A Certain Slant of Light (35 page)

  
I felt happy, imagining James and Mitch having fun together,
but when he looked back into my eyes, the light still flicked over
his features like the twin sides in a stereoscopic picture, one im
age slightly different from the other. My James and the James
who came before, both hiding behind Billy's eyes.

  
"He misses his brother," said James.

  
My skin turned cold, for some reason. "He loves you, anyone
can tell."

  
"He loves Billy."

  
I wondered if anyone truly missed Jenny.

  
"You didn't drive Billy out." I could hear the fear in my voice. "He ran away before you ever touched his body."

  
The nuns were staring now. The way James lifted his hand to
his brow, smiling at them but forgetting he had no hat to tip,
warmed me again and made me want to kiss him.

Although Mitch and Libby's cars were not in sight, James opened the door very slowly. "Hello?" We were alone, it seemed.

  
With a backward kick of his foot, James slammed his bed
room door behind us.

  
"We have hours," I laughed between kisses. But I was actually thinking,
We have forever.

  
"I'm sorry." He stopped and looked at me. He was breathtaking, his cheeks flushed and his shirt half open. "No, I'm not," he
said and he was kissing me again. It was no use. I imagined hav
ing eons together ahead of us, but we still made love as if we had
only a stolen hour.

  
We were laced in each other, clinging and damp. James was
gazing at the wall where a column of type showed through a
magazine picture of a sports car. The window light reflected in
his eyes like the moon.

  
"I think I used to write for a newspaper."

  
"I don't want to wait for thirteen months," I told him.

  
At this he looked at me, pulling my leg around him. "Billy
might know someone who can sell us fake licenses."

  
I brightened at the idea but saw a shadow cross James's smile
for a moment. I knew what it was, though he covered it. He
imagined us running away together, but he also imagined Mitch
finding that Billy had left him. I was stricken with envy. If only I felt that sort of love for Cathy and Dan.

  
He recovered his smile and rocked on top of me, slipping his
hands beneath my hips.

  
Then I remembered what I'd brought. "Can you reach my
bag?"

  
He shifted me under him, as ready to fill me as when he'd
kicked the door shut. "Why?"

  
I laughed and climbed out of his arms, pulling the camera
from my bag where it had been shamelessly dumped among our
discarded clothes. I snapped the latch open and pointed the lens
at him.

  
Quickly he pulled the sheet over his lap. "Miss Helen, I'm
shocked."

  
"Smile."

  
"No. Come here." He waved me back into the bed. As de
lighted as a child on Christmas morning, I jumped into the
sheets, and he put his arm under my head as we lay down. "We
can both be in the picture," he said.

  
I tried to hold the camera far enough away from us and still manage to push the button. James, who had a longer arm, took
the camera from me. We nestled our faces close together and just as the flash of light hit us, I pulled the sheet off him. He laughed
and the camera spit the blank photo out at us like a metal frog
showing its tongue. He gave me the camera but kept the picture away from my hands, flapping it above me as I fought to snatch
it away.

  
"That's mine," I told him.

  
"We can both see," he said finally, lying back down, holding
the picture up as it faded in. I lay with my head on his shoulder, watching the faces appear—two laughing, slightly out-of-focus lovers, their expressions so the same, naked shoulders and wild
hair against the white pillow.

  
We spent a long minute admiring it, then James said, "May I
keep it?"

  
"Yes."

  
He lowered the picture to his chest and let it rest there. "You
and I were left behind on earth for a reason."

  
My blood cooled so suddenly, I felt ill.

  
James drew me in close. "But we've found each other now. It's
all right."

  
I knew he was trying to comfort me, and himself, but there
was still something wrong.

  
"Why do you think that is?" he asked. "Why were we haunt
ing this life?"

  
"I did something dreadful," I confessed.

  
"What was it?" he asked without a moment's apprehension.

  
"I can't remember." Why would you want to remember a hor
ror? I didn't know whether God had stolen my memories as a
punishment, but it felt like a blessing.

  
"Whatever it was," said James, "I forgive you."

  
The simplest of words, but they squeezed at my throat. A
fever-hot tear escaped my lashes and mixed with the salt on his
chest.

  
"God doesn't forgive me," I said.

  
James turned his lips to the curve of my ear, his breath trembling my hair. He said one word, one I hadn't expected.

  
"Stubborn."

  
James was in love with me, and that made him a gentle judge.

  
I couldn't remember my sin, but I knew it was deep. My banishment from heaven was proof of it. He stroked my hair, but I felt
as if I were falling away from him, as if we were being uncou
pled by gravity.

  
"Perhaps if we could discover why we were marooned here,
we could be free to be together," he said.

  
"How do we do that?" I asked.

  
James raised himself up on one elbow and looked at me.
"What do you remember? Before you were Light?"

  
I saw dark water rushing past a broken plank. "Only what I've
told you," I lied.

  
I thought he would sense my dishonesty, but he didn't. "After
I went into Billy, I remembered little glimpses of things, but from the moment I first spoke to you, I've remembered more. This morning I remembered reading at my mother's sickbed. I
read her children's books. That was all she wanted."

  
"What's the last thing you remember?" I surprised myself by
asking such a thing. He might loathe recalling his last hours as
much as I dreaded mine. But he didn't flinch.

  
"My father remarried and my cousin and I went to New
York." He frowned, as if bringing back the images gave him a
headache. "I worked at a newspaper. And we lived over a bakery.
Our rooms always smelled of bread. We joined the army on the
same day." He stared into the air in front of me as if adjusting his
telescope. "I remember a tree." He was staring through me, his
vision resting on the hollow of my throat. As if hibernating, his
breathing slowed. I felt his flesh cool. "It's cold," he said.

  
I tried to warm him with my leg over his, my hands on his
arms.

  
"I made a mistake."

  
"What do you mean?" I asked.

  
He was bone white. I knew he was seeing more than he was
saying. He rolled onto his back. I was terrified of the fear crystal
lizing in his eyes. I took his face in both my hands and turned it
to mine, so he'd have to see me.

  
"They all died," he said.

  
With a jolt, he looked deeper into my eyes, as if I had become
someone else. His hand shot to my ribs and he pressed my stom
ach with his palm as if he saw some phantom wound. "Oh, God," he whispered. Fear was shivering through his hand into my chest.
I pressed his forehead to mine, praying that this illusion would
stop.

A flash of white, so bright it stung, turned into winter sky. I
found I was Light again. I was floating formless beside a man I
knew was James, though he was not in Billy's body. His eyes were
darker, his hair lighter, but his smile was James. He straddled a thick limb and clung to the black trunk of a huge leafless tree in a landscape as bare as the moon. I stayed close to his shoulder,
watching him as if he were my host. He looked down twenty feet to a small face that peered out of the trench. Both the young man
and the hole he crouched in were powdered with ash.

  
"Diggs," James called to him. Diggs glanced down the trench,
narrow as a grave, and then crept out, staying close to the tree
trunk.

  
"Are they moving?" he called to James.

  
James's uniform was as dirty and frayed as his friend's, but his
helmet was hung on his back like a metal saucer instead of safely
on his head. "We've been here for weeks and they haven't ad
vanced a foot," James laughed. "We'll be here until the Second
Coming."

  
"James?" I whispered in his ear, but he couldn't hear me. It
was as if I had slipped into a memory of his—a story I could not
affect but only observe.

  
Diggs started climbing the metal spikes that made the tree
into a watch tower. "So, what's the matter?"