The Unquiet

by Jeannine Garsee

  Bennie peers around the cluttered closet like he’s checking for video cams. “This ain’t a joke, right? I don’t like people laughing at me.”

  Whatever crap I’ve gone through the past few years may be nothing compared to what Bennie’s had to endure. “I’m serious, Bennie. And I’m not gonna laugh.”

  Bennie shifts to the other foot. “Okay. I ain’t never seen nothin’ … but she’s there, all right. She’s been there a long time. You didn’t call her out.” He shakes a chastising finger. “You all weren’t supposed to go in there, anyhow.”

  “How do you know she’s there if you haven’t seen her?”

  Bennie hunches his sloping shoulders. “Same way you know. You just know. Anyhow, Miz Prout told me, too.”

  “Miz Prout?” I repeat.

  “Yup. She’d take her lunch and go sit by the pool every day.” He pats his oversized key ring with pride. “I’d let her in there myself and clean out a place for her to sit. She always said, ‘Thank you, Bennie.’ She sure liked her peace and quiet. She’d sit in her folding chair and eat her lunch and read for a spell. Then she’d get up and leave. That’s before she got sad.”

  “Sad how?”

  He cracks his knuckles, one by one. “She used to take pills every day, just like me. She’d drink ’em down with her lunchtime coffee. Then one day she says to me, ‘Bennie, I’m tired of taking these pills.’ And then, I reckon, she didn’t take ’em no more.”

  “What kind of pills?”

  “Well, they must’ve been happy pills, ’cause then she stopped being happy. She’d cry sometimes. And she’d walk around that pool, just walk, walk, walk, like she didn’t have no other place else to go. I’d hear her talkin’, too. Talking to Annaliese.” He scratches the back of his cap. “I reckon she was one of those ladies who sees things, like with crystal balls and stuff. Only she didn’t have no crystal ball.”

  Entranced, I ask, “Was she a medium?”

  “Yeah, sort of regular size. But not as big as Miz Gibbons. She came here, too. Miz Prout brought her once. Good thing Mr. Solomon didn’t know.”

  “Why’d she bring Mrs. Gibbons?”

  “So they could call up Annaliese ’cause Miz Gibbons missed her so much. She was a sad lady, too. Real lonesome.”

  I ponder this. Did Miss Prout believe she could communicate with Annaliese? So she brought Mrs. Gibbons along to “visit” her dead granddaughter?

  I ask Bennie this. He only shrugs. “Beats me. But it was pretty soon after that when Miz Prout went away. Then poor old Miz Gibbons—” He makes a vague jerking motion above his head.

  “Bennie, do you know why Miss Prout left town so fast?”

  “Yep. So Annaliese couldn’t find her.”

  “What do you mean, f-find her?”

  Bennie industriously wraps up the remnants of his sandwich. “Like she found you girls. And like she found that boy, Dino.” A regretful headshake. “He acted mean, but I never wished him no harm. Nope, not like that.”

  The end-of-lunch bell rings, I have to get to English, but something else nags me. “You said Miss Prout ‘told’ you about Annaliese. What did she say, Bennie? Exactly?”

  Bennie frowns, thinking hard. “Oh.” He brightens. “She said ‘Be sure to take your medicine, Bennie.’”

  “Why’d she say that?”

  Bennie smiles broadly. “ ’Cause then I can’t see nothin’. Then Annaliese can’t touch me.”

  Nate and I make up after school. I apologize for my snarky attitude. Nate apologizes for his rudeness and for not being more sensitive to my Annaliese fixation. Then he invites me to his house to do homework.

  Luke and Mom, I’ve noticed, are spending more time together, too. Tonight, in fact, they’re having dinner at some fancy restaurant in Kellersberg. Nate and I avoid this subject while he diligently works on a German paper, and I sweat buckets of blood over my algebra problems. I’m not sure which is the biggest shocker: That Mom and Luke no longer want to rip each other’s throats out? Or that Mom trusts me enough to let me hang out with Nate, at night, in an empty house, without supervision?

  I surrender in the middle of my second page of problems. “If I tell you something about Annaliese, will you flip out again?”

  Nate drops his pen. “This is the part where I’m supposed to be more sensitive, right?”

  I relate what Bennie Unger told me. “So he thinks if he takes his seizure meds, Annaliese can’t hurt him.”

  “Need I remind you, surfer girl, that Bennie’s not all there?”

  “He’s there enough. He believes this stuff. So did Miss Prout and Mrs. Gibbons. Were they missing part of their brains?”

  “Well …” Nate thinks. “Miss Prout was an oddball. She’d deal Tarot cards right in the office, and read fortunes and stuff. And obviously Mrs. Gibbons had problems. Anyway, how do you know Bennie wasn’t making it up? Nobody talks to him. You gave him a captive audience.”

  “He was pretty convincing.” But I’m thinking: Tarot cards?

  Nate pushes his book aside. “Let’s watch TV. It’ll get your mind off this stuff.”

  “I hate TV. How many times do I have to tell you?”

  “Yeah, but you never told me why.”

  “It reminds me of my grandmother,” I admit. “We’d watch those old reruns one after another. Bewitched was her favorite.”

