The Medium (29 page)

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Authors: Noëlle Sickels

BOOK: The Medium
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“I thought he was safe,” she said after they'd gone halfway around the yard in silence. She felt a catch in her throat on the word “safe,” but she wrestled it down.
“He was a soldier, Helen.”
“But he wasn't in the war yet.”
Lloyd stopped walking and turned to face her.
“My unit went ashore at Gela in Sicily,” he said. “Do you remember reading anything about what happened there? We heard General Eisenhower asked the war correspondents not to report it because of morale at home.”
“Gela? I'm not sure.”
“While we were fighting on the beach, they flew in reinforcement troops. Only, the transport planes happened to come in right on the tail of a heavy German bombing attack. Our gunners got confused. They thought the German bombers were back. They shot down our own men. Our own guys, Helen. Twenty-three planes went down. More than four hundred GIs
were killed.”
“I remember it now—but the report didn't come from anyone in the field. There was a leak from the War Department, and there weren't many details.”
“The point is, Helen, that war's messy. You listen to news broadcasts, you look at neatly drawn maps in the papers, you hear the President or the generals talk, and it seems like everything's all worked out and under control, like some kind of gigantic football game. But it's not under control, really. It can't be. There are rules, sort of, but everyone knows they can be crossed if you have to. There's people giving orders and other people following them, but they're all winging it a lot of the time. And there are accidents …”
He shoved his hands in his pockets.
“When you sign on for war,” he continued, “you sign on for whatever comes down the pike, and you find out quick that anything can and that if you live long enough, you'll see plenty, and not a lot of it will make sense—not in the way things used to make sense.”
“That's how I've been feeling about Billy—one of the things I've been feeling. That his death didn't make sense.”
“It made as much sense as any of them.”
They started walking again. Gray Ladies came to take the men in the wheelchairs inside. One of them reminded Lloyd that dinner would be arriving on the wards soon. He said he wanted to make one more circuit before returning to his room.
With the men in the wheelchairs gone, Helen could pretend they weren't in a hospital yard but in some undergroomed city park. She didn't want to think about the soldiers shot out of the Sicilian skies by their compatriots. She didn't want to think about the maimed men in the buildings around them. She didn't want to think about war and its jumbled mix of sense and nonsense, of hard necessity and profligate waste. Would Billy's
death have been any easier to take if he'd died in battle? He was gone. That cold fact overrode its own trappings.
“We're back at the entrance,” Helen informed Lloyd when they'd done their last tour of the yard.
“Is there a bench we could sit on a minute?”
There was, and she led him to it.
“Do you think, Helen, that you're gonna hear from Billy? Do you think he's gonna come to you?”
She hadn't expected this. It was something she'd wondered herself. She'd even talked to Nanny about it. But she hadn't thought anyone would broach the subject with her.
“My grandmother says he won't,” she said.
“Why not?”
“She's never known it to happen. Besides, I'm not holding seances now.”
“Do you think
she
could do it? Call him for you?”
Helen had considered this, too, but Nanny had refused.
“She doesn't think her ability's strong enough,” she answered.
The old woman had meant not only that she might be unable to bring Billy through, but also that she wouldn't know how to supervise the energy between a new spirit who'd passed violently and a grieving, powerful medium.
“Nanny said we have the proof of all the others that Billy is all right. She said that's enough.”
“Is it enough for you?”
Helen picked at a loose thread on her jacket. Lloyd was making her think, making her shape her thoughts into explanations. She balked at the effort, but she was grateful to him for forcing it.
“No, it's not,” she said. “But seeing him wouldn't be enough, either. It wouldn't be the same as really seeing him again. And it wouldn't last.”
Lloyd turned, angling his body towards Helen. When his
knee bumped hers, he pulled back a few inches.
“He didn't really believe all that stuff, did he?” he said. “About what you can see.”
“He had his doubts.”
“Would that stop him from contacting you?”
“I really don't know, Lloyd. He'd have to want to, certainly. He'd have to think it would help me.”
“Would he come, do you think … would he come to help
me
?”
Helen was startled. Lloyd sounded as needy as any mourner at one of her seances. Was he asking her to bring Billy to him? Now that the wish was issuing from someone other than herself, the notion of fulfilling it suffused her with anxiety. Perhaps Nanny was right that mediums were not meant to call up their own dead.
“Is there something specific you want to hear from him? Or something you want to tell him?”
Lloyd slowly shook his head and stood up.
“Forget it,” he said. “It was just a cockamamie idea.”
Helen, too, stood up. Lloyd took hold of her elbow in preparation for entering the building.
