Spirit Legacy Read online

  “Come on in,” said a man’s voice. He sounded irritated. Great, just what I needed: to catch him in a bad mood.

  I pushed on the door, which opened into a veritable disaster of an office. Every inch of wall space from floor to ceiling was covered in bookshelves, save one very tall, very narrow window that overlooked the courtyard—or at least, it would have if you could have seen out of it; a large dusty plastic ficus plant obscured most of the view. Precariously placed piles of books, papers, and file folders were teetering on every available surface. The place smelled like a cross between a library archive room and an airport smoking lounge. In the corner, nearly hidden by the oversized desk and its abundance of papers, was a very old, very cozy-looking brown leather arm chair in which sat the elusive Professor Pierce.

  “Can I help you?” he asked, looking up from the book he was reading.

  My immediate impression of David Pierce was that he would look more at home in the back of a VW van with a joint hanging out of his mouth than he did in this office. His hair was long and black, pulled into a ponytail even longer than mine. His face was overgrown with a poorly trimmed beard and mustache. He wore a threadbare purple Henley, ripped blue jeans, and an ancient pair of brown Doc Martens. The only aspect of his appearance that could be considered a nod to academia was a pair of horn-rimmed glasses perched tentatively on his nose, as if unsure whether they really belonged there. His eyes were blue and very inquisitive, and they bore into mine like drills as he waited for my response. I was instantly intimidated in spite of myself.

  “Um, hi, Dr. Pierce. My name is Jess Ballard. I’m a freshman.” I didn’t know why I included this last bit of information—maybe I thought my timid manner needed some sort of excusing.

  “Ah, shit. Am I your advisor? Do we have an appointment to pick your classes or something?” Dr. Pierce started to get up from his chair.

  “No, my advisor is Professor Holden, Art History,” I answered.

  “Oh.” Pierce plopped back down in the seat, but did not pick up his book. “So, what do you want?”

  His bluntness did nothing to help my courage. “I was hoping you could help me, actually. I saw that you teach a class in parapsychology, and—”

  “—And you thought I’d be kind enough to sign you in even though you aren’t a senior and you haven’t taken any of the pre-recs,” Pierce finished.

  I stopped short. It sounded pretty ludicrous when he put it that way. “Uh … yeah, actually, that’s pretty much it.”

  Pierce made a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a snort. “Ballard, is it?”

  I nodded.

  “Ballard, do you know what page I’m on in that book right there?”

  “I … what?”

  “I asked if you know what page I’m on in that book I was reading when you came in.”

  I felt thoroughly confused. Was he testing my psychic abilities or something? “I have no idea.”

  “It’s the same page I’ve been on since eight o’clock this morning. That was three hours ago.”

  “Okay.”

  “And would you like to know why I’ve been on the same page for three hours?” Pierce asked conversationally, crossing one leg over the other.

  “Sure.”

  “Because you are about the hundredth lower classman who has made the trip all the way up here to try to get into my class. A class that specifically states it’s only for seniors and which has been full since last spring anyway.” Pierce stopped as though to gauge the effect of these words on me.

  “I … I’m sorry,” I faltered, back-pedaling. “I didn’t realize the class was so hard to get into.”

  “Well, it is. This happens every year. It’s the most popular class in the whole goddamn college. Lucky me.”

  I could feel my hope slipping away. I tried again. “Professor, are you sure there’s no way to get into the class? I mean, can’t you make an exception? I’m … um, I’m really interested in parapsychology.” It sounded lame before it even came out of my mouth, and I knew it.

  “Do you know why so many kids want to take this class, Ballard? They think it’s a joke. A fucking blow-off course, you get me? They think it’s gonna be a barrel of laughs, sitting around telling stories about Indian burial grounds under their backyards or their dead grandmothers leaving them messages on bathroom mirrors.”

  I was starting to get flustered now, and not just because a professor was swearing at me like a sailor. This wasn’t going well. “I don’t think it’s a blow-off—”

  “—Well, quite frankly, Ballard, you don’t sound any different than any of the other kids who’ve come up here looking to get signed in. Why should I make an exception for you and not any of them?” He seemed to think it was a rhetorical question and, by extension, that the conversation was over. He returned to his book with a smug expression.

  I could feel my temper boiling just below the surface. After months of confusion and terror, after my mother and Evan, the dreams and the voices, I was at my wits’ end. But in spite of all of that, I just couldn’t bring myself to tell this man the real reason I was there. If he wasn’t going to believe that I wanted to be in the class for the usual reasons, he’d probably laugh right in my face at the real reason. I tried to keep my voice even so that I wouldn’t betray how close I was to completely losing it. But I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice. “You know what, forget it. I’ll find someone else to help me. Enjoy your book.” I turned to leave.

  My hand was on the doorknob when Pierce suddenly spoke. “What do you mean, ‘someone to help you’?”

  I whirled around, all pretense gone. “What do you care? I’m just another presumptuous freshman, right?”

  “Aren’t you?” he asked, with the first flicker of real interest.

