The Edge of the Light

by Elizabeth George

  The talent agent had an office in the downtown area, above a shop called Dusty Strings, where handmade musical instruments were sold. They’d spotted this as they drove around looking for a place to park, and once they found a spot, they had a hike in front of them to get back to it.

  Prynne was still out of it. No way could Seth keep claiming she was just sleeping off a bad night. Jackson opened the driver’s door, got out, leaned back in, and shot a look at Prynne where she remained sprawled across Seth’s lap. He said, “What the hell, Seth. What’s she on?” and when Seth tried to make an excuse, Dane opened the back door of the RAV4 and grabbed Prynne’s shoulder bag before Seth could protest.

  He dumped its contents onto the floor of the vehicle, at Seth’s feet. He pawed among them and then he swore as he grabbed up a small labeled bottle and tossed it to Jackson. “Oh great, oh too perfect, oh hell,” Jackson said. “Weed oil, man. She’s downed half the bottle.”

  Seth wanted to say, stupidly, that it wasn’t against the law. Weed oil came in various strengths, depending on what you wanted it for, and Prynne was old enough to buy it, so what was everyone freaking out about? That’s what he wanted to say, but he didn’t because when Jackson passed the bottle to him, he saw that for some insane reason Prynne had scored the strongest of the oils and according to the label it was intended to help you sleep.

  His first reaction was that he wanted to kill her. His second was to tell the two other guys that he would handle everything. They should head in the direction of the talent agent’s office, he told them. He’d get Prynne straightened out and meet them there.

  When Jackson’s response to this was, “Get her straightened out how, man?” Seth told him just to leave it to him. He added, “C’n you take our instruments? We’ll catch up,” and when Dane said under his breath “Like that’s going to do any good,” Seth said, “Hey, back off.”

  Dane retorted with, “No way is she going to be able to play.”

  “She’ll play. Just get going, okay?”

  Once they were out of sight, Seth heaved Prynne out of the vehicle. He stood her upright, and this was enough to get her to open her eyes. He snapped at her, “What the hell, Prynne. Why did you do this?”

  She squinted at him. “I tried to tell you . . .” was all she could get out.

  “What?” he demanded. “That you had to get stoned because you’re just so totally nervous? I believe that like I believe . . . I don’t even know what. Like I believe anything you ever say because obviously everything you say is a lie because why would you do this?”

  He started her walking in the direction of Dusty Strings. She stumbled a bit but she was able to walk. She said, “Sorry, sorry,” but the words were a mumble. “I didn’t know it would . . .”

  “Like hell you didn’t,” Seth replied. “Like you couldn’t have just done a little weed, huh? It had to be the oil. And not only the oil but the strongest, right? You had to have the strongest on this day of all days? I can’t even believe you’re real.”

  They came to an espresso bar. Seth ducked in quickly and bought her a double. He stood there on the sidewalk and made her drink it. Then he went inside and bought another. He didn’t know if it would do any good, but he had to try something, and this was the something that came to his mind. Once she’d drunk them both, they walked on. He had nothing more to say to her. He felt like a dog she’d decided to kick.

  Upstairs at Dusty Strings, they found Jackson and Dane in a reception area of the agent’s office. They weren’t the only ones there. A lady cellist and her guitarist partner were also waiting, and Seth recognized them from Whidbey. Steamer Constant was also in the reception area, having just come out of an inner office as Prynne and Seth entered. She frowned when she saw them and said, “Is she okay?” in reference to Prynne. He said, “She got real sick last night. She didn’t want to come today, but I talked her into it.”

  “Will she be able to play?”

  “Think so,” Seth said.

  “I c’n play,” Prynne added.

  Luckily, the cellist and the guitarist went first, so they had extra time for Prynne to recover. She walked back and forth in the reception area. Jackson and Dane wouldn’t look at her.

