Jane Was Here (33 page)

At Gita’s door it occurs to him: her mother might hear if he knocks. He tries sending a mind-message.

He hears a toilet flushing. Gita comes out of the bathroom into the corridor. When she sees Collin, her eyes open wide. Putting her finger to her lips, she pulls him into her bedroom and quickly shuts the door.

His eyes take a moment to adjust to the darkness. Her curtains are drawn; the room is lit only by the blue screen-saver on Gita’s laptop, and some candles set before the shrine to Gana. He smells sweat and leftover skunk.

When he tells her his plan, Gita’s eyes glow with approval. “Yes! We can do this.”

“But what do we do when we get to Jane’s hiding place? How do we fight Shaarinen?”

“We’ll ask the goddess.”

A soft knock at the door: “Gita?”

Motioning toward her bed, Gita lifts the dust ruffle so he can hide underneath. Collin curls up alongside their summer stash of stolen items: the Episcopalian psalter, the Jewish blue-and-white braided candle, the Catholic altar bells, the Calvary of Holy Innocents tambourine, the Meltzers’ tiki torch.

He can see Gita’s bare feet retreat as she goes to the door. Opening it a crack, she speaks with her mother in their language.

Hearing the door close, he crawls out. Gita is swallowing some pills with a glass of water.

“The doctor says I have an ulcer. Just another one of the trials a warrior has to go through. Did you bring an offering?”

“I couldn’t. Dad doesn’t let me do anything except what he wants.”

“Never mind. Let’s write our questions.” Gita tears a page from her school notebook in two.

They each write a question, then fold the paper into small squares, placing their petitions on the shrine amid the candles. Gita turns off the light so they can meditate before Gana.

Collin stares into the flame, repeating the prayer he has learned—
”Tell Me O Gana”
—until the goddess answers his question.

Afterward he turns to Gita. “I asked if my plan would work and she said, ‘Yes.’ What did you get?”

“I asked her how we destroy Shaarinen. She said:
‘By blade or by fire.
’”

Gita has an idea for the fire. And Collin can steal his dad’s machete, so that takes care of the blade.

“Tell me again what will happen after we complete our mission.” He never gets tired of hearing her tell the story.

When the battle is won, Gita and Collin and the other avatars scattered about the planet will shed their color. Their skin will go white, then transparent, then invisible. They will walk among the people unseen, potent and infinitely wise.

C
HAPTER
-T
WENTY
-S
IX

I
  
am Jane Pettigrew.
   Her words echo in Brett’s mind. They are all he has to go on.

This was my home almost two centuries ago.

Now that he has lost the Jane he knew, the only thing left is to delve into the past, and find the Jane he doesn’t know.

With Elsa’s help, Brett turns up a record of Jane Pettigrew’s baptism in 1833, at the Unitarian church.

Child: Jane Amelia Pettigrew. Parents: Benjamin and Sarah Pettigrew.

Later the same year, the registry reports Sarah’s funeral. Elsa sighs, “Poor girl, to lose her mother so young. At any rate, now we know the Pettigrews were Unitarians.”

They wade through the next twenty-three years of the Unitarian registries but find only Benjamin Pettigrew’s funeral in 1854. No weddings for Jane or her sister Rebecca; no funerals for them either. By 1860, all the Pettigrews have disappeared from the Graynier census.

What happened to the two sisters?

What if Jane married someone from another church, and left the Unitarians?

Brett resigns himself to flipping through the other five churches’ records. The leather bindings powder his fingers with dust which coats his sinuses as he turns the stained pages, poring over the spidery script that reports arrivals and couplings and final departures of the human faithful.

There is no trace of the Pettigrews in any of them.

He has always assumed reincarnation to be horseshit, a way for nobodies to boast they used to be somebodies. You can claim you were King Arthur or Cleopatra in a former life, and who can prove otherwise? Funny how no one ever says he was a garbage collector, or an aardvark.

Fragments come to me and I don’t understand them. But they have a certainty—I know them to be true, as I know my name is Jane and I was born in Graynier. If they come not from my memory, then where?

How could she know which was the Pettigrews’ house? The detective said she had lived in the autistic facility for most of her life. Where did she get her memory of a wall, and the name Quirk?

Elsa pipes up from the corner where she is studying local cemetery records: “I’ve found the headstones!”

She brings the book over to Brett’s table, pointing out the entries. He reads the first: “Pettigrew, Sarah. Location: Beacon Unitarian Cemetery. Description: marble monument, side border of vines, flowers, and fruit, crowned by weeping winged head. Inscription: ‘Sacred to the memory of Sarah Mayhew Pettigrew, our cherished wife and mother, born in 1807 and died on February 6, 1833.
I am the resurrection and the life/ He that believeth in me/ Though he were dead/ Yet shall he live.
’”

Underneath Sarah’s entry is “Pettigrew, Benjamin. Location: Beacon Unitarian Cemetery. Description: simple granite slab. Inscription: ‘In memory of Benjamin Leviticus Pettigrew who died March 21, 1854 aged 48 yrs.
Calm & resigned I do give over/ My life for one that shall never end/ Death has no terrifying power/ To those who find in Christ a friend.
’”

Turning the page, he sees the last listing is Rebecca. “No headstone for Jane?”

“I’m sorry, dear. Perhaps she moved away to live with relatives, after her father and sister died. But go back and look at Rebecca’s entry, because there’s something odd about it.”

He returns his eyes to the page. “Pettigrew, Rebecca. Location: Crompton Field plot. Description: sandstone slab, broken at base. Inscription: ‘Rebecca Pettigrew, died April 1854, aged 24.’”

