When Isis came along, we welcomed her into the fold as if she had always been. Our creation, our love child. During her first year, she slept between us at night. Sometimes I would wake to see Sammy’s enormous brown eyes gazing at her with this mystified expression, as if she was an alien who teleported into our bed at three a.m. I knew the look. I experienced the same awe, and when he looked up into my eyes, that knowing passed between us wordlessly. That was our bond. We didn’t need vocabulary. We could have been mute and still reveled in the knowledge that we understood the other completely.
Those days have begun to feel like a dream. I remember them, but I can’t recreate them. It’s such a horrible curse - the way my mind shifts to the present and slowly releases all that came before. I’m sure it’s still stored in there, but I can’t reach in and grab it. I can’t smell his skin after a long day at the beach or hear the funny pitch of his laughter after he’s just smoked a joint. All the nuance has blurred and faded.
“Momma?”
I opened my eyes, pushing myself up to sitting in bed.
Isis stood at the foot of the bed in her kitty pajamas, clutching her stuffed Gizmo.
Sammy had relinquished control of much of his monster memorabilia to Isis after her second birthday, when suddenly her eyes lit up every time she entered his study. Gizmo had been the first to go, and when he handed her the bulge-eyed Mogwai, she had jumped up and down and raced through the house to show me her new friend. The items still off-limits to Isis had been moved into Kerry Manor’s study, but even those were likely smothered in her sticky fingerprints.
The study had been Sammy’s favorite room in Kerry Manor. I had often found him there, comfortable in a throne chair with its ornate high back, his feet tucked into a pair of Bigfoot slippers, giggling as he read a Tales from the Crypt comic book and listened to Bill Evans light across the keys with haunting clarity.
I have not been in the study since the morning after I found his body. I walked in once, in the hours after it happened, and clutched the scattering of papers on his desk. I crumpled them into a tiny ball and shoved them in my mouth and tried to stifle the sobs erupting from the mysterious cellar in the darkest parts of my being. Eventually when I choked, I spit them out and raced from the room.
“Dada...” Isis continued, as if Sammy was hiding under the covers like he always did and would spring out to scare her at any moment.
I pulled back the comforter to reveal the empty white sheet and patted the silhouette of his body I couldn’t see, but felt sure was there.
We had returned to Kerry Manor the day before, four days after Sammy’s death. My sister and her husband accompanied us, so I wouldn’t be alone in the house, though all of them - Amy, Todd, Sarah, and Helen argued with my choice to return. Isis and I could stay with any of them, but I refused their offers. If I wanted to be close to Sammy, I needed to be at Kerry Manor.
Isis crawled onto the bed and laid her head in my lap. She stuck her index and middle fingers in her mouth and sucked. I stroked her wispy blonde hair that shot like sprouts from her soft, pink head.
Sometimes Sammy had called her his hairless princess because her blonde strands grew in so slowly.
“There’s my sweet girl,” Sarah said, appearing in my doorway. She held a canister of cheese puffs. “Did she wake you?”
I shook my head and turned to look out the window at the lake. Sarah bore such a striking resemblance to my dead husband that something ripped open every time I looked at her.
She knew as much and kept her distance. I hated to put her in that position. Surely, as Sammy’s twin, her own loss struck a deeper chord than mine, but my grief trumped my compassion.
“Icy? Cheese puffs?” Sarah shook the canister, but my daughter burrowed under the covers next to me.
“It’s okay, Sarah,” I told her. “Thank you.”
She left, and I tugged Isis from beneath the blankets and pulled her back onto my lap. My pajama bottoms were damp from the sweaty, nightmarish sleep I’d had. I shivered as her warmth seeped into my clammy skin.
She tilted her face to mine and repeated her earlier plea.
”Dada?”
I rested my palm on her forehead and tried to look into the dry emptiness that rose up to meet me at her question. How could I tell my two-year-old child her father was gone forever? That his body lay in the cold, hard ground, but his soul had escaped the confines of this desperate life for something sweeter?
“Dada’s not here, Honey Bear.”
