Help for the Haunted (43 page)

MY
MOTHER
:  I think we've gone as far as I feel comfortable on
this topic. If you don't mind I'd like to conclude the interview for the day.
Thank you very much.

This time when the tape went silent it stayed that
way. A dull, empty hum filled my parents' bedroom. I sat there watching the
wheels of the recorder spin round and round until I heard the sound of an engine
and screechy music moving closer down the lane and coming to a stop in our
driveway.

Instead of looking out the window, I went to the
answering machine and pressed Play. “Sylvie, it's Sam Heekin. After you left
that message last night, I did some digging. I uncovered some things you should
know about. Call me right away.” While that played, I pulled the newspaper
article Dereck had given me from my pocket and stared at that picture again, my
father's words about values ringing in my mind.

Rose had yet to walk through the front door, so I
slipped down the hall to her room. Quickly, I slid open her nightstand and dug
out that laminated prayer card she had saved. Clutching it, I went down the hall
to our parents' room again and picked up the phone on their nightstand.

“Saint Julia's Home for Girls,” a man's voice
answered after I dialed the number on the back of that card.

It felt like ages since I'd made those survey
calls, but I summoned that grown-up voice I used to interview all those people.
“Hello,” I told the man on the other end. “I'm looking for a school for my
daughter.”

I waited for a moment to see if he would ask how
old I was. But he did not. “Well, this isn't exactly a school. You know that,
don't you?'

“Yes. My daughter, um, she needs a place to go
to”—I paused, remembering my father's long-ago words—“to get her head right. I
assume that's the sort of situation you treat there.”

“Yes. We treat young women who have developed a
sexual confusion. One that goes against the teachings of the Bible,” he told me.
“But you should know we have rules. Once you sign your daughter into our care,
you entrust her well-being with us. Our treatment is quite serious and not to be
taken lightly. One of the first things we require is that no one from the
outside have contact for the first thirty days of admission—”

The door opened and closed downstairs, and I
slammed down the phone. Rose's feet came pounding up the steps. She rounded the
corner and stopped when she saw me there, sitting on the edge of our mother's
bed. “What the hell are you doing?” she asked.

I lifted that torn newspaper article, showing it to
her the way I had been tempted to do for days. “Who is this in the picture with
you?”

“What picture?”

I stood, walked closer to her out in the hallway.
“This picture. It was taken after you came home from being sent away. After the
accident where Dereck lost his fingers. Who is that with you?”

Rose made a show of squinting at the photo, but I
had the sense she wasn't really looking. “I don't know. I have too much on my
mind for your egghead crap today, Sylvie. I've signed up for GED classes and I
have homework to do. You, more than anyone, should be able to sympathize with
that.”

“Franky?” I said.

“Who?” my sister asked, but I could hear a knowing
quality in her voice.

“Frances? Frances Sanino, the daughter of Emily and
Nick Sanino?”

Rose's face took on a stunned look, as though she'd
been slapped, a look she quickly tried to conceal, pinching her lips together
and sucking in a breath. “I don't know what you're talking about—”

“Yes, you do. Because her mother has been the one
leaving food here on the steps. And I know why you didn't want us to eat it. It
wasn't because you thought it was poisoned. It was because you were saving it
for someone else. Franky.”

“Shut up,” Rose said. “Shut the hell up, Sylvie.
You think it's easy for me? Do you? All I wanted was to be free of this place,
and now I'm stuck here taking care of you. And what do I get in return? Nothing
but a bunch of ungrateful back talk. I'm sick of it. So I'm going to my room. If
I were you, I'd steer clear of me for the night, because now you've put me in a
mood.”

“I know!” I screamed at her. “I figured it all
out!”

“You didn't figure anything out,” Rose said. “You
are crazy. You told the police and the reporters and everyone else that you saw
Albert Lynch that night. And it turned out you were wrong, because that old
couple came forward. Now you are waving some newspaper article around and
getting ready to make God knows what new accusation. You think you are so smart,
Sylvie, but you are dumb. Really, really dumb.”

“You can say that all you want,” I told her,
stepping past her and starting down the stairs. “But I'm about to prove you
wrong.”

“Where are you going?”

I did not answer as I made my way to the first
floor, then cut through the living room toward the door that led to the
basement. The entire time Rose was right behind me. When I pulled open that door
and stared down into the shadowy darkness below, lit only by that yellow glow,
she stepped in front of me and said just one word: “No.”

“Yes,” I told her. “Now move.”

Rose lifted her hands and shoved me. I stumbled
back, losing my balance and falling. The newspaper article slipped from my
hands, landing in the space between us. I stared at my sister's sneakers on her
small feet, thinking of that day in the truck when I crawled around, scraping
for the money I'd earned only to end up with loose change.

All our lives together, Rose won every fight with
her words and with her might. Never once did I stand a chance. But now as my
hands began to shake, as my heart banged in my chest, I stood and reached up
and, with everything I had in me, I shoved her back. In an instant, she lost her
footing and stumbled toward those stairs. For a moment, it seemed like we could
stop what came next. She reached her hand out, and I grabbed for it, because I
hadn't meant for this to happen. But our hands didn't catch one another in time,
and so she tumbled backward down the stairs.

After Rose hit the cement floor with a great crash,
a thick silence followed. I thought of that cassette tape when my parents'
voices had stopped, those tiny wheels spinning round and round as their words
echoed in my mind:
I guess what I am trying to say is that
we are like any other parents. We are trying to raise our daughters with
good Christian values in a world that is increasingly secular.
A
feeling of shame, a feeling of pure horror, filled me up at the realization of
what I'd done. Useless as it sounded, I spoke to her down in the basement. “I'm
sorry, Rose. I'm so so sorry.”

