Talking to the Dead

by Bonnie Grove

  “Things got a whole lot worse,” I mumbled, thinking of the warning Maggie had given me three months ago.

  She gave my hand a soft rub of sympathy. “It breaks my heart to see you here, duck.” Then she poked my hand with two quick fingers. “But you can get out, start your life anew.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to do, Maggie. All this time I’ve been trying to start my life over, and look where I’ve ended up.”

  Maggie rested her chin on the knuckles of her right fist. “I’ve been chatting with your mother and sister. They’ve told me about the terrible time you’ve had. And I agree, you’re in a bad place.” She paused, and for a moment she looked like the matronly aunt of the famous sculpture The Thinker. “But you didn’t get to this place by trying to create a new life for yourself.”

  I looked at her, startled.

  She gave a sad smile. “No, dear, you got here by trying to wrestle with the past. Trying to change what was into something else.”

  A static-filled voice on the intercom filled the room. Visiting hours were over. Maggie pushed up from her chair and stretched her back. “I’m praying for you, Kate.”

  I knew I was supposed to say thank you. But I wanted to say, “Save your breath.” The mention of God conjured the image of The Reverend towering, glacial, smothering, hollering about my sin and filth. I wondered what Maggie would think about him. But I nodded and watched her as she left, dipping her head as she nudged past the security guard.

  I brooded about choices well into the evening. My future stretched out like a hallway lined with closed doors, each a possibility, leading somewhere. But which door to walk through? Which one would open for me, and which would slam in my face?

  Choices. What choices had I made? I’d been in therapy for months, but always a reluctant participant. I had talked in the hallowed privacy of Dr. Alexander’s sumptuous office, but had refused all other treatment methods he prescribed. I had attended group therapy, but never shared my story, never shared myself with the others. Fear had held me back from participating.

  And Jack. I’d gotten more from the time spent with him than all the others combined. His calm presence and easy manner always set me at ease. But I turned my back on him too. For all my talk of moving on with my life, all I’d managed was to drive everyone away.

  The next day, I lay on the nubby couch of the center’s therapy room, and Dr. Alexander counted backward from ten. When he got to five, he stopped counting and said, “Are you certain you want to try this today?”

  I didn’t move. “Yes, why?”

  “You’re gripping the edge of the cushion so hard your knuckles are white.”

  I loosened my hold and pulled in a long breath. “I’m fine. Really. I want to do this.”

  “Good, good,” Dr. Alexander murmured. “Let’s begin again, starting at ten.” He counted, I breathed. In moments I was looking at my mother’s cookie jar, floating in darkness.

  “Are you ready to reach into the jar, Kate?” Dr. Alexander’s voice came from far away, a pinpoint on the ceiling.

  “It’s just floating; I don’t like it hanging in space.”

  “Where would you like to take your jar? Take it somewhere pleasant.”

  The space around the jar opened, and bright sunlight poured in from every angle. The dark turned shimmering blue. Warmth surged and surrounded me and my cookie jar.

  I dangled my feet in the cool water of the outdoor pool my family visited every summer until I was seventeen. I was alone and the surface of the pool glistened with stillness. I held the jar on my lap and gazed into its murky interior. “Okay,” I said, my voice undulating like the ripples on the water. “I’m ready.”

  “Put your hand in the jar and feel the pieces of paper at the bottom.”

  I pushed my hand inside and instantly felt bits of paper brush against my hand. I stirred them around, then scooped a handful and let the bits of paper fall through my fingers like sand. “There are so many,” I said.

  “Choose one and read what you see on the paper.”

  I grabbed the smallest piece I could find, a tiny scrap that couldn’t hold many words. I pulled it out, so small it was a dot in my hand. I smiled at it, smiled at this harmless thing. Too minute to carry consequence. “I have one.”

  Dr. Alexander cleared his throat, and the sound floated down from his distant cloud. “When you’re ready, read the words on the paper.”

