Under the Light by Laura Whitcomb Page A

A montage of famous places was accompanied by romantic strains of cellos and oboes. The Great Sphynix in Egypt, a white beach and blue lagoon in Greece, the Lincoln Memorial, the Taj Mahal, the Golden Gate Bridge, Big Ben, the Great Wall of China, the Eiffel Tower.
    Jenny stood up. “I’m going to bed.” Perhaps on other nights she might have asked permission to go to her room, but this evening she turned without saying good night to her mother and walked out of the room and down the hall. Cathy seemed not to notice.
    I followed Jenny into her room, where she closed the door. She walked to her bed, but instead of sitting or lying down, she crouched beside it on the floor and began to cry as if her heart had been shattered. She reached up and took one of the pillows off her bed, holding it to her face.
    I sat on the rug beside her and tried to stroke her hair or rub her back, but I was having trouble keeping my spectral body together. I felt nervous and vaporous. With each of Jenny’s sobs I shifted in the air, a little closer, now away, like a cloud of gnats.
    “Hush,” I whispered. “Poor thing.”
    She cried into the pillow until I thought she might become ill.
    “Get into bed now,” I told her.
    After a few moments she took a hitching breath and crawled up onto her mattress, still clutching the pillow.
    “Rest your head and I’ll sing you a song,” I whispered. I was relieved that she seemed to be sensing my message—by and by she stretched out and put the pillow under her head, wiped her eyes on her sleeves, and gave a heavy sigh.
    I sang a folk song I’d sung to my own little girl a hundred times—the one about the rolling river. Soon Jenny’s eyes were closed and her breaths came smooth and far between. Tears had dried on her face in delicate salt lines. Her hair fanned out on one side of the pillow.
    “Why are you sad?” I asked her.
    I didn’t expect her to answer, but from her throat came the faintest sound of question, as if she hadn’t understood me properly. It gave me a thrill to think she might have actually heard my question in her sleep.
    “Why were you crying?” I asked.
    Then the faintest sound of regret from deep in her dream. And four words, “I used to fly.”
    I wanted so for her to say it again so I could be sure I’d heard correctly—she used to fly, and that was sad.
    I sat on the edge of her bed all night long, but she didn’t speak again. After watching her in silence for a time, I decided to slip back to heaven and tell James that I had finally spoken with Jenny. To tell him that from now on I was sure it would be easy to talk to her. I was certain I could visit James and be back before Jenny woke up in the morning.
    I thought about the last place I’d seen James, in a shaded wood beside a clover-covered tree trunk. I pictured the quality of light, the scent of damp earth, the piano music, a lilting melody, a folk song I couldn’t place, sweet even in its minor keys.
    And in the same way it happened when I neared Jenny, as I closed in on heaven everything in front of me thinned into converging lines. Jenny’s bedroom and the garden outside her window and the hills beyond her neighborhood flattened like a sketch of themselves drawn on a sheet of paper and contracted into black and white, ink on a blank page, but then it stopped. I couldn’t stretch it any further, and try as I might I couldn’t slide into it between the shadow and the light.
    I was frightened for a moment, but fear had not helped me find heaven the first time. Then I was angry—how could God deny me entry when I’d had such a charitable motive for leaving? The truth was, I realized, that I had made a promise to come back to Jenny and be her guardian until the troubles I brought her had been calmed. If I broke my word, it seemed I would not be traveling back to James.
    I was trapped in the land of the Quick until I fulfilled my promise to Jenny.
     
    Because I had borrowed Jenny’s body for only six