by Noel Hynd
Annette hesitated.
But Mrs. Ritter’s voice was kindly, patient and convincing. “How much time do I have left before I die?” she asked. “How many opportunities will I have when you come by? Please,” she urged. “It’s very important. Please come upstairs for five minutes. Then you can leave.”
Annette gave it a final second’s thought. “All right,” she eventually agreed.
With difficulty, Helen Ritter rose from her chair. Annette offered her a hand of support. The old woman accepted it. Mrs. Ritter moved slowly. Annette was patient with her. They walked into the home and past the receptionist who gave Annette a friendly smile after an initial hesitation. Then the two women walked to the elevator.
On the second floor, where Mrs. Ritter lived, they passed the porter, Mike Silva. Annette remembered him from the previous Sunday. Silva barely raised an eye to Mrs. Ritter, but gave Annette a full double take. He stared at her the way certain men often stare at women whom they know are unattainable. Annette felt his eyes upon her, following her down the hall toward Mrs. Ritter’s chamber. For no real reason, Mike Silva gave Annette the creeps.
The door to Mrs. Ritter’s room was open. They went into the room and both sat down, Mrs. Ritter in her usual chair. She fumbled for a pair of glasses. It took many painful seconds for her to find them, put them on and allow her eyes to adjust. Then she turned her back to Annette for a moment and reached to a small brown radio that was on her writing desk. She flicked it on. The dial was already set to a “Beautiful Music” station from Cape Cod.
“Much more cheerful like this, isn’t it?” the retired schoolteacher said.
“Much,” Annette agreed.
On the radio, a chorus of homogenized voices mutilated a selection of Franz Lehar. When Mrs. Ritter wasn’t looking, Annette turned the volume down. Helen
Ritter’s attention then landed with a thud upon the checkerboard table a few yards beyond her reach.
“See that little table over there?” she asked.
Annette said that she saw it.
“Slide it over to me.”
At first Annette couldn’t figure out what the old woman had on her agenda. But the request seemed harmless. Annette went to the table. There was a small pink vase bearing a red plastic rose on top of it. Annette removed it and placed it on the old woman’s writing desk. Then Annette pushed the antique table to Mrs. Ritter.
“Know what we used to do with this table?” the retired teacher asked. She didn’t wait for an answer. “Communicate with the spirits.”
“What?”
“Communicate with the spirits,” Mrs. Ritter repeated. “Conjure up the dead.”
For a moment, Annette thought she had misunderstood. Then an ominous feeling was upon her when she realized that she hadn’t.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Annette finally lied.
“Sounds very clear to me,” Mrs. Ritter said gently. Her aged arthritic fingers were working around the edges of the table now. There was something very authoritative about the way she was touching the piece. A lifetime of familiarity, perhaps. A sense of mastery. The old woman’s eyes rose quickly, found Annette’s, then returned to where her fingers seemed to take the inanimate object’s pulse.
“I used to talk to my grandmother with this table,” she said as routinely as if she were revealing the time of day. “Grandma Lizzie. Born in Inverness. You should have heard her brogue.” Mrs. Ritter laughed. “Grandma Lizzie died in nineteen hundred and thirteen.”
“Uh huh.”
Annette disbelieved. But she felt a chill anyway.
Mrs. Ritter raised her eyes again. “Don’t believe me, do you?”
“I…”
“You will. Eventually.” Mrs. Ritter pursed her lips, hummed for two seconds, then continued. “Wouldn’t matter right now, anyway, whether you believed in it or not. We’re one person short.”
Annette felt a second chill that was even deeper. “One person short for what?”
But Mrs. Ritter didn’t hear. Or didn’t choose to hear. “I used to do this when I was a little girl,” she said. “My mother owned this table. You need three people who believe. That’s what I meant when I said we’d still be one person short, even if you believed. This part is very important, you see. Six hands. Three people. The right amount of heartbeats. The correct number of palms. Or maybe it’s fingertips. Or maybe it’s just the number three. A trinity. I think that’s what makes it work. The right equation.” There was a longer pause and she concluded. “The right amount of blood.”
