by Rhian Ellis
When she caught up she came to me and looked me in the face. “Hurry up, Viv!” she said in a nasty, sarcastic voice.
For several seconds I just stared at her, unable to believe what I’d heard. She glared right back. Without even thinking about what I was doing, I slapped her, hard, across the cheek.
“Do not speak to me that way,” I said.
She barely flinched, but continued to glare at me, her left cheek growing red and hot. I turned and walked quickly back to the house. Vivian followed several minutes later, quietly hanging up her jacket and lying down in front of the television, cradling her injured cheek in her hand.
Horrified at what I had done, and panicky to think of what would happen if Vivian told her mother, I drank cup after cup of coffee at the kitchen table and finished the crossword puzzle in record time.
If Vivian did tell her mother, it didn’t get back to me. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. In my head I slapped her over and over. I slapped her until she fell down. My hand felt huge and fiery. For several nights, I slept with it clamped between my knees, hating it and what it could do.
It was the middle of the night, long after we’d all gone to bed. I was dreaming my drowning dream—in the high school pool, crowds of boys swimming above me and blocking my way to the surface—when the phone rang. I sat straight up. The glow-in-the-dark dots on my clock were no longer glowing so I couldn’t be sure of the time, but judging from how deeply asleep I was it must have been three or four. I had an extension in my room, and I reached over and picked it up just after Jenny did. I heard her soft voice say Hello.
“Is this Naomi? I’m looking for Naomi,” said the other voice. It was my mother.
“I’ve got it,” I said.
“All right,” said Jenny, and she hung up.
There was a click, a pause, and another click, which must have been Ron seeing if it was for him. Then quiet.
“Mama, what’s wrong?”
She was crying. She made little choking sounds into the phone.
“Mama! What is it?”
“I had a dream. You were lost. You were with your father, and I couldn’t find you…” She cried, snuffling and blowing her nose.
“Mama, I’m right here. Do you want me to come over?”
She gasped out a laugh. “Oh, God, no. It’s all right. I’ve just never been so…discombobulated by a dream. Oh, Naomi, it was horrible. I was so lonely. It was…like you never existed. Like I’d made you up.”
There was a pause while she blew her nose again and got herself together. “All right. All right.”
I picked up my clock and tried to read the hands. “Did you say my father was in it?”
“I think. I’m sorry. It’s boring to hear about other people’s dreams.”
“No, no, it’s fine.”
“When I woke up, I didn’t know what was real. It was the same feeling as when my mother passed over, and I’d wake up and remember all over again that she was gone.”
“Why don’t you drink some milk or something? I can come over.”
“No,” she said firmly. “I’m fine. I’m sorry I woke you up.”
“It’s all right.”
She hung up without saying good-bye.
I got down under my blankets and tried to sleep. Usually, if I woke in the night I could go back to sleep immediately, but after my mother’s phone call I had the creepy sensation that there was something fluttering in the corner of my room, something like a bat, and it kept me awake. Every time I opened my eyes and checked, nothing was there, but the feeling didn’t go away. Maybe, I thought, it’s a spirit. I cleared my mind and tried to contact it.
What do you want? Leave me alone, I want to sleep.
It didn’t answer. But after a minute or two it began to moan. The sound it made was like my mother weeping: dry, hacking sobs. I pulled my pillow over my ears, but the thing wouldn’t stop. It didn’t make any sense to me; I had no idea what it was. Maybe it was a demon, but I didn’t believe in demons. It seemed neither spirit nor animal, but like a thing in between, a thing incomplete, like the ragged neck of the reconstructed head.
Eventually I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up when it got light. Ron was stomping around downstairs, and the newspaper hit our front door with a bang. Morning. Whatever the creature was, it was gone. But the feeling it left me with was a sick and horrible one: like guilt, or regret. It was as if what I had done all those years ago had come back to life, and was trying hard to fly, howling, into the world.
