Читать книгу The Magnetic Girl - Jessica Handler - Страница 10

CHAPTER THREE

Cedartown, Georgia: October 1883

OUR HOME WAS A SUNK-IN PLACE, WHERE GREEN hills rolled like lumps in a blanket under a sparkling blue sky. From our porch, I studied the road to Cedartown, which either was born or died at our property, depending on how a person considered it.

The Cedartown Appeal was my atlas. In that newspaper I saw glimpses of the world beyond our dead-end road: cotton prices, train schedules, advertisements for Cheney’s lung expectorant, and closeouts on knit underwear. I read the train timetables more closely than any school book. Cedartown to Palestine, Tredegar, Singleton, all in Georgia, until the end of the line, Pell City in Alabama. Eighty miles in just half a day. Electric wires webbed the skies of New York City, strung overhead like the work of massive spiders, wires that came loose from their wooden poles to spark fires in the streets and roast a little boy unlucky enough to grab the living cord. In New York, Mrs. Vanderbilt dressed for a ball in a gold and silver electrified gown and called herself “The Electric Light.”

In the South Pacific, a volcano rained black smoke onto a place called Krakatoa. In America, the men who ran the railroad companies were getting together to decide how people told time. They sliced the nation into zones from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Six o’clock in the morning in Georgia would be three o’clock in California. Time and distance folded like paper.

I wanted to leave our close hills, but where would I go? If I had all day, I could walk into town, but I couldn’t picture myself telling the clerk the name of a city, buying a train ticket, and handing over money I didn’t have. How would I decide if I should go to New York City or Atlanta? I could choose a closer place, like Rome, Georgia, or Chattanooga, Tennessee, but I had no answer to what I would do when I got there. School, church, the barn, and the field were where I belonged, even less for Leo. We had a sister, too, but she was under a stone, born, baptized, and buried in a day. There was nothing here for any of us, and yet here we stayed.

Imagining myself out in the world meant leaving Leo. That thought made me want to wrap my arms tight around our square white house with its peeling white paint. Momma said that no one with any class should act like they were someone’s renter, but the house wasn’t ours. We leased it and worked the land for the family of the man who had built the place fifty years before. The oldest members of his family were gone to the beyond, the newest ones gone somewhere else earthly. Those hills and the land we worked kept me hemmed in during the winter when I ran with the kitchen bucket to the cistern, my coat over my shoulders, sleep gritty in my eyes. No matter how cold I was, I always stopped to watch the hills, gray-green and speckled with snow, crows drifting across the silver sky. In summer, I watched the hills through the wavering heat of the afternoon, perspiration holding my dress tight to my skin.

If I left, I wouldn’t have to hear one person say I looked like a possum in a dress, the way I’d overhead a fellow remark at the post office. He’d looked me up and down when he thought I wasn’t aware. If I left, no one would whisper behind their hands when I came into the schoolroom, calling me a tall tree. Captivating a person, not a fox, would make a moment when no one could shame me. So, on a Sunday, when Mr. Campbell pointed his finger at me for Sunday School recitation, I tried it.

“The tongue of the wise useth knowledge aright: but the mouth of fools poureth out foolishness,” I said.

Behind me, Early Trumball belched, then whispered, “Excuse me.”

“Train up a child in the way he should go,” I continued.

Calling out a miscreant with choice Bible words had entertainment value, and I hoped Early got the message. As I spoke, I lowered my eyelids, filtering the daylight into a warm blur that let me focus on soft, round Mr. Campbell at the front of the room. Half-lidded, I brought him into bright relief, and then concentrated only on his eyes. My recitation grew distant in my ears, replaced by the thrumming of my blood coursing through my body. I kept my gaze locked to Mr. Campbell’s until it was clear to me that a nearly empty room was behind his eyes. A room inhabited only by me.

At the last line of my recitation, I cut my gaze away to the windowsill, and let him go.

Mr. Campbell staggered, knocking a piece of chalk to the floor. As he ducked to fetch it, the back of my neck crawled. My head swam, and I sat without him telling me to. I nearly missed my seat, landing half on and half off as I went down too hard. Even though the stove was not lit, my collar and the backs of my knees were uncomfortably damp.

THE FIRST TIME I WENT alone to my father’s study was the next Saturday afternoon. He had books that Momma wouldn’t have in the parlor, books with stories about somewhere not here.

