Help for the Haunted (10 page)

“Dad? Are you there?”

The tinkling sound of glass and ice. The sound of a sitcom laugh track. Finally, his father's voice: “Your mother was the talker. Not me.”

What his father said was true, though his mother's conversations were limited to gossip: which neighbor was having trouble paying rent, whose husband was screwing another woman. Things that held little interest for my father. “Well,” my father said, “Merry Christmas.” Those bus lights blinked outside and he thought of the artificial tree his mother used to assemble. The angel on top wore a white dress splotched with yellow from all her time spent in the attic. Year after year, her blank face stared down at the four of them before she was stowed away once more. At last, my father pushed the thought of that angel and that tree and his mother and even his father who was still on the line from his mind. It had been a mistake to call, he decided. It always was.

“Same, same,” his father said, then fumbled with the phone in a clunky good-bye.

Whatever appetite my father felt had vanished. He made up his mind to head home on an empty stomach. But as he walked out to the parking lot, he came upon a young woman with long, raven-black hair and impossibly narrow shoulders sitting on a suitcase outside the bus. She held the thick end of an icicle against her face. Her skin was so translucent, her features so delicate, he thought she might very well be an apparition.

“Ghost of the Future,” he exclaimed, “I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But as I hope to know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear your company, and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me?”

The woman glanced up at him, and my father heard himself asking, “Did someone sock you?”

“Sock me?” Her voice was like the rest of her: soft, fragile.

“You know,
hit you
? I'm wondering on account of the icicle.”

“Oh. No. I have a terrible toothache. I'm on a choir trip, and the director is inside looking through the phone book, trying to find help. I thought I could bear the pain until we got to where we are going, but now that the bus is having problems, I just don't know.”

My father stepped closer, reached out a hand, and lifted the icicle away from her face. “If it's a toothache, the pain you are feeling is in your nerves. So you can put all the ice in the world on your face, and it is not going to make you feel better.”

“It's not?”

“No. But I can help you.”

Did that broken-down bus and the rest of the choirgirls make it to Harlem? How did my mother convince that matronly choir director to allow her to go off with a man she met in the parking lot? Or was the pain so severe that she made one of the few rash decisions of her life and simply picked up her suitcase and got in his car without telling anyone? I don't know those answers. However it came to be, less than an hour after he lifted that icicle from her face, my father was back at the clinic with my mother. X-rays revealed her need for a root canal. He was far from a specialist, and he couldn't perform one on his own that night, but he gave her a pulpotomy, removing the dead tissue to alleviate the pain and pressure until she could be properly treated.

That night in Ocala, after my father shared a modified, less personal version of those events with the crowd, my mother spoke up for the first time. In her lilting voice, she said into the microphone, “Since my mouth was stuffed full of instruments, Sylvester got to do all the talking. What better way to make a man fall in love with you?”

Not the funniest joke ever told, but something about her mild-mannered delivery ignited a burst of laughter from the crowd. All at once, the feeling in the air of that auditorium shifted. People had been won over, I sensed. They were on my parents' side now. Even my father relaxed, placing his index cards on the podium and putting a period on their how-we-met story by saying he and my mother spent that Christmas together and every one since. One of the things that drew them to each other, he explained, was their belief that the world consisted of more than just what we see and understand. And when he first confessed to her the strange things he'd witnessed starting as a child in his parents' movie theater, she did not laugh like so many before. Instead, she asked questions. She tried to make sense of it all.

“In this way, together over time, my wife and I began to investigate ‘the otherness' of this world we live in,” my father told the crowd. He pressed a button on the podium and the screen behind him filled with an image of an institutional hallway with a light in the corner that looked amorphous until you stared long enough and an elongated face emerged, its mouth open in a ghoulish howl.

“Ladies and gentleman, meet Caleb Lundrum. Caleb was one of the first, and certainly one of the most powerful, spirits my wife and I encountered when we began working together in the years after we were married.”

