by Bryn Donovan
David wrapped his arms around her. She hugged him back, hard. “Andi, listen. I’m glad you told me.”
“Yeah, I bet.” She sniffled.
He pulled away so he could look her in the eyes. “I’ve got to tell you something, okay? She did exist.”
“What?” Andi looked up at him.
“The woman in the bathtub. She was my mom.”
Chapter Eight
Andi stared up at him. He didn’t appear to be joking. “I don’t understand.”
“My mom killed herself in there,” he told her. “I saw her once, too.”
I cannot be having this conversation. “You said she died in childbirth.”
“I didn’t say that. She died right after. She went into that bathroom, ran a hot bath, got into it, cut her wrists open right down the middle and bled to death.”
He explained that he’d learned about it from some older kids at his school, who’d overheard their parents talking. Razor blade. Suicide.
Andi touched her fingers to her mouth. No wonder he wanted nothing to do with that bathroom. “So, you’ve seen her before?”
He nodded. “When I was little. I didn’t know then about her killing herself.”
“Did you know it was her?”
“No. I’d only seen a photo of her once. I didn’t make the connection.”
“But you realized it was her later.” Andi’s thoughts swirled. She’d never imagined that one of her macabre visions would have appeared to someone else as well. “It was only one time?”
“Yeah.”
Did you ever see anything else?” she asked, thinking of the man with the bashed-in head on the stairs.
“What? No.”
“I always see imaginary stuff. I never saw anything real. Not before now.” She tried to take in what he had said. “Suicide. Why did she do it?”
A muscle in his jaw twitched. “I’m guessing my father had a lot of affairs,” he said. “And it was probably worse than that.”
“You think he beat up on her. The way he did with his girlfriends.”
“I don’t know why he wouldn’t,” David said. “He beat up all the other women. Why not my mom?”
“Oh, my God.”
“She killed herself right after she had me.” He inclined his head. “I guess I put her over the edge.”
“What?” Andi couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“As a kid it really confused me. Why I made her so sad she wanted to die. But now I get it. I was a baby from a man she hated.”
“Don’t be crazy,” Andi retorted. “Don’t say that about your mother. I bet she loved you more than anything!”
He looked at her as if she might be a little stupid, after all. “The evidence is kind of against that.”
“No! Look. She was probably going half out of her mind to begin with, if your father was like that. And then a lot of women get depressed, like seriously depressed, right after they have babies. It’s a chemical thing…they didn’t know about those things then. They didn’t have, you know, medications.”
She didn’t know if these explanations made sense, but she couldn’t believe for a minute that David’s mom killed herself because she had him. Even more, she couldn’t stand the idea of him believing that. What a terrible thing to think for so many years.
“It wasn’t you,” she told him.
He started to speak and then didn’t. After a moment he said, “Well. It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter,” she insisted, reaching out to take hold of his hand.
He flinched at her touch then pulled away from her. “I don’t need anyone to feel sorry for me,” he said in a low tone.
“I’m not feeling sorry for you, I just…okay, I am a little.”
“You should feel sorry for my mother, not me. A lot of people have crappy childhoods. It’s no big deal.”
“A lot of people don’t,” Andi said, thinking of her own upbringing. Her psychological problems had made things miserable at times, sure. Also, her parents had been very traditional, and sometimes that had caused conflicts. But mostly, in her family, there had been love.
“Anyway. Now you know why I hate the house.”
“Carlos was right,” Andi said softly.
“Right about what?” David swung into anger at the mention of the man’s name.
“Your house is haunted.”
“You think that’s her ghost?”
“What else would you call it?” she challenged him. And what about the man on the stairs? She lacked the courage to bring it up. David had not seen the guy. That was her own private slice of crazy. “I don’t know anything about ghosts. But don’t they always say that a lot of times, they’re people who died violently, or people who killed themselves? So their spirits aren’t at peace.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“I think I read about it somewhere.” Andi didn’t care to admit she’d learned it from about a hundred episodes of Ghost Investigations.
“It makes me think of the time Mr. Willingham talked to me about her,” David said. “He told me that for her, it was like she went to sleep and had a nice dream and didn’t wake up. He said she was in heaven now.” His mouth twisted. Andi doubted he even believed in heaven. “Guess he was wrong,” he added.
“Yeah…seems like she’s still here.”
“I don’t know what to think. And what if that is true? What am I supposed to do about that?”
She frowned, thinking. “I think you should hire someone. I mean, there must be specialists.”
“What, like an exorcist? It’s a bunch of garbage.”
“Not an exorcist, exactly. Aren’t they for really bad things?”
“I have no idea.”
“And your mom’s ghost can’t be evil. What I was trying to say before was, she’s probably just still sad.”
“You know, this is stupid. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” The edge of anger in his voice startled her.
“She tried to talk to me!” Andi protested. “Maybe a psychic or someone could talk to her and find out what she wants!”
“A psychic?”
Andi spread her hands in a challenging gesture as if to say, Yeah? So?
