Help for the Haunted(109)

“With us?” my father said. “Downstairs?”

“No,” my mother told him. “Why don’t you come with me, Sylvester? I’ll show you.”

Since my mother had shut Rose’s bedroom door the day before, Abigail had not been outside the room and no one had been inside—as far as I knew, anyway. I assumed my father would make immediate adjustments to the sleeping arrangements, and since he left the suitcase by the stairs, I carried it to the second floor to see how things would play out. When I reached the top, though, my parents were already stepping out of Rose’s room and closing the door behind them. My father came to me, took the suitcase, and gave me a hug hello, before asking, “How would you feel, sunshine, if our guest stayed in your sister’s room a little longer?”

“Guest?” I couldn’t help repeating.

“Yes, Sylvie. You wouldn’t mind if Abigail stayed in your sister’s room while she’s here, would you?”

“What about that partitioned area in the basement? I thought—”

“You thought it was done. I know. So did your mother. But after all these years, that little project of mine has a ways to go still. There’s no electricity, for one. Not the best furniture either except for that cot and old dresser. So even though no one exactly invited our guest into Rose’s room, now that she’s there, it seems kinder to let her stay put. For a few nights anyway.”

The basement was good enough for all the other haunted people who had come here before, I wanted to say. But I held back because I knew the response he wanted—didn’t I always? And even though it left me feeling all the more guilty toward my sister, I gave it to him anyway.

In the days that followed, it hardly mattered. Whenever I was on the second floor, I stayed in my room with the door closed. Not a single time did I so much as glimpse Abigail. If she used the bathroom, if she descended the stairs to the kitchen, I never saw.

And yet, things remained quiet inside our house. My parents slipped in and out of Rose’s room so discreetly it was as though they were coming and going from a confessional. Early mornings, I heard my mother’s gentle voice praying on the other side of the wall. Evenings, I heard her reading scripture. Most often, it was the same passage from deep in the Book of Philippians, one I came to know by heart; if Abigail was paying attention, she must have come to know it too:

Do not be anxious about anything. But in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your heart and your mind in our Lord Jesus Christ.

Those words were not intended for me, but I tried my best to heed them anyway. Fighting off any anxious feelings, however, became just that: a fight. It did not help that the phone kept shrieking at all hours, until at long last my parents turned off the ringer and let calls go to the answering machine. It also didn’t help that I woke some nights to the sound of a car motoring down our street, bass thumping, as people shouted from the windows about Penny and Satan and things they believed were happening in our home. And it did not help that, despite my father’s reports to the police and his careful work of regularly resurrecting the mailbox, we discovered it knocked over, along with our garbage cans, again and again.

The initial arrangement my mother made with Albert Lynch—that he should call in a few days and see about getting his daughter—was not mentioned. Instead, a few days turned to four, four turned to five, five to eight, and on it went. One afternoon, I glimpsed my mother slipping into Rose’s room, carrying a tray of food like some do-good nurse in a ward for the infirm, when it occurred to me that Abigail had been with us a total of two and a half weeks. Seventeen days, I thought, working out the math in my head.

By then, it was early July. The official holiday had come and gone, but backyard fireworks could still be heard, popping off now and then like distant gunshots in the night. Temperatures had spiked to such a sweltering degree that my mother took to preparing cold dinners—beet soup, tuna sandwiches, tomato and cucumber salads—meals she normally reserved for the thick of August. Window fans worked overtime, whirring all over the house, blowing hot air around.

On this particular evening, my mother must have felt tired of those nonsupper suppers, so she baked a vegetable lasagna from a recipe clipped out of the newspaper. The idea sounded good, but after the oven had been on for over an hour, it created a sweltering, junglelike atmosphere in our house. Nevertheless, we took our same old seats at the kitchen table.

“I remember,” I said, swatting a mosquito that had made its way inside, “when Rose and I were little, and it got this hot, you used to take us swimming at that pond over in Colbert Township.” It was a memory none of us had talked about in years, but I could still see my sister and me in our bright bathing suits, splashing in the water, burying each other’s feet in the rocky dirt on the shore. I waited to see if my parents remembered too.

My mother kept eating, or not eating exactly, but dissecting the dish she had prepared, segregating peppers from onions from tomatoes on her plate. During the previous seventeen days—since Penny had been put in the cage, since the light had been left on below, since Abigail had arrived and my father returned home without Rose—my mother had not uttered a word about feeling unwell. And yet, I couldn’t help but sense that something about her, something unnameable, was no longer the same and, if I was truthful with myself, had not been since our trip to Ohio.