Talking to the Dead Page 6

  I was wondering how to pronounce “Bhagavad” when the inner door opened and a woman poked her head in the room. “Kate Davis?” she said almost shyly. I nodded. “I’m Eliza Campbell. Come this way, please.”

  She led me into the inner office and seated herself in an oversized chair that looked both chic and comfortable. She offered me my choice of either a similar chair, an arrangement of pillows on the floor, or a camel-colored couch, on which I was welcome to lie down if I first removed my shoes. I chose the pillows. I saw Eliza Campbell lift a long eyebrow at my choice, but she said nothing. I took a moment to get comfortable.

  “Do you consider yourself a spiritual person, Kate?”

  I blinked twice. Spiritual? Images flashed through my mind: an unkempt, dreadlock-wearing girl sharing a passionate embrace with an elm tree. A meditating Yogi defying gravity. A red-faced preacher hollering about hell and sin. I felt no connection to any of these images.

  “I guess I’m …” I stammered. “What I mean is … I meant to be. I might be. Spiritual. I guess.” I heaved my shoulders up and held out my palms in a what can ya do gesture.

  Eliza Campbell looked spiritual. Like she could ascend to a higher plane of existence at any moment. Her dark eyes were framed by smoky eye shadow, making them appear deep set and large. Her mouth was wide and full. Her long brown hair was streaked with blonde and red, like she was trying on colors to decide which one she liked best. She wore loose-fitting clothes: billowing pants and a long, flowing blouse; a reformed sari, the color of dry mustard. Her face was calm and knowing. Although this was a counselor’s office, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a crystal ball or deck of tarot cards among the artifacts that dotted the room. I didn’t.

  Eliza Campbell lifted a finger adorned by no less than three rings. A column of silver bracelets clacked together as she raised her arm. “What I hear you saying, Kate, is that you might be a spiritual person, but you aren’t sure.”

  I nodded my quick agreement. That sounded pretty good. A spiritual wannabe had to be better than a no-show, right? I had attended Sunday school as a child, until I was about eight. But even sitting cross-legged among throw pillows on the floor of my counselor’s office trying to think spiritual thoughts, I couldn’t recall why I had started going, or what compelled me to stop.

  “The reason I ask,” Eliza Campbell said, “is because I take a spiritual approach to my counseling. By that I mean I see us all as interconnected beings. We are connected, not just to other humans, but to the earth, the universe, and the spiritual realm.”

  “Oh.” I wondered if I should be taking notes. The only connection I had ever felt to the spiritual realm was watching zombie movies with my best friend, Tanya, in seventh grade. Scared us both spitless.

  She waved her hand. “It sounds complicated, but it’s not.”

  I picked up a pillow. “Interconnected. Right.”

  “I don’t know your story, Kate, but I can see you are spiritually blocked.”

  “Blocked?”

  “Closed off. Your spiritual taps are turned to the ‘on’ position, but nothing’s coming through.”

  My spiritual pipes were plugged? This was news.

  Eliza Campbell pointed at me. “Why are you hugging that throw pillow?”

  “Pardon?” I unfolded my arms from around the pillow and held it at arm’s length as if it had developed a rank odor. “I don’t know.”

  “You are using the pillow as a shield, Kate.”

  “I am?” I supposed it wasn’t a passion for polyester that had me embracing throw pillows. “Sorry.” I put the pillow down.

  “Don’t apologize. I’m simply pointing it out to you. It’s a sign of spiritual repression. One of several I’ve noticed since you first arrived.”

  “Repression. Right. I see,” I mumbled, not looking up. Was there something I could do that was a sign of spiritual … whatever, unrepression? I felt vaguely defensive. Off balance. This wasn’t the conversation I expected to have. Should I tell her how I prayed for my dead goldfish when it had been flushed when I was seven? How my sister and I would make fairy crowns from dried flowers and grant each other three wishes? Was that spiritual? Maybe I should hit her with the conversations I was having with my dead husband? That’s not something that happens to spiritually repressed people, is it? Do spiritually plugged-up people talk to the dead?

