Help for the Haunted(96)

“Then why did we go there?”

“At first, they wrote to say that in its own strange way the doll had brought hope back into their lives. But over time, they reported that her presence seemed to be responsible for disruptive occurrences.”

“What sort of occurrences?” I asked, thinking only of the ones in our lives.

Again, my mother sighed. She never liked talking about this sort of topic as much as my father, and I worried she might cut it short. But she continued, “Broken dishes. A shattered mirror. A fire in the store below their apartment. More than any of those things, however, they described a pervasive, off-kilter feeling that plagued their home. Eventually, your father convinced me that we should visit and help them if we could. But from the very moment we watched you girls drive off to the movies, I had the same impression as when reading the Entwistles’ letters: this was a couple struggling with overwhelming grief. At first, that opinion was based solely on those feelings I get. But the details of their lives confirmed it. Their daughter had been dead nearly three years, and yet, when the Entwistles showed us the girl’s bedroom, it was just as she left it, right down to her barrettes on the nightstand and her dirty play clothes in the hamper. Most nights, Mrs. Entwistle informed us, she slept right there in the twin bed with her daughter’s doll cradled in her arms, rather than in her own bed with her husband.”

“So were they lying to you and Dad about the things they claimed Penny did?”

“Not lying exactly. What they were doing, I believe, was sharing with us a kind of truth they had created for themselves. In some ways, it’s not so different from what many people do in this world. Their truth was a story that they had woven together in the years after their heartbreaking loss—one they kept adding to, seizing any scrap of evidence to support their belief. You’ll see as you get older, Sylvie, even if the examples aren’t so extreme, there are times when it is easier to fool yourself than swallow some jagged piece of reality. Does that make sense?”

I nodded. “What about—” I paused, wanting to finish with: the snapped limbs on my horses, the doll missing from the rocker that night, the way it had of turning up in your bed. But I held off, asking instead, “What about the broken dishes and the shattered mirror? What about the fire?”

My mother could not explain those things with any certainty, she said, except to tell me that it was not so unusual for objects to break. As for the fire downstairs, Drackett’s Used Goods looked more than a little cluttered when she glanced in the window. “All those ancient things crammed inside probably made for a fire hazard.”

At last, the water letting from the doll’s body had slowed. My mind was full of more questions, but I brought up one in particular. “When we knocked on the door, Dad had a scratch on his hand that was bleeding. What happened?”

“That’s probably the least mysterious thing of all. Mr. Entwistle was showing your father pieces of the broken mirror that he kept in a plastic bag. Your dad cut himself. Simple as that.”

“I see,” I told her.

“I know what you’re thinking, Sylvie.”

“You do?”

“Yes. I bet you’re wondering why, if I did not believe the things they said about Penny, did I go along with your father and remove her from their home?”

She was right, that had been on my mind.

“Whether or not I believed them was beside the point. Getting the doll out of their home was what they wanted, and it seemed like the most sensible—the most kind—thing to do in order to help them move on. Besides, your father believed what they said. That’s happened many times, in fact. He sees things a certain way that I do not. When we prayed with them, he felt strongly that a door had been opened inside that apartment. For that reason, he asked me to keep the doll away from anyone else until we got home. He especially didn’t want either of you near her—” My mother stopped. “Near it, as your sister pointed out. I suppose I should break that habit at least.”

This time, the mention of Rose led me to try and picture her at that moment, in the passenger seat for a change, while my father sat at the wheel. I imagined the thick silence between them as they sped north toward the New York border and that school beyond. Maybe she was right, I thought. Maybe any place would be better for her than our house, considering how strange things had become.

Keeping my eyes on the doll, while digesting the things my mother had said about how harmless it was, I couldn’t help but tell her, “I still don’t like the idea of having Penny around. I don’t like seeing it in your rocker. And however it happens, I don’t like it ending up in your bed. Plus, I don’t like that its picture was in the paper. Kids in school, people in town, they all know what’s going on here, Mom. And knocking down our mailbox and trash cans is their way of showing us they don’t like it.”

My mother fell quiet before telling me, “At the moment, there’s nothing we can do about what people out there think. But we can do something about Penny. And whatever the truth about the doll, at the very least we can put it someplace where you won’t have to see it. Someplace where, no matter what anyone believes, it will seem incapable of doing harm.” She got up and walked toward Rose’s old rabbit cage, where Mr. Knothead once lived, twitching his wet nose, devouring the endless carrots my sister fed him, dropping his stinky pellet turds through the metal bars to the lawn beneath. It was not so terribly big, that cage. Not so terribly heavy, either. That’s something I learned when my mother detached and slid it out from the wooden stand, then asked me to give her a hand. Together, we wedged our fingers between the bars and carried it across the lawn, up the stoop, inside the house, and down to the basement. The most out of the way spot, we decided after some discussion, was atop that hulking bookshelf by the crawl space. We steadied the cage up there, and then my mother disappeared up the stairs, returning with Penny in her arms. After placing the doll’s wet body inside, she closed the door and fastened the latch, letting out a breath.