Under the Light (2 page)

In my bathroom, he opened the cabinet and started to pick up my mascara.

“She needs to be presentable.” My mother finally spoke up.

“She’s fifteen. She should not be trying to attract men.”

“She can’t wear coveralls and wash her hair with a bar of soap,” she said, and he must have believed her because he left my toiletries alone.

Again, he did not invite us to follow, but we did. He walked out of the bathroom, down the hall, through the kitchen, into the garage, and up to the garbage can. He lifted the lid, paused to tie a knot in the top of the bag, and gently lowered it into the can, letting the lid fall closed.

The product of my self-expression was not good enough for the Salvation Army. I was already scheming how to get my music back and hide it at school, but the game wasn’t over yet.

“Follow me.” He was ordering a dog to come. My mother and I sat down obediently in the Prayer Corner.

The spine of the diary crackled as he ripped out a handful of pages and thrust them in front of my face. “Read.” When I just stared at the papers he shook them under my nose. “Take them and read.”

The pages looked wounded, jagged paper teeth dangling from the left side. The writing at the top of the page started in midsentence so I began with the next paragraph. “I don’t know, but I don’t think God did that. Not the God I believe in. Could we really worship different Gods?”

My father reached down and tore the page from my grip, jabbed his finger at the next page down. I read out loud from the first line: “. . . dreamed I was walking down a staircase at school and a guy who looked like a guy from that movie we saw in history class walked right up to me and put his hand under my blouse . . .” I hesitated. I remembered the dream, but I couldn’t remember how many details I’d written down.

“Go on.” My father took his seat now, ready to be entertained. My mother sat with arms folded, legs folded, the foot that wasn’t on the floor vibrating as if she were wired to a socket. My vision blurred for a moment—my ears were ringing. I couldn’t look at my mother. Something bothered me about the way her foot suddenly stopped shaking.

That was the last thing I remember before I found myself far away: my mother’s shoe freezing in midair.

The world disappeared.

I wasn’t in the Prayer Corner anymore. I was sitting on something slanted—birds were chattering away. The shadow of a tree crossed over me . . . no,
through
me. Sunshine and little shadows moved in the breeze. I was sitting on the roof of a house, but not mine. Our roof was flat and covered with white painted gravel—I’d been up there to save a kite once. This roof was covered with brown shingles, the wood all dried out and warped. I recognized our street below. I’d landed two doors down from my house.

Stupidly, the first thing I did when I was free of my life was to fly back to it. When I left the neighbor’s roof, I didn’t climb down like a human. I floated down like a bird.

I’m dead!
I thought. I was as light as smoke. I was sure I must be a ghost. The idea that I might have had a brain aneurysm right in the middle of the Prayer Corner panicked me—I rushed home expecting to hear my mother’s screams ring out or sirens to fill the streets, but it was so quiet, you could hear the leaves in the trees fluttering.

I expected to find my body lying on the floor in the family room, though when I flew around the side of our house and stopped at the glass doors, I saw I was wrong.

My parents weren’t trying to revive my corpse, because there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with me. My body was sitting up straight, my head bowed over my diary. There was a pen in my right hand.

The sliding door was closed, but I could still hear my mother’s voice.

“Exodus twenty,” she read from the Bible in her lap. “Then God spoke all these words, saying: I am the Lord your God.”

The Jenny I used to be took dictation, slowly writing in the journal as my parents watched. Now I noticed there
was
something wrong with me, but nothing my parents could detect.

My flesh was empty. More graceful than a robot from a horror movie, but still horrible.

CHAPTER 2

M
Y BODY LOOKED HEAVIER TO ME
, like a statue of a girl. Maybe my spirit was what gave my flesh and bones their lightness. Since I didn’t have any control over my body anymore, it was sickening to watch it move on its own. My hand held the pen, my elbow and shoulder shifted back and forth as I actually wrote in the journal, my eyelids blinked, my head tilted slightly. The worst part was the way my mother and father seemed to have no idea.

