The 'Geisters (9 page)

“I see you’re without a drink,” he said, and offered the fresher of the two Coronas. She smiled and fended it off with a hand.

“Thanks but no. I hope you didn’t get that for me,” said Ann. “I’m giving my liver a break.”

He shrugged and grinned. “No loss in trying,” he said, eyeing one beer, then the other. “But my work is cut out for me. May I
join you?”

Ann was sitting in a wooden chair joined to another by a small table, and the other chair was empty. She motioned to it.

“Where is your dashing husband?” he asked as he took the seat and set the beer bottles between them.

“Inside. He’s sleeping off a sunburn.” It was true; Michael had pulled her from the burning beach house unscathed. Their first afternoon here, he’d fallen asleep on his stomach by the pool, stayed there for an hour, and that was all it took. Funny old world, he’d said.

“He won’t mind me sitting here?”

“I don’t think so. He’s sleeping.”

“Okay,” said Paolo. “I don’t want to make trouble on anyone’s honeymoon.”

Ann laughed, and it must have been a bit too hard because Paolo frowned. She waved a hand and shook her head, and asked him, “On that subject . . . how was the wedding?”

“Oh, it was very beautiful. We all took off our shoes. Danced in the sea as the setting sun turned the bride and groom to gold.” He took a deep pull from the Corona. “Now they are gone, to a house down the coast. And the rest of us will be back to Caracas in a day or so.”

“That sounds lovely.”

Paolo smiled and squinted out at the sea.

“Weddings are often lovely,” he said. “Now tell me, Ann. What are you doing here? Sitting by yourself on the beach. Not even a drink beside you. Not an iPad or an iPod or even a book. No husband. And you are here! Weren’t you staying at a beach house?”

“Burned to the ground,” she said, and he laughed.

“The heat of passion,” he said, and when she didn’t laugh, he apologized.

“It’s all right,” she said. “No offence taken.”

Paolo finished his beer. “You probably think I’m hitting on you,” he said. “And probably, I am a bit. I shouldn’t be. You’re on your honeymoon after all. And your husband is much handsomer than I. Even all burned up.”

He stood up, and made a small bow of his head.

“Excuse me, please, Ann. I hope your husband’s sunburn recovers as well as your lovely knee.”

Ann smiled and thanked him, and Paulo made his retreat. He was out of sight, when she noticed that he’d left the untouched bottle of Corona on the table, within easy arm’s reach.

She contemplated it a moment. From the sweat on the bottle, the beer was still cold; bubbles of carbonation traced up its side and gathered around the triangle of lime stuffed in its neck.

Ann shut her eyes. Another bottle of beer was not what she needed right now. Because there was work to do. She took a deep breath, and imagined a spectrum of colour, in sequence, and dreamed a verdant land at the foot of a range of mountains. It was a place near, but out of sight of the tower where she had imprisoned the Insect long ago. But it was a good site; the mountains would yield stone to build a new tower; the land would yield crops to feed the men and women who would raise the walls that would soon make a home for the Insect once more.

The last time she’d done this, it had been hard work. But she thought that this time it might go quicker; after all, when the closet had lit bright at the Lake House that winter, the first time, Eva had not told her about the safe place. No one had known what to do.

They had all done the best they could, with what tools presented themselves.

The offices that Charlie Sunderland used in those days were situated in a strip mall at the south end of Etobicoke, smack between a medical centre and a pharmacy. But he made it clear to all of his clients who made the observation, that the proximity was entirely coincidental.

“I’m not going to write you a prescription. I promise you that. Because you know by now, drugs aren’t going to resolve anything. And as for the clinic? If you needed a physician, you wouldn’t be here.”

Ann’s mother lifted her bandaged right hand. Two days ago, those bandages had been applied in the emergency room at Perth County General, on top of deep, stitched-up cuts from which the doctors there had extracted three thin shards of glass. They had pulled six more from her shoulders and chest, but the bandages from those wounds were hidden under a thick sweater.

