Goldengrove by Francine Prose Page B

used to play with a ouija board we’d found in the attic. The first few times were thrilling. The gliding, the spelling out, my gathering amazement as the letters turned into words. I’d wanted to believe that Margaret and I were taking dictation from the beyond.
    The last time we did it, we’d asked the spirit what its name was.
    “M-o-t-h-r-a,” it spelled out.
    I said, “Isn’t that the monster in that horror film you like?”
    “Hush, you’ll scare it away,” Margaret said.
    The spirit spelled out “N-i-c-o.” I caught my breath.
    It spelled, “G-e-t y-o-u-r s-i-s-t-e-r s-o-m-e c-a-k-e.”
    I said, “You’re doing it, right?”
    “Think what you like,” Margaret said.
    It was easy for us to play like that, then. Whom did we think we were contacting? We’d never met anyone who had died.
    But now, though I longed for a message, I would never have touched the board. And whom would I have played with? Instead, as I lay in bed, feeling the sun filter through the curtains, I prayed to become a human ouija-board puck. Let my sister move me.
    After a while, I felt . . . something. The urge to get out of bed, a faint pressure on one elbow. I let it push me, I didn’t resist as it steered me to my closet. My hand rose, and I plucked Margaret’s Hawaiian shirt from the swaying clothing. I reentered my body to find it wearing my sister’s shirt and feeling ever so slightly braver.
    “Thank you,” I said to the empty room. Or to Margaret, if she was there. In the shirt, I could face the bookstore and not succumb to the temptation of obsessively rereading the poem about death and my sister.
    I slipped out of the house. I didn’t want my mother to see me in Margaret’s shirt.
    My father was waiting in our usual booth at the Nibble Corner. When he spotted me, he looked vaguely irritated or anxious, as if I were bringing him bad news about a broken household appliance. Maybe Margaret’s shirt stirred some recollection that failed to compute. Or maybe that was the default expression his face assumed that summer, before he knew someone was watching. He didn’t seem to notice what I was wearing, or to connect the shirt with my sister. Evidently, Margaret’s fashion sense hadn’t come from Dad.
    We ate our sandwiches. I went to the bookstore. I felt fine, or almost fine. The silkiness of the shirt on my skin could have been Margaret touching my arm. The palm trees swayed, hula girls danced, Margaret’s ghost exerted its pressure, and all of it lulled me and kept me from seeing the hurricane heading my way. Still, I must have sensed some disturbance in the air. Because when my father left for the library, I didn’t want him to go.
    I said, “Have fun, Dad,” in someone else’s reedy voice. I felt a grinding in my chest. I needed to see a doctor! The first appointment my mom had been able to make was not for another few weeks.
    To calm myself, I opened my favorite book, a volume on Sienese painting so large that I had to spread it across the counter. Each picture reeled me in, first with the bait of its story line, then with the lure of the secret beneath it. Turning the pages transported me from a candy-colored city to a hillside on which two shepherds and their dog huddled by a fire, gazing up at an angel powered by a rocket exploding from its robe. I paused at a levitating monk, rising into the air, then went on to the garden paradise crowded with joyous, reunited souls. All around were flowering plants in glorious full bloom, trees loaded with enough lemons for eternal lemonade. How glad the embracing angels were to have ended up there.
    Painting by painting, I worked my way through the miraculous rescues, the saints snatching infants from the jaws of wild beasts and restoring the pink of life to the ashen-faced dead. One artist seemed to specialize in saints resurrecting drowned children. A baby had fallen into a fountain. A boy had slipped into a river. Both paintings showed the children immersed, their