The Séance Ladder

Anya's car crunches up the gravel drive at half past seven, and the first thing she sees is not the hives or the candles. It is the truck. A green Ford, mud on the wheel wells, parked crooked the way Luke always parked everything.

She sits in the driver's seat with the engine off and her hands still on the wheel.

"Well, hell," she says to the windshield.

She is sixty-two years old, born in Leicester to a Punjabi mother and an English father. She has done three national tours, buried a mother, survived a hip replacement, and sat through more opening nights than she can count. And a parked truck has just turned her stomach over like she is twenty-four again.

She had assumed he would not come. Assuming it was the entire point. Odessa had said on the phone, "Luke might pop round, he's back in the country for a bit," and Anya had said "lovely" in the exact tone she uses for disappointing news in a script. Then she had spent forty minutes deciding on a scarf.

She gets out. The evening smells like woodsmoke and flowers, and somewhere behind the stone wall a few bees are still working late. The yard is strung with little lanterns. Painted hives in blue and yellow line the fence like a row of small loud houses. A long wooden table sits in the middle, covered in candles, wine bottles, and a Ouija board that still has a thrift shop price sticker on the corner.

Odessa comes around the bothy wiping her hands on her apron. She is sixty-two and built as if she argues with weather for a living. She lights up when she sees Anya.

"There she is! The famous actress, come to my yard."

"Retired actress. Mostly. Semi-retired."

"Come here." Odessa hugs her hard enough to mean it. Then she pulls back and looks at Anya's face, and her grin goes knowing. "You've seen the truck."

"I've seen the truck."

"He arrived twenty minutes ago. Brought wine. Good wine, not beekeeper wine."

"Odessa."

"What? I'm saying nothing. I'm hosting a séance. I'm a neutral party."

Anya laughs despite herself. "You invited him on purpose."

"I invited everyone on purpose. That is what inviting is." Odessa links arms with her and steers her toward the table. "Now sit. Ahmed brought biscuits shaped like bones. He is very proud of them."

***

Ahmed is already at the table. He is Odessa's neighbor, sixty-three, a retired electrician with a white beard and a cardigan that has clearly outlived several cardigans. He stands when Anya approaches, which nobody has done for her in years.

"Miss Anya. My late wife watched you on the telly. She'd be thrilled I'm meeting you, if she weren't busy discussing matters with the other side tonight."

"That's the sweetest thing anyone's said to me at a séance."

"Only séance you've been to."

"Only séance I've been to," she agrees.

Then she turns, and there he is.

Luke is standing by the ladder. A tall orchard ladder, wooden, leaning against the old stone wall of the bothy. He has a glass of wine in one hand and he is looking at the hives like they might explain themselves. He is sixty-four now. His hair has gone white at the temples and his shoulders have settled lower, but he stands the same way, weight on one heel, like a man perpetually about to step off something.

He sees her. He does not say anything for a second.

"Hello, Luke."

"Anya." He says her name carefully, like setting down a full glass. "You look... well. You look well."

"You look well too. That's a terrible sentence. We're both terrible at this."

"We were never good at it," he says, and something in her chest loosens, because he is smiling.

"Thirty-eight years and that's the opener."

"I've been working on it since 1987. That was the draft."

She laughs. God, she laughs.

Odessa calls everyone to the table, saving them both from whatever came next. "Seats! Seats, everyone. Ahmed, you're at the head, you're the guest of grievance. Anya, there, next to Luke. Luke, there. Don't argue, it's a small table."

There is no room to argue. The benches are close and the candles take up half the surface. Anya sits and her shoulder is a hand's width from Luke's. Then he shifts to let Ahmed pass behind him, and the hand's width is gone. Their shoulders touch, wool on wool, and stay touching.

Neither of them moves away. Anya stares at the Ouija board and thinks about her knee, her knee, think about your knee.

The candles flicker in a wind that comes over the wall. Odessa pours the wine.

"So," Odessa says, settling at the corner like a judge. "Rules. We are here to contact the dead, politely. Fingers stay light on the planchette. No pushing, no cheating, and if anything actually spooky happens, Ahmed has a torch and I have a smokehouse full of bees, so we're covered."

"What about the cat?" Ahmed says.

"Ahmed, we're getting to the cat."

"My cat, Mr. Buttons. He died in March. Eleven years old. Fat as a church loaf. I want to know if he is at peace and whether he is eating well wherever he is."

"That's a lovely question," Anya says.

"It's the only question. My wife and I, we never had children. We had that cat. She'd want to know he's all right, and I'd like to think he's sitting on someone's warm dresser."

Everyone puts two fingers on the planchette. The candle flames lean. Out past the wall, a bee gives up on the day, one long lazy buzz fading.

"Is anybody with us tonight?" Odessa asks the board, in a voice she probably uses on new volunteers at the hive. "Knock once for yes. Well, slide once for yes. Board rules."

Nothing happens for a long while. The planchette drifts a little, because four people's hands always drift a little. Then it slides, slow and deliberate, to the letter M.

"M," Odessa says. "M. Who is M?"

"Mice," Luke says.

Anya snorts into her wine.

"What?" Ahmed says.

