The odd thing about Earth was what we saw when we looked down. Besides the initial view that you might suspect, the old ants-from-the-skyscraper phenomenon, there were souls leaving bodies all over the world.
Holly and I could be scanning Earth, alighting on one scene or another for a second or two, looking for the unexpected in the most mundane moment. And a soul would run by a living being, touch them softly on the shoulder or cheek, and continue on its way to heaven. The dead are never exactly seen by the living, but many people seem acutely aware of something changed around them. They speak of a chill in the air. The mates of the deceased wake from dreams and see a figure standing at the end of their bed, or in a doorway, or boarding, phantomlike, a city bus.
On my way out of Earth, I touched a girl named Ruth. She went to my school but we’d never been close. She was standing in my path that night when my soul shrieked out of Earth. I could not help but graze her. Once released from life, having lost it in such violence, I couldn’t calculate my steps. I didn’t have time for contemplation. In violence, it is the getting away that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping only to land away from where you are.
Like a phone call from the jail cell, I brushed by Ruth Connors—wrong number, accidental call. I saw her standing there near Mr. Botte’s red and rusted Fiat. When I streaked by her, my hand leapt out to touch her, touch the last face, feel the last connection to Earth in this not-so-standard-issue teenage girl.
On the morning of December seventh, Ruth complained to her mother about having had a dream that seemed too real to be a dream. When her mother asked her what she meant, Ruth said, “I was crossing through the faculty parking lot, and suddenly, down out of the soccer field, I saw a pale running ghost coming toward me.”
Mrs. Connors stirred the hardening oatmeal in its pot. She watched her daughter gesticulating with the long thin fingers of her hands—hands she had inherited from her father.
“It was female, I could sense that,” Ruth said. “It flew up out of the field. Its eyes were hollow. It had a thin white veil over its body, as light as cheesecloth. I could see its face through it, the features coming up through it, the nose, the eyes, the face, the hair.”
Her mother took the oatmeal off the stove and lowered the flame. “Ruth,” she said, “you’re letting your imagination get the best of you.”
Ruth took the cue to shut up. She did not mention the dream that was not a dream again, even ten days later, when the story of my death began to travel through the halls of the school, receiving add-on nuances as all good horror stories do. They were hard-pressed, my peers, to make the horror any more horrible than it was. But the details were still missing—the what and when and who became hollow bowls to fill with their conjectures. Devil Worship. Midnight. Ray Singh.
Try as I might, I could not point Ruth strongly enough to what no one had found: my silver charm bracelet. I thought it might help her. It lay exposed, waiting for a hand to reach out, a hand that would recognize it and think, Clue. But it was no longer in the cornfield.
Ruth began writing poetry. If her mother or her more approachable teachers did not want to hear the darker reality she had experienced, she would cloak this reality in poetry.
How I wished Ruth could have gone to my family and talked to them. In all likelihood, no one but my sister would have even known her name. Ruth was the girl who got chosen next to last in gym. She was the girl who, when a volleyball sailed in her direction, cowered where she stood while the ball hit the gymnasium floor beside her, and her teammates and the gym teacher tried hard not to groan.
As my mother sat in the straight-backed chair in our hallway, watching my father run in and out on his various errands of responsibility—he would now be hyperaware of the movements and the whereabouts of his young son, of his wife, and of his remaining daughter—Ruth took our accidental meeting in the school parking lot and went underground.
She went through old yearbooks and found my class photos, as well as any activities photos like Chem Club, and cut them out with her mother’s swan-shaped embroidery scissors. Even as her obsession grew I remained wary of her, until that last week before Christmas when she saw something in the hallway of our school.
It was my friend Clarissa and Brian Nelson. I’d dubbed Brian “the scarecrow” because even though he had incredible shoulders that all the girls mooned over, his face reminded me of a burlap sack stuffed with straw. He wore a floppy leather hippie hat and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes in the student smoking lounge. According to my mother, Clarissa’s penchant for baby blue eye shadow was an early warning sign, but I’d always liked her for just this reason. She did things I wasn’t allowed to do: she lightened her long hair, she wore platform shoes, she smoked cigarettes after school.
Ruth came upon the two of them, but they didn’t see her. She had a pile of huge books she had borrowed from Mrs. Kaplan, the social science teacher. They were all early feminist texts, and she held them with their spines resting against her stomach so that no one could see what they were. Her father, a building contractor, had made her a gift of two super-strong elastic book bands. Ruth had placed two of them around the volumes she planned to read over vacation.