“I wouldn’t say we don’t need a physician,” she said.

Sunderland smiled a little sheepishly and looked down at his own hands. He was a tall man with very dark hair and a prominent chin, a deep tan for this time of year. He didn’t look like a physician to Ann; he wore an open-necked sweater and pale blue jeans, and he smiled too much.

But maybe that was fine. Maybe he was right.

A physician wouldn’t be able to do much for the problem at the Lake House.

“What happened to your hand?” he asked.

Ann’s mother looked down now, and Ann’s father put his hand on her shoulder, and she looked up at him, and said: “The ghost did it.” And then she looked back at her hand, and her lips pressed tight together.

The ghost did it.

This was a hard thing for her to say. Of the four of them, she had held onto her skepticism the longest, edging out Philip by about a week. Until then, Ann’s mother had answered Ann’s complaints with a hug, and a trip to the closet or the basement or the bathroom with a flashlight to say:
There’s nothing here
.

Not now there’s not. But before—

Not ever, Ann. Imagination’s a powerful thing. But it’s not real. It’s all in our heads.

It’s all in the closet.

You just think so. But really, baby—it’s you.

Saying that was like a challenge—and after the thing had happened in Ann’s brother’s room, the thing he wouldn’t talk about, not yet, Philip tried to tell their mother so. But she wouldn’t listen. She just kept on opening doors and moving curtains aside, shining her flashlight into the dark corners of the bright new house—until she opened the hall closet, and looked into the light.

“Why do you say it was a ghost?” asked Sunderland. Outside, it had begun to snow, and as he spoke, the heating system kicked into higher gear.

“There was . . . a stack of light bulbs. They weren’t connected to anything—just in the closet. They were . . . on.”

“On?” Sunderland’s smile faltered.

She looked down at her bandaged hand, and said again: “They weren’t connected to anything. They weren’t just on—they seemed to be pulsing, showing me a pattern. When I got close enough . . .”
She made an exploding sound with the roof of her mouth—the kind of sound some of the boys that Ann knew would make if they were pretending to blow things up. Dr. Sunderland nodded. He had a computer on his desk, and he glanced at the screen, tapped some keys, and pushed a disk in the three-and-a-half-inch drive.

“We both saw it,” said Ann’s father.

“But you had the presence of mind to get a fire extinguisher,” she said to him.

“You were bleeding.”

“You were right there,” she said. “Thank God.”

Sunderland left them to it, and turned his attention to the computer. He typed something. Ann met Philip’s eye, who was sitting in an old plastic-covered chair by the window. He pursed his lips and nodded with resignation, jammed his fists farther into the pockets of his fleece vest.

“Please excuse me,” said Sunderland. “I’m opening a file for you. That way, we’ll have everything in one place.”

“I thought you had a file already,” said their father.

On the desk beside Sunderland was an old school notebook that Ann had half-filled with what she could remember about the incidents. She had also made some drawings and they were in there too. Philip had used his own computer, and his homework was in a stack of printouts underneath the notebook. Underneath that, a yellow questionnaire that Ann’s mother and father had filled out, and signed.

Sunderland pressed a key and the drive started to write. It made a squonking noise, Ann thought.

Squonk squonk.

He turned his attention to the notes, picking them up and holding them, like a restaurant menu.

“These are great,” he said. “Ann, Philip—you’ve done a great job setting things down. I’m really impressed with you.”

Ann nodded
you’re welcome
. Philip regarded Dr. Sunderland, but didn’t say anything.

“What’s your prognosis, then?” asked their father.

He shook his head. “Prognosis. That’s a doctor’s word. We’re not dealing with a medical situation, Mr. LeSage. Aside, I mean, from the injuries you sustained from the electro-kinetic event last week, Mrs. LeSage. We’re dealing with something more . . . complex.”

