The Medium

Chapter One

Chapter One

Lenny never could decide whether he and Mara were a thing. Sometimes he thought they were, and sometimes they definitely weren’t, and sometimes it was just completely impossible to say what they were. He knew he loved her and she loved him back, but he was never sure whether either of them was ever in love.

He did know she was exactly the right shape. She fit perfectly under his arm, up against his side, like they were puzzle pieces. They matched.

It was two in the morning, or maybe later. Lenny lounged on one end of the couch, and Mara was where she fit, there beside him. His mouth still tasted like cheap wine, the kind that leaves a sweater on your tongue. It had been hours since the real television stopped and the endless commercials started. The light from the screen caught on two glasses, two bottles on the table. It lit Mara’s face. She had fallen asleep.

He let her stay there. Neither of them had anywhere to be in the morning. A night on the couch wouldn’t hurt her.

Saturday came too early. He could still taste the wine, even worse the next day. Mara had slid down from his chest to his thigh. He was okay with that. She was warm.

He slid her off as carefully as he could, replacing himself with a rolled-up blanket, and shuffled off to make coffee. After a couple of cups, he could start to function.

Mara stumbled in after him when the coffee maker started to growl. Her hair stuck up on one side, and a red fan-shape of creases crossed her cheek. Her eyes were puffy.

“Morning?” she mumbled.

“Yeah. Sorry to say, it is.”

“No school.”

“Nope. ‘S Saturday.”

“Good. That’s good.” She went around him and pulled two mugs from the cabinet, set them on the counter and grabbed milk from the refrigerator. The calendar stopped her.

“Your conference is next weekend?”

“Yeah.”

“You packed?”

“Nah. G-gotta do laundry first.”

The milk carton clunked down, and one of Mara’s arms went around Lenny’s waist. Her chin fit perfectly into the crook of his neck and shoulder. “Bring me a tee shirt.”

“M’kay.”

Just then, he was pretty sure they were a thing.

The week went past like a greased cat. He re-administered a test and launched various objects across the football field with a catapult his students built and didn’t get a moment’s peace before Thursday afternoon.

He and Mara got home around five thirty. They were both dead beat, but teachers never have the option of kicking back. He had to go through one more time and make sure he had everything he was going to need. Mara disappeared into her half of the duplex for an hour and then wandered back with a bowl of spaghetti. She symbolically offered him some, and as always, he declined.

“You know,” she said, “I heard some of the kids talking. At least one of them is pretty sure the reason you never eat is because you’re actually a robot, and you go home and plug in at night to recharge.”

She snickered. Lenny didn’t. He was too busy looking for one more pair of socks.

“Yep. I c-can shoot lasers out of my eyes, t-too.”

She laughed harder.

“Got everything?” she asked, wiping a red smear of sauce off the tip of her nose.

“Working on that.”

“Clothes for three days? Aspirin, notebook, pens… Reading material for the bus? Or knitting stuff?”

He wasn’t about to take knitting stuff on the bus. The last thing he needed was to make friends with yet another elderly lady or accidentally poke someone in the arm with a needle. It was tempting to go off to Austin and come back with one more sweater for Mara, but the logistics were just difficult.

He held up a small stack of battered paperbacks he’d snagged from the library’s too-old-to-keep box.

“Bunny?”

She was teasing, and he knew it, but he still shifted uncomfortably. The bunny in question was an antique toy, made of white wool, with a faded letter K stitched onto its chest in once-red silk. It sat on his bed during the day and sometimes at night, too. He didn’t sleep with a stuffed animal, he always insisted; he just liked the smell of it.

“You c-can take care of the bunny while I’m gone.”

“Looks like you’re set, then.”

“Well… I hope so.”

She snorted and pressed her cheek against his back, being careful not to get spaghetti sauce on him.

“It’s weird,” she said, “thinking about you being gone for a weekend. Who am I gonna pester?”

He zipped up his suitcase and set it by the door, shoved his notebooks and novels into his backpack, zipped that, and flopped down onto the edge of the bed to stress about the trip in the morning.

They got up early on Friday. At that time of year, they were always up before dawn, but he had somewhere to be, and Mara was his ride. He struggled into khakis, a sweater, and a windbreaker, and tossed his suitcase and backpack into the rear seat of Mara’s Datsun. He waited while she slapped on makeup and shoved her hair into a straining scrunchie.

He handed her coffee in a vacuum mug and climbed into the car, sitting quietly while she peeled out of the driveway. He could handle early mornings, but until she’d finished her first cup, Mara was only one bad joke away from homicide. She chugged most of it at the first light they hit.

Abilene wasn’t a big place, and the streets were dead empty before daylight. There was only one other car in the parking lot at the bus station, an orange sports car sprawled across three parking spaces. Mara screeched into a space on the far end and had jumped out of the car almost before the keys were out of the ignition. Lenny pulled himself out more slowly while she fished around in the back for his suitcase and backpack.

“I am so sleeping through lunch today,” she growled. “Ugh. And study hall. Do you think they’ll rat on me?”

He shrugged and slung his backpack over his shoulder. Mara’s breath steamed in the freezing air. His didn’t, and he prayed she didn’t notice. But then, she never had before. He was already losing feeling in his fingers.

She smiled. “Have a good trip, Len.”