“Dada’s in heaven?”
I looked at her sparkling eyes nestled in her perfect round face.
I nodded and pulled her closer.
CHAPTER 7
Now
Corrie
“Todd is happy to ask the people renting your house to leave, Corrie,” my sister Amy told me, folding tiny pairs of mismatched pants and shirts Isis had destroyed with a variety of chocolate fudge-pops and grape juice.
I sat at the kitchen table in Kerry Manor, staring dazedly into my coffee cup, watching the oils swirl and create strange patterns. I saw Todd walking hand in hand with Isis on the frozen beach. Her winter jacket enveloped her tiny body like bubble wrap.
We had been back in the house for two days. Someone had removed the Halloween decorations, mopped up the fake blood - and the real - and unraveled the spider webs.
“I don’t want to do that,” I responded, loathing the prospect of returning to the house we had created as a family.
What would the first seconds be like? Swinging open the blue door, marred by the claws of our two cats, and smelling, for the first time, our little home without Sammy? How could I step into that foyer, painted with our favorite poetry in elegant black calligraphy I had spent hours perfecting while Sammy read the poems aloud?
“Your lease here is up on May, you have to go back sometime...”
Was that true? Did we have to go back? What if we never went back? I could pack a suitcase for Isis and myself, and we could fly to Costa Rica or Australia. I had always wanted to hike the rain forest and listen to monkeys chatter from the trees overhead. Isis could chase birds on the beach, and I could learn to be a tour guide or a snorkel instructor.
Or if I was really desperate, I could continue my therapy practice. Costa Rica was likely filled with expats dying to pour out their woes on some other first-world prat.
“May is six months away, Amy.”
“Sure, but in the meantime, you’re stuck in this creepy house all by yourself. I’m worried about you, Corrie.”
Amy awkwardly rubbed my back, and I continued to stare out the window and refuse the lurid images from Halloween that the oak tree conjured. Sammy’s face, streaked with sweat and then later, streaked with blood.
“Todd and I would love to take Isis, maybe for a week. She can play with Tyler and Adelaine. Plus, we have tickets to Elmo on Ice.” Amy sat down across from me at the kitchen table.
I looked up at my sister. Her freshly dyed blonde hair was neatly arranged in a French braid, not a single strand out of place.
“All-Together-Amy,” I murmured, echoing a nickname Sammy secretly called my sister.
Amy had responded to our mother’s chaos and alcoholism by constructing the perfect life. She and Todd bought a sunny yellow house in a subdivision of Stepford two-story family homes, each adorned with two rose bushes, a single lilac tree, and a little concrete pathway that led to white doors hung with decorative wreaths, no matter the season. The rooms were color coordinated with paint and artwork and even figurines to match.
When Sammy and I visited, we slept in the ocean room with deep aquamarine paint, sand dollars decorating our bureau, and a giant photograph of a sailboat drifting on a calm sea.
When we’d gone down for coffee one morning, Sammy had opened the cupboard and laughed.
‘Which mug do you want?’ he’d asked me.
I had looked up to a shelf of tidily arranged, identical white mugs in three perfect rows. Our own coffee cupboar
d was comprised of two dozen mismatched mugs in different colors, some chipped, all connected to a memory. Sammy loved to buy mugs at truck stop gas stations during road trips. Arkansas or Wyoming, they’d announce in huge black letters against a painted backdrop of rushing streams or snowcapped mountains. We picked up mugs at thrift stores, traded mugs with friends, and Sammy had at least five advertising his favorite horror flicks.
“What did you say?” Amy asked.
I felt guilty for the comment, and guiltier for all the times Sammy and I laughed at how hard she tried to put everything in its right place. It was only funny from the bubble of Corrie and Sammy – but here in this untethered place, floating in a vast terror, I understood her desire to keep it all together perfectly.
“Nothing,” I sighed, rubbing at my face, where dark circles spread beneath my eyes like spilled ink. “Isis would love that.”
“She would,” Amy agreed. “And you need a break. I know Sammy’s mom loves to take her, but she needs time to grieve. This will give all of you a little time to put the pieces back together.”
