by John Searles
“She can’t tell you,” I said, watching the bricks of vanilla and chocolate ooze apart.
“Why not?”
“Because then the wish won’t come true.”
“Who made that rule?” my father asked.
Smart as my parents were, some basics about the world escaped them, but it usually came down to a lack of knowledge about things like MTV and Swatches and Reeboks. “I don’t know,” I told him.
“Wishes are like certain prayers,” Father Coffey said, seated between my mother and father and wearing a black turtleneck. “Some are best to carry privately in your heart.”
Our family was used to Father Vitale, who had come to dinner many times. Vitale never brought his own cake, never showed up without his collar, and never challenged my father even on a point as small as that. But Vitale was retiring soon, which was why Coffey had been brought to Dundalk. My father considered his comment before saying, “I suppose that’s one way to look at it. But to my way of thinking, prayers and wishes are nothing alike. The former is a sacred conversation with the Lord. The latter is a whimsical expression of worldly desire.”
My father seemed to be waiting for Coffey to keep the debate alive, but the man stared down at the fast-melting cake on his plate and let the point die.
“Well, then,” my father said. “Since what we are talking about here is a simple birthday wish, I think the rule seems a bit silly. Don’t you, Rose?”
The rest of us had been calling my sister Rosie for a good hour by then, so my mother assumed the question had been meant for her. “Maybe so,” she answered, poking at the dark crumbles with her fork. “Although there’s nothing wrong with keeping something to yourself, Sylvester.”
“And what about you, birthday girl?” he asked. “Do you think it’s silly?”
“A little,” Rose said.
“If you can’t tell your family and your priest what you want most, who can you tell? Besides, depending on the wish, we might be able to help make it come true.”
No one spoke for a moment after that, though the silence in the kitchen begged for the news of what Rose’s wish had been. My sister must have felt it too, because after she took a bite of a baby blue flower on top of that cake, which left smudges on her lips, she said, “Do you all really want to know?”
“Only if you feel comfortable sharing,” my mother said.
Rose eyed my father. “You promise you won’t get mad?”
“Promise,” he told her.
“Okay, then.” It didn’t take my mother’s gift to sense from the way Rose inhaled that she felt nervous. “I wished . . . I wished that I could get my learner’s permit.”
The phone rang. My father excused himself, slid back his chair, and crossed the room to pick it up. As he talked to the person on the other end, my mother took a bite of cake at last, and asked in a quiet voice, “A learner’s permit for what?”
Again, I thought of that disconnect between them and the world. Father Coffey and I both spoke up for my sister, saying, “For her driver’s license.”
My mother mouthed an Ohhh, though that was all. I knew she’d never offer an official answer until my father weighed in, but he was deep in conversation by then. “Of course I remember you,” he said into the phone as he stretched the cord tighter into the living room. “I did get the letter. It was very flattering. But, well, I need to speak with my wife about the matter. We make all decisions together so she gets an equal vote. . . .” And after a pause: “We liked it very much. Thank you again. We will certainly consider your request.” With that, my father hung up and returned to the table. I expected the topic to go back to my sister’s wish, but my mother asked who had called.
“That reporter,” he told her.
“Which reporter?”
“You know, the one from the Dundalk Eagle.”
She squinted, as though reading something in small print. “Samuel Heekin?”
“The one and only.”
“I see,” my mother said. “But we gave him the interview for that paper months ago. The story has already run. What could he possibly want?”
“Says he’s interested in meeting again. He’s got this idea about writing a book.”
“About?”
“What else?” My father smiled. “Us. Who would have thought?”
“Oh, Sylvester. I don’t like the idea. A book only invites more attention.”
“I understand, my dear. But let’s discuss it later. Now Rose, about your wish—”
“I’m sorry,” my sister said, pushing the last of her melting blue flower around her plate. “Never mind. I shouldn’t have said anything. It was a dumb idea.”