“Nothing a lady would choose to spend her time with,” she said. No copies of Godey’s Lady’s Magazine or the Cedartown Appeal, or a novel like The Victories of Love. She found his books dull. Almanacs. Shakespeare. Histories of the Ancient World.

Momma had gone with Daddy to town. I convinced Leo that he wanted a rest, and after he lay on the divan I hemmed him in with a blanket and busied him with his wooden soldier. I promised myself ten minutes with my father’s books. That number that seemed right before a neighbor or a tradesman happened by of a Saturday afternoon and noticed through the window an unattended boy, an absent girl. I arranged a line of chairs around the divan to protect my brother like a cage.

Undoing my boots so my footfalls wouldn’t distract Leo from his toy, I crept away, thrilled by my planning. At the study door, I turned the handle quickly, and slipped into the room. The door hinges didn’t squeal, the frame didn’t scrape—a grant of permission, at least from the room itself. The single window streamed a burst of sunlight onto the bookshelves. My father arranged his books tall to short. His ledgers squared to the far edge of his desk calmed my racing heart. In this room, all was as it should be, perfect and controlled. I wondered what my father believed when he watched the field and the fringe of trees from here. Did he pretend, like I did, that we owned it all? His presence clung to the air, a scent like sour teeth and flatiron starch. Five years had passed since he had asked me to help with his accounts for the church or the store, me reading numbers back to him as he flicked his pencil tip against the pages of a ledger. When I had been very small, I drew pictures in the empty spots in those almanacs and histories, happy in his company.

I hadn’t helped him count since the day Leo fell.

I listened for Leo’s conversation with his soldier. Even the distance of two rooms between us was a laxity on my part. No cry of frustration from dropping the man to the floor, out of reach and out of balance, no shouts of glee as the soldier fought a blanket or a weak fist.

The books, spines out, seemed to have their backs turned to me, but those books who didn’t want my company would be the ones to tell me what a train ticket looked like and how a person chose a destination. If that person’s brother wasn’t imperfect. If she wasn’t a person who kept silent about the day she dropped him, the day he hit his head. Leo, in the parlor, was silent. He might have fallen asleep, solider in hand.

Turning out the Bulfinch, the Shakespeare, an almanac or two, I came to a book with a red leather cover. Involuntarily, I pushed my thighs together as if my body had made that color. The book’s title was The Truth of Mesmeric Influence. Below that, in somber black letters, the author’s name. Henrietta Wolf. A book by a lady writer. Surely a novel, but why tucked away here I couldn’t fathom. Momma likely hadn’t read this one. I would beat her to it.

To my dear reader—the first chapter began. Being the dear reader, I rested for the moment in my father’s chair.

I am capable of affording testimony. The atmosphere around my head was not like smoke, nor fog, but a kind of sunrise or glare directed only at me.

I thought of how the sunlight over the sidewalks in town made my eyes hurt when I was a little girl. Like me, this author suffered under a glare that no one else saw.

I turned a page.

She wrote of curing blindness in an elderly woman, of hearing words articulated clearly before the speaker had opened his mouth, of being overcome by a heat wave in a chilly room. Like me, devastated by a wilting heat after I’d captivated Mr. Campbell.

Cautioning myself to be gentle with the brittle paper, I turned page after page, devouring her words like a meal.

She had been imprisoned by aloneness. So had I. Her empathy moved me to tears. Sufferers are many, she wrote.

In the parlor, Leo was searching for me. As if I were at his side, I saw him elbow himself up from the pillow, and crane his neck to find me in the doorway. His come get me rustled in my ears. I’ll be right there formed in my mind and flew toward him.

I needed to know if Henrietta Wolf had stilled a wild animal or made a teacher stumble at his chalkboard. The book wouldn’t fit in my pocket or palm like a pin or a button. I couldn’t bear to leave The Truth of Mesmeric Influence behind. Henrietta Wolf knew me deeply. We were dear friends already, and I had read only a few of her pages. She understood suffering and silence, and her words were a gentle hand over mine. I know you, they said. Stay with me and I will show you who you are. I pushed the Bulfinch and the almanacs together to cover the empty space where the book had been. Lightfooted and light of heart, I hurried to my brother’s side, The Truth of Mesmeric Influence a prize against my ribs.