  I unfolded the bit of paper only to find it was folded again, then again. I kept unfolding, but the paper grew and grew. “I can’t find the words.” Each time I opened one fold, I found another. I moved my hands quickly over the paper, flipping and turning it until it was the size of a road map. Fear squeezed my heart. “They aren’t here,” I said, my voice high like a bird singing. “No words.”

  “You are calm, Kate. As you look at the paper, feel safe and peaceful.”

  I turned and lay down in the water, floating on my back. I held the paper above me, straight-armed to keep it dry. The warm water lapped around me, held me up as if I were made of cork. I looked at the paper above me as the words arranged themselves into neat rows. “It’s not mine,” I said.

  “All the memories in the jar are your memories, Kate.” Dr. Alexander’s voice reached my wet ears. He was below me now, a shadow at the bottom of the pool, like my father waiting to grab my ankles and toss me into the sky.

  I shook my head, water sloshing into my ears. “It’s not my memory. I don’t want this one.”

  His silence told me he would wait.

  I opened my hands and the paper floated away, a kite with no string. It drifted above me. Dipped and swayed. I crossed my arms over my chest and lay as a corpse in a casket, tears flowing from my eyes into the pool. “I didn’t mean for it to happen.” My heart pulsed against my palm. “I should have never—” I stopped.

  “Let the truth set you free, Kate,” he said, his words floating up in a bubble from the bottom of the pool. Then, another voice, soft and feminine. I couldn’t make out the words. She spoke to someone, not me, someone else. Who were they?

  They speak to each other in hushed tones. When they walk, their shoes make no noise. Everything is white and clean. An unsmiling woman speaks to me, only to me. They never look at Kevin or acknowledge him in any way. One woman, wearing nurse’s white, touches my arm and says, “Scared? You’ll be fine.”

  She leads me down a hall to another room. Kevin follows at a distance. If she notices him, she never lets on. She hands me a dressing gown and tells me to change, then I’m to lie down on the table.

  I fumble with the buttons on my blouse and the woman, the nurse, not Kevin, helps me. I cry softly as she pulls the blouse off my shoulders. “Can you do the rest yourself?”

  I nod.

  She looks out the window. “It’s snowing. Almost Christmastime. Do you like the snow?”

  I don’t know; I can’t answer. She leaves the room while I finish changing.

  I lie on the table and turn my head so I can watch the snow fall. I think about it covering the earth, the universe, until all of humanity is covered in a blanket of clean white snow. Kevin stands silent beside me. I’m glad he is here. Glad he is silent.

  The door opens and I hear voices. I squeeze my eyes shut.

  “I’m done after this,” one voice says. “Off for two weeks. Me and my sweetie are heading west. Taking in some skiing.” It’s the nurse who helped me undress.

  I’m cold.

  Another voice. “I can’t ski worth beans. Oh, she’s crying again.”

  A pat on my arm. “That’s okay, hon. Everybody cries sometimes.”

  They stop talking; I hear them move around the room, preparing for what will happen.

  I keep my eyes shut tight. I’m sobbing, my body jerking and hiccupping. I pray, “I’m so sorry.” Bu
t I think what I mean is, “Please don’t blame me.”

  The door opens again. A male voice. “Ready?”

  Everything is white.

  “Everything’s ready, doctor.”

  A click, like a switch turned on, and the air fills with the roar of a machine. “Just relax,” the doctor says. “Spread your knees a bit more.” The machine roars like the ocean. Then the sound changes, a slurping sound. I feel pressure—terrible pressure. I scream, a long keening sound, like a wolf.

  39

  My name blared over the intercom. I sighed and kicked the bedcovers off my stocking feet. It was too early for medication, so it meant someone was here to see me. Probably Mom, who had visited every day since my arrival at the psychiatric facility more than two weeks ago. I pulled on my jeans and threw a sweater over my T-shirt.

  I came around the corner and stopped short in front of the reception desk. Jack Slater stood, head bent, speaking to the woman behind the desk. He hadn’t seen me yet. He signed the visitor sheet and handed it back.

