by John Searles
Sylvie?”
I woke in my bed. My room was empty, except for those horses on their shelf, fighting for space. For a long moment, I lay there, counting limbs and tails as best I could, wondering if I’d dreamed the sound of someone calling my name. But then came the knocking. I kept still, listening to the faint tapping until the voice that first woke me said again, “Sylvie?” It was coming from the other side of the wall, from Rose’s bedroom.
“Yes?” I said.
“Are you awake?”
“I am.”
“Sorry to bother you.”
My sister and I had never spoken through the wall, since her bed was on the other side of her room. I wondered if Abigail had taken it upon herself to rearrange the furniture in all the time she’d been living there. Seventeen days had turned to twenty then twenty-four, and now, somehow we were tiptoeing into August. If there were signs of things returning to normal—of Rose coming home soon, of Abigail leaving—I had not noticed. Instead, the four of us went about our lives, discarding old traditions and creating new ones. At church on Sundays, people stared and whispered about the new addition to our family and the conspicuous absence of my sister, until one day, my father announced we would not be going to church at all, that it was better for us to simply pray at home. In the evenings, it became a custom to go for ice cream after dinner, followed by a swim at the pond. My mother insisted my father track down the owner to ask for permission. The old man told him he used to love people swimming there and was all too happy to know people would be enjoying it again.
How could any girl my age not be happy—or at least placated by nightly trips to the ice cream shop and swims in a pond beneath a blanket of stars before bed? Guilty as it made me feel, I enjoyed those times. I sensed Abigail did as well. The two of us had begun occasional conversations, though until the night she knocked on the wall, the topics were limited to our choice of ice cream flavors and our favorite spots in the pond.
“It’s okay,” I told her now. “But it’s late. Is something wrong?”
“I have the same dream almost every night. About my mother.”
“Is it a bad dream?”
She was quiet. Perhaps, I thought, she had drifted back to sleep, and that would be the end of it. Then she said, “It’s a good dream and a bad dream. When we used to live all year long at the ministry in Oregon, my mother and I had a ritual before bed. Did you ever have that with your mom? Something that made you feel safe before she turned out the light?”
I thought of the prayers my mother used to say with me, a song she used to sing when I was younger, back before that other song took its place, the way she sometimes stroked my hair and kissed my forehead before leaving the room. “Yes,” I answered, feeling an unexpected nostalgia for those rituals. “We did.”
“Well, did you know my mother was once a flight attendant?”
“No,” I said, surprised. “She was?”
“That’s how she met him. He was on a flight to South Africa with other missionaries. That’s where my mother is from. Capetown. They fell in love and he convinced her to join the ministry too.”
By “him”, I assumed she meant her father but did not ask. Maybe it was the tense conversation between my parents at the pond our first night there, the secret my mother was keeping about Heekin’s manuscript, but something made me ask, “Did they stay in love?”
“He did. But she didn’t. It wasn’t just him she fell out of love with, though. She started to hate life at the ministry too.”
I tried to imagine what that life would be like but came up blank. “Why?”
“A million reasons. She used to say it was like living in a bubble. One day, she finally left that bubble and took me with her. We got as far as the Portland airport before he found us and kept me from going with her.”
“Your mother went anyway? Without you?”
“Yes.”
“But how could—”
“She said she had to. And that she’d figure out some way to come back for me. She gave me her word.”
“And did she come back?”
“Maybe. That was a long time ago, though. Even if she did, he made it so she would have a very hard time finding us. Who knows? By now, she’s probably given up and gone back to her country.”
“Is that why you wander?” I asked. “In case she’s still looking for you, I mean.”
“Yes. Most of the year, we are on the road. Except for a few weeks every winter when we go back to the ministry in Oregon. At that place, even the coloring books are about Jesus. Since there was never anything new to read to me, my mother used to do her old preflight routine before bed. You know, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the captain has turned on the Fasten Seat Belt sign. Please stow your carry-on luggage beneath the seat in front of you or in an overhead bin. Make sure your seat back and folding trays are in an upright and locked position. If you are seated next to an emergency exit, please read the instruction card located in your seat pocket. . . .’
“She used to look so pretty, my mother, with her long blond hair and blue eyes, standing at the foot of my bed, pointing up and down the imaginary aisles. It made me feel like we were about to take off, that our dreams were these great adventures. But then, the day we were supposed to take a real flight together . . .”
Abigail allowed her voice to trail off. It didn’t matter, since now I understood.
We were quiet for some time, until at last she said, “When I tell you the dreams are both good and bad, what I mean is that they start out good—my mother is showing me the emergency exit rows, explaining about the lighted path in the aisles, the oxygen masks that drop from the ceiling—but peaceful as they begin, the dreams always turn bad. It is that way with most things in life, my life anyway. Probably, it is the way things will go during my time here with you and your family—even though that is not what I want.”
