Melinda laughs.
“Maybe he got his legs, too,” I tell Melinda. “Apes are strong. Monkeys are, too. I’ll bet if they wanted to, all the gorillas and baboons and orangutans and chimps could break out of their cages and escape in a matter of minutes. Hey, Mom, how far is the zoo from our house?”
“Never mind that!” says Mom.
I snicker, and in a flash of inspiration, I grab Melinda’s Deep Space Barbie. “This is probably how it looked at the zoo yesterday.” I insert Barbie hair-first into my mouth and bite off her head.
“Mommmmyyyyyyy!” screams Melinda.
Mom glares at me in the rearview mirror. “Ryan, stop it!” she yells.
I spit it out and the little plastic head ricochets off the window and lands in Melinda’s lap. She puts the head back on, but she can’t stop crying. I, on the other hand, can’t stop laughing.
It’s a full moon tonight. The kind that brings out the werewolves—if you believe in that stuff. Our house doesn’t get werewolves, though. Tonight, we get something else.
I’m fast asleep when I first hear Melinda. She’s not screaming, she’s calling my name. “Ryan,” she whispers. I’m dragged feet first out of my dream, and twist through space back into my bed, where I open my eyes and see Melinda looking toward me in the dim blue of the moonlit room. It is four o’clock again. I sigh and wish there were a Sister Fairy who would come in the night to take Melinda away, leaving a quarter beneath my pillow. Fair exchange.
“Ryan,” she whispers. “Do you hear that?”
Scrape, scrape, scrape.It could be coming from anywhere.
“It’s probably just a stray cat,” I tell her. “Go to sleep.” But the sound gets louder. Scrape! Scrape! Scrape! Now I can hear the hiss and rattle of falling debris.
“It’s coming from the chimney!” says Melinda.
“Naah, it’s probably just Dad making some weird late-night snack,” I say, but now the sound has got me worried, too.
I sit up and listen. There’s a noise coming from the hardwood floor in the living room. The squishy sound of bare feet—plod-plod-plod—but then the sound is gone. It’s in the hallway, I tell myself. It’s walking on the carpeted hallway, silently .
It’s much too quiet. I can hear the ticking of the clock pounding in my ears like a woodpecker. I am about to announce to Melinda that it was just her imagination when a shadow leaps into the room, howling.
It’s a monkey—laughing in a crazy, screeching, evil voice. I see it, but I don’t believe it. I am too shocked to scream.
“Ryan?” Melinda’s high-pitched panicked voice is like a squeaky wheel. “No . . . no,” she whines. She tries to scream, but it’s like her throat is all closed up in fear. She starts batting the air around her. “Go away! Go away!”
A second monkey runs into the room, jumps up on a shelf, and begins throwing books everywhere.
Another monkey comes in through the window and terrorizes Melinda, flailing its hands in her face and making awful noises. Melinda gasps, unable to catch her breath in fear. Then she screams, and so do I. That’s when the room explodes into a mad monkey house. The closet door flies open and they leap out like commandos—not just monkeys, but apes like chimpanzees and orangutans, too. They charge out of the closet as if the closet is a doorway to another world. Small monkeys with long tails and white faces climb out from the dresser drawers and leap from wall to wall. A single gorilla growls in the doorway, making sure we can’t get out. Both of us scream and scream. Where are our parents? Why can’t we hear them coming down the hall?
One baboon with wild, fiery eyes and sharpened teeth smiles and speaks—he actually speaks!“Your parents won’t wake up.” He sneers. “They won’t wake up until morning. We won’t let them.”
I try to help Melinda, but hairy hands grab me and throw me back against the wall. I can only watch as they torment her, tearing apart her stuffed animals, chewing them to bits, shredding her books, leaping across her bed, and swinging wildly through the room. They pull at her arms and tug at her hair as she screams. An orangutan plays her head like the bongo drums. A chimp makes hideous faces at her, and Melinda keeps screaming in terror, until she finally screams herself out. Soon her voice is gone, but her mouth keeps screaming silently. This is her nightmare—but how did it get out of her head? How?