“So you can’t fix this?” said Ann’s mother.

Dr. Sunderland bent his head and regarded her, as though over the top of invisible glasses.

“We can learn,” he said, “about the phenomenon.” He gestured to the bandaged hands. “Make you safer.”

Ann’s mother was about to say something, but stopped at the touch on her hand. “That’s what we want,” said her father. If it weren’t for him, Ann thought they all would have walked out right then and there.

If it had been up to their mother, they wouldn’t have come in the first place.

Their mother had been the last of them to shed her skepticism, but that only became clear after the incident with the lights. Until then, it seemed as though both parents were on the same page when it came to understanding the presence that their children described. When Ann’s mother took the flashlight into the laundry room, Ann’s father would hang back, nodding in tacit agreement that yes,
the only thing to fear is fear
. He was the one who ordered the parental control box for the cable TV service, after they agreed that Ann was just scaring herself. Their father gave no sign that he understood the things that were happening in the Lake House to be anything other than a child’s overactive imagination.

It was, as it turned out, cover. After he had emptied the kitchen fire extinguisher into the closet—after he had gotten their mom home, stitched up and swaddled in bandages—he’d sat them down in a family meeting to explain some things. It was a fiercely cold night, and on other nights like this they might have lit a fire; sitting around the fireplace in the high-ceilinged living room was almost to the point of a religious ceremony with the LeSages. But their dad said no.

“We’ll turn up the furnace if you’re cold. I don’t want to start anything. Now sit down,” he said. “I have a confession to make.”

Their father, as it turned out, had not been nearly as skeptical as he’d made himself out to be. Which, he admitted, was another way of saying that he had lied to them—kept things from them. He hoped that they would forgive him.

“I’ve seen this thing too,” he said. “Bottom line. Three months ago.”

What had he seen? Ann wanted to know, and demanded details. Their dad seemed flustered at the request, and tried to avoid answering. But their mom said: “No, I want to hear this too. What did you see?”

He clamped his hands together and sat very still. He laughed a bit, and said he felt like he was telling a ghost story but that he didn’t want to frighten anybody more than they already were.

“Don’t worry about that, dad,” said Philip. “That ship’s sailed.”

And their dad laughed, and unfurled his hands, and started into it.

“It was down by the water’s edge,” he said. “Near the boathouse. Very early in the morning.. We’d had a movie night the night before.”

“So, Sunday,” said Ann.

“I got up before everybody and took my coffee out to the lake.” In fact, he had taken his coffee and a pack of cigarettes outside. But that was one of the things that he left out of the story, then.

“I remember that it was very still out. The mist was on the water. The first thing I heard was some splashing.”

“Under the dock?” Ann had been caught by that one more than once—what seemed like a fish caught under the floating part of the dock, splashing and twisting and pushing the whole structure out of the water and dropping it again. But her father shook his head.

“No, it was pretty clear that the splash came from the lake. First a big one, like a fish jumping out. Then they became rhythmic. I could see where it was coming from—the lake mist was swirling and spreading about a hundred feet off the dock, maybe further. It looked like someone swimming, but not well—it was like they were maybe in trouble. I called out and asked, and I heard something—it was like a cry for help—it sounded like a woman.

“I kind of panicked. If it were earlier in the year, the boat would have been in the water and I’d have been able to make it out there to pull her out. But we’d put the boat away. And it was pretty far out. So I put down my coffee cup—” and he stubbed out his cigarette under his boot “—and I pulled off my shirt and boots and jeans.”

“So you were going to swim out to her? In October?” asked their mother.

“Did you at least take the life ring off the dock?” asked Philip.

“I did that, yes. And yes, I was going to try and swim out there and help her. What else was I going to do?”

“The lake’s freezing this time of year. You’d give yourself a heart attack.”

“Yeah.” He went quiet for a moment. “I didn’t end up going in the water. Before I got my pants off my ankles, the swimmer had come closer. I thought maybe I could just throw that ring. But by the time she got close enough . . . well.”