The old woman seemed convinced of what she was saying. “My sister, Mother and I,” she said. “We used to do it together on Saturday evenings.” She paused. “Then my mother died in nineteen sixty-one and another lady joined us. My sister and I and this other lady. A Mrs. Prouty. She lived over on Orange Street. Lovely woman. But she died, too. Then my sister died. No one’s done it since.”
“Done it?”
“Turned the table,” Mrs. Ritter said. “Not for twenty-five, thirty years.”
Then the old woman explained. She spoke like a schoolteacher embarking upon a lesson. And her memory was as compendious as her body was spare. But surely she loved her memory more, for she had apparently packed into it the treasures of a lifetime. Now she put everything aside to unburden it.
She brought it all back in minute detail. It was her mother who taught her about “turning tables,” she said.
The latter had been a vogue in New England a few generations back, sort of like the great wave of revivalism in the 1920s or the public fixation upon reincarnation in the 1950s. And it all had begun when Helen Ritter was about fifteen years old. Or, as she might have alternatively phrased it, Year One of her lifelong involvement with her checkerboard table.
“Oh, I was a pretty little thing then, I was,” Helen said, tilting her head slightly. “Just becoming aware of myself.” Unconsciously, she dangled one stiff wrist coquettishly, perhaps recalling a series of adolescent indiscretions that she did not regret. “I married when I was seventeen,” she said with a laugh. But that, Annette could tell, was another story.
Helen Ritter had grown up in Fall River, Massachusetts, before moving to Nantucket in the 1930’s. As a girl, she, her sister and her mother would seat themselves in a darkened room in the Fall River homestead. They would sit around the checkerboard table, eyes closed, thoughts in unison, gently resting their eager devout fingers on its surface.
“‘Come forth! Any spirit in our home, benevolent or evil!’ my mother would call out,” Helen Ritter proclaimed. “Very loud and clear, in a voice like that. Have to let the spirits know you mean business. If a spirit was present, the table would start to move.”
“Uh huh,” said Annette.
“Sometimes it would rise. Other times it would move from side to side. But always the table would turn or tip. Then it would move one leg. It would tap out a message.”
Most tables didn’t work, Mrs. Ritter explained. Waste of time trying to levitate a normal table. But the checkerboard table would move. It always did—as long as there were three believers around it. A spirit would come forth. A message would be sounded out.
Tap, tap. Tap. Tap, tap, tap.
They would have the alphabet written out on a piece of paper, Mrs. Ritter recalled, and they would point to letters. One tap meant they were pointing to the wrong letter. Two taps meant they were right. It was always proper to have a pencil and a second sheet of paper handy. Spirits didn’t send telegrams. They beat out their thoughts with table legs.
“My blood ran cold the first time it happened,” the old woman recalled. “Then I realized it was the ordinary course of things. Never bothered me again.”
Annette Carlson sat very still and listened.
“A message could take fifteen minutes to an hour,” Mrs. Ritter sang, enjoying this tale as she weaved it. “Then we’d reply with words spoken aloud. Always made a big evening of it, us three ladies. My poor father, he wanted no part. Said we we
re foolish. Didn’t believe. Or he was afraid to believe. Could never tell which.”
She spoke now either from memory or from something that closely resembled it. And she spent several minutes—recollecting with remarkable clarity—conversations between her mother and her then-deceased grandmother, trivial tipping table chitchats that must have occurred seventy years into the unlovely past. To Annette’s creative mind, the old woman’s ramblings were many times wilder than she ever might have imagined.
Aside from Grandma Lizzie, Helen Ritter forged onward by way of explanation, a legion of other spirits had exchanged greetings from time to time as well.