  “Not Laverne and Shirley?”

  Wow! He remembers our first conversation? “No, that was mine. I liked The Andy Griffith Show, too. I called you Opie in my mind when I met you,” I confess shyly.

  He plays with my hair. “Is that good?”

  “Oh, yeah. Opie’s cute. If we had cable around here I could show you how cute.”

  “Maybe we could rent the DVDs and watch them together.”

  “That’d be cool.”

  So we curl up on the sofa together with the TV on.

  Not that we watch it, of course.

  4 MONTHS + 10 DAYS

  Saturday, November 15

  Moving from headstone to headstone, I search for the grave of Annaliese Gibbons. At last I find it, but the grave is open, the lid to the casket gone, and Annaliese stares up from her satin pillow. I smile. She smiles back—and then I watch in horror as her lips erupt into blisters. Her face blackens and curls, torched by invisible fire, till all that remains is a raw, leering skull and the stench of cooked meat.

  Haunted by the nightmare, half-dead from a cold, I stumble downstairs for something to clear the Play-Doh out of my nose. Mom hands me a blister pack of cold tablets. “Nate was looking for you already, but I told him you were sick. I heard you sneezing all night.”

  I moan. “I feel awww-ful.” And if I feel awful, Nate’s bound to get it, too. Last night was lovely.

  I swallow the tablets with my regular meds. “No riding for you today,” Mom warns. “Stay in bed. I’m going to pick up some groceries. You want anything?”

  Too sick to shake my aching head, I crawl back to my room, burrow under the covers, and sleep until the phone rings later in the afternoon.

  “There’s nothing wrong,” a voice says in my ear.

  “What?”

  “With me. I got the MRI results today. There’s nothing wrong—which means there’s nothing they can do.” Meg hiccups. “Tasha’s out of town, and I had no one else to c-call, and oh, God, I can’t b-believe this is happening to me.”

  “You want me to come over?” My feet are already on the floor.

  Ignoring my offer, she cries out, “How can they say there’s nothing wrong? This buzzing is killing me. Oh God, my ears hurt so bad, sooo baaad—”

  In the background a woman chides, “Meg, please don’t be so dramatic.”

  “But they hurt!” Meg screams, nearly cracking my ear.

  “I know, but the doctor said—”

  “Who cares what he said? I can’t fucking cheer!”

  Hearing Meg drop the F-bomb—to her mom, no less—sets off a terrible alarm. The Meg I know never uses that wo
rd. “Meg?”

  “For that, young lady”—her mother’s voice moves closer—“you can hang that phone up right now.”

  “I’m using this goddamn phone!” Meg screeches back at her.

  “I said—”

  I hear a smack against flesh. Then the sounds of a tussle. The phone drops.

  “Meg!” I shout. “Meg, pick up the phone!”

  “Stop! What are you doing?” Meg’s mom screams in the distance. “What the hell are you doing?”

  More scuffling.

  “No!” Meg’s mom, gasping, hysterical. “Stop! Oh God, no! No-o-o-o!”

  Moans. Inaudible cries. Panicked sobbing.

  And then … a terrible quiet.

  “Meg,” I shriek. “Meg, I’m coming over right now!” As I start to hang up, I hear the clunk of someone picking the phone off the floor. Steady breathing whooshes in my ear. “Meg? Did you hear me? I’m on my way!”

  “Don’t bother,” Meg whispers, eerily calm. “I’m fine. Really.”

  Gently, she hangs up.

  Nate answers the door to my frantic pounding. As he savagely scrapes ice from the windshield of his jeep, we hear the approaching sirens.

  I freeze. “Forget the car!” And I race off, my feet skidding in yesterday’s slush that turned to ice overnight.

  Taking the well-plowed streets instead of the treacherous sidewalks, it takes us less than five minutes to reach the Carmodys’. By then, the police and ambulance are there.

  Nate hauls me back, trapping me in his arms. “Wait!”

  Hugging him to me, I watch in horror as paramedics carry a stretcher out of the house. At first I think it must be Meg, then realize it’s not—it’s a woman bundled in blankets, oxygen strapped to her face. “Is that her mom?”

  Nate nods, rigid with disbelief.

  “What happened?” I cry out as a police officer shuffles us out of the way.

  The cop ignores me and mutters into his walkie-talkie. I struggle, but Nate grips me tighter. As they load Meg’s mom into the ambulance, the front door opens again.

  It’s Meg. In handcuffs.

  Trees and houses and cars spin around me. I lunge again, taking Nate by surprise, breaking free of his arms. I dodge the officer and stumble up the icy drive. I’m an arm’s length away from Meg when another cop grabs me. Close up, I notice the blood on her clothes, on her arms, even on her face. “Meg! What—what happened?”

  Meg rolls her heavy-lidded eyes toward me. “I told her to stay away from me. I begged her to. But she just wouldn’t listen.” She balks as the cops hustle her toward the squad car. “No! Wait! I have to tell her something.”

  The cops pause. The guy holding my arm lets me move an inch closer. Meg looks right into my face and smiles her old familiar smile, though her eyes remain flat, devoid of any life.

