by Rhian Ellis
I shook my head.
“It was on the floor underneath the bed. And the bed was at least three inches from the wall.”
“So…”
“So what must have happened was this: I fell asleep reading, the book still in the bed, and then sometime during the night someone—or something—shook my bed so hard that the book slid off the bed and fell down between the mattress and the wall! The sound of it hitting the floor woke me up.”
I smiled. “It must have been a pretty heavy book.”
“It was. The History of Greece.”
I didn’t say anything for a while. The day was so quiet I could hear the sound of boat motors out on the lake. There was something about Peter’s story that rubbed me the wrong way, though I couldn’t put my finger on it.
“It was his first paranormal experience,” said Nelson. He took his glasses off and polished them with a small cloth he got from his shirt pocket. Sweet, serious Nelson.
“Well, Peter Morton,” I said, leaning onto the table and looking him straight in the eyes. “I’m going to tell you something, and I want you to promise me you won’t forget it the entire time you’re here. Do you promise?”
He flickered his eyelashes, looked down at his hands, then back up at me. The skin beneath his eyebrows grew pink. This, I realized, was how he blushed. “Sure. Yes. I promise.”
“Spiritualism,” I said, holding the edge of the table, “is our answer to death. It’s not a joke. It’s not even close to a joke.”
He glanced at Nelson. Nelson’s mouth was shut tight.
“Okay,” said Peter, nodding slowly. “Okay, Miss Naomi Ash. I’ll remember that.”
That summer, I was a big, suntanned, lazy girl, with a lot of black hair I pinned to the back of my head. I’d mostly gotten over the incessant clairaudience and headaches of the year before, though I still sometimes spent whole days with the shades pulled down, wet towels over my face. I scheduled readings for the afternoon and evening, so I could spend the mornings at the beach in Wallamee. At first I went with Teeny Lawrence. She wore bikini bathing suits in blinding colors and ate potato chips from a can. Children galloped past us, spraying our towels with sand, and Teeny screamed blue murder after them. It wasn’t long before I was going to the beach with Peter Morton. Nelson knew enough to leave us alone.
Peter didn’t seem to like the beach, though. He didn’t have any shorts, so he rolled his pants up around his knees, and refused to take his T-shirt off. The brightness of the sun on the lake made his eyes water. But he wouldn’t admit that he’d rather be somewhere else, so we kept going; he spent the time lying on his side on the beach blanket, reading. Sometimes he’d sit up, his elbows on his knees, and watch me sunbathe. I pretended not to notice, but I could feel his eyes move over me.
One day we dumped the sand out of our shoes, rolled up our towels, and walked to the Ha-Ha for sandwiches. We’d known each other for almost two weeks by this time, and we saw each other every day, but he still hadn’t made any moves. He walked several feet away from me, his hands in his pockets. Once in a while he would stop, pick up a pebble, and wing it at a tree.
We were crossing the bridge at Wallamee Creek when he asked me a question. “Naomi. Why didn’t you go to college?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t want to. I never felt the urge. Why?”
“No particular reason. It’s just that everyone I know goes to college, or will go, or has gone. Everyone does, that’s all.”
“Not everyone.”
“I guess not.
We leaned over the railing and watched water tumble over rocks.
“I mean,” he said after a minute or two, “it’s not like you’re dumb.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not.”
The deli section of the Ha-Ha was in the back, past the racks of candy and fishing supplies. We got in line. Peter looked uncomfortable.
“Have you noticed,” he said under his breath, “that there are deer heads on the walls in here?”
“Yes,” I said. Of course there were; there’d always been deer heads in the Ha-Ha. I told him how once, a few years ago, my mother ran into a deer with her car out on Vining Road. Instead of leaving the carcass there to rot, she brought it to the Ha-Ha and had it cut up. We ate venison burger and venison stew and venison everything for months. We had no idea what they did with the head. It might well have been the one hanging above the cashier stand.
