Help for the Haunted (9 page)

Maybe it was all the cavity-inducing sweets from the candy shop that gave him the idea to become a dentist. Maybe it was all the teasing and those persistent sightings that made him want to study away from home. Whatever his reasons, despite the fact that there were perfectly good dental schools in Philly, my father applied to the University of Maryland. Moving into an apartment in one of the old Pascault row houses for students, he reported a newfound sense of freedom, having left his family behind. But he soon discovered that not everything had been left behind.

The ghosts—as he began calling them, plain and simple—had followed.

At this point in the chapter, Heekin broke from his own tangled writing and allowed my father to describe the moment, referencing a quote from a lecture he gave to the New England Society for Paranormal Research. Reading my father's words reminded me that when he spoke of the things he encountered, I felt no tug-of-war between believing and not believing. I simply believed.

Not far from my bed in the dim light of that apartment stood a figure no more than four feet tall. Before that night, the things I'd seen had been shapeless, shifting masses. Their lack of a fixed form is what led me to refer to them as globules from an early age. But this figure was different: its body looked like that of a dressmaker's dummy. No arms, but also no sliver of light between its legs, so it seemed to be wearing a dress. Although there were no eyes, no nose, no mouth to gauge her emotions, I sensed that she was studying me with great curiosity and need before she vanished . . . Just as some people forever attract stray animals, others tend to draw out the humming, peripatetic energies in this world. After that experience, I realized I was in the latter category . . .

My mother reported no such paranormal experiences growing up in a tiny mountain town of Tennessee. Heekin said that her father had died in an accident on the farm, one she witnessed at the age of eleven, and the mere mention of it forever held the power to bring her to tears. He persuaded my mother into offering a description of the man: gentle, soft-spoken, scrupulous, devout. He took their small family of three to church each Sunday and to breakfast afterward. He built birdhouses in his woodshed and allowed my mother to paint them whatever colors she wanted before nailing them up in the trees. With binoculars, they watched from the second-floor windows as families of birds came and went with the seasons. Those birdhouses, those binoculars, were the loveliest pieces of her childhood, my mother told Heekin during their interview, but they also exacerbated the heartbreak she felt after her father was gone.

Here, too, he allowed my mother to speak for herself. As I read her words, I couldn't help feeling that in some way she was there with me in the dark:

I remember waking in the mornings to hear those birds singing outside my window—a sound that once brought me happiness but no longer. I tried closing my windows. I tried putting a pillow over my head. But still that chirping found me. Finally, there came a day when I couldn't stand it any longer. Desperate to make their singing stop, I waited until my mother went into town then pulled the ladder from my father's woodshed and climbed into the branches of those trees in our yard. My intention was to knock the birdhouses to the ground one by one, but typical of my father, he secured them to survive even the strongest storm, never mind an eleven-year-old girl. That's when I had an idea. I climbed down and went to the kitchen, where I located a bag of steel wool, which my mother used to keep mice from getting into our house. I made my way back up into the trees and stuffed the entryways my father had drilled, then snapped off the perches so there was no hope of birds getting inside. Sure enough, their singing stopped, or at least I didn't hear it so close to my bedroom window after that. Those birds moved on and took my father's spirit with them, I believed, because that's when Jack Peele entered the picture . . .

Jack Peele. A man my mother never once mentioned to me, but whom my “practical, plain-speaking” grandmother had apparently married without her daughter present. One night, she simply set a third place at the dinner table and introduced him by saying, “Rose, I'd like you to meet your new daddy. Now let's eat.” My mother expected this new daddy of hers to have the sinister qualities of a wicked stepparent in a fairy tale. But Jack pulled coins from his floppy ears. He recited the alphabet backward. He built towering card houses and let my mother blow them down. Instead of going to church, Jack lingered in his pj's and watched cartoons, busting a gut each time the Road Runner escaped a free-falling anvil. One Sunday, they skipped cartoons and went out in the yard, where he kept spinning my mother by the arms and letting her loose into a leaf pile. When he grew dizzy, Jack lay on the grass, my mother beside him. Staring up into the branches of the trees, he asked, “What do you suppose is going on with those birdhouses?”

Reluctantly, my mother told him about her father securing them up there, about the binoculars and the notebook and the songs that filled her with melancholy after he was gone. And then she told him about the steel wool and the snapped-off perches. Jack's face grew serious. “What time of year did you do that, darling?”

