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Authors: Noëlle Sickels

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BOOK: The Medium
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“First, how to sit,” Ursula was saying. She crossed her wrists and her ankles.
“I know that already,” Helen said, recklessly unwilling to edit resentment from her voice.
She longed to be outdoors in the final hours of the afternoon. Instead, she was sitting at a card table in her grandmother's overfurnished bedroom. She wished she'd gone with her mother to do the marketing. That would have been dull, too, but at least she would've been out. In only a week's time, school would begin again, cooping her up on a regular basis.
To Helen's surprise, her grandmother did not reproach her, but only nodded.
“But do you know why we sit so?”
Helen allowed herself a loud exhale.
“To be comfortable?”
Ursula shook her head. “It is not comfortable, sometimes, to meet spirits.
Nein,
we cross our hands and feet to shut off from the other people and to save our energy.”
“Okay. Then what?”
Ursula stood up, folding her arms over her chest. She was a short woman, but her erect, stout figure was imposing in the small room where the only sound was the pointed ticking of an antique Bavarian clock.
“Maybe we are not ready for ‘then what.' Maybe you are not so special as I think, but just a girl with a too big imagination.
Or maybe you want to stay only skipping rope and singing songs, and make believe you are not different.”
Helen had regretted her recalcitrance the moment her grandmother pushed back her chair to stand, but now she regretted it more deeply because Ursula's words had delivered a sting. She was, in fact, different and had always been so.
“I'm sorry, Nanny. It's just that I wanted to go outside a while. All morning I was helping Mama make jelly.”
Ursula sat down.
“I would not keep you in, but our lessons must stay a little secret for now. So, when your mother went to the shops, we could not miss the chance.”
“Why do we have to be secret?”
“It is like how Emilie starts her seedlings in the kitchen window in spring. She does not put them out in the dirt until they are strong enough for some cold night or some day of sleet.”
“I don't understand.”
“There are people who will be afraid, Helen, when they know what you can see and hear. Or they will think you make it up, or that you are a little crazy. They will say things to make you feel bad, maybe bad enough to stop. That is why, first, you must become a strong seedling.”
Helen sensed truth in this. She'd noticed the whispers at their backs when she and Ursula passed certain neighbors on the sidewalk. When her parents had told her it was not proper to discuss family matters with outsiders, she knew they meant the seances. Hadn't even Billy Mackey succumbed to teasing her about it? What might someone who was not her friend be capable of?
“Could I make it stop, Nanny?”
Ursula stared out the window with a faraway look in her eyes. She turned her diamond wedding ring with her thumb, a
habit when she was mulling something over.
“If you are in a room,” Ursula began, still staring out the window, “and there is an opening to another room, you can turn your back and pretend you are alone. But you can not make the other room disappear.”
The old woman faced Helen.
“I have only a keyhole to look, but for you, Helen, there is maybe a wide doorway. Better to learn how to live in two rooms than how to move always carefully to keep away from the other room.”
In reply, Helen crossed her wrists and ankles.
“So,” her grandmother approved. “That is for a mental circle. The medium alone will hear and see the spirits. In his mind. For a physical circle, the medium leaves uncrossed the hands and feet.”
“A physical circle?”
“When there are things everyone can see and hear. When the table moves or there are raps, or when a spirit takes form and shows itself. Uncrossed lets you draw up energy.”
Ursula reached across the square table and tapped Helen's wrists, indicating she could relax them.
“But not so much anymore do spirits materialize. Not like you read about one hundred or even fifty years ago.”
“Did you ever see one, Nanny?”
“
Nein.
But Mrs. Durkin, she is hoping all the time. So she keeps her plants near our circle. Such a romantic. Waltzes she likes, too.”
Helen knew that her grandmother insisted on cut flowers on the seance table. She said flowers, especially dark flowers, increased the vibrations of spirit voices and made them easier for her to hear. But Helen had never considered that the rows of potted geraniums and violets on Mrs. Durkin's windowsills played any part.
“How do the plants help?”
“To take physical form, a spirit must pull energy from people in the circle and from magnetic currents in the earth and pass it through the medium's body. A growing plant has energy strength the same as several people.”
