The Bible Repairman and Other Stories (13 page)

Dressed in one of her old church-attendance skirts, with fresh lipstick, and carrying a big embroidered purse, Caroleen pulled the door closed behind her and began shuffling down the walk. The sky was a very deep blue above the tree branches, and the few clouds were extraordinarily far away overhead, and it occurred to her that she couldn’t recall stepping out of the house since BeeVee’s funeral. She never drove anymore – Amber was the only one who drove the old Pontiac these days – and it was Amber who went for groceries, reimbursed with checks that Caroleen wrote out to her, and the box of checks came in the mail, which Amber brought in from the mailbox by the sidewalk. If Caroleen alienated the girl, could she do these things herself? She would probably starve.

Caroleen’s hand had begun wriggling as she reached the sidewalk and turned right, toward Amber’s parents’ house, but she resisted the impulse to pull a pen out of her purse. She’s not talking to
me,
she thought, blinking back tears in the sunlight that glittered on the windshields and bumpers of passing cars; she’s talking to stupid
Amber.
I won’t
eavesdrop.

Amber’s parents had a Spanish-style house at the top of a neatly mowed sloping lawn, and a green canvas awning overhung the big arched window out front. Even shading her eyes with her manageable left hand Caroleen couldn’t see anyone in the dimness inside, so she puffed up the widely spaced steps, and while she was catching her breath on the cement apron at the top, the front door swung inward, releasing a puff of cool floor-polish scent.

Amber’s young dark-haired mother – Crystal? Christine? – was staring at her curiously. “It’s … Caroleen,” she said, “right?”

“Yes.” Caroleen smiled, feeling old and foolish. “I need to talk to Amber.” The mother was looking dubious. “I want to pay her more, and, and see if she’d be interested in balancing our, my, checkbook.”

The woman nodded, as if conceding a point. “Well I think that might be good for her.” She hesitated, then stepped aside. “Come in and ask her. She’s in her room.”

Caroleen got a quick impression of a dim living room with clear plastic covers over the furniture, and a bright kitchen with copper pans hung everywhere, and then Amber’s mother had knocked on a bedroom door and said, “Amber honey? You’ve got a visitor,” and pushed the door open.

“I’ll let you two talk,” the woman said, and stepped away toward the living room.

Caroleen stepped into the room. Amber was sitting cross-legged on the pink bedspread, looking up from a cardboard sheet with a rock and a pencil and BeeVee’s hairbrush on it. Lacy curtains glowed in the street-side window, and a stack of what appeared to be textbooks stood on an otherwise bare white desk in the opposite corner. The couple of pictures on the walls were pastel blobs. The room smelled like cake.

Caroleen considered what to say. “Can I help?” she asked finally.

Amber, who had been looking wary, brightened and sat up straight. “Shut the door.”

When Caroleen had shut it, Amber went on, “You know she’s coming back?” She waved at the cardboard in front of her. “She’s been talking to me all day.”

“I know, child.”

Caroleen stepped forward and leaned down to peer at it, and saw that the girl had written the letters of the alphabet in an arc across the cardboard.

“It’s one of those things people use to talk to ghosts,” Amber explained with evident pride. “I’m using the crystal to point to the letters. Some people are scared of these things, but that’s one of the good kind of crystals.”

“A Ouija board.”

“That’s it! She made me dream of one over and over again just before the sun came up, because this is her birthday. Well, yours too I guess. At first I thought it was a hopscotch pattern, but she made me look closer till I got it.” She pursed her lips. “I wrote it by reciting the rhyme, and I accidentally did
H
and
I
twice, and left out
J
and K.” She pulled a sheet of lined paper out from under the board. “But it was only a problem once, I think.” “Can I see? I, uh, want this to work out.”

“Yeah, she won’t be gone. She’ll be in me, did she tell you?” She held out the paper. “I drew in lines to break the words up.”

“Yes. She told me.” Caroleen slowly reached out to take the paper from her, and then held it up close enough to read the pencilled lines:

I/NEED/YOUR/HELP/PLEASE
Who R U?
I/AM/BEEVEE
How can I help U?
I/NEED/TO/USE/YOUR//BODY/INVITE/ME/IN/TO/YOUR/
BODY IM/SORRY/FOR/EVERY/THING/PLEASE
R U an angel now? Can U grant wishes?
YES

Can U make me beautiful?

YES/FOR/EVER OK. What do I do?

EXHAUSTED/MORE/LATER

BV? It’s after lunch. Are U rested up yet?

YES

Make me beautiful.

GET/MY/HAIRBRUSH/FROM/MY/SISTER

Is that word “hairbrush?”

YES/THEN/YOU/CAN/INVITE/ME/IN/TO/YOU

How will that do it?

WE/WILL/BE/YOU/TOGETHER

+ what will we do?

GET/SLIM/TRAVEL/THE/WORLD
Will we be rich?

YES/I/HAVE/BANC/ACCOUNTS GET/MY/HAIRBRUSH/FROM/HER/NOW

I got it.

