Abby described her parents’ visit and the chair they had brought. “While Brad was taking out the trash, I decided to sit down in the chair, sort of claim it. But I think it possessed me. It was like at the cemetery, Sleepy Hollow, when I kept feeling all this sadness sort of swirling around me. But this time, it was two completely opposite emotions, joy and sadness, but they kept shifting back and forth, back and forth. There was a woman, holding a baby, and it was dying, or maybe it was two babies and one of them died and the other one was fine. It was all just fragments. But it was so strong!” Abby realized she was trembling again.
“Whoa! Slow down, take a deep breath. First of all, Brad unwrapped the chair? And he didn’t notice anything?”
Abby shook her head.
“And when you sat down in it, that was the first time you touched it?”
“No, I touched it once and backed off fast. Then I pulled myself together and sat down in it. But, Ned, that chair was always at my folks’ house—I’ve sat in it hundreds of times before, all my life.”
“Whose chair was it?” He was watching her intently.
“My grandmother’s, as far as I know. That’s what my mother said.”
“Okay.” Ned sat back in his chair and stared over Abby’s head. Their food arrived, and he picked up his sandwich and took a bite, chewing pensively. Finally he said, “Did your grandmother ever lose a baby?”
“Not that I know of. I could ask my mother, but I don’t think so. My mom talks a lot, and I think it would have come out sometime.”
“You sure it was your grandmother’s chair? Did she buy it, or inherit it?”
Abby stared at him. “I don’t know. It never came up. I can’t ask her because she’s gone now—and before you ask, she’s buried in Maine. I can ask my mother, but I’m not sure she knows. You see, we grew up with this kind of strange situation: my great-grandmother got married in her twenties, and had my grandmother, and then the Depression hit and her husband ran out on her, just disappeared one day. She finally heard that he was dead, years later. She was so angry at him that she took back her maiden name, changed her daughter’s name, and refused to say anything about him. Ever. So there’s this big blank in our family tree, and we all grew up knowing that there were some questions we weren’t supposed to ask.”
“Interesting.” Ned took another bite of sandwich. When he had swallowed, he said, “Okay, let me summarize what we’ve got so far. Up until a couple of weeks ago, you’ve never had anything like a psychic experience, right? No ghosts, no voices, no premonitions?”
Abby shook her head. “Never.”
“And since you moved to Massachusetts, you’ve had four episodes, in different places, with different people. One,” he counted off on his fingers, “was at the Flagg house, and apparently the people who lived there at a particular time; two, at the Waltham cemetery, with the same people but a different time; three was the cemetery yesterday, with a tombstone for some Reed family; and four was last night, with a chair that’s been in your family for, what, at least fifty years? Does that cover it?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Can you think of anything that these places and things might share?”
“No.” Abby suddenly felt a wash of despair. “Except for the two Flagg ones, they’re all completely unrelated, as far as I know. There’s no warning—I touch something and wham, there they are. I’m beginning to get scared. The first time, seeing the people in that room at the Flagg house, it was kind of interesting, once I got over the surprise. The second with Elizabeth Flagg was kind of sad, and then by the third, I was feeling the pain that a lot of people were feeling, at different times—kind of cumulative, you know? But last night it really hit me hard, when I wasn’t expecting it—it was so strong.” She shook her head, as if to rid it of the memory. “At this rate, I’m going to be afraid to touch anything. How am I supposed to explain to Brad why I won’t go near a chair I said I loved?”
“Got me.” Ned looked at his watch. “Look, Abby, I’m really sorry, but I’ve got to go. I know I haven’t been much help, and that this is difficult for you. Did your parents have anything useful to say about the family tree?”
“We didn’t really have time to talk about it, and they’re driving to New Jersey today—I’m not sure how long it will be before they get back home. Or if they have anything back there that can help. For now, maybe it’s easier to assume that I’m on my own, starting from scratch.”
