by Rebecca Rupp
“This is insane, Ellen!” my dad would shout through the door. “That woman is a fraud! Do you know what she charges? She charges a goddamn fortune! And she’s not talking to your son, Ellen! It’s a scam! You hear me? It’s a big fat fake!”
Winnie Carver was one of the few things my dad and I ever agreed about, because I know what Eli would have said about Winnie Carver. Eli would have said that Winnie Carver was a steaming load of crap.
Then Isabelle came up with the Ouija board.
The whole thing was really my fault, because I gave her the idea by telling her the story about Jim Pilcher and his uncle Steve’s twenty-dollar bill and the something that started creaking down the Sowers house stairs.
We were sitting under one of the Sowers’s big old trees again, watching the twins, who were building a medieval pavilion out of a bedsheet, a bunch of tomato cages, and a pair of aluminum lawn chairs. At least they said it was a medieval pavilion.
“I knew the house was haunted,” Isabelle said. “I knew it. I could feel a presence.”
Walter opened his mouth to say something negative and scientific, but Isabelle had closed her eyes and leaned back against the tree trunk and didn’t notice. Her silky hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and her eyelashes were so long that they made little shadows on her cheeks.
“But I sense that it’s a friendly ghost,” Isabelle said. “A lonely little spirit that means us no harm.”
She sat up abruptly.
“Let’s try to contact it,” she said. Her face lit up and her blue eyes sparkled. “Think how incredible it would be if we could actually talk to it.”
“And just how would we do that?” Walter said.
“With the Ouija board,” Isabelle said. “It’s a gateway to the spirit realm. Did you know that this woman Emily Hutchings wrote a novel that was dictated to her through the Ouija board by Mark Twain? I read about it on Wikipedia.”
Walter opened his mouth again, but Isabelle reached out to either side and put a hand on each of our knees.
“Please?” she said. “Let’s just try.”
So we said yes because neither of us could ever resist Isabelle.
For reasons of privacy and ghost appeal, we decided to set the Ouija board up in the cupola, which is at the very top of the Sowers house, sticking up out of the roof like a decoration on top of a wedding cake, only trimmed with curlicues of white wood instead of frosting. You reach it by climbing three flights of stairs.
First there’s the big fancy staircase in the front hall, the one with the red carpet and the carved banisters, and then a steeper cheaper staircase covered with little tacked-down pieces of linoleum, and then a staircase that’s practically a ladder that goes up through a hole in the cupola floor. Once you crawl through the hole, you’re in this little octagon-shaped room with windows all around and some rickety old chairs, a dead plant in a pot, and a table. Isabelle had set up the Ouija board on the table. The whole place smelled of dust and dead flies.
“There’s a girl at my school who lives in a haunted apartment,” Isabelle said. “It’s haunted by the ghost of a little girl. They hear her crying, and at night they hear her crawling around on the floor. And sometimes they can see her in mirrors. She has long yellow ringlets, and she’s wearing a blue silk dress with a lace collar.”
“How did she die?” I said.
“The nursemaid drowned her in the bath,” Isabelle said. “She had a history of drowning children. They called her the Drowning Angel, because she said she was only sending the little ones to be angels in heaven. She was tried but never executed, for reasons of insanity.”
“If she was drowned, you’d think her ghost would be wet,” Walter said. “In those stories about ghosts of drowned sailors, people are always finding puddles and seaweed on the floor.”
“I thought you couldn’t see ghosts in mirrors,” I said.
Isabelle ignored us.
She had lit candles in jars, and since by then it was dark outside, we were all reflected in the cupola windows. We looked shadowy and transparent in the glass, as if our own ghosts were floating outside in the air and staring in at us.
