The Medium (5 page)

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Authors: Noëlle Sickels

BOOK: The Medium
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OCTOBER 1937
Helen heard honking and paused in her raking to look up at a V-formation of Canada geese flying by. They were the first flock she'd spotted this year. They seemed bulky in the sky, their wings pumping valiantly, necks strained anxiously forward.
After they'd passed, Helen became aware of another sound, the metallic
swish, swish
of a grass rake. She went to the plank fence and stepped onto the wooden soda crate kept there as a stool. Next door, working intently at the far side of his yard, Billy Mackey was also raking. His task was harder than hers, because the Mackeys had more trees, including three old apple trees. He was wearing baggy wool trousers and a snug sweater vest, and he had rolled his shirtsleeves up. Yellow jackets were circling him, disturbed from feasting on the rotten windfall fruit he was raking up along with the leaves.
Helen delayed calling to him. There was something enjoyable about watching him when he didn't know she was there. She admired how the muscles of his arms moved with each pull on the rake and how his torso twisted rhythmically like a little piece of a Fred Astaire dance. His sandy hair, usually tamed with brilliantine, had shaken loose with his exertions, and a couple of locks hung down over his forehead, the ends curled like commas. She wondered that it didn't bother him, and if she'd been close enough, she didn't think she could resist reaching out and pushing it back for him.
“Hey!” he said in greeting, noticing her at last. She'd been
standing there only a minute, but it had seemed much longer.
“Hey,” she answered.
He leaned his rake against a tree trunk and walked toward her. He was smiling, and to see that smile warmed her ridiculously.
“What's cookin'?” he said when he reached the fence. He had to tilt his head to look up at her, and when he did, the errant locks of hair fell back off his forehead. Her desire to brush at them with her fingers remained, however.
“I've got to rake our yard, too,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“How come your brother's not helping you?”
“Basketball practice.”
“Oh, right,” Helen remembered. Lloyd Mackey was the star of the eighth-grade team.
“But I'm gonna leave some for him,” Billy said. “Maybe in the corner where there's the most apples. Darn yellow jackets bit me twice already.”
He held up one arm to show her a red swelling near his elbow, then turned his head and pointed to another, meaner swelling on the side of his neck. Helen felt a quick, dropping sensation in her gut, like when her father drove too fast over a dip in the road.
“Want some baking soda?”
“Naw. Can't even feel the one on my arm anymore.”
He backed away, turning after a few steps and trotting to where he'd left the rake. Helen climbed down and resumed her own raking. Soon she'd accumulated three satisfying piles.
“Helen, hey, Helen!” she heard from the Mackey yard.
She went to the crate. Billy was right at the fence, his hand over one ear, a grimace of pain on his face.
“Got me again,” he said. “I'll take that baking soda this time.”
She hopped down and ran into her kitchen, where she mixed
baking soda and cold water into a paste in a small Willoware bowl.
To get around the fence, Helen had to go to the front of her house and up the Mackeys' driveway. She found Billy on a bench next to the garage, his head leaning back against the garage wall.
Businesslike, she set the bowl on the bench, scooped up a gob of paste, and applied it gently to the angry lump on his ear. He winced, but he didn't complain. He made no objection when she smeared some paste on the bite on his arm, and when he saw her swabbing up more from the bowl, he obligingly turned his head so that she could reach the bite on his neck. Her fingers trembled a little as she put the paste on his neck with a careful, stroking motion. He glanced sideways at her with a questioning look.
“It's getting dried out,” she explained. “Doesn't want to stick.”
As if to prove her right, two powdery clots, one from his neck and one from his ear, broke off and fell inside his collar. Laughing, he stood up and pulled his shirt out of his pants, shaking his shirttails to let the clots of dried paste fall free. Helen laughed, too, and sat down, leaning her back against the garage wall and wiping her pasty hand on her pleated wool skirt. Billy perched on the forward edge of the bench, his body angled towards her as if he were about to relate something important. Though he was still grinning, his expression had turned serious, and Helen wasn't sure which part to address, his easy smile or his vehement eyes.
“Did you see the geese went by before?” she said.
He shook his head no. She looked up into the sky, searching for geese, listening for their noise.
“Hey,” he said softly, “Florence Nightingale.”
He must have been moving as he spoke because when she
turned her face to him, she was surprised at how near he was. There was only a small space left to close before his mouth was on hers, a feathery swipe of lips, then a brief withdrawal, then a firmer press, less tentative, long enough for her to feel his breath against her cheek, long enough for his hands to cradle her hips as if he wanted to steer her. She clenched her fingers around the splintery edge of the bench and twined her ankles together beneath it.
When he pulled away, she regretted his leaving. She knew she was supposed to be outraged, that she should slap his face like they did in the movies, but instead she wished fervently that he'd kiss her again right away.
Billy abruptly stood.
“Gee, Helen, I hope you don't think I'm a heel.”
Helen looked down from his worried face and began scuffing the dirt with the toe of one shoe. She couldn't think of a single thing to say. Instead she gave a shrug of her shoulders so slight it could have been taken as reproof or release or a little bit of both. He waited, but she continued to watch her foot kick up dust.
“Well, it's not like it was a
real
kiss,” he finally said in a different, louder tone. His voice had lost all trace of plaintiveness.
She looked sharply at him and found that he didn't appear as decisive as he'd sounded. But she saw, too, that he would not back down.
“Didn't seem like you minded much, anyhow,” he said, and he dared a smirk.
Now she did feel like slapping him. Not for the kiss, but for the amusement in his face, however much put on. Maybe, even, because it
was
put on. She grabbed the bowl and ran down the driveway.
In her own yard, she crouched behind a bush that hid her from the sight of anyone looking out a window and from Billy,
should he decide to peer over the fence.
In a few minutes, she heard the sound of Billy's rake again. And he was whistling. She put her hands over her ears and started counting aloud. When she reached a hundred, she decided, she'd go into the house. Her father could scold all he liked, she'd do no more yard work today.
 