“There’s no such thing as a real psychic, okay? I hire people who do real jobs. People like you.”
“You don’t know unless you try—”
“I do know. Psychics are crap.” His eyes narrowed in disgust. “I don’t want anyone like that anywhere near my house.” He never called it that—my house.
“So what are you going to do?” Andi asked. “What am I supposed to do, pretend they’re not there?”
“Just don’t go into that bathroom. I told you not to.”
“You know what? It’s not fair to sell a house to people without telling them there’s sometimes a bloody lady in the bathtub!”
“I’ve only seen her once,” David said. “You’re the only other person who’s ever seen her—”
“As far as you know—”
“—And apparently you see all kinds of messed-up things.”
Andi’s nerves, already frayed, snapped at this. “You’re being a jerk.”
“I’m just saying I don’t think a normal person is going to see anything.”
“Because I’m not normal?”
“You just told me you weren’t,” he pointed out.
Andi’s throat tightened. “I’m going home.” She stood up. “No, you know what? I’ve got a job to do. I’m going to get back to work.”
“You have no right to tell me what to do with this place,” he said, that raw undercurrent of anger in his voice again. “It’s my house.”
“I was just trying to help,” Andi said in disbelief. She stormed back inside. She would rather hang out with the poor bloody woman in the bathtub.
Screw him, she thought as she got back to work. Then she laughed inwardly at the appropriateness of that sentiment. But really. Screw him. He didn’t have any right to get so angry w
ith her.
When, as a moody teenager, she’d worked with her father in the summer, he had talked to her about leaving her emotions aside on the job. At first she’d hated the advice, thinking it impossible to put into practice. Once she attempted to do as he said, however, she learned that it could be a relief to defer feelings until a later time, and to just concentrate on the unambiguous task ahead of her.
She did that now. In record time, she tore out the remaining cabinets, finding satisfaction in the destructive work. After she patched the walls where they needed it, she dragged the chunks and pieces of cabinet out to the rented dumpster.
As she worked on the cabinets, she thought about how Carlos had gone beserk, just because she started to help with the wallpaper. He’d seemed so nice at times, and other times he had been hostile.
Just like David today. It almost seemed as though the grand, dilapidated Victorian had that effect on people. Who knew? Maybe if they’d lived in a regular house, David’s dad would have been more of a regular guy.
She knew this didn’t make much sense. Still, she couldn’t help thinking that there was something strange and wrong about David’s reaction to her suggestion to hire a psychic. He wasn’t really a jerk…was he?
At the end of the day, she found him in the back parlor in deep conversation with a guy she hadn’t seen before. She thought about leaving them alone, but he looked up and saw her. “Hey.”
“I’m going to take off, I guess.”
She hoped he would apologize to her for being so angry before, but he didn’t. If anything, it seemed like maybe he was waiting for her to apologize.
There wasn’t a chance in the world she was going to. She hadn’t done anything wrong.
David shrugged. “Okay. I’m going to be here for a while. Phil’s going to do the structural inspection.”
“Oh. Do you want me to stay?” She wanted to hear what the guy would find. She always had opinions on those reports.
“No, that’s all right. You probably need to head home.”
“Yeah, okay.” Andi trudged out to her truck. She felt both rejected and mad, and the apparition in the tub still rattled her.
By the time she got home, those feelings had morphed into a simple and profound case of the blues. Maybe knitting would make her feel better. She dug a half-finished hat out of the basket next to the couch. But as she started to knit, she cried a little.
Lissa came in. “Hey, what’s up? Are you all right?”
Andi swept a hand across her eyes. “What do you mean?”
Her sister sat down. “A lot of times you knit when you’re upset.”
“I guess so.” Lissa knew her too well. “I just had a really bad day.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Anything in particular, or just…” She left Andi to finish the sentence.
“Not really.” Andi realized she’d dropped a stitch. She set the needles aside. “I’m going to take a bath.”
“Ah, ah, ah. No baths if you’re sad.” They had both decided, when they were girls, that if you felt bad, a bath just made you more depressed.
“You’re right. I should just go to bed.”
She stayed up for a while though, flipping around channels on the tiny TV in her room, with the sound on mute. It hadn’t been so crazy to suggest a psychic, had it? Under the circumstances, it was almost common sense. Couldn’t those things work sometimes?
Andi remembered a rainy afternoon in the basement of the twin girls who lived on Lyndale Avenue. Because they were twins, and older than Andi, the girls had held a certain amount of glamour, so when they’d demonstrated the Ouija board, she and Lissa were happy to take a turn.
It seemed as though they were talking to a woman named Georgiana. Andi recalled this because at the time she’d never heard of that name before. At first, Lissa and Andi thought the board was spelling out “George.”
Andi asked the woman when she’d died. She spelled out eighteen-something; that detail, Andi couldn’t remember. Then Andi wanted to know what the woman did for a living, when she was alive.
It struck her as a funny question now. But Andi’s mom had always worked, as a secretary before she quit that to work on houses full-time. Andi was too young then to understand that many women in the nineteenth century were solely wives and mothers.
