A Haunting Collection

by Mary Downing Hahn

  But not quite. Just before Dulcie planned to return to New York, Emma and I decided to visit the graveyard. On the way, we each gathered a handful of wildflowers. Sissy would like them, Emma said.

  Despite the sunlight, the graveyard was in shadows. A splash or two of light dappled the stone angel and the new grave at its feet.

  Emma seized my hand. “Look,” she whispered.

  Missing one arm, hair matted and dirty, skin stained, Edith lay on the earth that was heaped over Sissy. Emma ran to the grave, but I hesitated, not sure how to interpret the doll’s presence. Had Sissy left her there for Emma? Or did she want Edith to stay where she was?

  Something stirred in the shadows behind the angel. In the dim light, I saw Sissy. For the first time she looked like what she was, nearly transparent, too thin to cast a shadow, her voice a whisper. “The doll’s for you, Emma. To keep.”

  Emma reached out as if to embrace Sissy, but her arms closed on nothing. Sissy was gone. Gone for good.

  Tearfully, Emma laid her flowers on the grave and picked up the doll. “Sissy wants me to have Edith.”

  I laid my flowers beside Emma’s. Silently, the two of us stood together, thinking our own thoughts of Sissy.

  After a long moment, I turned to Emma. “Let’s go home,” I said softly.

  Hand in hand, we left Sissy resting peacefully under the angel’s protective hand.

  A Ghost Story for Norm

  1

  “YOU’VE BOUGHT a church?” Michael and I looked up from the pile of homework covering most of the kitchen table. I was in the middle of writing a poem for Mr. Pelowski’s English class, and Michael was working his way happily through twenty math questions.

  Mom filled a kettle with water and put it on the stove. Her cheeks were pink from the March wind, and so was the tip of her nose. “You and Molly will love it,” she promised. “It’s exactly the sort of place Dave and I have been looking for all winter. There’s a carriage house for him to use as a pottery workshop and space in the choir loft for me to set up a studio. It’s perfect.”

  “But how can we live in a church?” Michael persisted, refusing to be won over by her enthusiasm.

  “Oh, it’s not really a church anymore,” Mom said. “Some people from Philadelphia bought it last year and built an addition on the side for living quarters. They were going to set up an antique store in the actual church, but, after doing all that work, they decided they didn’t like living in the country after all.”

  “It’s out in the country?” I frowned at the little cat I was doodling in the margin of my notebook paper.

  Mom smiled and gazed past me, out our kitchen window and into Mrs. Overton’s window directly across the alley. I had a feeling she was seeing herself standing in front of an easel, working on one of her huge oil paintings, far from what she called the “soul-killing life of the city.” She has a maddening habit of drifting away into her private dream world just when you need her most.

  “Where is the church?” I asked loudly.

  “Where is it?” Mom poured boiling water into her cup and added honey. “It’s in Holwell, Maryland, not far from the mountains. It’s beautiful. Just beautiful. The perfect place for painting and potting.”

  “But what about Molly and me? What are we supposed to do while you and Dave paint and make pottery?” Michael asked.

  “You promised I could be in the enrichment program this summer,” I said, thinking about the creative writing class I was planning to take. “Will I still be able to?”

  “Yes, and what about Science Club?” Michael asked. “I’m already signed up for it. Mr. Phillips is going to take us to the Aquarium and the Science Center and even to the Smithsonian in Washington.”

  Mom sighed and shook her head. “I’m afraid you two will have to make other plans for summer. We’ll be moving in June, and I can’t possibly drive all the way back to Baltimore every day.”

  “But I’ve been looking forward to Science Club all year!” Michael’s voice rose, and I could tell he was trying hard not to cry.

  “You’ll have plenty of woods to explore,” Mom said calmly. “Just think of all the wildlife you can observe and the insects you can add to your collection. Why, the day Dave and I were there, we saw a raccoon, a possum, a woodchuck, and dozens of squirrels.” Mom leaned across the table, smiling, hoping to convince Michael that he was going to love living in a church way out in the country, miles away from Mr. Phillips and Science Club.

