The Queen Gene (18 page)

“That’s been their little game this afternoon. Mancha barks and Adam tells him not to bark at the lady. It’s really quite irritating, darling. I keep hoping one of them will do something different, but it’s the same tedium over and over again,” Anjoli said. She shrugged. “Kids, dogs, what are you going to do, right? They
are
cute, but not exactly stimulating, are they?”

“Mother, do you find anything odd about the house?” I sat next to her. Anjoli lowered her reading glasses and asked what I meant. “I mean, do you think there’s something wrong with the house?”

Anjoli waved her hand as if to dismiss my concerns. “All houses have problems. I’ve got old plumbing and a goddamned sorority house across the street. You should see the place. The oldest one of them is twenty-two.”

“Honky, look at the lady!” Adam shouted, pointing at a grove of trees.

“Adam, I’ve said hello to the lady three times now, darling,” she said in her sing-song voice. “I’m sure she feels properly greeted by us all.”

“Say hi to the lady, Mommy!” he said to me.

“Hello, lady!” I shouted and waved.

Anjoli was growing impatient. “Why can’t he watch TV for an hour?!”

“I think it’s great that he uses his imagination for play,” I said. “Miss Rhiannon says Adam is very bright and has conversations with his imaginary friends every day.”

“And this is positive?” she whispered so Adam wouldn’t hear. “Back in my day, kids who did that were oddballs. It wouldn’t kill him to watch a little
Sesame Street
every now and then. We didn’t do this whole imaginary friend nonsense back when you were a baby. I popped you in front of the TV and came back when it was time for bed.”

“The lady is flying!” Adam shouted as his gaze followed a path in the sky. Mancha joined him barking in the same direction.

“Mother! Don’t you find this odd?!”

“Extremely, darling,” Anjoli returned. “I think you’re turning an otherwise normal little boy into a social outcast. Don’t listen to that hippie teacher of his. Tell him that there is no lady and get him a video, or at least a truck or something real to play with so he’s not incessantly chattering and disturbing people. He sounds like Rain Man over there.”

Some of my friends tell me they can’t stand listening to their mothers’ constant cooing over their children. Mine just said she believed my son to be an idiot savant and suggested I remedy him with a ten-hour daily dose of Cartoon Network.

“Mother, I’m going to say something a bit strange for me, but I’m hoping that you, of all people, will understand.” Anjoli nodded. “Do you think there’s any bizarre chance that the house is, well, maybe slightly, um — haunted?”

“Haunted?!” Anjoli said.

“I know it sounds odd, but there have been some strange things going on since we moved in,” I explained.

“It doesn’t sound odd, darling,” Anjoli said. “It’s not at all unusual for an old house to have visitors from the other side. It’s impossible, though. Remember that when you moved in, I performed the space-clearing rituals that would rid your new home of any ghosts.”

“Oh, yes,” I said recalling Anjoli burning sage and chanting in every corner of the house. She took a class through the Learning Annex and was so thrilled with her newfound ghost-busting skills that she considered starting a side business. She gave up the idea after she found out how “exhausting” it was to rid our home of apparitions.

“So you see, darling, it’s not possible to have ghosts unless you think my

space-clearing rituals were ineffective.” I said nothing. “You’re not suggesting that my space-clearing didn’t take, are you?”

It was then I realized that my home was absolutely, positively, without a shadow of a doubt spooked.

Chapter Twenty-One

“You think the house is
what
?” asked Jack as he began changing into a shirt for dinner. I love the way he looks after he scrubs every last bit of the day’s paint off of his body, combs his wet hair to the side, and puts on a clean shirt for an evening at home. Honestly, I adore the way he looks as he’s painting as well. Sometimes I go down to his studio and watch him. I stand in the doorway, and he doesn’t even notice me there. He narrows his eyes with concentration, steps back, shakes his head, and returns to his stool to continue or correct his work. When I see him so engrossed in his painting, I know we made the right decision moving here so he could pursue his art. Haunted or not, I loved this house.

I sat on the edge of our bed and watched him button his shirt and start searching for his jeans strewn on the bedroom floor. “I didn’t say I think the house is definitely haunted, just that it might be,” I said.

Jack smiled. “Oh well, as long as you’re not saying definitely.” He laughed.