My sister did not respond, and the dread that this
could be more grave an accident than I first understood took hold. I pounded
down the steps to where she lay, her right leg bent in the most unnatural
position. “Are you okay?” I asked. “Please tell me you are okay.”

“It's my leg,” she said, and I heard in her voice
that she was crying, releasing the kind of exhausted sobs I'd never heard from
Rose before. “You did something to my leg.”

Those flyers on the bulletin board at the police
station—in my panic, they came back to me. Hadn't one advised never to move a
person in the event of an accident? Get help—that was always the advice. I was
about to go back upstairs to the phone and do just that when Rose spoke through
her tears, “Remember that rule they always used to say?”

“Who?” I asked.

“Mom and Dad. The rule that we could always tell
them whatever we were thinking or feeling, and they would do their best to
understand. Do you remember that, Sylvie?”

“Yes,” I told her. “But let's not—”

“It wasn't true,” Rose said. “It wasn't true.”

I didn't want to talk about any of that now, but
even so, I heard myself asking, “What do you mean?”

“When I was fourteen, I first told them. They
encouraged it, after all, always repeating that dumb rule. But when I said I
felt different from other girls, you know what they did? They acted like it was
some sort of fucking
possession
. They prayed over me
like one of those supposedly haunted people who came here in need of their help.
And they told me to keep my feelings a secret. The more it didn't change,
though, the more they prayed. I tried to give them the daughter they wanted. I
tried to be more like you. I brought all those boys home. But it didn't work. So
they sent me away to that home where I was supposed to get better. And you know
what? I did get better. I met Franky.

“Even though Franky's parents had sent her there
too, she already knew the place was a joke. She made me realize there was
nothing wrong with the way I felt.” Rose's words sputtered out as her crying
grew stronger. “ ‘Her coming was my hope each day,' ” she said in a broken
voice, “ ‘her parting was my pain; the chance that did her steps delay. Was ice
in every vein.' ”

“Rose, I don't know what you're talking about. But
we've got to get—”

“Those are the words from that book you used to
underline.
Jane Eyre
. I remember it, because it's
how I felt about Franky. And anyway, we planned to get out of there and save
money and find some way to live a normal life together in time. But when I got
home, I'd already been replaced by Abigail. So I gave up trying. And the fights
with Mom and Dad—Dad, in particular—got worse. And so one night I'm out. And who
do I run into but Albert Lynch?”

“I know,” I told her. “You don't have to say. We
need to get you help. And I told you, I figured it all out.”

“No, you didn't!” she screamed. “Because I bet you
didn't figure out the way I felt in all of this, did you?”

The rage, the sadness—those things in her voice
frightened me into silence.

“Did you?” she screamed.

I shook my head.

“Fifty bucks to talk to Mom and Dad. That's what he
offered me. And happily, I arranged it. But Franky knew what I was up to. She
was the one with me at the bar, after all. Since I wasn't of age, she kept
sneaking in and getting us drinks then bringing them out to the car. After I
made the call to Mom and Dad, she gave me some bullshit excuse that she wanted
to go back to a friend's house where she'd been staying ever since we left Saint
Julia's. So I let her go. Only Franky didn't go to her friend's. She went to see
them at the church too.”

Rose stopped. For a moment, I caught us both
looking around that basement, the strange world my parents had created down
there. That hatchet on the wall. The old branch with what looked like a howling
face in the bark. The dozens of trinkets and objects hanging from the ceiling
and filling the shelves. Those dusty old books about demons. And, of course,
Penny in the old rabbit cage, smiling that placid smile.

DO NOT OPEN UNDER ANY
CIRCUMSTANCES!

The sign was still there just the same.

“You know what can make a person possessed, Sylvie?
It's not Satan or Lucifer or any of that nonsense. Do you know what it is?”

“What?” I asked her, desperate to let her finish so
I could get help.

“Love and hate. Greed. Revenge. Pride. Those things
turned Dad into his own demon. He knew the things he was doing were dishonest.
Mom's gift wasn't powerful or controllable enough for him. He needed something
greater to get the attention he craved. He needed all of us to support his
stories, so he set out to make us believers too.”

Famous?
I remembered
the way my father shimmied against that nozzle, rain sopping his hair, dripping
from his lashes as he said,
Well, now that you mention it,
I suppose it would be nice to show them.

“And so, when those people stayed here in the
basement, he messed with them. Putting all kinds of pills he had access to in
their food. They weren't in their right minds to begin with, but after he messed
with them, who knows what sort of delusions they experienced? It was the same
with Mom. He did it to her. Abigail too—”

“How do you know that?”

“You think you're the only one to figure things
out? I watched him. Made a study out of it. And I caught him one day in the
kitchen crushing a pill and mixing it into some food. When I asked, he told me
it was just some medicine. But I knew better. I'd read those labels on the
prescription containers in his desk drawer. And the fact that I knew he was a
fraud only made him resent me more.”

I pressed my face into my hands, remembering my
mother being so ill and unlike herself after that trip to Ohio. Had he done that
to her because she wanted to stop their work the way Heekin told me? Or was it
so that she would have no choice but to believe in the power of Penny and so
many other claims he made? Is that why Abigail did not feel well that last
night? There was so much to understand but I found myself asking, “What did you
mean about love and hate? Were you talking about Dad?”

“Yes. But I mean me and Franky too,” she said.
“Those things made us demons as well. First her. And then me.”

I waited for her to tell me more, but she was
crying again.

“Rose,” I said, deciding once and for all that this
conversation had to wait. “I am going to call an ambulance. We need to get you
help.”

I stood, went up the stairs. In the kitchen, I
walked to the phone on the wall, only when I picked it up, there was no dial
tone. I clicked the receiver a few times, but the line was dead.