Help for the Haunted(15)

“The priest put the child in isolation. She was allowed no visitors except her mother. Her food and water were rationed. The priest spent hours each day, placing feathers between her toes in belief that it would enable the evil spirits to take flight. . . .”

At the top of the stairs, I turned and walked down the hall to my parents’ door.

“ . . . After a month of feathers and shouted prayers and the girl’s cries for help, Lydia began to speak of her desire to die in order to atone for her sins. That’s when doubt stirred in her mother, and she wondered if this priest was helping her daughter after all. She went to the city and spoke to people there. That is how she learned of my wife and me. And when she was told that our approach to these situations was more gentle, more humane, unlike the clichés we see in movies and books, she made contact with us . . .”

When I reached their door, I expected it to be locked. But it opened right up. The first thing I saw was Rose passed out on our mother’s bed, mouth open in a lopsided O, bible facedown on her chest. On the nightstand: the tape recorder from that basket in the basement. The wheels turned inside, and I looked at my father’s cramped writing on the cassette: Sylvester Mason, Light & Dark Lecture at The Believers Circle. 11/9/1985.

“ . . . When we arrived in that village, it was immediately apparent to my wife and me that this was not a girl in need of our help, but one who desperately needed a doctor to address her medical issues, a psychiatrist to treat her emotional problems. You are probably all wondering how were we able to tell the difference. Let me explain—”

STOP.

When I hit that button, the air inside our house fell silent. On the other side of the bathroom door, things remained eerily quiet. I waited for my sister to wake, but when she didn’t, I went to the door. “Dot? Are you okay in there?” She did not answer, and my sister remained dead to the world. I went to work, attempting to undo the rope around the knob. When it wouldn’t give, I moved to the bedpost, where the knot came loose more easily.

When the rope fell to the floor, my sister’s eyes opened. Groggy voiced, she asked, “What are you doing?”

“What do you think, Rose? She’s been in there for hours.”

I expected her to argue. Instead, my sister rubbed her eyes and got out of bed, then found her flashlight and strolled out of the room. I grabbed the other flashlight off the dresser and pointed it toward my parents’ pink-tiled bathroom. Inside, I found a slumped and shivering figure, huddled in the corner on the floor. Except for a towel wrapped around her waist and another around her shoulders, she was naked.

“Dot?”

Slowly, she lifted her head. One hand shielded her eyes from the glare of the flashlight. I moved it away. Asked if she was all right. Not a word in response. Quickly, I went to the bed, grabbed her uniform with the bears, and returned to hold it out to her. Dot stood, legs shaking, towel slipping from her body so that her skinny legs and sagging breasts and drooping pouch of a stomach, even the thatch of gray hair at her crotch, were exposed. I saw that her legs and arms were scraped and realized she must have tried, unsuccessfully, to crawl out the window onto the slanted section of our roof.

Before I could look away, Dot reached out and snatched the uniform. She began to clumsily dress, gripping the towel rack for support. In the end, her shirt wound up inside out and backward, the tag in front, the V of her neckline dipping down the wrong side. It didn’t seem to matter: Dot picked her bloated paperback off the floor and walked past me, bumping my shoulder so that I stumbled back. She felt her way down the hall in the dark as I regained my balance and trailed behind, doing my best to light our path. When we arrived in the living room, she grabbed her laundry basket off one of the wingback chairs right where I’d left it.

“I washed and folded your clothes just like you wanted,” I told her.

She did not respond, though the house seemed to, because all at once the lights came on and Rose clomped up the stairs. She paused when she saw Dot at the front door.

“Dot,” I called when she pulled it open. “You don’t have to go.”

Those words caused her to pay attention at last. She whirled around, eyes wide behind crooked glasses, more spittle on her lips than ever before. “Oh, yes, I do,” she told us, pointing a trembling finger between Rose and me. “I don’t care if I ever work for this service again! You girls are horrible! Horrible! You say your parents travel the country searching for demons. Well, I can save them the trip. Because they’ve got two of the most wicked little girls right here in their own home!”

With that, she stormed out into the bright daylight, leaving the door open behind her. I walked to the steps and watched her climb into her mud-splattered Yugo. As the engine turned over and she rolled backward up the driveway, Rose joined me at my side. We watched as Dot narrowly missed one of the birches before reaching the road. And when she shifted again, grinding the gears in a terrible grating noise, before sputtering away down Butter Lane, my sister actually put her arm around me.

“What if she calls the police?” I asked.

“She won’t.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do,” Rose told me. “And anyway, the good news is, it looks like it’s just you and me until Mom and Dad get home at the end of the week.”

Once and for all, my sister had made her point. After that visit from Dot, never again would we have another nanny. But Rose did and didn’t get what she wanted, because from that day on, whenever our parents went on their trips, they took us, their two daughters, their two very own wicked little girls, right along with them.