“Spring,” she answered.

Jack stood and climbed one of the trees. He didn't need a ladder; he was tall and lanky and moved chimplike through the branches. Slowly, his fingers tugged out the steel wool from one of the birdhouses before he peered inside, shaking his head and letting out a dive-bomb of a whistle.

“What?” my mother asked from down on the ground. “
What? What? What?
”

“Nothing,” Jack told her.

But that night, after he and my grandmother spent a long while whispering in the kitchen, they sat my mother down. In their most somber voices, they asked what had caused her to kill the baby birds inside those houses by making it so their mothers could not feed them. Horrified at the realization of what she'd done, my mother had trouble finding words. “It's like I told Jack,” she stammered, tears leaking down her cheeks. “I did it . . . I did it because Daddy went away, so I wanted the birds to go away too.”

A fist pounded on the door downstairs.

My head jerked up, and I dropped the flashlight. My mother, or at least the feeling of having her right there with me, vanished at once. I looked for a clock to figure out how long I'd been lost in those pages, but saw none. Outside, the Hulk's chain rattled, though she did not bark.

The pounding stopped then started again. I reached for the flashlight, which had rolled beneath the bed. When I pulled it out, I found a letter written to Rose—the return address on a random street in Baltimore. The fist pounded on the door again, so I slipped the letter in my pocket to read later, then tossed the book and all the rest in the plastic bag from the police station, returned it to the closet, and hurried downstairs. A laugh—deep, male—came from the other side of the door, followed by another, which made me certain those boys I'd been waiting for had arrived.

Astonishing the thoughts that can fill a person's mind in a single instant. For one solitary second after I put my hand on the knob and pulled, it was them standing before me. Not those phony Albert Lynches. Instead, I saw her in an ash-gray column dress with pearly buttons. I saw him in a rumpled brown suit and smudged wire-rimmed glasses. All my reading about their childhoods had summoned their spirits, the same way my father drew out those leftover energies late nights in the theater and in the dark of his university apartment.

That's what I first believed anyway.

But those thoughts gathered in my mind only for a moment. In the next, I noticed my mother's necklace, gold instead of silver, tight around her neck. The loose bun she wore to church not held up by bobby pins, but staples. My father's blazer may have been brown, but his pants were black and torn beneath one knee. His shirt, white rather than the mustard yellow he favored, was splattered with a substance meant to look like blood but too bright to be the real thing. The lenses of his glasses were popped out; without the usual smudges, I had a clear view of the cold, unfamiliar eyes beneath.

No longer was it enough to call me names in the halls.

No longer was it enough to knock down our mailbox.

No longer was it enough to toss rag dolls on our lawn.

Where would it end? I wondered. What would it take for them to leave us alone? Scream, slam the door, crumble to the floor—any of those reactions seemed possible until all that I'd read about my parents' childhoods returned to me. I thought of the way people mistreated them each time they offered a glimpse into their inner worlds. What good did it do my father to let his family know of the things he saw? What good did it do my mother to confess her ties to those ruined birdhouses? And then I thought of the kindness they always showed people, and I resolved to do the same. Those boys may as well have dressed as bums or superheroes, I offered the candy basket no differently.

“Go ahead,” I said as they stared at me, expecting something more.

After some hesitation, the boy dressed as my mother reached out his large, knuckley hand and foraged through the basket, coming away with a couple of Charleston Chews. The boy dressed as my father did the same, grabbing Milk Duds and Sweet Tarts. My gaze shifted over their shoulders to the end of the driveway, where reflectors moved round and round, glimmering like the eyes of a demon out there in the dark. More boys on bikes, I realized. All the while, the Hulk licked and chewed her bone, not bothering to offer up so much as a growl.

“Can we see the doll?” my father, or the one dressed like him, asked.

“No,” I told him.

“Where is she?” This question came from the one dressed like my mother.

I thought of Penny in the basement, slumped inside her cage, the sign written in my father's handwriting attached to the door:
DO NOT OPEN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!
Abandoned down there all these months, the spiders had likely made a home out of her, crawling across her moon face, stringing webs between her floppy arms. “She's at the bottom of the well,” I told those boys, a lie hatched out of old wishes.

“The well?” this version of my father repeated.

“We put it down there with all the others you and everybody else throw on our lawn. Go get it and the rest of them if you want.”

