by Gina Linko
But I had seen Mom looking at it. Lots of times. Just a few weeks ago, I heard a racket in her room, stuff being thrown around, a loud crash, and when I got to the door, the Sophie album was open on her bed. Mom sat with her hands in her face, her sobs shaking her shoulders, Dad picking up the remains of an antique crystal candlestick off the floor. One of her favorite flea market finds.
The pain in my rib cage, the weight of the guilt I was carrying, was astonishing. As I pulled the maroon photo album off the bookshelf, it was like I couldn’t get a big enough breath into my lungs, not enough air in there along with all the guilt. But I needed to see. I needed to remember, to know what my hands had done.
I knew there was never any intent. God no.
But it is what it is. That’s what Granddad always used to say. I had spent the past six months of my life trying to swallow that bitter pill, and now this guy with the hair was going to come out of nowhere and—grab my hand, for God’s sake! He deserved worse than what I gave him.
I sat on the floor cross-legged and opened the photo album. There she was. Her school photo from last year. The way her curls popped up in the back, that crazy cowlick. Oh God, how it hurt to look at her.
Handel’s Messiah. I hummed the hallelujah chorus. She had loved for me to play it last Christmas on the piano.
I fought the tears. Her blue eyes, all hopeful and ready for the world. That short nose, the freckles. Her gap-toothed smile.
I turned the page. Sophie as a baby, sitting in the laundry basket chewing on the rawhide that belonged to Granddad’s dog. Sophie swinging in the baby swing. Sophie eating her first ice cream cone. Sophie on the Canal Street ferry.
And here we both were, arms around each other, Sharpie mustaches that we drew on our faces—I had been trying to cheer her up after she broke her wrist falling out of the Sandbergs’ hayloft.
Jesus, it hurt to look at these. I closed the album, leaned my head back on the bed.
When I was finished, I put the album back and went to my room. I took out my sketchpad and found my pastels. I picked the indigo pastel. It was like new, unused. I never consciously decided not to use it, but now that I looked at it, it was the exact right shade of blue. Just this side of dark blue, with a hint of violet. Just the right deepness to it. Like the ocean on a postcard kind of day. Or the sky when there’s a rainbow.
Or the color of the powerful, flashing, crackling force of light that surrounds both you and your baby sister on the beach when you try to save her life, and you tell her, “Sophie, I got you, I got you,” and you hold her close, and you see the way her face relaxes, like she knows that you’ll save her, that it is going to be okay.
And you assume that blue is there when you lose time right then. You don’t know what happens. But you are sure that blue is there.
That same blue of the waves, lapping at you both on the shore when you come to, and she’s next to you—is she breathing?
And you reach out with your hand—
No. I shook my head, bumping it against the mattress behind me. I am not thinking about this again.
I was suddenly enraged, furious with Rennick “Mr. Crawdad Magic Trick” Lane. Did he think that he could gain some friends by telling them crazy stories about me? Was he trying to impress some voodoo-happy pals of his? Had he done that to me on some dare? Trying to get me to wig out so that he and his friends could laugh about it with some quart beers down at the cemetery later on?
I knew that I would go find Rennick tomorrow morning. I knew that I was going to give him a piece of my mind. I also knew that, no matter how mad I was, I didn’t want to entangle him in my curse. But who knew what he might do next time?
I was going to put him in his place. Then maybe I’d just keep going and leave here.
I shook my head. No. I knew I couldn’t run. It wouldn’t do any good. I couldn’t get away from this. I couldn’t get away from me. I would just end up hurting other people. Someone else’s loved ones. Someone else’s Sophie.
I stayed in my room. Isolation.
But I also Googled things. Weird things like physio-electricity. Reanimation of crustaceans. I didn’t believe Rennick. But part of me wanted to.
I didn’t find any answers. Not even any leads. But he had me thinking.
It was late, and I sat on my bed eating cucumbers and ketchup—Sophie’s favorite.
