Chapter 38 Inquiries
Inquiries
Lydia Brown
I build a fire to take away the chill while Gus takes the Ouija board out of the box.
The cuckoo clock strikes three, and we kneel on opposite sides of the board with our fingertips barely touching the planchette.
The air crackles. The glow on Gus’s face tells me that the portal to Ouija’s world has widened.
She says the opening prayer—twice, and commands it to memory. Evil is not child’s play.
I haven’t touched the board since I was eighteen and looking to fight and bite, hoping for a confrontation after being shunned. At forty-two I feel more trepidation because time has beaten me down and been a stubborn enemy. My bridge to beyond may be closer, but it’s still out of reach.
Gus asks Ouija standard teenage questions.
This mindset must be etched on an age-old tablet: Will I be happy, will I be rich, will I find love—que será.
Every new seeker asks the same questions because we humans are abysmally predictable.
A small gasp escapes when E-D-D-I-E is spelled out as her true love.
Then she asks harder questions. Am I good enough?
Does Mama hate me? Mercifully, Ouija responds YES then NO to the tender ones. Ouija may help her sleep better.
“Your turn,” she says, pleased with her answers.
“Go on, you can do it,” she urges, as though I am the hesitant child new to the game.
Our fingertips still rest on the planchette, but there’s only one question I want answered, and asking it has become tiresome.
Will my spirit gift return? But I ask it again, and the disk begins to move like a lazy serpent, weaving, teasing, taking the long way to its destination before stopping in the middle of nowhere. Like it’s out of gas.
Hasn’t there been enough headway in the last weeks for me to feel progress? A dream message from Gus, the ghost girl Loretty in the clearing, a tunnel that leads to more, a birthmark I share with a witch—and unprecedented access to Birdie’s truth.
I drop my arms and start to pack the board and planchette back in the box—and I almost forget to say the closing prayer and Gus dutifully repeats it twice. Thank you for answering our questions through the Angels of the Light…
My niece kisses me on the forehead like I’m the child. The cuckoo clock strikes four, and we curl up at each end of the long sofa and our bare feet touch. We stare at the flames while the rain on the tin roof is a muted kettledrum.
“Wanna talk about it?” Gus says.
I know what she’s asking. “It’s dark stuff, honey.”
“I’m not afraid of dark stuff. It’s part of life.” The girl’s voice is not naive. “Your dark stuff is my dark stuff, isn’t it?”
“No. You do not carry my burdens.”
“But what if I want to? Really want to? I may look like a child and sound like a child, but I’m not, Aunt Liddy. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I nod and blow her a kiss. “I do understand, and I won’t make that mistake again,” I say mostly to pacify Gus.
“Thank you. So the dark stuff. I think it comes when your mama and daddy died. What happened after that? Mama never says what came next.”
I choose my words carefully. “You know that our family’s tragedy arrived in 1955 when I was seventeen. I was supposed to go to market with Mama, but I woke up with the start of a cold. Daddy went in my place, and that’s where the day started going downhill.”
I take a deep breath.
Gus says, “You think you should have had a premonition.”
“Of course I do. I’d had dreams before that warned people. But it was more than that. It was Daddy doing my job at market. He went in my place. It should have been me in that truck. If somebody needed to die that day, it should have been me.”
“It doesn’t work like that. We can’t pick and choose, and we can’t volunteer.”
“I know that, honey, but the guilt was too heavy from every angle. I was only seventeen.”
“Only a little older than me.”
I nod. “Everybody stopped what they were doing when they got the call. And you wanna hear an odd thing?”
She nods.
“I remember vividly your Uncle Everett’s final riddle that he told the night before at supper. He used to tell one every day, but he stopped when our parents died. My sister Cora says he’s never told another.”
“What was it?”
“What can you break, even if you never pick it up or touch it?”
Gus says, “It’s a promise, isn’t it?”
“Yes. A promise. When I was little, I struggled to solve Everett’s riddles. It was your mama who figured them out quickly. Like you did now. You have a deductive mind like hers.”
I’ve tried to wander off course to softer memories, but Gus pulls me back to my telling. She won’t let me stray. “Tell me about that dark day.”
I look out the window and the fog is pressed against the glass, listening as I spill secrets like spilling blood. I end with the confession, “I left and never went back.”
“Maybe you weren’t running away, Aunt Liddy. Maybe you were going where you were supposed to go.”
Anger spikes in my chest, and I think this child isn’t following my story at all. She isn’t feeling my pain. I say sarcastically, “Like following my destiny?”
“Yes. Your destiny is a very real thing that can’t be denied. You are where you should be, but you don’t know that yet.”
I take a deep breath. Isn’t that what I said to Kate?
That she was where she needed to be? Did I think that comment would bring her comfort?
What a hypocrite I am that I can’t accept that I am on the right path too.
I whisper my hard truth. “My home is gone, Gus, and I miss it with an ache that could sink me if I let it.”
“Then don’t let it.” She gets up on one elbow to see me better.
“What?” I shake my head, confused.
“Don’t let it sink you.”
“Oh, honey, you make it sound simple—”
“—when nothing is simple or easy, right?”
I stare at the fire. The flames are hypnotic.
“But there’s more,” I say. Now the flames crackle like static on an old-timey radio.
“Trula Freed, my childhood friend, died four years later.” My right palm itches.
I hold it open so Gus can see. “Trula had this mark in the same place. And now I find that Birdie Rocas and the missing girl, Loretty, have one. Birdie called it the mark of a Keeper, but I haven’t a clue what that means.
I do know I don’t commune with the spirit world anymore like you do or like Trula or Birdie did.
But it is Jack’s death that is the cruelest reminder of what I’ve lost.” I bite my lip to keep from crying.
“I loved Uncle Jack,” says Gus sweetly. “When he died I was heartbroken because he always treated me like a grown-up. He taught me things and called me an excellent student. The last thing he told me three Christmases back was about an aspen grove in Utah called Pando. Did he tell you about it? He read in National Geographic that it’s the oldest and largest living thing on earth.
Over forty thousand quaking aspens cover a hundred acres with a single root system.
He promised to take me there but he didn’t say when.
Maybe you and I could go, Aunt Liddy. To honor him. ”
“I’d love that, honey. You set the date. And like your Uncle Everett’s last riddle, it’s a promise.”