With that, I slammed the door. Standing there in the dark, flashlight in hand, I listened to their feet thump down the steps. I went to the window and watched as they shoved off the plywood, same as I'd done a few nights before. I knew from experience they'd never see a thing in the absolute blackness below. Soon, the boys realized it too, because they gave up and headed to the street, where their friends still pedaled in figure eights. The boy in the dress tugged off his wig and dropped it among the cedars before picking up a bike by the curb. The boy in the blazer climbed on the back before they pedaled away into the night.

Once they were gone, my hands, my body, all of me began to shake. In an effort to make the trembling stop, I roamed the living room, dining room, kitchen, moving aimlessly through the shadows. I pictured my parents the last time I saw them. Snow gathering on the shoulders of my father's wool coat as he stepped from the car. Wind gusting my mother's hair when she got out too. Then I remembered stepping inside that church, where the air was so still, so absolutely frigid, it stung my lungs with every breath. Something smoky mixed with the faint trace of incense. It took time for my eyes to adjust, but once they did, I made out three silhouettes near the altar.

“Hello,” I called out, the word pluming in the air like a question:
Hello?

To distract myself, I located the diary Boshoff had given me. I forced myself to think of some other memory, to put it down in order to keep so many others at bay. That night in Ocala came to mind, and I started writing and did not stop or bother to even look up until the Hulk barked outside.

Once again, I went to the door. Daylight had yet to come, but the electric blue tinge in the air told me it was imminent. I had been writing for hours. Now, I spied the dog out there, lunging on her chain in the direction of the house.

“It's okay, girl,” I said, stepping outside, moving across the lawn. Afraid to get too close, I stopped at the edge of her reach, missing the way my mother had of calming, not just people, but animals too. Above us, streams of toilet paper rippled. While I'd been lost in that journal, someone had come by and tossed those rolls into our trees, soaped the windows of Rose's truck too—pranks that seemed quaint by now. As the dog kept at it, I found the courage to make my way around to her bone, slick and shimmering with saliva. No matter how much I waved it in her face, the thing held no interest for her anymore. All she wanted was to bark and growl and lunge on her chain.

What more could I do but leave her to exhaust herself? I dropped that bone, wiped my fingers on my T-shirt, and turned toward the house. That's when my hand went to my chest. That's when my breath caught in my throat. Earlier, when those boys came and went, I believed I'd faced down the most frightening event of the night, but not once I understood the cause of the dog's alarm. Down among the tangled branches of the rhododendrons, I saw it: the yellowy glow from the basement window. After all those months of darkness, whatever it was down there had turned on the light once more.

 

Chapter 8

Ghosts

M
aybe it was coincidence. But the books my mother gave me to read at an early age—
Jane Eyre
,
Great Expectations
,
Pippi Longstocking,
and so many others—were almost all about children who had been orphaned. Sometimes I wondered if those “feelings” she used to get allowed her to sense our family's fate, and if so, maybe those stories were her way of preparing me. That night at the Ocala Conference Center, I had no idea about any of that of course. I simply kept busy with
Jane Eyre
—or
tried
to, anyway. I never would have admitted it, but, despite my smarts, the book was too advanced considering I was only entering the sixth grade. It didn't help that Rose had left her bible back at the hotel, so she served up plenty of distractions.

She paced the small greenroom. (Not green, but peach, by the way.)

She picked grapes off the fruit platter.

She bounced them off the ceiling and caught them in her mouth.

The ones that missed, she mashed into the carpet with her sneaker. I didn't say a word, figuring it would be easier to clean up after she finished entertaining herself. I'd taken to underlining passages in the book that stood out to me, the way my mother did in her bible, and was about to put a pen to the page when I glanced up and noticed that Rose had slipped out of the room.
Let her go,
I told myself, but that promise to my father in the pool nagged at me, and so I put aside
Jane Eyre
and wandered the hall in search of Rose. It didn't take long before I found her standing in a large room filled with row upon row of chairs, all of them facing an enormous TV, all of them empty. The spillover room, I realized, but the weather had kept so many people away there was nobody to spill.