  But Michael wasn’t easy to convince. Slumping down in his chair, he mumbled, “I’d rather stay in Baltimore, even if I never see anything but cockroaches, pigeons, and rats.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Michael!” Mom looked exasperated. “You’re ten years old. Act like it!”

  As Michael opened his mouth to defend himself, Heather appeared in the kitchen doorway, responding, no doubt, to her built-in radar for detecting trouble. Her pale gray eyes roved from Mom to Michael, then to me, and back again to Mom. From the expression on her face, I imagined she was hoping to witness bloodshed, screams, a ghastly scene of domestic violence.

  “Why, Heather, I was wondering where you were!” Mom turned to her, infusing her voice with enthusiasm again. “Guess what? Your daddy and I have found a new place for us to live, way out in the country. Won’t that be fun?” She gave Heather a dazzling Romper-Room smile and reached out to embrace her.

  With the skill of a cat, Heather sidestepped Mom’s arms and peered out the kitchen window. “Daddy’s home,” she announced without looking at us.

  “Oh, no, I forgot to put the casserole in the oven!” Mom ran to the refrigerator and pulled out a concoction of eggplant, cheese, tomatoes, and bulgur and shoved it into the oven just as Dave opened the back door, bringing a blast of cold March air into the room with him.

  After giving Mom a hug and a kiss, he swooped Heather up into his arms. “How’s my girl?” he boomed.

  Heather twined her arms possessively around his neck and smiled coyly. “They were fighting,” she said, darting a look at Michael and me.

  Dave glanced at Mom, and she smiled and shook her head. “We were just discussing our big move to the country, that’s all. Nobody was fighting, Heather.” Mom turned on the cold water and began rinsing lettuce leaves for a salad.

  “I don’t like it when they fight.” Heather tightened her grip on Dave’s neck.

  “Come on, Michael.” I stood up and started gathering my books and papers together. “Let’s finish our homework downstairs.”

  “Dinner will be ready in about half an hour,” Mom called after us as we started down the basement steps.

  As soon as we were safely out of everybody’s hearing range, I turned to Michael. “What are we going to do?”

  He flopped down on the old couch in front of the television. “Nothing. It’s too late, Molly. They’ve bought the church and we’re moving there. Period.”

  Grabbing a pillow, he tossed it across the room, narrowly missing one of Mom’s paintings, a huge close-up of a sunflower. “Why did she have to marry him? We were perfectly happy before he and Heather came along.”

  I slumped beside him, nodding my head in agreement. “They’ve ruined everything.” Glancing at the stairs to make sure Heather hadn’t sneaked down to spy on us, I said, “If only Heather was a normal kid. She acts more like a two-year-old than a seven-year-old. And she’s mean; she tattles and lies and does everything she can to get us in trouble with Dave. Why do they always take her side—even Mom?”

  Michael made a face. “You know what Dave says.” Making his voice deep and serious, he said, “Heather is an unusually imaginative and sensitive child. And she has suffered a great loss. You and Molly must be patient with her.”

  I groaned. “How long can we feel sorry for her and be nice to her? I know it must have been horrible to see her mother die in a fire and be too little to help, but she was only three years old. She should’ve gotten over it by now, Michael.”

  He nodded. “I
f Dave would take her to a shrink, I bet she would get better. My friend Martin’s little brother goes to some guy out in Towson, and it’s helped him a lot. He plays with dolls and draws pictures and makes things out of clay.”

  I sighed. “You know perfectly well what Dave thinks of shrinks, Michael. I heard him tell Mom that all they do is mess up your head.”

  Michael got up and flipped the TV to “Speed Racer.” With one eye on the screen, he set about doing the rest of his math while I sat there doodling more cats instead of finishing my poem.

  After a few minutes, I nudged Michael. “Do you remember that movie we saw on TV about the little girl who did horrible things to her enemies?”

  “The Bad Seed?”

  “Yes, that was it. Well, sometimes I think Heather’s like that girl, Rhoda. Suppose she burned her mother up on purpose the way Rhoda burned up the janitor?”