  “No! I don’t give a shit about an ‘easy A’ or whatever lame reason people usually take your class. If you knew the first thing about me, you’d know I don’t need a pity grade to boost my GPA.”

  “So, then why do you want to be there? And don’t feed me that line about being interested in parapsychology.” Pierce had gotten up from his chair. He was eyeing me shrewdly, and seemed completely unfazed by my profanity.

  “Of course I don’t want to be a goddamn parapsychologist! I thought all this paranormal stuff was bullshit until ….” I didn’t know how to continue without telling him more than I wanted to. Luckily, there seemed to be no need.

  “Until something happened to change your mind,” he finished for me, giving me an appraising look. It was like being x-rayed.

  “Yes.”

  Several seconds passed. Pierce wasn’t signing me in, but he also wasn’t writing me off. I cooled off enough in the intervening moments to recognize that this was an opportunity. He was intrigued, I could tell. If I played this carefully, if I didn’t blow it, this might just work out. I decided to press my luck and try again, but I didn’t want to give him too much information; I wasn’t sure that I wanted to trust him with that yet. When I spoke again, I kept my voice calm. “Dr. Pierce, I’m sure that there are lots of kids who take your class for the wrong reasons, and that sucks. But would you be willing to make an exception for someone who needed to take it for the right reasons? I think your class might be the only way for me to understand what happened to me.” I hesitated and then added, “What’s still happening to me.”

  She shoots, she scores. He was examining me now like I was some interesting new specimen. Perhaps it was the guarded manner in which I spoke, but he didn’t press me for any more details, for which I was both surprised and grateful. There seemed to be an internal struggle going on between his desire to keep presumptuous freshman from his ranks and his eagerness to gain what could potentially be a new case study.

  After a moment that felt like an hour, he spoke. “I could let you audit the class. You wouldn’t get any credit for it.” He kept his eyes trained on my face.

  Relief flooded me. “Thank you, Professor. I don’t need the credit, just the in
formation.”

  It was as though I passed some sort of test. Pierce continued to look at me inquisitively as he held his hand out for my registration form. I waited quietly while he fished a pen from behind his ear and scrawled his initials on the crumpled paper. Expressing my thanks again, I left the room at a jog, before he had a chance to ask me anything else.

  Well, it hadn’t gone exactly as I’d envisioned, but all things considered, I was relieved. I’d managed to get signed into the class without giving Professor Pierce too much of my story. I was happy that he’d been ready to accept my claim to have experienced something out of the ordinary; I suppose I shouldn’t have been too surprised, once I thought about it. After all, his entire career was based upon his ability to believe that the impossible might be possible. Still, I felt like I was living on borrowed time. I didn’t have to explain myself that day, but that wouldn’t last very long. Sometime soon, I would have to tell David Pierce exactly why I was taking his class. I just hoped he turned out to be less of a jerk than he appeared at first glance.

  9

  UNEXPECTED GIFT

  I HAVE ALWAYS HATED WAITING ROOMS. My whole life I’ve had this mortal dread of having to sit in a waiting room. I actually have a theory about why that is. Waiting rooms are basically torture chambers designed to heighten anticipation and breed fear in those of us unlucky enough to have to wait in them. Whatever was lurking on the other side of the door was never as bad as the waiting room prepared you for. I knew this, and yet, I would always break into a cold sweat as I sat there, waiting.

  Every waiting room is only a slight variation on the universal waiting room design concocted, I believe, by scientists well versed in color and prop combinations that trigger irrational emotional responses in unsuspecting victims. The walls, if not a sterile white, are painted in some pastel color, perhaps a peach or pale blue. Hung upon these innocently hued surfaces are framed pictures, most of them neutral in content: a water color bouquet of flowers, a wheelbarrow of gardening supplies. Scattered among these are the pictures meant to calm us with their cute or humorous occupants. Children dressed in grown-up clothing or examining each other with stethoscopes grin precociously down at you. Kittens cling precariously to tree branches with captions like, “Just hanging around!”

  To escape the hypnotic stare of these photos, you can amuse yourself by counting the plastic ficus trees sprouting from baskets, or by flipping through magazines that no one but waiting rooms subscribe to. When these inane occupations fail to calm you down, you can look around at the other people sitting scattered around the room, but the barely contained panic on their faces will only amplify your own. When they took me to the hospital the night my mom died, I refused to go sit in that damn waiting room; I just sat outside on the sidewalk with a police officer. Hell must have a waiting room… or be one.

  And so I found myself outside Dr. Thomas Hildebrand’s office, which had a particularly horrible waiting room, though I had a feeling that my actual appointment was, for once, going to be worse. Karen had offered to stay with me, but I’d sent her out for coffee. There was no reason to subject both of us to the waiting room torture, and I really didn’t want the added pressure of knowing she was there. I think I’d freaked her out enough, quite frankly. And I also hadn’t quite forgiven her for making me go through with this in the first place.