I had absentmindedly sketched several pictures of Mia-Joy while I sat on my bed watching TV. But I hadn’t gotten her eyes exactly right. They flitted from one thing to another so quickly. She lived her life in eighth notes, bouncing here and there, staccato. And I hadn’t captured it.
I heard a click-clack then. I cocked my head, tried to figure out where it had come from.
Click.
I stared at the window. It sounded like it came from there. Click-clack. There it was. Someone had thrown something at my bedroom window. I froze for a second. What? I didn’t know if I should go see who it was or just ignore it.
Maybe because I had just been looking at her picture, I thought of Mia-Joy. Maybe she needed me. Was there something I could do for her—from a distance? I hesitated. I felt guilty that I hadn’t talked to her since Granny Lucy’s death.
Another rock. Click-clack.
I walked over to the window, peered into my backyard, which was bathed in only a small triangle of light from the nearby streetlamp. I saw a figure there. It looked larger than Mia-Joy. I squinted.
The figure waved, then beckoned. Before I realized who it was, I had this sense that I was watching one of the old black-and-white movies I loved. The streetlamp, the swoop of his gravity-defying hair, the line of his profile. He was the hero, the suave leading man. Lithe and broad-shouldered. Moving with confidence. Fred Astaire. I blinked and brought myself back to where I was, to who really stood down there in my yard.
It was him. Rennick. I stepped back and sat on my bed.
Son of a gun, I thought. Did he come for another kick in the nuts?
I wanted to be mad at him. I wanted to think he had pulled some big prank on me. But really, I was hoping there was some truth to what he had told me. Shown me.
But maybe his buddies were waiting in the bushes, ready to scare the shit out of the freaky Corrine Harlowe, who couldn’t shake anyone’s hand or give a high five. Or usually meet anyone’s eye. I knew about the snickers, the theories all the kids at school had about me. Germophobe. OCD. Schizo.
Rennick.
But there was a part of me that was curious. Could he know something? It was just so hard to trust myself, my judgments, anything.
I stopped still on my bed for a moment, reaching for my blue nail polish. What if I could control it somehow? Tame it. Not just be at its mercy. It was a singular thought. And because everything always seemed so out of my control, so beyond me, I hadn’t ever seriously considered it. Until that moment.
What if I learned to control it? What if the crawdad was not a fluke? Was that plausible? What if I could own this thing?
I thought of Mom’s quivering chin when she had broken the news about Granny Lucy’s death. The way she had come into my room later that night and asked if I thought I needed to see Dr. Claude again. “Because, Corrine,” she had said, “he can go through the medical reports again. Explain how Sophie died from cardiac arrest, likely brought on by the head injury. I mean, I thought we were getting somewhere.” She had waited for me to respond. I was surprised that I was so transparent, that she knew what I was thinking, but then again, that was Mom.
My silence answered her. She liked to believe we were getting somewhere.
“You didn’t have anything to do with Lucy,” she had said. “Corrine, I lost Sophie, and ever since, I lose you a little bit more every day. Your father and I can’t watch you do this!” Her voice had broken, and she had reached for me, without thinking, I’m sure.
I had recoiled, but I added, “I’ll see Dr. Claude.” I would do anything to keep that hopeless look off of her face.
May
be even see what this Rennick knew.
In my before-life, before Sophie died, I had loved goals, challenges, winning. I tackled Beethoven’s Ninth for contests when everyone said it was suicide. I chose Faulkner off the English list when everyone else veered toward Stephen King or Joyce Carol Oates. When Coach told me I had a better chance to go to state in the free or even the medley, I chose the butterfly. It was the hardest for me as a swimmer. I came in second. I did get a first at contest for Beethoven that year, though. But I never did understand Faulkner. I traded him in halfway through the semester for Stephen King and read six of his books over spring break last year.
Tame it. Control it. It sounded impossible. But didn’t all of this?
I held the bottle of nail polish in my hand, frozen on my bed with this newfound possibility. I felt lighter as I painted my nails and listened to Rennick’s pebbles bounce off my window. The guy did not give up easily.
