Free Under the Light by Laura Whitcomb Page A

warmth of her underneath. The smell of her wet hair. The sound of her smacking lips as she teethed on her own fingers. The way she kept turning her head while I tried to comb her tangled hair.
    You’re wrong,
I told myself.
You’re thinking of your own baby.
Perhaps coming back from heaven had rattled my mind—my memories were pieces of two puzzles mixed together.
    Billy came up close to the photo, tapped the frame with one finger. “Look at you, you little monkey.”
    In the hall there was a Bible quote from Colossians in cross-stitching framed under glass:
Live a life worthy of the Lord.
    I was reminded of another of my sins—I had not only ranted at the women in Cathy’s church group (an episode I suspected would stain her reputation in that congregation), but also raged at Cathy, said hurtful and peculiar things—I actually told her that I was not her daughter. But since I was wearing her daughter’s body, she didn’t believe me.
    As Jenny led Billy farther down the hall, he paused at the bathroom door and fingered the latch that he had broken the day before. “Sorry,” he told her.
    Jenny blushed again, I suppose not knowing what to say.
    Which brought me to a more serious sin—I had taken Jenny’s deflowering away from her and exposed her to Billy’s body unprotected. I had no idea how foolish the boy had been in his short past, and neither had James. It was thoughtless and selfish of me to have changed Jenny’s reputation at school, linking her not only with Billy but with my beloved Mr. Brown. That false gossip about an English teacher having taken advantage of a student was buzzing about the high school, and probably the whole community, was appalling. I told Jenny’s parents that it was James—well, Billy—who was my lover and not Mr. Brown, and I think they believed me, but the harm had already been done.
    “What happened here?” Billy asked when they got to the family room. The Prayer Corner had been neatened, the burn on the carpet hidden with a throw rug. But the charred ceiling looked like the mouth of hell.
    “Sort of a protest thing when my father left.”
    “You never said you were a pyromaniac.”
    When Jenny opened the door to the master bedroom neither crossed the threshold. “My mother’s room,” she told him.
    He peered in with no comment. Next the office, where several boxes of Dan’s belongings cluttered the middle of the floor, awaiting their fate.
    “It’s kind of messy in here,” said Jenny.
    Billy gave a little laugh. “You should see our place.” Then he caught her eye. “I guess you’ve already seen it.”
    “I don’t remember that,” said Jenny.
    “Believe me, you’re not missing anything.”
    I didn’t expect Jenny to know what had happened while she was away from her body, yet I had secretly hoped I had left some residual haunting, some scent or hue that would give her a sense of me. But she seemed completely unaware of me or James.
    Billy squeezed past her into the office and tilted his head as he read the titles of books left on the shelves.
The Christian Wife, The Bible Diet, A Mother/Daughter Walk with God.
“Man, your family is religious. No offense.”
    “It’s okay.” She tried to sound lighthearted, but her sigh was weighty.
    Finally she led him into her own bedroom and he followed without hesitation. Jenny sat on the bed and watched him study everything in sight: the girlish white dressing table, the orderly closet where the sliding mirrored doors were left half open, the view from the window into the pristine garden. He stopped at the painting of the praying hands.
    “How did we get together?” He said it as if it was a rhetorical question.
    Jenny didn’t answer him, but instead asked, “What’s the last thing you remember before your memory gap?”
    “I was at a park near my house,” he said. “Getting high.”
    “So you had a drug blackout?”
    “I guess. I was just trying everything that day. Whatever I could get my hands on.