“Jack,” I whined, urging him to take my suggestion more seriously. “Can’t you even entertain the idea that something like this is possible? I mean, do we really know everything there is to know about life after death?”

After he buttoned his jeans, Jack sat beside me and addressed me without smiling. He placed his hand on mine and said he could not possibly consider that the house was haunted. “I’m sorry, Luce. I can’t even go there. It’s not in my nature to believe in that hocus pocus.”

“But the leg injuries, the personality changes, the complete black hole of art down there,” I said, gesturing to the guest cottages. “Do you really think that’s a coincidence?”

“Yeah,” he said, “I do. Look, I’m not saying you can’t believe the place is haunted, but don’t get mad at me if I don’t agree with you.”

His response took me back to our days in marriage counseling where Etta would remind us that we could be a stronger, more united couple when we accepted each other as individuals. That is, Jack could have his quirks and idiosyncrasies, and I didn’t have to attach my identity to any of them. The reverse was also true, as he was now reminding me. I sort of missed our therapist back in New Jersey. Going to counseling forced Jack and me to sit down once a week and really listen to each other. We broke so many old habits like immediately defending charges that weren’t even launched and blaming each other for failings in the relationship. And, of course, couples counseling also gave us a common language to speak — and a common person to make fun of at home. We had more laughs at the expense of our therapist and the way she habitually drew diagrams on her dry erase board. I even bought a white board and mounted it in the kitchen so I could do my impressions of Etta when Jack and I had a disagreement at home.

“No, I’m not mad at you, Jack,” I assured him. “But I feel a little embarrassed that I’m even considering this, and it would be of great comfort to me if you also thought it might be a possibility.”

“Sorry, hon, but I don’t,” he said. “It’s too
Anjoli
for me.”

“Fair enough,” I returned.

“I won’t stand in your way, though, if you wanna, you know, do something about it,” Jack said. “I mean, if it makes you feel better to get the place, I don’t know, de-spooked, I won’t give you a hard time about it.”

“You won’t think it’s silly?” I asked.

“Luce, I will think it’s silly,” Jack replied. “What I’m saying is that if you feel like you need to do something, I won’t stand in your way.”

I took a deep breath and suppressed the urge to try to convince him to see things my way. I wasn’t even sure
I
saw things my way, and Jack was far more pragmatic a person than I. He hadn’t grown up with Anjoli as a mother. My mother-in-law, Susan, had been Jack’s den mother for Cub Scouts. She was a member of the Soroptimist Club in Winnetka, Illinois. She’d served as the PTA treasurer for all of the years her kids attended the local elementary school. If I was having trouble accepting the idea that our home might be haunted, how could I expect anything more from Jack?

“You’re right,” I said. “This is crazy talk. Of course the house isn’t haunted. I guess I want so much for there to be a reason for everything that’s gone wrong. I was so eager to pinpoint a cause to our problems, but it’s really rather ridiculous, isn’t it? As soon as you said you’d support my de-spooking the house, I realized how flaky it sounded.
Haunted house
,” I scoffed. “Forget I ever mentioned it.”

“Forgotten,” Jack said with a wink. “Now, let’s eat.”

* * *

The next morning, I woke up to the sound of the phone ringing. I rolled through my cloud of cotton sheets to see that Jack was still in bed, a rarity after 6:00. The clock read 7:48 am, which made me smile with a sense of mischievous accomplishment. I’d completely exhausted him the night before.

“Hello,” I said groggily. It was Renee in tears.

“Sorry to call so early,” she sobbed.

I sat upright and took the phone into the hallway so I wouldn’t wake Jack. “No problem. What’s going on? You sound upset.”

“Dan and I had a huge fight last night. He stormed out at midnight, and when I woke up this morning, I saw he hadn’t come home.”

“Whoa,” slipped out. There seemed little else to say because the next questions seemed to have obvious answers. I dared not ask where he went, but did make a pitiful attempt to convince her that this may not appear as bad as it seemed. “Are you sure he didn’t just wake up early to go, um, jogging or something?” These feeble attempts were always done as much for my benefit as the other person’s. I hate to admit, but I am so squeamish with other people’s discomfort that I try to make it go away as quick as possible. Sure, I want to help my friend feel better, but I also want to escape the painful reality in which we are both trapped.