I tiptoed out of my room, unsure whether I was going out there to ask him some questions or to yell at him to just leave me alone. But either way, I was going out there. My mother’s bedroom door sat open. She lay sprawled on her bed, asleep, papers on her chest, her reading glasses still on. Dad slept next to her, snoring loudly.
I slipped down the stairs and through the kitchen, to the back door. The front door often creaked, and I was glad that I had remembered.
I unlocked the dead bolt, so quietly, remembering last year with Cody. When Annaliese and I had snuck out of my old house, toilet-papered Cody’s whole front yard on his eighteenth birthday.
I froze when the screen door opened with the requisite snap. But I didn’t hear anything from above. I turned the knob and walked out. I let my breath out on the back stoop as I closed the door behind me.
I turned around, and sure enough I heard a footstep near the brush that lined the back of our property, by the garden Mom had planted in Sophie’s memory. I waited. Closer footsteps, the silhouette of someone near the lilacs.
The air took on an expectant, loaded quality, and I knew he was there. I felt it. And in that moment, I doubted my reasons for coming out here altogether. Did he know anything? Had it all been just a prank? I wavered, unsure. My feelings were so untrustworthy these days.
He appeared out of the shadows. “Hey,” he said.
“You can’t be around me,” I said.
“Listen,” he said, “I know you don’t want to talk to me. I know you’re mad at me. And I shouldn’t have done that with the crawdad. It probably just scared you even more, shell-shocked as you are. But you have got to listen to me before—”
“Just tell me what you want to tell me,” I said, and I tried to ignore it, but it was there, inside, deep inside like a pilot light switching on, heating up.
He started to say something, then stopped himself, rubbed at his chin, raked his hand through his hair in a funny motion. My eyes adjusted to the dark now, and I noticed his teeth, how they overlapped a little in the front. An imperfection.
“Two minutes,” I said impatiently, feeling the heat swirl and grow.
“You listen to me,” he said gruffly, pointing at me. “I’m going to knock on that door and wake up your parents, tell them I found you ready to hop a train, if you don’t give me a few minutes here.” He looked at me hard, threatening me, although I could see the apology in the shake of his head. But it was what it was.
I knew he would knock on the door, so I just gritted my teeth. “Tell me what you know.”
I met his eyes briefly. The moon was low in the sky, a tiny crescent, a thumbnail, as Sophie used to say. It was an inky night, with very little light, especially in the back of my house, next to the hydrangeas and the electric meter. And, of course, right beneath the window of my parents’ bedroom.
I listened to the hum of the crickets and toads as Rennick gathered himself. He rubbed his hand across his forehead nervously, and he started to say something twice but stopped himself again. I softened toward him for a second when I realized exactly why he seemed so different from anyone else in New Orleans. It was because he treated me normally. Like people did back in Chicago, back before everything. Easy. Normal. Everyday.
Here in New Orleans, I was not a real person. I was a freak, a weirdo. No one treated me like Corrine. I was a story. The sideways glances. The whispers. I deserved it.
Finally, Rennick pulled a couple of rolled-up papers from his back pocket and handed them to me. I took them reluctantly, carefully.
“Just read them,” he said. “I looked into a few things. It’s hard to know where to start, Corrine.” He looked at me for a moment; the headlights from a passing car flashed in his eyes, and I could see concern there, tenderness.
It hit me, deep under my ribs in a weird way, and my breath caught in my throat. I shook my head. In that moment, in that flash of human interaction, all that I had been missing in the months of my emotional and near-physical quarantine hit me out of the blue. Why he—this near stranger—would wait out here for me, or why he cared, I had no idea. But it was odd and disconcerting how much it meant to me, here in my darkest hour.
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “You shouldn’t be around me.” The skin on my scalp tightened, itched. The hairs on my arms stood up. The air around us thickened, and the buzz in my molars came back. My hand went to my jaw, and I pressed my fingers against it.
He hadn’t seemed to notice. “Just promise me you’ll read this, and know that—”
A spark jumped then from the electric meter, scaring us both.