Walter was in a temper that evening, but it wasn't about Helen's shirking. He was stony throughout dinner. Emilie kept casting assessing glances at him, but she didn't question him, which told Helen that her mother already knew the source of his irritation. Her grandmother chose to ignore his mood, and it was taken for granted that Helen wouldn't be inquisitive. The three females maintained intermittent conversation on easily exhausted topics—Helen's homework, the butcher's new kittens, the possibility of frost overnight.
Helen was surprised when her father made a rare after-dinner appearance in the kitchen, where she was scraping the plates and her grandmother was filling the sink with hot soapy water.
“Nanny,” he said, “if you would join us in the living room?”
The request, though polite enough, was not really an invitation.
“We'll soon be done here,” Ursula said.
“Helen can manage on her own,” Walter countered. “Let her finish one job today.”
“Very well,” Ursula said. “Helen, don't forget to wipe down the stove.”
Helen washed and rinsed the dishes and flatware and pots. When she couldn't dislodge some bits of crisped pork from the roasting pan, she put it to soak. She went into the dining room to brush crumbs off the tablecloth. The sliding doors to the living room stood slightly ajar. When she heard her father mention her name in a loud voice, she tiptoed quickly to the partially
closed door to eavesdrop.
“To have a neighbor tell me what my own daughter is up to!” her father was saying.
“I thought it was Emilie Mrs. Durkin told it to,” her grandmother replied calmly.
“The point is that you planned to have Helen perform at a seance next week without so much as a by-your-leave from either of us. I won't have it, Nanny. I just won't have it.”
Helen was startled. Her grandmother hadn't consulted her, either, about another seance.
Emilie spoke then, but her voice was so low, Helen couldn't make out what she'd said.
“It's unseemly for a girl of her age to exhibit herself like that,” Walter asserted.
“I was not much more when I began.”
“You weren't my daughter.”
“
Nein.
And still I am not. You cannot forbid me.”
“Walter doesn't mean—”
“Don't presume to explain me, Emilie. What I can forbid, Nanny, and what I do forbid is for Helen to assist you in any way with your séances.”
“The girl has a gift,” Ursula said, as if she were noting something as obvious as the furniture around them.
“A gift for what? Charlatanism?”
“Walter! My mother is not a charlatan!”
“No? And will you swear you have never tilted her table with your foot, or moistened an envelope with alcohol so that she might see through to the secret question sealed inside, or some other such shenanigans?”
A lengthy silence ensued after this outburst. Fearing that one of the adults might be about to slide the door open, Helen reluctantly turned away. Then she heard her grandmother's voice, hard and strong.
“You are right, Walter,” she was saying, though somehow she made it sound like she was telling him he was wrong. “Sometimes my Emilie must help. Even if she doesn't like to. Sometimes it is the kindest thing, instead of sending a sitter home still with fears and questions. But do you really doubt the dead can reach the living?”
Now Helen could not even consider leaving her listening post.
“Ursula,” Walter said. It was the first time Helen had ever heard her father use her grandmother's name. “I am a man of business. I have a practical mind. I believe that God could not mean so marvelous a creation as man to end at death, but I don't know if spirits can return to our world, or if they would want to. You say they can and do. I won't dispute that. I know you to be an honest woman at heart, in spite of the seance mischief. But I will not have my daughter become a target for people sunk in grief, nor for nonbelievers ready to ridicule.”
“She truly has a gift,” Ursula repeated.
“She's a child,” Walter countered.
“She is not so much a child anymore. Emilie told you? At such a change, the ability to meet spirits, it grows.”
Helen blushed fiercely.
“That's neither here nor there. She is still child enough to be under my direction.”
“Nanny,” Emilie said, “how are you so sure Helen has a gift?”
“I have seen it at work.”
“Well, I've seen nothing,” Walter declared. “Nothing at all. Have you, Emilie?”
“Well, no, but—”
“No buts. There is evidence, or there isn't.”
“And must you be witness, Walter, to trust that something is true?” Ursula challenged.
“Not always. But certainly if it's something that could well be
an exaggeration or someone's imagination.”
“Then there can be only one answer.”
A quiet followed. Helen pictured her father and her grandmother staring each other down, like in the game she and Rosie played to see who'd blink first. It was Ursula who broke the silence, though Helen did not suppose from that that she'd been the one to lose the contest.
“Helen must come to the seance, and you, Walter, must come, too. Then perhaps, as you wish, you will see for yourself.”
Helen heard her father clear his throat loudly, which meant he was about to agree to something he had originally opposed.
“There can be no tricks,” he said suspiciously.
“No tricks. Of course.”

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