Authors: Brian Mercer
****
I picked out a bottle of fizzy water from the trough of crushed ice. I wasn't thirsty but I wanted something to hold, something heavy and reassuring in my hand. My arm trembled slightly as I put the neck of the bottle to my lips and took a sip, scanning the sunny gardens around me. The party was just getting started and I wanted to find a secluded place where I could watch without being bothered.
The bubbly drink made me burp, louder than I'd intended. I looked around, hoping no one had heard.
These student mixers had been going on since we'd arrived at Waltham but I'd never attended one. Crowds still made me jittery. Even though the wall of unfiltered information no longer assaulted me the way it did back home, I still got overwhelmed if I was around too many people. Nicole and Sara always encouraged me to go with them to these gatherings, but it had been Cali, through no effort of her own, who finally convinced me to actually come. It always felt like Cali was judging me. Cali, whose brother had died in her arms. Cali, who'd watched her family crumble and everything she owned slip through her fingers. Who was I to her? A snotty rich girl who got spooked by even the slightest crowd. Just once I wanted to show a little backbone.
I moved along the buffet tables filled with traditional English fare: meat pies and breads and various cheeses; fresh produce, locally grown; little quiches and various French hors d'oeuvres. White-coated servers were circulating with glasses of wine and champagne. Old Becky would have jumped at the chance to partake of a little alcohol, but now it didn't seem like such a good idea.
I planted myself at the edge of the lawn, just outside the range of the shade. The late-afternoon sunlight was warm and pleasant, but it was still cold beneath the trees. As I took short sips from my bottle of fizzy water, Nicole walked over with a small plate of tiny salmon pastries. She looked charming in her floral dress, but wearing spring clothes didn't make it warm, and she shivered in the lingering April chill.
Nearby, Sara and Nigel stood feeding each other and giggling. It made me think of me and my first boyfriend, once upon a time, and I sighed longingly.
To my right and a little away from the gathering, Cali paced slowly back and forth, looking dark and brooding. I could sense a nervous tension leaking from her, even if no specific information came to me about what was bothering her, just a vague sense of her inner turmoil. Just focusing on her made me feel restless and keyed up. It had been more than a week since Cali and my confrontation over her eye makeup. She couldn't still be mad, could she? She knew it wasn't my fault.
The faint odor of freshly carved cedar wafted on an undercurrent of air. Jenny's familiar calling card.
"He's co-o-o-o-oming,"
Jenny said in my ear. Even though I'd been expecting it, the sound made me jump and emit a tiny scream. From across the way, Cali gave me a dirty look.
I told you not to creep up on me like that when people are around,
I told Jenny mentally. In private I liked to talk to Jenny out loud, but this wasn't the place or time.
Okay, what's this all about? Who's coming?
"You know,"
Jenny said,
"the one you've been waiting for."
Who have I been waiting for?
"You know, silly."
I was still trying to puzzle out who Jenny might mean when another voice, this one male, called my name from behind me. I jumped again, stifling a second cry, nearly crashing into Jean Paul, who had unintentionally snuck up on me.
"My apologies," he said in his halting English. "I did not mean to, mmm, astonish you."
I held up my hand and took a sip of fizzy water, stalling for time. "That's okay," I said, stifling another belch. "What do you want?" My voice sounded more abrupt than I'd intended.
Jean Paul looked a little off-balance now. "Oh, I was wondering, if you will, mmm, meet me at my table this evening at dinner."
"Ah, you know, I don't know if tonight is a good night for me," I answered without even a pause to suggest that I'd considered his invitation. I remember saying more after that, but I blocked out whatever I babbled. I recall only that I couldn't seem to stop jabbering.
Jean Paul's face colored scarlet. He mumbled apologies for bothering me and slunk away.
"What did I just do?" I asked Nicole and Sara, who had arranged themselves on either side of me.
"I think you just turned down Jean Paul for a date," Nicole said.
"Is it too late to change my mind?" I asked, trying to make sense of what was happening.
"I don't think he's fixin' on repeatin' that performance any time soon," Nicole answered.