Ned nodded. “All right. Then this is what I suggest: put together a family tree. See if you can find a software program and download it—it’ll make it a lot easier to keep your information straight. Then fill in everything you know. Write down all the family stories you can remember—sometimes there are clues there—dates, places, other names. Then when you know where the gaps are, start checking online resources. You can find a lot of vital records, censuses, stuff like that. But not everything—a lot of stuff isn’t online yet, and some other information, like for people in the twentieth century, isn’t available to the public yet. So you’re probably going to run into some roadblocks. But do the best you can.”
Abby was disappointed that he couldn’t offer more help, but he had a job—one that did not include babysitting her. “That makes sense. At least it’s something concrete that I can do.”
“Great.” Ned stood up and laid some bills on the table. “Sorry I’ve got to leave so fast, but it’s a crazy day. Maybe we can get together over the weekend and see what you’ve got. If you want to.”
“Hey, thanks for showing up at all.” Abby struggled to summon up a smile. “I think I just wanted you to tell me again that I’m not insane. I’ll get started on this stuff today. I don’t know what our plans for the weekend are, but we can talk later.”
Ned gave her one last look, then turned and headed for the door with a backward wave. Abby watched him go, then continued to sip at her now-cool coffee. Ned had given her a project, one that might keep the wolves of weirdness at bay, and which might even give her some answers. If she wanted them: too much of what she’d “seen” involved pain. It didn’t make sense to go looking for pain, but then, she’d have to look just to know how to stay away from the pain. She wasn’t sure there was any way she could win.
She paid for her lunch and wandered out onto the main street. There were fewer people around today, since it was a workday, and she could stop and try to visualize what it would have been like, as the redcoats, no doubt equipped with drums, marched toward the small green with their ragtag group of untrained soldiers. Why the heck couldn’t she “see” interesting historic events like that, instead of being blindsided by tombstones and furniture? What was triggering these episodes? And why her, why now?
The only thing she could do was to go back and build a family tree, as Ned had suggested. Did he have a theory about this? She’d have to ask, the next time they met. Soon.
10
Abby drove back to Waltham in a pensive mood. When she entered the empty apartment, she cast a wary eye at the swan chair. It didn’t do anything—didn’t send out sparks, or start rocking mysteriously. It looked just the way it always had, sleek and modestly elegant, its aged wood polished by years of loving hands, her own included. Abby sighed and turned to the computer. She was using Brad’s old laptop, since he had graduated to a sleeker and faster tablet. It was set up on a table in the already-crowded living room. Abby didn’t mind: she was more familiar with the older model anyway. She booted it up and waited for the apartment building’s Wi-Fi to kick in.
Two hours later her head was spinning. Following Ned’s suggestion, she had done a search on genealogy programs and had quickly been overwhelmed. They offered to insert photographs of all her loved ones, and print books for her. They even suggested including voice recordings of oral histories. All she wanted was a simple outline program that she could stick names and dates into and be able to turn out a basic family tree. Finally she settled on one that appeared to be relatively no-frills and, igno
ring the much-trumpeted add-ons (for an extra fee), she put in her credit card number and waited for the program to download and install. When it had, she opened it to a blank form.
Where to start? With herself, she guessed. Name, birth date, birth place. Parents’ names. Then she stopped. She knew their birthdays, from twenty-plus years of cakes and presents, but she wasn’t quite sure which years they were born, and she knew her mother had a tendency to shave a bit off her age. And where? She couldn’t even swear to the towns, but she put in the states. For her grandparents her information was even less complete. After half an hour or so, she printed out a basic skeleton report with her three generations, and looking at it, felt depressed. There were so many empty spaces and question marks. How was she supposed to take this back any further?
She sat back and stretched, easing her stiff back. The apartment was quiet, as was the entire building—most people were at work and wouldn’t be coming home for another hour or so. The swan chair sat silently behind her, waiting . . . Should she see if last night had been a fluke, a hallucination, or find out whether the chair was really trying to tell her something? She almost laughed at that idea—the chair was trying to communicate? Ridiculous.
