The Weight of One Wish

Walter Coyne had lived on North Haven for sixty-three years. He had never gone past the dead end of Hwy 143. The road stopped at a turnaround ringed by cedars, and past that was a footpath. People said the path led to Mairenn's place. Most people who said it had never walked it themselves. The ones who had didn't talk about what they found there.

Mairenn was a psychic medium. The entire town saw her as a witch. She went to town once a month for supplies and otherwise kept to herself on the east side of the island.

Walter walked it on a Tuesday in October. Ruth had been dead for fourteen months. Two nights before, he woke at three in the morning and reached for her. His hand found nothing.

He remembered the smell of her hair in the hospital bed the last week, thin and sour under the shampoo the nurses used, because there hadn't been a point anymore in bringing her own from home. The weight of her hand in his the night she stopped talking, four fingers and a thumb gone light after five months of chemo that never slowed the cancer, only slowed her. She had pancreatic cancer. The doctor at the hospital had used the word "aggressive" the way a person talks about the weather. Walter remembered all of it. He could not remember her laughter. The not-remembering scared him worse than the parts that hurt.

The path was longer than it looked from the turnaround. Ferns grew waist-high on either side. Water moved somewhere off to his left, though he couldn't have said if it was the strait or a creek he'd never known was there. After walking ten minutes, the trees opened onto a clearing. A house stood there, cedar shakes gone silver, a porch that leaned east. Smoke came straight up from the chimney though the day was still. From somewhere behind the house, faint, came a sound like wind chimes, except there was no wind, and the sound didn't have the ring of glass or metal in it.

Mairenn stood on the porch before he reached the steps. She was a small woman with rough hands. Her voice was low.

"Walter Coyne," she said. "You've walked a long way to get here for a man who lives four miles off."

"You know why I've come?"

"I know you've come. The why is yours to tell me." She held the door open. "Or not."

The inside of the house smelled like wood smoke and something underneath it he couldn't place, sweet and a little rotten, like fruit left too long in a bowl. Jars lined a shelf against the far wall, dark glass, none of them labeled. A table stood in the middle of the room with two chairs. She sat in one and pointed him to the other. She didn't offer tea, didn't light a candle, or lay out cards. She looked at him and waited.

"I heard you grant wishes," Walter said.

"You heard wrong. I don't grant anything. I open a door if a door needs opening and if what's behind it is willing to be moved. What happens after that isn't mine to control. It's rarely free, and it's never kind."

"But people come to you. For things."

"People come to me because they've run out of other places to go, and because some part of them already knows what it costs and wants it, anyway." She folded her hands on the table. "What have you run out of, Walter?"

He told her about Ruth's laugh, and then more than he meant to — the hospital room, the machine that beeped every four seconds until a nurse finally turned the volume down, the last thing Ruth said to him before the pain medication took the rest of her words away. The wool coat still hanging by the door at home, because he could not make himself carry it to the church rummage sale. He had not talked this much in fourteen months. Mairenn did not interrupt him. Her stillness made it easier to keep going, though somewhere in the telling he noticed the wind-chime sound from outside had gotten closer, or louder, or both.

"I want to hear her again," he said finally. "One wish. That's all I want. Her laugh, once."

Mairenn was quiet. Outside, the sound stopped all at once, the way a held breath stops.

"That's not a small thing you're asking," she said. "People think wishes are small because they only cost words. This one costs more than words, and it doesn't only cost you."

"I don't care what it costs me."

"I didn't say it only cost you." Her voice didn't rise or soften. "Sit with that a moment before you tell me you don't care."

"Then tell me the terms."

"I can open the door for one hour. Ruth will sit where you're sitting now, and she'll talk to you, and if something in that hour makes her laugh, you'll hear it. But the dead don't come easy, Walter. What comes back for that hour isn't free, and it isn't whole. What crosses over for that hour isn't called up out of some waiting room where she's been sitting comfortably, missing you back. Wherever she is, she's settled there. Pulling her out costs her the settling. For that hour she'll know you. She'll know she's dead, and know she's being pulled backward through something she'd already finished, and she won't be able to say no to it, any more than you can stop a fish once the hook's already set."

Walter felt something go cold in his chest. "You're saying it would hurt her."

