Velocity

kind to me when Grandmother was dying in the hospital.”
    Barbara had been a nurse, a good one.
    “How often do you visit her?” Billy asked.
    “Once a month.”
    “Why have you never told me, Ivy?”
    “Then we’d have to talk about her, wouldn’t we?”
    “Talk about her?”
    “Talking about how she is, what she’s suffered—does that give you peace?” Ivy asked.
    “Peace? No. How could it?”
    “Does remembering how she was, before the coma, give you peace?”
    He considered. “Sometimes.”
    Her gaze rose from the pistachios, and her extraordinary brandy eyes met his eyes. “Then don’t talk about now. Just remember when.”
    Finished with two cherries, the raven paused to stretch its wings. Silently they opened and silently closed.
    When Billy looked at Ivy again, her attention had returned to her shelling hands.
    He asked, “Why did you take this snapshot with you when you visited her?”
    “I take them all with me everywhere, the most recent photos of dead things.”
    “But why?”
    “Haruspicy,” she reminded him. “I read them. They foretell.”
    He sipped his tea.
    The raven watched him, beak open, as if it were shrieking. It made no sound.
    “What do they foretell about Barbara?” Billy asked.
    Ivy’s serenity and fey quality concealed whether she calculated her answer or whether instead she hesitated only because her thoughts were divided between here and elsewhere. “Nothing.”
    “Nothing at all?”
    She had given her answer. She didn’t have another.
    On the table, in the photo, the mantis said nothing to Billy.
    “Where did you get this idea to read dead things?” he asked. “From your grandmother?”
    “No. She disapproved. She was an old-fashioned devout Catholic. To her, believing in the occult is a sin. It puts the immortal soul in jeopardy.”
    “But you disagree.”
    “I do and I don’t,” Ivy said more softly than usual.
    After the raven finished the third cherry, the naked pits were left side by side on the window sill, as if in acknowledgment of the household rules of neatness and order.
    “I never heard my mother’s voice,” Ivy said.
    Billy did not know what to make of that statement, and then he remembered that her mother had died in childbirth.
    Ivy said, “Since I was very little, I’ve known my mother has something terribly important to say to me.”
    For the first time he noticed a wall clock. It had no second, minute, or hour hands.
    “This house has always been so quiet,” Ivy said. “So quiet. You learn to listen here.”
    Billy listened.
    “The dead have things to tell us,” Ivy said.
    With polished-anthracite eyes, the raven regarded its mistress.
    “The wall is thinner here,” she said. “The wall between the worlds. A spirit might speak through if it wanted to badly enough.”
    Pushing the empty shells aside, dropping the nut meats in the bowl, she made the softest symphony of sounds, quieter even than the melting ice shifting in the tea glasses.
    Ivy said, “Sometimes in the night or in a particularly still moment of an afternoon, or at twilight when the horizon swallows the sun and fully silences it, I know she’s calling me. I can almost hear the quality of her voice… but not the words. Not yet.”
    Billy thought of Barbara speaking from the abyss of unnatural sleep, her words meaningless to everyone else, yet fraught with enigmatic meaning to him.
    He found Ivy Elgin as troubling as she was alluring. If her innocence sometimes seemed to approach the immaculate, Billy warned himself that in her heart, as in the heart of every man and woman, must be a chamber where light didn’t reach, where a calming silence could not be achieved.
    Nevertheless, regardless of whatever he himself might believe about life and death, and in spite of whatever impure motives Ivy entertained, if indeed she entertained any, Billy felt that she was sincere in her belief that her mother was trying to reach her, would continue trying, and would eventually succeed.
    More important, she so impressed him, not by reason but by the judgment of his adaptive unconscious, that he was unable to write her off as a mere eccentric. In this house, the wall between worlds might well have been washed thin, rinsed by so many years of silence.
    Her predictions based on haruspicy were seldom correct in any detail. She blamed this on her incompetence in reading signs, and would not abide suggestions that haruspicy itself was useless.
    Billy now understood her