Help for the Haunted (45 page)

Beside us to guide us,
our God with us joining,

Ordaining, maintaining
His kingdom divine;

So from the beginning
the fight we were winning;

Thou, Lord, were at our
side, all glory be Thine!

Again, Franky lifted my head, and again she brought
it down. The force was so great that this time it felt as though the world had
stopped. I tried to open my eyes but could not. I heard no sounds, not even my
mother's singing.

And then, after what felt like a long stretch of
time, my eyes blinked open into the gloom of that water, and I had a vision of
her: my mother, standing on the other side of some great abyss, that dirty water
an ocean between us. She wore the beige trench coat from the video I played that
day in the basement so long ago while Rose messed with the fuse box and Dot
bathed in the tub upstairs reading her silly book. For a moment, the image
flickered and blurred just as it had done that day on the TV screen.
I'm losing her,
I thought.
Once
again, I will have to let her go.
But then her image sharpened. And
when her lips moved, she spoke in a serious voice.

“This is what I will tell you, Sylvie,” my mother
said. “Each of us is born into this life with a light inside us. Some, like
yours, burn brighter than others. As you grow older you will come to understand
why. But what's most important is to never ever let that light go out. Do you
understand what I am trying to say?”

“Yes,” I opened my mouth to tell her, only to take
in more dirty water, swallowing it, filling my lungs.

“That's a good girl,” she said. “It won't be easy,
but you have to believe. And you have to fight. Okay?”

This time, I knew better than to open my mouth to
answer. Besides, it no longer mattered, because that ghost, that globule, that
memory of her—whatever it was—had vanished into that murky green water. At the
same time, Franky made her greatest effort yet. She lifted my head by the hair.
And when I was delivered back into that world of air and fallen leaves and the
gray autumn sky growing dim above, my free hand scrambled along the cement floor
until I found what I needed. Before she could send me down a final time, I
squirmed around until I was on my back, pinned beneath her. And then I used my
free hand to bring a rock against the side of her head.

Once. Twice. A third and fourth time, until I saw
blood. After that, her body went slack and she fell to one side of me.

For a moment, after I let the rock drop, I lay
there catching my breath. As soon as I could manage, I forced myself out from
under her. I stood, wet and bloodied, and looked down at Franky. Her back rose
and fell with each breath, but otherwise she was motionless.

I walked away from her and began the climb up those
crumbling stairs. At the top, I stared back at my house. All those
NO TRESPASSING!
signs my father had nailed to the
birch trees, which had done nothing to keep danger away. My sister was still
inside, and though I thought to go and help her, I chose the path instead.
Dripping and muddy and shirtless, I stumbled along the twisted trail to the
field, where I stood so many mornings and afternoons. Over that barbed fence I
climbed, careful not to do any more damage to myself. I walked across the
trampled grass, where those turkeys had been for so long, most of them gone now.
I kept going until I reached the doors of the barn.

“Dereck!” I called, knocking and knocking.
“Dereck!”

When no answer came, I slid the doors open. A man
who was not Dereck stood on the other side, wearing headphones and chopping meat
on a wooden block. He had gray hair and a kind face. He looked the way I
imagined my mother's father to have looked. When he saw me, he yanked the
headphones from his ears and came to me. “What happened to you, young lady?”

“I'm here for Dereck,” I told him.

The man removed his white smock and draped it over
my shoulders. He led me through a maze of shelves and bins and small cages to a
back room, where the air was chilled. He told me to wait a few seconds. And it
really did seem like just a few seconds before Dereck appeared, covered in blood
too.

He took one look at me, then went to a locker
across the room and pulled out his battered barn jacket. Like that day I had
jumped from my sister's truck, he offered it to me, this time slipping it over
my arms and zipping up the front. As he did, I began to cry, the tears warm
against my skin. Dereck put his arms around me. “What happened?” he asked and
asked again, though I could not force the answer from my mouth. Not right away.
Not for some time to come. And still he kept repeating that question, “What
happened? What happened? What happened?”

But the words would not come. All I could do was
take his ruined hand in mine and lead him away from the farm, back across that
trampled field, back over the barbed-wire fence, along that twisted path in the
woods toward home.

 

Chapter 22

Faraway Places

I
did not take much from the house when I moved out. My journal, of course. That lone white horse Rose had given me, the only one that had never been broken. A bag full of clothes. My mother's silver cross necklace, which I have not taken off, even seven months later, along with her slim gold watch I use to tell time. With the exception of a few other odds and ends, I left the rest behind. It would be boxed up, I was told, put into storage or sold off. My father's old competition, Dragamir Albescu, surfaced and offered good money for the haunted artifacts in our basement. Rather than let the man pick and choose like some sort of rummage sale, my uncle offered him an all-or-nothing deal. In the end, every last relic from their unusual career—including the hatchet from the Locke Family Farm, Penny in Mr. Knothead's cage, even my father's old dental chair and my mother's rocker—all of it was loaded onto a moving truck headed for Marfa, Texas, where Mr. Albescu maintains the Marfa Museum of the Paranormal.