"I'm saying you'd be asking her to go through dying twice, the second time on your terms instead of hers, so you could have an hour you liked better than the one you already had. And when the hour's up, she doesn't go back gently. She gets pulled back the way she got pulled forward — fast, and without her say in it — and what she settles into after that might not be the same peaceful rest she had before you called her. Something in her may stay unsettled for a long while. It might never fully settle again. I've seen it happen. I don't always know beforehand which door will close cleanly and which one leaves a draft."

"And the two who took it," Walter said. "Their fourteen months. You said they lost those."

"They lost that, yes. That part's true, and it's the part I always tell first, because it's the part people can understand before they've had time to think too hard. But it's not the only cost, and it was never the worst one. The two who took the door didn't just come home lighter by fourteen months of memory. They came home to houses where things weren't right afterward. A door that wouldn't stay shut in a house with no draft. A cold spot on the stairs that hadn't been there before. One of them told me, a year on, that some nights she'd hear something in the kitchen at three in the morning, moving the way her husband used to move, opening the cupboard the way he used to open it, and when she went down to look, nothing was there."

Walter sat with that. Through the window, the light outside had gone the flat gray of a sky about to rain, though the forecast that morning had said clear.

"Why would you even offer that," he said. "Why would you open a door like that for anyone?"

"Because I don't decide what's fair. I only tell people what's on the other side, and let them decide if they still want it. Some do. Grief makes people trade things they'd never trade sober, and I've learned not to talk them out of it, because talking them out of it isn't mine to do either. But I tell them the truth of the cost, every time, plain as I can say it, so that whatever they choose, they choose it with their eyes open." Something crossed her face. It might have been sorrow. "I don't always get to see what it costs them afterward. That part I do carry."

"If I say no," Walter said, "what happens to me?"

"Nothing happens to you. You walk back down the path. You go home. The fourteen months stay yours, all of them, the bad with the parts that hurt less. Ruth stays settled, wherever settled is, undisturbed by anything you asked of her. Someday you'll remember her laugh on your own. Not because I gave it to you. Because that's what time does, if you let it, if you don't dam it up asking the dead to pay for what you're not ready to carry yourself."

"You make it sound as if the wish is a cruelty."

"I don't make anything sound like anything. I tell you what it costs and who pays it, and let you weigh those against each other." She let go of the table's edge, and for the first time Walter saw that her hands had been gripping it, knuckles pale, as though the telling had cost her something too. "Two people found out the hard way that the ones you love don't always come back from being loved wrong. I'd rather you not be the third."

Walter thought of Ruth in the hospital bed, the machine counting her breaths for her because she'd stopped trusting her own lungs to do it. Her hand going light as a bird's foot in his. Now he was being asked to put that same woman, already gone through all of that once, through the leaving of it again, backward, on a string he was holding, so that he could have one hour of a sound he missed.

"I don't want it," he said. His voice came out rougher than he meant it to. "I won't put her through that so I can feel better for an hour."

Mairenn nodded. It wasn't a nod of surprise. "That's the first true no I've heard in this house in a long while."

"What happens to the two who said yes? Is there any undoing it?"

"No. What's pulled through doesn't go back to being exactly what it was. I can't close a door I've already opened, only tell you before you open it what it's likely to cost." She stood. The visit, or whatever it had been, was over. "Go home, Walter. Let her rest. That's the kindest thing left for you to give her, and you can give it to her without anyone paying for it but you, in time, the slow way."

Walter walked back down the path alone. The ferns brushed his hands. The water sound, wherever it came from, was still there off to his right, and this time it didn't sound like water at all, but he didn't turn around to check.

He didn’t hear Ruth's laugh that week or the next. On a gray morning in November, restocking a shelf of canning jars at the department store with the radio on low, a song came on that Ruth used to sing along to, always half a beat behind the melody. Something in his chest turned over, not exactly pain, not joy either, the two of them arriving at once like a deep loneliness. He set down the box in his hands and stood still in the aisle, letting it move through him.

He still had not heard the laugh. But standing there, he understood he hadn't lost it. It was still in him somewhere, waiting for him to be ready. He thought of Ruth settled somewhere he couldn't follow her to, undisturbed, resting the way a person is supposed to rest once the hard part is finally over. For the first time in fourteen months, the thought didn't put a weight on his chest. It just sat there, plain, and stayed that way.

He went back to stocking the shelves. He finished the row and closed up the box. A woman was waiting at the register with a jar of pickling spice and a five-dollar bill, and he counted her change into her palm, and by the time she'd said thank you and gone, the path past the dead end of Hwy 143 was nowhere in his thoughts at all.