Or was the chair just a conduit for something—someone—else? Come on, Abby, grow a spine, will you? She stood up resolutely and walked over to stand in front of the chair, looking down at it. It was lovely. The years of hands sliding over the arms had lent a rich patina to the carvings. Maybe that was why she’d always loved it—because it gave her the sense that people had been sitting in it for a long time, and she was the latest of a long line. That idea had never frightened her, until now.
What had happened yesterday? She touched the chair and immediately she had been overwhelmed by . . . She wasn’t sure what. All right, Abby, try to put it into words. She would have to say that it had been a combination of emotions and images. She shut her eyes to reconstruct it. The images first, because they were easier. She, or that other person, had been sitting in the chair. In her arms there had been a child, no more than a year old. Abby couldn’t remember anything noteworthy about what the woman or the child had been wearing. No, that wasn’t exactly true: the baby had been wearing a long white cotton gown. Not a terry-cloth onesie and disposable diaper, that was clear. So, it wasn’t a modern baby. She hadn’t thought it was, somehow.
Boy or girl? That hadn’t been obvious either. Or—Abby recalled saying to Ned that maybe it had been two different babies, which would explain why she had such a muddled idea of its gender. One boy, one girl? And one dying or dead. Which? Why? But if one had lived and one had died, that would explain the wild mix of emotions that had swept over Abby as she took the seat: joy and sorrow, mixed, overlapping, all at once. It made a strange kind of sense.
So, Abby thought, I seem to be saying that it’s one woman sitting in this chair at different times, with two different babies. And one child lived and the other died. Who were they? Would she know if she sat in the woman’s place again? There was only one way to find out. Abby took a deep breath, turned around and gingerly sat down. She carefully laid her hands over the graceful swan heads and braced herself for the onslaught.
Which didn’t come. Cautiously she relaxed into the seat, tried to loosen her muscles, empty her mind. And only then did she catch an echo of what she had experienced the day before. Before, she had been in the midst of the storm; today she felt as though she were looking through a cloud. She could tell that she was looking through the woman, because she was seeing the baby through the woman’s eyes. One baby cooed and waved its little arms; and then as though a slide had been changed, it was the other baby, whose small chest rose and fell in labored breathing, until it stopped breathing at all. And Abby felt the pain again, but as a soft sweet ache. For this baby had died a long time ago, as had its mother. Only the sadness lingered.
Abby didn’t know how long she sat there, her mind catching at wisps of the memory as it faded quietly and then was gone. It wasn’t her pain—thank God. But she felt the mother’s pain, loss, helplessness, as the baby slipped into death. Nothing to be done, not then, not now.
Why was she feeling this now? Rocking slightly, Abby thought about it. It was as though somehow the chair had picked up an electrical charge from the event, or series of events, and stored it, and had only now discharged that energy to Abby. As a child of the computer era, she found it made a sort of sense to her. What were programs, emails, pictures on-screen, other than a complicated cluster of electrical impulses? The brain somehow recorded memories through electrical changes in cells, didn’t it? Couldn’t she extend that logic to say that what she was picking up and feeling were just saved images? That somehow, this particular group of impulses or memories had been held, perfectly preserved, until Abby had somehow inadvertently called them up? Abby shook her head. She didn’t have the technical terminology to explain it clearly, but intuitively it made sense—to her, at least. Maybe not to anyone else—but then, other people hadn’t lived inside the event, hadn’t “felt” it, the way she had. Did this happen to other people? She had never seen any kind of reference to it, even in the popular media, but then, she’d never looked for it either.
Now the memory was gone, the charge, if that was what it was, dissipated, dispersed. Abby now felt only the comfort of the familiar chair, its old wood satiny beneath her hands. Maybe she’d exorcized the demons, or maybe she’d just absorbed them, but it was safe to sit here again. She rocked. Good for you, Abby, she congratulated herself—you faced down your fears. Maybe you haven’t solved anything, but at least you’ve learned something. The thought energized her. Time to get up, time to start dinner. Brad had promised to be home “early-ish,” which for him probably meant seven. She stood up and then an idea struck her.
