“We don’t need to waste money on a school. I can teach her, same as my father taught me. Except I promise not to yell the way he did if you forget to signal. Okay?”
“Okay!” Rose leaped up from the table and actually hugged him, a sight I had not seen in a long time. She even kissed his forehead, leaving the last of the baby blue smudges from her lips on his creased skin.
Happy as that moment made them both, some part of me still worried and waited for that once hostile Rose to resurface. I thought for certain the driving lessons would end in a screaming match. But I was wrong. Things went so smoothly that within a few months Rose had her license, with a DMV photo that showed her smiling big and wide. And she loved nothing more than being behind the wheel, so she found any excuse. When I stayed after school, she picked me up. Sunday mornings when the four of us needed to get to church in the gym, Rose was always ready and waiting at the wheel. She even began grocery shopping with my mother just so she could drive. Best of all, as far as my father was concerned, she willingly played chauffeur when we headed out on more of my parents’ lecture trips and television bookings.
Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware . . .
Philips Convention Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania . . .
Webster Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts . . .
None of those places or any others brought about the drama of Ocala. Rather, things went as originally intended: while my mother and father talked to crowds, which grew larger each time, or when they appeared on a dozen local and a few national TV shows, Rose and I waited in the greenroom. No grapes thrown at the ceiling. No sneaking through doors to hear what they were saying. My sister simply passed the time spinning the car keys on her finger while reading those classics about orphans my mother pressed upon us, books Rose once refused. I spent the hours reading as well, though a different type of book held my attention now:
Encyclopedia of Visions, Possessions, Demons & Demonology by M. E. Roche.
Hard to believe, but soon nearly two years had passed since that visit from Dot, which meant the deadline for the Maryland State Student Essay Contest had rolled around again. This year I was working on a slightly less overblown paper than my first contest submission. Late one night, after hours spent working on my new entry about the Cold War, I went downstairs for a drink. I had just turned on the faucet when a voice came from behind, “You a real girl? Or one of those things I keep seeing?”
I whipped around. A man was slumped in a chair at the table, his face riddled with so many creases and folds it looked stitched together. His eyes were bleary and red, his salt-and-pepper hair mussed from sleep, his beard scraggly. “You’re . . .” I began as the water kept running behind me, “ . . . you’re not supposed to be up here.”
The man did not respond. He just blinked his bloodshot eyes and tapped his fingers against the table in such a determined way he might have been typing. A few nights before, I’d heard the phone ring then listened from my bed to the knock on the front door not long after, followed by the clomp-clomp-clomp of footsteps heading to the basement. So I knew we had someone with us in the house, but I’d never actually seen him. I’d never actually seen any of them before, I realized.
“There’s a cot downstairs,” I said. “And I saw my father take down a sandwich and a pitcher of juice earlier tonight. So you have everything you need down there. My parents don’t allow—” I stopped, searching for the word to describe this man and the others my parents welcomed into our home. “They don’t allow haunted people up here.”
That strange finger tapping of his came to an abrupt stop. He stood from the chair, and I saw that he was much taller than I realized, so tall his head knocked the ceiling lamp that hung above the table, causing it to rock back and forth. In a voice as distant as his expression, he told me, “Your mother. She’s been reading scripture to me. Things in that book never sounded so good as they do they coming from her mouth. And your father, well, he mostly asks questions about the things I’ve been seeing.”
The shifting light created a helter-skelter feeling in the kitchen, making me all the more nervous. I reached behind and turned off the faucet before walking to the basement door and pulling it open. When the man moved by me toward the steps, the air smelled like sweat and old clothes and damp leaves. At the top of the stairs, he paused, and I couldn’t help but ask, “What did you mean before? When you wanted to know if I was a real girl?”
“Since the night I got here, I’ve been seeing things. Down in that basement.”