  Karen had pasted on a carefully lighthearted demeanor from the moment she’d picked me up for winter break, but I wasn’t fooled. She hadn’t yet recovered from Dean Finndale’s phone call or my feeble explanations, and I could tell that there was something she wasn’t telling me. Her eyes kept darting to me anxiously the whole way home and all throughout dinner. I finally faked a headache and went up to bed at eight o’clock just to get away from her. My escape was only momentary. She dropped the real bomb when she came up to say good night.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “It’s a condition of your return to St. Matthew’s for second semester.”

  “Can they even do that? How do they have a say in my personal life like this? It’s none of their business.”

  “It becomes their business when they start investing scholarship money in you. You are an investment, Jess, and they want to see a return.”

  “And if I refuse to go?”

  “It’s this or you lose your scholarship.”

  “But a shrink?”

  “There are worse things in the world, Jess. It might even be good for you, the whole Evan thing aside. You haven’t even really dealt with your mom yet.”

  “I’m dealing.”

  “Well, now you can talk to a professional, someone who has experience with these things. You may be surprised at how much it helps.”

  “I’m pretty sure you couldn’t be more wrong about that,” I grumbled.

  Apparently she decided it wasn’t worth trying to convince me, because she left me alone after that—or so I thought. When I awoke sobbing from my familiar nightmare in the middle of the night, her slippered feet were there, casting a long shadow under the door in the light from the hallway. I’m sure she, like everyone else, thought I was completely nuts, or that I was going through some sort of post-traumatic stress thing. The difference was that she was the closest thing I had to a parent now, and she probably felt responsible for keeping me from falling apart.

  The secretary’s saccharine voice broke through my musings. “Jessica? Dr. Hildebrand will see you now.” I stood up and followed her through the door and down a narrow hallway.

  “Would you like to hang up your jacket?” she asked, gesturing to a coat rack in the corner.

  “No, thanks,” I said. It was probably childish, but having my coat with me made me feel like I was just passing through.

  The secretary knocked quietly and then, without waiting for an answer, opened the glossy paneled door.

  Dr. Hildebrand’s office was full of pretentious mahogany furniture. The doctor was sitting at his desk, his various diplomas and certificates floating above his head like halos of academia. He was overweight and balding with a bulbous nose and a weak chin that he compensated for by jutting his jaw out thoughtfully.

  “Jessica. So very nice to meet you.” Dr. Hildebrand’s voice was unctuous and fluid, like one of those narrators on self-help tapes. He probably was one, actually.

  “You too,” I lied.

  “Won’t you sit down?” He gestured to a chair that I was very glad wasn’t a sofa I was being asked to lie on. I sat.

  “So Jessica, why don’t we talk about why you’re coming to see me and what we hope to get out of these sessions.”

  Unable to identify a question that required an answer in that, I just nodded.

  “I spoke with your dean. She is very concerned about you and would feel better if you had someone to help you sort things out. I think you might feel better, too.” He smiled smarmily. “I’d like to be that person. Is that alright with you?”

  “Whatever.” Like I had a choice.

  “Splendid,” he said as he pulled a leather-bound notebook out of his desk drawer and prepared himself for whatever it was he did. I could think of nothing that was less appropriately suited to my definition of “splendid”.

  “So, Jessica, I want to start out by getting to know you a bit better. Why don’t you tell me about your childhood?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Oh, just anything at all that you would like to tell me about your life growing up.”

  I assumed that “nothing at all” was not an option, so I stuck to the basics. He started writing feverishly before I’d even opened my mouth.

  “Well, I lived with my mom growing up. I’ve never met my dad. We moved around a lot; I was born in New York City. Then we moved all the way across the country to live in San Francisco, but I was still too young to remember it. From there we moved to L. A., then to Seattle, then to Chicago, Milwaukee, Houston, Albuquerque, Richmond, Charleston, Cleveland, D.C., and finally back to New York again. My mo
m died this past summer, so I went to live with my aunt while I’m attending St. Matt’s. I’m moving out soon, though.” I felt compelled to tack on this last detail. I really didn’t care what this guy thought of me, but I didn’t want to give the impression of being a charity case.

  “And why did you move around so much, Jessica?” Dr. Hildebrand asked, tapping his gold pen loudly against his blotter.

  “My mom liked a change of scenery every once in a while.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Hildebrand smiled, jotting a note on his paper. I could feel the blood rising in my face, splashing carefully concealed anger right across my features. “And what was it your mother was so eager to run from?”

  “I never said she was running. She wanted to see the country, to have as many experiences as possible.”

  “Certainly, certainly,” Hildebrand said, clearly humoring me. I was just a little disturbed though; I did always have a feeling that my mother was trying to keep something at bay, an undefinable something that she never wanted to catch up with her. Our moves were always sudden, spurred by no change of circumstances I could identify, other than my mother’s apparent restlessness. “Life’s getting stale here, kiddo! Time to open a new door,” she’d always tell me. I usually went without complaint because complaining had never turned the Green Monster around, but it was always odd to see the gleam of relief in her eyes as we drove on to our next destination, leaving whatever mess she’d made far behind us.

  “How did the frequent moves affect you?” Hildebrand continued, with the maddening air that he already knew the answer and merely needed my confirmation.