Renee laughed. “Oh, that’s right, you’ve never seen Dan. Well, let me assure you, he’s not out jogging. I might buy it if you said he got up early to get himself a dozen Krispy Kremes.”

This depressed me more than anything. A woman in her forties with a few extra pounds — okay, we’re talking about me — was as sexually marginalized as a pair of old tennis shoes, while Pudgy McButterball had a beautiful wife and mistress on the side.

“Can I come over?” she said. Renee had always sounded so self-assured, it was unsettling to hear her sounding this vulnerable. I had already cast her as the woman who had it all together in spite of her marital problems. Now I would be forced to see her as a more complex, textured person, which terrified me to no end. Nonetheless, she was a friend and her needs would have to supersede my fears.

“Of course,” I said. “We’re just getting up. Can you come by in an hour, and we’ll put some breakfast on the table?”

“Thank you,” she sniffed. “I’ve got to bring my kids. Is that okay?”

“Of course, I just set out the inflatable pool yesterday so they can splash around in it.”

“Eric will like that,” she said of her four-year-old. “Jenna’s twelve, though, so she’s far too cool for kiddie pools.” I could see Renee rolling her eyes with exasperation at her high-maintenance adolescent. (Is that redundant?) “She can bring a book or her phone. I just don’t want to be home alone, ’cause I know I’ll start crying and the kids can’t see me that way.”

I always wondered about that parental choice. On the one hand, I understand the instinct to shield one’s children from unpleasantness. On the other, I wondered about raising kids who were unaware that their parents experienced real emotions. When Jack’s father left their family, Susan put a smile on her face and never spoke a word of her ex-husband. As a result, Jack grew up thinking all negative feelings should be shoved under the bed, out of sight and never to be spoken of. During our marital blue period — the years that followed a series of miscarriages — Jack constantly dismissed my bereavement by telling me, “Don’t feel that way,” or worse, “You shouldn’t feel bad.” It caused a wedge between us that took years to remove. I felt for Eric’s future wife if Renee continued along the same path as Susan’s.

“Of course they can come over,” I said. “But don’t worry about your kids seeing you upset. You’re human, and it’s good for you to show them that it’s okay to experience a full range of emotions.”

“I don’t know how positive it is for them to see me stuff daddy’s clothing with pillows and stab him in effigy,” Renee said, sniffing.

“Point taken,” I said. “All I’m saying is you don’t have to be a martyr. If you need to cry, your kids can handle it.”

“Is Anjoli still there?” Renee asked. I confirmed that she was, wondering how it would go over once Renee found out that Anjoli was on the flip side of several affairs. My mother wasn’t exactly secretive about her history, as she saw very little condemnable about her behavior.

When Renee and her kids arrived, Anjoli was setting the table in the backyard. I had debriefed her and Jack on the situation so neither would say anything that may inadvertently upset her. Jack had already commented on the fact that Dan never accompanied her to events, and Mother had a habit of espousing her self-acquitting philosophy on infidelity at every opportunity. I couldn’t bear the thought of Jack innocently remarking, “Hubby’s left you alone again, eh, Renee?” Even worse was the image of Anjoli sipping tea pondering why married women don’t look within for the answer to questions about their husbands who go astray.

“Not to worry, darling,” Anjoli assured me. “I’m very sensitive to other people’s feelings. In fact, at a workshop last weekend, I was told that I am an intuitive, always tuned in to the feelings of others.”

“Really?” Jack said as he brought out a pot of coffee. He couldn’t resist. “Let me ask you — what was the name of the person who told you this?”

Setting the silver down beside each plate, Anjoli tilted her head to look at Jack to reply. “It was the
leader
of the workshop,” she said, impressed. Adam sat facing the guest houses and sang a song as he jerked Elmo around by the neck to make him dance. Mancha sat quietly beside him as if he were ready to pounce.

“What was his name?” Jack asked.

“It was a woman,” Anjoli replied, now actively dodging the question.

“Okay, what was her name?” Jack asked.

Anjoli shifted her eyes back down toward the table. “It was Camilla,” she said.

“Really, so if I went to the website of this workshop, I’d see that the leader’s name was Camilla?” Jack asked.