Before he and the movers drove away, Albescu told my uncle that a special room would be dedicated just to my parents and their contribution to the field. When Howie made some mention of Heekin's book and asked if the things he had written might keep people away, Albescu waved one of his jeweled hands in the air and scoffed, “Not at all. In fact, these things in our line of work are like a shuttlecock in the game of badminton. They need to be swatted back and forth in order to keep people paying attention.” Then he told us that we were welcome to visit the museum anytime, free of charge.

I can't imagine a day will ever come when I'll want to do that.

My life is different now. And the way things are looking, it is going to get more different as time moves forward, though I don't think I'll ever forget the life we lived in that house on Butter Lane as Rose once predicted. At the moment, I am staying a few towns over in Howard County, at the home of a couple named Kevin and Beverly. They take in foster children, which for the time being anyway, I am.

When I arrived on their doorstep, escorted by a brand-new caseworker, and carting along my journal, that horse, a bag of clothes, and only a few other possessions, they told me their names were easy to remember, because they rhyme. My mind was in such a daze still that I could not understand how that made any sense. But then Beverly—who wears a never-ending supply of oversized sweatshirts in bright pastels and keeps her hair tugged back in a never-ending supply of scrunchies—let out a bubbling, infectious laugh and said, “You know,
Kev
and
Bev
. It'll be hard for you to forget us, Sylvie. Trust me. Now come on in.”

They showed me to my room, which is clean and simply furnished. There is a single bed with an oak headboard, a matching dresser and nightstand with a simple white lamp on top. The window beside the bed looks out over their fenced yard. The view is not unlike the one I used to draw outside the imaginary windows on the walls of the old foundation across the street. It is late spring now, so I see tufts of grass out there and all sorts of colorful flowers. Most days, there is a bright sun shining in the sky. Sometimes, I sit quietly in that room on the edge of the bed and spin my sister's globe, which was another thing I took from our house. When I plunk my finger on a random location—Tokyo, San Francisco, Mexico City—I think of the way she used to do the same.

Places like that—faraway places, I mean—they're where I want to go someday . . .

I hear her voice saying those words and, inevitably, I think of that final afternoon when I took Dereck's hand and walked back through the woods. I should have noticed that Rose's truck was gone from the driveway. But we were too preoccupied by the sight at the bottom of the foundation. When I'd fled not long before, I remembered glancing behind to see her back rising and falling. Now, though, the body had gone motionless. Whatever I'd done in the commotion with that rock had brought an end to a life down there. The sight made me shudder, and Dereck pulled me away across the lane.

“Rose!” he called, pushing open the door to our house.

The antique clock ticked. The oversized cross hung on the wall. The curio hutch showcased my father's haphazard stacks or books behind the glass. Considering all that had occurred, it seemed even those things should offer an indication of being altered somehow. And yet, it all remained the same, indifferent as ever.

“Hello!” Dereck called when we did not hear an answer.

Words refused to come to me still, but with my hand in his, I guided us to the kitchen and that door to the basement. For a long moment, we stood at the top of the wooden stairs that so many of those haunted people had clomped down in hopes of leaving their demons behind. We stared into the shadowy space, where I had last seen my sister. There was my torn T-shirt. There was the dishtowel with Popsicle juice dripping in all sorts of bright colors from the steps to the cement below. But there was no Rose.

It must have been the man who first opened the door back at the farm who thought to call the police, because soon sirens wailed in the distance and drew closer. Before long, car doors slammed outside, footsteps pounded up the front steps and around back of the house. At least a half-dozen officers arrived on the scene, maybe more. Many of them I recognized from the hallways at the station, or perhaps in my vague, flickering memories of that winter night when I was pulled from beneath the pew at the church. The last to arrive was Detective Rummel, since he had already gone home for the day. By then, Dereck and I were sitting on the steps outside. Yellow police tape had already been set up around the foundation across the street. Officers were unspooling even more around our yard too, stringing it among the birch and cedar trees. I wore Dereck's barn jacket still and rocked and back and forth, since my body carried a chill I could not shake.

Same as he did that first day at the hospital, Rummel took my hand in his. He spoke gently, saying, “Tell me what happened, Sylvie.”

And so, at last, I found the words to tell him all that I'd come to know and exactly how I'd come to know it. The story took time as I explained about my visits with Father Coffey and Sam Heekin and my uncle and, of course, Emily Sanino. It took longer still to tell him about Abigail and my parents and the things I'd learned about my father. After a long while, though, I came to the end of that story. When I finished speaking, the detective gazed at me with his bright blue eyes and asked the very question I'd been wondering since returning to the house: “Where is your sister?”

Seattle. Montreal. Madrid.

Sometimes, I sit on the bed in my room at Kev and Bev's house and spin that globe, imagining I know the answer. I try to picture her life in any one of those places. I try to imagine her happy too, which I hope is so. The most I know for certain, the most the police know as well, is that her truck was found the next day in a rest stop off the highway in Pikesville, Maryland. Whatever money she had, Rose took from the house, right down to the coins inside the old doorbell box, which she had put there as a child, not knowing that someday she would rip it off the wall and retrieve every cent before leaving home forever.