Finally the raid ends, and the apes and monkeys begin to leave. Some climb out of the window, others vanish into the closet, some climb into the dresser drawers and disappear, and others race out of the room and scurry up the chimney. I look to Melinda. She is pale. She looks straight ahead, frozen, but does not see.
“Melinda?”
She will not answer me. It’s as if she’s gone far away and doesn’t even hear me.
“Melinda?”
But she won’t talk at all. I think she may never talk again.
The last monkey—the baboon with sharpened teeth—looks around the ruined room, at the night’s work. He leaps up to the windowsill to leave, and I say a prayer of thanks that it’s all over. But then he turns to me before he disappears into the night. He smiles at me, showing his terrible teeth. I pull my blanket over me, but it won’t cover me no matter how hard I try.
“Pleasant dreams, Ryan,” he rasps in a deep, scratchy voice.
Then he says, with an awful wink:“Tomorrow night, spiders.”
SCREAMING AT THE WALL
One of my all-time favorite songs is “Synchronicity 2” by the Police. I’m sure you know the song, even if you don’t know it by name. It’s about, among other things, the Loch Ness Monster rising from the depths, and an equally frightening family situation about to unfold many miles away. (The monster, you come to realize as you listen to the song, is a metaphor for what’s happening in the family. Man, those guys were brilliant!)
Well, this story has absolutely nothing to do with that.
However . . . the first two lines of the song are “Another suburban family morning, Grandmother screaming at the wall.” Every time I heard Sting sing that line, the image got to me. Grandmother screaming at the wall. Why is she doing that? In the song you assume she must be crazy. . . but then I started thinking—what if Grandmother’s not crazy at all? What if something else is going on . . . ?
SCREAMING AT THE WALL
“Of course I love you,” says Grandma. “I love you very, very much, Leslie.”
Grandma stands inches away from the hallway wall. There is not so much as a picture on the wall, just white paint.
I can see her from my room. The way she stands there talking to the wall—it scares me.
“Let me give you a hug,” says Grandma. She holds out her arm and grasps the air in front of her, as if she is hugging someone. But no one is there.
She’s been talking to that wall for about a month now. It’s not just the wall, though. She’ll get angry at someone who’s not even in the room. And she treats all of us as if we’re invisible.
Dad hardly seems to notice anymore. He’s too busy remodeling the house, even late at night. Each night I go to sleep to the sound of saws and hammers and drills.
Mom sits on the edge of my bed, and we talk about things. Lately, we just talk about Grandma.
“Sometimes it happens like that when you get old. People just sort of wind down,” Mom tells me. “It’s a part of life.”
I think about that: winding down, like old gears . . . like our grandfather clock in the hall, which can never keep the right time. But Grandma’s not a machine; she’s a human being.
I think back to the times when Grandma was okay, before her mind started to slip. She was wonderful and warm and loving. She would take me to the movies and we would talk like the best of friends. But that was a long time ago. Now she’s very different. My friends laugh at her, but there’s nothing funny about it.
I hear a hammer banging away in the garage. In the kitchen, Grandma sits in the dark. I can hear her talking about the ice cream she’s pretending to eat, and then she sings “Happy Birthday
” to the empty room. I remember that my birthday is coming up next month.
“That’s all right, honey,” she says to the dark, empty room. “I don’t mind wearing a party hat.”
“Who is she talking to?” I ask Mom. “What is she seeing?”
“I don’t think we’ll ever know,” says Mom.
I know what my birthday wish will be. I’ll wish that Grandma had her mind back.
It is midnight. I hear Grandma. I leave my room and go into the living room, where Grandma sits in the green velvet chair, watching TV by moonlight. But the TV isn’t on.
“They call this music?” she says. “A lot of noise, if you ask me. And look at them—grown men with pink hair.”
She reaches down beside her and moves her hand back and forth. It takes me a moment to figure out what she’s doing. She’s petting a dog. But we don’t have a dog.
