A Good and Happy Child (29 page)

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“Did it wake you?” Mom asked me.

“Why do you think I was
up?
” I said. “Didn’t you hear it?”

“Yes. But I was deep asleep. Tired.”

Swish boom, swish boom.

“What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know. I guess we have some sort of poltergeist.” Her lips were very dry.

“Poltergeist means ‘racket ghost,’” I volunteered.

“Yes, it does.”

We were silent for a time then.

“It’s getting worse,” I said.

The sound had changed. It was no longer
swish-boom
but
boom . . .
boom . . . boom.
The door was slamming itself against the aluminum frame with increasing violence. We could feel the impact through the wall.

“Should we stop it?” I asked. She shot me a sudden suspicious glance, as if to say,
You know how to stop it?
For an instant I was George the mental patient again. “You know, put some towels there so it doesn’t break.”

“You mean the glass could shatter,” she said, understanding me.

“Yeah.”

“That’s a good idea.”

Neither of us moved.

“I don’t think I want to go in there,” Mom said.

“Okay,” I said. I stayed seated—I sure wasn’t going in without her. Mom came and sat next to me on the bed and put her arm around me.

Finally the doorbell buzzed. Mom leapt up and tied her robe around her. “You stay here,” she said. She took a deep breath and opened the door.
Bang, bang.
The noise sounded like a team of workmen with hammers.

“I’m coming, too.”

“No, stay here.”

A minute later I heard footsteps, then a soft knock. I cracked the door open and saw Kurt, my mother behind him.

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“Hiya George,” he said. He wore his usual smile, but his eyes were puffy and his hair was tousled. He was bundled in a flannel-lined jacket, and he wore pajama bottoms with snow boots. “Anything going on in here?” he said looking around, meaning the ghost.

“No, ’s quiet here,” I said.

“Okay.”

I held the bedroom door open to watch. Kurt faced the bathroom, transfixed.
Bang.
The shower door jerked again. My mom peered at him anxiously.

“Never seen anything like this,” said Kurt with a nervous laugh. He advanced toward the bathroom and the shower door.

“Don’t!” my mom shouted. But in my head I urged him on. Someone had to cope; Kurt was the man; Kurt was coping. He inched forward—perhaps half expecting the shower door to attack—until he stood a foot away, my mother and I trailing behind him. Then, slowly, he leaned forward and extended his meaty-fingered hand to catch the door.

The shower door stopped.

Kurt stood upright, puzzled, but pleased. I think he was about to make some joking remark like
Problem solved!
the way you do when a radio “fixes” itself the moment after you’ve given up fiddling; but another sound stopped him: the creak of glass on chrome. He took a step closer.

“Come away from there, honey,” said my mother. It was the first time she’d used a term of affection for Kurt in front of me. But I had no time to dwell on it. Kurt moved a half step back. The door was banging again now, but not along the traces. It slammed against them. Invisible hands rocked it back and forth with increasing force, pressing it outward from the center of the glass, giving it a convex belly. Suddenly the glass exploded like a starburst into tiny fragments. Before I closed my eyes to duck away from the flying glass, I registered an image, a snapshot of Kurt, big belly and back nearly filling the door frame, one arm crooked around his face as the glass pellets flew and a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

219

stuck to his hair and clothes, bounced off him and scattered across the tile, making a hundred tiny scratches.

Like people fleeing a tornado, we hastily dressed and packed socks and toothbrushes and a day’s worth of clothes into bags. We piled through the front door, with me in the lead. Crossing the front porch in the cold dark, I noticed Kurt and Mom stop and spin around sharply.

“Come on,” I said. “What is it?”

They frowned.

“Nothing,” said Kurt firmly.

But I didn’t take orders from Kurt yet. “What
is
it?” I said, and pushed past him back into the house. “What . . .?” I was about to ask again, then stopped, because I heard it. The aluminum frame of the shower door was sliding again, without the glass, regular as an industrial machine. Kurt set down his bags. “I’ll take a look . . .”

“Leave it,” said Mom. “Just leave it.”

r r r

Kurt’s place overlooked the green and sluggish James River. Sycamores curved over the water like white stalks. From one of them—a thicktrunked monster that jutted over the stream at a forty-five-degree angle—dangled the frayed end of a rope swing. Planks had been nailed to the tree’s skin as crude ladder rungs. In summer a tire would be tied to the the rope. County folk would park their trucks along the roadside and line up to leap from a hump in the tree trunk, swinging out over the river and splashing into the deep water.