So Andi asked, “What did you do?” When the board didn’t answer, she clarified: “How did you make money? What was your job?”
The woman spelled out, W-H-O-R-E.
All of the girls looked at each other. What did that mean?
“That’s not a word,” Andi told the board. “Did you spell it wrong?”
The Ouija board device under their hands zoomed to “no.”
One of the twins got up and came back with the dictionary. “Hang on,” Andi told the woman. “We’re going to find out what that means.”
The twin told them that it meant “prostitute.” They all gaped. Geogiana was a bad woman. She seemed so nice! When Andi put her hands back on the device, she demanded, “Why did you do that?”
The ghost just spelled out, Had to.
“Why did you have to?” she persisted.
Husband died. A wave of grief passed over Andi as the spirit spelled out the answer.
It was the first time Andi understood that someone might become a prostitute because she didn’t have any other choice. “I’m sorry,” she told the lady.
Thank you.
Andi knew it hadn’t been Lissa guiding the board. Her little sister couldn’t have been six years old at the time. She wondered if Lissa even recalled the incident. And Andi couldn’t imagine how she could have been guiding it subconsciously herself. She’d been a smart eight-year-old, but not that smart.
As an adult, she’d often told herself that she’d imagined the Ouija board incident. She hadn’t. You could talk to the dead sometimes.
And one of the people she’d seen, the lady in the blood bath, was an actual dead person. David’s mom.
What if all the other people she’d seen were not, as various doctors had always told her parents, morbid fantasies or even borderline schizophrenic nightmares?
What if they were all just ghosts?
That would mean she wasn’t crazy, right? It would be wonderful not to be crazy.
Had anyone else died in that house? The man on the stairs? Surely it wasn’t impossible. How could she find out?
Why couldn’t David just listen to her?
She crawled under the covers and closed her eyes.
* * *
David walked into the kitchen, where Andi was taking out the old window frame over the sink. She angled a flathead screwdriver between the wood and the wall and pounded it in with a rubber hammer. When she pried the sill away, it made a loud, splintering crack that sickened him.
“What are you doing?” he demanded.
She looked at him, bemused. “Replacing the window? Like we talked about yesterday? I’m putting this one in.” She indicated the new window propped up against the fridge, still in its factory wrapping.
“But that window is original to the house.”
“Right. And the sill is rotted and the glass is cracked. We talked about this.”
He couldn’t make his fury go away, but he could hide it. “No, you’re right. I remember now.”
“Hey, are you all right?” Andi set the tools down and came over to him, looking up at him with those sky-blue eyes. “You seem tense.” She touched his arm, a gesture that did nothing to dampen his anger, even as it flamed his lust.
“You’re right. I’m tense,” he breathed, taking her into his arms. “Maybe you can help me relax a little.”
“I might be able to do that,” she murmured, getting on her tiptoes to kiss him.
He picked her up and set her on the stove behind them so he had better access to her body. Undoing the buttons of her shirt, he stroked her bare skin beneath. She seemed so vulnerable, nearly limp beneath his caresses. But she was making sure the house got sold and taken aw
ay from him forever. Her and that bitch of a real estate agent. He hated her.
As he kissed her, touched her, he leaned over and turned on one of the front burners, then the other. She was oblivious. He stripped the chambray shirt from her body, then the black lace bra—the same one she’d worn the other day, when they made love in her bedroom.
She wrapped her blue-jeaned legs around him. As they kissed and kissed, he thought, She’s a whore.
When she leaned back and put her hand down for support, she let out a little shriek, pulling back—her finger had touched the burner. She straightened up. “The burner’s on,” she said, reaching back to turn the knob.
He grabbed her wrist.
“Oh my God, this one’s on, too!” She tried to wriggle down from where she sat.
David grabbed her other wrist as well and pinned her hands to her sides, leaning against her knees, trapping her where she sat on the stove.
“This burner’s on!” she yelped as if he hadn’t understood. “Let me up!” She struggled.
“What’s the matter, Andi?” he said. “Am I making you hot?”
Andi threw him off and slid down from the stove, to her feet. He grabbed her wrists again, pinning her where she stood, although she tried to twist away, shouting, “What the hell is wrong with you! Let me go!”
“I thought you’d like this,” he sneered. “A slut like you.”
Tears stood in her eyes. “David.” She seemed to be looking for the person she knew. “Let me go.”
He shook his head. “You don’t tell me what to do. You forget this is my house.”
“I know. I know it is.”
“No, you don’t. You want to get it sold.” He raised one of her captured hands. “That’s why you’re working your fingers to the bone.”
The burners on the electric stove glowed hot orange now. He pulled Andi’s hand toward one. She tried to resist him, but he pried open her clenched fist and he smashed her hand down flat on the burner and she screamed.
David woke, sitting straight up in bed.
* * *
In her apartment, miles away, Andi woke up with a shout, clutching one hand in the other.
Chapter Nine