Finally my father took the journal from my hands. My back bent forward, feet shifted, as I knelt in the middle of the Prayer Corner. My fingers interlaced, ready for praying, and my parents laid hands on my strange doll head. Why didn’t they feel my absence like a chill under their palms? All those things that made me who I was since I was born didn’t matter to my parents. I sat outside the glass doors and cried like a baby.

I knew I couldn’t take my body with me and I knew I couldn’t stay, so without saying goodbye, I abandoned my life. My spirit slid up the wall of my house, rising as slowly as a raindrop in reverse, and glided over the white rocks on our roof. I could see every rotting leaf there as I swam the air over my home and then up high into our neighbor’s tree. Like Wendy from
Peter Pan,
I flew through the branches, beyond the leaves, and into the sky.

Was anything possible now? Paris or the pyramids in Egypt? Could I sit on the shoulder of the Statue of Liberty if I wanted? All I knew for sure was that I wanted the opposite of my old life.

My wish was granted—I was there in a single heartbeat.

The painting was huge, three feet wide and six feet high. A girl, probably life size, rode on the back of some half-hidden sea serpent in the middle of an aqua lake. She stood up straight between the monster’s fanlike fins and held a glass bowl in her hands. Calmly, as if this kind of thing were totally normal, she poured the water from the bowl into the face of the creature. Her gown was dark blue and fell off one of her white shoulders. Her hair was gypsy black.

But I wasn’t like her. Even though it seemed as if no one could see me or hurt me, I was still scared.

A plaque beside the enormous frame said it had been painted by a man named Waterhouse, on loan from Australia. I was in a wing of the county art museum. I’d been there only once, on a school field trip that my parents let me attend because they had been assured there would be no nude statues and because there was an exhibit of artifacts from the Holy Land on display.

But today the walls were full of skin—pale bodies and rich colors. I was surrounded by Pre-Raphaelite paintings from all over the world. A maiden leaned over a balcony to kiss an armored knight, a lady with waves of auburn hair breathed in the scent of a flower in her hand, mermaids lounged around on rocks, water nymphs hid between lily pads and tried to pull a shepherd into their pool. Something my mother would have considered borderline pornography.

I stayed there for I don’t know how long before I began to wander and found myself in a wing of photographs. A hundred or more black-and-white pictures surrounded me. No landscapes or bowls of fruit. Every image was human. These were the kinds of photos I’d wanted to take before my parents had shut down my experiments. I stared at the high contrast, deep shade, and blazing light. In one a naked woman lay across a grassy hill, half in and half out of the sun; in the next shadows ran like streams across the speckled skin on the back of a wrinkled hand.

And these weren’t just pictures about the beauty of the human body; the spirits looking out of those faces shocked me. An old woman waiting on her porch steps, her eyes heavy with pain. A boy balancing on the bow of a broken rowboat in the sand, flexing his skinny arms and staring down the camera with defiance. They were so fearless about who they were.

I found out how things worked through trial and error. Sometimes I decided to go somewhere, like when I was back in front of the Waterhouse painting in the blink of an eye because I thought of being there, and other times I found myself in a different place without warning or knowing why.

That’s how I landed beside a podium that held an enormous dictionary. I knew the place even though I’d been there only once—the huge main branch library downtown. I came to a story time there with my first grade class.

I moved through the aisles between millions of volumes and realized I could read anything I wanted now, uncensored. It wasn’t until I tried to open the cover of a novel on the new arrivals table that I discovered I was wrong. I had to read the back covers of books propped up on book stands and half articles visible on the pages of magazines left open on the couches in the lobby—it was impossible to grasp anything or even turn a page. Eventually I was brave enough to lean over an old man who sat in a study carrel and a woman at the long table in the computer wing and read silently along with them. They weren’t reading what I would have chosen myself, but still I liked the quiet and the colors of floor-to-ceiling books.

I visited the dance studio where I’d spent hours taking ballet. I hadn’t had lessons in months and I missed it. I loved how the mirrors created a world that went on forever; perfectly matched wooden bars and floors stretched into infinity, with company after company of girls calmly breathing, bending, stretching in unison.

