Connecting (8 page)

No one else comments.

It’s just me,
Calla realizes uneasily.

When Patsy announces that it’s time for the class to give billets a try, Calla shifts her weight on the folding chair and raises her hand halfway.

Patsy, busy gathering paper and pencils, doesn’t notice.

“What’s wrong?” Evangeline whispers.

“I need to get going.”

“Home? Why?”

Calla shrugs. “I just have to go.”

“You can’t. We’re in the middle of class.”

“I know, but . . . I don’t know how to do this.”

“What? Billets? It’s really cool. You need to try it.”

The woman on Calla’s other side nudges her. She’s middle-aged, with a pale, drawn face and telltale scarf tied over her head. Cancer, chemo. You see a lot of that around Lily Dale, the desperately ill in search of healing.

She holds out a handful of pencils and smiles. “Hi. I’m Anne. Take one, pass the rest on.”

Calla hesitates.

She’s here. She might as well stay, ghostly visitors and all, rather than disrupt the class by walking out in the middle.

“All right, does everyone have a pencil and a slip of paper?” Patsy asks a few seconds later. “Notice that the papers are all exactly the same size. And we’re going to fold them exactly the same way—in half, and then in half again. Everyone needs to write a question on the paper, then fold it and put it into the basket when I pass it to you. Got it?”

Almost everyone nods.

“What kind of question?” asks Lena, a girl who’s a year behind Calla at Lily Dale High.

Sitting cluelessly with her pencil poised on the paper, Calla was wondering the same thing and is glad she didn’t have to be the one to ask.

“Anything at all,” Patsy tells them. “Something you’ve been wondering about, or wrestling with. Something you’d like Spirit to provide the answer to.”

Whoa. Now she gets it. She knows exactly what question she wants answered.

Where can I find Darrin Yates?

Then, thinking better of writing his name, which will probably be familiar to these locals, she erases it. She could just write his initials, but someone might still figure it out.

Instead, she replaces the name with
the man who calls himself “Tom”?

That, after all, is the fake name he gave Calla when he came to see Mom back in March. Spirit will probably know that. Spirit knows everything, right?

Wondering if she really believes that, Calla folds her paper as instructed and puts it into the basket Patsy passes around the circle.

Then she turns off the lights and, in the flickering candlelight, passes the basket around the circle again.

“Everyone take a slip of paper. Don’t unfold it. Just hold it in your hands.”

When everyone has a folded billet, she leads the class through a series of relaxation exercises, telling them to open their minds to Spirit and ask Spirit to give them the answer to the handwritten question they haven’t even read.

With her eyes closed, Calla does her best to focus on the paper in her hand.

In her mind’s eye, she sees a train speeding toward a mountain tunnel. She can hear the whistle blaring, then it becomes muffled as the train is swallowed into the darkness, until all is silent.

What does it mean?

Calla has no idea. Maybe the person who wrote the question asked whether there’s a railroad journey in the future. If so, it looks like the answer is yes.

If not, I’m clueless.

She wonders—not for the first time this morning—why she’s here.

They begin.

An elderly woman with puffy dyed black hair begins. “Spirit is showing me a springtime meadow,” she says, eyes closed in concentration. “I know it’s springtime because I see tulips and daffodils growing. I see a woman’s left hand, wearing a gold wedding band and feeding some long grass to a young colt.” She opens her eyes. “That’s all.”

“All right, open the paper and tell us what it says,” Patsy commands.

“It says, ‘Will I carry this baby to term?’ ”

A choking sound, almost a sob, escapes a young woman on the opposite side of the circle. Her hand, wearing a gold wedding band, Calla notices, flutters to her mouth.

“That’s mine,” she manages to say, her voice choked with emotion. “I’ve lost two pregnancies now, and . . . I’m due in April.”

Patsy smiles. “I think you just got good news, Emily.”

Everyone claps.

Calla joins in, but she’s not so sure they should be celebrating just yet. It’s not as if the old woman saw Emily cradling a newborn.

Then again, Patsy has mentioned a few times that often the spirits will deliver a sort of symbolic message, conveyed in what some locals like to call psychic shorthand. Patsy said every medium has her own shorthand symbols.

Calla’s received plenty of messages from Spirit since she got to Lily Dale, but she’s never tried to give an actual reading. She has no idea whether she has shorthand symbols in her repertoire. Maybe she does. Maybe for her, trains stand for something else. Something that doesn’t involve travel. Who knows?

Patsy decides that whoever has just been read will do the next reading.

Emily says that she saw a boat on a choppy sea, taking on water.

Calla listens for the response with interest, wondering if Emily’s boat—and her train—symbolize something else.

The question:

Would it be a mistake to give my brother a loan?

“That’s mine,” says a middle-aged man with a red beard and a blue flannel shirt stretched tightly across a pot belly.

“Wow, that’s good. Freddie—he lives in Rhode Island—he’s a fisherman. His trawler was damaged in a Nor’easter a while back. He wanted to borrow some money for repairs—you know, get back on his feet. He’s never been good with money, and me . . . well, I’ve never had much. I’d have to cash in some stuff to get it for him. I guess it’s a bad idea?”

“That depends on your interpretation of what Emily saw.

What do you think, Emily?”

“I think it means he’s not supposed to lend the money,”

she tells Red Beard. “The boat was sinking.”

“Was my brother on it? Because maybe it means I’m supposed to rescue him with the money.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see him.”

Either way, Calla realizes, it’s pretty clear that a boat is just a boat. At least this time.

And now it’s Red Beard’s turn.