He shifted his backpack and picked up his suitcase.

And Mara bowled him into the side of the Datsun, pressed her hips against his, grabbed him by the collar of his jacket, and kissed him hard. Compared to the air, her lips were boiling hot. It’s strange what people remember from moments like that. Lenny remembered that she stepped on his foot and that she was the only person he’d ever known who put honey in her coffee.

When she stepped back, she looked almost confused.

“Hm,” she said. “I’m going to have to keep thinking about that.”

Then she slammed back into the driver’s seat, started up, and drove away, leaving him choking on exhaust and unexpected signals.

He didn’t remember much about waiting for the bus. He must have sat there for the hour or so before it came. He must have gotten on, picked a seat, stowed his stuff. Mostly, he remembered thinking.

He had thought about Mara before, about being with her. He’d only been in love once, and he knew whatever he felt for Mara didn’t feel like that, but it had been too many years since Kate, and he did wonder sometimes whether it was time to let her go. But mourning had become a part of him, like a bad habit, and though the agony was past, the habit stuck around. He knew he couldn’t fall in love again if he was still in love with a ghost.

He cycled through the old standbys.

They were friends. He didn’t want to risk that.

They were colleagues. He didn’t want to risk that, either.

He loved her, and he was pretty sure she loved him back, but there was no way for him to say whether he could ever be in love with her. Kate was still in the way.

Mara was beautiful. He had always thought so, but he’d never been and would never be attracted to her. He couldn’t be, not in that way. It wasn’t in his nature.

And that brought him to the last point. His nature.

No one had ever stared at him in horror and breathlessly demanded to know what he was. It never happened like that. He hated having that conversation, though, so he usually made sure it took place over a cup of coffee and tried not to stutter too badly.

“So, some of my quirks aren’t actually neuroses. It’s not that I don’t eat in public because I can’t stand being watched; I actually don’t eat at all. I guess I could, but it makes me sick. Not going near the river? Yeah, I don’t really like running water, but even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to cross it. Playing catch-and-release with the spiders? You would, too, if you could feel them die…”

He muttered it under his breath and grimaced. Words were not his forte.

The full answer to that question had two parts, and while neither was particularly complicated, the two came together to make something tricky.

Most people were usually looking for the fact that he was dead. More specifically, undead. That had never bothered him, but it bothered other people, sometimes a lot, so most of the time he let people assume he was a walking pile of tics and phobias. Mara didn’t mind. That was one of the reasons he loved her.

The second part, the tricky part, was that he was a medium. He saw ghosts, but it was more than that. The clue was in the word itself. A medium was something—someone—in the middle, between. Between two worlds, between alive and dead. Even when he was alive, part of him had been dead, and once his body died, he was—paradoxically—still alive. It made sense to him, but it was impossible to articulate, so he usually explained what he was able to do and left it at that. His superpowers, he said, though only with irony. When they needed it, he could help ghosts to cross over. When they needed it, he had no choice.

It was tricky because he also felt death. He felt terrible for saying that some deaths hurt him less than others, but it was true. It was easiest to handle little things, like when someone stepped on an ant. Murder hurt like he was the one dying. A medium can’t kill, so a medium who ended up as a vampire was just a joke. He had never wanted to kill, but sometimes he wished he could’ve been dangerous. Danger was impressive; Lenny wasn’t.

Mara wasn’t the kind to freak out, though. He knew her well enough that he wasn’t worried about frightening her. More likely, she would call him a liar, and he’d have to prove himself.

They kicked him off the bus in Austin in time to prevent him from having a nervous attack. He forced his brain out of high gear long enough to call a cab and check in at the hotel and had just enough time to dump his stuff on the bed, change clothes, and run to the ballroom for the first-night mixer.

There are more male science teachers than other kinds of teachers, but the hall was still a swimming pool of estrogen. Lenny huddled in the corner with the shyer members of his s*x and stressed about Mara.

Teachers’ conferences were draining. He didn’t like sleeping in a strange place, trying to make small talk with a lot of people he didn’t know, with every third one of them offering him unwanted advice to help with his stutter. He’d done speech therapy. Tea didn’t help. Talking with a mouthful of marbles didn’t help. Repeating lines from movies didn’t help. He didn’t like listening to them complain about work and about their colleagues. Teachers are wonderful people, on the whole, but put a bunch of them in a room together, and they turn into a bunch of chickens, squawking and pecking each other to death. That was probably true of any profession, though.

He sat quietly and pretended to pay attention while he played out scenes with Mara in his head. The words had to be just right, and he would need to know them beforehand, or else he would ramble, and she would never understand.

Suddenly, he realized that the applause was a little more heartfelt than it had been, and the speakers were blasting Texas, Our Texas, and everyone stood, and then it was over. A few people hurried to find friends they had made. Some exchanged business cards or telephone numbers. Most made for the doors. Lenny sat still waited for the tide to pass him by, then rode out on the back end of the wave. It deposited him at the hotel bar, which seemed like as good a destination as any. Such a long weekend deserved a beer. He already knew he would be sleeping for most of the bus ride back home, so a tiny hangover wouldn’t hurt anything.

He unpinned his name tag and stuck it in his pocket, shuffled into the smoky room, and went to get himself a drink.