  “Tell me what brought you here to see me, Kate,” Eliza Campbell said, interrupting my thoughts.

  I felt unreasonably panicked. What had brought me here to see her? Serendipity? Colossal forces beyond my knowing? My car? All my reasons piled up behind the same giant cork that was plugging my spiritual access. I was sure there had to be an answer, somewhere in the universe. “I don’t know what brought me here,” I said. “Can I take a bathroom break?”

  Again that long eyebrow arched. “I don’t think you want a break, Kate. I think you want to end the session. Is that what you want?”

  I thought for a moment, then said in a small voice, “Yes, please.”

  I spent the forty-five minutes it takes to drive from Eliza Campbell’s office in the city back to Greenfield mentally yanking on my giant spiritual cork.

  I hadn’t even told Eliza Campbell about Kevin. His death. His voice. I couldn’t. When she had asked me if I was spiritual, it was as if, somehow, a great crack had opened somewhere inside of me. I felt a sort of painful hope. There had been so much to think about. While I doubted it was her intention to get me defensive, her questions pushed me somehow.

  Sure, I’d been embarrassed at first by the gaping void that was my past spiritual existence. But she assured me that I was a spiritual person, deep down. I just hadn’t explored it yet. The proof of it was that I was there, talking to her. “There are no accidents,” Eliza Campbell had said. “Everything happens for a purpose.”

  I took strange comfort in the thought. Perhaps it was enough to go on for now. It was as if simply talking about my utter lack of spiritual experience, calling it out caused a shift in the foundations of my thinking. I didn’t have answers exactly, but just the idea of spiritual things—the fact of them, that they existed in the world—seemed to lighten my load, broaden my thinking. Maybe hearing Kevin’s voice was, in fact, a spiritual thing. A spiritual experience on which I could build. Build what, I didn’t know. But I felt, for the first time since Kevin died, that I could look up, look around. My spiritual cork was beginning to loosen.

  I’m awake, but I keep my eyes closed and just feel. The warmth of the sheets against my skin, the comfort of the soft mattress. The sound of Kevin’s breathing. I lie on my back and count back the days and weeks we’ve been married. More than three years, and it feels like five minutes.

  I turn my head and open my eyes. Light from the street pushes into the room through the cotton curtains and I look at Kevin’s face, softened by sleep, in the dim shadows. The sheets are pulled down, exposing his bare chest to the cool night. I rest my hand there, the hair on his chest curls around my hand like an embrace.

  I close my eyes and feel the rise and fall of his breath, the steady beat of his heart. Within moments my heartbeat matches his. I wonder how this could still feel so new, and I’m filled with beautiful longing. I inch closer, lay my head on his shoulder, fitting myself between his arm and torso. I press my length against his side. His arm goes around me, but he’s asleep, unconsciously moving his body to fit with mine. The smell of him so familiar it’s somehow a part of me. As I drift off I think, Mine.

  11

  When I arrived home from my appointment with Eliza Campbell, the last of the evening sun was spilling orange and blue onto the dark wood floor of my living room. It was late and I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten before driving to the city for my appointment. In the kitchen, I opened and closed the doors of a few appliances, and within minutes I had a hot meal on the table. I offered up a
silent thanks to microwave ovens and my sister’s single-serving organizational skills.

  I ate four cabbage rolls, a withered salad, and drank two glasses of water. It was more food than I’d eaten in the past week. Amazing how a full stomach can give a body a sense of bloated calm.

  I filled the sink with warm, sudsy water and belched like a trucker, then set about washing the dirty dishes lined up on my counter. As I plunged both hands in, I found I was humming an old song from my childhood. From my maternal grandmother. My mother’s favorite. I sang,

  “Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, Too-ra-loo-ra-li, Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, hush now, don’t you cry!