This stunned Peter into silence.
For the first time, I found myself looking around at the Ha-Ha and actually seeing it. Flies buzzed and died against the windows, and their tiny corpses littered the sills. Whole squares of linoleum were missing from the floor, revealing the patchy concrete beneath. Some of the cans and boxes on the shelves, with their crushed corners and faded labels, could have been twenty years old. This was the gift Peter gave me: the ability to escape myself. Though it might not have been a gift at all, but a curse.
We got our egg salad sandwiches. They were wrapped in white paper and accompanied by a little sack of chips. From the glum look on Peter’s face I knew what he was thinking: hepatitis B.
“I’ve eaten sandwiches here a thousand times,” I told him. “I promise it won’t kill you.”
He looked at me dubiously. “If I die, you can have my books.”
“Thank you,” I said.
We ate on the tiny square of lawn that passed for Wallamee’s War Memorial Park. Peter leaned up against a skinny maple tree, relieved to be out of the sun. I asked him what, exactly, he was doing in Train Line.
“Nothing,” he said. “I’m here to do as close to nothing as possible.”
He’d finished his history degree at Princeton in the spring, he said, and was going to graduate school in Boston in the fall. He had a scholarship and a teaching assistantship waiting for him. “But I almost can’t stand the idea, I’m so burned out. I don’t want to work, I don’t want to travel. I want to do nothing. Nelson told me Train Line was a good place for that.”
“I guess that depends.” I talked about my own last year, getting my registration and doing endless message services and being laid up with headaches half the time. I’d never spoken to him about my mediumship before, and after a few minutes I began to feel self-conscious. I stopped and prodded my sandwich.
“Go on,” he said. “Please.” And he took my hand.
It was hard to speak with my hand clamped between his, so I just shook my head.
“Please?” he said again.
“No. That’s all.” I waited a moment, struggling to get a hold of myself. “You think we’re wackos, don’t you?”
He looked at me for a long time, then frowned and looked away. “No. I have to admit I thought that before I got here. And for a little while afterward. But I don’t now.”
“Hmm,” I said.
“I mean it.” He gave my hand a squeeze and rolled away across the grass, staring up at the tree branches.
Soon we were kissing in the woods, holding hands under tables, lying for hours on the narrow, lumpy bed in Peter’s hotel room. The room was tiny, with a sink and a chair but no desk or table. Books and clothes covered the floor. Through the window floated the voices of the people on the porch below, chatting and complaining and cracking themselves up.
“This place disturbs me,” Peter said one afternoon. We were lying half-dressed in front of an oscillating fan, trying and failing to get cool. The temperature was in the nineties outside, even hotter in here, and stuffy.
“The point is to disturb you, I suspect.”
“Not how you think,” he said. He pulled a T-shirt on and crouched next to the window, looking out. “I haven’t seen anything I couldn’t explain. The messages at services are pretty general, you know. And there’ve been no materializations, nothing like that.”
“What’s so disturbing, then?”
“The people here. Some are a bit odd, but no one’s downright crazy. And, for the most part, no one’s stupid.”
“‘For the
most part,’” I said. “I like that.”
“You know what I mean. These people are smart and nice, and about the most earnest people I’ve ever met. They’re not trying to trick anyone or make a lot of money. Which means—”
Below us, the gang on the porch erupted in laughter. Someone had a deep, honking laugh, like a foghorn.
“Which means what?” I asked, when the noise died down again.
“They really believe in it.”
“Duh.”
“You’re not listening to me,” he said grumpily.
“Sorry.”
I stood up and buttoned my skirt. I didn’t have much patience for this sort of thing. Believe it or don’t believe it, I wanted to tell him, but don’t make me listen to you muddle through it.
“Naomi!” He turned to me, desperate. “I’m sorry. It’s just that there’s something here I’m not getting.” His hair was flattened on one side of his head and stuck out on the other.