I wasn’t sure what to say so we went back to being quiet after that. I tried to picture Abigail on the other side of that wall. Had she moved the bed the way I imagined? Or was she simply kneeling there in that white nightgown originally intended for my sister? I never did find out, because soon I drifted off to sleep and Abigail must have too.
The next night brought another trip to the ice cream shop, another swim in the pond where I kept watch on my parents sitting calmly side by side on that crooked bench back on shore. Afterward, on our bumpy ride back down the dirt road toward home, I stuck my hand out the window and surfed the air once again. Abigail did as well, though she told me I was doing it wrong. It never occurred to me that there was a right way to hand-surf, but she said, “I can tell you’re in your head too much, Sylvie. You need to give yourself over to the air and motion. Stay in the moment.”
“What makes you such an expert?” I asked.
Abigail fixed me with a look, and I thought of that van she had first arrived in, all the years she and her father had spent wandering. “The secret is to not think so much,” was all she said. “Just feel the air. Just let go.”
After that, I pulled my hand inside and simply watched her, since I felt suddenly self-conscious about the whole thing. And as we drove the dark streets, I couldn’t help but notice how comfortable she seemed beside me, living Rose’s old life. Thinking that caused some suspicion to awaken inside me, one that kept nagging at me the rest of the ride home.
And then, hours later, I woke in my bed. No one had called my name, but I sensed her presence lingering on the other side of that wall. This time, I knocked.
“Yes, Sylvie?” Her response was almost immediate.
“They aren’t real, are they?”
It was, finally, the words that had festered in my mind ever since watching her in the car earlier, though they seemed to have been there long before that, I realized. In some way, it seemed I had always known.
The question brought about a pause, longer than
any during our conversation the previous evening. I wondered briefly if Abigail knew what I meant. But at last she said, “The answer isn’t a simple yes or no, Sylvie. It’s harder to explain than that.”
“Then try.”
“Okay, then. But do you promise not to tell anyone? Because my wish is that things stay good. My wish is that we stay friends, Sylvie, always and forever.”
Is that what we had become? I was not so sure, but I was hungry for whatever she was about to tell me, so I said what she wanted to hear, “I promise.”
Abigail sighed loud enough that I could hear it through the wall. “Other than those few weeks in the winter when we’re in Oregon, we live in campgrounds and rest stops. We hardly ever see anyone at all. The only thing we do is go to whatever religious services he finds. One day, years ago, we slipped into a healing service in some auditorium in some town. I don’t even remember where since they are all pretty much the same after a while. People singing the identical songs, raising their hands in the air, falling to the floor when they think the Holy Spirit has overtaken them. But at this one service, the preacher announced that his inner circle was going to pray over a boy whose soul had been occupied by an unwanted spirit. They brought out the boy and laid hands on him. In big, booming voices, as he snarled and scratched at them, they ordered the devil to be gone. Looking at it all, I thought I could be that boy.”
I didn’t understand what she meant at first. “Why would you—”
“My father never listened to what I wanted—until I behaved that way. Then he paid attention. It put me in control instead of him. At first, that power meant nothing but making sure he was as miserable as me. But in the end, it led us here, to me living with your family instead of him.”
“I see. He’ll come back for you, though. Eventually.”
“I worried about that at first too. But it’s been so long now I’m pretty sure he’s given up. Before we came here, I made it so I was impossible to live with. He’s afraid of me now. Terrified, in fact. I did some pretty awful things to him. So if he’s smart, which he is in his own way, he’ll keep staying away. Because I want to live here for good, Sylvie. I want to go to school here in this town like a normal person, to have a normal family and a normal life.”
Abigail Lynch might have been the first person ever to look upon our family as normal, but I didn’t tell her that. Instead, I simply kept listening.
“Your father mentioned a lecture date he’s got coming up. He asked if I’d be willing to go onstage, the way your sister never would, to talk about how he and your mother helped me.”
I tried to recall an occasion when my father had ever asked my sister to join them onstage, though no such memory came. “What did you tell him?”
“That I’d do it. Happily.”
“But you’d be lying. And my father wouldn’t—”
“Please, Sylvie. It doesn’t matter as long as I do a good job for him. Besides, it’s not all a lie. There is something inside me, just like my father told you and your mother that first day. Some people might call it a demon. All I know is it’s something that made me live my life this way. It’s made me do terrible things too.”
Given the things she was saying, I felt grateful for that wall between us then, since I did not want to look at her. All summer, I’d been thinking about the deal my parents made, the one where things would return to normal come fall. I’d even been ticking off the days until early September arrived and we would make the trip to see Rose and maybe even bring her home. All along, I’d envisioned Abigail being gone by then, returning to that life she lived with her father. Now, I was not sure what would happen, but I didn’t say another word about it and neither did she.