That night, I carried my lamp to my bedroom and unwound the book from the cocoon where I’d hidden it inside a woolen scarf in my bureau. Freed at my table, Mrs. Wolf described how Aaron in the Bible used hypnotism to turn a rod into a serpent. She hadn’t seen it herself, but she knew how it was done. A behavior of stillness and rest is effected by the transference of human energy, she wrote. So much knowledge accumulates every day that not a single book can hold the whole truth. In a month, in a year, what will the genuine practitioners learn and share with their dearest ones? The Mesmerist’s mystery exerts a force over his subject.

When Leo followed my hand after his fever broke, he was able to do so because I had captivated him with my human energy. Mrs. Wolf described back to me what I could do and what she could do, and she called herself a Mesmerist.

There was so much more to learn. Had I known everything she could do—that I could someday do, too—on the day that he watched my hand, I might have cured him right then.

The whole body may be filled with a churning magnetism that reciprocates the gift of human energy.

That swirling in me was why I had to poke holes in my poor ruined mattress. I was filled with magnetism that I had to release. Every time I worked a pin into the underside of a finger, I wouldn’t breathe—I couldn’t—until I’d broken the skin without raising blood. That tiny disturbance of sharp metal into dull flesh was a relief, a victory. Blood would have been a failure, proof that I was merely human, clumsy and made of shame. Magnetism stirred in me, seeking exit.

At first, I had worked the pin into the pad of my finger, but I’d learned that moving it across the narrow column of fat at the place where the joint met the palm was better. This hurt less and left no tiny torn piece on the tip of my finger, a defect signaling weakness. The sight of that silver pin, so sharp and bright at the tip showing blurred and yellow-pink inside my own skin calmed what I had no name for until Mrs. Wolf named the feeling. Magnetism. Human energy.

When I was done, I eased the pin out as intently as I’d put it in, watching that I didn’t break the skin but for the entry and exit points. I rendered the pin innocent by wiping the metal against my dress and returning the tool to the sewing box from where I’d taken it.

No one knew this, of course. Not even Leo.

One more day, I told myself. One more day and I’ll put Mrs. Wolf’s book back on the shelf. One more day before Daddy notices a gap in the height of his books, before he looks for a red cover that couldn’t belong to the father I knew. While I read, I slid the point of a glass-topped hairpin through a waxy callous at the base of my left ring finger. There was no need to watch.

A WEEK PASSED. Even though we were well into autumn, the air hung summer-heavy. I sat by the kitchen door hoping for a breeze, peeling potatoes, tossing the skins into a bucket, and dropping the exposed white lumps into a bowl in my lap. The glare of hot weather had begun to hurt my eyes. Thunder in the distance meant relief.

I knew I couldn’t captivate my cousin Dale. She never would look straight at me.

Dale attended the same girls’ academy in Tennessee that our mothers had. They were sisters, and until they’d married, did everything together. Like them, Dale studied Shakespeare, Scripture, homemaking, and Latin. She sang in an unstable soprano that sounded like a bucket being pried from ice. And as often as possible, Momma invited her to visit.

“She’s the kind of young lady we don’t see enough of lately,” Momma told me every time she sent an invitation.

Everything I did, I did better than right. Counting the stitches as I sewed a hem, I made twenty-four, twenty-six, then twenty-eight, each exactly the same. Always evens, too. No stopping at an odd number ending in a seven or a nine or a one. Even numbers and balanced sets tended to keep me from wanting to jump out of my skin. Same with movement: even numbers. Churning butter was a task where Momma’s “be gentle” didn’t apply. I counted to myself in twos, fours, eights. Collect the eggs, sweep the house, do my schoolwork when I had it. Tell stories aloud to myself and Leo when I didn’t.

When I did, Daddy told me to hush up. He read the newspaper aloud to Momma, who could read, of course, but liked to hear Daddy while she did her needlepoint in the evening. I sat on the piano bench and spoke quietly to myself about horses who could dance and boys and girls who sailed across the ocean on a slice of toast.

“Listen to your Daddy,” Momma told me. She didn’t look up from her green thread. She was making a parrot in a jungle.

My story kept on inside my head.

“Quit moving your mouth like that with no sound,” Daddy said. The Appeal was in front of his face, but he could see me.

Tell me the story again, Leo said, inside my head.

The last time Dale was here, she twittered at Leo. I wanted to slap her for aiming a laugh like that at such a little boy, and her without the sense to see that Leo wasn’t right. Dale dropped fussy French phrases into the most average conversation. She wasn’t right either, talking in a language none of us but my mother understood.

