Opal had read in the papers that the comet had been blamed for avalanches, windstorms, hurricanes, even rheumatoid arthritis and migraine headaches from changes in barometric pressure. “I don’t believe it,” Opal said.
“You don’t believe in science?” Maria asked. She stood and began organizing her workstation. She kept a small paintbrush in her apron pocket, and now she dusted the surface of the table with it.
“I think the comet will save us.”
Maria asked how, but Opal didn’t know.
When Maria finished dusting her own work surface, she helped Opal clear her own. “So— Are you like him? That doctor in St. Louis? The spiritualist?”
Save her, she’d heard a voice say that night in the river. She hadn’t been able to tell if it was a man’s or a woman’s—but it was as clear as if she’d lifted a telephone receiver to her ear, as clear as when Alexander Graham Bell said those famous first words ever spoken with electricity: “Mr. Watson, Come here. I want to see you.” A desire disguised as a command. A telephone requires two people to hold the line, but only one to speak.
“Yes,” Opal said. “I am a spiritualist.”
There, she’d named it.
The foreman’s buzzer signaled the end of the shift. Opal brought her attention back to her station. It was noisy, hot. Maria stood to gather her things. The floor manager collected their crates and made some tick marks on a clipboard. Their numbers.
Only after the floor manager left did Maria speak again. “I’m not asking for anything free. I’ll pay you for a cure.”
Just last spring Jagr let Opal accompany him in the woods, collecting plants he’d place in his specimen cabinet. He knew how to evaluate each plant for the potential fructification; he knew which to cut with shears and which to dig out. He dug up the roots of a shrub and balanced it so gingerly, she thought it might be an injured bird. She’d never known him to be that gentle. Opal herself could recognize by sight many medicinal species: black haw, red clover, fringe tree, wild geranium, bloodroot. She knew which plants were useful for the flower, the root, or the seed. She’d seen sick people empty their pockets for one of Jagr’s cures. He’d been a very good doctor.
“Tomorrow,” Opal said. “At lunch. We’ll sit. We’ll have a little séance.”
As she headed for home, Opal thought of a girl she once found on her porch, back in Gallipolis, when Jagr was away on a call. Her hair was red, and she couldn’t have been older than sixteen, and Opal recognized her as one of her husband’s patients who, like Opal, had been brought to him to cure her of her shame. The girl said nothing at first, just pointed. “Look,” she said.
Opal turned in the direction the girl was facing. The barn would need painting in the spring. In the fields behind it, the wheat bent their heads. Jagr would be home soon. “Do you hurt?” Opal had asked. “Are you ill?”
“Look how lovely the moon is tonight. How I wish I could hold it in my hands.”
Opal looked up to the sky and longed to see the beauty. The moon was a moon. When had Opal lost her sense of wonder? The stars once made her breathless. She could measure the vast expanse between them with her thumb and finger, capturing the distance of millions of miles with her very own hand.
“I need more medicine,” the girl said, growing somber. She clutchedher stomach, and when she caught Opal’s arm to brace herself, Opal smelled something sweet and musty, like a wound.
When Jagr arrived home, the girl was sitting by the fire, mesmerized. The flames aimed upward, spindly fingers. Jagr pressed her abdomen. He checked her pulse. “The pain medicine. She’s had too much of it,” Jagr explained.
“Please. It’s the only thing that helps,” the girl said. “Without it, I’d… I’ll do anything. I’ll—” But Opal had cut her off before she could offer something she’d regret. Jagr sent the girl away. He discarded some pills in the compost bucket that he expected Opal to dump behind the woodshed. The formula needed reworking.
Afterward, Opal had opened the lid of the compost bucket. She allowed her fingers to sink past the peels of potatoes and rinds of squash, to the pills at the bottom of the container. She placed one on her tongue. She walked to the sink and ladled water into her mouth. And then she swallowed. An hour later, she looked up to the sky. The stars were staccato beats of light. The moon was a round, fat face grinning behind the trees. It wasn’t a man at all. She stepped out on her front porch and studied the space between the stars. She thought of how these same stars held the memories of all life on the planet—that anyone who’d ever existed had seen this exact canopy overhead. Some of them were already dead. A pang of grief hit her, but it felt like ecstasy. Her longing became a kind of pleasure.
She’s had too much of it, Jagr had said. But Opal thought:I haven’t had enough.
THE LUNCHROOM WHERE OPAL ANDMaria met the next day was a converted closet, narrow and windowless, only large enough to accommodate two long tables and some chairs. To access it, one must cross through the women’s washroom, so the lunchroom was considered a private space, safe from the foreman and machinists who took their meals upstairs. Even so, most of the Earthshine Girls preferredeating their lunches near the benches out back, even in the winter, seeking a reprieve from the factory’s heat.
Maria sat in the corner. Opal pulled out the chair across from her. At the other table three women leaned into one another, with an open newspaper among them.
At first Opal and Maria said nothing to each other. Maria’s lunch pail sat on the table, untouched. Opal’s stomach grumbled against her will, the baby begging for food.
The other women in the cafeteria folded up their paper, laughing; then they stood and left.
When they were alone, Opal reached for Maria’s hand. The woman drew back. Light from the mantel lamp bounced on Maria’s face. Opal hated electrical lights, how they hummed, how they assaulted her senses, making her eyeballs throb. She preferred the natural glow of fire, how it illuminated some things and cast shadows on others. How it demanded stillness in a world intent on constant motion. Maria lowered her eyes.
Human minds are trained to resist the unfamiliar, that’s what Madame de Fleur had told her. But with time, one can grow accustomed to that which appears, at first, unnatural. It’s a matter of gradients, the incremental arriving at a place of familiarity where doubters become devotees.
Opal now took Maria’s hand. This time, she allowed it. How awkward to hold her hand, but how comfortable, too. How miraculous that human hands fit together by design, little pawed puzzles. Opal had not touched another person since she’d left Gallipolis, unless she counted the accidental brushing against shoulders at the market, which, she was loath to admit, provided her a pleasure so deep she felt ashamed.
Maria’s hands were warm, dry like her own. She studied the texture of Maria’s fingernails, the color of her palms, the visibility of blood vessels just beneath her skin—the way she’d seen Jagr do hundreds of times with his patients. Now, she clasped Maria’s wristand noted her pulse, how quickly she breathed, and the scent of her breath; she studied how frequently Maria blinked and whether her eyes looked glossy or her skin malnourished. Clairvoyance is, first, a study in observation.
“It’s a bit like telephoning,” Opal explained, how Madame de Fleur had explained it, the first time they sat together, the first time they held hands.