  If I turned and hustled back to my room, he wouldn’t see me, wouldn’t know I’d been there. Then he would leave and I would tell them I hadn’t heard the page, was in the shower, something. Jack looked up and gave a flat smile, the kind where you arrange your lips in the posture of a smile when you know it isn’t appropriate to be happy.

  I pushed my greasy hair away from my face, wishing I actually had taken a shower. I pulled at my loose-knit clothes and shuffled up to the desk. He reached for my hand, squeezed it, and let go, his hand warm and familiar. I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. And he simply watched, unhurried.

  Finally I said, “Want to walk the grounds?”

  “Sounds good.”

  We waited for a nurse to buzz us through the locked door. When it clicked open, I pushed the door hard and ran to the middle of the patio, as if they might change their mind and pull me back inside.

  Jack called, “Wait for me.” He smiled.

  We walked across the stone patio, down a grassy slope, and onto a sports field built so patients could play football or soccer, but I’d never seen anyone do anything but walk on it. We were silent and I was glad. I needed time to adjust to Jack being in this place, witnessing the worst of me. Obviously he’d tracked me down. How, I didn’t know, didn’t need to know. But I was glad he was here.

  “Have you ever had a time in your life when everything went wrong at once?” I said suddenly.

  Jack didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

  I studied his profile. “Oh?”

  “Sometimes I think my whole life is just everything going wrong at once.”

  My thoughts exactly. “But you’re a pastor.” And not locked in a nuthouse.

  Jack smiled. “I’m a pastor so I have everything figured out? Not even close.” He glanced at me. “Life is complex. People are complex.” He said it calmly; no need to get upset, kick up a fuss. Just accept it.

  “People,” I said. “I’d be perfectly happy in my life if it weren’t for other people.”

  He didn’t laugh. “There are days I think the same thing.” We walked on, our faces cooled by the October wind. “But, truth is, most people aren’t really evil. Most of us are just scared.”

  I thought of Donna, her cool matter-of-factness. “Evil isn’t scared of anything.”

  Jack looked at me for a moment then spoke slowly, as if each word was being measured and weighed out. “Sometimes evil comes through the front door, robs you blind, and laughs when you cry.”

  “But?”

  He looked straight ahead, squinting into the wind. “I don’t have a ‘but’ for you.”

  We fell into silence and I studied the grass with each step. “You’re handling yourself very well.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes. I walked out on you at the restaurant, but you still came here to see me.” I half turned to him, not quite able to look into his face. “And you don’t even seem nervous about being alone with someone who is being held here because she attacked a banker.”

  “I’m a pastor. I deal with crazy all the time,” Jack said. “And I know a lot of people who fantasize about attacking bankers.”

  I laughed. The sound, strange in my throat, was music in my ears. Despite my misgivings I’d missed him. “Can I buy you a coffee, Pastor Jack?”

  He grinned. “I’d love one.” We turned and made our way back to the center.

  I tapped the rim of Jack’s mug. “Actually the coffee here is free.”

  He took a sip. “Good. I’ll have two.”

  The dining room was much like you’d expect to see in a school or old-folks home. Rows of tables and chairs, floors waxed to maximum shine. We had scheduled hours for meals, but coffee and other beverages were always available. A homey touch in the middle of institutional hell. Jack and I were alone, two people in a sea of dining furniture. From the kitchen, sounds of food being prepared chimed.

  Jack ran a hand through his dark hair. “Can we talk about what happened with my father?”

  I pushed my spine into the back of my chair. A strange topic of conversation considering he’d come to visit me in a mental institution. Not that I wanted to talk about mental institutions either. “I don’t want to go through all of that again, Jack. I’m trying to move on.”

  He reached over the table, as if to grab my hands, but he stopped short. “Of course not. I don’t mean the details of what he did. I mean the fact that he’s my father and what that means—” he paused, “to … our friendship.”

