Spirit Talk: (Book One of The Fiona Series) Read online

  Spirit Talk

  Colleen McManus Hein

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 1

  Fiona dreamt of the flood before it happened. It was the kind of dream that seemed different from other dreams, the kind you remember after you wake up. In the dream, she saw the contents of the basement floating like flotsam and jetsam...a plastic bin of Christmas decorations, a serving tray, an old sled, a floral wreath for the front door in summertime, a tennis ball, her dad’s fishing hat, all bobbing in the brackish water that rose and rose and rose. In the dream, Fiona could even smell the mildewed basement.

  When the weather reports and warnings and rising water from Lake Quinn began to resemble the dream, Fiona felt curiously free of anxiety. She was miserable anyway. What difference could a flood make? Her friends from high school were all gone, packed merrily off mid-August in overflowing cars, grinning from back windows as mothers in the front seat wept and fathers in the driver’s seat grimly adjusted their rearview mirrors.

  It was a ritual Fiona always assumed she’d be a part of. It was all part of the plan and everyone she knew in high school had the same plan. She’d known since March that she and Janie would both be going downstate for college. They got their letters on the same day. If they filled out their roommate questionnaires with identical answers, they’d be sure to be put in the same dorm room. They’d laughed as they sat side by side at Janie’s kitchen table and written identical answers. It was a plan they’d cooked up as sophomores, and it worked.

  *****

  Then, the stroke happened. It came out of nowhere on a bland Tuesday night. There was no warning. If her father had symptoms beforehand, they would never know. He didn’t say a word or emit a moan, just went down in the middle of the kitchen. He’d been holding an oven mitt as he bent forward to check the chicken roasting in the oven, and then the stroke took him all the way to the floor. It felled Fiona’s strong father like a tree hit by lightning. He went down and never got up, so…nothing else could really happen after that, could it? The scene was etched in Fiona’s brain and she saw it constantly. It played out, over and over and over again.

  Life, though, did go on. But for Fiona and her mother, it felt like a dream, or a nightmare they couldn’t wake up from. Fiona’s sister Ann had a husband and a baby, but Fiona felt as though she was left with nothing.

  The night her father died, Fiona slept in her parent’s bed next to her mother. Theresa had taken a pill to help her sleep and Fiona stared into the dark and listened to her mother’s breathing. This isn’t happening, Fiona thought to herself. I will wake up tomorrow in my own bed and my father will wake up in this bed. Before I leave for school, I will come into the bedroom and watch him choose a tie from his rack in the closet and then I will watch him loop it into a perfect knot. He will tighten the knot by his throat, then wink at me in the mirror. I will kiss him goodbye before I leave for school and he will tell me to have a nice day and that he’s making pasta for dinner.

  There were the appallingly painful days before the funeral. When people came to their house, Fiona hid in her bedroom. She was repelled by the condolences and well-meaning attempts of her friends to comfort her. Janie came to her room without knocking and simply lay next to Fiona on her bed. She didn’t say anything and she didn’t touch Fiona, she just was a familiar presence. It was exactly what Fiona wanted from her best friend. Janie knew her so well.

  Nothing was the same for Fiona anymore. Couldn’t her other friends see that? There wasn’t any comfort. Fiona felt like her life was halted like a video permanently on “pause.” At school, her teachers and the other students looked at her nervously when she returned to classes. No one knew what to say to her and Fiona preferred the ones who said nothing over the kids and teachers who awkwardly told her how sorry they were for her loss. Stop reminding me, she wanted to say.

  Ann was a comfort, though, because they were both feeling the exact same way. They sat for hours together over endless cups of tea, offering one another memories from their childhood. Remember the time Dad dressed up like a biker for Halloween? Remember when he hid the Thanksgiving pies in the garage and the ants got them? And he was crushed? Remember how he bought us matching nightgowns every Christmas? Remember how he loved to hide chocolate eggs on Easter, even when we were way too old to believe in the Easter Bunny? Remember when he helped us make the snow fort and he let us attack him with snow balls? Remember how he made bacon waffles every Sunday? The memories made them laugh, then cry.

