Help for the Haunted: A Novel

by John Searles

My father’s gaze found mine in the rearview mirror. “Sorry, tadpole. Consider this a reconnaissance mission. If things look good, we can come back tomorr—”

  “Sylvester,” my mother interrupted. Then to us, “Go ahead, girls. But like I said, no wandering off.”

  Abigail’s hand had been on the door handle for some time, but she kept watching me for a signal that it was okay to get out. When I opened my door, she did the same. She followed me to the pond and bent to rinse her sticky hands in the water, just like I did. Just as I’d imagined, moonlight shimmered on the surface of the pond so that it glowed like some living, breathing force. Too many stars to count twinkled in the inky sky overhead. Across the water, in a marshy area thick with reeds, I made out what looked to be a half-sunken dock.

  “Is everything okay?”

  Not just on account of her oddly serene voice, but because she had been quiet for so long, it was still something of a shock to hear Abigail speak. In some way, it felt not much different than if Penny’s mouth were to open and words were to come tumbling out. I quit rinsing my hands and stood to look at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Are they fighting?”

  The moment we shut the back doors of the car, my mother had launched into the conversation she wanted to have with my father. Muffled as their voices were, I caught their opening gambits before stepping away.

  “First the trip out for ice cream, now this detour. What are you trying to do?”

  “Show us a good time for a change. After everything that’s happened, I thought you’d like that. I thought the girls would too.”

  So the answer to Abigail’s question was yes. But I didn’t think it was any of her concern, and that’s exactly what I told her before turning away. While I was busy looking into the water, she stepped into the pond. I heard her before I saw her: plunk, plunk.

  When I glanced over, Abigail was submerged up to her ankles. My parents said we wouldn’t be swimming, but they didn’t mention anything about wading, so I decided to slip off my flip-flops and step into the cool water too, my feet sinking into the mud, shifting away from stones that pricked my soles like sharp teeth.

  “I bet this isn’t like that lake in Oregon,” I said, making a stab at conversation.

  Abigail swirled a foot around, mixing the mud and rocks into something soupy. “No, it’s not.”

  “Can I ask why don’t you live there anymore?”

  “We still live there.”

  “That’s not what you told us earlier. You said when you were little you used—”

  “To live in one place. That’s what I said. Now we live lots of places. Oregon is just one. But we’re usually there for a few weeks in the winter when it’s too cold to swim.”

  Behind us, the doors of the Datsun opened. Immediately, Abigail retreated back to the shore. I didn’t move fast enough, though, and my mother arrived at the water’s edge to find me ankle-deep. She glanced at Abigail’s feet, slick with water, then looked at her slim watch and said, “Now that we’re here, your father and I agreed you might as well take a dip. It’ll help you sleep tonight at least. So go in with your clothes on if you like. You’ve got ten minutes. And let’s hope we don’t get arrested or find out this place has become a toxic waste site.”

  If Rose had been with us she would have let out a loud Wooohooo! Abigail simply waded in again, deeper this time. When the water reached the hem of her shorts, she turned to my mother, my father too, who had just arrived at the water’s edge, looking shaken. Neither protested, so she sucked in a breath and slipped under.

  In the silence that followed, the three of us stood waiting and waiting for her to emerge. Abigail seemed strange enough that she might have been capable of sprouting gills and fins, capable of swimming down to some watery underworld, or out into the shadows of those trees and the starry sky beyond. At last, however, her head emerged, small and turtlelike, far out in the pond. Since we didn’t have much time, I waded up to my shorts too, trying not to think of creatures beneath the surface as I slipped under as well. When I came up again—sooner than Abigail, closer to the shore—I saw that she had swum the entire way to the reedy area with the half-sunken dock. Rather than follow, I floated on my back and studied the stars dotting the sky.

  If I kept my splashing to a minimum, it was possible to hear my parents. My mother took a seat on a slanted bench not far from the water’s edge and my father stood next to her. “We’ve received requests for lectures that pay more than ever,” he was saying. “Not to mention all the places people want us to investigate. There’s an old estate in New Zealand that a widow refused to leave after her husband died. Now she’s deceased as well, and people there are reporting some pretty bizarre occurrences.”

  To all of this, my mother said only, “New Zealand.”

  “That’s right. They’ll fly us there. All expenses paid.”

  “What about the girls?”

  “They’ll fly Sylvie too. And Abigail if that’s what we want. We hold the cards now, my dear. How’s that for a change? No more sharing the stage with that phony Dragomir Albescu and his fingers full of fake jewelry. No more humiliating myself at Fright Fest just to make a—”

  “Abigail is not our daughter, Sylvester.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “When I asked about the girls, I was talking about our daughters. You remember who they are, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do,” my father said, clearly exasperated and offended too.

  “Well, you didn’t mention Rose coming on this trip of yours.”