But now, in wintertime, the river formed the frigid border between county and town. On the county side lay floodplains of brown grass, then fences, then a hinterland of sandy-colored hills. On the town side rose the machicolations of Fort Virginia, protected by a sheer, lichenous cliff face.
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Kurt’s home was a split-level, sleek and modern with a vaguely Frank Lloyd Wright hill-hugging sprawl. The entry hall was hung with photos: Kurt skiing with pals, grinning under black goggles. A collie. A collage of nephews. An older woman—his mother?—with a hair-sprayed white coif, pearl earrings, and a frown. The hall gave way to a vaulted living room supported by beams. Sliding glass doors looked onto a shallow backyard. We dumped our bags on the floor, peeled off our coats. My mother went upstairs to change.

“George, you’ll be okay on the couch down here, won’t you?”

asked Kurt.

The sofa in question smelled new, with oversized beige cushions that seemed commodious enough for three. I eagerly accepted and quickly prepared to bunk down.

Then it hit me.

“Where are you guys sleeping?” I asked.

“Your mother and I are sleeping upstairs,” Kurt said evenly. On the way over, we had chattered excitedly about the shower door. My mother joked that she would call the historical society in the morning to have them add our place to the local ghost-story tour; Kurt sent shivers up our spines suggesting, in a dramatic voice, that a prior resident had hanged himself in the basement. We shouted him down—

No, stop it! Too scary!
—and giggled with nerves and late-night excitement. Now I felt a sense of dread.

“No ghosts out here, that’s for sure,” Kurt was saying. “This house was built just ten years ago. One owner. A tax lawyer. Ectoplasmic reading of zero.”

My mother padded downstairs in robe and slippers. She shooed Kurt away, fished in our overnight bag, and produced the pajamas I had started the evening with—blue flannel with fire engines. I changed. She bedded me down as only a mother can, with tender efficiency.

“You okay?” She stroked my hair.

“Mom?” I said tentatively. “Do you believe it now, too?”

a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

221

“Believe what?” Her voice dropped twenty degrees.

“About the demon?” I waited, heart beating.

Her stroking stopped. She seemed to drift into reverie, reliving the instant the door shattered. “This would get me to believe it, if anything would,” she said.

“It would?” I sat up on one elbow, excited. “Tom Harris says they have power over matter,” I said. “
Bodies, faces, furniture.
That’s what he said.”

“George, we talked about that,” she said warningly. “You’re not to mention that again.”

“But—but you saw what happened,” I pleaded.

“We’ve got an old house. These things happen,” she said crisply. She patted the pillow. “Come on. Sleepy time.”

“But Mom.” I lay back down. “I thought I could talk about demons. I’m going to Forest Glen anyway.”

“Exactly,” she said grimly. “And I want you coming back from Forest Glen, too.”

She dimmed the lights. After a time I drifted to sleep in the clean, new-furniture smell of the pillows, thinking of her parting words to me:
We’re okay, now,
she said.
Kurt will protect us. We had a scare,
that’s all.

When I woke it was some time later—a few minutes, an hour—and I heard them. First, my mother giggling warmly, then Kurt’s deeper tones in a murmur, then the wet smack of kissing. I strained to hear, fascinated, my heart beating. But soon the sounds changed. I put the pillow over my ears. I couldn’t stand to listen.
She doesn’t care that my
father’s gone
was all I could think.
She doesn’t care.
I tossed on the sofa, trying to get comfortable; attempting, impossibly, to find a position where I could not hear the sounds of their lovemaking; hoping they would hear me tossing and turning, that they would stop and realize the shame of what they were doing. But it seemed to last forever. Their
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gasps, the bed creaking, grew louder. Finally I threw the bedclothes off me, determined to do something. I would scream. I would turn on the brightest lights and accuse them, to their flushed and sticky faces, of how rotten they were, how my father, my father . . . I stood in the center of the living room, trembling with anger. In the sliding glass doors I saw my reflection: heaving chest, disheveled hair. But there was something wrong. A malevolent grin spread across the face in the reflection. I touched my face. My reflection did not.

You left Saint Michael at home
came a familiar voice.
Poor George.