"Nothing against your cat," Luke says, dead calm, fingers still on the planchette. "But if I'm a cat and I've just arrived in the afterlife, I'm not answering messages. I'm chasing celestial mice. Whole fields of them. No fences. It's a paradise of mice and he's leaving us on read."

"Luke," Odessa says.

"That's a good cat, mind. That's a cat with priorities."

Ahmed is trying to look offended and failing completely. "You think Mr. Buttons is chasing mice."

"I think if there's a heaven for cats, it's mostly mice, and he earned it. Eleven years of that diet you had him on, he's owed a few thousand mice."

"He was not fat. He was substantial."

"He was round, Ahmed. He was a lovely round boy."

"He had dignity."

"He had a face like a doorknob and everyone loved him. Both things can be true."

Ahmed laughs then, a big helpless laugh, and wipes his eyes with the heel of his hand. "All right. All right. Mice. That's not the worst answer." He looks at the board. "Mr. Buttons, if you can hear me, pace yourself on the mice."

The planchette, under four drifting hands, slides to the letter P.

"P," Anya says. "P... maybe?"

"Pace," Luke says. "He heard you."

"Don't encourage him," Odessa says, but she is grinning.

The wind comes again and the candles gutter and steady. Anya becomes aware, very precisely, of the warmth of Luke's shoulder against hers, and of the fact that her hand is on the planchette and his hand is on the planchette, and their fingers are overlapping by one knuckle.

She should move her hand. She does not move her hand.

"Hold on," Odessa says, tilting her head. "Is somebody trying to say something?"

The planchette pulls, or seems to pull, toward the corner of the board. Toward GOODBYE.

"Rude," Ahmed says.

"Or finished," Odessa says. "Or the wind. It's a thrift shop board, it came with an ex-wife's regrets written in the box, probably."

"Is that true?" Anya asks.

"No. But it should be!" Odessa sits back and stretches. "Right. The dead have signed off early. Wine's not going to drink itself, and I've got honey cake that needs judging."

They lift their fingers off the board. Anya's knuckle leaves Luke's last, a half second late, and she knows he notices, because he looks at her then. Not at the board. At her.

"Thirty-eight years," he says quietly, under Odessa's noise about cake.

"Thirty-eight," she says.

"I kept meaning to write."

"I kept meaning to not care."

"Did it work?"

"No," she says. "It did not work at all."

Ahmed leans over with the biscuit tin. "Bone biscuit? They're ginger. I made them myself, don't tell my doctor."

Anya takes one. Her hand is steady, which surprises her, because under the table her knee is touching Luke's knee now, and the night is only starting.

Anya looks down the table and finds Luke already looking at her. It is the same look. That is the strange part. Ahmed is laughing about his cat, Odessa is up and gathering plates, and Luke is looking at her the way he used to look at her across a crowded student union, thirty-eight years ago, when the look meant one thing only. It meant, we are the only two people in this room who get the joke, and it usually led to the door.

She raises an eyebrow at him. He almost smiles.

"That look used to get us thrown out of parties," she says.

"Which parties?"

"The McKenzie ones. The flat with the broken radiator."

"Ah." He leans back. "The one where the host fell asleep standing up."

"You remember."

"I remember carrying your coat. I remember everything about leaving those parties, and almost nothing about arriving."

"That is a flattering way to put it."

"It's an accurate way to put it."

Odessa comes back out with a tray and no patience. "Up. Table's moving inside. Anya, you're on lantern duty. Ahmed, stop feeding the invisible cat."

"There's honey cake?" Ahmed says, already standing.

"There is honey cake, and you will rate it honestly, which means you will lie and say it's the best one yet."

"It is the best one yet," Ahmed says. "You only made three."

Odessa points at Luke with a cake knife. "You. There's something I'm meant to be cross with you about and it's bothering me."

"Odessa. Twenty-odd years of Christmas cards, and this is the greeting."

"No. It's not the cards. It's..." She waves the knife at him. "It'll come to me. Inside, all of you. There's a fire and the midges are organizing."

They move inside. Anya carries the lanterns and sets them on the windowsill of the bothy, and the room fills up with candlelight and honey cake and Ahmed's opinions about icing. Anya sits on the bench with her wine and lets it happen around her. Odessa tells a story about a swarm in a postbox. Ahmed tells one about wiring a shed in 1988 and getting it backwards. Luke laughs in the right places.

Anya watches him and thinks, he stands the same way. Weight on one heel, waiting.

Odessa pours more tea. "Anyone want the tour of the new hives? I've got one queen who is a tyrant and I want witnesses."

Ahmed is up like a shot. Luke hesitates, and Anya sees it, the hesitation, the glance at her.

"Go on," she says. "I'll mind the fire."

"You don't have to."

"I know. Go. Argue with her about bees. She'll enjoy it more with an audience."

Luke goes. The door shuts and the room goes quiet and Anya sits there with her wine, feeling thirty-eight years tall.

* * *

Ten minutes later she is back outside. She tells herself it is for the lantern she left on the table, which is true, which is convenient. The yard is dark and the lanterns make little pools along the fence and the hives sit there in their