  She began to tune her fiddle as the others saw to their own instruments. She had some trouble with the bow and with the tuning keys and when she finally said, “That’s close enough,” Dane rolled his eyes and Jackson swore under his breath. The cellist and guitarist continued to play energetically inside the agent’s office.

  When they finally emerged, they were all smiles, casting thank-yous over their shoulders. One of them said good luck to Triple Threat, and that was it. Their time had come. Seth could only hope that Prynne’s recovery was sufficient to allow her to shine.

  The agent was a tattooed woman given to lots of fringe that hung about her clothes in a leather rainfall. Her name was Freda Windsarm, which suggested Native American birth, but she didn’t look even vaguely Native American since her hair was bleached to the point of no turning back and her skin was so pale she looked like one of those Japanese dancers who wear white masks. She was at the window of her office, blowing cigarette smoke into the street below, and when she said to them, “Give me a sec,” they had a chance to check out the space, which was characterized by photographs galore: Freda with Kurt Cobain, Freda with Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, Freda with Snoop Dogg, Freda with Jay Z, Freda with Britney, Freda with Cher, Freda with Queen Latifah, Freda with Michael Jackson, and on and on. It was sort of strange, Seth thought, because in each picture she looked exactly the same no matter how long ago it had been taken.

  They set up to play for her in an area designated for this: a square of hardwood floor sitting beneath an enormous poster from Star Wars, Han Solo and Chewbacca at the controls of the Millennium Falcon. By the time they were ready, so was Freda Windsarm. She sat down behind her desk, gave them a nod, and said, “Let’s see what you’ve got then, Triple Threat.”

  • • •

  NOT MUCH, AS things turned out. What they had wasn’t a disaster, as Jackson and Dane had thought it would be. But what they had was marginal. Prynne did her best, but her performance was riddled with mistakes that the rest of them tried to cover. And even when Freda Windsarm said with a frown, “Let’s have the fiddler sit the next one out,” the rest of them were so stressed that they weren’t anywhere in the same hemisphere as their best. Thus all of them knew what the outcome would be even before Freda Windsarm said it: “We’ll be in touch. Thanks for coming in,” after which she shot a look at Steamer Constant that clearly said, What the hell were you thinking?

  They plodded back to the SUV in silence: stony on the part of Jackson and Dane, sorrowful on the part of Prynne, crushed on the part of Seth. It wasn’t till they got to the vehicle and piled inside that Jackson turned to Prynne and said, “You sabotaged us. Happy about that?” For a moment no one said anything. Then Jackson went with a choice epithet said under his breath, which caused Seth to spring to Prynne’s defense with a “Hey, back off,” which caused Dane to suggest Seth would say or do anything just as long as he got laid. This put Seth into a real state—Hey, what do you think? That his thing with Prynne was all about sex or something? he demanded—which caused Dane to remark, “You said it, we didn’t, man,” which caused Prynne to say “I tried to tell you,” which caused Jackson to shout, “Shut up, Prynne,” which made Seth want to punch his lights. He made a lunge for him, but Prynne put a stop to that.

  “It’s not Seth’s fault! It’s mine!” she cried, and having said that she dumped out her shoulder bag, found the bottle of weed oil, and drank the rest of it in front of all of them.

  31

  Becca began to understand that a quickening was happening, just as the book given to her by Diana Kinsale had explained. After the Mutt Strut, she pulled that book—Seeing Beyond Sight—from the bookshelf in Ralph Darrow’s former bedroom that n
ow was hers. She opened it, and she refreshed her memory with the words: “A verbal exploration and subsequent interpretation of the visions will lead the visionary to propel events forward to a safe, desired, or happy conclusion that might not otherwise occur should the visions not be explored completely and understood with a sharp degree of accuracy. This is what we call a quickening.”

  The quickening appeared to be going on everywhere. It was as if everyone’s life was geared up so that Becca could see exactly what was happening. How to propel events forward so that the conclusion would be a good one, though . . . ? That was trickier. And how the quickening applied to her own life was trickier still.

