Help for the Haunted(3)
I don’t know why, but the first thing I did was reach forward and turn off the car. The wiper blades halted in their path across the window. Except for the wind and the scuttling branches, the air was quiet when I pushed open the door and stepped outside. I hadn’t thought to turn off the headlights and they lit the footprints before me, the first set almost completely dusted over with snow. How long had I been asleep? I wondered as I left the Datsun behind.
The next time you feel afraid, I want you to pray . . .
I tried. I really did try. In my nervousness, however, too many prayers clashed in my mind and tangled on my tongue so what came out was a mangled version of them all: “Our Father who art in heaven, the Lord is with thee, I believe in his only Son, who was born of the Virgin Mary, was crucified and buried. He rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, from thence he shall judge the living and the dead. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. Amen. Amen. Am—”
At the bottom of the cement steps, I fell silent. For a long moment, I stood listening for some sound of them inside the church. But none came.
[page]Chapter 2
Things in the Basement
How would you describe yourself now?
Arnold Boshoff asked a lot of questions each time we met in his windowless office decorated with Just Say No posters, but he returned to that one again and again. Boshoff gave a taffy stretch to the word nooow while resting his hands on his mountainous belly and steepling his fingers. Always, I looked up at his puffy pink face and watery blue eyes and fed him the obvious. I was an Advanced Honors student at the top of my class. My long, black hair was too stringy to stay in a ponytail. My skin was pale. Eyes, hazel. Sometimes, I informed him, I thought my head was too big for my body, my fingers and feet too small. I doled out those sorts of details before moving on to more minor things, like the flea-sized freckles on the inside of my right wrist. God kisses, my father used to call them. Hold them to the wind and they might blow away. By the time I started talking about how I used to make a triangle with those freckles by drawing on my skin with a marker, Boshoff unsteepled his hands and moved onto a new topic.
“I have something for you, Sylvie,” he said, after we finished that routine one chilly October afternoon. He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a present, wrapped in polka-dot paper.
“What is it?” I asked as he placed the gift in my hands.
“You have to open it to find out, Sylvie. That’s the way it works with presents.”
Boshoff smiled and clacked his cough drop around his mouth. Judging from his rumpled sweaters and stain-splotched khakis, he wasn’t the neatest person. Somehow, though, he managed to do a careful job wrapping that present. I peeled back the paper just as carefully, to find a diary with a miniature lock and key.
It had been some time since anyone thought to give me a gift, and I wasn’t sure what to say. Finally, I managed, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Except for the flippity-flip of my hand turning the diary’s empty pages, things were quiet. Boshoff was the teen drug and alcohol counselor for all of Baltimore County, Maryland, and rolled through towns like Dundalk on a weekly basis. Unlike his regulars, I had never puffed on a joint or tasted a drop of alcohol. Even so, I was excused from study hall once a week on the principal’s suggestion that an hour with him might be helpful, seeing as there was no budget to fund a professional who had experience dealing with my “situation.” The first time I went to his office in September, I asked Boshoff if me visiting him was like a person going to a vet to treat a burst appendix. He laughed and clacked his cough drop before using a serious voice to tell me, “I suppose most veterinarians could perform an appendectomy on a human if the situation called for it, Sylvie.”
That ruined the joke.
“I’ve come to realize in these meetings of ours,” he began now, so many weeks later, “that there are things you might not want to share with me or anyone else. But you might find it helpful to write them down in that journal, where they’ll be safe.”
I fingered the flimsy lock. With its violet cover and pink margins, the diary looked meant for some other girl, one who would fill the pages in loopy cursive with tales of kissing boys, slumber parties, cheerleading practice. Instead, my father’s voice rolled through my head: People don’t need to know what goes on inside our house, so you and Rose shouldn’t say anything to anyone—no matter who it is.
“What are you thinking?” Boshoff asked, another favorite question of his.
“I’m thinking I don’t know what I’d possibly write about in a journal,” I told him, even though I knew what he intended. But I’d spent so much time in other windowless rooms, recounting the details of that night at the church for a white-haired detective and a haggard-looking assistant district attorney, that I felt no desire to do it again.
“Well, you could at least start by writing about your day, Sylvie.”
I walk the hallways of Dundalk High School and people clear a path. No one makes eye contact or talks to me unless it is to taunt me about my parents and the thing that happened to them—the thing that almost happened to me too. . .
“You could write about what’s going on at home with your sister now that things have, well, changed for you both.”
Rose refuses to bother with grocery shopping except when Cora is scheduled to come by with her clipboard. Most nights, we eat Popsicles for dinner. Potato chips for breakfast. Mayonnaise smeared on bread in the middle of the night. . .