Absolute Brightness (24 page)

“Holy shit,” I said aloud. “He's naked.

“
Uncle Mike!
” I yelled, but he just kept swimming farther away. Only the high-pitched whirring of the cicadas answered back. Either Uncle Mike was too far out to hear me or he had decided to swim without letting anything stop him.

“What's up?”

It was Chuck; he was standing behind me and looking out at the sunstruck lake.

“He's such a total nutcase,” I said, letting out a sigh of exasperation. “I mean, what's he think he's doing?”

“He'll come back,” Chuck said, and then he laughed. “Maybe he's just cooling off.”

We watched my uncle skim the shimmering surface of the lake, his big arms going in an easy rhythm and taking him farther and farther away from us.

“I heard he was in Mexico when it happened.”

I turned and looked at Chuck with one eyebrow raised and said, “He's not a suspect returning to the scene of the crime, if that's what you think. Jesus, I can't believe I'm using words like ‘suspect' and ‘scene of the crime.' It's so Nancy Drew. What's happened to my life?”

Chuck just stood there with his hands in his pockets, squinting against the glare and breathing. Finally he said, “I don't know. Maybe your life's just got complicated. The world's a complicated place.”

“Thanks,” I said as I turned back toward the water. And then I shouted, “
Uncle Mike!
”

“Don't worry,” Chuck mumbled as if he were talking to himself, “we'll find whoever did it.”

“Why do you care?”

“Um. It's my job,” he replied.

“That doesn't really answer my question. I'm just asking 'cause it seems weird to me. A job chasing down evil.”

“Like I said, it's a complicated world.”

I shot him another raised eyebrow.

He looked up into the cool center of the tree towering above us as if he might find the answer hanging there. Then he took a deep breath and said, “I don't know. I used to think people were basically good and sometimes they just behaved bad. Then something happened to me. I was about your age. It's a long story. Let's just say I realized there's a little evil in all of us. It just takes the right conditions for it to come out full force and do damage.”

“Wait. Are you saying that deep down any one of us could've killed Leonard? I mean, given the
right conditions
?”

“No. Not exactly. I'm just saying that without restraints, any one of us could end up on either end of evil. It's out there. But it's also in here.”

He pointed to himself, just so there was no confusion.

“Restraints?”

“Yeah. Like society, like laws, the church, whatever. For a while, I thought about becoming a priest, y'know, as a way of encouraging the good in people. But it just wasn't for me. So I thought the next best thing I could do was become a cop. I thought maybe I might discourage one or two people from being bad.”

“How you doing?”

“I dunno,” he shot back at me. “You tell me.”

And we left it at that.

By this time, Uncle Mike was out in the middle of the lake. He had stopped swimming, and only his head was bobbing above the waterline.

“
Uncle Mike!
” I shouted. This time his head whipped around and he raised an arm to signal that he'd heard me.

“
We have to go!
” I added, just so there was no mistaking my meaning.

He gave me another quick wave and began the swim back toward us.

“I'm going to wait in the car,” I told Chuck. “The last thing in the world I need today is to see my uncle's naked ass in broad daylight. Tell him to hurry it up, will ya? And don't mention the rope thing to him. My mother doesn't know I came out here.”

“Sure,” he said.

I walked up the grassy slope toward the house, and just as I made it to the back door, I heard Chuck's voice calling out to me.

“Hey, Phoebe!”

I turned around and saw him standing alone in the middle of the yard where I had left him. He was smiling with one half of his face, and I knew what he was going to say before he said it. Then he said it.

“Be good, okay?”

 

sixteen

WHEN I WAS
about nine years old, Nana Hertle told me that she'd chosen me.

“For what?” I asked, thinking that all my efforts to be good had finally paid off and I was about to be rewarded with a load of candy or toys or money. But no. She told me that she had other plans for me. She said that after she “crossed over,” she would make every effort to come back from the dead and tell me what it was like in the spirit world.

