The voice, if that’s what it was, Lydia thought, came out of nowhere as far as she was concerned. She heard it, but didn’t hear it at the same time. That is, the voice seemed composed of a small mountain of sounds in some dim distance, and if she turned her attention in that direction, then she felt the sounds stacked up there, falling down into soundlessness or building up again—she couldn’t tell which—when somehow she felt the words.

She’d just been thinking of Roger, her husband, trying to recall their life together, so maybe this was a message of sorts from him, she thought. Yet again, the name and the voice didn’t seem to go together.

“It’s Roger Junior,” Lydia’s living son said for the tenth time, following the medium’s directions and feeling like a damned fool.

The candlelight flickered on the fringed table covering, touching the gilt-framed picture of Christ on the nearest knickknack-filled shelf, dancing on the edge of his sister Anna’s huge diamond ring, and on the little gold bell that sat at the medium’s fingertips. Roger’s eyes followed the candlelight as it flickered from object to object. He shifted his weight in the straight backed chair. He was tired of the whole affair and he’d come only because he had promised Anna that he would.

“The vibrations are changing,” the medium, Mrs. Always, said. She swayed gently. Her voice changed timbre. Roger looked at the glittering reflections again: They made Christ look cross-eyed, he thought nervously.

“Call her name again,” Anna whispered, in a small spooky voice. She remembered playing with a Ouija board once as a child, when the pointer suddenly went speeding across the board, seemingly all by itself. Whether it was all bunk, as Roger said, or not—one never knew. “One never knows,” she whispered.

The medium said, “Think. Concentrate. Close your eyes and try to see your mother in your mind’s eye.”

Roger did. He saw the bony finger, the boyish frame at about seventy, the intense, ironic eyes, the tailored suit she wore when she gave poetry readings. He saw her in the dungarees she used to wear most of the time and he saw her running off with that man—what was his name? Lawrence somebody—when she was past seventy. Christ; he tried to squash the image of the two bony old bodies making love in a trailer alcove. He was still scandalized by the whole affair.