The Clairvoyants Read online

  I put the water on the burner and stood over him in my coat.

  “Sit down,” he said, taking a long drag. “Tell me about yourself.”

  Suzie lay flat out with her noble head in her paws. I’d grown to accept that she would keep clear of me, and she no longer frightened me. Geoff held the joint toward me, sodden from his lips, and I hesitated, but only for a moment. I sat at the little table and he began rambling on, telling me about London and the chest of drawers he was making in his little shop on Ithaca Street, and how the woman who had ordered the chest was a ruthless bitch with a big house on the lake. Then he stopped and gave me a long look.

  “Your hair is pretty in this light,” he said.

  I was flattered, even if he was nearly my father’s age, and even if it felt slightly unsettling to be the object of his attention. I passed him the joint, the room sunny and filled with a languor that followed me to campus, late for class.

  * * *

  MY MOTHER SENT checks on a bimonthly basis and phoned regularly, ready with details of Leanne’s and Sarah’s perfect lives. Once in a while I’d get a call from one of them, and I’d hear the real story—arguments over a husband’s inattentiveness, a car accident after too much wine at a luncheon. I continued to send letters to Del care of the Ashley Manor facility. I’d gotten used to this method of navigating the distance between us. Like the woman at the porch party, I felt guilty, and I had been prevented from living my life by my guilt, but the more I heard about Del’s life away from me at the Manor, the less guilty I felt. Ashley Manor was a place from which she was free to come and go on a daily basis. It was also a structured environment that offered meals and medication supervision—a place she might graduate from once she felt more in control. She sounded happy in her letters and full of her usual plans to find an apartment on her own, to start classes at the University of Connecticut—all things she’d talked about before but that now seemed imminent.

  I received a letter from her one day in September telling me about her new boyfriend, Rory. I was sometimes envious of her boyfriends—though she’d cycle through them so quickly, it was hard to keep track, and sometimes I wondered if, like me, she’d invented most of them. Rory, she claimed, was different. I think he is going to pop the question, she wrote. Mother is all sorts of upset, and thinks I’m crazy for considering it. But who doesn’t want a little house and a hubby and a garden full of vegetables and Peter Rabbit peering out of the shrubbery, and maybe a cat sleeping on a rug by the hearth.

  Unlike my mother, I didn’t entertain the possibility of any of this. The Peter Rabbit reference meant she wasn’t really considering it, and she found it all outlandish. Then I received another letter, two weeks later, in October. The leaves of the elm had brightened and had begun to litter the sidewalk and the porch. I’d find the leaves tracked into the vestibule, and sometimes Geoff would bring one, stuck to his shoe, all the way up the stairs. It had gotten cold; the grass, the windows, and the windshields of cars were sometimes stamped with frost. I was leery of winter, its portent like a trap about to snap shut around us. Del’s letter arrived on a day the temperature dipped to thirty degrees. Rory and I are running off together, she wrote. We’re going to get married in Maine, where he has a cabin, and a friend who lives on a commune who is a religious figure in some church or other. I thought apprehensively of the Theosophists who’d penned my great-grandfather’s manuals. Del detailed the dress she was going to wear, peasant style, with smocking and wide sleeves, and the bouquet of mums she would carry—a fall bride, she said.

  I pictured her marrying Rory, the two of them reciting lines of poetry in a ceremony attended by commune members. I doubted my mother, or Leanne or Sarah, or my father with his new wife, would consider attending, even if they’d been invited. Nowhere in her letter had Del extended an invitation to me. Had she gotten well enough to leave Ashley Manor for good—or had she been given some sort of overnight pass?

  It surprised me then to return home from class that same afternoon and find Del sitting on my front porch. I recognized her old purple ski parka, which made me instantly leery. She wore a striped stocking cap, the kind that could hang down the wearer’s back, or be wrapped like a scarf around the neck—a vintage piece she might have found at a Salvation Army store. Her hair had grown long, nearly waist-length, and she’d dyed it auburn, matching my own. Her face seemed bloated and her eyes too bright. I hadn’t seen her in three years, and I felt a mix of emotions I couldn’t have described. I swore I was happy to see her, but she looked at me askance.