Nana Hertle had read plenty of books on the “afterlife” and even went so far as to attend a few séances while she was still alive. Despite her best efforts, however, she was never completely satisfied that contact had been made with the other side. She said she never could be sure whether it was in fact her childhood friend Agnes Hrabel spelling out a lazy request for remembrance on a Ouija board or if it was a manifestation of her own wishful thinking. But rather than conclude that the whole enterprise was crackpot, she decided that the dead people she had targeted for communication didn't have the right attitude or know-how to make it a complete success.

“Conditions on both sides have to be just right,” she once explained to me. “It's sort of like waterskiing.”

It was a warm afternoon in June, and we were strolling down the boardwalk in Asbury Park. Dark clouds hung heavy over the horizon; they were rolling in toward the shore, bringing with them a curtain of rain. No one seemed to care very much. Not yet.

“Now, if you've ever been waterskiing, you know…”

She paused here, turned toward me, and focused her dark-gray eyes on me with birdlike intensity. “
Have
you ever been waterskiing?” she asked.

“No,” I told her. “Have you?”

“Oh yeah. A zillion times,” she replied. Then, looking straight ahead and ignoring the first few raindrops that were beginning to dot the rotting boardwalk at our feet, she continued. “Waterskiing takes real effort. Both mental and physical. But once you get the hang of it, you wonder why more people don't put sticks on their feet and let themselves be pulled across the surface of the water at sixty miles an hour. It's a thrill and a half.”

She looked out at the ocean and squinted into the distance as though she might actually see a waterskiing version of her former self go whizzing by. Nana Hertle was a good-looking woman in her day. As an older woman she tended to dress in comfortable clothes, slacks and tops with a bright sweater that was, like her, faded some from use. Her skin was clear and powdery smooth. She had a thin knowing smile, and her nose was as sharp as her wits. Sometimes when I tried to look at her objectively, to see her as someone I didn't know and love, I saw an old woman who didn't take crap from anyone.

“It's not for everyone,” she added wistfully, “but then again, neither is life. You up for it?”

“Waterskiing?” I asked.

“No,” she scoffed. “Being my contact once I cross over. Would you be up for it?”

Earlier that same month, Mom had sat Deirdre and me down in her bedroom and explained to us that Nana had been diagnosed with cancer. It was in her colon and had already spread to her liver, an indication that there was only a slim chance of recovery. Mom told us that after a lot of fact-finding and soul-searching and several second opinions, Nana had decided to skip medical treatment of any kind. She said it wasn't her thing and claimed that the radiation followed by aggressive chemotherapy did something like poke holes in your aura. Since she didn't want her spiritual body to end up looking like an overbleached undergarment, Swiss cheesed beyond recognition, she was opting out of the process altogether. She would trust the deeper knowledge of her own physical body, treat herself with herbs and affirmations, and book herself into a hospice when the time came. She was ready, we were told.

Deirdre and I cried and cried until we had each soaked a wide circle of tears into Mom's bedspread. When I had finally cried myself dry, I got up from the bed and life continued pretty much as before. But then one day out of the blue, I dialed Nana's number. She answered, cheerful and chipper as ever, and I heard myself insist that she come over right away and take me for ice cream.

“Now?” she had asked me.

“Yes,” I replied a little too sarcastically. “I'm ready.”

That was the day she and I walked the boardwalk together, and, typical of me, I forgot everything I wanted to say to her. I just kept trying to memorize her smell, the sound of her voice. I had even forgotten about the ice cream; I was too busy defending myself against the thought of her no longer being with us. She looked fine to me. A little pale, a little thin, but fine. I didn't want her to die. Ever. But if she
did
die (a situation that she said she figured would happen before the end of the year), I would most likely want to hold on to her even if it meant teaching myself to do something as ridiculous as learning how to water-ski.

“Sure,” I told her. “What do I have to do?”