Momma had sent Dale and me into the woods to pick scuppernongs. Away from my mother’s judgmental eye, I plucked the green grapes from their vines. The fullest grapes radiated pressure from within, like skin swollen by a spider bite.

“Dale, look, a grape like a swolled-up finger,” I said, presenting her with a fat grape.

As I expected, she recoiled, which prompted me to bite down on the swollen-fleshed grape, squirting green muck and pale brown seeds in her direction. The grape’s skin was sour and unpleasantly slippery inside, with rough scabs on the outside, but she didn’t need to know that. The mess didn’t touch her—I hadn’t intended that it would—but fell onto the dirt, no bigger than a bird dropping. Dale curled her lip.

“Mmm,” I said, possessing my field, my grape vines, my peeling house. “Just like popping a good blister.”

Dale’s shriek didn’t gratify me the way I’d hoped it would.

While Dale approached us on a train from Tennessee, I waved flies from potatoes and worried that she’d find my book wrapped in a scarf atop my wardrobe. My paring knife skipped and peeled a strip from my thumb.

Sure enough, when Dale made herself at home in the chair beside my bed, she settled her too-many clothes into left- and right-hand stacks, smoothing the tissue paper between each fold. I didn’t own five dresses to wrap in paper. She kept a broad-brimmed straw hat in a patterned hatbox, and I was certain I’d heard her whisper ‘goodnight’ to the hat the last time she visited. I’d have wished the hat sweet dreams too if it were mine, the way it complemented her petal-white skin and sat just right against her hair. Her hair was black as mine, but smooth and shiny as a crow’s wing.

I helped her unwrap three dresses from their paper, but the heavy weather made my head throb. I wanted to unbutton my dress and walk around in my cotton chemise and stocking feet, stomping like the dray horse I was, just to annoy someone. Her. Me. The sky drooped like soiled diapers. Faced with a week in Dale’s company, I tossed out a story.

“The last time the weather felt like this, we had nuts from the hickory tree in the yard come flying in the front room,” I told her. This wasn’t a complete lie. There had been a rainstorm and strong winds. When the front door blew open, nuts scattered off the tree and rolled into the house.

Dale picked strands of her hair from a brush and made the not-listening listening sound. “Mmm-hmm.”

I flung myself wide across the bed, circulating the stuffy air.

“Electrical tree,” I said, delighted by my inspiration. “Electricity flew them in, knocked them around like hailstones. Then they stopped cold and fell to the floor. Me and Momma swept them out, even though they were still sparking.”

The last part wasn’t entirely a lie, either. We had raked the nuts out the door, lifting the edges of the carpets to find the strays.

“Keep any?” Dale asked, shaking out a purple and blue checked skirt. “You know it’s ‘Momma and I.’ Don’t act ill-bred or you won’t get the right kind of paramour.”

Fooling her was deliciously easy.

“I’d love to hold an electrical nut in my hand, see if it’s still got a jump in it,” I said.

She clicked the trunk shut.

“What do you know about electricity anyway, way out here? We saw electric lights in a drawing of Paris up at school in a lecture about great cities of the world. They make streetcars go without horses. They’re bright as the sun, electric lights. You can’t look right at them or they’ll burn out your eyes. On the avenues of Paris, they burn all day and all night and never go out.”

I didn’t know the first thing about electricity other than what I’d read in the newspaper. The Wizard of Menlo Park was going to do in America what Dale said about Paris. The editor’s column in the Appeal claimed that electricity was an artificial light more brilliant than a thousand suns, and it was dangerous. A person could burn to cinders from touching it. Consider that boy in New York City, fried on a wire.

Propping myself up on my elbows, I waggled my foot at Dale.

“I should have kept one! You’re right, that would have been a thing to own. Hold a nut up to a light in France, maybe it would dance again.”

I would have liked to see an electric light. I hadn’t yet seen one. No one I knew had. Dale alighted on the bed and made the not-listening sound again.

“Do you have my shawl? I’m sure I set it right there on the chair.”

I didn’t say anything about the shawl. Instead, I told her that I’d heard from one of the girls at school that electricity is an example of God’s power on his earth. I’d heard no such thing, it just seemed like what Dale wanted to hear, and I wanted her to not sit so near to me.

