“Fifty bucks to talk to Mom and Dad. That’s what he offered me. And happily, I arranged it. But Franky knew what I was up to. She was the one with me at the bar, after all. Since I wasn’t of age, she kept sneaking in and getting us drinks then bringing them out to the car. After I made the call to Mom and Dad, she gave me some bullshit excuse that she wanted to go back to a friend’s house where she’d been staying ever since we left Saint Julia’s. So I let her go. Only Franky didn’t go to her friend’s. She went to see them at the church too.”
Rose stopped. For a moment, I caught us both looking around that basement, the strange world my parents had created down there. That hatchet on the wall. The old branch with what looked like a howling face in the bark. The dozens of trinkets and objects hanging from the ceiling and filling the shelves. Those dusty old books about demons. And, of course, Penny in the old rabbit cage, smiling that placid smile.
DO NOT OPEN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!
The sign was still there just the same.
“You know what can make a person possessed, Sylvie? It’s not Satan or Lucifer or any of that nonsense. Do you know what it is?”
“What?” I asked her, desperate to let her finish so I could get help.
“Love and hate. Greed. Revenge. Pride. Those things turned Dad into his own demon. He knew the things he was doing were dishonest. Mom’s gift wasn’t powerful or controllable enough for him. He needed something greater to get the attention he craved. He needed all of us to support his stories, so he set out to make us believers too.”
Famous? I remembered the way my father shimmied against that nozzle, rain sopping his hair, dripping from his lashes as he said, Well, now that you mention it, I suppose it would be nice to show them.
“And so, when those people stayed here in the basement, he messed with them. Putting all kinds of pills he had access to in their food. They weren’t in their right minds to begin with, but after he messed with them, who knows what sort of delusions they experienced? It was the same with Mom. He did it to her. Abigail too—”
“How do you know that?”
“You think you’re the only one to figure things out? I watched him. Made a study out of it. And I caught him one day in the kitchen crushing a pill and mixing it into some food. When I asked, he told me it was just some medicine. But I knew better. I’d read those labels on the prescription containers in his desk drawer. And the fact that I knew he was a fraud only made him resent me more.”
I pressed my face into my hands, remembering my mother being so ill and unlike herself after that trip to Ohio. Had he done that to her because she wanted to stop their work the way Heekin told me? Or was it so that she would have no choice but to believe in the power of Penny and so many other claims he made? Is that why Abigail did not feel well that last night? There was so much to understand but I found myself asking, “What did you mean about love and hate? Were you talking about Dad?”
“Yes. But I mean me and Franky too,” she said. “Those things made us demons as well. First her. And then me.”
I waited for her to tell me more, but she was crying again.
“Rose,” I said, deciding once and for all that this conversation had to wait. “I am going to call an ambulance. We need to get you help.”
I stood, went up the stairs. In the kitchen, I walked to the phone on the wall, only when I picked it up, there was no dial tone. I clicked the receiver a few times, but the line was dead.
Hands shaking still, I went to the freezer and pulled out an ice tray to get ice for Rose’s leg. But the tray was empty. Instead, I grabbed a bunch of Popsicles, wrapped them in a dishtowel, and rushed back down the stairs.
In the brief time I had been upstairs, the air in the basement had changed. Outside the window, the light was just the same. That bare, yellowy bulb still glowed on the ceiling as well. The dank, loamy smell still hung in the air. And yet, I had the sense that something had shifted. “Rose,” I said, pressing that cool towel to her leg. “The phone isn’t working.”
“Sylvie, you better go.”
“What? Go where?”
“Anywhere. Just not here.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
I heard a sound in the corner of the basement then, from behind that partition. I stood, remembering the reason I had been so determined to come down here in the first place. I thought of Emily Sanino humming “Happy Birthday.” I thought of that cake she left. I thought of all those candles too. And then I walked over and stepped to the other side of that paneled wall. There was only the empty cot covered with rumpled sheets. On the small dresser by the sliding door that led out onto the backyard, I saw a stack of empty Tupperware containers that had been left on our stoop.
I stepped back to the other side and looked at my sister, who had propped herself up into a slumped position against the stairs and was nursing her leg. “So those noises I heard, they were her?”