  “Liar,” she said.

  I felt instantly regretful, and she laughed. “I could tell you missed me from your last letter,” she said.

  I didn’t know what I’d written to her—all of it was an invented mess.

  “Where’s your husband?” I said.

  She laughed, again, flashing her bright teeth, her face altered in the time since I’d seen her. It had grown more mature, more filled with nuance I had trouble deciphering. Behind her expression lay the years of time we had spent apart. She was still the prettier sister. She said the Rory saga was a long one. She had left the manor of her own accord, taken the bus with money she’d saved.

  “They just let you leave?” I said. “Or did you run away, like Gene Tierney?”

  Del sang a little bit of the Laura movie theme, deepening her voice to sound like Frank Sinatra. “Laura is the face in the misty light.” We’d spent long weekends as children watching old movies or singing the songs from our grandmother’s Broadway musical albums—My Fair Lady, Funny Girl, Oklahoma!

  “I wasn’t in shackles,” Del said. “Sure I could leave!”

  I found I was nervous, unused to Del’s teasing outside of her letters.

  “I like your haunted house,” she said. “I could have guessed this is where you’d end up.”

  After our grandfather died, we had made a regular habit of sneaking into the Spiritualists by the Sea camp. A group called the Ladies’ Aid Society coordinated events and visiting mediums, and the programs were held in the old wooden temple. The cottages, spruced up each summer with paint and annuals, were, by the time we visited, privately owned, or used as seasonal cottages. There were sessions on “Meditation and Spirituality” or “Advanced Mediumship Techniques” or “Past Life Regressions,” and a medium’s cottage for private readings. Del memorized all of the upbeat inspirational songs played out on the temple piano, and when we mingled in the meditation garden, or in the gazebo placed on a spit of land near the Sound, she would sing them, to the pleasure of camp visitors. With her long, blond hair and her blue eyes, she could smile sweetly and seem ethereal, while I sat beside her on the bench like her dark opposite.

  “Have you had any séances yet?” Del asked me. She dug a plastic bag filled with spice drops out of her backpack. “Summoned any spirits?” She held the bag out to me.

  “Still eating this crap,” I said. The scents of spices—clove, cinnamon, cardamom, anise, wintergreen—filled me with a strange longing for our old bedroom at our grandparents’ house, for the way the sun came in across the floor in the mornings, for the strange call of the loon through our open windows.

  Del chose an orange drop for me. “Clove,” she said. “Your favorite.”

  Our eavesdropping at the camp had provided us with séance techniques, the language of mediums calling forth spirits from the ether, and Del had convinced me one summer to put these things to use in our grandparents’ pool shed, corralling neighborhood children eager to hear from dead relatives, from recently deceased children’s show hosts, from the local babysitter killed riding on the back of her boyfriend’s motorcycle. Del always had a plan.

  “What did we charge? A dollar?” Del dug around in the bag and pulled out a dark red drop for herself—cinnamon.

  “We got up to two-fifty,” I said. “I can’t believe I let you talk me into that.”

  We’d been eleven and twelve—bored that summer. It was disarming to be the focus of Del’
s attention, her spotlight pointed on you, pressuring you to perform, to be who she wanted you to be. She was relentless about getting her way, annoying and a burden at times. But she also knew how to draw me in, to make something seem an adventure.

  “Remember Mrs. Parmenter?” Del caught the red drop in her mouth, her eyes bright.

  “She gave us ten dollars,” I said.

  Our grandmother’s neighbor, Mrs. Parmenter, had shown up at the pool shed door. She wore a scarf over her head and dark sunglasses, and she wanted to contact her husband. We knew none of the details of his death at that time, only that he had passed away that winter, and though I did wonder why she would come to two children rather than visit the medium at the Spiritualists’ camp, I brushed my concerns aside. She cut the line of children and stepped, a little unsteadily, through the wooden doorway smelling of gin and perfume, her lipstick dark and carelessly applied. The shed was tucked behind a privet hedge and faced a lane that led out to the main road. It housed the pool pump, life jackets and rings, cleaning supplies and tools. Towels smelling of chlorine hung on pegs, and folding lawn chairs, their slats bright green and white strips, were stacked against a back wall. The shed was naturally dark, with only one window we’d covered with a striped beach towel. Our candle was an old red glass citronella, stolen from a patio table. We were no-frills—no jewelry or fancy scarves. Mrs. Parmenter took in the croquet set, the galvanized metal tub we’d turned upside down to use as our table. We’d placed three low folding chairs around it.