“Jeepers, I don't know if I'd want a spirit to … to …”
“Materialize.”
“Isn't it scary?”
Ursula shrugged.
“You see them in your mind, you see them in the house—not so different, I think. And everyone else gets to see them, too. It could be good for sitters coming back and telling friends.”
Helen wasn't so sure about that. Mightn't Mr. Howard have been badly shaken if he'd actually seen his little dead brother crying in the corner? What about when the spirit left? Wouldn't its loved ones get upset then?
“Don't worry, Helen. This won't happen. There are special ways the room must be, and still, the spirits may not show themselves, even with a medium practicing for years. But we don't say this to Mrs. Durkin, because hope is not a thing to push down.”
There it was again, Helen thought, another slippery version of honesty. She looked hard at her grandmother's face, as if it might provide some clue to explain this unsuspected side of her. There was nothing, of course, but the same face she had known all her life, although Helen did see in sharper relief than ever before the signs of old age on her grandmother's features—the deep wrinkles around her eyes and the lavender shadows below them, the soft folds of skin at her neck, the brown spots on her cheeks.
“You can go outside now. We are done for today,” Ursula was saying. “Next time we will try the automatic writing.”
Helen hesitated, consumed by a tender affection for her
grandmother. She felt the urge to embrace her, but no one ever embraced Ursula except at her instigation.
“Go, go, child, or you will be a fidget at supper, and I am too tired to hear your father complain.”
Reluctantly, Helen left the room. At the doorway, she glanced back and saw Ursula still seated in her chair, again playing with her ring and staring out the window into the golden glow of the summer dusk.
SEPTEMBER 1937
The automatic writing was not going well.
Helen followed her grandmother's instructions scrupulously. She would get comfortable in her chair and listen to her breathing until she felt sleepy. Then she'd pick up a pencil, hold it loosely in her fingers over a sheet of paper, and wait. Once, her hand had trembled and she'd felt it being pulled to the paper, but she produced only a few unrelated letters, which her grandmother said were the spirits getting used to the feel of Helen's muscles. The start of school had limited Helen's free time, but Ursula had admonished her to keep practicing.
“Just ten minutes,” she'd said. “Every day.”
“Every day?”
“So the spirits know you are serious, and maybe a guide will come.”
“Do you have a spirit guide, Nanny?”
Ursula considered a moment, and then she nodded.
“What does it do?”
“Sometimes he calls other spirits to come, ones that the sitters want. Sometimes he speaks for them. But …”
Ursula clasped her hands in her lap and looked down at them.
“My guide comes not so much.”
“Why not?”
Ursula looked at Helen.
“It is no matter,” she said. “Every sitter brings spirit companions. In the seance, other spirits visit. Always I find one
who will talk. Or I can guess good at what they would say.”
“Well, when he did used to come,” Helen persisted, “what did he look like?” She didn't fancy the idea of encountering a spirit alone in her room.
“His name is Gerard. He is dressed in hunting clothes, like my
grosspapa,”
Ursula replied. “But I cannot see the face. Only light there.”
“What should I do if someone comes to me?” Helen asked nervously.
“Like with anybody. Tell your name. Ask his name. Ask how to make the contact again. If it is a person, not an animal, maybe ask who he was in this life. If you have the curiosity.”
Helen didn't think curiosity would be her foremost reaction. Her grandmother clucked her tongue.
“A spirit guide is a helper, Helen. He is like a part of you, the part that can see the unseen and know the unknown. You have a pure heart. Your guide will be a good spirit. And remember, if ever any spirit frightens you, order it to leave and it will go. It is your own fear that gives such a spirit power.”
Helen nodded, only somewhat reassured.
“It can happen slower,” Ursula continued, “if you ask that the guide comes first to your dreams. One night, maybe after many times of asking, you will feel him behind you. Turn around just when you are ready. Look at the feet, then slowly up. Speak, too, only when you are ready. You can use many nights. The spirits are patient.”
Helen had been attempting automatic writing daily for ten days now, and last thing before sleep every night she'd asked for a guide to come into her dreams. So far, neither exercise had borne fruit. Still scribbles. Still dreams populated only by schoolmates and neighbors, or blank nights of no dreams at all. Helen wondered how long her grandmother would expect her to keep trying without any sign of success.