  *****

  It was impossible for Fiona to accept that her father was gone, but things began to occur without him. She graduated from high school without him cheering in the auditorium as she walked across the stage. Her mother, Ann, and Ann’s husband Rick shouted and clapped for Fiona, as did the parents of Fiona’s friends, but it wasn’t the same. On stage with the other Lake Quinn High School Class of 1985, she looked down at her sandaled feet peeking from beneath the long gown and prayed that her hands would stop trembling long enough to grasp the scrolled diploma her principal handed to her.

  Fiona did hear her father that day, though. She knew he was there, right next to her. As she sat back down in her folding chair on the left side of the stage, she heard him next to her ear. “Fiona, my sweet,” he intoned in his rich voice, deep like an oak tree would sound if an oak tree could speak, “I am so proud.” Fiona gasped but no one could hear in the noise from the ceremony.

  She knew not to turn her head and look for the source of the voice; she knew she would not see his loving face. The departed person’s figure never accompanied their voice. Dead relatives had spoken to Fiona for as long as she could remember; it was her very private and closely-guarded secret. As a young child, she assumed all people heard voices. When Fiona reached the age of six, however, she began to understand that she was different. When she alluded to the voices, people responded with puzzled, concerned, or frightened responses. They looked at her as if she were odd. Fiona did not want to be different, so she mostly kept the messages she heard to herself. Fiona wrapped her hands around her diploma and tried not to cry, concentrating instead on the graduation ceremony. She clapped and hooted and hollered when her friends took their turns across the stage to the waiting principal, but she felt. When Janie took her diploma, Fiona cheered.

  After graduation, she, her mother, Ann and Rick went out to dinner at Fiona’s favorite Italian restaurant, Villa Rosa. Nula was at home with Rick’s parents. Fiona felt grown up in her pretty white graduation dress, but it bared her shoulders and she shivered in the air-conditioned restaurant. She wished she’d thought to bring a shawl.

  Theresa ordered a bottle of champagne and the waiter served Fiona a glass unquestioningly. The food was delicious and the service was excellent, but Fiona could tell that Ann, Rick and Theresa felt as awkward as she did. They had been going to Villa
Rosa with her father for as long as Fiona could remember. They’d never been there before without him and his absence was as strong as his presence had been.

  After the dinner, Fiona went to a graduation party at Janie’s house and drank beer outside around the fire pit with her friends. She listened to everyone talk excitedly about their college plans until the beer sent her sleepily into the spare bed in Janie’s room, where she slept anytime she spent the night at Janie’s. She slept at Janie’s so often that she kept a toothbrush and some of her own toiletries in Janie’s bathroom. As she drifted off to sleep, she forgot for a moment that her life had changed. She imagined how, soon, she and Janie would share a dorm room. She imagined the Bruce Springsteen poster that would surely grace one wall and Elvis Costello on another wall.

  *****

  When Theresa told her the next morning that attending college downstate would have to wait a year until they could figure out their new financial situation, Fiona didn’t flinch. As she stared at Theresa’s face and saw her lips begin to form words, it was like she knew what her mother was going to say; she wasn’t sure if it was one of her premonitions or just plain old deductive reasoning. Also, she realized that she didn’t really care. She was still numb and couldn’t picture herself leaving home, where everywhere there were reminders of her father. Things were happening to Fiona but she wasn’t really experiencing them. It was like she was observing her life though a plastic bubble. You can go to community college for a semester. We can afford that, she watched Theresa say.

  Fiona did dwell on one stark fact, though; if she waited a year to begin downstate, she’d be a newbie. Janie, however, would be an experienced sophomore, probably wanting to live in an apartment or a sorority house with her new friends. She tried not to think about this.

