A Certain Slant of Light (18 page)

  
After an hour, a nurse paused in the doorway: The visiting
session was over. By that time Mitch was slumped back in his
chair, a hand over his eyes as if he'd been trying to sleep. Verna
packed her bag.

  
"Next time I'll bring that short story about the yard sale," she
promised. "It was a hoot."

  
Mitch got up, battle weary, aching with the weight of his
armor.

  
"Bye, sweetie." Verna kissed the patient's cheek again. "Say
goodbye, boys."

  
"Bye, Mom," said Mitch without looking at her. He was al
ready out the door.

  
James waved at the silent woman, a small boyish gesture.
"Bye, Mom." He stayed beside Verna, carrying her bag. She
seemed to have even more trouble walking out than in. Mitch was waiting in the car by the time they were signing out at the
desk. I trailed behind, mesmerized by Verna's lurching gait.

  
"You take the front," said James opening the door for her.

  
When he was in the back, James finally looked at me. I knew
he wanted to speak, but he glanced in the rearview mirror and
changed his mind.

  
"She loved those flowers," Verna said to Mitch.

  
Mitch turned on the radio and played music all the way to
Verna's apartment building. As soon as the music came on, James
leaned toward me and whispered, "She wasn't ringing." When I
looked perplexed, he added, "She's not empty. Their mother is
still in her body."

  
I was horrified at the idea of this type of hell. "Without being
able to speak or move?"

  
As we passed the graveyard again, the stones flashing by
seemed to catch and hold his eyes like the pendulum swing of a
hypnotist's watch. "Seven," he whispered.

  
"Seven?" I asked.

  
"Ghosts in the cemetery."

  
"What?" asked Verna.

  
"Nothing," said James.

  
When Verna got out, James got out too and gave her his arm.

  
"Want me to walk you to your door?" he asked.

  
She gave him a bemused look. "No, I'll manage."

  
James bounced into the front seat. I stayed in the back.

  
"Bye!" She waved, but the car was pulling down the street be
fore James could answer.

  
"Okay," Mitch sighed. "Light me a cigarette."

  
When we arrived back at Amelia Street, James pretended to watch television as Mitch read the sports section of the paper.
Finally Mitch got his jacket and picked up his keys.

  
"Can I take a walk if I stay out of trouble?" James asked.

  
"I guess."

  
"Since I got brain damage and all," said James, "can you re
mind me, how long am I grounded for?"

  
"To be announced," was all he'd say.

I watched James eat a peanut butter sandwich.

  
"I've always wondered what that tasted like," I said, sitting
across from him at the kitchen table.

  
"Well, now I know what to get you for Christmas." When he'd
finished, he drank a full glass of orange juice and said, "Let's go
hunting."

  
"Where will we go?"

  
"Where people go in September on a Sunday afternoon," he
answered. "The mall."

  
It was strange following James while he rode his bicycle. He'd
look about now and then but couldn't focus on me. He locked the
bike to a rack outside the huge shopping plaza, and we wandered
into the cavernous clatter. The mall was choked with people and
echoing with babble. Music of various kinds mixed in disconcerting waves. Mr. Brown hated shopping, so I hadn't been in this sort
of place for several years.

  
James moved slowly against the current, "hunting." Wrinkled
faces with thick saucer eyeglasses, baby faces half-hidden by plas
tic pacifiers, bearded faces with mirrored sunglasses, blue-lidded
faces with rings in their noses, spotted faces with braces: All
swam past me, misunderstood like foreign words. James walked
the length of the vast mall and back again three times with me
in tow. He sat on a stone ashtray, his brow dark, watching a flock of youngsters as they ate at little round tables. Finally he rose and
began walking again, staying in the center of the wrong side of
traffic. I was feeling much less nervous now than I had the night
before. It seemed so farfetched, finding an abandoned body, that I
felt I had nothing to fear yet. It would take us days to find some
one to save.

  
"That one," he whispered.