Today's practice was extra onerous because she didn't feel well. Since mid-morning her stomach had been aching in a strange tugging way, as if some small animal were methodically pawing her insides. She'd gone to the school nurse, but since she showed no fever, the nurse had only let her recline on the couch in her office for twenty minutes and then had sent her back to her classroom without even a note to excuse her from making up the math quiz she'd missed.
Helen hadn't bothered to tell her mother or grandmother when she got home. They, too, would simply have taken her temperature, then passed over her complaint as indigestion or growing pains, maybe offering her a cup of heavily sweetened chamomile tea. Helen went to her bedroom, closing the door to shut out the sounds of
Mary Noble, Backstage Wife
from the radio in the living room.
Resignedly clearing a space on her desk, she set out pencil and paper and sat down. As she slid into the familiar float on her breaths, the dull pain in her abdomen gradually muted until it was just one other vaguely registered physical fact, like the sweep of hair into her barrette, or the ribs of the braided rug under her stocking feet. As she continued to ride her breaths, she felt suffused with warmth. The sensation was such a pleasant relief she put off picking up the pencil.
Then, between one breath and the next, she knew someone else was in the room. Her heart heaved with apprehension. There was the same prickly feeling in her armpits as when she had to walk at night past the overgrown yard of the spooky old house two blocks over, and the same lurch of dread. She sat rigidly still, and resolutely shut her eyes.
For almost intolerable long minutes, nothing changed. Helen realized that playing possum was not going to work, and doing nothing was itself becoming distressing. Remembering her grandmother's advice, she decided to find out who was there.
She wasn't brave enough to move or open her eyes, but she shifted her mind toward the presence as pointedly as if she had actually turned around and looked.
She saw a tall woman wrapped in the graceful folds of an emerald green hooded cloak. Her feet were clad in thin sandals. One pale hand held a single iris so rich a purple it was almost black. Helen made out a soft, close-lipped smile and widely spaced dark eyes within the shadows of the hood. A deep calm close to joy fell upon Helen.
“Who are you?” Helen said.
The figure did not stir or speak.
“Are you my guide?”
The woman bent her head over the flower as if she were smelling it. Could she be nodding yes?
“I'm Helen Schneider,” Helen said.
“I know,” the woman said. Except that she didn't really say it. Her voice came into Helen's head as smoothly as one of her own thoughts.
“Why are you here? Is it for the writing? Will I see you again?”
A slight inclination of the head. The hood slid forward, further obscuring the face, which Helen now imagined must be beautiful.
“When? How?” Helen asked urgently.
A flood of words cascaded into her mind, tumbling over one another, yet she was able to comprehend perfectly. The woman told her she'd come whenever Helen wanted to contact someone in the spirit world, that Helen only need open herself and wait. Helen understood that she could dispense with the automatic writing practice, that it was not to be her way until later in her life.
Surprisingly, after the first rush, no further questions bubbled up in Helen. She was content simply to behold her visitor, who shimmered like a reflection on quiet water. Again, words came
to Helen from the woman, this time in a dreamy flow even more like the winding circuits of her own mind. The woman let her know there would be times when she'd come to Helen unbidden and that at those rare times Helen might experience her only as a strong desire or a strong distaste, or a nudge to unaccustomed action. Helen wondered how she'd be able to tell when such feelings were her own and when they'd been sent from the woman, but at the moment it seemed an unimportant quandary.
Helen felt a cool breeze. The woman withdrew the flower into her cloak and was gone. So was the warm, floating feeling. The pain in her abdomen reasserted itself.
She stood up and stretched and looked around her room, half expecting it to be different, but, of course, it wasn't. Or was it? The colors in the worn patchwork quilt didn't seem as faded, the starched linen dresser scarf looked crisper, the windowpanes more clear, the jumble of books, games, and old toys on the open shelves tidier. Something had definitely happened here.
Helen knew she ought to feel special, and in a way she did. But special had two sides. When the woman was smiling and speaking, Helen had felt large and strong. Now what she mostly felt was empty, and that let a little of the fear creep back. She worried that something about her might show that she was a girl whom spirits visited, and that kids at school would notice. Surely it wouldn't be as obvious a badge of difference as that fifth-grader Charlene Thatcher's big bosom or Harvey Winkel's stutter. But what if it were?
