Ghost Girl (20 page)

“That’s not what Miss Ellie says. She says if I want to make you die, I can.”

“No, I won’t die.”

“That’s because you’re God, aren’t you?” Jadie asked, looking up.

“No. That’s because Miss Ellie is wrong.”

T
o say I went home from work that night unhappy and confused would be to greatly understate the feelings Jadie was beginning to generate in me. I could see only three possible explanations for her behavior. One, she was a deeply disturbed child, her internal world made up of a terrifying mix of hallucinations and fragmented, schizophrenic thought. Two, she had suffered some sort of traumatic event—perhaps abuse or separation or something like that—and had compensated by creating this elaborate fantasy world that protected her from facing the real event. Or three, she was a sane child, caught up in some inconceivably wicked web of murder and torture with no one believing what she said. I had more or less eliminated any likelihood that Jadie’s problems were physically based, in that she showed none of the indicators I had come to associate with aphasia or other forms of brain damage, but even here I was forced to keep an open mind.

At home that evening, I found myself restless and distracted, shuffling through my mail, opening letters and only half reading them, pushing the bills into a pile unopened. I wasn’t really hungry and nothing in the fridge took my fancy, so I settled for a quick sandwich, which I decided to eat in front of television. The only thing watchable at that time of day was a rerun of “I Love Lucy.” Cozily reminiscent of my fifties childhood, it gave me thirty minutes’ suspended animation before Jadie returned to haunt me.

Unable to concentrate on the TV any longer, I got up and shifted restlessly around the apartment, straightening things up, doing my dishes from breakfast, and pushing papers around on my desk in the bedroom.

At the bottom of a stack of books beside the desk was the case containing the old reel-to-reel videotape with Jadie on it from the previous winter. I hadn’t looked at it since I’d shown it to Jules in the summer, but now I felt an overwhelming urge to see it again, to study Jadie’s ghostly figure wavering before the camera, to hear her eerie, high-pitched whispers. Would they have more meaning to me now? Would I understand things I hadn’t understood then? Holding the tape case in my hands, I realized, as I looked at it, that my intense restlessness on this particular evening was not so much the result of being unable to leave my concerns about Jadie at work as of not being able to pursue the matter in a satisfying manner. If I was honest, I didn’t want to stop thinking about her. My frustration lay in not understanding her.

Sitting there alone in the bedroom of my attic apartment, I was suddenly stricken with yearning for the professional chumminess of the clinic. I ached for the camaraderie of Jules, Jeff, Dr. Rosenthal, and all the others, for the intellectual acrobatics that went on each day around the coffee pot. How had I ever let myself get into this state of isolation?

I toyed with the idea of calling Jules. He was the one I really wanted to thrash this out with. A broad-minded, creative thinker, he was always able to come up with quirky ideas that, even when shy of the mark, were stimulating and kept me thinking. We had worked well together, our thoughts often leap-frogging over each other in rapid succession to produce seemingly disjointed conversations and ideas by the bucketful. But would he remember this case well enough? Would he mind my phoning him up out of the blue? Would he be free? Would it be the same over the telephone anyway?

No. What I wanted was to talk
with
someone, someone I could sit face to face with, someone who knew Jadie, too. This didn’t leave many alternatives.

There were dozens of Petersons in the phonebook. Narrowing the likely ones down to three, I tried to call Arkie. Two were wrong numbers. The third had no reply. In desperation, I rang Lucy.

“Yeah, Luce, it’s me. How’re you doing? Yes, just wondering … Is Ben home? He’s not? Oh, good. Well, I don’t mean
good
, but you know what I mean. Just wondering, well … you wouldn’t want to go down to the bowling alley for a bit, would you? … Yes, I know it’s late … and sort of spur of the moment, but just a couple of games? I need some exercise. And I thought I could bounce a few things off you about school. If you don’t mind, that is. Okay? Want to meet me there?”

Lucy was in jeans and had her short hair pulled back into a squat little ponytail. It was the most informal attire I’d ever seen her in, and she looked charming in a farm-girl sort of way.

