She was right. I should have had my ear checked. Foolishly, I still believed it was her responsibility to make that happen—at least that was the understanding when the hospital released me into her care. The gaggle of nurses and administrators at the discharge counter made a fuss over me: the girl with bandages on the left side of her head, a tube snaking into her ear, all because she walked inside a church on a snowy night to see what was keeping her parents. They plied Rose with forms to be signed. They plied her with papers listing doctors I needed to visit. They told her about appointments already made in my name. After we left the hospital, however, the dates came and went.
Clatter. Clang. Crash. Another night brought no movement or sound from us, but a cacophony from below. I began pressing my ear—the good one—to the floor, picturing Penny, that toddler-sized doll with the moon face and vacant black eyes, rattling the walls of her cage. If I pressed my ear to the floor long enough, I could swear some moments I heard what sounded like something breathing. Sucking in air, blowing it back out. Lifting my head, I spoke to Rose in a quivering voice, near tears, “You’re crazy if you don’t hear those things. They’re pissed off. They’re sad. They want them back. I can tell.”
Rose turned down the volume once more. With less enthusiasm each time, she did the lift-and-tilt motion with her head. “I’m sorry, Sylvie, but I really don’t hear anything. And why would I? There’s nothing down there except some rag doll and a bunch of dusty crap. You’re the crazy one if you believe the stuff Mom and Dad claimed to be true.”
“I’m not crazy.”
“Well, neither am I. And if you’re so convinced, go see for yourself.”
We both knew I was too afraid to go down there alone.
As the days wore on, Rose’s scoffing chipped away at me. I began to wonder if it was just a matter of me hearing things. After all, a doctor should have been the one to remove the tube from my ear. Instead, I woke one night to find it resting beside me on the carpet like a small worm. Apparently, I’d yanked it out in my sleep. Perhaps I’d done more damage than I realized, I started to think. After nearly a month, when we no longer spent so much time in the living room, the rattling and shaking and all the rest grew silent, sudden as a needle lifted from a record. Part of me believed my hearing was improving, that someday the shhhh would fade as well. But another part couldn’t help believe that down below those things my parents left behind had made their peace. If that was the case, they’d done it much faster than my sister and me up above.
For those reasons, for so many reasons, ours was not a house people should have visited on Halloween. Trick-or-treaters would have made better use of their time roaming the golf course, where oversized colonials were piled one on top of the other, instead of venturing down our street with its half-dozen cement foundations. Despite mosquitoes, puddles, and weeds rising from the cracks, Rose and I used to play in the one across the street when we were little. In pastel chalk, we outlined imaginary bedrooms for our imaginary children. We drew furniture on the floor, pictures on the walls, careful to stay away from the rusted steel rods on the far end that Rose speculated had once been the start of a fireplace. Our time down there was the closest anyone came to living in those structures, since they were abandoned years ago when the builder went bankrupt. The sole property he unloaded before trouble hit was the one my parents purchased.
Still, trick-or-treaters walked right past the NO TRESPASSING! signs and made their way down our driveway. Some behaved so casually I could tell they had come only for candy. But there were others who came on a dare, who giggled nervously as they approached, who fell into uncomfortable silence the moment they stepped onto our porch. It used to be that what they wanted was a glimpse of my mother or father—to leave with a story to tell. How disappointed they must have been those years when the most they encountered was a basket of candy on the doorstep along with a note in my mother’s careful cursive telling them: Please help yourselves, but be mindful of other trick-or-treaters and don’t let greed get the better of you. . . . And the years when we were at home, they were met with still more disappointment when the door was answered promptly and my tall, pale mother smiled as she dropped Butterfingers into their pillowcases.
But who knew how the details were altered in the retelling?
No one answered for a long time and we heard chanting in the basement. . .
When that woman opened up, she had dried blood caked around her cuticles. . .
That moon-faced doll with the red hair was rocking in a chair all on its own. . .