Help for the Haunted(116)

And then, hours later, I woke in my bed. No one had called my name, but I sensed her presence lingering on the other side of that wall. This time, I knocked.

“Yes, Sylvie?” Her response was almost immediate.

“They aren’t real, are they?”

It was, finally, the words that had festered in my mind ever since watching her in the car earlier, though they seemed to have been there long before that, I realized. In some way, it seemed I had always known.

The question brought about a pause, longer than any during our conversation the previous evening. I wondered briefly if Abigail knew what I meant. But at last she said, “The answer isn’t a simple yes or no, Sylvie. It’s harder to explain than that.”

“Then try.”

“Okay, then. But do you promise not to tell anyone? Because my wish is that things stay good. My wish is that we stay friends, Sylvie, always and forever.”

Is that what we had become? I was not so sure, but I was hungry for whatever she was about to tell me, so I said what she wanted to hear, “I promise.”

Abigail sighed loud enough that I could hear it through the wall. “Other than those few weeks in the winter when we’re in Oregon, we live in campgrounds and rest stops. We hardly ever see anyone at all. The only thing we do is go to whatever religious services he finds. One day, years ago, we slipped into a healing service in some auditorium in some town. I don’t even remember where since they are all pretty much the same after a while. People singing the identical songs, raising their hands in the air, falling to the floor when they think the Holy Spirit has overtaken them. But at this one service, the preacher announced that his inner circle was going to pray over a boy whose soul had been occupied by an unwanted spirit. They brought out the boy and laid hands on him. In big, booming voices, as he snarled and scratched at them, they ordered the devil to be gone. Looking at it all, I thought I could be that boy.”

I didn’t understand what she meant at first. “Why would you—”

“My father never listened to what I wanted—until I behaved that way. Then he paid attention. It put me in control instead of him. At first, that power meant nothing but making sure he was as miserable as me. But in the end, it led us here, to me living with your family instead of him.”

“I see. He’ll come back for you, though. Eventually.”

“I worried about that at first too. But it’s been so long now I’m pretty sure he’s given up. Before we came here, I made it so I was impossible to live with. He’s afraid of me now. Terrified, in fact. I did some pretty awful things to him. So if he’s smart, which he is in his own way, he’ll keep staying away. Because I want to live here for good, Sylvie. I want to go to school here in this town like a normal person, to have a normal family and a normal life.”

Abigail Lynch might have been the first person ever to look upon our family as normal, but I didn’t tell her that. Instead, I simply kept listening.

“Your father mentioned a lecture date he’s got coming up. He asked if I’d be willing to go onstage, the way your sister never would, to talk about how he and your mother helped me.”

I tried to recall an occasion when my father had ever asked my sister to join them onstage, though no such memory came. “What did you tell him?”

“That I’d do it. Happily.”

“But you’d be lying. And my father wouldn’t—”

“Please, Sylvie. It doesn’t matter as long as I do a good job for him. Besides, it’s not all a lie. There is something inside me, just like my father told you and your mother that first day. Some people might call it a demon. All I know is it’s something that made me live my life this way. It’s made me do terrible things too.”

Given the things she was saying, I felt grateful for that wall between us then, since I did not want to look at her. All summer, I’d been thinking about the deal my parents made, the one where things would return to normal come fall. I’d even been ticking off the days until early September arrived and we would make the trip to see Rose and maybe even bring her home. All along, I’d envisioned Abigail being gone by then, returning to that life she lived with her father. Now, I was not sure what would happen, but I didn’t say another word about it and neither did she.

In the days that followed, we lived two lives: the one where Abigail and I were those disembodied voices, communicating through the wall in the dark of our rooms. In that life, we stayed away from any difficult conversations. Instead, she taught me her mother’s preflight routine, and I repeated it back to her each evening, a kind of prayer that comforted her before sleep. And then there was our second life, the one we lived during the day. No longer afraid to go to the basement, Abigail spent hours down there, practicing her part in the talk with my father. He told her that all she had to do was get up onstage and tell her story, but she wanted every word, every gesture to be approved by him beforehand.

And then, just as my mother predicted, summer ended and school began. The publication of Heekin’s book was just weeks away, and though my father called him to request a copy, he never heard back. Meanwhile, my parents’ lecture came and went with Abigail joining them onstage to great success according to my father. I waited in the greenroom, like I used to with Rose, taking that old copy of Jane Eyre along, studying the words I underlined years before, and wondering what I’d seen in certain passages.