  “Here’s five dollars for each of you,” she’d said. “Let’s get started.”

  I had given Del a cautionary look, but she’d taken the money from the woman’s shaky hand and tucked it into her shorts pocket. It was dusk, and the sky beyond the curtained window was alive with last light, the darkness encroaching from the woods that backed the gravel lane. The shed flickered with shadow, with the eerie twilight. We lit our candle and Mrs. Parmenter sat down. She wore a narrow skirt and had to sit with her legs folded to the side. From her purse she removed a heavy, man’s gold watch and tossed it down onto the galvanized tub.

  “This was his,” she said. “I thought you might, you know, need it.”

  “Perhaps,” Del said.

  She moved the watch out of the way, and we put our hands down flat on the galvanized surface, fingertips touching, and instructed her to do the same. Mrs. Parmenter’s nails were long, the polish chipped. Del told her to close her eyes. She tilted her head at me—the oldest, and therefore considered the most responsible—her mouth a flat line.

  “Why? So you can trick me?” she said. Then her expression changed and she complied, mumbling what sounded like an apology.

  Her perfume was suffocating in the warm shed, an amorphous presence. Del summoned the spirits in her best medium’s voice, a copy of Reverend Earline Morrissey’s at the Spiritualists’ camp. She said we wanted to hear from Mr. Parmenter, would he be willing to talk with us. And then Mrs. Parmenter interrupted Del, her eyes still squeezed shut.

  “Oh no,” she said, her voice harsh. “He doesn’t get to talk. I want to give him a message. You let me know when he’s here.”

  Del and I had exchanged a look. We’d never done this with an adult before, and the problems were immediately evident. Inventing anything seemed like lying, yet saying nothing would reveal us as shams. I pressed Del’s finger with mine, giving her a warning to stay silent.

  “I sense he is present,” she said, ignoring me, proceeding with our usual script.

  “I want a sign,” Mrs. Parmenter said. And then outside a bird called, an evening songbird, and Mrs. Parmenter stiffened, hearing it. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes.

  “He’s here,” she said, giddy and girlish. “He used to whistle like that. That tuneless sound. Yes, I know you’re here, sweetheart.”

  Del’s body trembled with nervous laughter, and I struggled to keep my own in check, my voice level.

  “Yes,” I said. “He is waiting for your message.”

  He wasn’t there—none of the dead showed up at our séances. I played along with Del and felt guilty for our lies. Some of the children were suffering, confused and unappeased by the priests and ministers who insisted their loved ones had gone to heaven—a place I sometimes equated, wrongly, with the astral plane, and which they imagined as a cloud-filled oasis in the sky.

  I expected Mrs. Parmenter would say how much she missed her husband, how much the children missed him. Already the oldest girl had come to us seeking him out. “Daddy,” she’d said, “you promised you’d take me to the Civic Center for the Ice Capades. You promised.”

  Mrs. Parmenter seemed to gather all of her strength. “My darling,” she said, her voice wavering and sweet. “Father March says that you’re in hell, and I hope that’s true. I wouldn’t expect a priest to lie. I want you to stay there and know how much you’ve hurt—no—how much you’ve destroyed your lovely family. You stay there and think about that for eternity. You just settle in, the way you do, with your goddamn cigarette and your bourbon straight and your pressed boxer shorts and your ‘just heading out to the office,’ and that fucking plaid cap on your head, and you fucking rot there.”

  I pulled my hands away. Mrs. Parmenter took a deep breath, exhaled, and opened her eyes. In the candlelight she wiped her tears gingerly with her fingertips. Then she stood and smoothed down her skirt.

