Help for the Haunted (41 page)

I remember that when I
ran across the street and burst through the front door, the first thing I
wanted to do was hug my sister, since I had not hugged her the day she left
home. But the sight of Rose made me stop abruptly in the entrance to the
living room.

“What are you gawking
at?” Rose said. “You look like you've seen a ghost.”

“Your head,” I told her.
“What did you . . .”

She reached a hand up
and ran it over her scalp, still nicked and bloody from the razor. “Funny, I
had a full head of hair when I got here this morning. But when I found
someone else sleeping in my room, wearing my clothes, living my life, I
thought I better do something to set myself apart from her.”

“Rose,” my mother said.
“Your father and I explained why you found things the way you did. You never
should have—”

The front door opened
and my mother grew quiet. A moment later, Abigail padded up the hall in bare
feet until she was standing beside me. Why had I failed to notice earlier
that the shirt she wore was not one of those tattered things she had arrived
with, but rather a simple black tank that belonged to my sister? How many
other days and nights had she taken to wearing her clothes without my
noticing?

“Abigail,” my father
said, his voice rising with alarm. “What happened?”

I watched as she held
out her palms, blood still drooling and dripping from each, as her mouth
moved open and closed but made no sound. First my father, then my mother,
rushed toward her. In a moment, they had whisked her off to the kitchen,
where I could hear water running and my mother praying too.

Meanwhile, Rose and I
had been left alone in the living room. There was a little blood on her hand
as well from when she ran it over her scalp. But nothing she couldn't wipe
away on her jeans, which she did just then. “Well, squirt,” she said. “I can
see things have really normalized while I've been gone.”

How could I tell her
that in their own strange way, things had seemed normal—happy even—all those
months? There was the ice cream. There were those late-night trips to the
pond. There were the conversations Abigail and I had through the bedroom
wall.

Instead, I said, “I'm
glad you're back. Are they going to let you stay?”

“They're not happy about
it, but I'm not giving them a choice. No way am I heading back to that
place. And I'm not going back to school again either. I'm going to stay here
through the fall and winter, save my money then get an apartment of my
own.”

I thought of that globe
up in her room, the way she used to spin it, plunking her finger down on
random locations. Warsaw. Buenos Aires. Sydney. “Get a place
where?”

“Don't know. Haven't
figured that out yet. But it won't be Dundalk or even Baltimore. It'll be
someplace a safe distance from this madhouse.”

I stood there, saying
nothing. All summer long, I had wanted the same things as my mother: for
Rose to come home, for Abigail to be gone, for things to return to normal.
But I realized then that things would never go back to the way they had
been. When Rose left that morning months before, she may as well have left
for good.

“Sylvie,” my mother
called from the kitchen. “Can you run to our bathroom upstairs and get some
bandages and peroxide?”

I turned away from my
sister and did what our mother asked. When I stepped into the kitchen
moments later, Abigail held her hands above her head to slow the bleeding.
“Does she need stitches?” I asked.

“I don't think so,” my
father answered, then looked to Abigail and asked her, “How did this
happen?”

Her mouth moved up and
down again, but no words came. You're good at this, I thought. If I didn't
know better, I'd have been fooled too.

“You were with her,
Sylvie,” my mother said at last. “Tell us.”

Abigail's eyes caught
mine then. I thought of that morning when I spoke the truth for Rose and how
badly that had turned out despite my intentions. Let them believe what they
want, I decided before answering only with, “I don't know what happened to
her.”

Abigail's eyes were on
mine still as my parents walked her to the basement door. Her mouth was no
longer moving, though I could imagine words slipping out anyway, saying:
“The money. Tonight, after I'm down there asleep, don't forget to bring me
the money.”

“And then what?” Lynch said. He was not exactly
leaning forward at the table, but he was sitting up at last, his spindly fingers
pressed to the surface. “You went down there and gave her the money?”

“Your turn,” I told him. “Tell me about the deal
you made with my sister.”

He balled his hands into tight fists and seemed
about to drum them on the table, but shook them in the air a moment instead.
“Fine,” he told me. “It's nothing I haven't said before. All that fall and all
that winter, I kept searching for Abigail. I had ideas about where she might
have gone. Back to the ministry in Oregon. Or off to find a friend of my
ex-wife's. Or to a town in the south where we once stayed for a few months,
since she seemed to like the other children at the church there more than other
places. But she never turned up anywhere. All the while, I kept calling your
house, but your parents just let that stupid machine answer. I couldn't go to
the police, because of the way we had been living. Besides, I didn't know if my
ex had some sort of report filed against me. I found out from one of the lawyers
after I was in here that she never did stop looking.

“I started coming to your house again. That fall.
That winter too. Eventually, your parents didn't even bother to open the door.
By then, I had read that book by Sam Heekin, which meant I knew about the
Mustang Bar where he took your father after he apparently popped a few of those
pills he liked to take when his back was hurting. The day of the storm, I went
through the same routine: hammering away on your front door to no avail until I
gave up and found myself sitting at the Mustang Bar too. It had been ages since
I'd had so much as a drop of alcohol, never mind the few shots of whiskey I
tossed back that night. As I sat at that bar, drowning my sorrows, some girl
kept coming in and ordering drinks. Eventually, I realized she was sneaking them
outside to the car. When I stood from the stool and made my way outside, who do
I see but your sister? She looked different from that night I saw her in the
parking lot in Florida, but I remembered her face.”

“And that's when you made the deal?” I asked.

“Yes. Fifty bucks to call your parents and get them
to talk to me. I told her that's all I wanted to do and she believed it.”

“Then what?”