I wasn’t very nice. I put my sandals on and tied my hair up. “Give me a call when you figure it out,” I told him, and walked right out the door.
He didn’t call for almost a week, but I thought about him the entire time.
Though I would never have admitted it to Peter, there was a part of me that was falling in love with the idea of going to college. I had no idea what Princeton looked like, but I imagined buildings with Gothic windows and towers and an observatory, one that would open up on clear nights and poke its telescopes at the moon. The library would have green reading lights and the kind of book stacks that reached so high you had to climb ladders to get to the top. I would write with fountain pens if I went to college, I thought, and I’d study my textbooks for hours and hours, until I was kicked out of the library or my eyes went bad, whichever came first.
Naomi Ash, College Student, was a very different person from me. I knew that, dropped suddenly from an airplane into a college campus, I would not be able to do it. I’d go to my room and want to sleep the whole time. At parties I’d spill drinks on my dress and have to flee, stained and mortified. In classes I’d be so afraid of not understanding what the professor was saying that I’d spend the whole time staring out the window at the beautiful campus or else drawing tiny pictures in my notebook. But I wanted to be someone else. I’d never felt this way before, but something about Peter brought it out in me. I wanted to be like him: quiet, studious, and full of information. I wanted to know things.
Actually, Peter never did call. I’d turned off my bedside lamp one night, and had just pulled the sheet over my shoulder, when something hit my window screen and bounced away into the night. It happened again, then again, so I stood up and squinted out into the dark.
“But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?”
I knew that from high school.
Peter was wearing a white shirt and his pale-blue pants. Standing there out in the street, he practically glowed. “It is the east,” he said, and went on to recite the whole damn soliloquy.
I pushed the screen up and leaned out on my elbows to watch him. He was making a fool of himself. Anyone watching from a porch or window or yard all up and down Seneca Street could hear him. Even I knew it was a cheesy thing to do: clichéd, sentimental, silly. It seemed out of character for Peter, who was such an intellectual, and so serious. But it knocked me for a loop.
“Naomi?” he called when he was through. I didn’t answer. “Naomi? Am I going to have to repeat it?”
I fell in love that fast.
And as the summer wore on, Peter changed. He shoved his history books underneath his bed and began hanging around the library, reading up on spiritualism. A lot of what he read annoyed him.
“Did you know, Naomi, that after the Fox sisters admitted, admitted, they were dropping apples and cracking their toes to make the rappings, people refused to believe they were fakes?”
“Well,” I said. “They were only fakes in one sense of the word.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
I explained. It is possible, I told him, to begin with what may seem to you like fraud, but have it acquire truth. As an example, I asked him if he’d ever been in a horrible mood and then gotten out of it by smiling.
“Maybe, I don’t know. But I see what you mean. Go on.”
At first, I said, that smile is a fraud. You’re not in a good mood at all. But then, because you’re smiling, you are. Is that smile still a fraud?
“Hmm,” he said, dubious.
“Plus, most mediums end up fudging a bit, now and then. People pressure you to come up with something, no matter how crummy your day’s been or how rude they are or anything.” I told him about the intercom in our house in New Orleans, and about poor Miss Beryl. A lot of times, I said, what seems most faked to you can turn out to be the most true, and the most helpful. That, anyway, was how I saw it.
But what changed his mind, in the end, I think, was me. He came to message services and Circle Nights and watched me. Once I even had a message for him. It was during the four o’clock meeting at the Forest Temple.
I liked the Forest Temple—it was made of white painted wood, just an archway with a back on it, rather like an oversized shrine, with the words FOREST TEMPLE in old-fashioned green lettering—but it was right off Seneca Street. From the platform I could see tourists walking by with their dogs, and the old men coming in and out of Ferd’s grocery. It made it hard to concentrate. Peter sat in the back, the shadows of leaves moving over him.
“Peter. I have your father.”
Did I? I had a presence. I wanted it to be Peter’s father, and it might have been. Sometimes a presence was all I had to work with.