The newest log burning in the fire place cracked and popped twice before he continued.

“There was no she. No swimmer. It was just the water. Splashing and swirling by itself.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” asked Philip.

Their father shut up again. There was no good answer for the question.

Finally he said: “I’ve got in touch with somebody. I’m told he can help.”

They wound up staying at Dr. Sunderland’s offices until late that night. Most of the time Ann spent waiting around.

Dr. Sunderland explained it: “We’re going to do individual interviews and tests. So we’ve got a room for you kids to hang out in while you’re waiting.”

The room was off a long hallway in back of the main office. There were no windows, but it was nice enough. There was a couch and a chair and a TV, a little table with a pitcher of ice water and cups to one side—a coffee table in the middle. There was nothing to read, Philip noted.

“You won’t be here that long,” said Dr. Sunderland as he shut the door.

“This is bullshit,” said Philip.

“Bullshit,” agreed Ann, and giggled.

Philip got up and opened the door, looked up and down the hall.

“Is the coast clear?”

“The coast is clear.”

“Are we going to escape?”

“We’ll make a break for it at shift change. Hotwire the minivan. Hit the border by sundown.”

Ann giggled, and Philip let the door close, fell back on the couch beside her. They looked at the blank TV screen, and Ann found the remote control on the arm of the couch. When she turned on the set, the screen went snowy.

“No cable,” she said, and Philip nodded.

“Ghost-busting doesn’t pay like it used to.”

Ann punched him in the arm and clicked up three channels before shutting the set off. Philip looked at his watch. Outside the room, they heard footsteps, but they didn’t stop and no one opened the door. The light from the fluorescent fixture overhead flickered, made everything seem a little dead.

“I’m scared,” said Philip.

It was the first time he had admitted that, and looking at him, eyes straight ahead, Ann thought he was joking. But he wasn’t, and told her not to laugh.

“I don’t like this place,” he said. “I don’t think Sunderland’s a good person.”

“What do you mean?”

Philip sat up. He frowned, opened his mouth like he was going to say, then stopped. “I think he’s going to try to talk to us by ourselves.”

“That’s what he said he was going to do.”

“He’s not a real doctor. He said so himself.”

Ann nodded. “So?”

Philip looked right at her. “When he talks to you,” he said, “promise me something.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t let him make you take your clothes off.”

“Are you blushing?”

Philip
was
blushing. He looked away. “Just promise me. He might say it’s part of the tests he’s got to do. He might say something else. But he’s got no business taking your clothes off. So don’t do it.”

“Okay,” she said. “I promise.”

“Thanks.”

“Is that what you’re scared of?”

“Maybe.” He bit his thumbnail. “I don’t know, exactly.”

“Well I’m scared too,” said Ann, and took her brother’s hand. The thumb tip was still damp with spit. “But not of that.”

“I just don’t like him. That’s all.”

They sat waiting for a half an hour by Philip’s watch, before the door cracked open and Dr. Sunderland peeked in. Ann got up, but he shook his head. “You stay here,” he said. “Philip, it’s your turn.”

“How long will it be?” she asked.

“Not long. Why don’t you watch television?”

“It doesn’t work,” said Philip. “No cable.”

Dr. Sunderland frowned. “What? Sure we do. Hold on a second.” He went over to the TV, reached around behind, jiggled something, and turned it on. A music video came up. “Hm. Sir Mix-a-Lot.” He looked at Ann. “Your kind of thing?”

She wrinkled her nose and shook her head.

“Well,” he said, pointing to the remote, “there are plenty of channels to choose from. Take your pick.”

And with that, he and Philip left Ann alone in the room. She started to flip channels.

“Mr. Spock had to have his brain put back in,” she said. “Dr. McCoy didn’t know what he was doing, but Mr. Spock talked him through it.”