Help for the Haunted (7 page)

I hesitated, waiting for her to retract the bowl. When she didn't, I reached two fingers in and scooped out a blob. The walnut inside made me think of those embalmed bugs once more. I opened wide, my breath causing the Jell-O to wiggle on my fingertips, and then, at the last second, said, “I can't do it,” and tossed it back.

Rose set the bowl aside. “Thought so.” She fussed with the knot on the collar of her cape while telling me about a warehouse party she was going to two hours away in Philly. Normally there was something impenetrable about my sister's face, but in contrast to all that green, her eyes looked red and tired, her teeth smaller, more yellow. The effect was not scary so much as gloomy.

“You know, Sylvie, it wouldn't hurt you to act fourteen instead of forty for a change. Throw a sheet over your head. Go out with your friends.”

“I don't have friends,” I told her.

“Yes, you do. That girl with the weird name and the other one with the weird face.”

“Gretchen moved when her dad got a job in Cleveland.”

“And Elizabeth?”

“She moved too.” That part wasn't true, but I didn't feel like explaining the way Elizabeth stopped sitting with me at lunch after I came back to school last winter. “Forget about them,” I told my sister, and then I thought of what I'd overheard in the school library, the reason I felt nervous about who might show up tonight. “Besides, one of us needs to watch the place in case anyone decides to make trouble.”

“Oh, don't you worry, Sylvie. I've got us covered on that front.”

A fist pounded on the door, startling me. When I opened up, it took a moment to place the driver, since her face was caked with witch makeup too. The extra features didn't help: matted wig, fake eyebrows, rubber hands with noodly fingers. Instead of a “trick or treat,” she launched into an explanation of how she'd been listening to Rose and me until she remembered the doorbell was broken. “You really should put a sign up, letting people know the thing doesn't ring. Lucky I figured it out, because someone el—”

“All right, all right,” Rose said, cutting her off. “Come in already, Cora.”

I stared at Cora's noodly fingers, thinking of that rainy afternoon when I first found her waiting for me in the living room, the way Rose had returned downstairs a few minutes later only to peek over her shoulder at the clipboard and ask us both the questions listed there:
How many hours of sleep do you get a night? Do you ever feel anxious during the day? If so, how often and why?
“I didn't recognize you without your clipboard,” I told Cora now, as I remembered the reluctant answers she'd given my sister that day:
Four or five at best . . . Yes . . . Quite a bit . . . I'm supporting my sister and me with this new job. . . . And I guess you could say I don't have enough fun in my life. . . .

She tilted her green witch face and said, “Really? Well, it would have been odd for me to bring it. I mean, witches don't carry clipboards.”

“That was a joke, Cor,” Rose told her. “It might come as a shock, but we do make jokes in this house. Even Great-Grandma Sylvie ekes one out now and then.”

Cora pressed her fake fingers to her mouth and let out an “
Ohhhhhh!
” Then she smiled. “How are you doing, Sylvie?”

“Fine.”

“How's school?”

“Good.”

“No problems?”

“No problems.”

“While I was waiting at the door, I heard you saying something about your friends. Is something wrong?”

“One moved away. That's all. I have plenty of others.”

“Well, don't forget if you ever need anything, how do you reach me?”

“
RIBSPIN
,” I told her, repeating the acronym she'd worked out for her number.

“Good. And do you have paperwork from your doctor visits like we discussed?”

“All right already,” Rose said. “You're off duty, so let's skip the official business. We are supposed to be having fun, remember? And where the hell is your date?”

So this was not an unexpected visit after all, I thought, as Cora informed us that “the Hulk” was waiting in the car. I went to the window and looked out to see an enormous rottweiler leaping from the front seat to the rear and back again, its tail a drumstick beating the seats.

“The Hulk belongs to Dan,” Cora explained. “Dan lives upstairs from my mother. He let me borrow her for the night.”

“
Her?
The Hulk's a girl?”

“Yeah,” Rose told me, thrill rising in her voice. “We're going to tie her to a tree. She'll scare the crap out of anybody who comes around to mess with the place.” My sister turned away and started rummaging through the closet.

The news should have made me feel safer. But that dog would also keep away ordinary trick-or-treaters, like my happy hookers, spoiling what little fun I looked forward to. I didn't bother saying any of that, though. “So are you going to the party with my sister?” I asked Cora.

She gave a tight-lipped smile. “Guess that's probably breaking some sort of code. But it's just one party. You don't mind, Sylvie, do you?”

I shook my head then remembered Louise's warning about speaking up. “No.”