The twins were sitting on the floor against one wall, and Isabelle had told them that they had to be absolutely silent on pain of instant death. They both had their lips pinched tight together, which made them look like prunes. Jasper was wearing a T-shirt with a tentacle-y monster on it that said CTHULHU FOR PRESIDENT — WHY CHOOSE THE LESSER EVIL? Journey was wearing a bathing-suit top and polka-dot pajama pants. She had a pad of yellow paper on her knees and was holding a pencil.
“So what do we do?” I said.
“We all put our fingers on the planchette,” Isabelle said.
It was a little heart-shaped piece of wood on wheels.
“You just rest them there — very, very lightly. And then you don’t do anything. I’ll ask questions, and if a spirit wants to communicate, it’ll spell a message using the letters on the board. And Journey — without talking, or else — will write it down.”
We put our fingers very, very lightly on the planchette, and I realized at once the problem with the Ouija board. I knew I could never concentrate on the spirit realm with Isabelle’s fingers touching mine like that. I felt hot all over, and I started sweating on my upper lip. What if the planchette could tell how I felt? What if it suddenly started spelling out stuff like DANNY LOVES ISABELLE? Or something way more embarrassing, with sex.
“O spirits!” Isabelle said in a dramatic throaty voice. “O spirits, please speak to us! Is there anyone there? Are there any messages for anyone here from the other side?”
We sat there with nothing happening. Isabelle had her eyes closed. Walter was glaring at the planchette, and I could tell he was still thinking about the drowned little-girl ghost who should have been dripping. Walter has trouble with logical discrepancies like that. The twins were whispering to each other, but apparently not loud enough for the pain-of-instant-death thing to click in.
“Is anyone there?” Isabelle said again.
There was a little whoosh of breeze through the windows, which were open at the top because it was really hot up in the cupola. The breeze made the candle flames flicker and flap like crazy things but didn’t do much to cool anything down.
“Don’t be afraid, O spirits!” Isabelle said. “Please come to us! Is anybody there?”
And then the planchette gave a little wiggle under our fingers and started to roll.
It rolled back and forth and back and forth, and I knew I wasn’t pushing on it, and I was pretty sure Walter wasn’t, and Isabelle still had her eyes closed. Back and forth like one of those little bumper cars at the Fairfield County Fair. Then it stopped. It was pointing at the H. Isabelle opened up her eyes.
“H,” she said. “Write it down, Journey. Does anyone know anybody from beyond whose name starts with H?”
“‘G is for George smothered under a rug,’” Journey muttered. “‘H is for Hector done in by a thug.’”
The twins have this morbid alphabet book about kids who came to awful ends. They both know it by heart.
“There’ve been a lot of Sowerses named Henry,” I said.
At which point the planchette moved on to E.
“E,” Isabelle said.
“‘E is for Ernest who choked on a peach,’” Jasper stage-whispered.
Isabelle glared at him.
“What did I tell you?” she said menacingly.
Jasper stopped whispering and pinched up his lips.
Then the planchette whizzed across the board to Y.
“H-E-Y,” Isabelle said. “Hey?”
I thought, What kind of a ghost says “hey”? It didn’t seem like a ghost-type word.
The planchette just sat for a few seconds as if it was thinking, then swooped through three letters real fast. K. I. D.
HEY, KID.
And I got a crawly feeling up my back, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up on end. I yanked my fingers off
that planchette so fast that you would’ve thought it had suddenly turned red-hot. I shoved my chair way back to get away from that board.
“That’s what Eli always said,” I said in a voice that didn’t sound at all like me. It sounded more like Beaker, the squeaky Muppet.
Isabelle got an excited interested look, and her eyes went wide.
“Oh, God, it’s your brother,” she said. “Danny, he’s here. He’s really here. Let’s see what he says. Let’s ask him what it’s like, where he is.”
“No!” I said, still in that voice that didn’t sound at all like me.
“But don’t you want to know?” Isabelle said, incredulous. She looked really beautiful by candlelight. “He could have a message for you, Danny. Don’t you want to hear what he has to say?”
“No,” I said. “It’s not him.”