I could see every detail as clearly as if I were lifting onto pointe myself. But I wasn’t really there. I proved this to myself by rushing toward the mirrors on the far wall, coming smack up against them without ever appearing in the reflection. I suppose I could have continued on through the mirror, but the idea frightened me.

Once I ended up at the Reed Theater. I stood in the center aisle, a dozen rows from the front, watching
West Side Story.
My parents refused to rent the movie for me; said it was inappropriate. But I had watched it on TV one day when I was home from school with a cold and my mom was at a church committee meeting. I was twelve, and I cried so hard I caught the hiccups.

Now I floated up onto the stage and turned back to see what the audience looked like as Maria and Tony sang a duet. The light from the stage turned everyone into angels—a thousand gold faces in the dark.

I went to a forest many times. There was no sign of humankind, though there were tiny bugs, camouflaged birds, and chittering squirrels. I darted between tree trunks and leapt over bushes. I jumped streams and climbed to the tops of trees to look down on the forest canopy. I threw myself into the thick of the woods to swing onto a branch and perch there like an elf. Since I weighed nothing I didn’t even bend the slenderest twig.

To my surprise, I once found myself back in my old house, in my old bedroom, at my vanity, where the mirrored closet doors behind showed me a view of the empty chair where I sat.

I froze, terrified, not because I wasn’t reflected, but because something was moving by the bed. The gentle robot of my body pulled the covers down—I could see it from the corner of my eye. It passed behind me, reflected as a pale apparition I would not focus on. The door swung open and my father said, “Good night, Puppy. Say your prayers.”

“Good night, Daddy,” said my body.

I hunched down, too afraid to even run away. It was like a scene from one of those old flying saucer movies they showed every Halloween. There was nothing creepier than the child who weeps as he tells the policeman, “Those aren’t my parents—they look like them, but they’re not my mommy and daddy, I tell you! You’ve got to believe me!” But the policeman never does.

And I was the alien.

That’s not me anymore,
I told myself. I stood up.
I’m riding a sea serpent.

And I was back in the museum’s Pre-Raphaelite room. But nothing was the same after that. I didn’t want to go back to my old life, but my life out-of-body was becoming unsettling. When I went to the dance studio, no boy could be my partner and lift me in a pas de deux, but now I realized that living as a spirit meant no boy would
ever
take me in his arms.

CHAPTER 3

I
DIDN’T KNOW WHY
I
FOUND
myself in front of that store window with a display of tie-dye kaftans and hemp shirts, but maybe I’d wished for the opposite of my old life. The shop was called Reflections; their logo, made into a stained-glass window in the front door, was a tree of life with a rainbow behind it. My mother refused to go into this or any other New Age store because she was afraid they were fronts for satanic cults.

I slipped right through the door without jingling the tiny string of brass bells that warned the cashier when customers entered. The room was filled with books up to the ceiling, and displays of candles, incense, crystals, massage oils, yoga mats, CDs with monks and angels on the covers, DVDs of Tai Chi masters and pregnant women meditating. Even statues of the Virgin Mary, Saint Francis, Buddha, and a goddess with six arms. There were two customers, an elderly man with glasses pushed low on his nose, and a young woman in overalls who had a sleeping baby strapped to her belly. She chatted with the cashier, a young man wearing black eyeliner and his long hair in a braid.

Even though I felt out of place in this world, the soundtrack that was playing—flute over the sounds of a babbling brook—calmed me. I was attracted to laughter from somewhere beyond the main room of the shop. I drifted back through a grass mat doorway and found a group of seven people sitting in a circle with their eyes closed and their hands in their laps, palms up.

The woman who was speaking seemed the same age as my mother, but she wore her hair in dreadlocks pulled back, and had a single silver stud in one nostril and a tattoo of a flying bird on one wrist. No shoes, no makeup. Like my mom’s polar opposite.

“Lift up this picture of your desires to God,” she said. “Don’t try to figure out how you will receive this gift. Just know that you already have received it and feel the joy. You don’t have to know how this blessing will come to be. You only need to be grateful.”