People leaned forward in their chairs. My father began to explain how he and my mother became involved in the case when a man in the audience, about twenty rows from the stage, stood. From where I crouched in the back, I made out a bit of his profile, though mostly what I saw was from behind. His hair was dark and unkempt. His shoulders, round and beefy. His jeans, sagging. “Excuse me,” he said in a slurred voice.

Earlier, when we turned into the parking lot of the conference center, my father commented to my mother that at least the weather had kept their detractors away. At the time, I didn't know what he meant. Rose, of all people, informed me later that at certain of their events, religious groups waited outside, shouting at the people who walked through the doors, calling them devil worshippers and sinners. My mother always felt genuinely confused by their venom, since she considered herself to be a woman of faith and did her best to live by the Bible. When this man first disrupted their talk, I thought maybe he was someone who had it out for my parents.

“You mentioned seeing ghosts in the movie theater when you were young,” he said, his tongue sloshing around his
s
's. “But in the dark of a theater, there are all kinds of shadows and strange lights, especially if the projector's still, you know, running. Isn't it more likely that you saw something that
looked
like a ghost in the dark?”

People craned their heads around to see who had cut off my father just when he was getting to the good stuff. Rose and I watched too. My father removed his glasses, rubbed them on his yellow button-down, then returned them to his face. “At the moment, we are discussing Caleb Lundrum, whose image is here on the screen, so I'd—”

“Well, your friend Caleb looks to me like he might just be a problem with a camera flash. Or maybe you need to get your lens cleaned.”

Lookshhhh to me . . . Jussshht be a problem . . . Lensshhhh cleaned . . .

He acted so drunk it seemed put on. Still, his comment drew a laugh from the crowd nearly as big as the one my mother's joke stirred earlier. My father kept calm and explained that the photo was taken with a special camera and that the image was most certainly not the result of a faulty flash or an unclean lens. As he spoke, Rose jabbed me in the side. “You know who that is, don't you?”

I stared at the man, seeing only his unkempt hair, those droopy jeans. “No.”

“If ghosts are real,” the man said, cutting off my father again, “I mean, if they're spirits who've been left in this world after their bodies have passed on, wouldn't it be a huge epidemic? I mean, billions of lives have come and gone from this planet. So wouldn't that mean there would be billions of ghosts wandering around taking up space?”

“Spirits don't occupy physical space in the way that you and I do.”

“Oh, yeah? And how do you know? Do ghosts all go on a diet?”

The audience let out their loudest laugh yet. Now that the man's tone had tipped over into aggressive, I waited to see if my father would match it. “Ladies and gentlemen,” my father said, “before we go any further, I may as well use this opportunity to introduce you all to my brother, Howard.”

The small crowd might not have actually gasped, but the news brought about yet another shift in the air of that auditorium. People twisted their necks around to see. As much as I wanted to get a better look too, I crouched lower for fear of being discovered. The last time I'd seen my uncle had been a few summers before when he rolled into the driveway on his motorcycle, making an unannounced visit and staying nearly a week. Nights, he spent watching
M*A*S*H
and
Odd Couple
reruns in the living room. Days, he passed out on the sofa. The clock that ticked not far from the cross on our wall made him jittery, and he insisted my parents stop it. “Feel like I'm living inside a time bomb,” I remembered him saying, though we were all so used to the sound it had no effect on us.

The visit came to an end one evening at the dinner table. My uncle, his mouth full of food, said, “This pork piccata, or whatever you call it, is dry. That's what happens when the cook tries getting too fancy. Me, I like things simpler.”

“Well, if you like things simpler,” my father told him, not looking up from his plate, “get on your motorcycle and go find the sort of fleabag flophouse you're used to.”

“Come on, buddy,” my uncle said. “
Relax
.”