"I don't know," said Sara. "He was very brave. He
might
try again."
Nicole and I looked at each other. "No, I don't think so," we said simultaneously, giggling. Nicole put her arm around me and hugged me.
I managed a smile despite my goof with Jean Paul. I was so happy to have friends again,
real
friends. I was still lost in that welcome feeling when a hot wave of emotion hit me with such force that it nearly knocked me down. The wave was filled with rage, jealousy, envy, and anger,
feverish
anger. It came from the edge of the gathering, from where Cali stood.
The sensation was intense, like a dagger in my heart. My eyes filled with tears and I began to sob, loudly and uncontrollably. The partygoers, some four dozen students, teachers, and administrative staff, immediately silenced and looked in my direction as abruptly as if a waiter had dropped a tray of dishes. All that attention, suddenly centered on me, filled me to overflowing. My vision grew white, my body numb, and everything around me took on a muffled and remote quality.
When I could see again, I was sitting in a chair with my head between my knees. A nurse was talking to me, asking simple questions, which I eventually began answering. I just wanted to lie down. I just wanted to be left alone. Someone explained that I'd passed out, but it took a few minutes for the information to sink in. I was carted off to the infirmary, where I was given something to drink. After a few tests the nurse, Miss Carter, pronounced me fit and with a fistful of iron supplements, I was sent back to my room.
****
"Ah, Becky, there you are. Come in. Come in." Sir Alex set his book down on the small table near his reading chair and waved me inside. "Please, mind these idlers and layabouts." He gestured with his pipe to the basset hound and beagles asleep near his feet. The closest animal studied me drowsily before resettling closer to the flickering hearth and falling back to sleep.
"Please take a seat," he said, indicating the wingback chair across from his. "Can I offer you something to drink? Tea? Cocoa? Warm milk?"
"No, nothing for me. Thank you."
"You're feeling better?"
"I'm still kind of a spaz, if you really want to know."
"Still a little lightheaded? Crowds still making you uneasy?"
"Yeah, something like that. I'm better than I was when I used to go into New York, but I'm still not really comfortable when there's a lot of people around."
"I wish I could tell you that Waltham had some sort of magical power to sort out everything that's happened to you. That will take practice and patience and time."
"But I thought... I just assumed... is there no way to treat this? Is there no way to turn this off?"
Sir Alex gazed at me wistfully, compassion gleaming in his deep brown eyes. "Is that really what you want, Becky? To make it all go away?"
"I would if I could."
Sir Alex watched me pensively, puffing on his pipe. Something about his tweed clothing and the spicy scent of the blue tobacco smoke made me think of an old, tenured professor.
"Becky, would you retrieve that file there on my desk?"
"This one?"
"No, that one. The grey one. Thank you."
I approached him, careful to skirt the dogs assembled around him.
He gestured for me to sit back down. "No, no. It's for you. Please take a look."
I perched myself at the edge of the burgundy leather chair and opened the folder. In it lay various newspaper clippings dating from over a year ago. I read the first, "The seven-year-old girl found hanged in her bedroom closet last week has been identified as Jennifer Clarke of Surrey. After a thorough investigation, officials have ruled out the likelihood of foul play. Clarke, who for several days had been despondent as a result of the death of a family pet, was found in her closet by her mother, Rose, with a cord wrapped around her neckâ" I snapped the folder closed. "I don't want to read anymore."
Sir Alex pointed at the file. "In the back there's a photograph that you need to see."
"But I don'tâ"
"Take heart. It is nothing gruesome. Please, trust me."
I peeled away the back pages, wary now of its contents. There I found a picture of a familiar face. It was a face I'd drawn, sketched and painted many times. A face that I'd seen again and again in my dreams. "Oh.
Jenny
.
My
Jenny." My tears fell on the glossy photo.
"You see," Sir Alex explained, "I think Jenny hasn't fully integrated into the afterlife, to her rightful home, because she's got a message she wants to convey to her family, who have been through much suffering. And of all the people in the world she could have chosen to help her, she's chosen you.
"I've been doing this a great many years and in that time I've stopped believing in coincidence. I don't believe these powers of yours, these talents that you've brought back with you from the ether, are merely an accident."
