Help for the Haunted(114)

Like a radio losing reception, I lost their words a moment. Hoping they wouldn’t notice, I allowed myself to drift closer again.

“Saint Julia’s is far from cheap,” my father was saying when their conversation came clear once more. “The extra money—frankly, we need it. Especially if you’re telling me you want to hold off on the lectures now too.”

“No matter how badly we need the money, it’s only reasonable to expect more than that one call in all this time. I can’t help feeling that we should . . .”

“We should what?”

“Do something.”

“Like what?”

“Like—” As though working to stay afloat same as me, my mother paused, measuring each breath, before saying, “I don’t know. Report the situation to some agency. Tell them her father has not returned for her.”

“And how would that look for us? Besides, I don’t see what harm it’s doing. The man is sending checks, so it’s not as though she’s been abandoned. And look at tonight, it’s been a perfectly lovely evening.”

“I’m aware of that, Sylvester. If only you made this much effort to have perfectly lovely evenings when our other daughter was at home.”

After all my father’s uncharacteristic efforts that night—the ice cream, the detour to the pond—at long last her words pricked at something inside him. I sensed him deflating there on the shore. He looked out over the water, and I dipped under and swam through a tangle of vines. When I came up, I heard him calling my name, calling Abigail’s name too.

“Here!” she called back.

“Here!” I called back too, as though answering some sort of roll call.

“We should get going,” he said, his voice echoing around us, sounding weaker than usual. “Consider this your three-minute warning.”

After that, there were no words for some time. I looked to see Abigail in the distance, still watching them just the same. I turned to see my father walking back to where my mother sat on that crooked bench. Something about the way he stepped toward her reminded me of that story about their meeting. The girl on her suitcase. The girl with a toothache. The girl in a snowstorm. Now, instead of lifting an icicle from her cheek, he leaned down and kissed her. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“I’m sorry too,” she told him.

“Let’s make a deal. We enjoy the summer. No work other than the few lectures I’ve already booked. In the fall, we’ll be sure Abigail is back with her father. And if Rose is ready, we’ll be sure she is home with us again. How does that sound?”

My mother lifted her hand and touched her fingers to her lips, then her cheek, as though touching the kiss he had planted there, the place that icicle had been so many years before. I heard a splash on the far side of the pond and looked to see Abigail had leaped off the dock and was swimming back. I began swimming back too, thinking the things my father suggested made for a perfect plan, except for one detail: my mother had yet to tell him what she knew about Heekin’s manuscript and the damage it would do to their reputations when it was published come fall. But even as I thought about that, I arrived at the shore and stood again, feeling the sharp rocks and mud sinking beneath my feet, while my mother stared up at my father, telling him, “That sounds good to me.”



Sylvie?”

I woke in my bed. My room was empty, except for those horses on their shelf, fighting for space. For a long moment, I lay there, counting limbs and tails as best I could, wondering if I’d dreamed the sound of someone calling my name. But then came the knocking. I kept still, listening to the faint tapping until the voice that first woke me said again, “Sylvie?” It was coming from the other side of the wall, from Rose’s bedroom.

“Yes?” I said.

“Are you awake?”

“I am.”

“Sorry to bother you.”

My sister and I had never spoken through the wall, since her bed was on the other side of her room. I wondered if Abigail had taken it upon herself to rearrange the furniture in all the time she’d been living there. Seventeen days had turned to twenty then twenty-four, and now, somehow we were tiptoeing into August. If there were signs of things returning to normal—of Rose coming home soon, of Abigail leaving—I had not noticed. Instead, the four of us went about our lives, discarding old traditions and creating new ones. At church on Sundays, people stared and whispered about the new addition to our family and the conspicuous absence of my sister, until one day, my father announced we would not be going to church at all, that it was better for us to simply pray at home. In the evenings, it became a custom to go for ice cream after dinner, followed by a swim at the pond. My mother insisted my father track down the owner to ask for permission. The old man told him he used to love people swimming there and was all too happy to know people would be enjoying it again.

How could any girl my age not be happy—or at least placated by nightly trips to the ice cream shop and swims in a pond beneath a blanket of stars before bed? Guilty as it made me feel, I enjoyed those times. I sensed Abigail did as well. The two of us had begun occasional conversations, though until the night she knocked on the wall, the topics were limited to our choice of ice cream flavors and our favorite spots in the pond.

“It’s okay,” I told her now. “But it’s late. Is something wrong?”