“Finish about the patient,” I prodded him.
He scooted over and waited, and after a moment, I took a seat beside him on the futon.
His slight smile conveyed his pleasure before he took a breath. “I told her that perhaps I could make a trip out to her home and we could have a look at her place together.”
“Seems reasonable.”
“Yes. She agreed and wanted to go to her house, and since I was free until later in the day, I agreed.”
The woman, Alice Perkins, whose name he shared with me, knowing I’d never tell another living soul, had opened the front door, and Benji leaned in, saying hello because he was certain he’d heard someone call out a greeting to them.
“And what’d Alice say?” I asked.
“She explained to me she lived alone, and if, heaven forbid, there was another person in the house, then that was not necessarily a good thing.”
He told me that, as he stood there in the foyer of her home and then slowly made his way farther in, he felt something brush by him, and he turned and offered his hand to whatever it was.
“I think the normal gesture of greeting, of meeting someone for the first time, made all the difference.”
Apparently, the spirit, entity, whatever someone wanted to call it, who had come to visit was Alice’s sister. She’d come to comfort Alice in her loneliness after her husband’s death. The sisters had become estranged when Alice married, and now her sibling wanted to reconnect.
“But Alice couldn’t connect with her through the veil.”
“The veil?” I repeated, trying not to let my cynicism show.
“What should I call it instead?” he asked irritably.
“Never mind that. So Alice’s sister—what was her name?”
“Geraldine.”
“Okay, Geraldine came to do a good thing, to comfort her sister, but she ended up scaring her instead.”
“Exactly.”
“And you figured this out how?”
“By asking yes-and-no questions Geraldine answered with a series of knocks.”
“You’re telling me there was knocking on what, a wall?”
“Yes. They were responses to questions I posed. There was one knock for yes and two for no. It was clear, precise communication.”
I wouldn’t go so far as to say clear or precise, but he’d asked me to listen, so I was.
“Shaw,” he began, trying to sit up, but I gently put my hand on his shoulder to keep him there. “I know how it sounds, but––”
“I’m not trying to upset you,” I explained, keeping my voice soft. “It’s just—it sounds like something out of a movie.”
“I know, but I swear it happened,” he insisted, exhaling but staying where he was.
“And how long did it take?”
“Three days,” he admitted, grimacing. “And that sounds bad too, I know, but ghosts have a limited amount of energy. They have to recharge.”
I nodded because I didn’t want him to have to stop and argue with me. I wanted to hear how the event had impacted him.
He shook his head. “I know what you’re thinking, but that experience changed my life.” His smile lit up his face. “When Geraldine said what she needed to say, with my help, and Alice cried and said how much she missed her and would always love her, I mean, I—Shaw,” he rasped, “there was such closure, and in that moment, the house somehow seemed brighter, and everything changed. The sun came in.”
I nodded. “Did it occur to you that maybe talking about her sister was the outlet Alice needed? That perhaps the relief was from that alone?”
“Enough to change the physical feeling of the home?” he asked skeptically.
“But is that what happened?”
He exhaled sharply. “There’s no way to convince you without you having been there, without you having seen the change in the atmosphere, in everything all around us. It was incredible, and Alice was crying, and her relief was overwhelming.”
I was certain the woman had felt much better after relieving herself of the emotional burden she’d been carrying around. What he was somehow missing, for whatever reason, was that he’d helped his patient with nothing more than some good old-fashioned therapy. They’d talked out her issue, he’d allowed her to vent her feelings about her sister, and then to forgive her. It was therapeutic, cathartic, but not a ghost leaving a house. It was not the end of a haunting.
“I helped her,” he assured me.
“I have no doubt you did,” I agreed quickly, allowing him to take hold of my hand. “I’m sure you helped her, but the question is how. Through what process?”
“By speaking to a spirit and cleansing her home,” he declared, the moments between eye blinks getting longer and longer. “I facilitated her sister’s leaving.”
“Or you talked to a woman who needed closure, and she did that with you.”
“No,” he murmured, yawning. “You weren’t there. You don’t know.”
“I wasn’t there,” I affirmed, doing what my mother did when I was little and using my thumb to stroke over the bridge of his nose. His eyes dipped closed and didn’t reopen. “But there’s no such thing as ghosts.”