On the screen, I saw my father. If the rainwater had made him appear boyish and less serious earlier that day, the stage lights did the opposite. Shadows fell across his face, carving his features into a jumble of sharp angles and deep wrinkles. His glasses caught the light in such a way that his eyes seemed to flash as he spoke, stiff voiced, to the crowd. “Well before this century, those in the medical community had begun to discard the idea of possession as an explanation for abnormal human behavior. Instead, experts resolved that specific conditions were symptomatic of schizophrenia and other psychosis. These afflictions were dealt with by putting the sufferer away in an institution, or with crude and harmful methods of electroshock therapy, and more recently, experimenting with medication . . .”

“Rose,” I said.

“
Shhhh
. I'm listening.”

“ . . . Of course, it would be foolish to deny the importance of the myriad of advances in the treatment of mental disorders. But in the hurry to embrace the science of psychiatry, the medical field might have been a bit too eager to relinquish belief in evil forces, demonic oppression, and to accredit natural causes to all mental diseases of unknown etiology . . .”

“Rose, we're not supposed to be here. Let's go.”

My sister whipped around. “ ‘The mouth of a righteous man brings forth wisdom, but a perverse tongue will be cut out.' ”

“What?”

“It's a bible proverb, stupid. In other words, keep it up and I'll cut out your tongue. Now
shhhh
. I'm trying to listen.”

“ . . . While the majority of psychiatrists are satisfied to diagnose mental illness in terms of abnormal brain function, chemical imbalances, and personality disorders, there are those who admit that a tiny percentage of cases defy medical science. These cases do not allow for an easy explanation because they exhibit symptoms traditionally associated with demonic influence. . . .”

“Rose,” I said, even though it meant risking my tongue. “Let's go.”

This time, she turned from the TV. “You know what? You're right. Let's go.”

With that, she stepped out the door and headed down the hall. Where she should have hung a left into the peachy greenroom, however, Rose kept going. Through a set of doors. Up a flight of stairs. I followed until she slipped through one last door into the back of the auditorium where my parents were speaking. For a long while, I waited outside, wondering what she was up to and what, if anything, I could do about it. The entire time my father's voice drifted into the hallway. He described how so often people came to them as a last resort, after all attempts at treatment had failed, and I thought of the people who showed up unannounced on our front steps, a look of desperation in their eyes. Then I heard my father say, “No doubt you came here expecting a ghost story. You'll get plenty, I promise. But first, I'd like to start with a love story. I guess you could say it's a Christmas story
and
a love story, because it takes place in December and it's how I met my beautiful wife.”

I didn't know how my parents met, and my curiosity led me to tug open the door the tiniest bit. I spotted Rose crouched in the rear of the auditorium. When I slipped inside and joined her, crouching and pressing my back to the wall as well, she did not acknowledge my presence. My father continued, and as we listened, I looked around at the empty seats. The crowd of three hundred he'd been anticipating had dwindled to no more than seventy. I wondered if that's why he seemed so distracted and uncomfortable up there. Talking in that stiff voice. Fidgeting with a stack of index cards, fanning and flipping them this way and that. Beside him, my mother stood, calm as could be, hands joined together, listening intently, as though she'd never heard the story before.

Which details am I recalling from that night and which have I filled in from things my parents told me when I asked questions later? And which, if I'm truthful, did I color in myself, lending their meeting a fairy-tale quality in my mind? Rather than attempt to separate those versions, I'll tell the story I carry with me.

When my father finished his coursework at the dental school in Baltimore, he spent a year working at the university clinic, clocking in the hours required to graduate. Although his career as a dentist had yet to officially begin, he had grown bored. The field lacked a sense of mystery, he said, and silly as it sounded, he despised the one-sided conversations with the people in his chair. (“How much can you learn when you're the only one talking?” I heard him once say.) So while his days were spent drilling and filling cavities, he found a more satisfying activity to occupy his evenings: he began studying the paranormal to make sense of the unexplained things he had seen since childhood.

As for my mother's life, the events of her childhood led her to spend an inordinate amount of time in prayer. On her way home from school each afternoon, she stopped at her small brick church, slipped into a back pew, and spoke to the Lord. On Sundays, she arrived early and distributed prayer books to worshippers entering the service. Afterward, she taught in the Bible school, where the pastor overheard her singing to herself and found her voice so melodic he convinced her to join the choir. When she was nearing the end of high school, that same pastor helped her get accepted into a small Christian college in Georgia on a voice scholarship.