I told him something fairly general: how much he loved Peter, how Peter should study hard but remember there are things more important than school, and that he had to be careful not to become too self-absorbed.
“You know what I mean,” I added.
Afterward, Peter came up to me, furious. “My father would never say anything like that,” he said, eyes narrowed. “Fucking never.” There was a bright-red splotch on each of his sharp cheekbones.
“How do you know?” I said, just as angry. “Just because he never did doesn’t mean he didn’t want to. And what he said was true, wasn’t it?”
He didn’t say anything. “Peter,” I went on. “I don’t have a father, either. I know it’s hard…”
He turned and kicked one of the benches, emptied now of old ladies and impressionable teens. “You never had a father,” he said bitterly. “I had one and lost him. It’s not the same at all.” He took a breath. “Look,” he said, calmer now. “I want to believe this. You don’t know how badly I want to believe this stuff. But I can’t.”
“If you want to, you can.”
He looked at me, anguished. His eyes filled with tears. And then, while I watched, Peter’s face fell apart. It was almost as if the structures that held it together, the jawbones and snooty brow and arching nose bone, had been taken away and replaced with a meltable substance—wax, maybe, or ice. Something was happening to Peter; something in him was breaking down. It didn’t last long. After a few moments he pulled himself together. But that face was never quite the same.
“Fuck,” he said. “I’m in love with you.”
After that, Peter relaxed a little. He took the Kirlian photography workshop that Nelson was teaching and told me he wasn’t even going to bother thinking up a scientific explanation for the strange, bright auras on the film. He met me for lunch after message services, and we discussed the good parts and bad parts, sharing pie and coffee. He even seemed to gain some weight. Everything about him softened; his hair even lay flatter against his head.
The first time we had sex, I didn’t like it much. Peter was thorough and clinical and removed. “It’s like you’re hammering nails into the wall,” I complained. He was good-natured enough to laugh. But the sex changed, too, and before long we were having it up against trees in the woods, and in my rowboat, and in t
he bathtub on the third floor of the Silverwood. Our times together became charged. I’d slept with boys in high school—a long-haired soccer player named Ryan Forbes, and a boy named Preston Venn, who was obsessed with computers—but it never interested me. Having sex, I thought, was not much different from playing volleyball or swimming laps in the pool: a lot of effort for nothing. I had trouble concentrating on it. But sex with Peter was its own form of concentration, like concentrating with your body and mind and eyes and mouth all at once. I’d never felt so absorbed.
We noticed that the places we’d had sex seemed, every time we came back to them, weirdly haunted. If we passed a spot in the woods where we’d done it, something hummed in our ears, and the air felt thicker. This erotic fog began filling Train Line, rolling off the lake and out of the woods and filling up places we’d never been, let alone had sex in. It rolled out of the Silverwood bathroom and down the stairs and into the lobby, where old women sat crocheting with their purses on their laps and old men read back issues of Spirit Light Monthly. Soon we’d barely have time to walk up the wooden porch steps, set foot on the lobby carpet, before we nearly suffocated with the thought of making love. Anything could set us off; the swirly pink-and-yellow spirit art in the cafeteria, the sound of wind blowing through pine branches. Poor Nelson Karp left for Princeton early, as soon as his workshop was over. His missed Diane, he said—she never did come and visit.
As fall loomed, we became more and more preoccupied with each other. My readings and messages were all for Peter, though I had to pretend, most of the time, that they were for someone else. It was only Peter’s mind I was in, and only Peter’s spirits that held any interest for me. And, for Peter, I was the only thing he wanted to look at, see, or touch. His history books were lost somewhere beneath the bed.
It was the end of August when he had to leave. His teaching assistantship at the university was about to start, and he’d been getting letters about his scholarship that he opened, read, and dropped on the floor of his room. We both felt it coming but didn’t say anything, until one afternoon Peter asked me if I’d drive him to the train station the next morning.