“And what’s the point of smashing the guitars?” she says, pointing at the dark TV. “This isn’t music; it’s a circus.”
“Grandma, can you hear me?” I ask.
She looks through me as if I’m not even there. Then, suddenly, she gasps in shock and jumps to her feet. She feels around the walls as if she’s blind.
“I’ll go get the candles,” she says, and then shakes her head with a sigh.
“All this rain,” she says. “I’ve never seen it rain like this.” But outside the stars are out and the moon is bright. It isn’t raining—not a drop.
Dad works hard every weekend, building our new rec room. He pretends that nothing is happening. Grandma is his mother; it must be hard for him to see her like this.
Anyway, he doesn’t like to talk about it, but I keep asking because I want answers. I miss the way Grandma used to be.
“It started about five years ago,” Dad finally says, resting from his work and drinking a Coke. “I remember, I first noticed something was wrong when she started laughing at a joke before the punch line. She just walked away, not even hearing the rest of the joke. Then she would start waking up at all hours of the night. She would go and make herself breakfast and talk at the breakfast table as if we were all there at two o’clock in the morning.” He shook his head. “Anyway, pretty soon she was living in a whole different world from us.”
Dad wipes the sweat from his brow. “She needs us to take care of her now. Okay, Leslie?”
I nod quietly, sorry I made him talk about it.
Dad goes back to his work, burying himself in the room he’s adding on, trying not to think about Grandma. I watch as he takes a heavy sledgehammer and swings it at the hall wall, over and over, creating a huge hole that will become the doorway to our new rec room.
One night before the rec room is finished, Grandma starts screaming at the wall again.
“How dare you!” she screams. “I’m your own flesh and blood!”
The others race in to find her standing in the unfinished rec room. “You’re going to put me in a sanitarium?” she screams at the drywall in the corner. “That’s what you’re going to do? I’m not crazy!”
“I can’t take this anymore, Carl!” my mom screams at my dad. She storms out of the room in tears.
Dad follows her, trying to calm her down, and I’m left alone with Grandma.
There’s no electricity in the rec room yet. The only light comes from the hallway and from the bright, full moon. I watch Grandma staring out of the picture window, as if she can see something in the dark, as if she can see the river that the window overlooks. All I can see is darkness.
There are tears in her eyes. Even though she is standing right next to me, she seems so far away. So alone.
“Grandma,” I ask. “Do you love me?”
“I wish it would stop raining,” she says, looking up at the clear, starlit sky. “All this rain, it can’t be good for the soil.”
“Could you just give me a hug, Grandma—just one hug, like you used to?”
Then, for a moment, I get the feeling that we have had this conversation before. But the feeling is gone in an instant.
For my thirteenth birthday we have a small party with just a few friends. Dad tries to get us to wear stupid party hats, but no one wants to. Grandma sits alone on a folding chair out in the unfinished rec room, staring at the unpainted wall across the room, occasionally chuckling to herself.
We all eat ice cream and everyone sings “Happy Birthday”—everyone except Grandma. A few minutes later I notice that one of my dumb friends has put a party hat on her. I go into the rec room and take the hat off.
“Have you ever seen the river like this?” Grandma says to the dry, sunny day. “All swollen from the rain? It has to stop raining soon.”
For a strange moment, as I hold that party hat in my hands, I get the feeling again that I’ve done this before . . . but I know I haven’t.
Party hat,I think. Wasn’t Grandma talking about a party hat a few weeks ago?But everyone calls me back into the living room to open my presents, so I don’t think about it anymore.
For my birthday I get a puppy.
The next night it begins to rain. Troubled by the thunder and lightning, I stay up late and watch TV with Mom and Dad in the living room. Magoo, my new dog, sits by the side of the green velvet chair. On TV a rock band plays wild music. Mom and Dad think it’s awful, but I kind of like it. And then I notice . . .
The guys in the band all have pink hair . . . and at the end of the song they smash their guitars.
