After You Were Gone by Vikki Wakefield

Author:Vikki Wakefield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2022-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

AFTER

Jess was visiting me at Kelly’s property for my birthday. She’d planned to stay for a couple of weeks. Like me, she hadn’t found her path: flitting from place to place, job to job, living from day to day, and her relationships were brief and unfulfilling. A case of it’s not you, it’s me, she said. At the time she was working as a supermarket merchandiser, couch-surfing with friends. All her belongings were crammed in the back of her car. Kelly said she could stay as long as she needed, but I knew that, by the end of the two weeks, Jess would be gone. We were alike in that way, too.

We were trying to make dough for pizza. So far we’d made glue and managed to talk about everything but my missing child and our increasingly distant mother.

‘Do you remember when you and Cass were supposed to be babysitting, and you tried to hold a seance?’ Jess said out of the blue. ‘You got a message saying kill them all and you both ran into my bedroom screaming. As if a ten-year-old could save you.’

‘I remember.’

‘Cass told me there was a girl who haunted my room. She said she could see her sitting on the end of my bed. I couldn’t sleep for months after that.’

‘When?’ I said, horrified. It sounded exactly like something Cass would do.

‘That same night.’

I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry. She could be cruel like that. Anyway, Cass pushed the glass. I just let myself get caught up in her hysteria. I always did.’

‘How do you know she pushed it?’

‘She never admitted it, but I knew.’

‘Oh. So nothing really happened.’ She looked disappointed.

‘Nothing happened because there’s nothing out there,’ I said.

‘What if there is and you’re just not open to it?’ Jess leaned close. ‘How do you feel about having a reading?’

‘You mean like the Tarot?’

She rummaged in her handbag and pulled out a card. ‘I got the name of a psychic—Rose DeCamillo. She comes highly recommended.’

‘I bet. You don’t believe that shit, Jess, do you?’

‘She helps with real missing-persons cases.’ Jess gave me a beseeching look. ‘Look, at the very least it’ll be good for a laugh. I need a good laugh.’

‘At my expense. She’ll know all about us from the newspapers. She’ll have a research team and a thing in her ear feeding her information.’

Jess shook her head. ‘I’ll book under a fake name. It can’t hurt, right?’

She was wrong—hope hurt. More than letting go.

If I thought about psychic phenomena it was to feel mild disgust that there were people who built empires on a foundation of grief. I had no faith in a god who had created the universe, controlling the fates of billions. I didn’t believe there was anything after death, just life, then nothing—no reckoning, no higher consciousness, no light. Punishment for sin took place here on earth, or else the sinner got away with it. But at my lowest, I didn’t care how I found answers, only that they came.

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