Help for the Haunted(11)

For a while at least, Rose left her alone. I took care of the laundry. Slipped into my pajamas. Spent time completing a paper I’d been writing for the first ever Maryland Student Essay Contest—a two-hundred-dollar cash prize would be awarded to a student in each grade from fifth through twelfth and the deadline was the next morning. My topic was inspired by a documentary my mother and I had watched about the aftereffects of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. When I mentioned it to Ms. Mahevka, my pasty, yawning English teacher, she told me it was “overreaching” considering my age. I kept at it for weeks anyway, my electric typewriter conking out before I did, since the last of my ink cartridges ran dry that night. The letters of my final sentence were so faint I backspaced and typed over them again and again.

“Boo!”

I glanced up to see Rose lurking in my doorway. “Stop it.”

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Just homework.”

“What kind of homework?”

The kind you never do, I thought. “A paper. I’m finishing the last line.”

“Read it to me.”

“The entire paper?”

“No. The last line.”

“Why?”

[page]“I don’t know. Guess I’m curious what goes on inside that egghead of yours.”

Why I did not simply refuse her request, I don’t know. Maybe the pride I felt clouded my judgment. I cleared my throat and, rather than read, recited: “Only by entering into the most crystalline of consciousnesses and by raising our voices vociferously enough to be heard by those in power will the citizens of this great but troubled country of ours send such bigotry and phobia tumbling toward obsolescence.”

Rose stared at me, blinking. “Now that you’re done speaking in tongues, what are your plans tonight?”

I tugged the sheet from the machine and placed it beneath the others on my desk. My parents had given me that typewriter, a brand-new Smith Corona Spell Right, for Christmas, and even though other students were getting pricey word processors, I treated it like a favorite pet, wiping down the keys and fitting the dustcover over the top after unplugging the cord. Rose kept her eyes on me, smirking. So many things she’d been given ended up neglected, like those mahogany horses, gifts to each of us from Uncle Howie on one of his rare visits. I’d given mine fairy-tale names that suited their looks: Esmeralda, Sabrina, Aurora, Megra, Jasmin—and arranged them on my shelf according to color and height. Rose’s had long been banished to a dark corner of her room.

When I was finished shutting down the typewriter, I pulled back the covers on my bed, climbed in, and turned off the light. “Good night, Rose.”

“Come on, Sylvie. It’s early! Why turn in when Dot the Twat is soaking her lazy bones in the next room? The woman’s just begging for us to mess with her.”

“Seven-twelve.”

“Enough with the seven-twelves already. It’s like some pathetic police code. Ten-four good buddy.”

“Good buddy is more of a trucker saying than cops.”

“Whatever. The point is, I’m not a baby. So therefore, I don’t need a babysitter. Especially some fart-face who comes around here claiming she’s going to take care of us when all she’s doing is taking care of her own fat ass. You mean to tell me a substitute nurse at a children’s hospital is smarter than me? I don’t think so. And even if she is, there’s no way she’s smarter than you, Sylvie. Listen to that sentence you wrote. That is not the sentence of a person who requires a babysitter. That’s why I’ve taken the liberty of locking Dot in the bathroom.”

My eyes, which had fallen shut, snapped open. “What?”

“I locked Dot in the bathroom.”

I reached over and switched on the lamp. Got out of bed. Slipped on my slippers. Walked across the hall to my parents’ room. On account of our father’s back trouble, they had slept separately for as long as I could recall. Their room resembled one in a roadside motel: two full-size beds, a nightstand between, even a bible tucked in the drawer. On this particular night, a bright yellow rope stretched from my mother’s heavy wooden bedpost to the bathroom door. Behind that door, Dot hummed away, making bubbling sounds in the water, oblivious to her predicament.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Rose whispered.

“I don’t think it’s pret—”

Rose yanked me into the hall. “Don’t blow this with your big mouth. Whether you like it or not, you’re going to help me, Sylvie.”

“No, I won’t.”

But Rose ducked into my room, returning with the pages of my freshly typed essay in her hands. “ ‘The Aftereffects of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Assassination on American Society,’ by Sylvie Mason,” she read. “Bet you’d hate to see all your hard work go tumbling toward obsolescence too.”

I reached for the paper, but she pulled back.

“Careful.” Rose gave a little tear to the title page, the sound causing me to wince. “Oops. Are you sure you don’t want to help me?”

I looked away, into my parents’ room. Their beds perfectly made, their bedspreads the swirling colors of a leaf pile. That rope, stretching between my mother’s bedpost and the bathroom door. From the other side, the sounds of Dot splashing about, making those hapless bubbling noises. I turned to Rose. “What do I have to do?”