I didn’t want it to be him.
“But why?” Isabelle said. “This could be a breakthrough. Danny, please. Please let’s talk to him. Let’s try again.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Journey said.
And I realized right then why I’d really hated Winnie Carver and why I hated the Ouija board.
There was part of me deep down that kept hoping that Eli was still alive. I had a buried secret hope that it was all a mistake, the kind the army makes sometimes, and that Eli wasn’t dead after all but missing. He’d hit his head on a rock after the bomb and lost his memory, and he’d been wandering around in the desert, maybe living with Bedouins and riding camels like Lawrence of Arabia. Eventually he’d remember who he was and he’d remember us, and then we’d get a phone call from some doctor at an army base.
“May I ask who is calling?” my mom would say, and her face would go all confused, because she wouldn’t be able to take it in at first, and then when she did, she’d light up all over like a sunrise, and she’d turn to me with this incredible smile and she’d say, “It’s a miracle, Danny. They’ve found Eli. Eli’s alive. He’s coming home.”
Then Walter cleared his throat.
“You know how a Ouija board really works?” he said. All calm and deadpan, like Walter does. Like Mr. Spock, the voice of reason on Star Trek.
“No,” I said. Squeaked.
“It’s called the ideomotor effect,” Walter said. “People make these little muscle movements all the time that they don’t even realize are happening. That’s what moves the planchette around the board. You’re doing it yourself even though you think you aren’t. You were thinking about your brother, so unconsciously you spelled out words you used to hear him say.”
Isabelle looked crushed.
“Dowsing is the same,” Walter said, dry as toast. “And those mystic pendulums. You know, you dangle the pendulum over a piece of paper that has YES and NO written on it and you ask it questions and it’s supposed to move toward the right answer. But it’s really you who’s moving it all along.”
I thought how Eli used to have us ask questions all the time of the Magic 8 Ball that he got for his birthday once from Uncle Al. “Do we need a milkshake?” he’d ask that ball. Then he’d shake it up, and if it said YES, he’d say that the old Magic 8 Ball always knew, and if it said NO, he’d say that the Anderson brothers were too smart to pay any attention to a stupid plastic ball.
“But there are spirits,” Isabelle said. “Maybe they just won’t come near nonbelievers.”
She eyed Walter.
“‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”
“What?” I said.
“Shakespeare,” Walter said.
“But what if we’ve actually made contact?” Isabelle said. “Do you want to turn him away? Danny?”
“It’s not him,” I said.
All of me was sweating now, and I knew that if I let them, my teeth would start to chatter.
Isabelle sighed, folded up the Ouija board, and started blowing out the candles. I could tell by the way she didn’t look at Walter that she thought it was all Walter’s fault.
“Maybe we can try again another night,” she said.
But I knew I wouldn’t, even for Isabelle.
We all went downstairs, and Isabelle let the twins start talking again, which ordinarily I would have thought was a huge mistake but just then was sort of a relief.
When my mom stopped seeing Winnie Carver, I’d thought it was because of my dad and the money thing. But right then I wasn’t so sure. I thought that maybe a part of my mom, the real part, the part I knew, didn’t want Eli out there being a ghost. She didn’t want him stuck with the psychic medium any more than I wanted him trapped in some stupid Ouija board.
Because I’d rather it was what Walter said.
I’d rather it was just me.
One of the things I like best about Jim Pilcher is that he doesn’t give a damn about my college plans.
There’s something about being my age — it’s like every adult around you has only one topic of conversation, and that’s your future. What you’re actually doing right now isn’t important. The only thing that’s important is what you’re going to be doing ten years from now. What they want to know is: Where are you going to go to college? What are you going to do with your life? How are you going to make a living?
