Help for the Haunted(25)

Here, too, he allowed my mother to speak for herself. As I read her words, I couldn’t help feeling that in some way she was there with me in the dark:

I remember waking in the mornings to hear those birds singing outside my window—a sound that once brought me happiness but no longer. I tried closing my windows. I tried putting a pillow over my head. But still that chirping found me. Finally, there came a day when I couldn’t stand it any longer. Desperate to make their singing stop, I waited until my mother went into town then pulled the ladder from my father’s woodshed and climbed into the branches of those trees in our yard. My intention was to knock the birdhouses to the ground one by one, but typical of my father, he secured them to survive even the strongest storm, never mind an eleven-year-old girl. That’s when I had an idea. I climbed down and went to the kitchen, where I located a bag of steel wool, which my mother used to keep mice from getting into our house. I made my way back up into the trees and stuffed the entryways my father had drilled, then snapped off the perches so there was no hope of birds getting inside. Sure enough, their singing stopped, or at least I didn’t hear it so close to my bedroom window after that. Those birds moved on and took my father’s spirit with them, I believed, because that’s when Jack Peele entered the picture . . .

Jack Peele. A man my mother never once mentioned to me, but whom my “practical, plain-speaking” grandmother had apparently married without her daughter present. One night, she simply set a third place at the dinner table and introduced him by saying, “Rose, I’d like you to meet your new daddy. Now let’s eat.” My mother expected this new daddy of hers to have the sinister qualities of a wicked stepparent in a fairy tale. But Jack pulled coins from his floppy ears. He recited the alphabet backward. He built towering card houses and let my mother blow them down. Instead of going to church, Jack lingered in his pj’s and watched cartoons, busting a gut each time the Road Runner escaped a free-falling anvil. One Sunday, they skipped cartoons and went out in the yard, where he kept spinning my mother by the arms and letting her loose into a leaf pile. When he grew dizzy, Jack lay on the grass, my mother beside him. Staring up into the branches of the trees, he asked, “What do you suppose is going on with those birdhouses?”

Reluctantly, my mother told him about her father securing them up there, about the binoculars and the notebook and the songs that filled her with melancholy after he was gone. And then she told him about the steel wool and the snapped-off perches. Jack’s face grew serious. “What time of year did you do that, darling?”

“Spring,” she answered.

Jack stood and climbed one of the trees. He didn’t need a ladder; he was tall and lanky and moved chimplike through the branches. Slowly, his fingers tugged out the steel wool from one of the birdhouses before he peered inside, shaking his head and letting out a dive-bomb of a whistle.

“What?” my mother asked from down on the ground. “What? What? What?”

“Nothing,” Jack told her.

But that night, after he and my grandmother spent a long while whispering in the kitchen, they sat my mother down. In their most somber voices, they asked what had caused her to kill the baby birds inside those houses by making it so their mothers could not feed them. Horrified at the realization of what she’d done, my mother had trouble finding words. “It’s like I told Jack,” she stammered, tears leaking down her cheeks. “I did it . . . I did it because Daddy went away, so I wanted the birds to go away too.”

A fist pounded on the door downstairs.

My head jerked up, and I dropped the flashlight. My mother, or at least the feeling of having her right there with me, vanished at once. I looked for a clock to figure out how long I’d been lost in those pages, but saw none. Outside, the Hulk’s chain rattled, though she did not bark.

The pounding stopped then started again. I reached for the flashlight, which had rolled beneath the bed. When I pulled it out, I found a letter written to Rose—the return address on a random street in Baltimore. The fist pounded on the door again, so I slipped the letter in my pocket to read later, then tossed the book and all the rest in the plastic bag from the police station, returned it to the closet, and hurried downstairs. A laugh—deep, male—came from the other side of the door, followed by another, which made me certain those boys I’d been waiting for had arrived.

Astonishing the thoughts that can fill a person’s mind in a single instant. For one solitary second after I put my hand on the knob and pulled, it was them standing before me. Not those phony Albert Lynches. Instead, I saw her in an ash-gray column dress with pearly buttons. I saw him in a rumpled brown suit and smudged wire-rimmed glasses. All my reading about their childhoods had summoned their spirits, the same way my father drew out those leftover energies late nights in the theater and in the dark of his university apartment.

That’s what I first believed anyway.

But those thoughts gathered in my mind only for a moment. In the next, I noticed my mother’s necklace, gold instead of silver, tight around her neck. The loose bun she wore to church not held up by bobby pins, but staples. My father’s blazer may have been brown, but his pants were black and torn beneath one knee. His shirt, white rather than the mustard yellow he favored, was splattered with a substance meant to look like blood but too bright to be the real thing. The lenses of his glasses were popped out; without the usual smudges, I had a clear view of the cold, unfamiliar eyes beneath.