Mitch pushed the box back under the bed and stood up.
“Why’re you still here?” Mitch wanted to know. “I gotta be at work.”
“I need a ride.”
Mitch and his friend left Billy’s room as the sound of water in the shower stopped. I slowly sat down on the bed, for some reason still so careful not to cause the slightest stir even though the two men were now well away, their voices in the kitchen.
When James came into the doorway, he was wearing a towel like a kilt, and his hair was still dripping. “I need some clothes,” he said in apology and skulked to the dresser.
“I’ll go,” I said, and I was through the wall at once, lingering in the bushes outside the house, near the bedroom window. The sun was trying to push through the clouds, and every leaf was wet and clean. I did something then I’d never done. I watched my host dress. I didn’t go back into the room, but, like a guilty thing, I stayed at the window sill, a peeping torn, watching James throw his towel onto the corner of the bed and pull a pair of gray shorts from the top dresser drawer. He stepped into them and I meant to stop, but it wasn’t just the novelty of his nakedness that gripped me. It was all of him. He let the door stand open to the hall, so unmindful of the other men, yet he dressed quickly, as if not wanting to keep me waiting and as if he would be too modest to have me arrive back before he was covered.
I felt quite the sinner, but I couldn’t help myself. I had to watch him step into a pair of pants and pull a sweater over his head. Was it actually the shape of his chest or the muscle of his arm that attracted me, or was it just James? He started to pick up his shoes from the floor but changed his mind. As he left the room, I moved back through the wall and found him in the living room, dropping into the couch there, picking up the tiny box that controlled the television.
“Do we have any food?” James called loudly. “Maybe I should go to the store.”
Mitch came into the kitchen doorway. “There’s half a pizza left. You don’t go anywhere. Clean this place up, if you want something to do.”
The other gentleman came from the hall, tucking his shirt into his stained trousers. “Stop bitching,” he laughed at James. “We have to go to work. You get to sit around here and jack off to MTV.”
There was a slight pause before James spoke, as if he were always translating from one language to the other. “Screw you.” James turned on the television to a movie with cars chasing each other and muted the sound. He slid down on the couch until he was almost reclined. Mitch and his friend picked up keys and denim jackets, and the friend took a half-empty bottle of beer from the small table in front of James.
“Have fun,” he said.
“I’ll be thinking of you, Benny,” said James without looking at him.
Benny stopped with the beer almost to his lips. “What did you say?”
Mitch shoved a tattered cap into Benny’s hands. “Ignore him.”
James waited until the two men had closed the front door behind them, then he sat up and turned the television off. He watched the door until he heard the sound of a car engine moving away down the driveway. Then he looked around the room and found me loitering in the corner.
“He’ll be gone for hours,” said James. “Wait for me.” I watched him rush from room to room, gathering trash to the garbage can, dishes to the machine in the kitchen, clothes and towels to the machine on the back porch.
“If I do any more than that in one day,” he said, “Mitch will think I’m losing my mind.”
I watched him put on shoes and take an apple from a drawer in the icebox. “It’s a drawback to the flesh,” he said, “having to eat.”
A drawback? I hadn’t tasted an apple in 130 years. Truthfully, until that moment, I hadn’t missed it. But now I listened to the crunch as James bit into one and saw the juice spray in a momentary mist. It was then that I noticed a rose-colored bruise on his cheekbone from his brother’s hand. And a fainter gray one on his jaw that I hadn’t noticed.
Before I could reach over and touch the place, James turned. “We should get away from here.” He locked the house and I followed him across the lawn and down the pavement under a dark sky with one odd shaft of gold that slanted down to some unseen place in the distance. He took a leisurely pace, eating his apple.
We passed the tiny park with the statue of the deer where the swings were decked with shouting children, and chatting women surrounded the picnic table. James turned left at the corner and crossed the street. He tossed his apple core into a pile of raked leaves and looked at me.
“How fast can you travel?”
It had never occurred to me to wonder. “How fast could you travel when you were Light?” I asked.
“Race,” he smiled, and suddenly he was running. He was laughing so hard when he saw me on the end of the block up ahead that he had to stop and rest with his hands on his knees. He walked the rest of the way to me and said, “Double or nothing.” He pointed to the baseball field a block farther and panted, “Top row of the bleachers, west end.”
The park was nothing more than a baseball field, but it was alive with activity—the bottom two rows of bleachers were full of parents, grandparents, young siblings, watching twenty little children in uniform play ball.
James was sprinting toward them. I was so taken with the sight of his lean form as his clothes were pressed to him by the wind that I waited until the last moment to arrive before him. He scrambled to the top bleacher seat beside me, gasping for breath, his hair in his eyes.
“You win,” he said. I could tell that he delighted in the power of the human form. I tried to remember the feeling of running with my own legs under me but could feel only envy. He sat taking in the scene. The crowd on the lower benches took no notice of him. On the field, two men coached a tiny boy who struggled to lift a wooden bat that outweighed him.