I snorted but said nothing. The pieces had been stabbed to death. They sat in the cold, dark earth. There was no putting them back together.
Amy stood and moved around the table, wrapping her arms around me and pressing her face into my disheveled hair.
I smelled her perfume, something strong and heady, the perfume that assails you when you walk through a department store.
“You will get through this, Corrie. You don’t believe it right now, but I know you. You’re strong.”
She pulled away and moved to the kitchen counter, pulling dishes from the sink and loading them efficiently in the dishwasher.
I LAUGHED and clamped my hand over my mouth as if I’d committed a sin. The graveyard yawned darkly beautiful in the moon’s light. Splashes of white and gray headstones rose like teeth.
“And I in the beast’s mouth,” I murmured, sitting on the damp leaves that blanketed the cemetery floor.
I clutched a canvas sack, which held a Ouija board, four reiki candles, a book about using the board, and a pair of Sammy’s worn socks. I wanted something that held remnants of him, and it didn’t get much more potent than those. This was just the kind of thing Sammy would do, as a joke, and my laughter bubbled when I imagined him waving the socks wildly in the air and demanding their owner reach out from the spirit world.
A mass of withering flowers lay near my elbow, their scent grossly intoxicating. I closed my eyes and searched for a breath free from the scent.
The gates to the cemetery had been closed hours earlier, at dusk. I had walked around them but felt like a trespasser just the same. Despite my layers of clothes, goosebumps rose along the back of my neck.
As I sat in the pervading darkness, terror edged in, but I shooed it away with thoughts of hearing Sammy’s voice drifting up from the mound of fresh dirt beside me. I didn’t look too closely at that pile of earth. I couldn’t truly consider what lay within it.
I pulled out the Ouija board, unwrapped the plastic sheath and stuffed it into my bag. I lit two candles and set them on either side. The cheap board felt flimsy beneath my desperate fingers, a child’s toy. I set it on the dirt and took up the little plastic dial.
I had never used a Ouija board but couldn’t shake the idea when it struck me that morning. I knew he was close, Sammy. He’d been close since it happened. I saw him slipping around corners, sensed him watching me. I needed to bring him into the light.
“Sammy?” I asked, placing the dial in the board’s center and moving it slowly in a circle.
My hands shook, and I stared hard at the black letters.
“Sammy, if you’re here, move the pointer.”
The candles flickered in the night breeze and I shifted my gaze to them. If one blew out, would I believe he stood nearby? Was that rustling in the leaves my dead husband reaching from beyond the grave?
I closed my eyes and waited. Seconds ticked by, and then minutes.
Nothing happened.
I opened my eyes and stared at the board until the black calligraphy blurred and my tears wet the dirt beneath me. I took a handful of the dirt in my hand and clutched it to my chest.
The silence turned into pain, unbearable pain. How could I go on living with it? One of these nights it would tear me in two and I would bleed to death on the cold, dark floor in Kerry Manor.
“Please,” I whispered, pushing the dial toward the letter S. “Please.”
A movement caught my eye deeper in the graveyard, and I stared into the darkness, searching the shadows. I saw the whisper of a hand behind a tall tombstone.
I jumped to my feet. It was Sammy.
He slipped away, his shape dissolving into the darkness as my eyes trained hard, tried to ferret him out.
I ran toward the headstone. In a little grove of trees, something moved. I sprinted into the trees, glimpsed his face from the shadows, his brown eyes sparkling in the moonlight.
“Sammy, please,” I gasped, a stitch clutching my side.
A creek ran along the back of the cemetery. Thick trees arched over the running water, blotting the light. I perceived movement. He’d gone there. He was hiding near the stream bank.
I stumbled through sharp branches, sliding in the slick leaves along the bank. My shoes stuck in mud and I almost lost one, wrenching it out before the damp earth swallowed it.
“Gorey…” I heard my pet name whispered from his lips.
