Little Girls(44)

“There’s no need to explain yourself,” said Laurie. “Please go on.”

Teresa drank down half her coffee in two large gulps. When she set it down, Laurie could see that her hands were shaking.

“I once saw this movie about a psychiatrist who has these sessions with this mental patient. Only instead of, like, making the patient better, by the end of the movie the patient made the psychiatrist insane. It sort of felt like that, Mrs. Genarro.”

“Call me Laurie.”

“Okay.” She pressed her hands flat on the table, presumably to stop them from shaking. “You know, it’s hard to explain. His concern about the doors being unlocked, I mean.”

“How so?”

“Well, at first it was no different than how you or I would check to see if the doors are locked before going to bed. He’d follow me around the house and watch as I turned the key in each lock. He had to actually see the key turn before he was satisfied. Then we would check the windows.” The corner of her mouth turned up in a lopsided grin. “There are a lot of windows in that house. And he kept saying they were too easy.”

“Too easy for what?”

“For someone to get in.”

“Is that why they’re all nailed shut?”

“Jesus, yes. I’d forgotten about that. But he’d nailed them shut before I came on board. I wouldn’t have allowed him to have a hammer and nails.”

“Of course,” said Laurie.

“But even with them nailed shut, he didn’t trust them. So we checked the windows. This was fine with him for maybe about an hour or so, when he would forget that we had locked everything up already and he wanted to go through the house again. Like I said, we sometimes did this a couple times every night.”

Laurie shook her head. “I can’t imagine. . . .”

Teresa shrugged. It was obvious that whatever had happened after things got worse made this part seem trivial. Whatever it was, it still nested inside Teresa Larosche. She was still afraid of it.

“After a while, he became focused on one door in particular.”

“The front door?” Laurie guessed.

“No. The door off the kitchen. The one that leads out into the side yard. I thought maybe because it was dark and hidden from the road, and if you were a burglar, breaking in through that door would make the most sense.”

“But my father wasn’t thinking logically by then. He had no sense left in him.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too.”

“Did you ever ask him why he had become obsessed about that particular door?”

“Yeah, I did. But his answers never made any sense to me.”

“What were his answers?”

“Something about locking up the passageways, that passageways let it in and out like a turnstile. He actually said that—like a turnstile.”

“It lets who in?”

“Sometimes he called it the Hateful Beast,” Teresa said. “Other times, it was the Vengeance. Most times, though, he didn’t have a name for it, or at least didn’t give me one. God, it sounds so silly now, sitting here in a coffee shop telling you about it—and look at that, my hands are shaking—but it used to spook the hell out of me when he’d say it.”

“What exactly did he mean? What was ‘the Vengeance’?”

“Beats me. All I know is it scared the shit out of him and it started scaring the shit out of me, too. I assumed he got it from the Bible. He read the Bible most nights. When he was able to, anyway.”

“I never realized he had become religious.”

“You didn’t know him very well, did you?”

“Not since I was a little girl. And even then I don’t think I really knew him.”

Teresa nodded. The look on her face was one of understanding. Perhaps she had issues with her own father. “Anyway,” she went on, “I humored him, and that seemed to make us both feel better. Sometimes he’d have me lock that door five or six times. Once, he watched me lock it and when we were headed back out into the parlor, he paused in the kitchen doorway, turned around, and insisted I relock the door. Of course, for him it wasn’t relocking, because he’d forgotten we had already locked it the first time. Times like that, when the forgetting came on him so quickly, I could almost see the memories draining out of his face.

“He only really became upset when he thought someone had actually gotten into the house. He said he could hear someone, and that they were hiding from him. Sometimes he would go looking for them, shouting and stomping around the house and checking all the rooms. Other times, the poor guy would cower in his bedroom and not come out. It really freaked me out when he would get like that. I mean, it sounds so incredibly na?ve, but he started to . . . I mean, there were a few times when he had . . .”

“Yes?”

“He had started to convince me.”

“That someone was in the house?”

“Sometimes I thought I could hear someone talking softly in the next room, or that there’d be footsteps at the far end of the house. A few times I thought I caught movement out of the corner of my eye when no one was there. That sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, I know—jumping at shadows, right? I believe it now, but it was plenty real in that house when it’s the middle of the night and you’re starting to let your imagination run wild. It was like I could hear everything he could hear, and it didn’t matter if you were sane or crazy to hear it.”