There had been a Union soldier from the Civil War, she remembered, unable to rest because his fiancé had married another man while he starved to death at Andersonville. There had been a merchant seaman, looking for a family that had been wiped out by influenza while he had voyaged two years around Cape Horn. There was a young woman who had hanged herself and was sorry ever after. And once, Helen Ritter said chillingly but with no further elaboration, they had conjured up an aggressive spirit which identified itself only as Tib. Helen Ritter had believed at the time that Tib was a demon. Something from a nether world. So had her mother. So they shoved the table into a downstairs pantry and stored canned goods upon it. They stayed away from its mystical qualities for several months. Tib never returned.
“Come forth any spirit in our home,” Helen Ritter repeated aloud, as she sat in her chamber at Mid Island Convalescent. Then she laughed. She threw her head back and blood rushed to her face.
“Know what I believe?” Mrs. Ritter asked Annette. She didn’t wait for an answer. “I think that God’s universe is a much stranger, more complicated place than science is willing to recognize. And I think that spirits are around us all the time. Good ones and evil ones. Right now, for example. Watching us. Laughing at us. Close enough to brush against our cheeks, if they wished. But only occasionally, only under the right circumstances can we make contact.”
Annette felt that uneasy tingle again. Mrs. Ritter glanced toward the table. Lovingly, she ran her stiff fingers across the top of it. She traced a pair of parallel lines in a light covering of dust. She was breathing more heavily now, perhaps not from any one emotion but from a whole slew of them, washing around within her like mixed drinks.
On the radio came a fifteen-second spot ad for a variety store in Hyannis that boasted Cape Cod’s largest selection of postcards and souvenir items. They also sold overstuffed sandwiches.
“This table, combined with the right believers, dearie,” Mrs. Ritter explained. “Those are the proper circumstances.” She smiled sweetly, her eyes open again and alert. “That’s all I wanted to say,” she said. “I’m tired. I’m going to rest now.” There was only a second’s pause before she concluded. “I’ve said all I need to for this lifetime. Don’t you agree?”
Annette didn’t specifically answer. Mrs. Ritter’s eyes glazed and narrowed. She hummed again, her fingers still on the tabletop, as if she were caressing the hand of a beloved but long lost child.
Annette did not want to leave her just like that in her room. On the radio, the announcer was now covering news headlines and sports. But Mrs. Ritter was swaying ever so imperceptibly to the measures of a symphony that only she could hear. So Annette gently removed Mrs. Ritter’s hand from the table. Her eyes flickered slightly as Annette eased her arm back into her lap. She smiled with gratitude but suddenly seemed exhausted. Then Annette moved the checkerboard table back to its position against the wall. She replaced the pink bud vase on top of it.
Annette glanced again at her host. Mrs. Ritter’s face was content now and she seemed to drift into a peaceful sleep. Her breathing was even and peaceable. Very quietly, Annette left the room.
A few moments later, Annette stepped into the elevator which would take her from the second floor to the lobby. The door closed. Mike Silva, the porter, was in the elevator with her. Mike shook his head as he punched the button for the lobby.
“Daffy old hen, huh?” Mike said.
“Who?”
“Mrs. Ritter,” Silva said. “I seen you in her room.”
Annette said nothing, trying to determine whether Silva would eventually move the subject to films.
“More trouble than they’re worth, keepin’ them alive,” the porter muttered.
“You’re in a rotten mood today, aren’t you?” Annette shot back, her tolerance eroded.
“Nah. I’m just talkin’ the truth. Stuff most people are ’fraid to say. Lot of people today live too long, know what I mean?”
“And who decides what ‘too long’ is?” Annette asked. Silva gave her a pained expression. “Not me or this place would be empty,” Silva said.
The elevator rose an extra floor. The door opened on Three. No one got in or out.
“You work here, don’t you?” Annette asked.
“Yeah.” Silva brushed a renegade lock of hair away from his forehead.
“So having these old people here pays your salary, doesn’t it?”
The door closed slowly.
“Yeah,” Mike Silva said, quickly grasping the direction of Annette’s remarks. “Hey, look. I don’t mean nothin’ by it. I’m jus’ the type of guy that says what’s on my mind.”
“So I see.” Annette was willing to let the conversation drop right there. Silva wasn’t.
