But I should not be talking about snowstorms, not yet. It was summer still, the sunniest and hottest I’d experienced in my life. Odd as it may sound, considering my sister had been plucked from our family and Abigail deposited in her place, it also came to be the happiest summer I recalled in a long time, that last summer my parents were alive.
When my father returned the following morning, he carried the empty suitcase Rose and I shared. She had no need for it there, I heard him tell my mother when she met him at the door, and seeing it would only keep thoughts of leaving the place thriving in her mind. Those weren’t his ideas, but protocol at Saint Julia’s, he explained. According to him, that same protocol prohibited family contact for the first ninety days to allow students time to detach from their former lives and acclimate to a new environment, one with rigid structure, firm values, and a strictly enforced disciplinary code. That was the most I heard him say about my sister, since my mother began telling him about all that had transpired in his absence—most important, how Albert Lynch and his daughter had shown up the day before, how she was with us still.
“With us?” my father said. “Downstairs?”
“No,” my mother told him. “Why don’t you come with me, Sylvester? I’ll show you.”
Since my mother had shut Rose’s bedroom door the day before, Abigail had not been outside the room and no one had been inside—as far as I knew, anyway. I assumed my father would make immediate adjustments to the sleeping arrangements, and since he left the suitcase by the stairs, I carried it to the second floor to see how things would play out. When I reached the top, though, my parents were already stepping out of Rose’s room and closing the door behind them. My father came to me, took the suitcase, and gave me a hug hello, before asking, “How would you feel, sunshine, if our guest stayed in your sister’s room a little longer?”
“Guest?” I couldn’t help repeating.
“Yes, Sylvie. You wouldn’t mind if Abigail stayed in your sister’s room while she’s here, would you?”
“What about that partitioned area in the basement? I thought—”
“You thought it was done. I know. So did your mother. But after all these years, that little project of mine has a ways to go still. There’s no electricity, for one. Not the best furniture either except for that cot and old dresser. So even though no one exactly invited our guest into Rose’s room, now that she’s there, it seems kinder to let her stay put. For a few nights anyway.”
The basement was good enough for all the other haunted people who had come here before, I wanted to say. But I held back because I knew the response he wanted—didn’t I always? And even though it left me feeling all the more guilty toward my sister, I gave it to him anyway.
In the days that followed, it hardly mattered. Whenever I was on the second floor, I stayed in my room with the door closed. Not a single time did I so much as glimpse Abigail. If she used the bathroom, if she descended the stairs to the kitchen, I never saw.
And yet, things remained quiet inside our house. My parents slipped in and out of Rose’s room so discreetly it was as though they were coming and going from a confessional. Early mornings, I heard my mother’s gentle voice praying on the other side of the wall. Evenings, I heard her reading scripture. Most often, it was the same passage from deep in the Book of Philippians, one I came to know by heart; if Abigail was paying attention, she must have come to know it too:
Do not be anxious about anything. But in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your heart and your mind in our Lord Jesus Christ.
Those words were not intended for me, but I tried my best to heed them anyway. Fighting off any anxious feelings, however, became just that: a fight. It did not help that the phone kept shrieking at all hours, until at long last my parents turned off the ringer and let calls go to the answering machine. It also didn’t help that I woke some nights to the sound of a car motoring down our street, bass thumping, as people shouted from the windows about Penny and Satan and things they believed were happening in our home. And it did not help that, despite my father’s reports to the police and his careful work of regularly resurrecting the mailbox, we discovered it knocked over, along with our garbage cans, again and again.