“It’s not dumb,” my father told her.
Rose looked up. “It’s not?”
“Not in the least. After all, you’re seventeen now. I think it’s a very smart idea.”
“You do?”
He smiled and looked to my mother to see if she objected, though she gave no sign of it. “Yes, of course. We know how your mother hates to drive, so it will be handy having another person around here willing to get behind the wheel. Of course, there’s just the Datsun, so it’s not like you’d have your own car.”
“That’s all right,” my sister told him. “I don’t need my own car.”
“I hear there’s a driving school right over on Holabird Avenue,” Father Coffey said.
“We don’t need to waste money on a school. I can teach her, same as my father taught me. Except I promise not to yell the way he did if you forget to signal. Okay?”
“Okay!” Rose leaped up from the table and actually hugged him, a sight I had not seen in a long time. She even kissed his forehead, leaving the last of the baby blue smudges from her lips on his creased skin.
Happy as that moment made them both, some part of me still worried and waited for that once hostile Rose to resurface. I thought for certain the driving lessons would end in a screaming match. But I was wrong. Things went so smoothly that within a few months Rose had her license, with a DMV photo that showed her smiling big and wide. And she loved nothing more than being behind the wheel, so she found any excuse. When I stayed after school, she picked me up. Sunday mornings when the four of us needed to get to church in the gym, Rose was always ready and waiting at the wheel. She even began grocery shopping with my mother just so she could drive. Best of all, as far as my father was concerned, she willingly played chauffeur when we headed out on more of my parents’ lecture trips and television bookings.
Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware . . .
Philips Convention Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania . . .
Webster Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts . . .
None of those places or any others brought about the drama of Ocala. Rather, things went as originally intended: while my mother and father talked to crowds, which grew larger each time, or when they appeared on a dozen local and a few national TV shows, Rose and I waited in the greenroom. No grapes thrown at the ceiling. No sneaking through doors to hear what they were saying. My sister simply passed the time spinning the car keys on her finger while reading those classics about orphans my mother pressed upon us, books Rose once refused. I spent the hours reading as well, though a different type of book held my attention now:
Encyclopedia of Visions, Possessions, Demons & Demonology by M. E. Roche.
Hard to believe, but soon nearly two years had passed since that visit from Dot, which meant the deadline for the Maryland State Student Essay Contest had rolled around again. This year I was working on a slightly less overblown paper than my first contest submission. Late one night, after hours spent working on my new entry about the Cold War, I went downstairs for a drink. I had just turned on the faucet when a voice came from behind, “You a real girl? Or one of those things I keep seeing?”
I whipped around. A man was slumped in a chair at the table, his face riddled with so many creases and folds it looked stitched together. His eyes were bleary and red, his
salt-and-pepper hair mussed from sleep, his beard scraggly. “You’re . . .” I began as the water kept running behind me, “ . . . you’re not supposed to be up here.”
The man did not respond. He just blinked his bloodshot eyes and tapped his fingers against the table in such a determined way he might have been typing. A few nights before, I’d heard the phone ring then listened from my bed to the knock on the front door not long after, followed by the clomp-clomp-clomp of footsteps heading to the basement. So I knew we had someone with us in the house, but I’d never actually seen him. I’d never actually seen any of them before, I realized.
“There’s a cot downstairs,” I said. “And I saw my father take down a sandwich and a pitcher of juice earlier tonight. So you have everything you need down there. My parents don’t allow—” I stopped, searching for the word to describe this man and the others my parents welcomed into our home. “They don’t allow haunted people up here.”
That strange finger tapping of his came to an abrupt stop. He stood from the chair, and I saw that he was much taller than I realized, so tall his head knocked the ceiling lamp that hung above the table, causing it to rock back and forth. In a voice as distant as his expression, he told me, “Your mother. She’s been reading scripture to me. Things in that book never sounded so good as they do they coming from her mouth. And your father, well, he mostly asks questions about the things I’ve been seeing.”