  “Thank you, girls,” she said. She stepped to the door and then paused. “How’s your mother, by the way?”

  Del drew her legs up and hugged them. The candle sputtered and made our shadows glimmer.

  “She’s fine,” I said.

  Mrs. Parmenter hardened her eyes. “So happy to hear that,” she said, though I could see that she was not happy about anything.

  She turned to step outside and had forgotten Mr. Parmenter’s watch. I picked it up to hand to her, and she took it, grudgingly, and slipped it back into her purse. We’d watched as she’d disappeared through the gap in the hedges toward the lane.

  * * *

  GEOFF CAME OUT the front door and gave us a little wave. Del was checking out his boots as he passed by.

  “Those are desert boots,” she said.

  “This is my sister, Del,” I said.

  Geoff paused on the sidewalk and shaded his eyes. “Lovely,” he said, then he walked off.

  “Cheerio,” Del called out after him, imitating his accent.

  She unwound the stocking cap from her neck and fiddled with the fringe of the pompom.

  “Mr. Parmenter committed suicide,” she said.

  “At the Stardust Motel,” I said.

  “Supposedly, he was waiting for the woman he’d been seeing, and she never showed.” Del stared at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “Never mind,” she said.

  I’d never told her about Mr. Parmenter’s watch. This was years before the dead began to appear to me again, and at the time I believed I’d imagined it. When I’d touched the watch I’d seen a man stretched out on a bed, his hair dark and wet against his head, the pillow stained and his mouth open, as if in sleep, or in the process of a yawn or a scream. The motel room’s paisley bedspread held its own dark stain, the man’s feet shod in dress shoes and the thin dress socks the fathers all wore splayed at the bed’s foot. And the terrible stillness, a slight wheezing sound that may have been last breaths, and then nothing, nothing but the cars passing on the turnpike, nothing but the dust and the spring day shifting through the blinds, and the long length of silence.

  Del had goaded me on during the pool shed sessions—“Tell us what you see, Sister. What is he saying?” so I was forced to reply, to invent lies, and to keep the things I believed I was imagining to myself—vivid, disconcerting scenes, ones that would suddenly be presented to me while I sat in the quiet of the shed, smelling the citronella and the chlorine: an old man with a belt, beating a child on the back of his legs; a woman leaning over a toilet, spitting up chalky, white pills into the b
owl; a dog locked in a toolshed, clawing at a door. The children returned with messages, with news of their accomplishments, with admissions, sometimes shyly expressed, so that I felt, at times, like the priest in the confessional. The Spiritualists by the Sea had taught me that there were places where others who purported to see what I saw gathered. I suspected that many if not most were liars and fakes, and was certain that to align myself with them would be a grave mistake.

  “Think of the money we might have made if Mother hadn’t caught on,” Del said, in that wry, raspy voice I had missed more than I’d realized. I felt a twinge of sorrow, too, for all the time we’d spent away from each other, and for the way I’d let resentment color our childhood.

  The wind swirled leaves around our ankles on the porch. I told Del to come inside, and she picked up her backpack and followed me. It seemed that she’d not come directly to Ithaca but had in fact taken a side trip to Maine with Rory. From her letters I’d gathered he was older, in his thirties, a gentle man who dyed her hair for her, and took her out places and always brought her back. I’d pictured his trembling hands in plastic gloves squeezing the bottle of dye onto the top of her head and tenderly distributing it through her roots.

  “So what happened?” I asked her.

  I’d showed her into my tiny bedsit. I’d told her she could put her backpack anywhere.

  “What do you mean happened?” Del was sitting on my couch. “Where do you sleep?”

  “What happened with Rory,” I said. “Why did you call off the wedding?”

  They’d had an argument and gone their separate ways, Del explained. “He was too controlling,” she said. “Always wanting to have sex in the woods.”

  I leaned on the small counter, feeling the smallness of the room with the both of us there.

  “Like some sort of pagan ritual?”

  I told her the couch pulled out into a bed, and she removed the cushions right then, and marveled at the way the bed unfolded, as if it were something she’d never seen.