“You know what else my grandmother says?” she told him gently. “She says that the dead hang around a while watching how the people they left behind are doing. So, if there's something you want Billy to know, you can talk to him like he's right in front of you. Because he probably is.”
MAY 1944
Rosie was home on a month's furlough. The day after her arrival in town, she was on Helen's doorstep, looking fit and trim and serious. Helen immediately threw her arms around her, and they both burst into relieved laughter.
“Come in,” Helen said, pulling her by the hand. “I didn't think you'd stop over for a day or two. My folks are all out. They'll hate it that they missed you.”
“I couldn't wait to see you,” Rosie said. “There's plenty of time for everyone else later.”
They went through into the kitchen. Helen filled two tall glasses with iced tea made with spearmint from the Victory garden and cut two pieces of Ursula's
Linzertorte.
They took their glasses and plates into the backyard and dragged two Adirondack chairs under the big maple in whose shade they'd spent so many summer afternoons. Rosie peered around the yard.
“It all looks the same,” she said. “And yet it's not like I remember it.”
“What do you mean?”
“It's smaller, for one thing. But that's not all.” She scanned the yard again. “I feel it at home, too. It's not a
bad
feeling, just a little confusing. When I was overseas, I'd picture this yard sometimes, and my mother's kitchen, and Oratam Beach, and a couple of other spots. To remind myself of what our guys were fighting to save and why I was living in a wet, muddy tent or
letting myself get eaten alive by desert flies. But it turns out the real places don't fit the pictures I thought up.”
“Lloyd Mackey said he thought home could never be like what you dreamed about. He said when you're away at war, you build up a dream of home, and you've got the dream, and then when you're back, you've got nothing, and it's like you're moving slower than everyone else and you're not sure how to join in.”
Rosie nodded thoughtfully.
“How is Lloyd?” she said.
“He's all healed, but he won't ever see again. He's in a rehab hospital in Pennsylvania.”
“Gee, that's tough.”
“Oh, he'll be all right. He'll be better than all right. He's got so much heart, Rosie. And guts. When you're with him, you feel like …”
Helen interrupted herself with a swallow of iced tea.
“Well, you know, same old Lloyd,” she continued brightly. “Nothing could ever keep him down for long.”
Helen thought she saw a question in Rosie's eyes, but her friend turned her gaze to a couple of robins on the grass. She crumbled up a bit of torte crust and threw it to them.
“Helen,” she said quietly when she'd turned back, “I'm so sorry about Billy.”
“Yes, I know. I got your letter. It was wonderful, the things you wrote.”
“I can't even think how I'd feel if anything happened to Arnie, and we've only known each other seven months, while the two of you …” Rosie shook her head. “Gosh, Helen, you were in love with Billy even before there
was
a two of you—your whole life practically.”
“A kid's crush,” Helen said, shrugging.
“But not later.”
“No, not later.”
Rosie set her empty plate on the ground and her empty glass on top of it. One robin hopped a little closer, cocking its head to inspect the plate for crumbs.
“Do you miss him a lot?”
Only Rosie would dare to ask so blunt a question, though it wasn't really daring, but simply an expression of her guileless nature and her deep affection for Helen. Rosie's bluntness made Helen feel daring, too, which was not particularly natural to her. It was as if Rosie had leant forward and cajoled Helen, as she'd done so often when they were children and she was proposing some mild trespass or chancy exploit. “C'mon,” she'd say, “you can do it. It'll be okay. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“I miss him,” Helen said. “But maybe not as much as I should.”
“Who says?” Rosie spouted. “That mooning mother of his? Say, Mary Steltman hasn't been needling you again, has she?”
“No, no,” Helen said, smiling.
“What then?”
“Oh, Rosie, I'm afraid to say it out loud. I've hardly even said it inside my own head.”
“C'mon, it'll be all right,” Rosie said, reaching out to squeeze Helen's arm.
Helen took a deep breath.
“Sometimes I think it was just the nearness of the wedding making me nervous. You know, like you hear all brides get? That my nervousness mixed me up.”
“If me and Arnie ever get to where we set the date, the only thing could make me nervous is whether he'd show up on time! But you've got to be a little plainer, Helen. What happened?”
“Lloyd happened.”
Rosie raised her eyebrows and sat back in her chair.
“Plainer,” she instructed.
“Well, I visited him in the hospital, over in Staten Island, and then he came home on furlough at Christmas, and he got in the habit of stopping by. We'd take walks, I'd read him the newspaper, we'd talk.”
“Did he make a pass at you? 'Cause these soldiers, sometimes they can be—”
“No, nothing like that. But one day, my parents and my grandmother kind of warned me about him, that they thought he was falling for me. I was mad about them saying that, but then I started to think that maybe I could be falling for
him
. At least a little. And I got scared. 'Cause how could I fall for somebody when I was about to get married? Especially, how could I fall for my fiancé's brother?”