“What are you doing here?” I said aloud.

What are
you
doing here?
he echoed mockingly.

“We’re here because there’s a poltergeist in our house.”

My Friend seemed to grow at these words and become more vivid. I saw him no longer as a reflection, but as a flesh-and-blood child—

ragged and dirty in his pajamas. He stood in the frost-covered grass, just beyond the glass doors. I no longer heard the moans of the two grown-ups upstairs. I only heard the shimmering, ethereal voice in my ears. I stared at the figure standing in the moonlight in Kurt’s backyard, an inch from the glass door, his breath making fog on the glass.
I meant what are
you
doing
here? He shook his head sadly, pityingly.
They don’t want you, George. Listen to what they’re doing.
I knew what I was supposed to do: say your prayers. But the one I knew best, the Lord’s Prayer, seemed remote, fragmentary, only guessable: the phone number of a friend who had long since moved away.
They don’t want you,
he said.

Suddenly he stood next to me. No longer separated by the glass, he reached over with his hand—fingers grubby, nails bitten and bloody—and clutched his fingers over my chest. I could scarcely breathe. Tom Harris’s words returned to me.
They can make a heart . . .
stop.
My forehead broke into a cold sweat.
I will die here,
I thought.
I will die here and they won’t know because
of what they’re doing.

They don’t want you,
my Friend whispered close, in my ear. a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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I searched in one final frantic effort for a prayer, but merely swooned. His lips kept moving next to my ear, hissing long, circular, hypnotic phrases. I listened, I argued and defended, but I was swimming against a tide. The circuitous debate lasted until finally, too exhausted to remember when or how, I crawled back under the covers, trembling and chilled, and fell into a bleak unconsciousness. March, This Year

The fluorescent lights in our corridor flickered. Odd, how in only a month our apartment building could change. The striped carpet was the same. The unreliable lighting was the same. It was I who had transformed into an interloper. When I saw our neighbors—the rolypoly Wall Street couple, the gay mountain-biking fanatic—I grinned and waved, but they held up a cautious hand in greeting, offered a dubious smile. They knew Maggie and I had split. They appraised my twoday scruff, my change from suit-man to sweatshirt-guy. They thought,
trouble.
Now I stood in the hall, outside my own apartment, holding a thick manila envelope. I saw the locked doors and the empty hall from the point of view of a delivery boy, an exile, a thief. And I waited. Maggie turned the corner. When she saw me, she came to a full stop.

“What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to talk to you,” I said.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” she said. “You should go.”

This resolved, she withdrew her keys—a big tangle in a red leather pouch—and charged the door, studiously picking out her key to avoid eye contact.

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“Listen,” I said. “I’m working with the psychiatrist, like we said.” But she plunged the key into the door. “I’m just not going fast enough.” She turned the bolt. Started to pick out key number two. “Stop it!” I said.

I grabbed her hand. She jerked it away, face white with fury. I often wished she would go red like the other Irish—her livid anger spooked me.

“Get off.”

“There’s stuff you don’t know about me,” I said. “I’m staying away from him for a reason.”

“I’m glad you’re gone,” she said spitefully. “It’s better.”

I stepped back, wounded. She fumbled for the second key, hands shaking now. This violent separation from the past was too much to bear. Maggie and I opening this door together hundreds of times. Giddy. Grumpy. Drunk. Stamping snow off our boots. Sun-baked and sweaty. Maggie bending at the waist,
Hurry, I gotta pee so bad.
With shopping bags. With new furniture. With friends. With her gentleness and patience and beauty, Maggie had redeemed me once—from the rootless misery of a volatile, self-loathing youth. Why couldn’t she pull that trick again? Yet here I was, stale-smelling and red-eyed, pulling at her like a beggar. I was Grendel, a monster gazing longingly at a campfire from my place in the woods. The past seemed so close. I wished to reach out, dip my hand into that other dimension, be her husband again, rewind back to our first date at an East Village bar, drinking dirty martinis and swiveling on barstools like kids. I gripped Maggie’s face with both hands. I forced a kiss on her. It worked. The sensations returned: her full lips, her scent—same perfume, I noted—the nearby jangle of earring, the tickle of her curly hair, her presence, her aura, the slight clamminess from a ride on the subway, the end-of-day fatigue . . . it was all still there—a destination in itself, a place where I’d been happy.