In the days that followed, we lived two lives: the one where Abigail and I were those disembodied voices, communicating through the wall in the dark of our rooms. In that life, we stayed away from any difficult conversations. Instead, she taught me her mother’s preflight routine, and I repeated it back to her each evening, a kind of prayer that comforted her before sleep. And then there was our second life, the one we lived during the day. No longer afraid to go to the basement, Abigail spent hours down there, practicing her part in the talk with my father. He told her that all she had to do was get up onstage and tell her story, but she wanted every word, every gesture to be approved by him beforehand.
And then, just as my mother predicted, summer ended and school began. The publication of Heekin’s book was just weeks away, and though my father called him to request a copy, he never heard back. Meanwhile, my parents’ lecture came and went with Abigail joining them onstage to great success according to my father. I waited in the greenroom, like I used to with Rose, taking that old copy of Jane Eyre along, studying the words I underlined years before, and wondering what I’d seen in certain passages.
Eighth grade should have been something I looked forward to, considering it was my last year of junior high. But from the very first day I stepped through the doors to see the same old teachers and Gretchen and Elizabeth, who had never been quite the same toward me since that article appeared in the paper, I couldn’t help but feel that the year ahead was simply something to be gotten through.
What I looked forward to most was our visit to see Rose, since the ninety days would soon be up. My mother informed me that we would be going to Saint Julia’s the weekend after school began. No one mentioned enrolling Abigail as she’d hoped. Instead, she walked me to the bus stop each morning in her bare feet and met me there each afternoon.
Only a few days into the first week, I stepped off the bus to find her waiting for me the same as always. Even before I saw the fresh scratches and bruises on her toes, I sensed something different in her expression, which appeared glazed and distant. As the bus lumbered away, Abigail said in a voice less serene than the one I’d finally grown accustomed to: “Let’s not go home for a little while, okay?”
“Okay. But why not?”
“Your parents. There’s someone in the house with them.”
“Your father?” I said. There was a certain inevitability and relief in my voice. “Did he finally come back?”
“No,” she told me. “Not yet anyway. But that’s what I need to talk to you about. Your mom told me that he’ll be coming to get me any day now.”
She had begun walking, and I trailed along. Soon, she led us to the foundation directly across from our house, where Rose and I used to create our imaginary homes. The crumbling cement steps, the twisted iron rods in one corner, the fallen tree resting in a puddle—I looked over the edge at all those things, trying to imagine us playing there now.
Despite her bare feet, Abigail started down the steps. I worried she might cut herself, but she so rarely bothered with socks or shoes that she seemed unfazed. When she reached the bottom, Abigail picked up a stone and used it to write on the wall the way Rose and I once did with our pastel chalks. An X and a Y—that’s what she drew, placing them at a distance from each other. The sight of those letters put me in mind of that helter-skelter pattern on the van the day she arrived, the doodle of that headless animal with its endlessly swirling tail.
“If you’re in the mood to do algebra,” I said, trying a joke as I looked down at her inside the foundation, “I have plenty of homework in my bag. It’s all yours.”
“That’s not what this is,” she said in a serious voice.
“So what is it then?” I asked, glancing across the lane at my house, feeling impatient.
“It’s more like a geography lesson. One you are going to teach me.” She paused and looked up at me, and I couldn’t help glancing away again across the lane, until she called out. “If I’m at X, which is right here in Dundalk, but I want to be at Y, which is the Baltimore Train Station, what’s the best way to get there?”
It felt odd to have such a serious conversation in the daylight, rather than through the bedroom wall. “Ask my parent
s. They’ll—”
“They’ll tell me to forget it, Sylvie. They’ll make sure I stay put until my father comes to take me back. And I can’t do that again. Not anymore.”
I stopped and looked at her down in that foundation, the X and Y on the gray wall. “Where are you planning to go?” I asked at last.
“My mother used to have a friend—a nice lady who left the ministry before we did. The two of them wrote letters all the time. I remember that friend’s name and where she moved to.”
“Where?”
“I’m not telling you, Sylvie. Because once I’m gone you’ll feel obligated to tell your parents, to give them the answer they want.”
She was right, of course, but I couldn’t help feeling surprised she’d figured that out about me. I would always give them the answers they wanted. “Well, even if you get to this friend of your mom’s, then what?”
“Then she will help me contact my mother.”
The two of us stood there a moment, staring at that X and Y.
“It’s not the best plan, but it’s the only one I’ve got,” Abigail said finally. “So please. Help me.”
At last, I put down my books and descended those crumbling stairs into the old foundation, where I took the stone from her hand. The last time I had drawn on that wall, it was to create a pretend window, one with pink curtains that looked out onto a yard with lime-green grass and lavender flowers. Now, I drew a map of the path through the woods, past the poultry farm to the spot where you could hear the highway in the distance. “This would be your quickest way,” I told her. “The path opens up right behind this foundation. Just follow it to the highway. Then follow that into Baltimore. There must be signs for the train station, I’m sure.”