“Well, how could you? Honestly. Tell me what's so swell about Lloyd that you'd think for one minute about throwing over the love of your life.”
Helen slid forward on her chair.
“I
didn't
think of throwing Billy over,” she protested. “But I did think maybe … I did start to wonder, Rosie … if he really was the love of my life.”
“Look, Helen, like you said yourself, it was probably just bride's nervousness.”
“I didn't say probably.”
“What was it then?”
“Being with Lloyd is so … so
easy.
And Lloyd's not an easy person.”
“And being with Billy was hard? C'mon, Helen, you were ready to marry the guy. You can't tell me there was nothing there.”
“Of course there was something there. There was a lot. He was … well, I guess he was my definition of what being in love is. I couldn't imagine him not being part of my life. I still
forget, sometimes, that he's gone.”
She looked over at the fence along the driveway. The old wooden box she used to stand on was still there, a clump of dandelions growing pressed up to one side of it. Rosie was right. She had loved Billy practically her whole life, with a naive ardor that would not tolerate doubts. When misgivings or misunderstandings did crop up, a kiss, a touch, the fulcrum of private history eviscerated them so handily she barely knew it was happening. She looked again at Rosie.
“It was something you wrote me about Arnie that gave me my first twinge of not being sure.”
“Arnie?”
“Not about him, exactly, but about how you felt with him. That you felt more like yourself. You thought I'd know what you meant because of Billy. But I didn't.”
Helen fiddled the fingers of her right hand on the broad wooden arm of her chair.
“Later, I thought of your letter again,” she continued, resting her hands in her lap, where she stared down at them. “Because later, I thought I did know what you meant. But not because of Billy.”
“Because of Lloyd?”
Helen nodded.
“Oh, brother,” Rosie said, shaking her head. Quickly she added, “Gosh, I guess that's not the best thing to say.”
Helen couldn't repress a wry smile.
“What's Lloyd got to say about all this?”
“Nothing,” Helen replied, appalled. “We've never talked about it. Never even come close.”
“And what about now?”
It was the very question that had been dogging Helen since the last time she'd seen Lloyd, when she'd had that shameful desire to feel his arms around her. She kept pushing the question
down, refusing to give it any berth. She felt guilty that it even arose. Now, agitated, she stood up and walked away from the chairs and along the fence a short distance. Rosie didn't interfere. Helen returned to her seat.
“There's more,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Billy hasn't … come to me yet,” she said hesitantly. “Not even in a dream.”
“Is he supposed to?”
“I keep wondering if he's not coming because he knows that I was worrying about us. Oh, Rosie, what if he knew it before he died? What if somebody said something to him?”
“I don't get how these things work, Helen, but just because you haven't seen Billy in a dream or anything doesn't have to mean he knew you were trying to decide between him and his brother.”
“I wasn't! It wasn't ever a choice between him and Lloyd—I could never, ever think like that. I was still gonna marry him. I
wanted
to marry him.”
Rosie reached over to hold Helen's hands.
“Well, there's your answer, then. You didn't do anything wrong, Helen.”
“But I
feel
wrong, Rosie. Even now, when I think about us getting married, there's this scared lump in my stomach.”
“Maybe that's why Billy isn't coming.”
Bewildered, Helen made no response.
“Maybe he doesn't want you to be scared.”
“Seeing Billy wouldn't scare me. It's my own feelings that scare me.”
“Could be it looks the same to him. Could be he thinks you don't want to see him. Do ghosts think?”
The back door of the house opened, and Emilie poked her head out.
“Rosie!” she called, crossing the yard. “I didn't know you were coming over. Here, let me give you a good hug. You're not too much of a soldier for that, are you?”
“No, ma'am,” Rosie said, getting up.
Over Emilie's shoulder, Rosie shot an appraising glance at Helen. Helen made a gesture that said it was all right that their talk had ended so abruptly. Rosie had given her something to ponder.
Helen had resisted going into trance to seek Billy. She'd wanted him to do the seeking. Even as part of her dreaded what he might say. But maybe it was a mistake to avoid trances and seances. She still preferred that Billy come without her sending Iris to find him, but she could let him know the door was open, couldn't she? Shouldn't she?
Yes, she decided, only half listening as her mother and Rosie chatted, she'd hold a seance, or a series of seances, a fuller giving over to trance than she'd ever made before. She'd discard the careful rules and schedules she'd set up in the fall, after the materialization of all those faces had so unnerved her. She'd let anyone attend, allow any questions, give Iris free reign, welcome any spirit. She wouldn't pull back no matter what she saw or heard.

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