Help for the Haunted(121)
“So,” Lynch was saying now. “You know the things your father told that reporter.”
Be direct and clear, I thought, repeating those survey rules in my mind. “That’s not what I want to talk to you about. I want to hear what happened in the moments before I entered that church.”
Lynch looked behind him at the guard, no more than ten feet away, then at the clock on the wall. Twenty-one minutes—that’s all we had left. He turned to me again, but said nothing.
Rummel came closer, put his hand on my shoulder, and squeezed. “We can go, if you like.”
“No,” I told him. “Not yet.”
I waited for him to step away again, and when he did and the clock showed only nineteen minutes remaining, this is what I offered Lynch: “If you want, I can tell you what happened that summer you left your daughter with us. I can tell you what I know of her last night in our home. The things that went wrong.”
That got his attention. Lynch raised his head and said, “If you’re planning on feeding me the same lines about those demons who drove her from your house, then save it, Sylvie. I already heard that crap from your old man before he died.”
I swallowed, noticed that my hands were shaking. I moved them beneath the table and took a breath, trying to calm the rabbit beat of my heart. “I’m not going to tell you the same story as my father. I’m going to tell you the truth of what I know. So long as you do the same for me.”
“Okay, then,” he said. “You first.”
How much easier might this conversation have been if I had never lost my journal, if I could simply open to the pages where I’d written all about that summer, all about that last night in particular, then slide the book across the table for Lynch to read?
I remember that when I ran across the street and burst through the front door, the first thing I wanted to do was hug my sister, since I had not hugged her the day she left home. But the sight of Rose made me stop abruptly in the entrance to the living room.
“What are you gawking at?” Rose said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Your head,” I told her. “What did you . . .”
She reached a hand up and ran it over her scalp, still nicked and bloody from the razor. “Funny, I had a full head of hair when I got here this morning. But when I found someone else sleeping in my room, wearing my clothes, living my life, I thought I better do something to set myself apart from her.”
“Rose,” my mother said. “Your father and I explained why you found things the way you did. You never should have—”
The front door opened and my mother grew quiet. A moment later, Abigail padded up the hall in bare feet until she was standing beside me. Why had I failed to notice earlier that the shirt she wore was not one of those tattered things she had arrived with, but rather a simple black tank that belonged to my sister? How many other days and nights had she taken to wearing her clothes without my noticing?
“Abigail,” my father said, his voice rising with alarm. “What happened?”
I watched as she held out her palms, blood still drooling and dripping from each, as her mouth moved open and closed but made no sound. First my father, then my mother, rushed toward her. In a moment, they had whisked her off to the kitchen, where I could hear water running and my mother praying too.
Meanwhile, Rose and I had been left alone in the living room. There was a little blood on her hand as well from when she ran it over her scalp. But nothing she couldn’t wipe away on her jeans, which she did just then. “Well, squirt,” she said. “I can see things have really normalized while I’ve been gone.”
How could I tell her that in their own strange way, things had seemed normal—happy even—all those months? There was the ice cream. There were those late-night trips to the pond. There were the conversations Abigail and I had through the bedroom wall.