1910
After the boiler explosion, the factory had closed for two days and all the machines inspected and declared in good working condition.
Now, however, the Earthshine Girls startled at every unfamiliar click or clang or hiss.
Perhaps that’s the reason Opal jolted when Maria shouted her name.
The very utterance of it seemed dangerous.
“Opal Doucet—”
Maria pronounced her name like it was French. Do-say, she said, an invitation to speak, not do-sit, how Jagr said it, a command to find a chair. She had spotted Opal’s full name on the foreman’s clipboard.
“Opal Doucet,” she said again, loud enough for others to hear. Earthshine Girls always spoke above the noise, and sometimes they found themselves shouting, even outside during breaks. “Can you hear me? I’m talking to you.”
“Shh. Quiet down,” Opal said. She leaned over her station, the crate beside her nearly full.
She folded paper over the rectangle of soap, flipped it, and dabbed the ends with wax.
Behind her, a machine worker banged on pipes, doing maintenance on the boilers.
She didn’t like the disruption of her work, the impact it’d have on her numbers.
Workers who exceeded their quota received an extra dollar at the end of the month, and Opal was counting on it.
She lifted another cake of soap from the table and dug her fingernail into it.
She wrapped the soap, pleased that this tiny dent would make its way into someone’s home, a secret sign of her existence.
“I’ll cover for you, if that’s what you want. ”
“Not that—something else,” Maria said.
Maria’s cap rested far enough back on her head to reveal her dark hair and the powder she’d not rubbed in all the way. Strung around her neck on a simple chain was a silver ring, wide as a quarter, the accessory popular among the girls who’d lost their husbands.
“Then what?”
Maria’s lips parted, and she stood there for a moment, on the verge of speaking. She twirled a cake of Earthshine, her hand moving like one of those mechanical trinkets Opal had seen at the shops near the river. “I know your secret,” Maria said.
Opal didn’t speak. Her whole body tightened. She eyed the exit. The machine workers’ blowtorches sounded like wind.
“Did you hear me? I said I know your secret.”
“I’m not deaf, you know.”
The late afternoon light came in through the window slantwise and golden. Opal set down her work and began tidying her station. Her whole body vibrated, but she didn’t make a sound. She stacked the papers. She capped the sealing wax. She swiped crumbles of yellow powder to the floor to be swept.
Your secret. She was dizzy with anticipation. Maria must have seen those papers. Her mouth felt dry, her tongue a thick swollen weight. She couldn’t be sent back to Gallipolis as a criminal. And what would they do about the baby? Her baby.
“I’ve always thought there was something a little off about you.
No offense. You don’t talk much, eat your lunch alone, always rubbing that necklace of yours.
Sometimes I seen you looking into the distance, your lips moving like you’re talking to someone who ain’t there.
And when you helped Betsy, sitting on the floor there with her burn … I noticed … I figured it out.”
Opal felt far away from her body, like her head was a balloon that’d floated up to the ceiling, and now she could observe herself down below.
An unusual episode. In her apron and cap, she appeared indistinguishable from the other girls busy at their stations.
But she’d always felt such distance between herself and others. Such difference.
Maybe Maria knew about Jagr. Or maybe Opal’s uniform shift, tied high on her waist, hadn’t obscured her middle well enough.
How stupid of her to think she could fool anyone.
She could walk out right now and leave. It was close enough to the end of the day that she wouldn’t raise suspicions.
She still had free will. She still had choices, hadn’t she?
She could go home and pack her things and still have time to take the evening train.
But what good would free will do her then?
She needed a job. She needed the money if she wanted to make it to France.
Maria stacked two crates and sat atop, her legs tucked beneath her.
“My cousin in St. Louis, she told me about this doctor,” she said.
“He can see sickness inside people, just by touching them. My cousin’s friend, she saw him once.
She’d been lame all her life. He told her she had copper in her liver, or something, but he cleared her up.
The spirits taught him. They tell him what to do.
She walks better now. I thought it was all flimflam when my cousin told me.
” She rested her index finger inside that ring around her neck, as though it were a lever that might detach her head from her body.
“You’ve lost your husband,” Opal said, trying to deflect the conversation, to appear casual despite her galloping nerves.