  “The buzzing’s gone. I’m okay now, Rinn.”

  I spend the afternoon on the sofa with my head in Nate’s lap. Mom doesn’t mind. She and Luke sit pretty close themselves.

  Why did she do it? Why? The question pecks at my brain with a ragged beak.

  “Maybe we need more coffee,” Mom suggests, probably to break the silence.

  Luke objects, “Maybe we need something stronger.”

  “Wine?”

  “That’ll do.”

  He follows Mom into the kitchen. I hear the clatter of glasses, the pop of a cork, hushed voices, and the scraping of two chairs. I hear the click of a lighter, once, then twice. Mom’s having a cigarette? I’m too upset to care.

  Nate tucks hair behind my ear. “You okay?”

  “I just wish I knew why she did it.”

  “People snap,” he says, like I don’t already know this.

  I sit up and scooch back till we’re side by side on the sofa. “She said her ears hurt. She was crying, Nate, crying with pain. But then, after she did it, the ringing went away.” I hug myself. Like that’s what it took. Like hurting someone was the only way to get it to stop. “The way Lacy’s headache went away after she wrote that letter.”

  “What letter?”

  I tell Nate about the letter, and about Lacy’s miscarriage.

  He doesn’t say I’m crazy. He says nothing at all.

  4 MONTHS + 18 DAYS

  Sunday, November 23

  The headline in the River Hills Journal reads: LOCAL GIRL ARRESTED IN DOMESTIC DISPUTE. I skim it only for the facts I care about: that Meg’s mom is in serious condition, but there’s no question that she’ll recover. And that Meg’s in jail, on suicide watch. She hasn’t been charged yet.

  Millie has a cell phone. Nobody gets a signal around here, but Tasha says they use it when they’re out of town for practice or competitions. Mom tries the number this morning, fearing the Luxes might read this and find out about Meg before anyone can tell them in person.

  I can’t imagine how Tasha’s going to take this.

  But Millie’s phone flips right to voice mail. “I don’t get it,” I say as Mom hangs up a second time. “Regionals were yesterday. You’d think Millie’d be calling CNN, at least.”

  “It’s strange,” Mom admits. “I thought for sure she’d call last night and let us know how Tasha did.”

  Personally I’m glad we can’t reach them by phone. Some things need to be said face-to-face, and I think telling someone her best friend’s in jail is one of them. Especially when you have to tell her why.

  I can’t stand hanging around the house and thinking about Meg. Nate, when I call him, agrees, and we decide to spend the day at Rocky Meadows. This time, though, after we ride, we work; I help him turn out the horses, muck out the stalls, sweep the stable, and refill the water troughs. By the time the last horse is back in and happily fed—hours later—I’m caked with mud and manure, my jacket is ruined, and I’ll probably end up with pneumonia on top of this head cold. But at least it took my mind off Meg for a while.

  We pass Millie’s car on the way back, parked in front of the Boxcar Diner. But the restaurant’s lights are off and the CLOSED sign hangs on the window.

  “What gives?” I wonder.

  Nate suggests, “Bet they’re out celebrating Tasha’s victory,” as he backs the jeep into his drive.

  “Bet not.” Not if they heard about Meg first.

  Unafraid of my germs, he kisses me good-bye with warm, salty lips. When I open my front door a minute later, it’s Millie I hear first, agitated and hysterical: “How could this have happened? How? I’m just sick about it. Sick, I tell you.” As I creep toward the kitchen, she wails, “Oh, Mo, what’ll we do? What do we do no-o-w-w?”

  In the kitchen, Millie’s sobbing on Mom’s shoulder. Mom pats her. “C’mon, Millie. It could be worse, much worse.”

  I marvel at Millie’s over-the-top reaction. Shaking and gasping, she clings to my mother, stretching Mom’s sweater halfway up her back.

  “It’s okay, Millie,” I say from the doorway. “Meg’s mom’ll be fine. The newspaper said—”

  I cut myself off as Millie rears up, and Mom throws me a warning frown two seconds too late.

  “I know that,” Millie snaps. “I can read the paper, too. I’m talking about Tasha, dammit. All our plans! Everything!” She clutches Mom again. “Oh, what’re we gonna doooo?”

  “Honey,” Mom says over Millie’s sobs. “Tasha’s upstairs. Why don’t you go keep her company?”

  Confused, I nod, back out, and run up to my room. Tasha is stretched out on my mattress, studying her fingers. “What happened? Tell me!”

  “I blew it,” she says, with no emotion. “I blew regionals. They disqualified me.”

  “How? Why?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  I sit down beside her. She doesn’t look at me, just watches her fingers making designs in the air. “I thought … I mean, when I heard your mom …”

  A disbelieving scoff. “You thought she was crying about Meg, right? Like she cares about anything except me winning?”

  “I’m sorry about Meg.�
� Feeling awkward, I reach for her hand.

  She ignores it. “I thought I could get through this, you know? But she won’t stop harping on it. And then when we got back and heard about M-Meg …” She drops her hands and squeezes her eyes shut. “Oh God. This is the worst day of my life.”