The shifting light created a helter-skelter feeling in the kitchen, making me all the more nervous. I reached behind and turned off the faucet before walking to the basement door and pulling it open. When the man moved by me toward the steps, the air smelled like sweat and old clothes and damp leaves. At the top of the stairs, he paused, and I couldn’t help but ask, “What did you mean before? When you wanted to know if I was a real girl?”
“Since the night I got here, I’ve been seeing things. Down in that basement.”
I looked past him at the bottom of the stairs, expecting to see whatever it was dart between the shadows. “What . . . things?”
He just shook his head and started down the steps without answering. I watched until he was gone from view, then shut the door. Before going back up to my room, I found myself walking to the curio hutch in the living room and staring at all those books behind the glass cabinet. I thought of what that man just said. Then I thought of my sister sneering at that phony ghost at Disney World, of her asking if I believed the things our parents claimed to be true. In search of some sort of proof, I dragged over a chair, climbed up, and reached for the key my father kept hidden on top. Possessive as he was about those books, it was odd how carelessly they were shelved: haphazardly piled, upside down, wrong side in. I pulled out what looked to be the oldest and thickest of all. Back in my room, I made a cover out of a paper bag, same as for my textbooks, writing simply HISTORY on the front.
Inside the worn pages, I did discover a history, different from any I’d read before, about people from long ago who suffered strange afflictions and reported otherworldly visions. Of all the stories I read, none stayed with me so much as those about the girls. The first I encountered was Marie des Vallées, born in 1590 into a poor family in Saint-Sauveur-Landelin, France. At the age of twelve, Marie’s father died. Her mother remarried a butcher, “whose humour and manners resembled those of the animals he worked with” and who beat Marie with a stick until she fled. For years she lived on the streets until in 1609 a female “tuteur” took her in. After moving into the woman’s house, Marie began to experience what the clergy labeled as symptoms of demonic possession. On countless occasions, she fell to the ground, “mouth agape, emitting otherworldly cries of agony and terror.” If she walked by a church, never mind attempting to enter, her body collapsed and convulsed until she was carried away.
Another girl, more famous than the first Marie, was also born in France, though later, in 1844. Her name: Marie-Bernarde Soubirous, though she came to be known simply as Bernadette. A devout peasant girl, Bernadette began seeing apparitions at the age of fourteen. She described her first sighting as, “a gentle Light that brightened the dark recess, and there in the Light, a smile. A girl dressed in a white dress, tied with a blue ribbon, a white veil on her head, and a yellow rose on each foot.” Despite early skepticism, the church declared Bernadette’s sightings worthy of belief. The site in Lourdes where her body was buried became a shrine where millions search for miracles.
And then came a different kind of trip for our family. I first learned of it when Rose picked me up one Friday from school. On the dashboard, I noticed a map with a route highlighted in yellow. “Planning a vacation?” I asked.
“If I was, it would be to pretty much any place but the Buckeye State.”
“Texas?”
Rose groaned. “Texas is the Lone Star State, Sylvie. Buckeye, that’s Ohio. Anyway, Dad will tell you, but we’re going there this weekend.”
“For another talk?”
Rose shook her head. “You know those calls we’ve been getting at night lately? Apparently they’ve all been from the same person.”
“Who?”
“Don’t know. Didn’t ask. My guess: the owner of a house where weird crap keeps happening. Or maybe a parent with a kid who’s messed up, like so many of them.”
It had been some time since I thought of that girl in the bushes out front of the convention center in Ocala—long enough that it took me a moment to pull the memory into focus. As I stared out the window of the Datsun, I saw not the houses we passed, but that father with blood on his face as he called into the shadows. I remembered the way he approached my mother for help, the way she knelt, humming that song while reaching a hand toward those shiny, blinking eyes. “Albert and Abigail Lynch,” I said aloud as we made the turn onto Butter Lane.