And they hate it when you say: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
My future was pretty much all my dad talked about when he talked to me, and I could tell he thought my prospects were bleak. Every time we discussed it, I came away knowing he figured I’d be spending my life in the Fairfield Alarm Clock factory on the third shift, sticking on the minute hands. Or maybe lying under a plastic bag in the gutter, drinking cough syrup through a straw. “Exactly what do you plan to do with your life?” my dad would say. “How are you going to support yourself? This isn’t something you think about later, Daniel. This is something you think about now. If you don’t apply yourself and get your grades up over the next couple of years, you’re not going to have many options left. People who don’t know where they’re going, Daniel, are generally going nowhere. And you’re not a little kid anymore. It’s about time you stopped acting like one.”
“Yeah,” I would say.
“Yeah what?” my dad would say. “When Eli was your age, he’d already made a college list. He had ambitions. It’s the ambitious people that go places, Daniel, not the people who just sit on their butts, waiting for something to happen.”
“Yeah, look where Eli went,” I said.
“That’s enough of that lip, young man,” my dad said.
Walter says what I have with my dad is not a discussion. Walter says that a discussion is an informal debate between two or more people, which ours is not, due to my dad doing all the talking.
I didn’t know what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, but what I did figure out that summer was that I really loved working at the blue-potato farm. Which surprised me, since I didn’t take the job because I was so into farms or blue potatoes. I just wanted out of remedial summer school. But it turned out to be what Walter calls serendipity, which is stumbling across something great when you’re not really looking for it.
The thing is, when you think about it, growing stuff is so cool. You start out in the spring with this puny seed the size of your pinky fingernail, and you put it in the ground and pour some water on it, and then all of a sudden you’ve got a million miles of vines and a bunch of pumpkins the size of beach balls. It’s like one of those magician acts where they make a train appear out of nothing.
It’s sort of fascinating when you think about it, why people like one thing and not another. I mean, why? Why do people like dogs more than cats or chocolate more than vanilla or art history more than chemistry?
And once you know what you like doing, why can’t you just go do it? How come if all you like is computers, you have to prove you’re good in American history and French before they’ll let you into college to do computer science? What they say is that you have to be well rounded
, which doesn’t make much sense to me, seeing as there’s a planet of six billion of us. It seems to me if we all just did what we’re good at, the planet would average out to okay.
Anyway, Jim says I’m a natural with potatoes and also holistically connected to the earth, or at least I would be if I’d remember to keep my great big clown-foot sneakers out of his rhubarb, and Emma says I’ve got green thumbs.
But what Peter Reilly said that summer was that I’d lost my freaking mind.
I was still friends with Peter and the other guys, but I just didn’t seem to have much time for them anymore, what with the potatoes and Jim and Emma and hanging out with Isabelle and Walter. But the more I said I was busy, the more Peter got on my case. “Busy with what?” he said. “What do you have to be so freaking busy with?”
Then he told me how last Saturday, he’d gone over to Amanda’s house and they’d watched Jaws 2 on DVD, the one where the shark eats a bunch of teenagers, and then they’d made out on the couch in the Turners’ rec room, and Peter found out that Amanda wears black lace bras.
Then he said, what about this weekend, doing something with him and Amanda and blue Yvonne? When I said I couldn’t, he got mad.
“What’s the matter with you, Anderson?” Peter said.
Then he told me to take my head out of my ass.
Then he hung up the phone.
For a long time Peter had been my best friend and the person I most wanted to be if I could be anybody except me. But I was changing, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it, any more than you can stuff a butterfly back into a cocoon and say, “Hey, big mistake; go be a caterpillar again.”
One of Walter’s questions is: “Can a person step into the same river twice?”
The first time he asked it, we were sitting on the bank of Scrubgrass Creek, Walter and Isabelle and me, with our feet in the water. The twins were splashing around downstream, building a beaver dam, though not nearly as effectively as beavers.
I wasn’t paying as much attention to Walter as I should have been, due to thinking about how Isabelle had really beautiful feet. Neat and narrow, with these perfect little toes.
