“One hundred and thirty years,” I told him, speaking quietly, though there was no need.
“Were you born here or did you die here?” he said softly but not softly enough. The girl who used to sit beside him turned and glared back at him.
“Write,” I whispered.
“Which?” he wrote and tilted the page toward me, though it was not necessary. I was leaning as close to him as a cat at a mouse hole, ready to pounce on every word.
“Neither,” I whispered.
He said aloud, “Then why—”
“Mr. Blake?” interrupted Mr. Brown. This time both the girl and the boy in front of us turned back to frown at him.
James jumped. “Sir!”
“Something you’d like to share with the rest of us?”
“Not for the world,” he said.
I took my right hand and touched the fingers of James’s right hand, the one that held the pencil. He made the smallest sound, a faint intake of breath, and looked down at this. I folded my fingers into his. For some reason, perhaps because James was inside this boy, my hand didn’t pass through. In a fragile way, I could hold his fingers. I wished I could grip the pencil, as well. I could feel that falling sensation I felt whenever I touched the Quick, but this time there was something different to the touch. I could feel his knowing that my hand was there. I could feel him seeing my fingers. I could feel him thinking, My God, I can feel her.
The afternoon sun slanted warm on his face like firelight. He wasn’t breathing at all now. I placed my other hand on his shoulder and stroked his right arm from the top down toward his hand, willing him to relax. He let me draw the tension out of him, and when I felt his resistance subside, I started gently to move his hand. He breathed now, and I could feel his heart pounding. He looked at the word he had written, that I had written: Write.
“My God,” he whispered.
“Shh,” I warned him as I let go.
He glanced back up at the classroom, but no one was watching.
“That was amazing,” he wrote. Then he waited, trembling a little, his hand holding the pencil lightly, waiting for me. I put my hand into his and wrote through him, “How true.”
“Why do you haunt this place?” he wrote.
I took his hand and wrote, “I don’t. I’m attached to Mr. Brown.”
James took a moment to read this twice, and then wrote, “Why?”
I took such a long time without moving that he looked up into my face. I finally took his hand and wrote, “Literature.”
To my surprise, James gave a short laugh.
“Why don’t you give it a try, then?” called Mr. Brown. “Mr. Blake?”
“Sir?” James sat up straighter in his chair.
“Care to offer a sentence with an example of an adverb?” Mr. Brown watched him doubtfully.
“Breathlessly he watched her hand,” said James.
Mr. Brown blinked at him. “Okay.”
As a student in the front row asked a question and Mr. Brown turned his attention elsewhere, James looked down again.
“He’s my host,” I wrote.
And James wrote, “Lucky man.”
Next I wrote, “Have you ever seen Billy’s spirit since you took his body?”
James thought about this for a moment. I watched him hold the pencil, rereading the last line. His hand was a fine thing, lean and long-fingered, as strong as a farmer’s but unscarred.
“Only once,” he wrote. “I thought I saw him watching me for a moment the first night I slept in his room.”
I took his hand, hesitating slightly before beginning to write, wondering whether he’d realize that I paused not because I couldn’t choose the words but rather because I wanted to just feel his fingers for a moment. I wrote, “Did he speak to you?”
“Alas, no,” James wrote in answer.
Again I took control of his pencil. “So you go home to Mr. Blake’s family at night?”
I took another moment before letting his fingers go. He kept his eyes on the page and wrote, “Such as it is.”
Then I wrote on the bottom line of the page, “No room.”
He frowned at these two words for a second. Suddenly he was fumbling so wildly in his bag for his notebook, I thought the paper would fly into the next row. He tore out a fresh page and slapped it down and wrote, “Sorry.”
I laughed.
“Mr. Blake, you seem to be taking lots of notes today,” said Mr. Brown. “Do you remember an example of where not to insert an adverb?”
James just stared at him.
“To desperately hope,” I whispered.
James let out a breath. “To gratefully believe.”
“Well,” Mr. Brown said. “Claustrophobia certainly has improved your grammar skills.”
“Yes sir, captain sir.”
The class laughed.
“At ease, Mr. Blake.”
“Helen,” James wrote on the paper.
I was fascinated by the look of the word. A picture flipped past my mind—“For Helen” scripted in fading ink on the linen frontispiece of a small leather volume. One moment, then the vision snapped shut.
“Don’t go home with Mr. Brown,” he wrote. “Come with me.”
I read the words and didn’t take his hand right away. He waited, keeping his eyes on the paper. Finally I touched his fingers, and it may have been my imagination, but I sensed that he could feel me trembling and knew before reading the words. “I’m afraid of leaving my host.”
With my fingers still entwined in his, James wrote, “You must’ve changed hosts before.”
The young man seated in front of James twisted around, surveyed the distance between them, and threw the paper in his hand backward at James. It swooped and landed in the aisle. James bent and retrieved it. It was a lined sheet of paper, wrinkled and torn on one corner. In handwriting that was not James’s, the paper was labeled: “W. Blake, September 4, eleventh grade English.” The page contained only a few lines of messy black ink. In green ink, at the bottom, in Mr. Brown’s hand, were the words, “5/10 points. The assignment was to write a full page of descriptive prose. Please rewrite and submit for full credit.”
