Help for the Haunted(76)
When I’d found the broken horses a week before, I waited till morning to take the pieces into the bathroom where Rose was brushing her teeth. “Did you do this?” I asked.
“Me?” Her mouth was full of toothpaste, which she promptly spit out. She plucked a leg from my palm, inspected the knobby knee, the broad hoof. “Of course not.”
“Well, who else then?”
“I don’t know. But what reason would I have?”
“There are lots of things you do, Rose, that I don’t understand your reasons for.”
“Careful. You’re starting to sound like Dad.” She returned the limb to my hand, her toothbrush to the medicine cabinet. “You know, Sylvie, when a horse breaks a leg, it’s a lost cause. In real life they’d shoot it. If I were you, I’d just toss it in the trash.”
Her surprise, her denial—they had seemed genuine, so I left her and went to my desk to begin the careful surgery of gluing the pieces together. Still, I could not believe that my father or mother—or even that doll—could be responsible.
Now, not so many nights later, I listened to the murmur of my parents’ voices discussing their work down in the living room while I looked up at that shelf. Inspecting the horses, counting their legs to be sure they were intact, had become a ritual before sleep. The ritual was interrupted when my gaze reached a spotted pony with glimmering brown eyes. Aurora’s wooden tail had been snapped off. It took hunting, but I located that tail behind my desk. I felt the urge to march down the hall, to slam my fist against Rose’s door, to scream at her that none of this was funny. But I knew she’d only deny it again, doing an even more convincing job the second time around. The obvious solution was to begin locking my door. I locked it then, and found the small hook-shaped piece of metal to lock it from the outside in the future too, before sitting at my desk once more and gluing yet another horse together.
All the while, I heard my parents below. It was not possible to make out their words, but the clipped rise and fall of their speech gave me the sense that the discussion wasn’t pleasant. And then, all at once, they fell silent. I heard them climb the stairs and settle into their beds down the hall. By then Aurora was whole again, and though I needed sleep, I stayed at my desk and let my mind wander. For days, I’d been replaying what Rose had said about me ending up like our parents if I didn’t pay attention to the real world. Maybe the details about TV shows she tossed out in conversation were meaningless compared to the information in the documentaries we were allowed to watch, but I didn’t like the idea of my sister knowing things I did not. That feeling is what led me to unlock my door and sneak downstairs.
Other than a quick glance, I forced myself not to look at Penny in my mother’s rocker. I simply pulled a chair close to the TV, turned it on, and lowered the volume. Flipping channels past late-night news stories about Margaret Thatcher and another about Oliver North, I landed on the sort of rerun my parents forbid but Rose might reference: Three’s Company. It didn’t take long to suss out the players and the plot, which had to do with an overheard conversation wildly misinterpreted. Ridiculous as the story was, I kept watching, easing into the unfamiliar sound of canned laughter. During a commercial, I went to the kitchen, where I made myself a sandwich from the leftover roast and poured a glass of milk before returning to the living room. It wasn’t until the credits rolled that I looked over at the rocker again. The watery blue light of the television flickered over that chair, over me too, as I stared at the place where Penny sat when I came downstairs.
But Penny was no longer there.
Had she been there when I walked out of the kitchen moments before? I could not be certain. And as I picked over the possibilities, my mind arrived at the same conclusion it did with those horses: my sister was playing tricks on me. I imagined her padding down the steps to watch TV, realizing what I was doing, and getting the idea to move that doll somewhere just to scare me. I moved quietly around the room, peeking behind the sofa and drapes and any other place where Rose and I used to hide. But there was no sign of Penny anywhere, so I gave up and turned off the TV, sliding my chair back into place before climbing the stairs again.
At the end of the hall upstairs, Rose’s door was shut. My parents’ was cracked open, however, so I peeked inside. The green glow of their alarm clock gave only enough light to make out each of them, lumps in their beds. I thought of the silence that had fallen over them before bed. I rarely heard them argue, and I wondered if they’d gone to sleep angry at each other, which left me with a sudden sense of sadness toward them.
In the morning, I woke early to find my sister’s door still shut, my parents still lumps in their beds. Downstairs, the doll sat in the rocker again as though she had been there all along. I walked closer, staring at the smudges around her neck, the bracelet around her wrist. That face—one a child might draw with a crayon—was nothing more than a pair of eyes, a triangle nose, and a curled slash for a smile. And yet, looking at it brought a feeling of dread. I stood there, soaking in that feeling, wondering if I’d imagined the entire thing the night before, as that waitress’s voice echoed in my mind.
She’s just an old Raggedy Ann. A dime a dozen. But this one, well, she feels different somehow . . .
“You girls having a nice morning chat?”
The voice startled me, and I whirled around to see Rose, showered and dressed, walking down the stairs. Say something, I told myself. About the doll. About the horses. But I just stood there, watching her move through the hall to the kitchen. I heard the fridge open and close. Cabinets and drawers too, followed by the sound of cereal being poured into a bowl.