The hot dry treetops glared like cut tin. Wind stirred the field across the road, making the trees scrape against each other like giant matchsticks.

“You know that the Devil isn’t far under our feet,” Dale said. “Below this house, below the fields. Mama told me that years ago there was an earthquake in Tennessee, and the newspaper back then said that if the earth did open for good, the Devil would be free to walk among us.”

Dale got up and probed through her stacks of clothing while she talked. Finding no shawl, she fussed with her skirt. A stray lock of hair came loose from the twist at the back of her neck, and she threaded it back into the bundle with the thumb and middle finger of her free hand.

“Uncle Will’s people were from Tennessee, weren’t they?” she asked.

As good a story as the Devil would make, the only thing below my feet was the floor, and below that, another floor, and then earth, and roots. Around the roots, copper and iron threaded through the insides of rocks. Daddy said so and proved it with his cairn of polished stones on the parlor mantel. Veins of copper and iron ore ran through those stones. The copper tugged gently at the iron, and according to him, the iron responded, bowing toward its true mate, copper. These two together, Daddy said, made the power of a magnet.

“Are you listening to me?” Dale asked. “I’ll find the shawl after we eat. We have to go downstairs and help with supper.”

“Did they find him?”

Dale had her hand on the doorknob.

“Find who?”

“The Devil.”

“Hush, you.” She shook her head and shut the door behind her. Her footsteps tapped down the hall and receded down the stairs.

“Well amen, then,” I said, but only to the door. My washrag swung slightly on a peg, mocking Dale’s pull on the handle. I reached into my blouse and extracted the shawl she had been looking for. I shook it out, folded it into a little square, and lay it neatly in the hatbox.

The sky was sickly green by the time we sat down for dinner. My ears popped, even though I worked my jaw and tried to shake my head clear like a rained-on dog. When rain fell while the sun shone, people always said, “the Devil’s beating his wife.” I couldn’t imagine who a Mrs. Devil might be, or how she and the Devil might have courted.

Momma dished up second helpings of ham, squash, bread, beans, and pickled tomatoes, a warning in her smile. Eat all of this. For Dale, we would show no struggle in planting the food or keeping it alive, no strain in portioning it out for the table. When we were alone, Momma tallied up prices like they were my fault. A sack of corn cost one dollar sixty cents, and five pounds of dry beans a quarter. A gallon of kerosene cost the same as five pounds of beans. Money was scarce as blood from a turnip, she said. On a rare night, we ate possum.

“Once you’ve had possum,” my father liked to say when he had his plate, “you won’t go back to squirrel.”

He had it backward: squirrel was all right. Some nights we ate cornbread and syrup, and I gave Leo a sweet rag to suck so he could think his belly was full. He knew better but pretended along with the rest of us.

With Dale at our table, the chat was about a fellow over by Aragon who’d stopped his wagon to have a smoke and burned up his bushels by accident. Daddy was sympathetic to the man’s loss. Momma called the disaster the fellow’s own fault.

Dale cleared her throat and patted her mouth with her napkin.

“Uncle Will, do you plan to open more acreage?” She was breathy and childlike, a fluttery Dale, not the cousin who last year had screamed about a grape.

Please hush, I warned her in my head, but she couldn’t hear me. Sitting across from her, I couldn’t reach under the table to pat her arm and take her attention away from the disaster she was igniting right here at the table.

She wouldn’t make eye contact. I couldn’t get to Dale. I cut into my ham, wishing it were her flesh, or mine.

“I would think by now you’d just go ahead and move back to town. I mean to say that you ought to give up,” Dale said.

My forked shrieked across my plate. My cousin, with her perfect hair and womanly shape, had shot flames from her mouth.

“Living out here while the town’s going on,” she continued. She might as well have spit ash. “Momma says Aunt Sally will fade away from indigence.”

Momma paled and didn’t speak. Rude as anything, Dale pointed to my mother, in case we hadn’t understood who her Aunt Sally might be. Maybe the floor had opened, and Dale was the Devil.

I wiped Leo’s chin and put a sliver of ham into his hand. I was teaching him to eat with his fingers in the interest of dexterity.

“More water, please,” Daddy said, tapping the rim of his glass. He spoke as if Dale hadn’t said a word. Momma stood to get the pitcher from the sideboard. She had to have been relieved to turn away.

