Help for the Haunted(27)

She paced the small greenroom. (Not green, but peach, by the way.)

She picked grapes off the fruit platter.

She bounced them off the ceiling and caught them in her mouth.

The ones that missed, she mashed into the carpet with her sneaker. I didn’t say a word, figuring it would be easier to clean up after she finished entertaining herself. I’d taken to underlining passages in the book that stood out to me, the way my mother did in her bible, and was about to put a pen to the page when I glanced up and noticed that Rose had slipped out of the room. Let her go, I told myself, but that promise to my father in the pool nagged at me, and so I put aside Jane Eyre and wandered the hall in search of Rose. It didn’t take long before I found her standing in a large room filled with row upon row of chairs, all of them facing an enormous TV, all of them empty. The spillover room, I realized, but the weather had kept so many people away there was nobody to spill.

On the screen, I saw my father. If the rainwater had made him appear boyish and less serious earlier that day, the stage lights did the opposite. Shadows fell across his face, carving his features into a jumble of sharp angles and deep wrinkles. His glasses caught the light in such a way that his eyes seemed to flash as he spoke, stiff voiced, to the crowd. “Well before this century, those in the medical community had begun to discard the idea of possession as an explanation for abnormal human behavior. Instead, experts resolved that specific conditions were symptomatic of schizophrenia and other psychosis. These afflictions were dealt with by putting the sufferer away in an institution, or with crude and harmful methods of electroshock therapy, and more recently, experimenting with medication . . .”

“Rose,” I said.

“Shhhh. I’m listening.”

“ . . . Of course, it would be foolish to deny the importance of the myriad of advances in the treatment of mental disorders. But in the hurry to embrace the science of psychiatry, the medical field might have been a bit too eager to relinquish belief in evil forces, demonic oppression, and to accredit natural causes to all mental diseases of unknown etiology . . .”

“Rose, we’re not supposed to be here. Let’s go.”

My sister whipped around. “ ‘The mouth of a righteous man brings forth wisdom, but a perverse tongue will be cut out.’ ”

“What?”

“It’s a bible proverb, stupid. In other words, keep it up and I’ll cut out your tongue. Now shhhh. I’m trying to listen.”

“ . . . While the majority of psychiatrists are satisfied to diagnose mental illness in terms of abnormal brain function, chemical imbalances, and personality disorders, there are those who admit that a tiny percentage of cases defy medical science. These cases do not allow for an easy explanation because they exhibit symptoms traditionally associated with demonic influence. . . .”

“Rose,” I said, even though it meant risking my tongue. “Let’s go.”

This time, she turned from the TV. “You know what? You’re right. Let’s go.”

With that, she stepped out the door and headed down the hall. Where she should have hung a left into the peachy greenroom, however, Rose kept going. Through a set of doors. Up a flight of stairs. I followed until she slipped through one last door into the back of the auditorium where my parents were speaking. For a long while, I waited outside, wondering what she was up to and what, if anything, I could do about it. The entire time my father’s voice drifted into the hallway. He described how so often people came to them as a last resort, after all attempts at treatment had failed, and I thought of the people who showed up unannounced on our front steps, a look of desperation in their eyes. Then I heard my father say, “No doubt you came here expecting a ghost story. You’ll get plenty, I promise. But first, I’d like to start with a love story. I guess you could say it’s a Christmas story and a love story, because it takes place in December and it’s how I met my beautiful wife.”

I didn’t know how my parents met, and my curiosity led me to tug open the door the tiniest bit. I spotted Rose crouched in the rear of the auditorium. When I slipped inside and joined her, crouching and pressing my back to the wall as well, she did not acknowledge my presence. My father continued, and as we listened, I looked around at the empty seats. The crowd of three hundred he’d been anticipating had dwindled to no more than seventy. I wondered if that’s why he seemed so distracted and uncomfortable up there. Talking in that stiff voice. Fidgeting with a stack of index cards, fanning and flipping them this way and that. Beside him, my mother stood, calm as could be, hands joined together, listening intently, as though she’d never heard the story before.

Which details am I recalling from that night and which have I filled in from things my parents told me when I asked questions later? And which, if I’m truthful, did I color in myself, lending their meeting a fairy-tale quality in my mind? Rather than attempt to separate those versions, I’ll tell the story I carry with me.

When my father finished his coursework at the dental school in Baltimore, he spent a year working at the university clinic, clocking in the hours required to graduate. Although his career as a dentist had yet to officially begin, he had grown bored. The field lacked a sense of mystery, he said, and silly as it sounded, he despised the one-sided conversations with the people in his chair. (“How much can you learn when you’re the only one talking?” I heard him once say.) So while his days were spent drilling and filling cavities, he found a more satisfying activity to occupy his evenings: he began studying the paranormal to make sense of the unexplained things he had seen since childhood.