“She show you that table of hers?” Mike asked. “The ‘checkerboard table.’ I bet she showed you that.”
“She might have. Why?”
The elevator moved slowly downward, past the second floor. It approached the first. There was a mean-spirited glee in Silva’s eye. “That means, yes, she did,” Silva concluded petulantly. “Did she say how it used to rise into the air?” he asked. “She tell you how she and her sister used to fly the lousy thing?”
“She told me a story about it.”
“She claims she flew it.”
“She didn’t say it,” Annette answered with a sinking feeling and more than a touch of annoyance. “According to what she said, the table rose gently off the ground.”
And she conversed with the departed, Annette might have added. But she didn’t.
“Yeah. Sure,” Mike Silva chortled. “She flew it.”
The door to the lobby opened. The porter stepped out of the elevator first, directly in front of Annette.
“Well, don’t that tell you how daffy she is?” Silva insisted impatiently. “I been workin’ here for five years and I never seen that table do no lift-off from the ground yet.” He laughed. “And probably won’t, either, unless someone’s got one on strings.”
“You never know,” Annette said.
A funny thought passed through Annette’s mind. Of course the checkerboard table wouldn’t levitate for Mike Silva. Never in the world.
Mrs. Ritter’s concise instructions echoed: To tip an enchanted table, to contact the dead, you needed at least three believers. On most days it was challenge enough to locate two. So Annette continued toward the front door, giving no voice to her thoughts. And Mike Silva seemed smitten with the intellectual tidiness of his argument.
“Crazy old dame,” Annette heard him repeating as she walked down the front steps and away from Mid Island Convalescent. “Crazy, crazy, crazy.”
Chapter Nineteen
On the other side of the island, Tim Brooks sat in the bedroom of the small cottage he had purchased three years earlier. He stared at the screen of a television set. The Red Sox were playing Tampa Bay that evening at Fenway. The game was in the third inning and, if asked, Brooks could not have told the score. A deep pain had been growing within his head over the last several days. Since the last time he went by 17 Cort Street, in fact. Now it was turning serious. A throbbing, pounding right up front across the bridge of his nose.
He began to ask: What’s wrong with me?
Walks didn’t help. Extra sleep didn’t help. Some recreational tennis hadn’t done the job, either. He called friends. Other
cops and civilians. How do you get rid of a titanic headache, he asked.
They offered suggestions.
Go for a long swim in very cold water.
Four aspirin and a Pepsi Cola.
Apply an ice pack.
Vicodin, Vicodin and more Vicodin.
Empirin with codeine, by prescription.
If the Empirin with codeine doesn’t work, try a Vicodin with a Red Bull.
Lie in a very dark room for an hour.
Go see a favorite movie.
Booze.
Go see a lousy movie.
Get your girlfriend to do something new and perverse. But he didn’t have a girlfriend and none of the earlier methods worked, either.
On the third night of suffering, Brooks attempted to manufacture his own remedy.
He iced two bottles of Stella Artois and grilled a steak. He planned to rise early the next morning and run five miles. Then he would will the headache away. The sheer force of positive thinking, exercise and clean air would put him back on track.
He ate dinner. The Rex Sox lost. Later, toward ten thirty P.M., he found his most comfortable pair of pajamas. They were clean and fresh, neatly folded in a drawer. He showered and dressed for bed. He took an Ambien and pulled his phone off the hook. He was sending himself off early in the direction of dreamland.
It turned into a night of terror.
At first he was unable to fall asleep, despite the alcohol and despite the drug. Then, toward eleven o’clock, he felt himself drifting. But this wasn’t any ordinary sleep.
He entered this strange realm by being conscious that he was falling asleep. Then he experienced a sense of tumbling, a feeling of having passed over the edge of some precipice. He had a sense of floating downward through a passageway that grew dimmer by the second.
He was in a half world—half awake, half asleep.
At first, this sensation was accompanied by one of deep tranquility. But then the passageway grew dark. The tranquility was gone and the place he was in frightened him. He moved his arms to stop his descent.