These days, Howie comes to visit me quite a bit. Often, he is full of updates, since he's been working with the courts again in an effort to be appointed my legal guardian. His plan—
our
plan, I can safely say as the days pass and we spend more time in each other's company—is that I will go to live with him in a new apartment he is renting in Philadelphia. The place is situated on a quiet street, near a good school, and has a second bedroom that he says I can decorate any way I want in the few years I have left before college. The theater is up and running again, and even though there's only a smattering of bands booked to play the stage in the summer ahead, Howie tells me it's a sign that someday there will be more. When I mention those details to Kev and Bev and the caseworker who comes by regularly to check on me, they all say the same thing: a good home and a successful business will work wonders in helping my uncle to get custody this time around.

Howie sold off his motorcycle and bought a Jeep like Dereck's. On the days when he visits, we take rides together, usually going by the old house just to look at the place with a For Sale sign out front. Even though I avoid the newspapers still, my uncle told me there was a recent story in the
Dundalk Eagle
by Sam Heekin about a new developer who plans to buy up all the properties on the lane, finish building houses atop those forgotten foundations at last, then sell them off. So far, things there look the same, but I can already picture what it will become, since I'd been imagining real houses there for years.

Just today, when my uncle came to get me, the weather was warm enough that the top was off the Jeep. He asked if I wanted to take our usual route by the house, but I told him there was another errand I needed to run first. Rather than pull my hair back as we drove, I let it whip around me the way Rose used to do, the way Abigail used to do too. My hand surfed the wind, and I did my best to stay out of my head as I'd been taught that summer on our way to and from the ice cream shop and the pond.

By the time we pulled in front of the school, it was nearly the end of the day. Since I'd opted to finish the academic year with a home tutor, I had not been inside the building for months. It was the last day before summer vacation, and when I walked past the smoking area beneath the overhang with its ratty furniture, on through the front door, the air hummed with a palpable excitement. I moved through the halls until arriving at the windowless office Boshoff shared. Inside, I found him peeling his Just Say No posters off the wall, rolling them up, one by one. I stood in the doorway, watching him a moment before he saw me.

“Sylvie,” he said, smiling. “What a nice surprise. Please, come in. Sit.”

I stepped into the space but did not sit. “I can't stay long. My uncle is waiting.”

Boshoff put down the posters, and we stood gazing around at the walls covered with bits of stray tape. Everything else was gone. “Each June,” he said, “the maintenance crew tells me and the other faculty to leave the place bare, so they can paint over the break. The thing is, they say that every year and no one ever does a thing.”

We both laughed, and that's when I handed him the package I'd brought, wrapped up with a bow.

“Sylvie, you didn't need to get me a gift.”

“I wanted to,” I told him.

Boshoff tried his best to neatly undo the paper before giving up and simply tearing it open. Inside, he found a cookbook—not one I'd bought, but rather, one I'd made by gluing a wallpaper swatch over two pieces of cardboard then sandwiching a dozen or so empty pages inside. With duct tape from Kev's toolbox, I bound it into a book, which looked less homemade than I imagined. Even if I never managed to find wallpaper that perfectly matched my personality, I found one that suited Boshoff's book just fine. The Keep Calm—that's what it was called. The pattern was the deep blue of a nighttime sky with a dusting of dim yellow stars placed here and there. It seemed the sort of thing that might calm anybody who had trouble sleeping at night.

I watched as Boshoff opened the book to see that I'd filled the pages with recipes. Beef barley soup. Pork piccata. Lady Baltimore Cake. Those and the others were the meals my mother used to make during my childhood. Before leaving home, I'd found them written in her careful cursive on index cards she kept tucked in a kitchen drawer. It seemed important that she be remembered for something besides the strange artifacts on display in that room in Marfa, Texas. What I wanted was for some people—even if it was just the two of us—to remember her as a mother first, because that was the more important role she played during her time in this world. For that reason, I also filled the last of those pages with passages I once underlined in the books she made me read, like:

If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.

That was just one, but there were others. I thought those lines were like poetry in their own way too, because you had to stop and think about them in order to understand their connection to things around you.

Boshoff turned the pages, clacking a cough drop against his teeth, but not saying a word. After some time, I worried he did not understand what it was meant to be, so I explained, then finished by saying, “It's just a little something to read at night when you can't sleep. That's all. Anyway, how is your wife?”

When he looked up, I could see his eyes were rimmed with red at the lids. He blinked a few times, and I thought he was about to deliver sad news when he told me, “You are a very thoughtful young lady, Sylvie. Thank you for this book. It will remain special to me, always. And thank you for remembering my wife too. You'll be glad to know that she's doing well actually. In remission for a few months now, which is the biggest blessing we could ask for.” He closed the book and said he wanted to save it to read at night the way I intended. “Now, tell me about you. How is your ear?”