A chill runs through my body. I look for Grandma, but she is not in the room.
“What’s wrong, Leslie?” asks Mom. “Are you all right?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I just feel . . . funny.”
Bam!The thunder crashes at the same moment the lightning hits, and the house is plunged into darkness.
Dad is up immediately. “I’ll get the candles,” he says. He feels around for the walls in the dark, like a blind man.
A few minutes later, with a candle in my hand, I search the house for Grandma. I find her in the garage, looking through boxes of old photos.
“Can’t leave these behind,” she says. “Have to take them with me.”
“Grandma,” I ask, just beginning to understand. “Where are you? What do you see?”
“Barry, you and your family should never have come to visit with the weather like this,” says Grandma. “You should have told them not to come, Carl. You can do what you like, but I’m not taking the chance. I’m getting my stuff, and I’m getting out. Before it’s too late.”
I can tell she’s talking to my dad and Uncle Barry—but Uncle Barry and his family live a thousand miles away in Michigan, and they haven’t visited us for years. Yet Grandma’s talking to them like they’re in the room.
And suddenly I realize what’s wrong with Grandma.
“Grandma,” I say. “I know what’s happening. I understand now.”
“Leslie, your imagination is running away with you,” says Dad. He’s sitting in the rec room holding a candle. The lights have been out for an hour now. I stand at the entrance to the rec room. Mom and Dad sit in a corner. They’re talking about putting Grandma into a home or a sanitarium.
“No!” I insist. “It’s true. Grandma is living in the future. She’s not crazy.”
“Get some rest,” says Mom. “You’ll feel better in the morning.”
“No, I won’t!” I shout. “Don’t you get it?” I stand in the doorway of the rec room. “This doorway used to be a wall—this used to be the wall that Grandma would talk to—but she wasn’t talking to the wall, she was talking to usinside the rec room. Only the rec room hadn’t been built yet! And when she was pretending to eat ice cream in the middle of the night, she was seeing my birthday party a month later. And when she watches the TV when it’s off, she’s seeing TV shows that won’t be on for a whole month. I even caught her petting the dog beforewe had the dog. And remember when she stood in the rec room screaming into the corner about your wanting to send her away? Well, she was screaming into
the corner you’re sitting in right now! She sawthe conversation you’re having right now, and it really upset her!”
I clench my fists, trying to get Mom and Dad to understand. “Don’t you see? Grandma’s body might be stuck in the present, but her mind is living a month in the future.” I point to the grandfather clock down the hall. “It’s like how that clock always runs too fast. At first it’s just a couple of minutes off, but if we don’t reset it, it could run hours—even days—ahead of where it’s supposed to be! Grandma’s like that clock, only she can’t be fixed!”
Lightning flashes in the sky, and Mom stands up. “I think this storm is giving us all the creeps. I’ll feel better when it’s over tomorrow.”
“No,” I say. “According to Grandma, the storm goes on for weeks and weeks.”
That’s when we hear Grandma screaming.
We run into the bedroom to find Grandma thrashing around the room, bumping into things. She clutches the bedpost, holding on for dear life, as if something is trying to drag her away. Mom and Dad try to grab her but she doesn’t see them; she just keeps on thrashing and clinging to the bedpost, like a flag twisting in the wind.
“Barry!” she screams. “Hold on! Carl! Don’t let her go!”
Dad grabs her and holds her, but she is stronger than any of us realize. There is sheer terror in her eyes, and I try to imagine what she sees. “Holly’s gone, Carl—Holly, Barry, Alice, the twins, they’re all gone—there’s nothing you can do! Now you have to save yourself! No, don’t let go! No!”
She screams one last bloodcurdling scream that ends with a gurgling, as if she’s drowning. Then, silence.
And that’s when I know Grandma is gone.
She’s still breathing, her heart is still beating, but she is limp and her eyes are unseeing. Her mind has died, but her body doesn’t know it yet. It will in several weeks, I think.
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