Help for the Haunted(22)
“Promise,” I said right away, because I didn’t want to disappoint him. But then I thought of that night with Dot and how helpless I’d been to stop Rose. I thought, too, of how little control my parents seemed to have when it came to her.
My father must have sensed what I was thinking, because he wriggled his back against the water jet and sighed. “It’s probably more than you need to worry about. But your mother and I are aware that your sister has developed some, well, behavioral issues. We are trying to figure out the best way to handle it. In the meantime, whatever you can do to keep her under control is appreciated. You’re a good girl, Sylvie. And prominent lectures, like the one tonight, are very important. Unlike those silly talks I get suckered into doing every Halloween, these can make all the difference. They build our careers and notoriety.”
I bobbed in the water, thinking about his desk in the basement, that paperweight with the inscription about God lighting the dark, his old dental chair in the far corner reminding me of how much I wished he still had a job like that. “Do you want to be famous?” I asked, the words tumbling from my mouth before I even realized what I was asking.
The question surprised my father as much as me. “Famous?” He shimmied against that nozzle, rain sopping his hair, dropping from his lashes. “Well, now that you mention it, I suppose it would be nice to show them.”
“Show who?”
“My parents.”
My mother and father rarely said much about the families they had come from, so I knew little about them, other than that their parents were deceased. The only extended family I knew of was my father’s brother, Uncle Howie. “But they’re gone, Dad.”
“Your parents are never gone from you, Sylvie. You’ll see that someday, hopefully, a very long time from now. But I don’t just mean my parents. I suppose it would be nice to prove something to your uncle. Not to mention so many of the people who used to laugh when I told them about the things I saw. Really, though, what I want most is security for our family. To put you and Rose through college. But you don’t need to worry about all that.”
Thunder rumbled in the sky just then, startling us both. Seconds later, a flash of lightning.
“That’s our cue,” my father said, climbing out of the pool. “Come on, tadpole. Let’s head for dry land.”
I swam to him, feeling the urge to reach my arms up so he could lift me from the water like a much younger girl. On account of his back, I scurried up the ladder instead. As we made a mad dash for the room, our feet sounding a quick slap-slap-slap against the walkway, I thought of my mother’s feelings about the night that lay ahead. To look at her waiting in the doorway of that second-floor room, no one would have ever guessed her concern. She smiled as we ran closer, then wrapped us in the scratchy hotel towels. While helping us to dry off, she kissed my forehead, my father’s too, before shutting the door to keep out the driving rain and rumbling thunder and crooked branches of lightning that crackled in the daytime sky.
[page]Chapter 7
Out There, in the Dark
It used to be that every Halloween my father was invited to give a lecture at Fright Fest in Austin, Texas. Those talks paid the best, though he liked them the least. “The audience lacks serious interest in the subject matter,” he’d complain while packing his brown suits, yellow shirts, and pills for his back, which acted up in the cramped airplane seats. When we were little, Rose and I reminded him to bring us something from the trip, and every year he arrived home claiming to have forgotten. He’d hold up his empty suitcase, shaking it to prove there was nothing inside, and only once we believed that he really had forgotten would he laugh and reach into a compartment, pulling out cowgirl statuettes, plastic cactuses, or some other surprise.
Still, the next year we reminded him all over again while he packed and leveled the same complaints to my mother: “Those crowds want nothing more than the cheap chills they get watching that phony Dragomir Albescu, with all those ridiculous rings on his fingers, as he carries on about the ghosts and goblins he encounters on his trips home to Romania. No one is interested in hearing from an actual deacon in the Catholic Church with actual knowledge and years of experience with the paranormal.”
My mother used her most soothing voice as she pulled clothes from his suitcase, folding them more neatly than he had, before putting them inside again. “If that was true, dear, the organizers wouldn’t keep asking you back.”
“Yeah, well, maybe one of these years they’ll realize their mistake. The experience is downright degrading. I’d make a request to appear with someone else, but I’m afraid I’ll end up in what they call the ‘odditorium’ speaking with Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. Now that would truly be the bottom of the barrel.”
“Elvira who?” my mother asked.
“Never mind. You don’t want to know.”
“Well, are you sure you wouldn’t like me to come too? We’re a team, after all.”
My father took a shirt from my mother and set it aside. He held her hands, looked into her eyes. “It’s bad enough I have to share the stage with a man as legit as a sidewalk fortune-teller. I won’t allow you, who is every bit authentic as he is phony, to play second fiddle to a fraud.”
After that, my father said he didn’t want to discuss it anymore. They finished filling his suitcase as he joked that he better not forget to pack wax fangs and a tube of fake blood. Once he had left for the airport, my mother’s mood lightened. She loved trick or treating with us, and even if there had been other houses on Butter Lane, I still think she would have made the twenty-minute drive into Baltimore every year and led us along the narrow streets of Reservoir Hill, where she and my father had a tiny apartment when they first married. The old women who remembered her carried on at the sight of Rose and me dressed as vampires or princesses or aliens. One ancient, heavyset woman with a name that sounded like it should be flip-flopped, Almaline Gertrude, insisted on inviting us in each year. Her kitchen smelled of spicy stews that I imagined came from the deli downstairs, since there was never anything but crumpled dollar bills and envelopes on her stove. While Mrs. Gertrude sat at the table with my mother, sipping microwaved tea from dainty cups that clanked against the saucers, she told us to help ourselves to her candy basket.