  “Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, Too-ra-loo-ra-li, Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, that’s an Irish lullaby.”

  Water splashed onto the counter as I swayed to my own music. I’d been loosened somehow. The joints of my mind had been oiled by the idea of possibilities, that there were some, that they might be waiting for me.

  Kevin’s voice came on a breeze. “You used to sing that song while you were reading. I could never understand how you were able to read and sing at the same time.”

  I smiled down into the dishwater. Somehow I’d known he would speak. Maybe not right that moment, but just he would, sometime, speak to me again. It was as if I’d opened the door to an invited guest.

  Eliza Campbell had said we are all connected. There was no reason for me to fear the man I was most connected with, was there? No reason to fear the connection that held us together. No reason to think all of this was crazy. Okay, it’s not as if I was about to take an ad out in the Sunday Times announcing I was spending quality time with my deceased husband. But I was no longer thinking it was wrong, or crazy, or all in my head. Still, I didn’t know how this worked. If only there was some sort of cosmic rule book, I thought.

  I gazed down at the soapy water. “I am a multitasker by nature, Kevin.” I made a slow turn on my tiptoes and faced the kitchen. There was no one there. I felt a fissure of disappointment. What was I expecting? That he would materialize before my eyes? I looked around the room, unsure of what to fix on. “You, on the other hand, have a one-track mind,” I said to the microwave.

  “Especially when it comes to you, babe,” Kevin said. I heard the smile in his voice.

  I thought of saying I miss you, but I remembered the last time I said that to him he had stopped talking. “You were very one-track-minded when it came to me, yes,” I said to the cool, thin air.

  “Sing to me, Kate.”

  In my kitchen, alone except for the remnants of Kevin, I sang,

  “Me Mither sang a song to me, in tones so sweet and low.

  Just a simple little ditty, in her good ould Irish way,

  And I’d give the world if she could sing that song to me this day.”

  Kevin’s soft tenor joined in when I sang,

  “Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, Too-ra-loo-ra-li, Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, hush now, don’t you cry!

  “Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, Too-ra-loo-ra-li, Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, that’s an Irish lullaby.”

  I closed my eyes as I sang the final notes, a soft wave of comfort rolled over my body. I was smiling and crying at the same time. “That was nice.”

  I waited, but Kevin said nothing. I sensed somehow, inexplicably, that he wasn’t gone. I only needed to say the right thing. Like turning a key, or flipping the correct switch in the fuse box.

  I chewed the inside of my cheek, thinking. I couldn’t ask him questions. He wouldn’t, or couldn’t answer anything. I supposed the rest of the rules would reveal themselves over time. I thought for a moment, conjuring a sentence I thought he might reply to. I spoke to the microwave. “You sing in the shower. Loud, hysterical opera.”

  Kevin said, “You love it.”

  I smiled. So far so good. “I do. You make up the craziest words.”

  Kevin bellowed out in comical operatic parody, “You gotta pizza pie! I wanna pizza pie! Oh no, it’s for you, not I! Please share your pizza pie!”

  I laughed. I could see him, standing in the steam-filled shower holding the loofah like a microphone, hollering over the rushing water. My mind clung to the image. Kevin. Naked. Steam billowing around him. Water and soap rushing down his torso. In an instant my body was flushed with desire so acute that it caused actual pain. I bent forward, sucker-punched by lust, trying to stave off its advance. I reached out, but my hands remained dry and empty. I wrapped my arms around myself and pretended they were his arms. I squeezed myself hard, waiting for the sweet ache to subside. My lips opened and closed, searching for a kiss that would never come. Loneliness filled my body like a million small stones.

  12

  Singing my mother’s favorite song with Kevin in our kitchen reminded me that I hadn’t spoken to her since the day she brought me the stack of books, over a month ago. She wouldn’t contact me first, I felt sure. After Dad died, she made it clear to Heather and me that she would let us know when she was ready to talk, that she needed some space to adjust.