“I don’t know why,” he says, “but I keep seeing a statue of a bear in a fountain. I mean, not
a
statue,
the
statue. There’s only one that I’ve ever seen. It’s up in Geneseo—my cousin’s daughter went to college there, and I saw it when we went to her graduation.”

He pauses, rubbing his beard, eyes squeezed shut.

“I’m seeing a house, too—it’s Victorian, you know . . . with a mansard roof and gingerbread porch and shutters and all that. It looks like something you’d see here in the Dale, but . . . it’s not familiar to me. Maybe it’s up there in Geneseo, I don’t know. The thing about it is, it’s painted purple. Not, you know, lavender. Bright purple. Neon.” He laughs and opens his eyes. “Never saw anything like it.”

Patsy smiles. “Don’t think I have, either. Read the question, Bob.”

Red Beard—Bob, apparently—unfolds the paper and reads, “Where can I find the man who calls himself ‘Tom’?”

Calla’s eyes widen.

“Whose was it?” Patsy looks around the room.

“Uh . . . it was mine,” Calla manages to say.

Evangeline kicks her gently and whispers, “Who’s Tom?”

Calla ignores her, thoughts reeling.

“Sounds like Geneseo might be a good place to start looking for this guy,” Red Beard tells her. “That, or start looking for purple houses.”

“Maybe so,” Patsy agrees, “or maybe not. Remember, we aren’t always meant to interpret messages so literally. The color purple, the bear, even just a fountain—those could be symbols for something else. Calla, do they mean anything to you?”

She shakes her head. “Where’s Geneseo? I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s a college town, about an hour and a half, two hours away from here.”

Calla isn’t sure how she’s going to get there, or when. It seems impossible, considering that she’s flat broke and without a car.

But if there’s the slightest possibility Darrin Yates is there, then that’s where she’s going to go. She’ll just have to find a way.

“Odelia, that dinner was great.” Dad pushes back his chair and pats his stomach. “Normally I don’t like cereal on my chicken, but it was absolutely delicious.”

“It’s an old family recipe. You just dunk it in egg and roll it in crushed cornflakes, then fry it.”

“Really? Steph never made chicken this way.”

“Calla tells me she was something of a health nut. Right, Calla?”

“Mmm-hmm.” She pokes her fork halfheartedly at the barely touched chicken on her plate.

All she can think about is what happened in her class this morning.

Not just all those spirits she saw hanging around, or Red Beard’s clue about Darrin Yates—although that’s been the main reason for her preoccupation.

But she’s still feeling just as unsettled about what happened next, when it was her turn to read.

She described her vision of the train speeding into the dark tunnel and confessed that she had no idea how to interpret it.

Patsy assured her that was okay.

Calla was momentarily stumped when she read the question written on the paper in her hand:
Am I going to make it?

“Whose is it?” Patsy asked, and Anne, sitting right next to Calla—the obvious chemo patient—raised her hand. It was trembling.

Calla’s heart sank.

This time, Patsy assured them all that the vision might not be symbolic at all—that it quite possibly was meant to be interpreted literally: Anne might be going on a train journey sometime in the near future.

“I’ve always wanted to take the Orient Express,” she replied, but her laugh was hollow.

She knew, and Calla instinctively knew, that the answer to her question was no. She wasn’t going to make it.

“Calla,” her father says now, “are you okay?”

She looks up to find both him and Odelia watching her.

“Sure . . . I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine,” her father decides. “What’s up?”

“I’m just . . . you know, worried about school.” That’s always a good catchall source of angst.

“What
about
school?”

“You two sit, I’ll clear,” Odelia murmurs, and stands to begin taking plates away from the table.

“You know, college,” Calla improvises. “I have no idea where I want to go, and the guidance counselor said we should be in the final stages of narrowing things down.”

Mrs. Erskine, her guidance counselor, really did tell her to put together a list of schools to discuss with her father this weekend—reach schools, target schools, and safety schools, about ten in all.

Calla can’t think of even one . . . other than Cornell.

“I thought you were thinking Cornell.” Apparently, her father is a mind reader.

“I was, but . . .” But that was mostly because of Kevin. “I doubt I can get in there.”

“It can be one of your reach schools. You never know.”

Great. So, one down, nine more to go. And if by some miracle she does manage to get into Cornell, she can see Kevin and Annie every day. Yippee.

“There must be some other schools you’re interested in.”

Calla shrugs.

“Why don’t I fly back here in a few weeks, and we can go look at some campuses?”

“Around here?”

“Here, in New England . . . that’s what your mother was planning to do with you. I’m just sorry we’re getting such a late start.”

“Won’t it be too late, though, in a few weeks? I thought I had to have my applications in then.”

Her father puts a reassuring hand on her arm. “It’ll work out. Figure out where you want to go, and get started on the applications, and we’ll narrow it down when we see the campuses.”

“What if I want to go to . . . I don’t know, the Midwest? Or California?”

“Do you?”

No. She doesn’t. And she doesn’t know why she’s making this so difficult. She just can’t seem to help herself.

“I told you—I don’t know what I want, Dad!”

She sees her father and Odelia exchange a glance.

Then Odelia says, “You know what? I made a devil’s food cake for dessert, and I think it would be really nice if we invited Evangeline over to have some with us. Maybe we can all play cards or something.”

“That’s a great idea!” Dad exclaims. “And we can invite Ramona, too . . . if she’s around.”

“I’m sure she’s around.” Odelia looks pleased. “What do you think, Calla?”

“Sure, why not.”