“Helen,” he said, without turning to me. The sound of my name startled me. “I can’t explain how it feels to be able to ask you questions no one would understand but us.”
“I know.”
“The trouble is,” he said, and a wave of pain came over me, turning my heart to wood. He was ending our connection, I could feel it, the sound of tragedy. “The trouble is,” he said, choosing words carefully, “I find that my feelings for you are changing.” Although the people sitting below could not hear him, he lowered his voice. “It’s hard to have you with me but not be able to take your hand or kiss you.”
This froze me, not just my voice but all thoughts.
He looked down, his expression dark. “I would never turn you away, since I was the one who invited you, but I might have been wrong. I don’t know...”
It was bewildering, the thrill that he loved me together with the fear of his saying goodbye. I fought to recapture my voice.
“This probably seems absurd to you,” he said. “I’m sure your feelings for me are not of this nature.”
“I can’t lie to you,” I said. “I do care for you. But I’m older than you.”
“You forget, I’m not a boy,” he told me. “I’m only in a boy’s body.”
This was difficult to remember—James was so young at heart. Now he looked me in the eyes.
“I would court you with a passion, if things were different. You’d never get me off your porch swing.”
I laughed at this, but I was still feeling hurt. I sensed that he was preparing to leave me. I remembered this feeling from before I was Light. A man says something meant to be flattering to balance his real message. He’d court me if he could, but the trouble is...?
“I’m a coward, though,” James sighed, looking back at the field. Another small boy was trying to dislodge a white ball from a red plastic stand, with no luck, as his fans called out words of encouragement.
“I don’t have the courage to be without you, now that I’ve been with you,” said James.
“Do you mean to say that if you had more character, you’d leave me?” I thought he might laugh, but he was very serio
us.
“Please tell me what you want,” he said. “I’ll do whatever you want me to do. If you find any comfort in being with me, then please forget what I’ve said. You deserve to be happy. What can I do?”
Don’t send me away, I thought.
He looked at me again. “What do you want?”
“I want to taste an apple,” I said. And your lips, I thought.
There was a sudden surge of cheers as the white ball hopped and bounced across the grass, and the small boy at home plate turned, surprised, to his parents’ calls before scrambling into a run toward first base. James was looking over the field, his face gone pale, the pink bruise standing out like a rouged kiss.
“Did I say something wrong?” I said.
“Do you believe I stole this body?” he asked me.
“You told me you saved him,” I said. “You didn’t chase him out.”
“Do you want to save someone?” he asked. His voice was even. He put no emotion into the words. He waited, not looking at me.
Not even when I longed to turn the pages of Mr. Brown’s book or bite into James’s apple did I conceive of this. It seemed to make no sense. It would be like a knight saying to a scullery maid, “Would you like to slay a dragon, as well?”
“I couldn’t,” I said.
“What if you could?” he asked.
My fears were strong, but the idea of actually being able to touch his hand, flesh to flesh...
“But I’m not like you.”
He laughed and gave me a side glance. “Not like me?”
“I want to be brave.”
“I’ll help you,” he said.
I was trembling again, the way I had when he had first spoken to me. “Tell me what it was like,” I asked him. He studied me, gently. “Saving Billy’s body, I mean.”
The cheers and laughter rose as the children pulled off their hats and went to greet their parents on the grass below.
“How did you go inside him?” I wanted to know. Something in my voice surprised and aroused James. I saw the pulse at his throat quicken.
“I lay down in his place, in his body, and fought to stay there until I felt his flesh,” he said. “From the inside.”
“Can you go out again whenever you want?”
He looked apologetic. “No. There’s the rub. I have to stay until the body dies or someone else wants in.”
“Someone else?” I was shocked. “Someone like us?”
“Or Billy, if his spirit is still alive somewhere.”
“Or something evil,” I said.
He didn’t comment on that.
“How do you know you can’t get out?” I asked.
“I changed my mind after the fourth day and tried to leave.” He looked as if he didn’t want to describe the outcome. “It was like the pain that would come if I tried to leave my haunting place,” he said. “Only worse.”
We were alone now. A bird in a tree across the field screamed, piercing my thoughts like a blade.
“I need to think,” I told him and let myself sink under our bench. Hiding beneath the bleachers, I watched him walk across the green and imagined James watching Billy, in the same way, before he took possession of his body.
Six
LIKE A BANNER, flying but captive, I floated behind him and then sat on the Amelia house roof, next to a rotting softball, for hours until I saw Mitch’s car, a patchwork of rusty mixed parts, turn the corner. I dropped through the ceiling to find James lying on his bed, awake. He smiled without surprise to see me appear in the corner.
“You do that so well,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Materialize.” He laughed.
“Were you not able to pass through objects?”
“In my clumsy way.” He looked me up and down, and I wondered whether I was clear or colorful at that moment. “Not with your grace.”
I hadn’t thought on it for years, but when I was newly attached to my Saint, I practiced moving through her walls and tables and rose bushes, sometimes slowly, like a smoke ring, and other times instantly, like a flash of lightning. It became less and less distracting, and soon I could wander through her rooms with no more thought than bird song moving through a lace curtain.