In order to be a practicing medium on the grounds of Train Line—that is, to be able to hang out a sign and charge money for individual readings in your own house—you had to be approved and registered by the Train Line board of directors. You’d have to present yourself to the board, state your beliefs and philosophy of mediumship, and then hold a circle. It was a rigorous process. Every year, more mediums failed than passed. I failed two years in a row and was nineteen when I finally got my registration.
I spent those years living with my mother, finishing high school and practicing my mediumship on friends. In the summers I took jobs. It was because of these jobs that I never gave up on being a medium; I knew I’d never make it in the world if I had to have a job. The summer after I graduated from high school I worked at a tomato-packing plant outside Wallamee. I was a sorter. The other sorters and I had to climb up to a huge conveyor belt contraption—we had to duck under steel girders and go up ladders—and sort the tomatoes as they tumbled past us. They were all hard as baseballs, and green. Our job was to pick out the defective ones and the ones with any trace of red at all. Red tomatoes went on another conveyor belt, eventually to be made into ketchup, and the defective ones were tossed down a chute. These were smashed or gouged or had weird prongs, like green fingers, or else had “cats’ faces.” The woman who trained me had an accent of some kind, and was hard to understand.
“See,” she said, pointing to a cleft in the bottom of a bad tomato, “this is a cat’s face.” It looked like a navel, intimate and odd. “If the cat’s face is bigger than a nickel, throw them out.”
Fow dem out, she said.
Somewhere at the head of the conveyor belt there was a sprayer that coated all the tomatoes with a slippery wax. It made the tomatoes hard to grab and puckered my fingertips. For what seemed like hours the tomatoes rolled by, and I’d frantically snatch at the rejects, grabbing and tossing them into the chute, becoming so hypnotized that when the conveyor belt was shut off for some reason—usually because a supervisor had noticed too many bad tomatoes getting by, or too many good ones in the chute, and needed to yell at us—I’d have to catch myself to keep from falling over. Once I cut my finger on a piece of metal. Something about the wax spray kept the wound from healing, so blood trickled from my finger for a long time, smearing the tomatoes. No one had told me what to do if I was bleeding, so I did nothing, pleased to imagine piles of bloody produce in the supermarket.
If it rained hard, as it did often that summer, the pickers wouldn’t be sent out into the fields and there’d be no tomatoes for us to sort. Those days we’d climb a ladder up to the loft, just under the warehouse roof, and fold sheets of cardboard into boxes. With the machines shut off, it was quiet enough to hear the rain on the metal roof and to talk. Some of the women—all the sorters were women—had worked in the packing plant for thirty years. Thirty years. They had strange, awful lives.
“So I says to him, if you’re gonna live like a raccoon, you can just go live in the goddamn woods! So he did! He took his shit out to the woods and built himself a hut. I ain’t seen him since.” The woman who said this was tall and thin and had the look of someone who smoked instead of ate. Her skin was leathery and her eyes colorless.
I could see my life going that way. No one would ever hire me to work in an office; I was not cheery or outgoing, and I couldn’t type. My fingernails stayed dirty no matter how often I washed my hands. There was no point in living, I knew, if I was going to continue
being a tomato sorter. I’d one hundred times rather be dead. Every day, as I got on my bike to go to work, I’d cry so hard I couldn’t see.
But I kept going, that whole summer, until the very last day when there were only a few mostly bad tomatoes, and they sent us home early. I thought I’d feel good, getting through the whole summer, but I didn’t. I felt like I’d just gotten out of prison, having paid for a crime I didn’t commit. I couldn’t tell anyone about this feeling. I knew what they’d say.
What, you think you’re too good to work?
Well, yes. I did.
But I couldn’t live with my mother forever. At night I’d lie in bed, thinking, Something has to change, something has got to change, but I couldn’t think what it was. My mind chased itself in circles. I could leave Train Line, but then what? Work as what, do what? It was when I realized that nothing seemed worth doing, that I couldn’t even imagine a worthwhile life, that I got scared.