“Here we go.” Rose unearthed two brooms, buried so far behind the coats it made me realize how seldom we swept. One had a wooden handle and cinched straw at the base, the other, a lime-green plastic handle and stubby plastic bristles. Rose handed Cora the bad broom before opening our front door and stepping into the dark. On the top step she paused, adjusting her hat so it didn't blow off in the wind. Then she stuck her broom between her legs and leaped off the stairs. She went so high that for a second it seemed she might actually keep on soaring before she landed on the mossy lawn.

“Not bad,” Cora said, taking her place on the step.

“Well, I did date a former track star. It's how I learned everything I know.”

“Come on!” my sister called to Cora. “Your turn!”

As the wind whipped the dead birch leaves into a whirl, Cora hesitated. I could tell she felt nervous about jumping, even if it was just three measly steps. But then she surprised me by letting out a cowgirl's “Yeeehaaaw!” and leaping off the step. She didn't soar nearly as high as my sister, and she made a crash landing, stumbling as leaves spun around her feet. But she managed to regain her balance and danced around the lawn, cackling.

Once they released the Hulk and hitched her to a tree, Rose and Cora climbed into the car. The engine started, and I noticed that one of the headlights was out. Isn't that a game for some people? I wondered. When you see a car with one missing, you punch the person you're with. Or maybe you kiss them, I was never sure of the rules. Either way, I realized they'd forgotten to leave water for the dog. I went to the kitchen and filled a bowl. Before taking it outside, I opened the freezer and dug out a bone behind my father's glass tumbler that I saw every time I reached for a Popsicle. My mother had frozen that bone to make stock for her beef barley soup.

When I put both the bowl and the bone by her paws, the Hulk didn't growl or bark. She didn't drink or bother with the bone either. She just sniffed my toes and slobbered on my flip-flops before rolling on her back in an invitation to scratch her belly.

“You're real fierce, aren't you, girl?” I said, kneeling and rubbing her velvety fur.

It was early enough that we had hours ahead. I stared off into the woods, thinking of Albert Lynch in a holding cell not twenty miles away, because of the answer I'd given Rummel that day in the hospital. And then I thought of what I heard those boys talking about while I'd been tucked in a study carrel at the school library days before.

“What would it take?”

“You've seen the dude's picture.”

“It's not like I've jerked off to it. I didn't memorize what the hell he looks like.”

“I guess we need a skullcap to look bald. We definitely need his weird 'stache. I could grow one. But you might need help, pansy. Use burned cork. Plus there's those glasses. Little round things that make him look like a bug. Then all we need is a weapon.”

“A weapon?”

“Not a real one, moron. But you know, like a rubber hatchet.”

“Dude, a hatchet isn't what he used to do it.”

“Okay, so now you're the expert. How the hell did he do it?”

“He blew their—”

Shhhh . . .

That day in the library, I pressed my hand over my good ear and shut out their voices. Now, just as I'd done then, I pushed the thought away. I quit petting the dog and stood to go inside, which was when I glimpsed the brake lights down the street. Cora and my sister had come to a halt by one of those cement foundations. As the car idled, the moon shone down, making it possible to see their pointy-hatted silhouettes. Funny how I'd been thinking about that game with the missing headlight and what you were supposed to do when you see one, because this is what I witnessed: two witches who had just completed their first successful broom flights of the night and were stopping a moment.

They were stopping to kiss.

 

Chapter 6

Thunder, Lightning, Rain

O
cala, Florida—of all places,
that
turned out to be the first we visited with our parents. They were scheduled to give a lecture at the city's conference center. The event was going to draw their biggest crowd to date—more than three hundred tickets sold, my father informed us, reading from a fax that came as we were stuffing our suitcases. Even though the auditorium only held two hundred, the coordinators were setting up a spillover room where people could watch on a monitor. My father was thrilled, though my mother never cared one way or another about those sorts of details. She was too busy making sure Rose and I packed our toothbrushes and plenty of underwear.

Kansas. California. Texas. Pretty much any location they'd traveled to interested me more. Still, I was grateful for the chance to see something outside of Maryland for a change. Mostly, I couldn't wait to splash around the hotel pool, even if that meant having to sit next to Rose on the fifteen-hour drive south. Ever since that night with Dot, my sister had developed an obsession that made her even less fun to be with. She'd been carting that bible around from the moment she pulled it from my parents' nightstand. Flipping pages. Underlining passages. Scouring the text in search of ludicrous scripture that she recited to my parents as evidence that the book was “nothing more than an outdated fable.” So while other families we passed on I-95 might have been playing I Spy or Twenty Questions, the Masons kept busy listening to Rose.