  My heart pounded a heavy thud, then began to race. “I don’t—”

  He interrupted. “What my father did to you left you justifiably angry. And maybe turned you off of God completely.” He drew swirls on the table with his finger. “And the way you looked at me the last time we talked …”

  “I know you’re not like your father. It’s just—”

  “I’m nothing like him.” He punctuated this with a beseeching look, a sort of pleading. I wanted to smooth it from his face with my hands. He shouldn’t have felt the need to convince me he was different from his father. His kindness over the past months had proven that a hundredfold. It wasn’t Jack I questioned, it was God. I cast my eyes to the floor. “You say I’m loved by a holy God; your father calls me a filthy sinner.” I pulled my chair closer to the table. “Both of you believe you’re speaking for the same God. How can that be? How can one God be saying such opposite things?”

  Jack said, “My father did teach me about God, but over the years I’ve come to reject the way my father understands God.” He took another sip of coffee. “I don’t agree with the way he lives out what he believes. For him life is black and white, right and wrong.”

  “But not for you?”

  He shook his head. “My experiences have taught me to see shades of gray.”

  That caught my attention. “What experiences?”

  He spread his hands. “My story, like so many, begins with a girl.”

  Huh? I felt a pang, like a pinch. “A girl?”

  He leaned back and looked over my head, into his past, I assumed. “I had a girlfriend a few years ago. Fiancée, actually.”

  In my head I heard the sound that in the comics is spelled “Zonk.” I had only thought of Jack as just Jack. Alone. Virginal. Like Bambi’s dad in the movie, strong and distant and waiting on a cliff top. Unattached, as if he’d just appeared one day, new, unwritten. Now I tried to picture him with someone, holding her, kissing her, loving her. I shook my head. Better not to try to picture it.

  “She broke it off.” His fingers played around his mouth. “I had a hard time getting over it.”

  “I know what that’s like.” I arranged my face in what I hoped was a nonchalant expression. I had no idea what this had to do with God, but I didn’t care. I wanted
to hear this story. “Tell me about her.” I lifted a casual hand.

  He fixed me with a long gaze that was like waiting for the click from a reluctant photographer, Take the picture already. “It was ten years ago.” He shook his head, as if surprised by the number. “I was twenty, she was twenty-two. She was new to the city and to our church. The first time I saw her—” His eyes glistened at the memory. “Boom.”

  Boom? Oh, please. “You mean she was nice looking? Sort of attractive?”

  Jack fixed his gaze on the wall behind me as if his favorite movie was playing there. “Gorgeous, long blonde hair, these big brown eyes, and all smiles.” He smiled too, as if she’d just walked in the room.

  “How nice.” If you like that type. Blonde isn’t a real color, it was invented by Hollywood. Everyone knew that. I was surprised by my jealous thoughts. Why should I be affected by a woman from Jack’s past? It had nothing to do with me.

  Jack continued, “And, like all gorgeous blondes, she was responsible for my utter downfall.” He chuckled at his joke.

  I grimaced. Utter downfall? An overstatement I was sure. “You don’t look ‘downfallen’ to me.”

  He looked at me, eyebrows pulled close as if surprised to see me there. “By the time that woman finished making a run through my life, I’d lost everything. Her, my church, my family, everything.”

  Lost everything. Jack had lost everything once. I glanced down at my open, empty hands. “How?”

  “Helene got pregnant.” He looked into my eyes, a man facing facts. “It wasn’t my baby. We hadn’t slept together.” He laughed again, a short sound that seemed to say, “Sucker.”

  “She betrayed you.” My voice hushed like a revelation. You’re betrayed, like me. “You must have been furious.”

  He rubbed his hand across his jaw and chin. “I was way more pathetic than that.” He spoke quickly, as if wanting to get the words out and be done with them. “I told her I wanted to marry her anyway. Raise the baby as my own.” He tossed out a snort. “She didn’t want any of it. Said she wanted out, that she couldn’t face people in the church. Said she didn’t love me the way I loved her.” He slapped a hand on his leg. “And that was it. She took off—I haven’t seen her since.”