The woman had promised to return. Helen wondered if it would feel as good every time and whether she could stop her from coming again if it didn't. She wished she knew her name. She thought that would make it feel safer somehow, friendlier, more ordinary.
She decided to call her Iris. She also decided that she
wouldn't tell her grandmother just yet. Iris hadn't wanted to answer too many questions right away, and neither did Helen.
 
Helen was silent at dinner, which was not unusual enough to provoke comment. She couldn't stop thinking about her encounter with Iris, but not in a dissecting way. The enormous fact of it was simply claiming all the space in her mind. Eventually, however, the adult conversation snagged her attention. Her grandmother was recounting a letter she'd gotten from a nephew in Berlin.
“Otto says things are better. Everyone has jobs.”
“The radio says there are still shortages of meat and butter and fruit,” Walter said. “And long lines at food shops.”
“Better are lines for food than no food at all,” Ursula retorted.
“But at a price,” Walter said. “The Reichstag a powerless sham. Nazis in charge of everything. They arrest anyone who speaks against them, even priests. Why, they don't hesitate to kill members of their own party who aren't loyal enough.”
“What do we know?” Ursula argued. “Only that Germany was on its knees and now it is not. That people were in despair and now they are not.”
“We can be glad for that, I suppose,” Emilie put in.
Walter nodded grudging agreement.
“Remember in 'thirty-three when Herr Hitler first took charge?” Ursula said. “Otto wrote then that people lit bonfires on every hilltop to show the nation had awakened.”
“But awakened to what?” Walter said. “I'd like to see Germany on its feet again, and I know the state has to be strong for that to happen, there must be order, the people must make sacrifices, but I still think placing all law in the hands of one man is dangerous.”
“Otto does not complain,” Ursula sniffed.
“Maybe Otto doesn't dare.”
Ursula had grown up in Germany, coming to America when she was twenty, while Walter and Emilie had both been born right here in New Jersey, but of late, news from Germany, whether from the radio or family letters, seemed to interest them all equally. Helen had never met this cousin Otto, nor had her parents. Yet her father acted as if Otto's plight were a part of their lives they must not ignore, like cobwebs in the corners of an otherwise well swept room.
Helen only half-listened to the news reports on CBS, but she was aware of Adolf Hitler and his rise to prominence. Her father's concern that Hitler now constituted the whole of the German government intrigued her. In their home, her father was the holder of all the rules. The fact that her mother and grandmother might find ways around him from time to time didn't dispute that. And wasn't a country a more difficult thing to manage than a family? How much more necessary for someone to be clearly in charge. Like FDR was here. In his second inauguration at the beginning of the year, he'd said he saw one-third of the nation still ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished. How would he fix that if not with a strong hand on the reins of government, even now when things were so much better than they had been when he was first elected? But maybe strength wasn't the only way to judge a leader. Maybe, as Walter implied, Hitler wasn't a safe man to give the reins.
 
Helen went to bed early, curling up in a ball around the lingering ache in her belly. She was disappointed to awaken some time later and find she hadn't yet made it to morning.
She fumbled out of a tangle of blankets and went to the bathroom. When she stood up from the toilet and turned to flush, she saw by the glow of the night light something dark in the bowl. She flicked on the overhead light. A bloody cloud was seeping through the water. Then she felt small splashes of warm
liquid on the insides of her thighs. She thrust her hand into her pajama pants and with a gulp of terror brought it back, the fingertips wet with bright red blood.
“Oh, oh,” she said aloud.
She wanted her mother, but she shrank from the thought of what would come next. The rousing of the rest of the household in alarm, the summoning of Dr. Nichols. It would be mortifying to have the doctor and her father learn the nature of her illness, but with such dire symptoms how could they be left out?
She pictured them all standing funereally around her bed. They would speak softly and smooth her covers. Her mother would wear a brave smile. Dr. Nichols would tell them to get some rest. He wouldn't even give her a shot or any foul-tasting syrup because what remedy could there be for someone whose insides were leaking out?
BOOK: The Medium
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