“She made the call from a pay phone right outside
the bar. Meeting at the church was a detail she came up with all on her own. I
was expecting to go by your house, but Rose told me that if your parents thought
they were going to meet her, that if she was willing to pray with them to get
things right in her head, they would venture out into the storm to see her.”

“Only it was you they would be seeing.”

“Exactly.”

“So then you went to the church?”

Lynch glanced behind him at the clock again. I did
too. Thirteen minutes. “Uh-uh,” he said. “Your turn.”

I took a breath, thought of those pages in my
journal, and began:

Abigail never came
back up from that basement—not that I was aware of, anyway. My mother,
however—she emerged a few hours later to throw together a quick dinner for
Rose and me. While my father took a tray down for Abigail, my mother said
she was sorry that we could not eat together as a family, but that any day
now, perhaps even the very next, Abigail's father would return for her at
last. A shame, my mother said, that after a perfectly fine summer, this is
how he would find the girl. She said she had tried her best, but there were
some haunted people she could not help after all.

Once our mother made us
two turkey sandwiches then returned to the basement, Rose told me that most
nights at Saint Julia's, she snuck her dinner back up to her room. That's
what she wanted to do then too. It had been so long since I'd seen my
sister, I agreed to whatever she wanted. Inside her room, I watched as she
shoved the bed back to where it used to be against the far wall, then
stripped the sheets Abigail had been sleeping in and piled them, along with
all the girl's clothes, into the cinnamon-colored suitcase we once
shared.

“She can have the old
thing,” Rose said. “It just brings back bad memories.”

After I hunted down
fresh sheets and helped make the room hers again, the two of us lay on her
bed and picked at our sandwiches. It was then that I asked Rose more about
Saint Julia's, but she told me she preferred not to talk about it, except to
say that she had left on her own and was never going back. The worst
experience of her life, that's what she said, but also the best because it
taught her once and for all who she was. There in that bed, lying side by
side the way we used to in those makeshift tents in the living room, we fell
asleep.

At some point, I was
woken by the sound of footsteps padding down the hall, and I looked to see
my father, then my mother, slipping into their bedroom and closing the door.
For a long moment, I lay there gazing over at Rose who, with her shaved
head, looked nothing like herself. In some ways, it was like sleeping next
to a stranger. And I couldn't help but feel that's what she was becoming to
me. I lay there, wondering about her plan to stay in our house without
returning to school and how many more feuds that would cause with our
parents. Finally, I decided to stop worrying and instead do my part in
making things better.

I got up. I went to my
room, where I stood on my desk chair and reached for that shelf full of
horses. There was one in particular, a horse I'd named Aurora, that came
with a small compartment inside its hollowed belly. I used a dime to pry it
open and pulled out the wad of money I'd stashed inside over the years. Six
hundred dollars—that's what all my work on those essays had totaled up
to.

Despite Abigail's
presence in the basement, my mother had left that bare lightbulb on just as
we'd agreed. When I made my way down the stairs, I saw Penny smiling inside
Mr. Knothead's old cage. I looked away and walked to that partitioned area
where the light did not fall and where I found Abigail fast asleep on a cot
with one of my mother's knit blankets draped over her body. Some part of me
thought to turn back and head upstairs, to forget about giving her the
money. But as I stood there, staring at the moonlight shining on those
bandages around her hands, I could not help but wonder what worse things she
might be capable of doing to herself—or to my family—if she did not get her
way.

“Abigail,” I
whispered.

Her eyes opened. She sat
right up. When she spoke, it made me think of earlier in the summer when it
was still a surprise to hear her voice. “I've been waiting for you, Sylvie.
Did you bring what I need?”

“Yes. But I still don't
like the idea.” As much as I wanted her gone, I couldn't keep from saying,
“How will I know if you'll be safe?”

“It's not your problem,”
she told me. “I'll be fine, though. Don't worry, Sylvie.”

There seemed nothing
more to do but give her the money. All of it, because she'd need more than
cash for a train ticket. Abigail might have been among the few haunted
people my mother could not help, but in my own way, I could. With one of her
bandaged hands, she took the wad of bills from me, not bothering to count
any of it. “Thank you,” she said.

“You're welcome,” I told
her, noticing a foggy sort of expression move over her face as she lay back
on the pillow. “Are you okay?”

“Yes. Well, no. Not
really. I feel wiped out, I guess.”

Who knew if this was
just part of her act? I couldn't be certain, but I put my hand on her
forehead anyway. Like that time I had kissed my mother's and found it cool,
I was surprised to find hers felt the same. “Do you need food? Maybe
something to drink?”

“No. Your father brought
dinner down to me a while ago. And there's a glass of water right there on
the floor by my cot.”

We were quiet a moment,
the two of us breathing in the shadows of that basement. At last, I asked,
“When will you leave?”

“Sometime tomorrow. But
instead of following the path through the woods, I have a better plan. Since
it's Saturday, your mother will want to go grocery shopping. Let's go with
her, and I'll sneak off when she's busy at the register.”

It seemed as good a plan
as any, so I agreed to it. And then, although I meant to say good night, a
different word slipped out, “Good-bye.”

Abigail let out a weak
laugh. “Sylvie, I just told you I'll see you tomorrow, so it's not time for
good-bye just yet. But before you go back upstairs, can you do one last
thing for me?”

“What?” I said, but then
I understood. “Oh. Yes. Sure.” I looked down at her head on that pillow,
hair fanned all around as moonlight shone through the sliding glass door,
making her face appear ghostly but beautiful. In that moment, she seemed
like the spirits my father so often spoke of, an energy trapped between this
world and the next. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I whispered, “The captain has
turned on the Fasten Seat Belt sign. . . .”