Chapter Three #2
“They called him up and he didn’t want to go. He went to Canada instead. I haven’t heard from him in three years, and I’m worried about him. But at least now I won’t worry so much.”
Becky got her walk with Skip in after the young woman left.
Later, she was slicing a pawpaw in the kitchen when it occurred to her that someone else who did what she did—or claimed to be able to do what she did—might just as easily have lied to that girl and told her that her brother sent his regards from the afterlife, and she would have walked away believing he was dead.
That was power. And not just power, but power that could be misused.
Her ability, she concluded, bespoke a province not to be taken lightly.
For the thousandth time, she wondered where it had come from.
God, maybe. She’d wondered as much, as a girl, following the Shefflin incident, and it had seemed so easy then.
God gave me this. Now she wondered why God would have done such a thing.
Clearly there was a need for what she could do; people were always dying and leaving the living in their wake.
But if God could zap an unusual ability into Becky Jenkins, why couldn’t He zap the life out of the war?
Or keep it from starting? How many people out there were praying right now for their suffering to stop, and it wasn’t stopping?
Mysterious ways—that bigger-than-life, worthless, blanket explanation people ascribed to God.
The ongoing promise that all would be revealed on the other side.
Forgive her (if she needed to be forgiven), but she was beginning to think a grand explanation wasn’t coming.
As August gave way to September, people—clients, she’d started thinking of them as—continued to trickle in. Two or three new ones a week, on average, plus those who came back. Some were just looking for a diversion, Becky suspected, but most were serious.
“Is this going to keep happening?” Cal asked one night after a drop-in had stalled their dinner. “People coming in and out at all hours?” He only saw the ones who showed up when he was home, but he assumed there were others.
“I’ve asked them to call ahead,” Becky said.
“You aren’t bringing any men up there, are you?
” he said, wagging his thumb toward the stairs.
His joking face was very close to his worried face.
She’d noticed that about him on their second date.
There was, she decided, no reason to tell him about Mr. Timmons, but sooner or later, if things kept up, she would have to consider these things.
She would have to be more proactive in discouraging people from showing up out of the blue, which wasn’t good for her or Cal.
She didn’t want to turn away anyone in need, she just wanted them to schedule in advance.
In October, with money from the house kitty, and without telling Cal (yet), she paid for a small ad to run weekly in the back of The Hancock Gazette, then paid a couple dollars more to have the Gazette send it over to the Toledo Blade.
The ad contained her married name, the words Spirit Liaison, and “by appointment only,” followed by their phone number.
When it ran the following week, it was sandwiched between ads for used fishing rods and farm equipment.
—
Most nights after dinner, Cal donned his armband and whistle and walked his “beat,” as he liked to think of it, with a little notebook and pencil tucked into his shirt pocket to record suspicious activity.
There wasn’t any. Nor was there ever any message for him, a certified Citizens Defense messenger, to deliver to one of the local wardens.
No news was good news, of course, but he couldn’t help feeling how infinitesimal his contribution to the war effort was.
Becky’s, arguably, was not. Word had spread that there was someone among them who could speak to the dead, who could maybe even find out if your loved ones were still alive, should you be in the dark about such a thing.
And there were a lot of people in the dark.
No one wanted missing and presumed dead to mean dead, and those who’d received the ultimate bad news—in the form of telegrams from the War Department—wanted some sort of assurance that their sons and husbands were at peace in the afterlife.
Cal understood all that; he just didn’t understand how the word had gotten around so efficiently—as if there were a secret club somewhere of all the people in town who took stock in that sort of thing.
He didn’t like strangers coming in and out of the house, and he didn’t like Becky’s spending so much time around people who were upset, especially with the baby there.
How could that be good for either one of them?
He sold hammers and screwdrivers. C-clamps and molding planes.
He stopped at the Esso station near home to get the Nash’s tires rotated, and the teenager who did the job asked him why he didn’t just get his wife to do it with her magical powers.