My heart spasmed at the sound, and I cried out, searching. I crashed down the bank into the river, the water icy as it swirled up to my thighs. I pushed through the stream - slow, cold. For an instant I saw his reflection in the moonlit water. I whipped my head around, but he was not behind me. I stood, panting, listening, but the presence had gone.
I was alone in the night once again.
CHAPTER 8
Then
Corrie
“I had a bizarre death dream last night,” Sammy announced, grabbing the box of donuts Sarah had arrived with. “Yes! Apple fritters.”
“A death dream?” Sarah asked, frowning. “Corrie, I got you blueberry, and a chocolate with sprinkles for Isis.”
I smiled and shook my head.
“No donut for me yet. I need at least two cups of coffee before I can disrupt my perfect caffeine buzz with sugar.”
“Corrie doesn’t play with the white wizards until after ten a.m.,” Sammy said, taking a huge bite and rolling his eyes with pleasure. “Ugh, yes, come on dopamine, have your way with me.”
“The white wizards?” Sarah laughed. “Death dreams and white wizards. You guys think Kerry Manor is getting to you?”
“The white wizards,” Sammy continued, winking at me, “are sugar and salt. We call them that because, well,” he gestured at the donut. “Need I say more? The death dream was…” He paused, scratching the back of his neck. “Freaky. I was covered in blood and my life was fading. It didn’t hurt, but I was staring up into a starry sky and watching the world recede into a pinhole, and I knew when it went black, I would be gone, over, poof!” He wiggled his fingers.
“But you didn’t die, right?” Sarah demanded.
“Nope, woke up just before.”
“Why do you say it like that?” I asked her.
“Because if you die in a dream, you die in real life,” she said, pulling a glazed donut from the box. “At least that’s what we always believed growing up.”
Sammy grinned.
“Thanks to Grandma Fiona, who liked to tell us stories about the Wolf Man and Sasquatch and fifty different tales from her childhood. She was a master of horror and didn’t even know it”
“I’m sure we have Grandma Fiona to thank for Sammy’s obsession with monsters,” Sarah said, grimacing as she traced a finger over the crown molding surrounding the doorway. “The house is overkill.”
“Grandma Fiona bought me my first ever horror comic,” Sammy beamed.
“What happened to her?” I asked.
I had heard references to Fiona over the years, but she died before I met Sammy.
“Lung cancer,” Sarah explained. “She smoked a pack of day from the time she was twelve years old. At least, that’s our mother’s story.”
“A nasty way to go,” Sammy said, grimacing. “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”
Sarah nodded.
“Where’s Isis?” she asked.
“Playing in the great room. Sammy found an old dollhouse in the crawl space beneath the house. Isis has claimed it.”
“Sounds gross. Was it cloaked in spiderwebs?”
“Yep, but otherwise in perfect condition. It’s weird. Most of the stuff down there is molded, but this dollhouse is flawless. Come check it out.” Sammy stood, stuffing the rest of the fritter in his mouth.
“Can I take one to Isis?” Sarah asked, plucking the chocolate donut from the box.
I would normally say no. I preferred Isis not play with the white wizards in the morning either, but I nodded instead. She would squeal with glee when she saw Sarah approaching with a donut.
Isis sat on a shag rug in front of the fire, gazing into the dollhouse. We had brought the rug from our house, and though it didn’t fit the decor, Isis often napped on it, so it was a must-have item.
“It’s huge,” Sarah marveled.
The house stood a good two feet above Isis sitting on the floor.
“Sawah,” Isis yelled, standing and running to her aunt.
Sarah lifted the chocolate donut, and Isis slid to a stop on the wood floor. “Choc-it!”
She grabbed the donut and took a bite before looking back at me for permission. I nodded at her.
“Play,” she mumbled through the donut, dragging Sarah to the dollhouse.
“Gothic Revival with some personal touches,” Sarah said, touching the gabled roof on the dollhouse. “Even a little widow’s walk. I bet this thing is worth a fortune.”
“We’d have to sell our daughter along with it, I’m afraid,” Sammy told her, leaning over and taking a bite from Isis’s donut.
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