  So the next morning I grabbed the keys to Kevin’s car, and the stack of books I didn’t read, and went to see her.

  Standing in the kitchen of the house I’d grown up in, I held a small, heavy object that looked exactly like a flat brown rock. I looked at my mother. “What’s this?”

  She glanced at my hand. “It’s a baking stone. It promotes even cooking.”

  “You just stick it in there with the bread or cake or whatever?”

  “No, dear,” she said. “First you have to heat it up in the oven. Then you put whatever you are baking on top of it.”

  I cocked my head to one side. Who was this woman who heated rocks? I couldn’t imagine her doing this when I was growing up. “How long does it take?”

  She folded, unfolded, and then refolded a dish towel. “It really shouldn’t take more than forty-five minutes or so.” She threw me a quick glance that seemed to say, “Please don’t tell your dead father.” Dad would have never understood his wife’s desire to cook rocks. I could almost hear him sputtering, “Waste, that’s what it is! Running the electric bill sky-high just to heat a rock. Ridiculous.”

  “It’s good for pizza, too,” she said, running her hand over the round, flat surface.

  I put the stone down. “You like pizza now?”

  “No.”

  I looked around the kitchen. I knew it like I knew my own childhood. But things weren’t the same here. There were changes I’d failed to notice when I first came in. Changes since Dad died. Beside the baking stone sat a new recipe box with the words BITE ME stamped on the top. The artificial roses that had sat perennially on the kitchen table had been replaced with massive, living gladioli from the garden. The faded lace curtains had been replaced with cotton ones the color of butter. The wallpaper—a blue and purple riot of tiny flowers I had long ago stopped noticing—was now a clean wall of paint, a soft, hazy green that drifted before my eyes like a summer memory. My father’s presence was nowhere to be seen. If he walked in now, he would look out of place.

  “Are you cold, Kate?” my mother said.

  My hands were running up and my arms, warming them in the already too warm kitchen. I dropped them to my side. “Is it going to get better?”

  She took a long breath, and then let it out. She knew what I was talking about. “It’s going to get different.”

  “I know life is different now, Mom. I meant—”

  She raised a hand in a “shush, I’m talking” gesture. “I don’t mean ‘life is different.’ I’m referring to the way you’re feeling. About losing Kevin. About grief and loss and sadness. It changes.” She stared down at the counter as if searching there for some lost secret. “It seems to me that feelings are the most unreliable things.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I know. I don’t mean to be vague.” She took in a long breath.
“When I lost your father, I felt like my life was over. Literally. That’s what it felt like. But it wasn’t true. My life wasn’t over. It kept going. It keeps going.” She shrugged one shoulder and turned away from me. “I feel differently today than I did in those first weeks after losing your father. I feel like my life has possibilities.”

  I traced a pattern on the countertop with my finger. Possibilities sounded better than questions and a memory filled with gaping holes. Better than a future that could not be fathomed or understood. “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  She turned and looked at me for a long moment. “Is it? My feelings when your father died turned out to be wrong. My life wasn’t over. Who’s to say these new feelings will turn out to be right?”

  “You mean—”

  “I mean the one thing I’ve learned is that you can’t trust your feelings.”

  “So what can you trust?”

  “Kate, honey, I honestly have no idea.”

  Outside my mother’s house, I sat in the car fiddling with the keys. I didn’t want to go home. Being out, driving, seeing things other than my own four walls felt good.

  I put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. I was driving Kevin’s brilliant-red Mazdaspeed3. I drove mindlessly for a few minutes, with no intended destination. The car maneuvered with little effort, cornering with only two fingers on the steering wheel. I felt vaguely dangerous. After a tight right-hand turn at the intersection of Drinkle and Magnolia, a smile pulled at my mouth.

  “Come on!” Kevin bellows from the front door.