Once I spent an entire day lying on top of my bed, staring out the window at the sky. I knew that pretty soon I’d have to get up and go downstairs and eat the dinner my mother was cooking—chicken patties, I could smell them—and I couldn’t stand the idea. There’d be a glass of water by my plate and the salt and pepper shakers shaped like corncobs, and she’d tell me all about her day and what everyone said and then we’d watch the television news. The thought of it made my head roar.
It was in the middle of this roaring that I heard my first voice. It wasn’t a spooky voice, or even an ethereal one, but a practical, somewhat bored one. It sounded exactly as if someone put her mouth right up close to my ear and said, in a slightly hushed tone, “Wake up, Naomi Ash.” The voice was so real I thought I could feel the heat of breath on the side of my face.
Until that moment, I had never really believed in spiritualism. I sort of believed. I pretended to. I enjoyed the attention I got when I worked message services and sat for séances, and sometimes I felt the thrill of connection, but part of me held back. I didn’t want to be like my mother, with her eager, delighted face and pushy advice. I dallied in spiritualism. And that was the problem. My life was a dalliance.
But when I heard the voice in my ear—it said nothing earthshaking, and it wasn’t a voice I recognized—I knew that all I lacked was conviction. The people sitting on the Train Line board of directors saw that; they saw that I didn’t take myself quite seriously, that I was hanging back. And it occurred to me, too, that if I wanted to I could dismiss the voice as a daydream, or, if I chose to, I could believe in it. Belief was a decision I could make.
That evening I ate my mother’s chicken patties and listened to her gossip and sat on the sofa with her, watching television, but I was different. I had become a medium. All it took was that small shift.
For the next few months I threw myself into my mediumship. At home circles and message services, I worked so hard I sweated and trembled and gave myself migraine headaches, the worst pain I’d ever known. Sometimes I’d go home afterward and lie on the floor of the bathroom with the light off, the headache beating at the back of my eyes, until I threw up in the toilet and began to feel a little better. I heard voices all the time, those months. Sometimes I recognized the voice—my grandmother, occasionally—but usually it was a strange voice saying things I didn’t understand. Try again, Lily, when the table’s bigger! I heard once. Another time it was, History is blasphemy, darling.
Because I accepted everything I heard, I heard more. The connection was clear to me. For a while things came in such a rush I had trouble sorting them out. It was like sitting in a room surrounded by people having conversations: sometimes a certain word would catch my attention, and the voice would, for a minute or two, carry above the others, until another voice drowned it out. This would go on for as long as I let it, as long as I concentrated. It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me.
I never doubted the validity of what I heard. Whether it was strictly true or not didn’t matter, because truth, I knew, could be interpreted a thousand ways.
I passed my board exam the spring I turned nineteen. It was a cold, drizzly afternoon, and I met the board of directors in the paneled exam room behind the main office. All the Train Line old folks sat in folding chairs around a long, flimsy table—a heavier table might never levitate—and they greeted me when I came in. Grace Batsummer gave me some coffee in a paper cup.
“Good to see you again, Naomi.”
“Think the sun’s gone in for good?”
“Hello, my dear.”
“Hello, Naomi, dear.”
As Troy read out the rules and procedures for the exam—they were long and detailed and I’d heard them twice before—I looked at the photographs on the walls. There was a picture of Train Line when it was just a big white tent in the woods: TRAIN LINE CAMP MEETING proclaimed a banner draped between two trees. Young ladies sat in the grass, their white summer dresses billowing around them. All the men wore top hats. There was a picture of a horse covered with paper flowers, a little girl on its back. I knew I was going to pass my exam.
“So, Naomi,” said Troy. “Tell us the forms your mediumship takes.”
“Clairaudience, mostly. Some clairvoyance and clairsentience.”