  When she’d arrived back at Grand’s house after seeing Mrs. Banks and her grandchildren, the first thing she’d done was to make certain that she was interpreting things correctly. She waited till she and Grand were alone on the porch, where he’d indicated he wanted to sit and enjoy the sight of his garden. By his side on the bench beneath one of the windows, she said, “Banks is a person, isn’t she? You didn’t mean banks like in the places where people put their money. You meant banks as in So-and-so Banks. She was at the Mutt Strut today with her grandkids.”

  Ralph was slightly slumped on the bench but as she spoke, his spine became straighter. He smiled lopsidedly and said, “Go banks.”

  What at once accompanied these hesitant words was a vision: papers spread out, Ralph’s hands on either side of them. Becca thought of a will. Grand was of an age when a will would be a crucial thing to have. But why this was important to him now when he was alive and kicking, she didn’t know. Unless he wanted to change that will. Or unless he knew that he wasn’t going to be alive and kicking very much longer, which was a thought she couldn’t bear addressing. But say it was a will. Shouldn’t there be a copy somewhere? In the house, maybe, locked in some kind of box that was fireproof? Except wouldn’t it be smarter to have that box somewhere else, beyond the house? She thought of the possibilities for this, but there seemed to be only two: Ralph’s workshop and his garden shed.

  She said to him, “Did Mrs. Banks make a will for you, Grand? Is that what you’ve been trying to tell us?”

  “Houch,” he said.

  She said, “Houch?”

  Ralph slapped his good hand against the building behind them. “Houch,” he said. “Banks. Houch.”

  “Oh God, of course!” she cried. “House. Mrs. Banks did something about a house. Can you tell me what?”

  “Pay,” was all he said. He sounded desperate to be understood.

  Banks, a woman, a drive through the forest, a stairway up the side of a cedar-shingled building that clearly looked like a house. Those were the clues Becca had. She knew she needed to work upon them to bring events concerning Seth’s grandfather to a conclusion that didn’t destroy his family.

  Mrs. Kinsale had told Becca that she couldn’t do anything about her visions until the time when she was fully able to block whispers without aid of the AUD box. But what Becca told herself now was that desperate times called for desperate action, and these were desperate times, especially for Grand.

  But they were also desperate times for Jenn, and Becca had known this the moment Jenn had brought up Mr. Sawyer’s visit to Jenn’s home. She’d also known what was coming before Jenn had made her request to couch surf at Mr. Darrow’s. What she hadn’t been able to tell her friend, though, was that she—Becca—could not bring more drama or even the potential for drama into Ralph Darrow’s life. She couldn’t risk it, not only because of his health and what stress could do to it but also because if Brenda Sloan found out that someone was couch surfing in her father’s house, she would have yet another reason to plant incendiary devices along the path of Grand’s recovery. Becca had intended to tell Jenn this, but her friend had walked off in anger before she could do so.

  She’d realized soon enough that there was someone else who might be able to help out, however. But because she didn’t want to get Jenn’s hopes up until she knew for sure, she had to talk to Diana Kinsale first.

  • • •

  JENN’S SITUATION, ALONG with Becca’s growing understanding of what Ralph Darrow was trying to tell her, was not the only sign that a quickening was fast approaching. The next day at school, Derric was waiting to talk to her at the end of her first class.

  Wordlessly, he dropped his arm around her shoulder and they walked in the direction of her next class. She fastened her arm around his waist, and he kissed the side of her head and said, “I showed her the letters. She didn’t want to look at them at first. But I wouldn’t budge and I wouldn’t get into it with her till she read them. It took, like, I don’t know . . . it took a while.”

  “And?”

  “She cried. I cried.” Derric’s face said he was reliving the moment and so did Becca, for she saw the vision of Rejoice sitting on the swinging bench on her family’s front porch, and she held in her lap a stack of letters that Becca recognized only too well. Then the vision was gone because Derric went on. “I took the album with me when I went. You know which one?”

  “The one your mom made that shows your adoption and coming to the island?”