  “First of all, it’s not my trip, it’s our trip. And who do you think worked so hard at finding a way to help Rose? Me. But since we’d have to go to New Zealand soon, I assumed she wouldn’t be able to join us.”

  “Then I won’t be either, because I don’t feel comfortable traveling so far from home with her at that . . . that place. Never mind taking a trip with someone else’s daughter. So we’ll just have to decline or put it off until things are back to normal.”

  “Okay, then,” my father said. “Okay. Okay.” I watched him walk to the edge of the bench. He seemed to be looking for some way to sit beside her, but it was too crooked for that. At last, he gave up and remained standing, telling her, “I understand what you’re saying. Besides, we’ve got other offers closer to home. And come fall, Sam’s book will be out. By then, we’ll be even more in demand. That night I saw him a few weeks back, he told me his publisher has already been getting quite a bit of interest from the media.”

  I looked to my mother on that bench—bouncing her legs, biting her lip—responding only with, “Ninety days.”

  “Pardon?”

  “That rule at Saint Julia’s. It just seems like an awfully long time.”

  “Oh, yes. That. Well, it’ll go by in a blink. You’ll see.”

  “Maybe so. But I’d at least like a phone call to—”

  “To what? Fight the same old fights with her?”

  “To hear her voice. To know she’s okay.”

  “She’s fine. She’s better than fine, she’s improving. We’re going to get her back good as new.”

  After that, they grew quiet. I must have drifted, because I found myself in a particularly cold patch of water. It seemed to move through me the way my father said spirits do, with an unmistakable chill. I swam away, making a show of splashing about so they did not suspect me of eavesdropping. Across the pond, Abigail perched on that half-sunken dock, a mermaid at the bow of a doomed ship, pale arms and face bathed in the moonlight, hair curly once more from the water. She stared back at me, back at my parents too. From that distance, I doubted she could possibly hear them. Still, the way she looked so intently left me wondering if their voices carried across the water.

  “Eventually, the summer will end,” my mother was saying as I went still in the water once more. “School will start up. Sylvie will be in eighth grade. We could get Rose enrolled in a few classes at a local college. Come fall, what I’d like most is for all
our lives to be back on track. Which means . . .”

  Like a radio losing reception, I lost their words a moment. Hoping they wouldn’t notice, I allowed myself to drift closer again.

  “Saint Julia’s is far from cheap,” my father was saying when their conversation came clear once more. “The extra money—frankly, we need it. Especially if you’re telling me you want to hold off on the lectures now too.”

  “No matter how badly we need the money, it’s only reasonable to expect more than that one call in all this time. I can’t help feeling that we should . . .”

  “We should what?”

  “Do something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like—” As though working to stay afloat same as me, my mother paused, measuring each breath, before saying, “I don’t know. Report the situation to some agency. Tell them her father has not returned for her.”

  “And how would that look for us? Besides, I don’t see what harm it’s doing. The man is sending checks, so it’s not as though she’s been abandoned. And look at tonight, it’s been a perfectly lovely evening.”

  “I’m aware of that, Sylvester. If only you made this much effort to have perfectly lovely evenings when our other daughter was at home.”

  After all my father’s uncharacteristic efforts that night—the ice cream, the detour to the pond—at long last her words pricked at something inside him. I sensed him deflating there on the shore. He looked out over the water, and I dipped under and swam through a tangle of vines. When I came up, I heard him calling my name, calling Abigail’s name too.

  “Here!” she called back.

  “Here!” I called back too, as though answering some sort of roll call.

  “We should get going,” he said, his voice echoing around us, sounding weaker than usual. “Consider this your three-minute warning.”

  After that, there were no words for some time. I looked to see Abigail in the distance, still watching them just the same. I turned to see my father walking back to where my mother sat on that crooked bench. Something about the way he stepped toward her reminded me of that story about their meeting. The girl on her suitcase. The girl with a toothache. The girl in a snowstorm. Now, instead of lifting an icicle from her cheek, he leaned down and kissed her. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I’m sorry too,” she told him.

  “Let’s make a deal. We enjoy the summer. No work other than the few lectures I’ve already booked. In the fall, we’ll be sure Abigail is back with her father. And if Rose is ready, we’ll be sure she is home with us again. How does that sound?”

  My mother lifted her hand and touched her fingers to her lips, then her cheek, as though touching the kiss he had planted there, the place that icicle had been so many years before. I heard a splash on the far side of the pond and looked to see Abigail had leaped off the dock and was swimming back. I began swimming back too, thinking the things my father suggested made for a perfect plan, except for one detail: my mother had yet to tell him what she knew about Heekin’s manuscript and the damage it would do to their reputations when it was published come fall. But even as I thought about that, I arrived at the shore and stood again, feeling the sharp rocks and mud sinking beneath my feet, while my mother stared up at my father, telling him, “That sounds good to me.”

  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.