The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(74)

“Then what happened?” I asked. She liked to be goaded.

“We didn’t really know what to do,” she said. “It felt good to know she’d been experiencing these weird things, too, because it meant I wasn’t crazy, but it also made everything scarier. The next night, while Tweedy was at work, I went to bed and tried to think about other things. I heard the footsteps again, upstairs, and this time they were right above my bed. They stopped. I rolled over so my back was to the door, convincing myself to remain calm and that probably these were just animals. Then I heard the bedroom doorknob twist. I heard a creak. The door slowly opened. I was too scared to turn toward the door, so I just lay there, staring at the wall. My heart was pounding. I heard the faint sound of footsteps walking across the room. And then, and this is the sensation I’ll never forget, I felt the weight of the bed shift, as if a person sat down on the edge of the mattress. I was petrified. I couldn’t move.”

I sat rigid in my chair, heart thumping.

“Finally, after I don’t know how long, a minute or two maybe, the weight let up and whatever had been pressing down on the bed lifted. I heard steps back across the room, and then the bedroom door shut. As soon as I could move my limbs, I got up and out of bed, and went to spend the night at a friend’s house.

“The next day, Tweedy and I decided we needed help. We searched the newspaper’s classifieds until we found an ad for a woman who specialized in dealing with the dead. When she arrived at the house, the woman said she was a medium and could communicate with spirits. As soon as she stepped inside, she took a deep breath and put one hand on her heart. ‘I feel the presence of someone with unfinished business,’ she said to the room. Then, to us, ‘We are going to need to perform an exorcism.’

“‘Why us?’ I asked the medium. ‘Other people lived here before and we never heard anything about this.’

“‘The spirits choose who they think will be open enough to communicate with them,’ she said. ‘They chose you.’

“I wasn’t sure if I believed the medium, or even in the medium, but I didn’t know what else to do. We told her to go ahead with the exorcism, whatever that meant.

“‘Can it hurt us?’ Tweedy asked the medium.

“‘No, probably not. Most spirits aren’t able to harm anyone, and don’t really mean to be frightening the living. They’re just stuck here and sometimes need some help to move on.’

“The medium turned off the lights, lit some candles, and got herself into a trance. ‘O spirit,’ the medium said, ‘we mean you no harm. We will not hurt you. We are here to help you. Are you with us right now?’

“We were frozen, listening, but nothing responded.

“‘Spirits, we are here to help you,’ she repeated, ‘we mean you no harm,’ and as she was talking, the shutters on the windows started opening and closing. ‘Let me know what you want and we will try to help you, as best we can,’ she said, and the coffee table, I kid you not, started shaking. I was getting scared, very scared, wondering if we’d gotten mixed up in something we shouldn’t have. I wanted to leave but knew, somehow, that it was necessary for me to stay. That this was a moment to face the thing that seemed so far beyond my control.

“The coffee table’s shaking got more and more violent, and finally, incredibly, it lifted into the air. The medium was yelling and turning herself all around the room, directing her voice at any place the spirit might be. The table was five and then ten feet in the air, still shaking, but completely and totally elevated, unmistakably floating. The shutters were still slamming and the candles were flickering and the whole thing was so strangely like a scene from a movie that it was hard to tell if real life was happening. But my overwhelming fear had almost turned into something else. Some trust in the larger universe that whatever was happening was going to be okay.

“Finally, the table dropped back down to the ground and the shutters stopped slamming and the medium stopped yelling. The candles were all out. The medium turned to where Tweedy and I stood hugging each other and said, ‘There is a woman in this house. She died here. She’s missing something, and that is why she’s still here. I think I know where it is.’

“The medium led us out the back door, to the small tile patio where we smoked our cigarettes. She used a hammer to swing at the patio tiles, breaking away small pieces at a time until she had cleared out most of the stone. About six inches under the dirt, we found a small wooden box. Inside were a few objects that a child might have collected—a glass bottle, some dried and crumpled flowers, a tattered white scarf.

“‘Do these things belong to the woman in the house?’ we asked the medium.

“‘Her daughter,’ she said.

“‘Now what?’ we asked. ‘What comes next?’

“‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘The woman will leave, I think. Maybe she already has. She just wanted these items back out in the world. She didn’t want her daughter’s treasures buried.’

“And that’s the end,” my mom said. “You can go to bed.”

“I’m scared of ghosts,” I said.

“There’s no reason to be,” she said. “If you don’t want a ghost to come, close your heart to the idea of a ghost and it won’t be able to communicate anything to you. Say, No, ghosts, I won’t hear you, and I won’t see you.”