Clarissa and Brian were giggling. His hand was inside her shirt. As he inched it up, her giggling increased, but she thwarted his advances each time by twisting or moving an inch or two away. Ruth stood apart from this, as she did most things. She would have passed it in her usual manner, head down / eyes averted, but everyone knew Clarissa had been my friend. So she watched.
“Come on, honey,” Brian said, “just a little mound of love. Just one.”
I noticed Ruth’s lip curl in disgust. Mine was curling up in heaven.
“Brian, I can’t. Not here.”
“How ’bout out in the cornfield?” he whispered.
Clarissa giggled nervously but nuzzled the space between his neck and shoulder. For now, she would deny him.
After that, Clarissa’s locker was burgled.
Gone were her scrapbook, random photos stuck to the inside of her locker, and Brian’s stash of marijuana, which he had hidden there without Clarissa’s knowledge.
Ruth, who had never been high, spent that night emptying out the tobacco from her mother’s long brown More 100s and stuffing them with pot. She sat in the toolshed with a flashlight, looking at photos of me and smoking more grass than even the potheads at school could suck down.
Mrs. Connors, standing at the kitchen window doing dishes, caught a whiff of the scent coming from the toolshed.
“I think Ruth is making friends at school,” she said to her husband, who sat over his copy of the Evening Bulletin with a cup of coffee. At the end of his workday he was too tired even to speculate.
“Good,” he said.
“Maybe there’s hope for her yet.”
“Always,” he said.
When Ruth tottered in later that night, her eyes bleary from using the flashlight and from the eight More cigarettes she’d smoked, her mother greeted her with a smile and told her there was blueberry pie in the kitchen. It took a few days and some non-Susie-Salmon-focused research, but Ruth discovered why she had eaten the entire pie in one sitting.
The air in my heaven often smelled like skunk—just a hint of it. It was a smell that I had always loved on Earth. When I breathed it in, I could feel the scent as well as smell it. It was the animal’s fear and power mixed together to form a pungent, lingering musk. In Franny’s heaven it smelled like pure, grade-A tobacco. In Holly’s it smelled like kumquats.
I would sit whole days and nights in the gazebo and watch. See Clarissa spin away from me, toward the comfort of Brian. See Ruth staring at her from behind a corner near the home ec room or outside the cafeteria near the nurse’s station. At the start, the freedom I had to see the whole school was intoxicating. I would watch the assistant football coach leave anonymous chocolates for the married science teacher, or the head of the cheerleading squad trying to capture the attention of the kid who had been expelled so many times, from so many schools, even he had lost count. I watched the art teacher make love to his girlfriend in the kiln room and the principal moon over the assistant football coach. I concluded that this assistant football coach was a stud in the world of Kennet Junior High, even if his square jaw left me cold.
On the way back to the duplex each night I would pass under old-time street lamps that I had seen once in a play of Our Town. The globes of light hung down in an arc from an iron post. I had remembered them because when I saw the play with my family, I thought of them as giant, heavy berries full of light. I made a game in heaven of positioning myself so that my shadow plucked the berries as I made my way home.
After watching Ruth one night I met Franny in the midst of this. The square was deserted, and leaves began to swirl around in an eddy up ahead. I stood and looked at her—at the laugh lines that were clustered near her eyes and mouth.
“Why are you shivering?” Franny asked.
And though the air was damp and chilly I could not say that that was why.
“I can’t help thinking of my mother,” I said.
Franny took my left hand in both of hers and smiled.
I wanted to kiss her lightly on the cheek or have her hold me, but instead I watched her walk off in front of me, saw her blue dress trail away. I knew that she was not my mother; I could not play pretend.
I turned around and went back to the gazebo. I felt the moist air lace its way up along my legs and arms, lifting, ever so slightly, the ends of my hair. I thought of spider webs in the morning, how they held small jewels of dew, how, with a light movement of the wrist, I used to destroy them without thinking.
On the morning of my eleventh birthday I had woken up very early. No one else was up, or so I thought. I crept downstairs and looked into the dining room, where I assumed my presents would be. But there was nothing there. Same table as yesterday. But as I turned around I saw it lying on my mother’s desk in the living room. The fancy desk with an always-clean surface. “The bill-paying desk” was what they called it. Swaddled in tissue paper but not yet wrapped was a camera—what I had asked for with a tinge of whining in my voice, so sure they would not get it for me. I went over to it and stared down. It was an Instamatic, and lying beside it were three cartridges of film and a box of four square flashbulbs. It was my first machine, my starter kit to becoming what I wanted to be. A wildlife photographer.