James glanced up. No one was paying us any heed. The students were looking over their graded papers, and Mr. Brown was still handing pages to the last few students. James whispered, with some embarrassment, “This was before me.”
It was odd to think that just two weeks before, Billy’s body had been sitting in this classroom, and I hadn’t cared. Now, because he was James, this same body drew my eye like the moon in a starless sky.
James was reading the five-point assignment with a weary expression. I leaned over to see as well.
It read: “I’m describing the library where I’m sitting. It kind of stinks, like old stuff. The librarian watches me suspisiously. Books are boring. I used an adjetive and an adverb so now I’m glad and I leave happily.” Mr. Brown had made a small green check mark beside the two misspelled words but had made no more specific suggestions.
“You’ll have to rewrite it for him, I suppose,” I said.
He smiled at me now. “I need a tutor,” he whispered.
“What?” The girl in front of him was looking at James with annoyance.
James turned the page over and wrote, “Help me.”
This made me feel restless, for some reason. I excused myself and took a walk, back and forth against the rear wall. I strolled up the outside aisle by the windows, then stopped and stood beside Mr. Brown, who was doing a review of the Dickens story before the students were to take turns reading aloud. I knew that James was watching me, but I didn’t meet his eyes. I needed to just be still with my host for a moment. I hovered behind Mr. Brown, listening to a girl flatly read of a boy dying in the arms of his cousin under a tree. But the next to have a turn was James. He didn’t read like the others. He understood the words. His voice rang so true, it tolled in every corner of me. I had to flee the room.
Under the tree whe
re I had hidden before, I waited. Finally the students appeared, James so full of color now, not at all the pale creature from the first day we’d seen each other. He strode toward me, his green bag over his shoulder and his hair blowing. I couldn’t take my eyes from him. He stopped under the tree and let the book bag drop as he knelt, pretending to tie his shoe.
“You have to come with me,” he said quietly, without looking up. “Can’t you see I’m on my knees?”
I said nothing.
“You move about the school freely,” he said. “You don’t need to stay in the same room with your host, do you?”
To move about freely sounded so appealing.
“Well, shadow your professor if you must,” he sighed, standing up but still not looking at me. “I’m going to the library.” He put his bag over this shoulder. “Of course, if you don’t like libraries, I understand.” With that he walked off down the path, merging with the rest of the bodies.
Except for the librarian and a couple of mice, I spent more time in the school library than anyone. Of course I followed.
I moved past the librarian’s desk and between the large tables, three in a row, but no James. I began slowly to snake my way up one aisle of books and down the next until I found him waiting for me at a small study table tucked in the back of the room. There were four chairs there. James looked up at me and slid his book bag off the chair beside him.
The library was quiet but not silent. There were whispers, gentle footfalls, the squeaking wheels of a cart in the next aisle. I sat. No one was nearby.
“Tell me all about yourself,” he whispered. “I want to know everything.”
“I thought you wanted me to help you write.”
“Tell me about your hosts,” he whispered. “You must’ve had several. Were they all men? What cities have you lived in?”
“We don’t have time,” I said.
“All right.” James took a notebook from his bag and tore out a clean sheet of paper. “A full page,” he said aloud. “Of descriptive prose.”
“Hush,” I warned him.
“About the library,” he whispered. He took out the pencil stub from his pocket and poised it over the page.
“Will you write like Mr. Blake or like yourself?” I inquired.
He wrote and whispered the words aloud as he did. “I am in the library. It smells like old stuff.”
“It smells familiar,” I suggested. “It smells like words.” Because his left side was to me, I couldn’t easily take his hand to write.
“Books are boring,” James said as he wrote.
“They line the walls like a thousand leather doorways to be opened into worlds unknown,” I offered.
He thought about this and then wrote with a smile, “I hate books.”
“A sea of dreams trapped in a span of pressed pages,” I said.
“Very well,” James said. “Shall we make Mr. Blake a little more enlightened?” His sudden smile at me, like an arrow, struck deep.
He crossed out the last two sentences and wrote, “Books are okay, I guess.”
I laughed. Next James wrote, “As I look around the quiet room, I see a thousand leather covers like doorways into worlds unknown.” He paused and then wrote, “I hear...”
“Silence,” I suggested. “Eternity.”
“A silence like the mind of God,” James wrote. He gave one small laugh, then wrote, “I feel...” He paused, then continued with, “a presence in the empty chair beside me.”
“James,” I scolded.
“But it’s true,” he whispered.
“What does Mr. Blake really think of the library?” I asked him.
“From what I’ve derived, he thinks it’s unpleasant because there’s no music and you aren’t allowed to eat,” said James.
“I should be going,” I told him. I could feel Mr. Brown preparing to leave, stopping in the hall to talk with another teacher. Soon he’d drive off without me if I didn’t hurry. A skittering panic moused up my spine. I had minutes, no more.
“We’ve only just started,” said James. “You can’t quit me already.”
“Very well, then, but be serious,” I said. I tried to reach out and take his right hand in order to control the pencil, but he laughed and moved to avoid me. “Do you have a suggestion, Miss Helen?”
