Help for the Haunted(115)

“I have the same dream almost every night. About my mother.”

“Is it a bad dream?”

She was quiet. Perhaps, I thought, she had drifted back to sleep, and that would be the end of it. Then she said, “It’s a good dream and a bad dream. When we used to live all year long at the ministry in Oregon, my mother and I had a ritual before bed. Did you ever have that with your mom? Something that made you feel safe before she turned out the light?”

I thought of the prayers my mother used to say with me, a song she used to sing when I was younger, back before that other song took its place, the way she sometimes stroked my hair and kissed my forehead before leaving the room. “Yes,” I answered, feeling an unexpected nostalgia for those rituals. “We did.”

“Well, did you know my mother was once a flight attendant?”

“No,” I said, surprised. “She was?”

“That’s how she met him. He was on a flight to South Africa with other missionaries. That’s where my mother is from. Capetown. They fell in love and he convinced her to join the ministry too.”

By “him”, I assumed she meant her father but did not ask. Maybe it was the tense conversation between my parents at the pond our first night there, the secret my mother was keeping about Heekin’s manuscript, but something made me ask, “Did they stay in love?”

“He did. But she didn’t. It wasn’t just him she fell out of love with, though. She started to hate life at the ministry too.”

I tried to imagine what that life would be like but came up blank. “Why?”

“A million reasons. She used to say it was like living in a bubble. One day, she finally left that bubble and took me with her. We got as far as the Portland airport before he found us and kept me from going with her.”

“Your mother went anyway? Without you?”

“Yes.”

“But how could—”

“She said she had to. And that she’d figure out some way to come back for me. She gave me her word.”

“And did she come back?”

“Maybe. That was a long time ago, though. Even if she did, he made it so she would have a very hard time finding us. Who knows? By now, she’s probably given up and gone back to her country.”

“Is that why you wander?” I asked. “In case she’s still looking for you, I mean.”

“Yes. Most of the year, we are on the road. Except for a few weeks every winter when we go back to the ministry in Oregon. At that place, even the coloring books are about Jesus. Since there was never anything new to read to me, my mother used to do her old preflight routine before bed. You know, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the captain has turned on the Fasten Seat Belt sign. Please stow your carry-on luggage beneath the seat in front of you or in an overhead bin. Make sure your seat back and folding trays are in an upright and locked position. If you are seated next to an emergency exit, please read the instruction card located in your seat pocket. . . .’

“She used to look so pretty, my mother, with her long blond hair and blue eyes, standing at the foot of my bed, pointing up and down the imaginary aisles. It made me feel like we were about to take off, that our dreams were these great adventures. But then, the day we were supposed to take a real flight together . . .”

Abigail allowed her voice to trail off. It didn’t matter, since now I understood.

We were quiet for some time, until at last she said, “When I tell you the dreams are both good and bad, what I mean is that they start out good—my mother is showing me the emergency exit rows, explaining about the lighted path in the aisles, the oxygen masks that drop from the ceiling—but peaceful as they begin, the dreams always turn bad. It is that way with most things in life, my life anyway. Probably, it is the way things will go during my time here with you and your family—even though that is not what I want.”

I wasn’t sure what to say so we went back to being quiet after that. I tried to picture Abigail on the other side of that wall. Had she moved the bed the way I imagined? Or was she simply kneeling there in that white nightgown originally intended for my sister? I never did find out, because soon I drifted off to sleep and Abigail must have too.

The next night brought another trip to the ice cream shop, another swim in the pond where I kept watch on my parents sitting calmly side by side on that crooked bench back on shore. Afterward, on our bumpy ride back down the dirt road toward home, I stuck my hand out the window and surfed the air once again. Abigail did as well, though she told me I was doing it wrong. It never occurred to me that there was a right way to hand-surf, but she said, “I can tell you’re in your head too much, Sylvie. You need to give yourself over to the air and motion. Stay in the moment.”

“What makes you such an expert?” I asked.

Abigail fixed me with a look, and I thought of that van she had first arrived in, all the years she and her father had spent wandering. “The secret is to not think so much,” was all she said. “Just feel the air. Just let go.”

After that, I pulled my hand inside and simply watched her, since I felt suddenly self-conscious about the whole thing. And as we drove the dark streets, I couldn’t help but notice how comfortable she seemed beside me, living Rose’s old life. Thinking that caused some suspicion to awaken inside me, one that kept nagging at me the rest of the ride home.