Help for the Haunted(91)
Standing at the edge of the property, not far from the NO TRESPASSING! signs that had never done much good, I looked at Rose’s truck in the driveway, the light in the basement window, which still glowed. Once I walked through the front door, I knew I wouldn’t walk out again until it was time to go to the station in the morning. Fifteen, maybe fourteen hours left, I guessed. The thought, coupled with the idea of facing my sister, made me want to put off going inside a little longer.
As night fell, I wandered to the empty foundation across the street. For a long while, I stood on the edge, not far from the twisted roots of the fallen tree. Same as Rose used to do, I reached down for a handful of rocks, tossing them at the metal rods that snaked up out of the cement in one corner. And then my memory of Rose was replaced by a memory of Abigail, sketching a map on the wall with a stone in the moments before blood pooled on her palms.
Now do you get it, Sylvie? Now do you understand how much I need your help?
When I grew tired of thinking about Abigail, tired of tossing rocks too, I sat on the ledge, legs dangling over the side the way a person sits by a swimming pool. Enough time passed that the last of the sun disappeared and the moon began to loom over the edge of the woods. And then, amid the never-ending shhhh, came the sound of an engine, like an animal rumbling down the street. I looked to see the glow of headlights against the bare tree branches. They came to a stop halfway down the lane, not far from the spot where I witnessed those two witches kissing on Halloween night.
Slowly, I stood. I saw a figure step out of the car and walk in the direction of our house, carrying an object of some sort. Another teenager with a doll to throw on our lawn—that was my first thought, since the person was difficult to make out with the car’s headlights so bright behind. But when the figure came closer, I realized it was the woman with the grim, head-on-a-totem-pole face, wearing the same sort of frill-less dress.
Just as I’d done while waiting for birds to land in my hands, I did not move. The woman reached the edge of our property and paused. I waited for the moment when she stepped into our yard—and that’s when I began moving, hurrying along the far side of the road in the direction of her idling station wagon. She had left her door ajar, and I slipped inside, leaning across the seat and reaching for the glove compartment, which popped right open. First thing I pulled out was a bible, thin pages highlighted and dog-eared same as my mother’s. I dropped it on the floor and fumbled for an envelope, pulling out a yellow slip of paper. In the dim glow of the dashboard, I looked to see:
Nicholas Sanino, 104 Tidewater Road . . .
Nearby, I heard footsteps and what sounded, oddly, like my mother’s humming. Lifting my head to look back, I saw that the woman had already left our property and was on her way to the car, close enough that she’d see me if I stepped onto the road. That’s what I should have done, of course: gotten out and confronted her. But panic compelled me to shove everything back in the glove compartment then throw myself over both sets of seats, until I landed with a thud in the very back of the station wagon. I reached around and found a blanket, gritty with sand, which I tugged over my body.
A moment later, I heard her arrive at the car. That song she hummed was too full of false cheer, too easily recognizable, to be anything like my mother’s, I realized. And where my mother’s tune had a way of slowly fading from her lips, the woman’s stopped abruptly. In the silence, I braced myself for the wide back door of the station wagon to swing open, for the blanket to be yanked off and for her to discover me. But there was only the sound of a door closing up front in a quiet click, the sound of a buckling seat belt, the sound of the car shifting into gear, and then the feeling of motion as the woman turned the station wagon around.
When we reached the end of the lane, the tic-tic-tic of my heart felt more frantic, more explosive, than Rose’s rabbit’s ever had beneath its soft fur. The shhhh grew louder too. I slipped my hand into my coat pocket to feel those pictures of my grandparents and my father and my uncle—even if I could not see them, I hoped they might bring some small comfort the way Howie said. But as the station wagon pulled onto the main road and picked up speed, moving faster and faster, I fished around that pocket, then another, before realizing the pictures must have fallen out somewhere. Same as all those people’s possessions in the theater years before, they were lost. But that wasn’t all. My violet diary, the pages filled with so many secrets of my parents’ lives, so many secrets of my life as well, it was gone now too.
[page]Chapter 18
Gone
In those thick old novels my mother used to force upon me, characters were forever having foreboding dreams. Jane Eyre dreamed of infants, sometimes wailing, other times hushed in her arms. Pip suffered through feverish nightmares in which he found himself no longer human, but rather a brick cemented into a wall, unable to move.
The night I dumped Penny down the well, then slipped beneath the sheets of my bed while those horse limbs lay piled on my desk, it only made sense that I should be haunted by turbulent dreams too. My subconscious could have churned up any number of images: Penny climbing out of that watery grave, my mother waking to find her soaked body oozing dank well water on the mattress beside her. Worse, I might have dreamed that it was me trapped down there beneath the earth, crying out for help. Instead, I slept more peacefully than I had in the months since that doll came to our house. Not a single disturbance until the sound of angry voices in real life began weaving their way into my tranquil subconscious.