“Gosh, this
is
good,” Lucy said in a half whisper, as we picked up our bowling shoes. “I feel really spontaneous. Ben’s going to be so surprised when he finds out. He thinks I never do anything except sit at home and do my lesson plans. Mostly, I don’t. Except when I go over to my mom’s.”

I grinned at her.

We played not two games but six and were still there at 10:30, when they signaled closing time.

“You want to get a Coke?” I asked, as we put the balls away. Attached to the bowling alley was a small bar, which stayed open later. I tipped my head in that direction.

“Yeah, okay,” Lucy said brightly. “But golly, I’m going to be tired tomorrow. Aren’t you? Have you got your lesson plans done already?”

She found us a small table, and I went up to the bar to get the soft drinks.

“I suppose you did all your plans before you left school,” Lucy said when I returned. “You’re so well organized. I keep meaning to, but then I get down in the lounge and somebody gets talking …” Then she shrugged. “But that’s okay, I suppose, because the plans give me something to do in the evenings when Ben’s not there.”

She glanced over. “This has really been fun. I wasn’t going to come when you first asked me. I haven’t washed my hair and I look awful, but then I thought, well, what the heck? I’m going to be really wild for once. I’m just going to go out and have
fun
. And you know what? It really has been fun. Thanks for asking me.”

Touched by her pleasure, I smiled.

“Do you do this kind of stuff all the time?” she asked. “I’ll bet you’re used to it, coming from the city and all that. I bet you went out a lot up there.”

Still smiling, I shook my head. “Not really. I’m not much the going-out type. I just wanted a change of scenery tonight. Things are starting to get on top of me at work, and I find I’m bringing problems home with me.”

“You’re having problems?” she asked, a fleeting look of alarm crossing her face.

Immediately, I realized she was thinking of June Harriman and I rushed to reassure her I hadn’t meant personal problems. “It’s Jadie. I’m in a real mess with Jadie.” From there, I went on to explain what had been going on over the previous months. Lucy knew a lot of it already, such as the sexual incidents, simply because, being next door, she was the one who had often rescued me in moments of chaos; but now, I also talked about my time after school with Jadie, when she often stood upright, often screamed and shouted. I told of Tashee, Jenny, Miss Ellie, and the others. I mentioned ghosts and spiders. Once I got started, it all just tumbled out.

When I finally took a breath, Lucy lowered her head and peered into her glass. Taking her straw, she prodded the crushed ice that remained. “Gosh,” she murmured. “Gosh.”

“The thing is, I can’t figure out what’s going on with her. That’s what’s so upsetting to me. I mean, what if it’s true? What if I’m sitting here, doing nothing because I think she’s imagining it, and these horrible, unbelievable,
unthinkable
things are happening to her?”

“Oh, they just couldn’t be,” Lucy replied. “It’d be murder you’re talking about, otherwise.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s what I keep thinking, but then … she’s so consistent in what she says … but then it’s so farfetched. I keep trying to conjure up what kind of situation could produce this …”

“But it
couldn’t
be real,” Lucy replied.

“It’d have to be a group of some kind. A porn ring, maybe. Pedophiliacs?”

“Torey,”
Lucy said, her voice almost plaintive.

I looked over.

“This is Pecking, for Pete’s sake. It’s not like up in the city. Jeepers, I don’t think that kind of junk even goes on up there. This is California-style stuff you’re talking about. Or maybe like what goes on in New York or Amsterdam or one of those other foreign places, where they let people get away with this kind of thing. But for God’s sake, Torey, this is my home town you’re talking about.”

“I’m not saying it is happening. I’m just speculating.”

“I know that kind of thing does go on. I’m not that naive, but I just don’t think it could happen here. This is a close-knit community. Everyone knows everyone—and everyone’s business. I mean, what would the neighbors think?”