Dale had spoiled dinner, and she was pleased. She was so pleased, in fact, that when I sat back from helping Leo with his ham, she looked straight at me, claiming a win. That was my chance, and I took it. I stared right back into her pale eyes. The sounds of Daddy pouring his water, of Leo chewing, of Momma’s anxious picking at the tablecloth faded into a dull hum. Dale wanted to pull away, but I held her like I did that fox and Mr. Campbell. Not until my father safely stood to leave the table, patting his stomach with an elaborate motion, did I let her go.

That night Dale took the pillow, leaving me with the edge of a blanket under my cheek. With her in the bed I couldn’t lie corner-to-corner the way I liked. With her in the bed, my feet hung off the end into the open air. Dale was the guest and taking up space was her prerogative. She fell asleep fast, mewing like a kitten. Beside her, I watched the starless night. My mattress stank, and I wished for Dale not to smell the sickness in it.

Momma’s father had lived his last months as an invalid on this mattress. He had died on it. When I became what Momma called a “little girl getting her big girl’s bed,” she pulled out the worn feathers and stuffed the mattress with empty feed sacks. She swaddled the stained mattress in oilcloth, since I was, after all, still a little girl. The mattress never entirely lost the stink of illness. When the sour smell got too bad, I rolled to the farthest edge and lay on my side, putting as much of me off the mattress as I could get.

Dale’s bedroom wouldn’t smell like old waste and varnish. I imagined her bed as soft and wide, with crisp sheets that smelled like perfume. I inched closer to the window and pushed it up for some fresh air. Blue and white streaks lit the distance. Outside was alive with a heady odor like fading sparks.

I’d been stabbing at that hard-edged mattress with pins for months, harder than when I slid a needle into my skin. When the sharp pin broke through the cracked fabric, my mouth watered from the anticipation and release. Small rips at the pinholes would expose my deed if anyone saw them, so I held the sheets under the soapy water when I helped with the wash. Wooden clothespins on the line covered the growing rents in the fabric.

Stabbing a pin through the thick cloth and feeling it pop through to the burlap inside satisfied an itch behind my knees and along the edges of my teeth. The relief in pushing through the mattress’s resistance, probing its depths, and that discrete little sound of completion when I pulled the pin away quelled my craving to scratch, or bite, or scream.

Dale didn’t seem to feel so mislaid in her life. Everything was dresses and cake to her. She slept beside me. My uncovered feet shone a dim blue with each lightning flare outside. Downstairs, my parents slept, and my brother slept. I rolled onto my stomach. Dale wheezed in her sleep, a deep sucking sound. Lately, what I wanted and what was right weren’t always the same.

A flash of lightning lit my bedroom walls. When the skittery brightness vanished, my hand crept toward the nest of hairpins on my bedside table. I found the one I liked best: a pin with a little metal fan at the top. That delirious moment when the sharp tip in my hand perforated the blunt mattress was so near. Lightning flashed once more in the heavy air, and thunder rolled as I counted ten. Ten miles away. In my mind, I watched the lightning strike a dead tree in a dry creek bed, starting a fire that would die out harmless and alone.

The pin made a hollow pop when it ruptured the mattress. I sucked in my breath and held it to calm my racing heart before yanking the pin free. That made another pop, a backwards sound.

Dale jerked upright.

“What was that?”

Caught in a private act, I froze.

“There must be a bug or some snake in your house,” Dale whispered.

She slid from the bed. I lay the culprit pin on the table, blessing the dark before I lit the lamp and rose to shake out the quilt. Dale searched beneath the bed and around the curves of the wash basin before she went for the wardrobe.

“Bugs with horns or claws,” she whispered.

“Like needles,” I whispered back, grateful for the darkness hiding my hot face.

Dale poked the walls with my buttonhook. No vermin emerged from the cracks.

“It was just the storm,” she sighed. Her face was flushed, the collar of her nightgown awry. She seemed disappointed.

“Well, thank heaven,” I said. “I was thinking a bug would bite my leg.”

