Help for the Haunted(60)

Courage—that’s what I wished for, so I could keep walking down those stairs and turn off the light. But Penny and the hatchet on the wall and all the rest filled me with enough fear that I turned back. At the top of the stairs, I shut the flimsy door behind me. Rather than go to my room, something made me walk back to the kitchen. I lifted the foil on that bowl. Chocolate pudding. Again, I thought of Coffey and how he claimed my sister had refused the food he brought.

I dipped my fingers into the bowl. It had been a long time since I’d tasted anything remotely homemade, and once started, I could not stop. Without bothering to find a spoon, I kept dipping my fingers in, kept eating until the bowl was all but licked clean. At last, I buried the Tupperware container in the trash so my sister would not find it, then washed my hands before going upstairs.

For the next few hours, I waited for whatever poison to take hold. My stomach felt fine. My mind, however, drifted more than usual. I thought of Boshoff and his ailing wife and that cookbook I’d never be able to get him. And then I thought about a lady I had called in the 561 area code while doing those surveys. The crackle of her voice told me she was very old. She was so happy to talk to me I had the feeling nobody called her very often. All through the survey, she kept excusing herself then muffling the phone to cough, deep and rattling, like there was something swampy inside her. We were almost at the end when it got so bad I said we didn’t have to finish. “Maybe you should have a glass of water,” I told her, since I felt guilty taking up her time asking meaningless questions about shampoos and deodorants.

She laughed a little, then said, “You are sweet to suggest it, dear. But I can drink all the water I want, and I’m never going to cough a pearl out on my pillow.”

I don’t know why I thought about that, but afterward, I did one last thing I wasn’t planning: I went to my closet and opened the door.

Inside, all my clothes from the previous winter fought for space. Sleeves and cuffs and hems tangled and twisted in such a way that it made me think of a pack of girls on a crowded bus. I reached in and pulled out a soft pink sweater with pearly white buttons. The sweater was warm, I remembered from the year before. Next, I pulled out a brown skirt. The wool was scratchy, I remembered as well, but it was warm too. The sweater and skirt matched enough that I set them on my chair the way my mother would have. I turned to the closet again and chose another outfit from the crowd. Then another. I imagined myself picking girls off that crowded bus. You, I said to them in my head, and you and you and you . . . I kept on picking until a week’s worth of outfits was draped around my bedroom. Once that was taken care of, I was about to get back into bed when the phone rang.

Sometimes, those haunted people still called, seeking my parents’ help. Rose usually just hung up on them, but I always took the time to explain that they were gone and apologized for not being able to do anything for them. I crossed the hall to my parents’ room, figuring it would be another one of those calls. But when I answered, the person on the other end said, “Is Sylvie there, please?”

“This is Sylvie.”

“It’s Sam Heekin. I got your message but not in time to call you back at the number you left, so I thought I’d try you here.”

“I see.” His voice did not stumble or ramble the way my father once complained, and I found myself skipping ahead in the conversation, coming to the point sooner than was polite. “I found the letter you wrote my sister, and I was hoping to talk to you.”

“Your sister? I never wrote any letters to your sister.”

“You didn’t?”

“No. But your mother. I used to write letters to her sometimes.”

“My mother?”

“Perhaps we can meet in person, so I can explain. Would you like that?”

I looked around my parents’ bedroom—at the pillows plumped beneath their bedspreads, at my father’s striped tie draped over the back of a chair, at my mother’s hairbrush and bobby pins on her dresser, and at the glowing green alarm clock, reminding me how little time I had left. I took a long, deep breath, before saying, “Yes. Yes, I would.”





[page]Chapter 14

Doll



In the beginning, there was no cage for Penny. She simply slumped in my mother’s old rocker, which my father dredged up from the basement and situated in the corner of the living room. Same as the cross on the wall, the desk in the corner, the drapes over the window, Penny remained positively, perfectly, one hundred percent inanimate. Strange as I found the doll’s sudden arrival into our lives, she had no effect on my behavior. Her mere presence, however, did something to my sister. In the way paint can peel from a house, revealing the true color beneath, the fa?ade Rose had maintained since the night my father dragged her from that hotel room peeled away too.

The erosion began almost immediately on our car ride home from Ohio. Except for the occasional soft humming of that song I still did not know the words to, my mother spent the ride in silence. She cradled the doll in such a way that Penny’s head propped over her shoulder, and so Rose and I found ourselves staring at those blank eyes hour after hour. We did our best to look away out the window at the 18-wheelers rumbling by in the dark, but while rolling through the hills of Pennsylvania, I noticed Rose’s hand reach slowly forward. She grasped a strand of Penny’s red yarn hair, tugged—hard, fast—and it came free. We went still, waiting to see if anyone noticed. My father was listening to a religious program on the radio, which put him in a trance. And my mother had been in her own kind of trance since coming down the stairs on Orchard Circle. When it was clear neither noticed, Rose set the yarn on the hump in the middle of the backseat and reached forward again.