And so it is that on this night, my wife four months dead, I find myself sitting in the dark watching an infomercial for a telephone psychic.
I’ve never been much of a believer in the mystical arts, although as a child I indulged all the natural curiosities for ghost stories, Ouija boards, and the like. In fact, the powers of the Ouija board have become legendary in my family: once when my sister and I were children, a Ouija board told her that she would marry a man with the initials PJM, and as it turned out, she did. My sister’s first husband, to whom she was married for a scant eight months right after college, was named Peter James Marsh. Now, happily married for almost fifteen years to a man with the initials LRS, the only thing she will say about her first marriage is that she should have known better than to marry a man based on his initials.
But in my adult years I’ve always been something of a skeptic. I don’t believe in ESP or UFOs, past lives or parallel worlds or spirits of the dead that haunt the living. I don’t believe in anything I can’t put my hands on. Still, something about this woman on the screen intrigues me, and I find myself not wanting to change the channel. I suppose everyone is a skeptic until they have a reason to believe.
Lady Arabelle is her name. She could not be more of a cliché—colorful scarves knotted about her head, a jangle of gold necklaces at her throat—but there’s something so sincere about her you forget all that. Something about her manner, the warmth she displays, draws you in right away. I can see why you’d want to believe what she has to say. The people who phone in with their problems, she calls them honey and baby, and she makes it sound like she means it. There’s something distinctly motherly about her. If she called me baby, I think I’d want to cry.
“Check him out, honey,” she’s telling the woman on the phone. “Make sure his divorce is final, because I don’t think he’s being honest with you. He’s hiding something. Did he ask you not to call him at home?”
“Well, he told me he has this roommate he doesn’t like, so he’s not home much. He told me I should call his pager.”
“That’s no roommate, honey. That’s his wife.”
They flash a phone number. “Lady Arabelle knows all your secrets,” the voice-over tells me. “She answers your questions about the future, your questions about the past.” Well, that’s something. Your questions about the past. Idly, I imagine the conversation that would follow if I called the number on the screen. “I see a large dog. The dog has something to tell you.”
Another caller, a man this time. “I’m sorry, hon,” Lady Arabelle tells him. “But that’s not your baby.”
“It’s not?”
“No, honey, it’s not. Tell me this, did she go out of town a few months ago, maybe for her job? Did she go to an Eastern city?”
“Yeah,” he says, his voice gone flat. “She went to Boston in June.”
“Well, that’s when it happened. Ask her about it. Ask her if she ran into an old boyfriend in Boston, and see what she has to say for herself.”
I give some thought to this man whose marriage may now be over as the result of a phone call to a stranger. I wonder if it’s true, this scenario she’s put in his mind. I picture the confrontations that will follow this phone call.
Another voice-over, some fine print about rates per minute. I find myself tempted to write the phone number down. Then Lady Arabelle is back, talking to another woman.
“There’s something you’re not telling me about,” she says. “You’re all excited about something. Something you found in his coat?”
“Yes,” the woman says. “I found a ring. I think he’s going to propose!”
“Well, I’m gonna tell you something, baby. That ring’s for someone else. That ring is not for you.”
It’s the specificity that seals the deal. The Eastern city, the hidden ring. She’s very convincing. But something about the desperation of these callers, the faith they put in this woman who, sincere though she seems, knows nothing about their lives, bothers me. I stand up, ready to turn off the TV—I have the remote in my hand—but what I hear next makes my heart stop.
Because the next voice I hear is Lexy’s.
TWENTY-ONE
It’s her. It’s her. I know it the way I know the pound of my blood in my chest. Lexy’s voice, like a homecoming for me. Lexy’s voice, filling the room once more.
“I’m lost,” she says, and I lose my legs beneath me. “I don’t know what to do,” she says, and I make a sound like an animal struck.
My hands are shaking, and I feel dizzy. My heart is beating so hard I think it will break. I pick up the remote from where I’ve dropped it, and I turn the volume up as high as it will go. Lady Arabelle, her voice like a lullaby, gives her reply.
“Listen to me, honey,” she says, so loud I can feel it in my teeth. “You have more strength than you know.”
I wait for more, I wait for Lexy to come back and say something else, but that’s all there is. They’re back to the voice-over about rates and phone numbers.
Lexy’s voice gone once more. I cover my face with my hands and give myself over to the wave of sound racking my body. A tightness in my chest gives voice to a bottomless noise like a howl. I kneel on the floor in the half-light of the television and wail loud enough to wake the dead.
I feel a wet pressure on the back of my hand, and I look up to see Lorelei staring me in the face. “Lorelei,” I say, my voice wrecked and uneven. “Did you hear it, girl?” She licks my face. I gather her in my arms and lift her, all of her dense, heavy weight, onto my lap. I press my face into the rough warmth of her neck, the thick leather band of her collar. I’m sobbing now, and her fur grows damp beneath my face. “Did you hear it, Lorelei?” I say. “It was her, it was her, it was her.”
Later, later, when I’ve calmed down enough that my body has stopped shaking and I’ve quieted my breath, I get a piece of paper and I write down the number on the screen. I stare at the number. My head is pounding. What does it mean? For a wild minute, I imagine Lexy alive, sitting in a room someplace, with a phone pressed to her ear. But no. Just as quickly, I see it all again, Lexy lying in her coffin, her body strange and still. Who knows how long ago she made this call? It could have been months before her death, it could have been years. For the first time, I think about Lexy’s words. “I’m lost,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.” What kind of trouble was she in? And where was I? It occurs to me that there must have been more to this phone call. I have to talk to this woman. I have to hear the rest of the story. But will she even remember Lexy? She talks to a hundred people a day. And all their problems are the same. All the world’s troubles and secrets, none of them new. She gives them all the same advice, Follow your heart and You know what you have to do. There’s no mystery there. The people who call know the answers already. They just need someone to say them out loud.
I get up and walk to my study. For once I’m glad I never throw anything away. In my desk drawer, I find a thick folder filled with old bills, and I begin to go through it. Nothing’s in any order; I always just cram papers in here at random after paying the bills. Here’s a water bill from three years ago; here’s the credit card bill I paid last week. I go through, separating out the phone bills and throwing the rest on the floor.
It takes me an hour to find it. That phone number, the one I’ve just written down, 11:23 P.M. Forty-six minutes in length. What desperate night was this? While I slept, she sat in this very room and made a phone call to a television psychic. “I’m lost,” she said, and I was asleep. And then she came in and lay beside me. She was lost, and I had no idea. She lay beside me, lost and scared.