A pause came into the conversation. Lucy, growing pensive, stirred the ice in her glass again, then delicately lifted some out with her straw and put it into her mouth. A country-western ballad on the jukebox momentarily intruded on my thoughts, distracting me with its soft, lonely sound.

“You know what I wonder,” Lucy said. “I wonder if Jadie could be someone like Sybil. You know, from that book.”

“The one with multiple personalities?”

“Yeah. Maybe Jadie’s divided herself up into all these different kinds of people. Maybe one part of her’s living kind of a ‘Dallas’ lifestyle and she’s made up a fantasy world with those characters. Like maybe all the badness and stuff that she feels inside her she makes over, as if it belonged to Miss Ellie and J.R. and them. The characters on ‘Dallas’ are no saints, so maybe she’s just used them to personify her own negative side. And Tashee … maybe Tashee’s the good, pure part of her, the bit she feels she has to save.”

A lot of what Lucy said made reasonably good sense. It was easy to imagine parts of one’s psyche being represented by TV characters, particularly in light of the pervasiveness of television in current culture, and there was little doubt in my mind that Tashee, real or unreal, had come to symbolize all that was good in Jadie’s eyes. I knew also that the phenomenon of multiple personality was often closely associated with sexual abuse, which would account for Jadie’s precocious sexual behavior, as well as provide the traumatic core for such a serious disintegration of self. Some things still troubled me, however. Why, for instance, did the characters she’d chosen to represent her other selves not quite jibe with their personalities on TV? Wouldn’t Miss Ellie have been more likely to come out as sweet, caring, and maternal, while J.R. or one of the other less upstanding citizens of “Dallas” have been assigned the evil role? Unless, of course, Jadie’s abuser was her mother … Then again, all her sexual behavior had been directed toward the male anatomy.

The other problem I had with Lucy’s theory was the simple fact that multiple personality, particularly in children Jadie’s age, is a rare phenomenon indeed. I’d never come across it. In fact, while we all knew about it, no one at the clinic had ever seen an adult with the problem, much less a child. It would be pretty incredible to find such a thing under our own noses. Then, as I sat there with Lucy, my mind going round and round and round, what occurred to me was that whatever Jadie’s circumstances, they
were
bizarre, and incredulity was probably playing a major part in preventing us from finding an answer.

The following day, Jadie did not turn up for school. This disconcerted me, given the nature of our time together the previous afternoon. Like most of my special education children, Jadie’s attendance record had always been excellent, and, while she was as susceptible to whatever was going around as the rest, there hadn’t been much making the rounds. No one even had a cold.

I was further worried because we had reached the last full week in October and Amber’s dreaded sixth birthday would be on Sunday. Jadie hadn’t mentioned it in the last few days, but I’d fully expected to have the chance to discuss the matter more thoroughly with her and perhaps provide some additional reassurance.

These concerns made me restless company during the morning. When the boys were all occupied, I found myself drawn to the window, where I could see across the playground to her house on the other side of the street. Nothing there seemed out of the ordinary. The blinds were up, the curtains back. But I kept checking anyway. At recess I went down to the kindergarten to see if Amber was there, and indeed she was, playing Doggie Get the Bone with the other kindergarteners, her fair hair flying as she ran, her face laughing and merry. Yet, I still couldn’t shake the sense of unease, so at lunchtime, I slipped out of the school.

Almost as soon as I rang the doorbell, Mrs. Ekdahl answered it. She held Sapphire in her arms and looked decidedly surprised to see me. Sapphire, a podgy, round-headed toddler with a very dirty face, whined and struggled to get down.

“She’s got a stomachache,” Mrs. Ekdahl replied, when I’d explained why I was there. “She puked in her bed last night, so I didn’t think I should send her to school.”

“No, probably best not to,” I agreed. “Do you suppose I could say hi to her?”

The blind in Jadie’s room was pulled against the late October sunshine, leaving the room in bright dimness. Jadie was sitting up in bed with a stack of Donald Duck comics next to her.

“Hello,” I said.

Surprised, Jadie looked at me.

“Your mom says you’re not feeling well.”