“ ‘And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night,' ” she read from Genesis before pointing out, “First of all, the moon is
not
a light; it only reflects light from the sun. And why, if God made the moon to ‘rule the night,' does it spend half its time moving through the daytime sky?”

Sometimes my parents ignored her—the best tactic as far as I was concerned, since it led to her quietly staring out the window, a faraway look on her face. Other times, my mother or father offered an explanation, which almost always led to an argument. Every once in a while, they'd try some version of: “It's nice to see you taking an interest and using your intellect, Rose. Perhaps all your questions will lead to a newfound faith.”

“I
seriously
doubt that,” she'd tell them. And soon, she'd be back at it. “Oh, here's a winner: Genesis 1:29: ‘And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which has the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.' ”

From the front seat, our mother asked, “What's so wrong with that?”

“Well, let's see. Since a huge majority of plants and trees are poisonous, God's advice is a tad reckless, don't you think? I mean, would you tell Sylvie to wander out into the woods and eat whatever plants she found?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, lucky for Sylvie, otherwise she'd be dead. I guess you're smarter than God who is apparently a moron.”

“Enough!” my father said, growing angry whenever she took things too far.

After that, my mother killed a few miles humming what sounded like a lullaby, one I'd never heard before. The tune climbed higher and higher until I think even she grew tired of it, and then she said, “Why don't you read us some of your paper, Sylvie?”

I kept quiet, anticipating a groan from Rose. But my sister just pressed a cheek to the window, and her lack of protest led me to take out my paper along with the envelope announcing that I had won first prize for fifth grade, along with two hundred dollars.

“The Washington, D.C., riots that took place in early April of 1968, following the assassination of civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King Jr., affected at least 110 U.S. cities,” I read after clearing my throat. “Chicago and Baltimore were among the most impacted. The availability of jobs in the federal government attracted many to Washington in the 1960s, and middle-class African American neighborhoods prospered.”

“That's a very good point you raise,” my father told me.

“It is, Sylvie,” my mother said. “Good job.”

Rose let out a
humph
.

“What?” I asked her.

“Nothing.”

Okay then,
I thought, and I started reading again, “Despite the end of mandated segregation, the neighborhoods of Shaw, the H Street Northeast corridor, and—”

“It's just funny that the people in the front seats agree with you,” Rose said, “since the Bible is racist and they are such big believers in everything the book says.”

“The Bible is not racist,” my mother told her.

My sister cracked hers open and began flipping pages. “Exhibit A: ‘If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property.' If that's not enough, here's another gem: ‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property.' Should I find more?”

“Some of the things in the book are from a long time ago. Back when the world was a different place.”

“So what you're saying is the book is outdated.”

“In certain areas,” my mother conceded.

“So you and Dad get to pick and choose what is and isn't worth believing in?”

“Enough!” my father said again.

After that we went back to being quiet. I waited to see if anyone wanted me to read more of my essay. No one did, so I pressed my cheek to the glass too.

Despite so many difficult moments on that trip south, there were times when my sister put away the Bible and nobody argued. We stopped at South of the Border, where my father bought us sparklers and people didn't stare at our family as much as they did in Dundalk. At the motel where we spent a night to break up the drive, we ate Kentucky Fried Chicken in our beds while watching black-and-white movies on the small TV. When we crossed the state line into Florida, we pulled into the Welcome Center, where my father asked a woman to snap our picture in front of palm trees. Even though the wind gusted and the sky grew dark too early, we wore the sunglasses my mother picked up at a pharmacy especially for the trip. In the remaining hours of the drive, however, the wind continued to gust and the sky grew darker still. One by one, we pulled off those glasses and tucked them away.

At 3:25 in the afternoon, my father turned the Datsun into the hotel parking lot. No one would have guessed the time since things were dark as dusk. After we checked into our room on the second floor, I didn't bother unpacking my bathing suit. Instead, I lingered by the window, staring out at the raindrops splashing against the surface of the pool. Somewhere back in Georgia, my father had confiscated Rose's bible, but she wasted no time finding another in the nightstand and stretching out on one of the beds to comb through the pages. My mother clicked on the clock radio and spun the dial until she found a meteorologist who made the same prediction as the others we had listened to in the car: heavy wind, heavy rain for the next two days.