  When she told the news to Janie, Janie broke down and cried; she herself was scared to go away. Having Fiona at her side made the prospect of college less frightening. Janie railed that it wasn’t fair for Fiona, but she knew Janie was also thinking it wasn’t fair to her.

  Her friendship with Janie, inevitably, suffered. Before, when they spoke, their closeness and ease was a natural result of their shared lives. They drove to school together every day, were in many of the same classes, ate lunch together, and shared the same friends. They even worked together at a pizza restaurant in town on weekends.

  Their phone conversations now, however, already bordered on awkward. Janie didn’t want to make Fiona feel worse by talking too much about her new roommate, a girl from Indiana whom Janie seemed to spend all her time with.

  Fiona, at her end, didn’t want to be a killjoy and complain about her classes at the drab Community College of Quinn County, where she listlessly dragged herself every weekday. Although Fiona knew a few of the other freshmen from high school, they weren’t friends at Lake Quinn High and it was too late to undo four years of not even acknowledging one another’s existence.

  Chapter 2

  Fiona fell into a routine: get up, read the newspaper and drink tea with her mother, shower, and dress in jeans and a t-shirt. Unlike her high school days, she didn’t spend time on makeup or blow-drying her hair. Why bother? No one at the Community College of Quinn County looked at her, or at least it seemed that way to Fiona. It was as if she barely existed anymore.

  Fiona would drop her mother at work, then drive the twenty minutes to campus. At least listening to the radio cheered her up. WXRT played the music she liked and she could raise the volume and feel like her old self for a while. She parked her car in the vast lot and wandered from one squat concrete building to the next for classes that didn’t excite her in any way. The other kids appeared to feel the same way. There was a noticeable lack of laughter and conversation that Fiona missed. In high school, it took the teacher a few minutes to quiet the class. In college, at least this one anyway, the room was eerily silent until the professor started to speak.

  One thing that still brought Fiona pleasure were her novels. Every other day or so, she went to the Lake Quinn Public Library to wander in the cool stacks, dragging the index finger of her right hand over the spines of the books. She chose a few, then carried them to a comfortable chair in one of the study carrels to see which novels she wanted to take home. Since she was no longer trying hard in school, she finally could read as much as she liked.

  Fiona read after school, pausing to make and eat dinner with her mother. They ate simply now that her father was gone. He had been a man who loved food; dinnertime each night with him was a chance to share a meal and tell one another about their days. With her father gone, though, she and her mother picked their way through deli sandwiches, scrambled eggs, or soup from tins. The food they ate sometimes required lighting a burner on the stove, but Fiona’s mother never used the oven anymore. Now, they stored pans inside. No more roasting chickens.

  *****

  One evening, Fiona found Theresa seated at her antique secretary desk, sighing as she stared at an ever-growing stack of bills. “Mom,” she asked, “are we going to be okay?” Theresa smiled sadly, shook her head, then shrugged. That night, Fiona watched her mother doze in the La-Z-Boy, a paperback copy of Lonesome Dove resting in her lap. The pages of the book were distorted and swollen from when Fiona tried to read it on vacation in Florida while floating on an inflatable pink raft in the hotel pool. When Ann called to her from the balcony of their room overlooking the pool, Fiona lost her balance when she looked up. The raft wobbled dramatically before Fiona tipped sideways into the warm blue pool. The book floated on the surface, but the paper greedily absorbed the water.

  Fiona lifted the book to her nose and she could still smell the faint odor of chlorine. She covered her mother with one of Grandma Kate’s colorful crocheted afghans, gently tucking the corners around her mother’s thin shoulders. Her mother’s lips, bare of lipstick, looked deflated and vulnerable.

  Grandma Kate was one of the dead relatives who spoke in Fiona’s ear on occasion. The previous week, Fiona was in her English class and reading a novel from the library (hidden behind a stack of text books) when Grandma Kate whispered, “Listen.” Fiona immediately sat up straighter and focused on the gray, tired-looking teacher. He was talking about run-on sentences and beginning to walk down Fiona’s aisle. There was just enough time to slip her notebook over her library book before the teacher reached her desk. Fiona realized that she was almost busted and silently thanked Grandma Kate. Even though she’d morphed into an apathetic student, Fiona still didn’t want to insult her professors.

