. In the dark of his bedroom his face and hair were pale against his spaceship-patterned pillow.

  “You were in the living room today, Auntie Martha,” he said. His voice was clear and soft.

  I stood in the doorway. Was he listening to my breathing, to the beating of my heart? “You knew.”

  He propped himself up, as someone might who wanted to see you better. “You smell like yellow.”

  Outside the cicadas sounded. A bicycle passed in the lane beside the house, its tires shushing over the sandy road.

  “What does yellow smell like?” I asked him.

  “Aunt Martha, quiet, lemons.”

  * * *

  I AWOKE AT dawn to Owen’s voice in the room across the hall. I listened to him turn the pages of a book. Every so often he would ask a question: Will the rabbit ever become real? There’d be a silence, and more turning pages, and more of the one-sided conversation. Soon after, he came into my room, stood beside the bed, and touched
my face.

  “It’s time,” he said. “Don’t you hear the birds?” The light played in his hair, swept over the shoulders of his pajamas where stars and blasting rockets dotted the dark blue background.

  “Your grandfather used to say that about the birds,” I said.

  My heart caught with sorrow, imagining William, Owen’s age, collecting apple money in the little tin.

  The Spiritualists’ organ’s notes came through my open window, and he pressed his face against the screen. “Where does that come from?”

  I wanted to say it was the sound you heard on the astral plane, as my grandfather had once told me. Instead, I helped him dress, and we slipped downstairs, unhooked the porch screen door, and left the house. I took him along the path through the woods, shadowed and cool from the recent rain, to the gravel lane that led to the Spiritualists by the Sea camp. We moved through the silence of the tree canopy to the open meadow, where the sun colored the blowing grass, and then down the little tarred lanes, Osprey to Nehantic, to the bulkhead. I told Owen about the cottages with their gingerbread trim. I described the hand-painted road signs. We took the path between the swamp rose bushes to the beach, where the tide was out, the Sound glazed and calm. We gathered jingles and arks that littered the wet sand.

  A pair of mute swans passed overhead, their wings disturbing the calm of the water, making a sound like singing. Owen tipped his face to them, and the breeze moved his fine hair, jostled the swamp roses, heavy on their stems. We listened to the organ in the temple, its notes flung out to sea. In the camp, we passed the meditation garden, where Reverend Earline, now a spirit herself, sat alone on a bench wearing her Diane von Furstenberg sheath, her scarab bracelet. She followed our approach with a yearning expression.

  “Aren’t you going to say hello?” Owen said.

  “No,” I said. “No, I’m not.”

  Could he read my surprise in the dampness of my palm?

  I circled the shell paths through the camp, and when we passed one of the dead Owen would squeeze my hand, and then we’d walk on. When I asked him how he knew them, he said they were quiet, like me.

  “Do they smell of lemons?” I said, smiling.

  “No, never,” he said. “They smell like anise.”

  It was the spice drops that Del brought him. Then I caught the scent myself, jumbled with that of the mown grass, the wildflowers, the gasoline of a boat powering out.

  His one-sided conversation over The Velveteen Rabbit in his room earlier suddenly struck me as odd. Despair filled me, and I scanned the camp grounds for Del, for the blouse my mother had bought for her when she was pregnant, the last thing I’d seen her wearing in a photograph she’d sent me in Ithaca: C’est Moi, Garden Club Secretary. But I saw nothing and reassured myself that Del, the living, breathing version of her, was still somewhere, sailing the Caribbean Sea, asleep in an island hammock, toasting an approaching hurricane with a glass of rhum agricole.

  Owen tapped his little cane along the shell path. Up at the old house, my mother would have made coffee, set out cups on the linen cloth. She’d wait for Owen and me on the porch, and when she saw us her expression would alter—happy sad—the closest to joy we would ever allow ourselves. Sister Martha Mary had shown herself to me on a summer day in a cold barn, the sun on her face, her hands clasped in her dark robes’ folds. And later, innumerable dead had disclosed their heartbreaking faces; Mary Rae had kept her frozen vigil beneath the elm. I’d believed the dead had expectations of me. But what if they asked nothing but that I serve as a witness to their longing?

  I told Owen that it was time to go home. My grandfather had a book with an Irish tale about the swans I’d find on the shelf and read to him. And maybe all that could happen to us in our lives was portended in fairy tales. I held Owen’s hand, warm and smelling of copper pennies. We made our way back along the wooded lane to the old house.

  ALSO BY KAREN BROWN

  The Longings of Wayward Girls

  Pins and Needles

  Little Sinners

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  KAREN BROWN’s Little Sinners and Other Stories was named a Best Book of 2012 by Publishers Weekly; her previous collection, Pins and Needles, received AWP’s Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction; and her first novel, The Longings of Wayward Girls, was published in 2013 by Washington Square Press to rave reviews. Her work has been featured in the PEN / O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, The New York Times, and Good Housekeeping. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of South Florida. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

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  3.

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  35.

  36.

  37.

  Also by Karen Brown

  About the Author

  Copyright

  THE CLAIRVOYANTS. Copyright © 2017 by Karen Brown. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.henryholt.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Names: Brown, Karen, 1960– author.

  Title: The clairvoyants: a novel / Karen Brown.

  Description: New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016019129 | ISBN 9781627797054 (hardback) | ISBN 9781627797061 (electronic book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Sisters—Fiction. | Ghost stories—Fiction. | Paranormal fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Romance / Gothic. | FICTION / Psychological. | FICTION / Literary. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction. | Pyschological fiction. | Ghost stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3602.R7213 C53 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016019129

  e-ISBN 9781627797061

  First Edition: March 2017

  Jacket design by Lucy Kim

  Jacket photography © Metra Stelmahere / Trevillion Images

  Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at (800) 221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.