“What?”
“That night in Ocala. Remember the man with the scratch marks? The one calling into the bushes?”
Rose smiled. “How could I forget a freak like that?”
“I thought maybe he was calling for a lost cat. But it was actually his daughter. A girl named Abigail. Mom helped them after you drove off with Uncle Howie.”
The most Rose had to say was, “Mom helped them, huh?”
“Yes. I witnessed it.”
“Well, good for you, Sylvie.” When Rose spoke next, we were turning into the driveway, and a trace of her old self shimmered beneath her words. “We better go inside and pack. Dad wants to leave at some ungodly hour in the morning so we get there by noon. You’ve seen firsthand how helpful they are when people need them.”
Five and a half hours—that’s how long it took to reach the Ohio state line, another two to Columbus. Rose drove except for a break in Pennsylvania when my father insisted on taking the wheel so she could rest. Otherwise, he sat beside her in the passenger seat, making notes on a legal pad. My mother sat in the back with me, knitting or reading her bible while humming that tune I recognized by now but still did not know the words to. My book kept me busy, but the more I read, the more the stories began to seem like just that: stories. Ancient and far away. Not much different than if I’d been reading about a world inhabited by witches who tempted pretty girls with poison apples. I began to get the sinking feeling that I was getting further from proof instead of closer.
At a gas station stop in Wheeling Creek, Ohio, I ran inside to pee in the grimy restroom. When I came out, my mother and father stood by the car, stretching their legs while Rose waited behind the wheel. As I got closer, I caught scraps of their conversation.
My mother: “ . . . scratches again.”
My father: “ . . . needs to be removed from the home.”
But that was the most I heard. When we climbed into the car, however, my mind filled with thoughts of the Lynches.
The plan had been that my parents would pick up Kentucky Fried Chicken for Rose and me then leave us at the hotel until they returned. When we arrived, though, the gum-chomping woman at the counter informed us that the room would n
ot be cleaned for a few hours. After some back and forth, my parents decided Rose and I would drop them in the Grandville neighborhood where they were headed. We had permission, along with a twenty my father pulled from my wallet, to see a movie at the Cineplex downtown.
Orchard Circle, like Butter Lane, turned out to be a pretty name for a place that wasn’t. Neglected two-story homes surrounded a dilapidated park with a rusted chain-link fence. When Rose stopped the car, my father gathered his equipment from the trunk while my mother took out her bible. She told Rose and me to enjoy our time at the movies then gave us kisses before getting out.
As we drove away, I stared at that second-floor apartment—the Lynches’ place, I felt more and more certain—where the curtains were all drawn. I watched my parents move up the outdoor stairs to the door at the top. After knocking, my father fussed with his tote while my mother waited beside him, hands clasped, that bible between, in a way that told me she was praying. I kept staring back to see if it would be Albert who answered the door, but we turned the corner before anyone opened up.
Despite my preoccupation with whoever was inside that apartment, I was excited to go to the movies so I did my best to put it out of my mind. It wasn’t that we weren’t allowed to go to the movies at home. My father grew up working in a theater, after all, so he loved them. But we went as a family, which meant my sister and I ended up sitting through films like Agnes of God or Mask—not exactly our top choices. That afternoon in Columbus, we looked at the splashy posters outside the theater for Die Hard, Beetlejuice, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and I could tell Rose was as excited as me. We compromised on our mutual second choice then spent what was left on popcorn, Kit-Kats, and sodas, something my parents never allowed.
As Rose and I sat in the dark, fingers sticky with butter and chocolate, watching Michael Keaton play a cartoonish ghost, that unsettled feeling slipped away and I forgot about what my parents were doing back on Orchard Circle. When the lights came up, the happy mood lingered as we walked to the lobby. We didn’t get far before an old man, broom in hand, called to us. “You wouldn’t happen to be Rose and Sylvie Mason, would you?’
