Once again, I went to the door. Daylight had yet to come, but the electric blue tinge in the air told me it was imminent. I had been writing for hours. Now, I spied the dog out there, lunging on her chain in the direction of the house.
“It’s okay, girl,” I said, stepping outside, moving across the lawn. Afraid to get too close, I stopped at the edge of her reach, missing the way my mother had of calming, not just people, but animals too. Above us, streams of toilet paper rippled. While I’d been lost in that journal, someone had come by and tossed those rolls into our trees, soaped the windows of Rose’s truck too—pranks that seemed quaint by now. As the dog kept at it, I found the courage to make my way around to her bone, slick and shimmering with saliva. No matter how much I waved it in her face, the thing held no interest for her anymore. All she wanted was to bark and growl and lunge on her chain.
What more could I do but leave her to exhaust herself? I dropped that bone, wiped my fingers on my T-shirt, and turned toward the house. That’s when my hand went to my chest. That’s when my breath caught in my throat. Earlier, when those boys came and went, I believed I’d faced down the most frightening event of the night, but not once I understood the cause of the dog’s alarm. Down among the tangled branches of the rhododendrons, I saw it: the yellowy glow from the basement window. After all those months of darkness, whatever it was down there had turned on the light once more.
Chapter 8
Ghosts
Maybe it was coincidence. But the books my mother gave me to read at an early age—Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, Pippi Longstocking, and so many others—were almost all about children who had been orphaned. Sometimes I wondered if those “feelings” she used to get allowed her to sense our family’s fate, and if so, maybe those stories were her way of preparing me. That night at the Ocala Conference Center, I had no idea about any of that of course. I simply kept busy with Jane Eyre—or tried to, anyway. I never would have admitted it, but, despite my smarts, the book was too advanced considering I was only entering the sixth grade. It didn’t help that Rose had left her bible back at the hotel, so she served up plenty of distractions.
She paced the small greenroom. (Not green, but peach, by the way.)
She picked grapes off the fruit platter.
She bounced them off the ceiling and caught them in her mouth.
The ones that missed, she mashed into the carpet with her sneaker. I didn’t say a word, figuring it would be easier to clean up after she finished entertaining herself. I’d taken to underlining passages in the book that stood out to me, the way my mother did in her bible, and was about to put a pen to the page when I glanced up and noticed that Rose had slipped out of the room. Let her go, I told myself, but that promise to my father in the pool nagged at me, and so I put aside Jane Eyre and wandered the hall in search of Rose. It didn’t take long before I found her standing in a large room filled with row upon row of chairs, all of them facing an enormous TV, all of them empty. The spillover room, I realized, but the weather had kept so many people away there was nobody to spill.
On the screen, I saw my father. If the rainwater had made him appear boyish and less serious earlier that day, the stage lights did the opposite. Shadows fell across his face, carving his features into a jumble of sharp angles and deep wrinkles. His glasses caught the light in such a way that his eyes seemed to flash as he spoke, stiff voiced, to the crowd. “Well before this century, those in the medical community had begun to discard the idea of possession as an explanation for abnormal human behavior. Instead, experts resolved that specific conditions were symptomatic of schizophrenia and other psychosis. These afflictions were dealt with by putting the sufferer away in an institution, or with crude and harmful methods of electroshock therapy, and more recently, experimenting with medication . . .”
“Rose,” I said.
“Shhhh. I’m listening.”
“ . . . Of course, it would be foolish to deny the importance of the myriad of advances in the treatment of mental disorders. But in the hurry to embrace the science of psychiatry, the medical field might have been a bit too eager to relinquish belief in evil forces, demonic oppression, and to accredit natural causes to all mental diseases of unknown etiology . . .”
“Rose, we’re not supposed to be here. Let’s go.”
My sister whipped around. “ ‘The mouth of a righteous man brings forth wisdom, but a perverse tongue will be cut out.’ ”
“What?”
“It’s a bible proverb, stupid. In other words, keep it up and I’ll cut out your tongue. Now shhhh. I’m trying to listen.”