A flash from my near-death experience brightened somewhere inside me. I remembered the kindly old grandpa-like guide who had shown me around, the one who'd told me that I had to go back to my Earth-life a little longer, that I'd promised to do something before I'd been born, something that was supposed to help a lot of people. Was this what he'd meant?
The thought of that kindly old man made me think of Sir Alex. I hadn't thought about it before, but I'd somehow equated that old man with Sir Alex. They shared the same kind of energy. They certainly
felt
the same. It was impossible but...
"Is shutting all this off really what you want to do?" Sir Alex asked.
"No. I think I understand now."
"Good girl. Now, there's much for you to learn and that is best done with a good night's sleep. Very soon everything will make sense to you. You will find that sometimes the quickest path toward healing yourself is by first healing others."
Becky
North Lawn, Waltham Manor
April 10
I glanced up at the turret in the manor house's northwest corner as Sara, Nicole, Cali and I made our way back from the stables. The white curtains in our third floor sitting room were parted slightly, as if someone inside was watching us as we moved across the lawn. Before we'd left that morning, Sara had opened a few windows, hoping to freshen up the room. What I'd seen was probably just a faint spring breeze swaying the curtains, yet I couldn't push out a sense of watchfulness, as if something from the shadows inside the room was looking back at us.
I could see now what had been impossible to understand last February, when the weather had confined us all indoors. Obviously, our rooms were on the topmost habitable level of the house. There was no way that the noises from upstairs could be rationally explained. If we'd only known then what we knew now.
"Sara, when do you think the trails will be dry enough for us to take the horses out for a full day's ride?" Cali asked.
"I should expect in about another fortnight, if the weather cooperates," said Sara.
"Look who's Annie Oakley all of a sudden," Nicole giggled, tickling Cali. "Looks like you turned out to be a pretty good cowgirl after all."
Cali put her arm around Nicole and another around me. "It's all in the horse, my friends, it's all in the horse. Maestro knows what he's doing, not me. But that seems to be enough." Horseback riding made Cali cheerful and whimsical. Today we'd ridden on our own as far as a small pond at the edge of thick woods that looked mysterious and other-worldly, as if a doorway to some mysterious parallel world might be discovered there. "I'm sick of being on a leash. I gotta check out those trails."
I smiled, putting my arm around Cali in return and my other around Sara, relieved that Cali didn't seem to be mad at me for the makeup that had mysteriously found its way into Sara and my bathroom. Together we made our way up to our rooms to change out of our muddy riding clothes. On our way upstairs, I told a horse joke that incited tearful laughter. We were all still in a good mood when we passed through the threshold of our sitting room, but then the atmosphere instantly darkened.
"What theâ?" Cali said, moving to the reading chair where I'd left my sweater. "What did I tell you about this? I don't know what kind of maid service you had back in Connecticut, but
I'm
not your maid!" She heaved my sweater into my bedroom, marched into her own room and slammed the door.
"I'm so sick of this," I muttered, then louder, so Cali could hear, "I'm sick of it!"
Sara and Nicole looked at each other awkwardly. "Have you ever noticed how we never seem to get into a row anywhere else but in here?" Sara asked. "All can be fine one minute, then we walk in here and suddenly there's shrieking and tears." She pulled off her coat and began moving about the sitting room, picking up the clothes and books she'd left there that morning. Although they outnumbered my things by six-to-one, Cali had chosen to ignore them.
I'd noticed the increased bickering, the heightened tension between us, but it had been offset by three times as many good experiences in class, at the stables, and at mealtimes. The four of us seemed to genuinely love and respect each other, but that didn't stop us from fighting at night, once we returned to our rooms.
Over the past few weeks, the paranormal activity in our secluded corner suite had tapered off completely. The unexplained noises that haunted us our first weeks at Waltham had never returned and even the strange moving about of our things had stopped as soon as we became aware of it. This sudden uptick in the squabbling that took place in our rooms seemed at first just a coincidence, a result of too many girls spending too much time together, but now I wasn't so sure.