“I'm not your ‘buddy.' And don't—
do not,
whatever you do—tell me to relax.” Still, my father kept from looking up. He cut a carrot, put it in his mouth. I thought he was done talking, but after chewing and swallowing, he continued, his gaze never leaving his plate, “Maybe I tolerated the way you and our parents treated me years ago. But I won't tolerate it here in my own home. My wife worked hard to prepare this meal for my family to enjoy. So shut up and enjoy it too. Or, like I said, leave.”

My uncle waited a moment before balling up his napkin and tossing it on the table. He stood and walked to the living room, where he gathered his clothes quick as a burglar. The front door opened and closed. Outside, his motorcycle roared, the sound rising then fading as he sped away.

Only after Howie had left did my father stop eating. He, too, stood, then walked to the living room and locked the door before starting the clock. The house filled with that familiar ticking sound once more as he returned. Our cutlery clanked against our plates while we finished the meal without another mention of Howie or any conversation at all.

Despite how many years it had been, I felt foolish for not realizing it was my uncle that night at the conference center. I whispered to Rose, “What's he doing here?”

“What does it look like? Busting Dad's stones.”

“The difficult thing about the business my wife and I are in is that many people don't believe us. We accept that fact. Sometimes, however, those skeptics are family. That's the case with my brother,” my father told the crowd before directly addressing my uncle. “But, Howie, these people paid to be here tonight. They came with open minds and a desire to hear what we have to say. So I'd appreciate it if you would take a seat and listen too. If not, I'd appreciate it if you would please exit the auditorium.”

In the silence that followed, my uncle swayed slightly, as though blown back and forth by a breeze. When he did not sit but did not leave, either, a man in a security uniform approached him, taking him by the arm. My uncle jerked it away, nearly falling, before shoving past. Rather than walk down the steps to the main doors, he headed to the back of the auditorium, the guard trailing him. When he reached the wall behind the final row of seats, my uncle came to a halt. Up close, I saw that he looked different from the way I remembered. He had a belly and a beard now. His once close-cropped hair had grown bushy. His eyes were mapped with tiny red veins. Rose whispered hello, though I felt overcome by an unexpected shyness and managed only a slight smile. Howie reached out and patted our heads before winking and hustling away down the back aisle. When he arrived at the exit, the guard snatched his arm again, keeping a tight grip as he escorted my uncle out of the auditorium.

After the door clanged shut, my father began the slow process of winning back the audience. “Forgive the interruption. Where were we? Oh, yes, Caleb Lundrum . . .”

Rose hissed in my ear, “Let's go find Uncle Howie.” She kept her back low and headed toward the door. I lingered, staring at that image on the screen. A trick of light or a howling demon? I couldn't be sure. Finally, I gave up thinking about it and headed toward the door too.

Outside, the rain had paused, though wind still gusted. The air felt hot and moist against my cheeks as I caught up with my sister in the half-empty parking lot, where the lamplights reflected in the deep puddles all around. “He's gone,” Rose said. “It's your fault.”

“
My
fault?”

“Yeah, you were so slow we missed him.”

What good did it ever do me to argue? I kept my mouth shut and followed her back toward the building. That's when we noticed the man with scratches on his face, on his arms and hands too. He glanced at us before turning to a row of bushes, wet leaves shimmering in the lamplight too. The man made a kitten call into the branches. “It's okay. Come on out.”

My sister must have found him as peculiar as I did, because both our paces slowed to watch. He kept calling, getting on his knees and reaching carefully into the dark of those bushes. When his hand was met by a sudden rustle and high-pitched snarl, he snapped it back. With his fingers in front of his face, we could see fresh blood glistening just like those puddles in the pavement. Rose and I might have stood there longer, waiting to see if he coaxed out what he wanted, but a horn honked behind us. We turned and saw my uncle at the wheel of a battered pickup, one side so buckled it didn't look like the vehicle should be allowed on the road. Over the chugging engine, Howie called out, “By any chance, are you lovely ladies looking for me?”