In bed, Dale fell immediately to sleep, but I couldn’t rest. Captivating a fox or a person was an aptitude, certainly, and I’d hidden my secret—human energy stirring, as Mrs. Wolf told me—by letting Dale’s imagination run away with her. She’d figured the sound I’d made was scuttling vermin, and I didn’t say otherwise. I’d stabbed that pin right beside her because I had to, and she wasn’t the wiser. I wanted to throw off the blankets and pace the room, but I didn’t want to have to talk to Dale if she woke. I lay still and shut my eyes, ready to stroll the aisles of a store in my imagination, choosing whatever I liked, peeling bills from a bankroll stuffed into a beaded purse. I bought a string of pearls, a red velvet dress with a bustle, and a matching hat with a white feather that complemented my jewelry.

A flash of lightning blasted the imaginary store to bits. In the depth of darkness that followed the bright light, my hand moved to my table. A hairpin rolled under my fingertips. Forcing myself to breathe slowly, counting the ins and outs in twos and fours, I slowed my heart’s banging until it was a rhythmic song of comfort. I was going to stab the mattress again, and I couldn’t stop myself.

My skin felt tight. I crept my hand beside Dale’s head and lifted the pin not two inches from the pink folds of her right ear. I plunged the metal through the mattress’s heavy ticking and lost myself in its disappearance in the packed fabric inside. My heart raced, then slowed again. I eased the metal up and out with a single movement of my wrist.

In the hills outside, thunder rolled and faded away. Dale tugged on the blanket, and the fabric slid from my legs.

“Oh, Lord,” she said, sounding small as a child. “Oh, Lord, promise us that we heard the voice of one of your tiniest creations.”

The Lord didn’t answer.

I dropped the hairpin beside the bed, swinging my feet hard to the floor at the same time to hide the ping of metal. Dale slid on all fours onto the rug as a door banged below us. My father’s heavy footfalls ascended the stairs. His lamp’s weak light fanned out under my door.

“It has happened again,” Dale said in a monotone. The pungent scent of her fear made me want to bounce on my toes, but I caught myself. I’d need to act scared with her.

“What has happened again?” My father’s voice boomed through the closed door.

Had Dale and I been younger he’d have busted the door down, but we were nearly grown women, too mature for a man to enter a bedroom without permission. I grabbed my dressing gown from the peg and handed it to Dale before I checked my nightdress, making sure everything was buttoned up and pulled down. Dale lit the lamp and checked her reflection in the window glass. I glanced at my hand, still feeling the hairpin between my fingers.

With that empty hand, I opened my bedroom door.

Daddy stood in the hallway, a monument in a blue nightshirt. Momma came up behind him with a lamp. Dale wailed as soon as she registered my father’s fury.

“A bug. Some giant bug or a living thing under the bed scared me out of my skin! And sparks flew around, big as thumbs!”

What had actually happened meant nothing to Dale. I’d made her believe she’d seen flaming thumbs in a room lit only by distant lightning. I wanted to try again that very moment and watch her face as I pushed and pulled my pin. I wanted to watch myself create the idea of flames where there were none.

Some kind of train was leaving the station, and I took my chance on that train. Yes, I said, there had been terrible, unnatural, sounds that woke us. I described shoving the furniture aside in search of insects or squirrels going about their vermin business. Dale began to moan like a pipe organ, and Momma charged past us, sniffing my bedroom’s air in all four directions. I quit talking to watch her.

After a minute, she spoke. “It’s atmospheric,” she said.

I grabbed Dale’s hand, partly for effect, but more because I was dumbfounded. Momma had plenty of opinions, but I’d never known her to fail to spot deceit.

Momma sniffed the air again. Daddy’s face was stone.

“What frightened you wasn’t vermin,” Momma said to Dale. “Particularly if you saw floating lights.”

“We saw them. Floating lights.” Dale repeated herself, nodding vigorously.

We’d seen no such thing. She’d conflated the aftermath of lightning into something present here in the house. I had made that happen. Anxious, I tugged my hair, a habit my mother hated.

“The storm has washed our home in electrical energy. Odic Orbs like the ones you saw are electrical,” Momma said. “They are the power of magnetism alive in this room.”

The floor might as well have opened under us. I had a sudden urge to hang onto my mother’s skirt, so she could pull me along behind her when she walked away, our game when I was small. But she left the room without me, nightdress swishing, Daddy following with the lamp.

“God’s with us, right now in this room,” Dale murmured. “It’s His power, alive all around us, bringing the glory of an electrified city into your own home!” She spoke as if she were in love.

From beneath the scarf in my wardrobe, Mrs. Wolf’s book applauded me, its pages like so many hands. From expression comes splendor, she said. No one heard her but me.