Help for the Haunted(111)
Maybe my mother did not tell him about that warning from her father, how the girl could seem normal—or almost normal—but that’s when she changed. Or maybe my mother did tell him, and he thought he knew better. Either way, even if no one else was thinking about Albert Lynch’s words, they whirred in my mind like those frantically spinning window fans. On the few occasions I’d been in Abigail’s presence, never once had she looked at me—not directly anyway. It was something I hadn’t realized until, there in our kitchen, she did for the first time. The effect was that of seeing some strange, poisonous flower bloom before my eyes, opening its petals and turning its face toward me. I watched as she lifted her gaze from her empty plate, fixing those wild blue eyes upon me, while speaking to my father in that serene voice. “Sylvie doesn’t want me to go.”
“Nonsense,” my father told her.
“It’s okay,” Abigail said. “If I were Sylvie, I wouldn’t want me to go either. It sounds like a family thing. And I get the feeling it’s important to her.”
That tub of sherbet, those Popsicles—my mother chimed in about both again, but those things had become consolation prizes nobody wanted, least of all me. My mother must have sensed it, because her next offer was to stay home with Abigail while my father and I went and brought back ice cream for everyone. But my father seemed determined we go together. “Sylvie, tell her it’s not true. We didn’t raise the kind of daughter who leaves out a guest in our own home.”
They were all watching me, but it was Abigail’s gaze I felt most. I looked into her wild blue eyes and my mind filled with the memory of the afternoon her father slid open the van door to reveal her lying on the thin mattress inside. I thought of how calm she seemed now, so different from the girl with snarled hair and bruised feet who hid behind my mother, who toppled the very chairs where my parents sat, who shredded our wallpaper. But despite that newfound serenity and my mother’s days and nights of prayer and scripture, I did not feel comfortable having her around.
Even so, I looked back at Abigail while speaking to my father, same as she had done to me. “I’m not sure where Abigail got the idea I don’t want her to come. But I don’t mind. If that’s what she wants.”
It was, of course, exactly what Abigail wanted.
After changing into a T-shirt with a faded Saint Louis arch decal and shorts my mother had repaired days before with a needle and thread, she got into the Datsun along with us. On a night that hot, any ice cream shop would have been mobbed; the one in Dundalk was no exception. The parking lot teemed with so many vehicles, my father settled on leaving ours a block away.
The moment we got out of the car, my mother noticed what none of us had before: Abigail was in bare feet. Too late to do anything about it, though, so we walked right past the NO SHIRT, NO SHOES, NO SERVICE sign on the door. As soon as we joined the line snaking through the place, a lull rippled through conversations all around. When it came to driving by our house at night, shouting from car windows, batting down our mailbox and trash cans, and speeding away in the dark, people had plenty of courage. But beneath the fluorescent lights of that ice cream shop, they stuck to whispers. They stuck to nudges and stares.
My parents paid no attention, of course. If Abigail noticed, I couldn’t tell, since she stayed busy studying all the ice cream behind the counter. I kept expecting someone to kick us out, but the line just inched along until I found myself waiting by a freezer with smudged glass doors. Inside, cakes filled the shelves. All those blue ice cream flowers, and blank surfaces, like snow-covered ponds waiting for happy messages to be squiggled on top, made me think of the Rosie cake, which had a way of hollowing me out right there on the spot.
“What flavor are you going to get?”
I was so caught up in thinking about Rose and how much our lives had changed that it took a moment to realize the person asking was Abigail—and she was asking me. I turned away from those cakes and looked at the decal on her shirt, plagued with so many delicate cracks it was like gazing at an old painting. I tried to guess which flavor my sister would have ordered if she had been with us, then made up my mind to do it for her. “Chocolate,” I told Abigail.
“Oh,” she said, smiling. “That’s what I’ll get too. I mean, if you don’t mind.”
The line lurched ahead. I stepped away from that freezer, away from Abigail as well. “Of course I don’t mind. Get whatever you want.”
At last, when our cones were in hand, the four of us headed outside to a row of picnic tables where customers congregated. In the dusky sky over Colgate Park, someone was shooting fireworks. I was glad for the distraction, since people were too busy gazing up at the bursts of Roman candles sputtering over the treetops to care about the Mason family and their guest. Even we became hypnotized, while ice cream trickled down our wrists, melting faster than any of us could keep up. When the show was done—cones eaten, napkins balled in our sticky palms—my father looked down and spoke in an oddly remorseful voice. “Maybe I was wrong,” he said, “all these years about it being a waste of money to go out for a night like this. It’s important for a family to share certain moments. When Rose gets back, let’s be sure we do this again.”
After so many days of no one saying a word about my sister, the mention of her, particularly the notion that she would return and that we would do something as a family, lifted my spirits more than ice cream or fireworks ever could. As we walked back to the Datsun, my happy feelings even led me to wonder if I should be nicer to Abigail. After all, strange as she was, the girl had nothing to do with Rose being gone, and like my father said, she wouldn’t be with us much longer.