  
Near the entrance to a large store, a woman of perhaps thirty crouched down to tie her running shoe. Her chopped brown hair
covered her face; she wore sweatpants and a hooded jacket. I hid
behind James as he slowly approached her.

  
"She's empty?"

  
"Listen," he whispered. "Don't you hear it?"

  
As she stood up, the hair fell back to reveal a thin face with a
shadow of tension around the mouth. She walked into the store,
and we followed three paces behind. I did begin to hear a faint
buzz, but I couldn't tell whether it came from the woman or the
lights from the jewelry cases.

  
"What should I do?" My nerves twisted in me like wires.

  
"Cleave to her," he whispered. "And when she's alone, go into
her."

  
I didn't want my spirit to cleave to anyone except James, but a
body seemed to be the only way to truly be with him. "What if
there's an evil that isn't afraid of me?"

  
"She's not on drugs." James stopped when the woman hesi
tated in an intersection of the aisles. "It won't be like with Billy. She's an athlete—she takes care of her body."

  
Now the woman turned left, and we circled after her until she
opened a door marked "Ladies" on the far wall. James turned and
pretended to check the price of a bathrobe on a rack beside him.
The empty woman was alone now.

  
"I'll be right here," said James.

  
Against my better instincts, I passed through the restroom
door just as she was locking it. It was a tiny room with one toilet
and one sink, a metal bin, and a warning sign posted for shop
lifters.

  
The woman looked at herself in the mirror as if she'd forgotten why she was there. Perhaps she had an athlete's body, but her
face looked far from healthy. It was pale and dark under the eyes, lined with small scars as if she had once been attacked by a cat. I
wondered whether I could fit behind those lips and make them
smile again.

  
I didn't need to cleave to the woman, as James was only a few
feet away outside the door, but I would soon lose my chance to be
alone with her. Although still afraid, I stood beside her at the
mirror and touched her left hand where it rested on the edge of
the sink.

  
It felt nothing like touching Mr. Brown or James. Her flesh had a prickling heat like frostbitten toes being revived in a hot
bath. With her right hand, she turned on the tap, then leaned
down and took a handful of water, swished it in her mouth, and
spat. Then she took a long drink and straightened up. I moved
closer, my right hand on her left hand, my right arm in line with
her left. She looked in the mirror again, a drop of water on her
chin. I could feel the definition of each of her fingers, though our
thumbs were on the wrong sides. The hot tingle of her rose up
my arm.

  
The woman was looking into her own eyes, but she frowned
now as if she didn't recognize herself. She pulled her left arm in
front of her and my right was drawn with it. I moved deeper into
her, my right eye now looking out through her left into the re
flection that showed only one woman. Where the darkness
around her mouth met the corner of my lips, I felt a tremor. I
tried to move out of her, but I was stuck. From the back corner of
her heart, a memory flitted by—the woman as a girl of ten, spit
ting into a bathroom sink, gagging and drinking water as she
wept, her brown braids hanging in the bowl. Flashes of her hands
trying to hold the door handle still in her dark bedroom, but the
knob twisting in her grip. Her stepfather mutely smoking a ciga
rette on the porch as her mother scolded her for wetting the bed
again.

  
It was gone as suddenly as it had come. The woman in the
mirror was looking me in the eyes, one of my eyes inside one of
hers, the other in midair and invisible. She was seeing me, I could
tell because her lips curled. But it wasn't the woman who was
smiling. That child had fled this body when she was still a
teenager. What looked back at me was not a woman at all.

  
There was a knock at the door. The handle shook. But a twisting doorknob couldn't make this flesh tremble or cringe anymore.
These bones now housed something unshakable that rose like a
puddle of tar and then, from a hiding place in the woman's belly, fanned up black like the head of a cobra.

  
"Helen!" James was on the other side of the door and
sounded scared. "Don't do it!"

  
I felt a stinging anger rise through my fingers, bringing with
it the urge to take that hand and scratch the cheek where half my
face was hidden, tear it bloody. It frightened me so much that I
tried to dive out of her. The hand I possessed only jerked into the
air and then gripped the sink as I fought for the use of it.