“That’s part of it,” Rennick said, excited, pointing toward the meter. “Corrine, you—”
I held my hand up to quiet him. I heard something. Footfalls in the long, dew-wet grass. The swish of Mom’s robe against it.
Mom appeared around the corner of the house, coming out from the front. Mom. In her blue polka-dot pajamas, her white terry-cloth robe.
She cleared her throat. “Corrine?” she said, low, questioning.
“Mom, I just came out—”
Her mouth was a grim line. She looked worried. Did she think maybe I was leaving? Running away?
“Is this the boy who was throwing rocks earlier?” Her voice sounded flat, unimpressed.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I apologize.” He looked at me hard. “Corrine …” I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t.
“Mom, I’ll be in in a minute,” I said. She nodded, gave us our privacy.
“I never meant to scare you off,” Rennick said. “I’m sorry about before.”
“I’m sorry about the knee,” I said.
He gave me a quick nod and was already through the lilac hedge when I called out to him. “Thanks.”
I spread out the four crinkled pages in front of me on my bedspread. The first two sheets were filled with chicken-scratch handwriting, I assumed his.
The realization that he treated me like a normal person softened me toward him, enough to give him some kind of credibility. But still, that made it even harder to entangle him in my curse. I didn’t want to hurt him.
But I had to know what he knew.
The notes were difficult to decipher at first glance. There was a lot of talk of auras, of certain colors, how to interpret them. This color equals this certain trait. There were Web addresses, article titles, references to all kinds of incidents. Articles on electricity—something called dirty electricity. And another term: atmospheric electricity. A new idea that scientists were testing now—that electricity could be gleaned from the air, harnessed, and used, not unlike solar power. I looked up some of it on my iPad. It was all very interesting stuff. But the last two pages really grabbed my attention.
They contained a xeroxed article from the Sutton County Herald. The headline read, “Child Saves Life, Credits Blue Light.” The tune I had been humming in my head suddenly switched keys, went lower, C minor, with an eerie, spooky tone to it. My heart sped up and I read the article with interest once, then again more slowly, taking in the details. I noted the date at the
top: September 28, 2002.
A seven-year-old boy found his father after he had fallen off of a ladder in the garage. His father was unconscious, and the boy knew enough to check his breathing. There was none. The boy called 911, but living out in the country, he knew he couldn’t wait. And that’s when it got really interesting.
The description of the blue light, the words he used, the feeling he described, matched exactly the way I experienced the blue light with Sophie.
In fact, it was the clearest part of that day. The most vivid memory. The boy, Jurgen Jameson was his name, said that the blue light “had some green and purple in it too, and it wasn’t like a haze but more like a lens.” This struck me.
It was exactly as I had experienced it. And then he described the feeling of the blue light “as if it started in my chest and throat and crawled out to my hands, into my daddy.”
I dropped the paper back onto my bed and stared into space. “Holy fluck.”
Later that night, I lay on my bed, sharpening my sketching pencil. I thought of Mia-Joy. I glanced at my phone on the nightstand. I knew I should call her. A memory hit me, clear as day. Sixth-grade summer. Mia-Joy had been all limbs and teeth, so skinny. Bossy and loud, with frizzy hair. But then something had happened the year of seventh grade, because when I came back that next summer, Mia-Joy had blossomed, grown into herself. She’d become a swan. So then she was tall, thin, striking. Bossy and loud. Still herself. But what I most admired, and didn’t realize until later, was that she hadn’t really changed. Not inside. She had become the most beautiful teenager, the most beautiful girl most of us had ever seen in real life, and she didn’t change.
She was obsessed with modeling, sure. She forced me to make audition tapes of her for every last reality TV modeling show in the world. But she still laughed that same loud bark of a laugh. She still kept the same friends.
At that moment, I looked up from my pencil and sighed. I realized how much I liked and admired Mia-Joy. How much I missed her. She never shut up. She watched only reality TV. She talked more and louder than anyone. She read only fashion magazines and apologized for nothing. God, she was fun.
