Help for the Haunted(8)

As we turned into our sloping driveway, past the faded NO TRESPASSING! signs, I couldn’t help but glance at the basement window. A light used to remain on down there at all times. Considering the reasons my parents kept it on, I should not have longed for the sight of that yellowy glow seeping beneath the rhododendrons, but I couldn’t help myself. Not that it mattered. The bulb burned out sometime after their deaths, and neither of us had gone down to replace it.

“Isn’t it funny?” I said. “All those times Mom and Dad went away and you fought for us not to have a nanny so we could be alone. Now, here we are. Just the two of us.”

Rose cut the engine. As we listened to the faint tip-tap beneath the hood, she untangled her hair, and I waited for that vibrating sensation to leave my feet.

“Like that time with Dot,” I began.

“Why do you have to talk about that stuff?”

“I just—”

“I don’t want to think about the past anymore, Sylvie. Mom and Dad chose their lives and beliefs and career. And look what happened. I know I should never have made that call. Believe me, I wouldn’t have if I’d had any idea what would come of it. But Albert Lynch would have found a way to get to them anyway. Or if not him, some other freak. So I don’t think it’s good for either of us to go on about what used to be anymore. Once we get through the trial come spring, we have to leave it behind.”

As she spoke, I stayed quiet, watching her undo the snarls in her hair.

“Someday, Sylvie, when you finish school and we move away from this house and live our separate lives, we’re going to forget the one we lived here. I know it seems hard to believe, but one day it’ll be just a bunch of lost memories from a long time ago.”

Shhhh . . .

It had nothing to do with that sound; I heard her just fine. Yet I couldn’t see how we would ever be able to leave any of it behind. But what more was there to say? I reached for my father’s tote full of books, including the diary Boshoff had given me earlier that day. I opened the door and lowered my feet to the ground. That’s when I felt something soft beneath my flip-flops. Part of me knew what it was right away. Still, the sensation made me gasp.

“What now?” Rose asked.

My silence did nothing to keep her from coming around to the other side of the truck. By then I’d stepped off the thing and placed the tote on the ground. We stood in our shadowy driveway, staring down at its splayed body and wide white moon of a face. Those blank black eyes and that peculiar shade of red hair. This one was smaller than usual: the size of a possum, but flattened, as though it had been run over.

With the tip of her boot, my sister flipped it facedown into the dirt. “Fuckers!” she yelled into the darkness surrounding our house. “You f*ckers!” With each new outburst, she raked her hands over her hair until the staticky strays levitated around her head. I thought again of how she’d first razored it to the scalp more than a year before, mainly because some guy she liked had shaved his and wanted her to do the same. If Franky told you to jump off a bridge, would you? If Franky told you to rob a bank, would you? If Franky told you never to speak to your family again, would you? Those were the questions my parents asked, to which my sister responded, Yes!

“Fuckers!” she yelled one last time before letting out a breath and kneeling in the dirt. Slowly, her hands reached out for the thing.

“Don’t!” I said.

“Don’t what?”

“Touch it.”

Rose looked up at me. She may have had our mother’s name, but it was our father’s face I saw on her: his wide chin, his pronounced nose, his eyes, dark and squinty behind his smudged wire-rims. Though our father never spoke to me the way Rose did when she said, “It’s not going to do anything, you idiot.”

“I know. But please. Just don’t.”

My sister sighed. She stood and walked to the rusted shed at the edge of our property. I heard her rattling around before she returned with a shovel. It took maneuvering, but she slid the foam-stuffed body onto the end and carefully walked to the well we hadn’t used since the town of Dundalk installed city water. I followed and pushed the plywood covering off the top. Rose raised the shovel over the gaping black mouth and, with a flick of her wrists, dropped the doll inside.

“It never ends,” my sister said, hurling the shovel into the darkness where her old rabbit cage once stood. “It never f*cking ends.”

“They’ll get bored,” I told her and pulled the plywood back over the hole, careful not to give myself a sliver. “They have to get bored.”

Inside, our house was silent except for the hum of the fridge and the ticking of the antique clock that hung not far from the cross on the wall. I went to the kitchen with its peeling blue walls and ate my dinner: a cherry Popsicle, the best kind. All the while I slurped and felt my lips go numb, I stared at my mother’s thick book of wallpaper swatches on the table and thought about another conversation with Detective Rummel, the morning after the first, at the hospital.

Rummel had slid a photo across the narrow table over my bed. “Do you know this man, Sylvie?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“He once was a friend of my— Well, not a friend. I guess he was what you’d call a client of my parents. His daughter, Abigail, was anyway. She was the one who needed them. Her father just brought her to us.”