  Michael peered at me over the top of his glasses. “You’re crazy, Molly. No three-year-old kid could do anything like that.” He was speaking to me as if he were a scientist explaining something to a child instead of a ten-year-old boy addressing his twelve-year-old sister.

  Realizing how ridiculous I sounded, I laughed and said, “Just kidding,” but I really wasn’t. There was something about Heather that made me truly uncomfortable. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t even like her, let alone love her as Mom kept urging me to. It was hard to feel pity or anything but dislike for her.

  It wasn’t as if I hadn’t tried. When Heather had first moved in, I’d done everything I could think of to be a good big sister, but she’d made it clear that she wanted nothing to do with me. If I tried to comb her hair, she pulled away, crying to Mom that I was hurting her. If I offered to read to her, she’d yawn after the first sentence or two and say the story was boring and dumb. Once I made the mistake of letting her play with my old Barbie dolls, the ones I was saving for my children; she cut their hair off playing beauty parlor and ripped their best outfits. She even tore up a family of paper dolls I made for her, taking great pleasure in beheading them right in front of me. Then she dropped them disdainfully in the trash can and walked out of the room.

  To make it even worse, she told lies about Michael and me, making it sound as if we tormented her whenever we were alone with her. Dave believed her most of the time, and sometimes Mom did too. In the six months that Mom and Dave had been married, things had gotten very tense in our home, and, as far as I could see, Heather was responsible for most of the bad feelings. And now we were moving to a little church in the country where there would be no escape from her all summer. Was it any wonder that I was depressed?

  I glanced at Michael, still hard at work on his math. My own poem was now almost obscured by the cats I’d drawn all over the notebook paper. I stared at it sadly, no longer in the mood to continue writing about unicorns, rainbows, and castles in the clouds. Tearing it out of my notebook, I crumpled it into a ball and tossed it at Speed Racer as he zipped past in his little car. Then I began writing a poem about real life. Something depressing dealing with loneliness and unhappiness and the misery of being misunderstood and unloved.

  2

  ON THE FIRST DAY of summer vacation, Dave and a bunch of his friends loaded everything we owned into a U-Haul truck and headed toward our new home in Holwell, Maryland. Dave drove the truck with Heather sitting beside him, looking very pleased with herself, and Mom, Michael, and I followed in our old van. Behind us was another van in even worse shape than ours, filled with Dave’s friends.

  After we turned off the Beltway, the roads narrowed and wound up and down hills, curved past farms, tunneled through forests. As we bounced along over ruts and bumps, Mom pointed out the scenic spots. “See that old barn over there?” she’d exclaim, pointing to a building on the verge of collapse. “Isn’t that a perfect subject for a painting?”

  When Michael and I mumbled something about Andrew Wyeth having already painted a hundred barns just like it, she’d spot something else—a twisted old tree, a line hung with flapping clothes, a flock of geese strutting across a yard—and get excited all over again. “You two are just going to love living here,” she said more than once, never losing hope that we’d eventually agree with her.

  After a couple of hours of driving, Mom turned to us and said, “Here we are!” Swinging off the road behind the U-Haul, she pointed at the little white church. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  It was pretty. No matter how much I preferred our row house, I had to admit that Mom and Dave had picked a lovely place. Quiet and peaceful, the small building sat by the side of the road, shaded by two huge maple trees. Although it had no steeple, the tall, pointed windows and red double doors left no doubt that it was indeed a church. On one side was an addition, built to harmonize with the original building, and on the other was the carriage house Dave planned to use as his pottery workshop.

  Behind it rose a forest in deep green leaf, and, on either side, fields of corn basked in the morning sun. Across the road, a herd of cows gazed at us, their big brown eyes taking in everything.

  “Look, it’s the welcome wagon.” Michael nudged me and pointed at the cows.

  “Where are the other houses?” I looked around, hoping I’d missed seeing them.

  “There’s a farmhouse about a mile down the road,” Mom said.

  “But I thought we were moving to Holwell.” I frowned at Mom.

  “That’s our post office address,” she said, looking at herself in the rearview mirror and smoothing her hair. I could tell she was a little uncomfortable at having misled me deliberately or accidentally into thinking we would at least have neighbors and the prospect of making new friends. “The town itself is only a couple of miles away,” she added apologetically.