“Perhaps it’s easier for those of us who haunt people rather than places. We’re always having to traverse through doors to keep up with them.”
Before James could answer, the bedroom door banged open, and Mitch stood fuming in the hall.
“Where the hell did you go?”
James sat up. “Nowhere.”
“Bullshit,” said Mitch. “I called when I got to work.”
“I didn’t see a message—”
“I didn’t say I left a fucking message, I said I called. So, where were you?”
“I took a walk,” said James.
“Do not lie to me.” Mitch shook his head.
“I’m not. I walked to the rec center and watched some little league.”
“Did I say you could leave?”
“I didn’t think you’d care if I took a damn walk. I locked the house.”
“Who were you with?”
“No one,” he lied, and Mitch could tell.
“I swear if I find out—”
“I’m not getting in trouble,” said James.
“I work all day and you sit on your ass watching baseball.”
“You’re right,” said James. “That’s not fair. I should get a job.”
“You’re not quitting school, asshole.”
“I meant on the weekends.”
“I know what kind of work you used to do.”
“You choose the job then,” said James. “No shit.”
This quieted Mitch. He frowned at his brother, then walked away.
“Did you have enough time alone?” James asked me now.
Mitch came back into the doorway. “Are you talking to yourself?”
“Why do you care?” said James.
“Chris is home for the weekend, wiseass. We’re going out tonight.”
James looked blank. “Okay.”
“Did you really get brain damage?” said Mitch. “You don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, do you?”
“Your friend Chris?”
“Rayna’s brother. Ring a bell? He’s on furlough.”
“Well, have fun. I’ll be fine.”
“Yes, you will,” sighed Mitch. “I want you where I can see you tonight. You’re coming with us.”
During my meditations on the roof, I had nearly decided to let James help me board an empty body, but I was still afraid that it wasn’t something my Light spirit could manage. Perhaps James was different. He’d haunted a place instead of a series of hosts. What if that quality had made him stronger than I? I was afraid that if I leapt into a body, I would fail and plummet into my hell, never to see him again. There was no way of knowing.
“Take me to your haunting place,” I asked him. I craved to retrace his steps.
“I did,” said James. “Where the baseball field is, that was my haunting place.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I felt almost annoyed.
“I thought it would make you sad,” he admitted.
And it might have, looking down at the grass and imagining a garden there with a two-year-old James running barefoot or looking out at the playing field and imagining a Light James walking the bases in the dark.
A sudden desire rocked me. I longed to know everything he remembered. Every scent and sound. Every color he could conjure from this life past. I dreaded my own, but I had a deep hunger for his memories.
“Tell me everything you can recall about your life as James.”
“I’ve told you everything I remember.”
“You said you remember new things every day,” I said. “What did you remember today?”
He thought for a moment. “I remember the sound of our rocking chair,” he told me. “It creaked on the left side.”
While I watched him p
repare for an evening with Mitch, he performed an act as if he were a silent comedian. Although it consisted of nothing more than showing me the fronts of Billy’s T-shirts, one after another, it made me laugh so hard, the pictures on the wall beside me fluttered like moths. The images on the shirts—everything from a skull with a snake crawling through the eye socket, to what had to be a puddle of vomit—were in such opposition to James’s personality, I was charmed to the core. When he finally pulled off the navy sweater he’d worn all day and tugged a plain brown T-shirt over his head, he was laughing, too. The weave of this shirt was so thin, I could see the shape of his collarbone, the curve of his muscle.
“I apologize in advance for any offense my companions this evening may cause,” he said, putting on his jacket.
“Thank you,” I said. “But I did live in a men’s dormitory with Mr. Brown for two years.”
“Did you?” He looked impressed. “Stout-hearted Helen.”
After many warnings from Mitch to hurry up, James had to wait for him at the front door. When Mitch finally appeared, pulling on his denim jacket, he eyed James suspiciously.
“What did you do, comb your hair?”
“Isn’t that what you told me to do fifty friggin’ times?” said James.
Mitch shrugged. “Never worked before.”
I followed the two of them into the patchy car, sitting behind them in the back seat.
“What’re we doing tonight?” James asked.
“Rusty Nail.” Mitch pulled out of the driveway and roared down Amelia. “Maybe a movie. Why?”
“I don’t care,” said James. “Is it too windy back there?” James asked as he rolled down his window. He turned and glanced at me in the back seat. I was too startled to answer. It felt flattering to have him forget that wind couldn’t muss my hair. Then James looked at his brother.
“What?” said Mitch.
“I mean...” James put his elbow out the window. “I don’t want to make stuff ... blow around.” Mitch still looked perplexed. “In the back seat,” James added.
“If it wasn’t so expensive,” said Mitch, “I’d have your brain scanned.”
“Shut up,” said James.
Mitch shook his head. “Light me a cigarette.”
A Certain Slant of Light Page 7
