Having been bent over Justine, the three bodachs abruptly stood upright and, as one, turned their wolfish heads toward the door, as if in response to a summoning trumpet that I could not hear.
Evidently Boo could not hear it, either, for his ears did not prick up. His attention remained on the dark spirits.
Like shadows chased by sudden light, the bodachs whirled from the bed, swooped to the door, and vanished into the hallway.
Inclined to follow them, I hesitated when I discovered Justine staring at me. Her blue eyes were limpid pools: so clear, seemingly without mystery, yet bottomless.
Sometimes you can be sure she sees you. Other times, like this, you sense that, to her, you are as transparent as glass, that she can look through everything in this world.
I said to her, “Don’t be afraid,” which was twice presumptuous. First, I didn’t know that she was frightened or that she was even capable of fear. Second, my words implied a guarantee of protection that, in the coming crisis, I might not be able to fulfill.
Too wise and humble to play the hero, Boo had left the room.
As I headed toward the door, Annamarie, in the first bed, murmured, “Odd.”
Her eyes remained closed. Knots of bedsheet were still clutched in her hands. She breathed shallowly, rhythmically.
As I paused at the foot of her bed, the girl spoke again, more clearly than before: “Odd.”
Annamarie had been born with myelocele spina bifida. Her hips were dislocated, her legs deformed. Her head on the pillow seemed almost as large as the shrunken body under the blanket.
She appeared to be asleep, but I whispered, “What is it, sweetie?”
“Odd one,” she said.
Her mental retardation was not severe and did not reveal itself in her voice, which wasn’t thick or slurred, but was high and sweet and charming.
“Odd one.”
A chill prickled through me equal to the sharpest bite of the winter night outside.
Something like intuition drew my attention to Justine in the second bed. Her head had turned to follow me. For the first time, her eyes fixed on mine.
Justine’s mouth moved, but she did not produce even one of the wordless sounds of which, in her deeper retardation, she was capable.
While Justine strove unsuccessfully to speak, Annamarie spoke again: “Odd one.”
The pleated shades hung slack over the windows. The plush-toy kittens on the shelves near Justine’s bed sat immobile, without one wink of eye or twitch of whisker.
On Annamarie’s side of the room, the children’s books on her shelves were neatly ordered. A china rabbit with flexible furry ears, dressed in Edwardian clothes, stood sentinel on her nightstand.
All was still, yet I sensed an energy barely contained. I would not have been surprised if every inanimate object in the room had come to life: levitating, spinning, ricocheting wall to wall.
Stillness reigned, however, and Justine tried to speak again, and Annamarie said, “Loop,” in her sweet piping voice.
Leaving the sleeping girl, I moved to the foot of Justine’s bed.
For fear that my voice would shatter the spell, I did not speak.
Wondering if the brain-damaged girl had made room for a visitor, I wished the bottomless blue eyes would polarize into a particular pair of Egyptian-black eyes with which I was familiar.
Some days I feel as if I have always been twenty-one, but the truth is that I was once young.
In those days, when death was a thing that happened to other people, my girl, Bronwen Llewellyn, who preferred to be called Stormy, would sometimes say, Loop me in, odd one. She meant that she wanted me to share the events of my day with her, or my thoughts, or my fears and worries.
During the sixteen months since Stormy had gone to ashes in this world and to service in another, no one had spoken those words to me.
Justine moved her mouth without producing sound, and in the adjacent bed, Annamarie said in her sleep, “Loop me in.”
Room 32 seemed airless. Following those three words, I stood in a silence as profound as that in a vacuum. I could not breathe.
Only a moment ago, I had wished these blue eyes would polarize into the black of Stormy’s eyes, that the suspicion of a visitation would be confirmed. Now the prospect terrified me.
When we hope, we usually hope for the wrong thing.
We yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it represents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was the progress in it?
Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been. But as we are yearning, the present is becoming the past, so the past is nothing but our yearning for second chances.
“Loop me in,” Annamarie repeated.
As long as I remain subject to the river of time, which will be as long as I may live, there is no way back to Stormy, to anything. The only way back is forward, downstream. The way up is the way down, and the way back is the way forward.
“Loop me in, odd one.”
My hope here, in Room 32, should not be to speak with Stormy now, but only at the end of my journey, when time had no more power over me, when an eternal present robbed the past of all appeal.
Before I might see in those blue vacancies the Egyptian black for which I hoped, I looked away, stared at my hands, which clutched the footboard of the bed.
Stormy’s spirit does not linger in this world, as some do. She moved on, as she should have done.
The intense undying love of the living can be a magnet to the dead. Enticing her back would be an unspeakable disservice to her. And although renewed contact might at first relieve my loneliness, ultimately there is only misery in hoping for the wrong thing.
I stared at my hands.
Annamarie fell silent in her sleep.
The plush-toy kittens and the china rabbit remained inanimate, thus avoiding either a demonic or a Disney moment.
In a while, my heart beat at a normal rate once more.
Justine’s eyes were closed. Her lashes glistened, and her cheeks were damp. From the line of her jaw were suspended two tears, which quivered and then fell onto the sheet.
In search of Boo and bodachs, I left the room.
Into the old abbey, which was now St. Bartholomew’s School, had been transplanted modern mechanical systems that could be monitored from a computer station in the basement.
The spartan computer room had a desk, two chairs, and an unused file cabinet. Actually, the bottom drawer of the cabinet was packed with over a thousand empty Kit Kat wrappers.
Brother Timothy, who was responsible for the mechanical systems of both the abbey and the school, had a Kit Kat jones. Evidently, he felt that his candy craving was uncomfortably close to the sin of gluttony, because he seemed to be hiding the evidence.
Only Brother Timothy and visiting service personnel had reason to be in this room frequently. He felt his secret was safe here.
All the monks knew about it. Many of them, with a wink and a grin, had urged me to look in the bottom drawer of the file cabinet.
No one could have known whether Brother Timothy had confessed gluttony to the prior,