One Christmas, the choir was scheduled to give a concert for inner-city children in Harlem. In the predawn hours of December 24, 1967, my mother boarded a bus with her fellow students and headed north. It began to snow on the East Coast that morning and kept up all through the afternoon. “Lift Jesus Higher,” “The Lord Is My Shepherd, I Shall Not Want,” “Amazing Grace”—with those songs and so many others, the girls sang away the miles until the choir director—out of genuine concern or, more likely, boredom—suggested it would be wise to save their voices. Except for the rumble of snowplows and rattle of salt trucks rolling past on the highway, the bus grew quiet. Soon, the girls had fallen asleep. My mother slept too, though she woke before the others with what she first experienced as a headache. Those “feelings” she sometimes got about the world didn't normally come to her in the form of physical pain, but the sensation was so intense she couldn't help but wonder if it was a sign.

By the time they reached D.C., snow spit frantically from the sky, blotting out the world outside my mother's window as pain crept to the side of her face and bloomed in her jaw. Despite the agony, my mother (being my mother) kept quiet. Nothing anyone could do until they reached New York City, she told herself. Besides, if she did say something, those girls might lay hands on her. Not only did my mother dislike being the center of attention, she did not believe they had the kind of faith to make that sort of healing possible.

Late in the afternoon on that same day, my father finished work and got ready to leave the clinic. In truth, he had seen his last patient hours before, though for once he felt no urgency to leave, since he faced the prospect of his first holiday alone. His final patient, a blowsy, red-haired woman doused with lilac perfume, whose oddly fanglike teeth he'd been capping and crowning for months, brought a Christmas gift to thank him for all his work. The gesture touched my father more deeply than he might have guessed, because it would be the only gift he'd be receiving that holiday. He peeled away the reindeer wrapping paper to find a leather-bound copy of Charles Dickens's
A Christmas Carol
.

“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”

The fang-toothed woman hugged him too long, leaving him smelling of lilacs. After she walked out, my father allowed himself to lounge in a dental chair. Page after page he turned until the Ghost of Christmas Future appeared and he glanced out the window to see the sky had grown dark. He decided to finish the story at home.

On the slippery drive back to his apartment, my father's thoughts turned to the ghosts of
his
past. Not the ones that appeared to him as apparitions, but rather his family. His mother had passed from lung cancer a few years before. (Hadn't he always warned her about all those cigarettes?) Since she'd been gone, his father and brother had done away with even the skimpy holiday traditions she once maintained and instead spent hour upon hour drinking from their freezer-chilled glass tumblers—getting good and sloshed in front of the TV. The year before, my father, who always shared one glass with them, had felt so gloomy during the visit that he vowed never to return. Even though he kept that promise, there he was on Christmas Eve, allowing those same old ghosts to haunt him anyway.

Your parents are never gone from you. . .

Perhaps those words flickered in his mind as he carefully navigated the slick roads that night. He'd already gone to an early mass—to his way of thinking, Christmas Eve mass was a candle-lit tourist trap, not meant for serious believers like himself—and now there was only dinner to think about. But he wasn't much of a cook and all the decent restaurants he passed were closed. That must have been what led him to pull into a Howard Johnson's off the highway.

Once he stepped inside, his eyes caught sight of a row of pay phones. Would he regret the call? Probably. But he walked to a phone anyway, fished out a fistful of change from his pockets, punched in the 215 area code and number he knew by heart. The phone rang and rang and he was about to give up when a craggy voice came on the line. “Hi, Dad,” my father said. “It's me, Sylvester. I just called to wish you a Merry Christmas.”

After a silence, “Same to you, son. Same to you.”

“Some storm, huh?”

“Guess so. But it'll melt. Always does. Nothing to get upset about.”

“I'm not getting up—” My father stopped, took a breath. “So I imagine you and Howie are spending the night together?”

“Nope. Howie's gone off. Here with Lloyd having a drink.”

“Howie's gone off where?”

“Joined the navy. You know that.”

“Well,
how
would I know that, Dad? I never hear from either of you.”

“Phone rings both ways, son. Phone rings both ways.”

Perhaps that was the moment my father first shifted his gaze toward the window and saw the idling bus in the parking lot. Emergency flashers blazed, turning the snow red then white then red again. Perhaps that was when a matronly, gray-haired woman stepped inside and approached the row of pay phones, opening the phone book and flipping pages. “I'll try to call more often in the New Year,” my father said, putting his back to the woman since he didn't like people knowing his business. “But, well, there never seems to be anything to say.”

Silence. More silence.