This kid had a smirk on his face that Cal wanted to make him swallow.
He also had all four tires off the car. “She’s got better things to do,” Cal said.
He didn’t mention the remark to Becky. Nor did he mention the pack of boys on bicycles who, unnoticed by her, rode up and down Taft Street one Saturday afternoon in late October yelling “Witch!” at the house every time they passed.
No doubt they were the boys responsible for soaping that word on the front-facing windows last Halloween.
Cal had cleaned it off, but not before Becky and everyone else on the block had seen it.
Becky claimed not to be bothered, but he wasn’t so sure. He had to wonder if her hobby was getting away from her, if it was becoming more of a nuisance than something she enjoyed.
Then came a weekday morning in early November when they were sitting across from each other at the kitchen table, Skip between them in his high chair, his legs kicking and his cheeks glistening with jam, and Cal, having read up on how all the states had voted in the election that had landslid Roosevelt into his fourth term, flipped through the rest of the B section and wound up on the classifieds page, where his eyes landed on Becky’s advertisement.
He looked from the paper to his wife, and from his wife to the paper, as if trying to match her face to a photo printed there.
Becky became aware of this without lifting her eyes from her Wilkie Collins novel. Eventually, she looked up.
What he wanted to know—once she’d told him why she’d placed the ad, apologized for not telling him about it sooner, and explained that it had been running for three weeks and was also in the Blade—was, where was all this going?
Becky knew he was upset, but the question struck her as obnoxious.
How should she know where it was going? What was her intention, then? he asked. To help people, she said.
“Help them what?”
She paused and skated her eyes over him.
“I thought you knew.” But if he did, he wouldn’t have that tone in his voice.
She told him that, believe it or not, there were people out there who found comfort in getting in touch with the loved one they’d lost. People came to her for that comfort, because she was a sensitive.
Thinking she hadn’t finished her sentence, Cal waited for the end of it.
“Let me ask something,” she said. “Haven’t you ever wanted to get in touch with your mother, or your siblings? Have you ever thought about how that might be beneficial to you? Or to them?”
“To them? No, they’ve been gone for a really long time. My brother died when I was five. What in the world would we have to say to each other?”
“People find solace in what I do, Cal.”
Who says I need solace? he thought. And where’s Janice?
He’d always suspected Janice resented him for stealing her best friend away—she’d thrown her rice sideways at him when he and Becky stepped out of the church.
Still, it seemed like Janice could start coming around again, pick up the spiriting slack a little.
Isn’t that what girlhood pals were for? He asked Becky where Janice had been lately.
“Are you kidding?” Becky said. “Janice moved away three months ago. She went to Kansas City to double up with her cousin and help out with her cousin’s children. I told you that.”
Had she? “Well, I think you know I don’t want to talk to dead people, loved ones or otherwise. And I don’t like the idea of people coming in and out of here whenever they want.”
“Not whenever they want,” she said. “That’s the purpose of the ad.”
“But it’s your name and our phone number in the newspaper.”
“They’re in the phone book.”
“That’s not the same. Don’t you worry about people intruding here? About them robbing us, or—or”—his face flushed—“kidnapping Skip?”
“Skip’s rarely out of my sight, I always know right where he is. And, Cal, what’s there to rob?”
“I can’t believe you did this without talking to me about it.”
“I said I was sorry. I knew you’d be against it. You don’t understand why people would want to come here, because you don’t see the point of what I do. Frankly, I don’t think you even believe in it.”
He’d never weighed in on that officially, though his feelings were probably easily inferred. It felt like a challenge, now. She was folding her napkin, waiting for his response. “Do I have to? Is it necessary?”
Becky had made the claim, but she hadn’t thought it was actually true. She’d thought of him as a skeptic, not a flat-out nonbeliever. “No,” she said, “it’s not necessary. But if you don’t believe in it, your opinion on how I do it shouldn’t carry a whole lot of weight, should it?”