She knelt in front of the chair, then lay full length, and stuck her head under it. There was an old paper label stuck to the inside of the frame. Abby twisted and turned until she could read the faded print. It was the maker’s label, some furniture store in . . . yes, Massachusetts. And it had a date stamped on it. She strained to decipher it: 1892. Older than she had thought. Older than her grandmother, certainly. Interesting. One more thing to think about.
* * *
Saturday evening Abby reluctantly agreed to accompany Brad to a party she didn’t want to attend.
“Brad, do we have to go?” Abby knew she sounded like a whiny child, but she couldn’t stop herself. She wasn’t even sure why. She should have jumped at the opportunity to spend a night out in the city with Brad. Shouldn’t she?
“Hey, babe, we haven’t seen the gang in, what, a month? You need to get out more. Besides, it’ll be fun.” He was rummaging through his closet, trying to find a shirt.
They had been invited to a party thrown by one of Brad’s new friends, and Brad was really excited about it. Abby had met all of them before, singly and in groups, in the time they’d been here, but she still couldn’t tell them apart. All the men were much like Brad—young, attractive, ambitious. Taken as a group, they reminded her of a bunch of high school football players, which they probably all had been. All alpha males. She knew they had to be smart: they had all gone to name schools and had all fought for the coveted entry-level slots in their prestigious banking firm. But most of their conversation was dominated either by sports or by the minutiae of deals they were working on, neither of which interested Abby. She wondered if they ever read a book, saw a play, visited a museum. She had no idea what to say to any of them.
Not that she fared any better with the women. She’d met most of them too, and heard more about them from Brad. They all did something important and productive. As she pulled on a cowl-necked sweater and zipped up her good black wool pants, Abby wondered idly how Brad described her to his cronies. Former schoolteacher, foundation flunky. No, he wouldn’t put it like that, because that wouldn’t make him look good. “Oh, Abby’s in educational management, funding resources, that sort of thing.” She could almost hear him
saying it. Problem was, tonight she was going to talk to all these people face-to-face, and she couldn’t glibly toss off all those tidy phrases the way Brad could. But she couldn’t stay home either.
The party was being held at a town house on Beacon Hill. “Isn’t that kind of expensive?” Abby ventured timidly as they drove over dark streets toward the heart of Boston.
“Bill’s folks helped out with the down payment, and Nancy’s making pretty good money.” Brad concentrated on navigating the narrow one-way streets on Beacon Hill, searching for a parking place.
Unfortunately neither Abby’s nor Brad’s parents had offered that kind of assistance, and Abby wasn’t bringing in anything right now, much less “good money.” Don’t start, Abby.
She tried to say something cheerful. “This neighborhood’s so pretty at night—all the lights glowing in the windows. So who’s going to be there tonight?”
Brad muttered a curse as a quicker driver darted into an impossibly small parking space in front of him. “Just the guys, and some friends. Don’t worry—it’ll be fun. Ah!” He executed a deft maneuver and shoehorned their car into a parking space. “Only three blocks away!”
Brad led the way to Bill’s house, Abby trailing behind, stumbling on the uneven brick sidewalks, made more slippery by fallen leaves. “Brad, slow down! I can’t keep up in these heels.”
He looked back as if surprised to see her, trailing behind like a clumsy puppy. “Oh, sorry.” He waited, then extended his elbow to her in a mock-courtly gesture. Whatever the intent, Abby was glad to slip her arm through his. He felt large and warm and steady. They covered the last block at a more decorous pace and stopped in front of a tall, slender brick building. Abby could see a crowd of people standing around in the parlor through the bow-front windows facing the street. When the door opened, a gush of chatter billowed out.
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