NIGHT/TIME/STAND/OVER/GRAVE/BRUSH/YR/HAIR/INVITE/ME/IN

“That should be B-A-N-K, in that one line,” explained Amber helpfully.

“And I’ll want to borrow your car tonight.”

Not trusting herself to speak, Caroleen nodded and handed the paper back to her, wondering if her own face was red or pale. She felt invisible and repudiated. BeeVee could have approached her own twin for this, but her twin was too old; and if she did manage to occupy the body of this girl – a more intimate sort of twinhood! – she would certainly not go on living with Caroleen. And she had eaten all the Vicodins and Darvocets.

Caroleen picked up the rock. It was some sort of quartz crystal.

“When,” she began in a croak; she cleared her throat and went on more steadily, “when did you get that second-to-last message? About the bank accounts and the hairbrush?” “That one? Uh, just a minute before I knocked on your door.”

Caroleen nodded, wondering bleakly if BeeVee had even known that she was leaving
her
with carbon copies – multiple, echoing carbon copies – of the messages.

She put the rock back down on the cardboard and picked up the hairbrush. Amber opened her mouth as if to object, then subsided.

There were indeed a number of white hairs tangled in the bristles.

Caroleen tucked the brush into her purse.

“I need that,” said Amber quickly, leaning forward across the board. “She says I need it.”

“Oh of course, I’m sorry.” Caroleen forced what must have been a ghastly smile, and then pulled her own hairbrush instead out of the purse and handed it to the girl. It was identical to BeeVee’s, right down to the white hairs.

Amber took it and glanced at it and then laid it on the pillow, out of Caroleen’s reach.

“I don’t want,” said Caroleen, “to interrupt … you two.” She sighed, emptying her lungs, and dug the car keys out of her purse. “Here,” she said, tossing them onto the bed. “I’ll be next door if you … need any help.”

“Fine, okay.” Amber seemed relieved at the prospect of her leaving.

Caroleen was awakened next morning by the pain of her sore right hand flexing, but she rolled over and slept for ten more minutes before the telephone by her head conclusively jarred her out of the monotonous dream that had occupied the last hour or so.

She sat up, wrinkling her nose at the scorched smell from the fireplace and wishing she had a cup of coffee, and still half-seeing the Ouija board she’d been dreaming about.

She picked up the phone, wincing. “Hello?”

“Caroleen,” said Amber’s voice, “nothing happened at the cemetery last night, and BeeVee isn’t answering my questions. She spelled stuff out, but it’s not for what I’m writing to her. All she’s written so far this morning is – just a sec – she wrote, uh, ‘You win – you’ll do – We’ve always been a team, right –’ Is she talking to you?”

Caroleen glanced toward the fireplace, where last night she had burned – or charred, at least – BeeVee’s toothbrush, razor, dentures, curlers, and several other things, including the hairbrush. And today she would call the headstone company and cancel the order. BeeVee ought not to have an easily locatable grave.

“Me?” Caroleen made a painful fist of her right hand. “Why would she talk to me?”

“You’re her twin sister, she might be –”

“BeeVee is dead, Amber, she died nine weeks ago.”

“But she’s coming back, she’s going to make me beautiful! She said –”

“She can’t do anything, child. We’re better off without her.”

Amber was talking then, protesting, but Caroleen’s thoughts were of the brothers she couldn’t even picture anymore, the nieces she’d never met and who probably had children of their own somewhere, and her mother who was almost certainly dead by now. And there was everybody else, too, and not a lot of time.

Caroleen was resolved to learn to write with her left hand, and, even though it would hurt, she hoped her right hand would go on and on writing uselessly in air.

At last she stood up, still holding the phone, and she interrupted Amber: “Could you bring back my car keys? I’ve got some errands.”

Like a lot of people of my generation, my wife and I spent a year — 2007, in our case — visiting elderly parents in “assisted living homes,” the kind of places where the dining room has tables but no chairs because all the diners will arrive in wheelchairs, and there are banners advancing sentiments like, “Sunsets are as beautiful as sunrises,” which can come to seem bitterly ironic.

In one of these places I was standing against the wall of a corridor so that two extremely elderly ladies could be wheeled past one another – and as they crossed, one of them croaked at the other, “Bitch!”

It occurred to me that a story about conflicts between two very old people would be fun – and of course I had to put a ghost in it.

And I teach one class a week at the Orange County High School of the Arts – the other end of the age spectrum! – and the school building used to be a nineteenth-century church. My classroom is the basement catacombs, and one afternoon when I had given the students an assignment and they had all dispersed throughout the church to write, I found two of the girls huddled over a box that they had converted into a makeshift Ouija board, using a crystal for a planchette. When I said, “What the hell!” one of them quickly explained, “It’s okay, Mr. Powers, it’s one of the good kind of crystals!”

Oh. Well then.

So I had to give Amber their Ouija board.

–T. P.

She had ordered steak tartare and Hennessy XO brandy, which would, he reflected, look extravagant when he submitted his expenses to the court. And God knew what parking would cost here.

He took another frugal sip of his beer and said, trying not to sound sour, “I could have mailed you a check.”