“Everyone knows that,” Maria said. Her lips bent upward in a sad sort of way, compelled to smile, even though the occasion did not call for one, the habit of women trained from birth to be pleasant.
“There is such a thing as Mourning Spray,” Opal began to say. “It smells like—”
“You’re a spook—” Maria said.
“—grapefruit.”
Now the wave of factory sounds receded. A pocket of quiet held the two of them.
“That’s how you helped Betsy, isn’t it? I’ve heard of people like you, but I’ve never met one,” Maria finally said. “A spiritualist.”
It took a moment for the word to take root in Opal’s mind, then a lightness.
She exhaled. She hadn’t even realized she’d been holding her breath, but now she no longer felt dizzy.
Not an unusual episode after all. Relief spread through her in the form of hunger.
Her stomach growled. This was the secret Maria knew. Not about Jagr. Not about the baby.
A spiritualist.
She felt the urge to move wildly, but she didn’t.
She remained very still. In her mind, she already began composing her next letter to Madame de Fleur.
Maria sees it in me, too—this gift you say I have.
And didn’t she have it? Hadn’t she heard that voice?
Hadn’t she touched the Other Side? The baby was proof.
Madame de Fleur had told her that all bodies contained maps to the deepest reservoir of their souls.
The body knows what our souls cannot speak.
Opal remembered when Madame de Fleur pressed her forehead against Opal’s, only that small table separating them.
Can you sense his presence? the woman asked.
With her forehead pressed against Madame de Fleur’s she did sense something.
“I’ve been unwell,” Maria continued, whispering. “But he says nothing is wrong with me.”
“Who?”
“My doctor. I…” Maria started to say, then: “Oh, this is silly. I’m silly.
You must think I’m a fool. It’s just … at night, I can’t sleep and my chest feels tight, like someone’s sitting on me.
I can’t breathe, and when that happens, my heart starts pounding, and I want to escape, only I don’t know to where because I am already home with my children.
And I feel so helpless, so out of control, and…
” Here she leaned in closer. Opal could feel the quickness of her breath.
“When I wake up in the morning, I feel … I feel dread. I don’t know how else to describe it, and I don’t know what it is I’m dreading.
I have plenty of good things in my life.
Children, a job. I can feed them plenty. I know I should be grateful.”
“Did your doctor tell you that?”
“And it’s not just me. The others—Betsy, Gilly, Ruth—they’ve all said the same, like it’s contagious or something.
Mildred’s family sent her away to Marietta to see a doctor who specializes in ennui.
Can you believe it? A doctor who specializes in that?
” She tapped her skull, as though pointing to something inside.
Ennui, perhaps. “Maybe it’s the comet,” she said.
“The paper said it can cause all types of unusual disturbances.”
Opal had read in the papers that the comet had been blamed for avalanches, windstorms, hurricanes, even rheumatoid arthritis and migraine headaches from changes in barometric pressure. “I don’t believe it,” Opal said.
“You don’t believe in science?” Maria asked. She stood and began organizing her workstation. She kept a small paintbrush in her apron pocket, and now she dusted the surface of the table with it.
“I think the comet will save us.”
Maria asked how, but Opal didn’t know.
When Maria finished dusting her own work surface, she helped Opal clear her own. “So— Are you like him? That doctor in St. Louis? The spiritualist?”
Save her, she’d heard a voice say that night in the river.
She hadn’t been able to tell if it was a man’s or a woman’s—but it was as clear as if she’d lifted a telephone receiver to her ear, as clear as when Alexander Graham Bell said those famous first words ever spoken with electricity: “Mr. Watson, Come here. I want to see you.” A desire disguised as a command.
A telephone requires two people to hold the line, but only one to speak.
“Yes,” Opal said. “I am a spiritualist.”
There, she’d named it.
The foreman’s buzzer signaled the end of the shift. Opal brought her attention back to her station. It was noisy, hot. Maria stood to gather her things. The floor manager collected their crates and made some tick marks on a clipboard. Their numbers.
Only after the floor manager left did Maria speak again. “I’m not asking for anything free. I’ll pay you for a cure.”