“Here we go,” Rose said, not caring about the weather. “A gem from Leviticus, which is quickly becoming my favorite source of all things ridiculous. ‘The Lord said to Moses and Aaron, Speak to the Israelites and say to them: When any man has a bodily discharge, the discharge is unclean. Whether it continues flowing from his body or is blocked, it will make him unclean. This is how his discharge will bring about uncleanness' . . .”

“Tell you what, tadpole,” my father said, ignoring her and putting a hand on my shoulder. “I've been looking forward to a swim too. Let's do it.”

“What about the rain?”

“We're going to get wet anyway. What's the difference?”

Across the room, Rose kept at it. “‘Any bed the man with a discharge lies on will be unclean, and anything he sits on will be unclean. Anyone who touches his bed must wash his clothes and bathe with water, and he will be unclean till evening . . .' ”

How desperate must my father have been for a break from her if he was willing to go swimming with me in the middle of a storm? But what did his reasons matter? I ran and got my bathing suit. When my mother realized what we were planning, she put up a fuss. Once my father promised to yank us from the water at the slightest threat of lightning, she gave in and even watched from the window, waving as we circled the pool before holding hands and jumping into the deep end.

With the wind blowing through the palm trees and rain splattering against our heads, I had the feeling we'd been tossed overboard from a ship during a storm. I flipped onto my back and kicked my way around the pool, squinting against the rain. In the shallow end, my father found a water jet and pressed his back to it. I watched him gaze up at the sky. More to himself than to me, he said, “I hope the weather doesn't scare away the crowds.”

“It won't,” I told him, though what did I know?

He looked across the rippling water at me. Without glasses, and with rain dripping down his face, he looked younger, less serious. It made me think of years before when he and my mother would take us swimming at a pond in Colbert Township near Dundalk. Back then, they used to swim with us too, though we never went there anymore. “Listen, tadpole,” he said. “Your mom and I agreed that you and your sister are going to wait in what they call the greenroom during our talk this evening.”

I said nothing, kicking my feet and picturing a room with green walls and a green carpet, maybe a green ceiling too.

“They'll have lots of food for you both.”

Green M&M's. Green Jelly Beans. Green grapes and kiwis and limes.

“You can read or play a game,” he said.

“Or listen to weird bible passages.”

He smiled, water dripping from his chin and from the cross nestled in his wet chest hair. “Or listen to weird bible passages. Anyway, we figured you'd prefer that to sitting in the audience.”

I dipped beneath the water, swam closer before emerging. “Sounds good to me.”

“Sylvie, you know how your mother gets her feelings sometimes?”

I did know. Everyone in our family knew. “Yes. Why?”

“Well, she keeps saying that she has an unsettled feeling about tonight. My guess is that she's worried about Rose.”

“What about her?”

“That she'll, let's just say,
act up
. And I know it's unfair to put this on you, seeing as you're the youngest, but I'd like it if you could do your mother and me a favor. Will you promise to keep your sister in line?”

“Promise,” I said right away, because I didn't want to disappoint him. But then I thought of that night with Dot and how helpless I'd been to stop Rose. I thought, too, of how little control my parents seemed to have when it came to her.

My father must have sensed what I was thinking, because he wriggled his back against the water jet and sighed. “It's probably more than you need to worry about. But your mother and I are aware that your sister has developed some, well, behavioral issues. We are trying to figure out the best way to handle it. In the meantime, whatever you can do to keep her under control is appreciated. You're a good girl, Sylvie. And prominent lectures, like the one tonight, are very important. Unlike those silly talks I get suckered into doing every Halloween, these can make all the difference. They build our careers and notoriety.”

I bobbed in the water, thinking about his desk in the basement, that paperweight with the inscription about God lighting the dark, his old dental chair in the far corner reminding me of how much I wished he still had a job like that. “Do you want to be famous?” I asked, the words tumbling from my mouth before I even realized what I was asking.

The question surprised my father as much as me. “
Famous?
” He shimmied against that nozzle, rain sopping his hair, dropping from his lashes. “Well, now that you mention it, I suppose it would be nice to show them.”

“Show who?”

“My parents.”

My mother and father rarely said much about the families they had come from, so I knew little about them, other than that their parents were deceased. The only extended family I knew of was my father's brother, Uncle Howie. “But they're gone, Dad.”

“Your parents are never gone from you, Sylvie. You'll see that someday, hopefully, a very long time from now. But I don't just mean my parents. I suppose it would be nice to prove something to your uncle. Not to mention so many of the people who used to laugh when I told them about the things I saw. Really, though, what I want most is security for our family. To put you and Rose through college. But you don't need to worry about all that.”