  Nights after dinner, Fiona carried her current library book to the park and climbed the ladder to the platform at the top of the slide. The wood was warm and fragrant, and Fiona was hidden from view. It was where she and Janie went to talk for hours, speculating on the boys they would meet at college and the adventures they would have as independent young women. The park was beautiful and Lake Quinn was a nice town to grow up in, but both girls desperately wanted to get away. They wanted to experience the world, and “the world” was anyplace other than Lake Quinn. Now, Fiona sat alone and allowed herself to slip away from her life and into her books. The books were her new world.

  *****

  Fiona’s sister and her husband tried to help by having Fiona and her mother over for dinner every Sunday afternoon. Ann and Rick had met one another through Fiona. When Fiona was ten, she’d been “horse crazy” and took riding lessons at the local stables. Ann, at seventeen, was usually the one to drive Fiona to her lessons.

  One Saturday afternoon, after Fiona hopped in the car with her crop and riding helmet, Ann asked, “Who is that guy?”

  Fiona turned her head to where her sister was looking and replied, “Oh, that’s Rick. He’s my instructor. I think his family owns the stables. He thinks I’m a natural. He lets me ride Queenie.”

  Ann, instead of peeling out of the parking lot like she usually did as soon as Fiona was in the car, leaned back against her seat and thoughtfully watched Rick carry a saddle between the two barns. S
he twisted the ends of her hair around one finger. “Next time I pick you up,” Ann said, “don’t wait out here for me. Make me park so I have to come inside to look for you. Then, introduce me to Rick.”

  “Oooh,” Fiona asked teasingly, “are you in love with Rick?”

  “Very possibly,” Ann replied, finally backing the car out of the muddy gravel lot.

  Ann succeeded in drawing Rick out of his shy shell and, initially faking an interest in horses, ended up dating Rick all through college. Shortly after graduation, she and Rick married. Not too long after came an adorable baby girl named Finula, “Nula” for short. Fiona was crazy about her niece and spent as much time as possible at Ann and Rick’s house on weekends. The little family lived in a tiny coach house behind the stables, so Fiona got to ride whenever she wanted to. Fiona could walk to Queenie’s stall in the barn and stroke her pretty nose whenever she wanted or saddle her up and ride the path in the woods beyond the barns. She felt peaceful in the woods with just Queenie for company, and she never heard the voices at those times. Sometimes, though, she felt that the trees were talking to one another; she couldn’t understand the language but the rustling left her calm and happy. Queenie, judging from the way her ears moved, could also hear the leaves speaking to one another.

  On Sunday after dinner, Fiona went upstairs with Nula to play in her little pink bedroom. She had an enormous doll house, built by Rick and painstakingly decorated by Ann. As Fiona reached through a window in the side of the dollhouse to place a tiny woman in a four-poster bed, complete with a miniature patchwork quilt, one of the spirits said, “There’s no glass in the window.”

  The voice was male and not one Fiona recognized. Right after the disembodied voice spoke, Nula glanced up and repeated, “No glass” in her soft baby voice.

  Startled, Fiona asked quickly, “You heard that?”

  Nula nodded and said again, “No glass.”

  Fiona put both of her arms around Nula’s small shoulders and kissed the top of her head. Nula laughed and squeezed Fiona’s arm. She wondered if Nula would always hear the voices like Fiona did. Fiona wished she could tell Ann, but she didn’t want to upset her sister. Ann, I hear the voices of dead people, and I think Nula hears them too. As a child, she’d tried to tell Ann about the voices, but Ann always dismissed them as Fiona’s imagination. It was understandable. Unless you heard them yourself, there was no way to comprehend the phenomenon. No glass.