The seven of clubs. Yes, it was.
“That’s great—”
“Wait,” he said. Then he ripped the card up and stuck it in the pocket of his shirt. Then he tapped the pocket with the corner of the pack. “Okay,” he said. “Reach into my pocket.” He leaned over, so the pocket fell away from his body. Inside was an intact card. I reached for it carefully. The seven of clubs.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “How did you do that?” I sat back on my chair.
“A magician never divulges secrets.”
“No,” I said. “Tell me!”
“Look it up,” he said, laughing. “I’ll give you a hint: you can find the answer in the Brewsterville Library.”
I handed the card back to him. “I was a big magic fan as a girl.”
“But not card tricks.”
“I didn’t have the patience. I didn’t do magic at all, I just read about it. I wanted to be an escape artist.”
James started shuffling again. “Yeah? You? Like Houdini?”
“Just like Houdini. I wanted to escape from milk jugs and glass booths.”
He laughed. “Can’t picture it. Why?”
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know. I never thought about it much. I guess: escaping was very dramatic, but with a happy ending. Like with the movies. I never liked comedies, because they were too silly, but I couldn’t bear tragedies because such terrible things happened at the end. And suddenly appearing after everybody has decided you were dead, that seemed like a tragedy with a happy ending.”
James started examining the face of each card, as though they were snapshots of loved ones. “Houdini had a thing about death. Didn’t he want to talk to dead people? At séances?”
“He wanted to believe he could, but he decided that he couldn’t, that nobody could. All that reading about magic, but you never wanted to be Houdini?”
James held the cards in one hand, tapped them against his chest, as if that were the start of another magic trick. “No,” he said. “Maybe I’m not that ambitious.”
“But you learned the card tricks,” I said. “I wanted to be Houdini, I just didn’t want to do the work. Or maybe I knew I couldn’t. It would have been too difficult to learn how to escape.”
“But that’s the thing of it,” said James. “It wasn’t escaping that was hard. I mean, he made it look harder than it was. He took just long enough to make the audience think he was dead. That was the real trick. Not that he was alive, because he was alive at the start and nobody was so impressed, right? The trick was he made people think he was dead.”
“Yes,” I said. “I think you’re right.”
“Maybe that’s why he could never talk to dead people. Dead people didn’t want to talk to him, because he only pretended to be what they already were.” James had an amused, pensive look on his face.
“Do you think that anyone can?” I asked.
“What?”
“Talk to the dead.”
“Here’s what I think, and lately I’ve been going over this. I think there’s definitely life after death.”
“You do?”
“Definitely. But the reason that there’s no real proof is that dead people — or spirits, or whatever — are different from us. Don’t you think?”
“I don’t know, James,” I said.
“I mean, not only do they live somewhere else — which means I guess a different language — but they believe different things. I think—” He sighed. “I thought I figured this out. Give me a minute. I think Heaven, whatever you call it, is a different religion. A really strict, different religion. As time-consuming as a serious orthodox earth religion. And that people in Heaven are just naturally not going to talk to people who aren’t part of their religion. I mean, they don’t need to convert people, that’s for sure.”
“Does everybody who dies join the same religion?”
“Yes,” said James. “You have to. And there’s no point in being religious before you die, because whatever you learn, it’s all wrong. It’s like really religious people have had this hunch, but they’ve jumped to the wrong conclusion. It’s not what you should do, it’s what you will do. You’ll convert sooner or later anyhow.”
“What about God?” I asked, though I’m not sure I wanted to know the answer. I was fairly sure he was an atheist, but it seemed a young man should have faith in the wonders of the world. On the other hand, I wanted us to have things in common.
“No such thing,” said James.
“But—”
“There’s no God. There’s just dead people.”
“So.” But I couldn’t figure out what the rest of the sentence should be. The windows were all open, and the long curtains were blown back, like the capes of magicians who had just left the room. Finally I tried, “Your mother—”
“Peggy,” he said. “Do you think my mother killed herself?”
I shrugged.
“She didn’t,” James insisted. “I would have known.” Then he said, “I was a lot of trouble for her.”
“No,” I said, though I wasn’t sure what I was disagreeing with.
“You don’t think I’m a lot of trouble?” He smiled.
“Look,” I said. He had his hand on the arm of the chair; I stood up, and I put my hand on his. This was that rarest thing in my life, an unpremeditated move toward another person. Once I’d done it, however, I felt awkward. “Your mother loved you more than anything.”
“Maybe,” he said. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. His skin was pale, scrubbed by the fluorescent lights of his hospital room, and he’d picked up a habit of his mother’s: he bit his lip, though he made it seem thoughtful, not nervous.
“No. It’s true. Everyone could see it.”
“Mothers love their kids. It’s a rule.”
“Not all of them. And not the way your mother loved you.” His hand was still under mine. I wanted to check my watch. This wasn’t the sort of thing I usually did, putting my hand on someone else’s, and I wasn’t sure how long was comforting without being unseemly. “I’ve known a lot of mothers. Most of them don’t hold a patch to yours.”
“What about your mother?” he asked.
“My mother? No,” I said. “She didn’t.”
“Didn’t what? Didn’t hold a patch or didn’t love you?”
I took my hand from his and scratched my ear. “My mother,” I said. “My mother is a good woman.”
His hand, free from mine, bounced on the chair’s arm. He opened his mouth to say something, but then changed his mind.
“I don’t know what happened to your mother,” I said. “But I know it had nothing to do with you.”
“She didn’t kill herself,” he said.
“Good.”
“No, she didn’t,” he said, as if I’d disagreed. “She would have told me. That’s one thing about her, different from everybody else around here. She was lousy with secrets. She couldn’t keep them for a minute.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“From me,” he said. “She told me everything. I mean, about her life, about my father. I knew when she had heartburn. I knew every last thing about those old ladies at the nursing home. Nobody will ever tell me the kinds of things Mom told me.”
“Somebody will,” I said, because it sounded like something he wanted. I almost said, I will, but I didn’t think I had it in me to honor that promise, not then. Worse, I didn’t think I was the one he had in mind.
“Nobody will,” he said again. “I knew everything she did all day. I knew when she was menstruating.” He stumbled over this last word, and I could tell he’d probably never said it aloud before; we both blushed. “I knew that she took sleeping pills. She took diet pills, too. I didn’t want her to. If I knew all that, don’t you think she would have told me something so big?”