  “You said there was a library,” Michael said, leaning across me, his voice full of anger. “I thought you meant it was just a few blocks away or something.”

  “You can ride your bikes into Holwell. It’s not far.” Mom opened her door and prepared to get out. “I told you we were moving to the country.”

  Before we could say anything else, Dave’s friends pulled into the driveway behind us and screeched to a stop in a cloud of white dust. At the same time, Dave and Heather got out of the U-Haul and walked toward us. I couldn’t help noticing that Dave looked a little tense and Heather was dragging on his hand, trying to keep him from joining Mom. Our first day in Holwell wasn’t beginning very well.

  “Come on, Jean,” Dave said to Mom. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

  “I’ll carry my stuff in,” Michael said, jumping out of the van. I knew he was worried that somebody would drop his insect collection or misplace his books.

  “How about you taking care of Heather?” Dave tugged her toward me, despite her efforts to dig her heels into the dust. As usual, she was frowning through the tangles of hair almost hiding her face.

  “What should I do?” I turned to Mom, hoping she’d suggest I help her with something important, but she sided with Dave as usual.

  “You could take her for a walk,” Mom said, patting my shoulder. “There’s a nice, little path down through the woods.” She pointed off to the right of the church. “It leads to a creek. You could wade or something.”

  “Don’t go too far, though,” Dave added, prying his fingers away from Heather’s clutch.

  Knowing I had no choice, I tried to take Heather’s other hand, but she snatched it away, scowling at me as if I’d tried to pinch her.

  “Go with Molly, now.” Dave succeeded in freeing himself. “Daddy has a lot of work to do, honey. You and Molly can have a real nice time.”

  “I don’t want to go with her,” Heather whined, her voice rising in pitch. “I want to stay with you, Daddy. I don’t like it here.”

  “You heard me, Heather. Don’t make Daddy cross with you.”

  “Come on, Heather.” I started walking toward the path, and, after some more pleading from Dave, she finally followed me. Silently we entered the cool
shade of the trees. Above our heads, the leaves rustled softly and the sunlight splattered down through the branches, gleaming here and there at the whim of the wind. A butterfly as big as my hand fluttered across the path, and I was glad that Michael wasn’t there. If he’d seen it, he’d have gotten his net and added it to his collection.

  “Look, Heather.” I pointed at the butterfly as it rested for a moment on a leaf. “Isn’t it pretty?”

  She glanced at it. “It’s nothing but a caterpillar with wings,” she muttered.

  After that, I didn’t try talking to her until we found the creek. The water was shallow, maybe two or three inches deep, and it was racing along over a bed of stones between low banks. It was perfect for wading. Sitting down, I took off my running shoes and socks.

  “Want to come with me?” I asked her as I stepped out into the clear water.

  She shook her head and continued following the path along the creek. Shrugging my shoulders, I splashed along beside her, enjoying the feel of the cold water as it rose higher, creeping up to my knees as the creek narrowed and the banks grew steeper.

  After wading for about five minutes, I came around a curve and was confronted with a rusty, barbed-wire fence from which hung a No Trespassing sign. On the other side, a herd of cattle looked up from the water and lowed. For a minute, I thought they were going to charge at me, fence or no fence, and I scrambled up the bank to Heather’s side.

  “They’re just cows,” she said, as if she knew I was thinking that they might be bulls. “They won’t hurt you.”

  “I know,” I said, trying to sound a lot more convincing than I felt. “Do you want to go back to the church?”

  She gave me one of her disdainful looks. “Well, we can’t go any farther, can we?” She looked pointedly at the fence and the cows watching us from the other side.

  Still carrying my shoes, I followed Heather back down the path. Instead of turning off through the woods, taking the route we’d originally chosen, we walked farther along the creek. It was a pleasant path, cool and shady, and I was too busy watching a couple of dragonflies darting back and forth across the water to pay much attention to what Heather was doing. When she stopped suddenly just ahead of me, I bumped right into her.