Brett looks up at Elsa inquiringly. “What’s strange about it?”

“Rebecca’s headstone isn’t in the Unitarian cemetery along with her parents. There was no funeral recorded in the church registry, either. She’s in Crompton’s Field, where they buried the orphans, the servants and shanty workers. To be in Crompton’s Field, you were poor, or an outcast of some kind.”

He doesn’t care about Rebecca. “But what about Jane?”

“I believe we’re at a dead end on Jane Pettigrew.” Closing the book, Elsa rubs her eyes, smudging her mascara into ghoulish whorls. “Is there a reason for your curiosity about this particular person?”

Because I love her.
“She’s, like, a distant relative.”

She glances at her watch. “I’m afraid it’s closing time.”

Dispirited, Brett follows Elsa to the door as she locks up.

“I’m still curious about Rebecca’s death,” she says as she lets him out. “I think I’ll have a look at Doctor Pincus’ journals. He was both doctor and coroner back then, and he cared for nearly everyone in Graynier. He made notes about all his cases, so maybe there’s some mention of the Pettigrews. Leave me your number and I’ll call you if I find anything.”

A FOOL’S ERRAND.

“Well, that was a wasted day,” Brett says on the drive home.

Collin, riding beside him in barbed silence, is even further beyond his reach than when they left Connecticut. Brett feels a growing contrition; he has squandered their summer.

At dinner he tries to engage his son, chattering inanely about software and sports. The boy, staring at his plate of takeout ribs, doesn’t even bother to grunt.

“Maybe we should use our last days together to take that fishing trip I promised you.”

“I don’t like fishing.”

“How do you know if you never tried it?”

“‘Cause I know.”

Right back where they began.

Collin rises abruptly, takes his plate into the kitchen. Brett hears water running in the sink, then the clank of the plate as the boy places it in the dishwasher.

I’ve lost everyone now
, Brett thinks.
The two Janes, and my son.

“Dad?” He feels the kid’s hand on his shoulder.

He looks up. Collin’s brown eyes are round and sweetly supplicating.

“Can you take me to the fair tomorrow?”

Even in the short time that’s left, they could change things around, Brett thinks. He needs to give the boy his full attention.

“Awesome! Great idea, son.”

They’ll have fun. And maybe the love he’s supposed to feel for Collin will emerge.

And then he could forget about Jane.

Later he kisses Collin goodnight, and finds his kiss miraculously returned. He arranges the mosquito netting around the boy’s bed and turns out the light, climbing upstairs to work at his computer.

Instead of working, however, he goes online and enters “jane amelia pettigrew” in a search window. The results return instantly: “0.” He tries other search engines, with no luck.

His cell phone rings.

It’s Elsa Graynier. “I hope you don’t mind my phoning so late. I was paging through Doctor Pincus’ journals and I found several notes on the Pettigrews.”

“Great. Anything new?” Brett asks, his hopes roused.

“In 1833 there was a scarlet fever epidemic. That’s how the mother died. And here’s the death of the father:
‘March 21, 1854. Attended bedside B. Pettigrew. Death past midnight. Phthisis.’
I had to look the word up. It’s what they used to call tuberculosis.”

“And…anything on Jane?”

“There’s only one entry about her. The doctor treated her for a serious bout of the grippe in 1853, which she survived. She would have been about 20.”

“That’s it?”

“I’m afraid so. But then there’s Rebecca. Listen to this:
‘September 20, 1854. Examined body of Rebecca Pettigrew. Death by drowning in Pease Pond. Decay indicates more than a month in water. By her own hand.’
It would explain why she was buried in the paupers’ field. Although I thought the Unitarians were more charitable toward suicide than the Catholics. I do hope your Jane had a happier life.”

Brett thanks Elsa and and hangs up.

He wants to cry; his heart feels leaden. Turning off his computer, he goes downstairs to his bedroom and lies down in the dark.
Jane, where are you?

Then he remembers the vision he had, here in this same bed, that night she first knocked at his door.

A doctor, bent over his wasted dead body, closing his lids. The blood flecks on the sheet about his chin.
Phthisis.
Tuberculosis, coughing up blood, wasting away…

He wishes suddenly that he could conjure that scene again, like a dusty volume that he could reach down from the shelf and open, to learn…

He feels a shifting in the darkness as his body grows heavy. He finds he can’t lift a muscle. A febrile heat spreads through his limbs, and a dim light blooms on the ceiling.

My Jane, my own dear Jane, where are you?

The voice is no longer his own. Another man’s tortured cry issues from his throat:
Jane! My daughter!

He tastes blood in his mouth; feels a suffocating pressure in his chest, his body immobilized on fever-soaked sheets. He manages to rotate his head a few degrees, and sees a kerosene lantern beside his bed. It throws a weak halo of light on the ceiling.

Suddenly the light is blocked: a face bends over him. A young woman in tears. She touches her hand to his, weeping, “Papa…I’m sorry, Papa…”

He musters enough strength to push her hand away.

She retreats from his view. “Oh! He won’t forgive me,” she sobs to someone else in the room.

He doesn’t want her. She isn’t Jane.

He hears her retreat, the door closing. A man’s head comes into view, looking down upon him. Rimless spectacles, a high stiff collar: the doctor.

He’s dying.

Again.

IT TAKES ALL
Brett’s effort to force the images away, and pull his consciousness away from the dying man’s. The scene dissipates.

He is Brett Sampson, splayed on the musty bedcovers in the dark, in Father Petrelli’s bedroom.