She gave me a crash course in what it takes to contact the dead. She taught me how to light a candle, manipulate a Ouija board, and write automatically. She handed me a hot-pink business card with Madame Sandy's address and phone number. Madame Sandy had been appointed as the medium best suited to connect me with Nana after her
transition
.

“She's totally one of us,” Nana had explained. “Only don't let her charge you for the sessions. I paid in advance, and she knows it. If she gives you any guff, tell her I'll come back and scare the bejesus out of her and I'll make sure she gets no psychic traffic for as long as she lives.”

After Nana made her transition, I gave everything a try. I even became a frequent visitor to Madame Sandy's storefront parlor in Bradley Beach, where I sat for hours in a dimly lit room supposedly speaking to dead people through a spirit guide named Morris. It was very entertaining and Sandy was a hoot. She taught me to play pinochle, served me sardine sandwiches, and let me smoke cigarettes in her house, but I'm sorry to report that I never received even so much as a hint of Nana Hertle from the other side. I can report, however, that after about a year, the experience of missing my grandmother became almost as real to me as her actual presence. In fact, I began to believe that this was her way of coming through to me—through the force of my own desire to lay eyes on her.

It was down in the basement sitting so close to her stuff that I could really feel her presence. Even after Leonard moved down there, I sometimes waited for him to leave the house so I could sit beside her boxes, smell the traces of her perfume, and lean against the weight of her old life. And that's what I did after my meeting with Peggy and Chuck—I went home, dropped my bag in the kitchen, tiptoed down to the basement, and sat beside my grandmother's boxes. But this time instead of just sitting there and communing with her spirit, I began to tear into the boxes in search of I-don't-know-what.

If I were writing a novel that involved the supernatural, this would be the perfect moment for my grandmother's ghost to appear. She would look pretty much the way I remembered her—wearing jeans, sneakers, a crocheted vest, and a shell top. Her hair would be less gray, but as always disastrously permed. She would look happier, less burdened by the concerns of the living, and she would tell me something about how it is over there on the other side. She might quote Jesus or Dr. Phil or Neil Diamond. Then, with a bit of trumped-up fanfare, she would present Leonard. She would push him forward like a prize pupil while saying something about how even death can be conquered if we put our minds and hearts to work. And finally Leonard would offer me a clue that would lead me to his killers.

Imagine me sitting on a blue metal stool down in the basement on a late Sunday afternoon in August speed-reading one of my grandmother's books, a little red paperback titled
The Magic of Believing
by Claude M. Bristol, in an effort to forget the gruesome photos of Leonard's bound and swollen ankles and his twisted blue wrists.

If you were going to judge
The Magic of Believing
by its cover, you would come to the conclusion (as my grandmother must have done) that powerful forces are locked in your mind and those forces can turn desires into reality. And if you happened to open to page 68, you would discover (as I did) that one of Claude M. Bristol's handy suggestions about this business of unlocking your mind can be easily proven even if you are not a big believer in such things.

Here's a simple experiment that will demonstrate to you this strange power of attraction through visualizing or making the mental picture actually work. Find a few small stones or pebbles which you can easily throw and locate a tree or a post of six to ten inches in diameter. Stand away from it twenty-five or thirty feet or any convenient greater distance and start throwing the pebbles in an endeavor to hit it. If you are an average person, most of the stones will go wide of their mark. Now stop and tell yourself that you can hit the objective. Get a mental picture of the tree figuratively stepping forward to meet the missile or the stone actually colliding with the tree in the spot where you want it to strike, and you'll soon find yourself making a perfect score. Don't say it's impossible. Try it and you'll prove that it can be done—if you will only believe it.

Later that night while I was lying in my bed, unable to sleep, I reviewed this particular passage in my mind:
Try it and you'll prove that it can be done.

I got up, threw on a pair of cherry-colored shorts and a black tank top, and tied my white Windbreaker around my waist. I tiptoed in my flip-flops down the carpeted staircase and then quietly slipped out the back door and into the night.