  “We went through it, and she saw how it was: how I met them, Mom and Dad; how Mom kept coming to Kampala as long as it took for the adoption to go through; how everyone was at the airport when we finally got there; how I grew up. And the rest was there, too, pictures Mom took at the orphanage. Rejoice was in them, just one kid along with the rest of us. And I was . . . Becca, I was never looking at her. Never. She cried about that, too, and so did I. I told her how sorry I was. I said I hated myself for what I did, leaving her like that. But I think she could see—Rejoice could see—that I meant everything because what she said was . . .” A muscle worked in his jaw. “She said she could see it’d been way harder for me than it had been for her because she didn’t remember she had a brother while I knew all the time I had a sister.”

  “Whoa, that’s nice,” Becca said. “Bet that helps her let it go, Der. Do her parents know? Did you guys tell them?”

  “I got to tell my own parents first. I’ve been waiting for the moment, but I’ll do it.”

  She raised her eyebrows. This had always been the real issue for Derric: telling his parents. He caught her expression and said, “I’m ready. I want them to meet her. I just want things to be normal.”

  Normal was the key, Becca thought. Wanting things to be normal seemed to be the theme of everything going on around her.

  This was what she understood when she saw Diana Kinsale that afternoon. She’d phoned Prynne at Ralph’s house and she’d asked if a couple of extra hours there would be asking too much, since Prynne had been there since seven that morning. Prynne said, “Oh . . . I was hoping . . . Before Seth gets home . . .” But then she changed course with, “No problem. It’s okay.”

  She went to Diana. She found her kneeling in her front garden, planting primroses along the flagstone path to the front door. As Becca watched, she nearly tipped over as she got to her feet. Becca hurried forward to help her up.

  Diana sighed. “I hate this damn business of getting old.” She was wearing her baseball cap and an old South Whidbey High School letterman’s jacket. She had a scarf around her neck and heavy gloves on her hands, although the day didn’t call for this much protection. “Is this a practice day? Have I forgotten?”

  “Nope. I just wanted to talk to you. I can come back later if you’re too busy.”

  Oscar had been lying on the lawn, head on paws, watching Diana. He’d risen as Becca helped Diana to her feet and now he came to her.

  Someday soon came from Diana in perfect clarity as did can’t take something from a younger person.

  “What’s there to take from a younger person?” Becca asked her.

  Diana stopped walking on their route toward the mudroom door. “You weren’t supposed to hear that.”

 
“Was I supposed to block you? You didn’t say.”

  “No, no,” Diana told her. “It’s fine.” Must be more careful. “The power you have is growing. Let’s do a little practice.”

  “Shouldn’t we go into the house for it? Shouldn’t we be in your room?”

  “Perhaps. But to block successfully, you must be able to do it anywhere. Why don’t you try it here and now and see what happens?”

  So Becca began the mantra: Empty of all there is, there is. Empty of all there is. She glanced at Diana to see that she looked placid. They walked steadily toward the back of the house where the view was expansive and there was plenty to distract her and to disrupt her blocking. Becca kept with the mantra and then released it slowly to see what would happen.

  Nothing. She held on to it. Again, nothing. She locked herself to the nothing. Blocking the whispers like this made her start to sweat. It made her heart pound. She began to feel like a runner near the end of a race.

  Next to her Diana stumbled. The blocking was gone and how much more was what Becca heard. When she took Diana’s elbow to keep her steady, what she saw was tubing going into an arm. This tubing ran from the arm to a large machine. A second or two, then the vision was gone. But it was enough to tell Becca what she’d known without wanting to know for at least a year.

  She said at once before she could lose her courage, “Mrs. Kinsale, are you sick? Do you have cancer or something?”

  Diana glanced at her. She smiled one of those fond relative-not-your-mom smiles. “Or something,” she said.

  “Are you . . .” Becca didn’t even want to say it.

  Diana did so. “Dying? Not yet. But I will eventually. Just like everyone.”