Chapter Fifteen #3
“I don’t really know,” he said. “I’ve just been carrying around this—weight. I want them all to know how sorry I am. I guess that’s it.” He made a face. “I have no experience with this at all.”
“That’s okay,” Becky said. “I do. Can you tell me the name of at least one of the people you’d like to make contact with?”
“You need a name?” He’d been hoping to do this without getting into specifics. Figuring if she was real, Augie would know without having to be singled out.
“First and last,” she said. “Middle, if you have it. And the date of the sinking, so I have an idea of when they crossed into the spirit world.”
Felix started having second thoughts. Come to think of it, he didn’t even know if he believed in the spirit world. Was it a contradiction to be an agnostic and believe in spirits? Were spirits souls? “Is there any way you could just try to reach the group of them?”
“I can try,” she said. He gave her the date and time of the sinking. The approximate location, and the number of men who’d died. That was it. She rolled up the sleeves of her turquoise blouse, closed her eyes, and asked him to close his own. He did.
It was very odd to be in a stranger’s home with his eyes closed. She did her work silently for a while, and as he waited they both heard a nervous curl of indigestion emanating from his stomach.
“Someone’s in the water,” she said.
His neck bristled. He opened his eyes, as if there were something to see.
Hers were still closed, so he closed his again.
Moments (minutes?) later, she said, “Someone wants—something—from someone else. There’s a great deal of unrest here. Many of these spirits think they’re still in the water.”
Not a comforting thought, but he felt that she understood the magnitude of what he’d been through.
The immeasurability of it. His neck wouldn’t unbristle.
What would he do if Carazzo or Goretsky suddenly started speaking through her?
Or Dale Baxter? Would she start growling, like Baxter had? Would she reach for him?
But no voice other than her own came out of her, and he felt both relieved and a little foolish, realizing that he had, indeed, brought to the session a considerable measure of doubt; if he’d truly believed she might bring Dale Baxter into the room, he might not have come.
She sat back and, rubbing one of her temples, concluded there were too many restless spirits connected to the Teague to be able to draw one of them forward without a name.
She’d never experienced anything like it, she said, but she’d also never tried to reach such a large group before.
She’d thought for a moment that she was on the verge of establishing a one-on-one connection; a man who thought he was still in the water was repeating a word she hadn’t been able to make out.
A foreign word, perhaps. If Felix wanted to zero in on a specific person, she said, the results might be different—but it wasn’t likely to happen today.
Felix glanced at his watch. Fifteen minutes had passed.
She pulled back the curtains.
“I guess it’s hard to predict the success rate of this kind of thing,” Felix said.
“It is. But when it happens, it’s—well, it’s not like anything else.”
“What is it like?”
Becky opened the pocket doors, blew out the votive.
“As best I can understand it, there’s a kind of membrane between the living and the dead that’s very thin, but also very strong.
Spirits who have something they want to convey tend to gravitate toward the membrane, or go to it when called, and linger there.
Some of us on this side—for whatever reason—can sense the membrane and what’s behind it.
And can push on it. And the spirits, if they choose to, can push back.
The pushing is language. The silence is language.
And sometimes there’s actual language I’m able to access.
Words. Phrases. Whole sentences. So the success rate is hard to predict, yes, but there is success. ”
Felix wondered.
They stepped into the foyer, and she asked him to wait while she went and got Tom. She came back without him. “I sent him around,” she said, smiling. “He’s covered in snow. You’re going to want to brush him off before he gets in the car.”
“Will do.”
She could sense Felix’s disappointment as she walked him out.
There was nothing to be done about that.
But out of her own curiosity, she was still trying to decipher the voice of the man in the water, the word he’d been saying.
Like a once-forgotten tune, these things sometimes came back to her after the fact, with startling clarity.
Tom was coming around the side of the house when they walked down the porch steps. Cal was two houses away. He paused shoveling and watched as the man and the boy in the trapper hat reached their car.
In the next moment, the word Becky was reaching for came to her.
“Mr. Salt,” she called after him. “Felix!”
He turned around.
“What’s a kapok?”
—
He waited two weeks before calling again. This time, he scheduled a session for early evening on a weekday. Cal had just walked in from work and was hanging up his jacket and scarf when Becky told him Mr. Salt would be there any minute.
The slim hope Cal had been holding on to that Felix Salt’s presence at their house had been an anomaly—vanished. Trying to push down the rise in his voice, he said, “Why?”
“Another session.” Becky carried a pitcher of water past him into the parlor. “It shouldn’t take too long.”
“He wants to find more…spirits?”
“You know I don’t talk about that with anyone but the person I meet with,” Becky said. “Mr. Salt was on a ship that went down in the war. A lot of people he knew died.”
Cal tried to feign a quiet surprise.
—
Becky was pleased Felix had made a second appointment.
Something in him, a woundedness in his amber eyes, pulled at her.
She wanted to help him. But when they sat down at the hexagonal table, he still didn’t want to give her a name.
She did her best with what she had to work with.
Several minutes in, she asked him if there’d been someone particularly close to him in the water.
“Close, meaning…”
“Proximity.”
“Yes,” Felix said. “A lot of them. There were people all around me.”
She knew that, because the spirits were swimming in and out of him as he spoke.
Quite a few were transmitting flashes of experience to her.
None of them pleasant. She told Felix of a spirit who’d gotten a kapok from him but had still managed to drown.
She told him of another who had a kapok and had hung on to the side of a raft but was injured and bled internally—to the end.
The last thing this spirit saw—as a man—was a ship arriving, the name on the side of the ship’s bow. She couldn’t make it out.
But then she could. Rigdon.
Some of the men, she said, didn’t seem to know they were spirits. They were still fighting to stay alive. One was trying to find the Teague on the surface. Another was still inside the ship, wandering its sideways corridors. Two were in the engine room, arguing over a bottle of something.
Felix was almost too stunned to respond. He’d never told her the name of the rescue ship. He’d never told her about Bollen and Marcello, forever accusing each other of theft.
Mid-session, eyes closed, he said, “You’re not not telling me anything, are you?”
She paused. “There’s one spirit who seems to be caught in a—a loop of anger. Directed at you.”
Augie?
“He’s still grappling for something, still struggling in the water with you.”
“With me?” Not Augie, then. Dale Baxter, maybe. Felix felt a wave of dread ripple through him. He didn’t want to talk about Baxter, certainly didn’t want to be put in touch with him directly, if such a thing were possible.
Before long, though, the spirit got bored, or distracted, and moved on.
The ceiling creaked. Cal, moving around upstairs.
Felix said, “Maybe it’s not possible to find out what I want to know.”
“You haven’t told me what that is.”
“I—I lived. They didn’t. I guess I want them to know that I know I owe them something. That’s part of it.”
“What do you owe them?”
His life, somehow. Their lives—even though he wasn’t supposed to think that way. Their lives, Augie’s life. “Please just convey my gratitude.”
“I am,” she said. And, “They know.” There was something more, though, she could tell. “Do you want me to try to contact a specific person?”
That question again. He did, and didn’t. He shook his head.
Afterward, wanting fresh air, she walked with him down the driveway to where his car was parked along the curb. “What’s the other part, if I might ask?”
He didn’t understand.
“You told me part of it was that you wanted to thank them, but you didn’t say what the other part is.”
She could see sadness—or maybe worry—tugging at the corners of his eyes.
“Next time,” he said, “maybe.” The smile he offered her faded as quickly as it had come.
He made an appointment for a week later but called the day before it to cancel, saying something had come up and he’d call to reschedule. She had a feeling that wouldn’t happen anytime soon.