“Clairaudience!” said Robin Blackthorn. “That’s new for you, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Could you describe for us how you intend to use your talents?”
I told them I believed that the fear of death distracted people and prevented them from living their lives in the ways they were meant to. I hoped, I said, to ease that fear.
They nodded. They’d certainly heard that before.
Grace Batsummer asked the next question. “Why, in your opinion, do spirits bother with the so-called Living? Why linger around this plane at all?”
“Well, first of all, I believe that the two planes are not all that separate. I believe that the spirit plane and the material plane are intertwined. Spirits bother with us because they can’t help it; we’re all around them. Just as some of us can’t help bothering with spirits.”
There were some low chuckles. “Very original,” said Troy.
Grace folded her knobby old hands on the table. “So you’re saying that spirits just…show up? That they have no real intentions toward communicating with us, that we bump into them like strangers at the supermarket?”
“No,” I said, trying to smile. “Not exactly. I meant that we are as important to spirits as they are to us. Some people have the idea that the spirit plane is higher, somehow, and that spirits condescend to us. I don’t think that’s the case. They want to speak to us to comfort us, and we speak to them to comfort them.”
“I can see that,” said Robin, nodding.
“Do you really think those on the spirit plane need comforting, Naomi?” asked Grace.
“Um, yes,” I said. “If—if my mother passed over, I know she’d take comfort in me, in my life…she’d want to see me, to know I was okay.” As I was saying this, I realized I had no idea if it was true or not. It had to be; it had to be. “I guess I’m trying to say that spirits all have unfinished business here on this plane,” I added a little dubiously. “It is a comfort for them to see us carry it out. And—and we need each other, the dead and the living. Our lives are meaningless without the afterlife, and well, their lives are meaningless without the…antedeath.”
“The antedeath!” yelped Grace.
“Remember, Grace,” said Troy. “There are no right answers or wrong answers here.”
“I know,” she said, leaning back, only slightly disgruntled.
There were some more questions. These I answered quickly and confidently, occasionally glancing out the window to make sure I was really here, that it was really happening. It was.
“Okay, then, let’s get started,” said Troy.
Grace lit three white candles and spaced them evenly down the table. We held hands—the old men on each side of me both had dry, papery, ice-cold fingers—an
d I led a short prayer.
“Blessed spirits,” I began.
After the prayer we let go of each other, and the room was silent for several minutes. A car crunched by on the gravel outside, and water dripped from the roof, splashed on the windowsill. I thought I could hear the hum of a television in the house across the street; I thought I could hear radio waves. I felt as if I could hear anything, if I listened.
The voices started.
“Um,” I said. “There’s a Lowell here. I don’t know if that’s a first or last name.”
“First,” grunted old Edgar Phinney, on my left. “My brother.”
“Right.” I listened for a minute or two. “A dog’s here with him.”
“Barnabas.”
“Yes.”
I listened harder. Voices poured down on me.
I told Edgar Phinney that Lowell was building a house with his own hands, out of sticks and mud and grass and rocks, and that the house would have five windows, and through one of them I saw a little girl with gray eyes. The dog had his own house, across the street. As soon as he was finished, Lowell would burn love letters in the fireplace.
Then I said I had someone named White. No one claimed him, at first. White wanted to tell us all about a woman he called Twilight, how she was dying of neglect. I cried in the middle of this one. Robin said, quietly, that she thought she knew who I meant.
There was more. A girl with no arms, a baseball player. It was possibly the strangest circle I’d ever led.
But it was the truest one, too. I felt shaken at the end of it, much more than usual, and when they sent me outside to discuss the exam, I had to sit down on one of the wet stone benches under the cedar tree and put my head on my knees.
Troy came out looking for me. His face was long and pale and his hair seemed to float over his scalp. “There you are, dear. Congratulations. You passed.”
I signed some papers in the office, shook everyone’s hand, and put on my coat. Grace pulled me aside as I was heading out the door.