“Stop,” I whispered.
James looked into my eyes to make sure I wasn’t truly angry. “Why do you whisper?” he whispered.
“Because a library is a sacred place,” I told him.
“The library,” he wrote, “is a sacred place.”
“You’re supposed to be Mr. Blake,” I reminded him. “At least misspell a word here and there.”
James thought this over and then erased sacred and replaced it with sacrid.
I could feel Mr. Brown moving into the far corner of my reach. The pain crept into my bones, but I tried not to let it show. I craved more time with James. But I also knew that it was important not to let my desire pull me down, as when I had dropped away from my host during a Shakespeare play.
“I’m leaving,” I said.
“She threatens to take her pulsing goddess light from this place,” he wrote. His teasing charmed me. As I reached again for the pencil, he hid his hand under the table, laughing at my frustration. Another warning chill made me recoil.
“If you have an idea, let’s hear it.” He glanced at me and must’ve seen some discomfort in my eyes, for his smile fell.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
We both looked up. The instinct to lift a rifle at this animal made me stiffen. But it was just a boy with a scar on one cheek, wearing a stained army jacket. He frowned at James. “What’re you doing, turning into a schizo?”
“Hey,” said James, deflated. He slid the page off the table and put it and the pencil in his pocket as the boy sat in the seat across from us.
“ Where’ve you been?” the boy asked. “It’s like you don’t know us anymore.”
“I had the flu,” said James. “Puked my guts out for days.”
“Grady said you OD’d,” the boy told him, looking him up and down, trying to determine what was different about him.
“Pretty close,” said James.
I rose and began to flow slowly away. I could feel the flutter as I passed through James—he had put out his arm, pretending to stretch, as I was leaving. We were as close to touching as one spirit and one mortal could for a moment. I started to imagine putting my arms around him but was stopped suddenly by a wall of cold blocking me. Blinded, I reached up and felt wet mud, the slime of a leaking dirt cellar or the bottom of a grave. I had let Mr. Brown leave me behind. I pushed against the coldness, and it gave way in messy pieces, the chill now running down over me like rain on my face. I had no voice with which to call out. I dug through the mud, hearing students laugh, buses, trash can lids rattling. I felt cement under my feet, and then the darkness was pierced with white. I was sitting in the back seat of Mr. Brown’s car, the sun blinding me in the rearview mirror.
All evening, I hovered as Mr. Brown and his wife made dinner together, listened to television as they paid bills, read, and talked in bed. After they had turned off the light and settled into each other’s arms, just as I was passing through the wall into the garden, Mr. Brown’s voice stopped me.
“I thought of a baby name.”
“Boy or girl?” she asked.
“Erin,” he said. “Could go either way.”
I had never heard them discuss children except as a distant possibility during their courtship. The idea frightened me. By their words I knew that this was a conversation that had been visited many times, most likely while I gave them time alone in bed. All my past hosts had been childless. I had not been drawn to children over the decades; nor had I been repelled by them on trains, in parks, laughing in the nurseries of homes my hosts visited, but this was different. This would be the flesh of my host. A child in my every room and in each hour of my existence.
??
?Spelled how?” asked Mrs. Brown.
“A I R O H N G,” he said.
She laughed in the dark.
“Silent G,” he explained.
I stayed perfectly still, half in and half out of the bedroom wall.
“Maybe for a girl,” she said. “Got any other boy names?”
“Chauncey.”
Mrs. Brown let out another laugh. “We’ll have to fork it out for those karate lessons so he won’t get thrashed every day.”
“Okay, how about Butch?” said Mr. Brown. “For a girl.”
It was dark, but I saw him stop her laugh with a kiss.
“Let’s get started then,” she said.
“I thought you wanted to wait so you wouldn’t be a blimp in the summer.”
“I don’t mind, as long as you wait on me hand and foot.”
I fled the rustle of sheets and hovered in the living room. Something stronger than logic tore at me. I drifted restlessly through their other rooms, sometimes shifting a curtain or making the floor creak without meaning to. I was a caged panther. I sat on their roof and stared at the stars, but I couldn’t explain my terror. Was it some instinctual knowledge that an infant would be aware of my presence? That thought knotted at my throat. Would a baby be frightened of me? Some deep voice answered yes, you are a danger to children. I realized suddenly that I no longer felt welcome in Mr. Brown’s house. I was an intruder. I tried to remember feeling at home in the houses of my other hosts but instead saw a hideous flash of a cellar door and a shelf of baskets. I flew to the car, thinking I might feel safer there, but as I sat in the dark garage, huddled in the back seat, I began to weep. I wept a waterless river, sobbing without relief. I thought of running away to the classroom or the library, but I knew I could not. They were too far away. I couldn’t go alone. I was a prisoner, crying bone-dry tears until the morning.
Four
THE NEXT MORNING, I meant to watch Mr. Brown write, but as I circled his desk, I kept thinking about James and worrying about a baby at the Browns’ house. When the first bell rang, I looked down at the manuscript. Mr. Brown had written and erased the same sentence so many times, the paper had worn through.